Extreme Elvin (16 page)

“I’ll be right up,” I growled, pointing a finger at Frankie.

When I went back into the garage, steaming, confused, ready to blow a gasket, I came upon Barbara crouched down among the dogs, holding Tag in her lap while the others sort of mingled about around her. She was talking to them, asking them their names, telling them one by one that they were “pretty boys. Yes you are, aren’t you. And pretty girls, yes.” And when she would speak to one, it would turn its unfortunate little mug up toward her and react. They were wagging too, at the sound of her voice. Not that they had actual tails, more like hairy shot glasses attached to their backsides, and when they wagged them it was really that they were wagging the entire rear third of their bodies. I couldn’t believe it. It looked
cute.
She got them to be cute.

I had no idea what the correct emotional response was to this situation, but I can tell you what
my
response was.

Fear. I could not stop staring at Barbara, as she coolly improved all my surroundings, and I felt afraid, that somehow this was not going to work, to be, to last. That I was not up to this. That I was not meant for this.

And all I could think to do was to kiss her for it. To run up and kiss her; then to run away while it was still perfect. The urge was so strong...

“Elvin!” The call from the kitchen again.

“We gotta go,” I sighed to Barbara.

“Sure,” she said. “But why do you say it like that? Is your mom, like, a lousy cook or something?”

“No, she’s great,” I said. “It’s just that we have party crashers up there now and...” I looked at her, and she was looking back at me intensely, waiting on my next words, taking my concern seriously. “And,” I said firmly, but in reality I was in the process of chickening out. Because what I wanted to say was, I want to stay right here in the garage with you. But what I did say was, “I might have to get tough with them.”

The thinking being, I guess, if you can’t be smart or honest, be macho.

“Oh, Elvin,” she said, shoving me hard toward the house, “you’re such a goof.”

Well then. Guess we’ll scratch
macho
off the list of approaches.

When we got to the kitchen, Ma was busy putting out extra place settings.

“Stop that, Ma,” I said. She continued without responding.

Frankie walked through the kitchen door. “Hi,” he said.

“No,” I said, pointing at him.

Mike walked in. “Hi.”

“No.”

“You two,” I barked, one last shot at the macho. “Out in the hall.”

As I followed the guys out of the kitchen, I stopped and placed a hand lightly on Barbara’s arm. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

I meant serious business now out in the hall.

“Please,” I begged. “Please, guys, get outta here. This is hard enough for me. I’m like, ready to lay eggs out there in the kitchen as it is, so I know if you two rats are here I’m gonna totally waste myself with Barbara.”

I was out of breath already. It was their turn.

“You got it backward,” Frankie said. “I’m only here to help you. To supervise. To make sure you don’t do anything you might regret later. To protect you from yourself.”

“But don’t let that worry you. I’m here to provide balance,” Mikie added. “I’m here to supervise
him.
If you’re lucky, we’ll cancel each other out and you can get on with your business.”

Something awfully close to a whimper slipped out of me there. As if this wasn’t already ten times more complicated than anything I’d ever attempted before. I was now going to have to operate with these two being like on TV when a person has the little good guy on one shoulder whispering in his ear, and the little bad guy on the other.

“And if your mother didn’t think we could be helpful, she wouldn’t have invited us, right?”

“I never invited you,” Ma replied from the kitchen.

They could hear us.

Oh god, they could
hear
us. “Shit.”

“Elvin!” Ma said.

I headed into the kitchen again, to find the two women seated at the beautiful dinner. The table was a little crowded, but it just looked more lavish that way.

“He says that all the time,” Barbara said. “He’s got a little problem there, I think, Mrs. Bishop.”

“It’s his only one, Barbara,” Mrs. Bishop said. “Otherwise he is just about perfect.”

That sounded like a joke, didn’t it? Could the naked baby pictures be far behind? Me and Mr. Potato Head over dessert, you’ll see.

However, there was a bright spot. Barbara was looking at me, so sweetly, so—friendly, is the word—that I stopped worrying that I’d ruined myself by shooting off my mouth.

Stopped worrying about anything, really. Even Mikie and Frankie.

“You did so invite us,” Frankie said to my mother, breaking like a thousand etiquette rules by engaging in an argument with the hostess, homeowner, cook, and best friend’s mother.

“I never did. I merely told you that Barbara was coming for dinner tonight. Pass me the egg noodles, fresh kid.”

The fresh kid passed the egg noodles.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What were you doing talking to him, anyway? What, you guys have this secret life that doesn’t include me?”

Frank, who was seated on my side of the table, to the left, with Mikie between us, leaned over his plate to leer at me. “Practice calling me Dad,” he said.

Ma, who was sitting in the seat directly across from Franko, reached out with the tongs she was about to use on the noodles. Snipped him right on the left earlobe, holding him still to give him a small slap on the right cheek. “Calling you
dead
is what we’re going to practice if you don’t get yourself under control.”

Franko, who couldn’t seem to tell the difference between being liked by a woman and being struck about the face and head by one, laughed.

“Now go get up and rinse these tongs off,” Ma demanded. As soon he was out of his chair, she chuckled too.

“Anyway,” Mikie said. “Back to the point. I called here yesterday, Elvin. Your mom was supposed to tell you.”

I looked at her. “Mikie called,” she said, shrugging and sending the noodles around the table.

“Well I hope you’re satisfied,” I said to both guys. Now, I realized that the fight over whether they were staying for dinner was pretty well finished, what with them actually sitting in front of quickly scribbled place cards with their names on them, nibbling bread rolls, and tucking cloth napkins into their shirts like bibs. But I wanted to take my last shot anyway. “My poor mother had to stretch and fill and patch together this meal because she wasn’t prepared for—”

“Oh stop, Elvin,” Ma said without looking at me. She was carefully ladling creamy beefy Stroganoff over the bed of noodles in her plate, in effect illustrating what she was about to say. “I made enough for ten people, for goodness’ sake.”

“Ya,” I said, quickly running out of material, looking around at some pretty unsympathetic faces too. “Well, I was planning on
eating
enough for ten.”

Ma made a subtle
tsk tsk
noise at me, and I shut up. Which helped move the evening along.

Because then we could eat, which was maybe the one thing everyone here at the table could do equally well. I probably had an edge, with a well-established history of scarfing down my mother’s Stroganoff, her fettuccine Alfredo, her escarole soup, or smoked shoulder with the blackened honey-mustard shell. I knew her art, and could appreciate it without even touching it to my lips. But tonight we were a gang. A happy and hungry bunch of consumers, and I think we did better dealing with each other because of what the food did to us.

Mikie could not stop thanking Ma, and pointing out what aspect of each dish made him excited, asking what she had put into the water to make the baby carrots taste like pumpkin pie. Ma loved it, and told him nothing. Frankie moaned. His
other
moan, the one polite company can appreciate. There was almost no conversation during dinner that I can recall, and I suppose that sounds disgusting, but you’ll need to just take my word for it that it wasn’t. There were noises, single words like “wonderful” and “unbelievable” slipped in between bites, and there were nods and gestures with silverware toward the salad bowl, the bread basket, the serving bowls. But there wasn’t a discussion about
anything,
really, and I was so, so grateful for that. No feeling that Barbara being here, in my house, at my table, across from me in the seating arrangement with the stupid funny sweet little place cards, was an issue at all.

Which freed me up to mostly just look at her. Her eyes, the color of honeydew melon tonight, were actually smaller than I had originally thought, and in fact they seemed to struggle, like little beings all their own, stretching up to get a peek at the outside world over the pale drumlins of her cheeks when she smiled. And she smiled every time she glanced up from her plate and caught me staring at her.

Like it was okay with her that I stared. Like it was not something that bored or annoyed or scared her. Like it wasn’t something she was so used to that she would want me to stop. This alone made us a good pair, because I felt like I could do it for a long long time.

I’d be staring, crouching low and awkward to try and catch her eye, then she’d look up, do the smile thing, and almost cancel out her eyes altogether, the long fat lashes waving Help me like they were going under for the third time.

But eyes or no, how could I ever not want her to do that?

“I can’t eat another bite,” Barbara said, speaking for everybody and closing down the meal. “But I will anyway” she added, and took one last scoop of the main dish without the noodles, and a snap of bread for mopping the sauce. I was impressed. Here was someone who shared my philosophy that you don’t stop eating just because you’re not hungry anymore. But looking down at my own plate as my mother—and Frankie!—came around and started the clearing, I realized I hadn’t gotten around to eating much of anything. And I still wasn’t hungry.

When Ma came around and saw, I thought for sure it was going to be time for one of those gentle-yet-embarrassing commentaries on what’s-up-with-Elvin, like I’d always heard when I’d eaten too much, or too fast, or eaten six helpings of turkey and no potatoes and none of stuffing, or the other way around, because I had for my entire life worn my emotions on my stomach.

She looked down at my plate, then at me, then at Barbara, then at me again.

She took my plate away with one hand, wordlessly, and gave my neck a squeeze with the other as she continued her rounds.

As Barbara’s plate was swept away by Frankie—who was earning big points for minimal misbehavior with Barbara—she dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin and leaned way out over the table to whisper to me. “This was really nice of your mother,” she said. “And you.”

I shrugged. “I suppose. Ya, thanks.”

“Well I think we should do something for you two in return,” she said.

“What’s going on down there?” Mike asked.

“No, no,” Barbara said, standing up and waving him off. “Sit there and relax. Elvin and I are just going to get the party favors.”

“Favors?” I asked as I blindly followed Barbara to the door. “Favors?” Frankie said, reentering the picture. “I love favors. This is, like the coolest dinner party of my life, and that is saying something.”

“What favors?” Ma asked as she came in with a silver bowl filled with Stella D’oros and Fig Newtons.

We were standing at the back door, about to exit.

“Didn’t you tell them this was a theme party when you invited them to dinner?” Barbara asked.

Ma was awesome.

“Of course I told them,” she hummed, nibbling the first anisette biscuit before she’d even hit the seat. “I told them when I invited them. They know that.”

Ha. Their mouths hung open.

“Hey Ma, looks like you got two baby birds there, need to be fed. Pop a couple cookies in those beaks, and we’ll be right back.” Nice exit line, that. Except, I didn’t go anywhere. I stood there in the doorway, wanting to linger in the moment, watch them. I felt sort of in control, and I had absolutely no idea why.

Barbara, who had already headed out, doubled back and grabbed me by the hand, tugging me along to the garage.

Ah right. That was it. As I stared at the pale dimpled hand holding mine, I realized why I was feeling the way I was feeling. The elevated Elvin. The thing that I didn’t feel very often—or ever. She was doing it here now. You know that thing she did for the dogs, making them better, making them doggier, making them happy? She was doing it for me by plotting with me against my friends, by leaving a room with me...

Why is that so thrilling, I’d like to know? In all my demented fantasies, my loony dreams and frothy schemes, I had done many spectacular and unlikely things with girls who had lots and lots of long hair and no faces. But never something as drab and nowhere as holding a hand and removing myself down the back stairs while a room full of people wondered about it at our backs.

My oh my, oh my oh my what I never knew. How this left every fantasy in the shade.

I stared at Barbara’s hand and listened to her laugh, and it was a very good thing that I knew my stairs and my driveway and my yard as well as I did because my feet could have been anywhere doing anything for all the control I had over them.

She got the garage door partway up, but it was a creaky heavy old thing. “I’m going to need at least two hands for this, Elvin,” she said.

I looked down and noticed I was squeezing. Hanging so tight to her free hand that the fingers were turning pink and puffy.

“Oh. Sorry,” I said, awfully slowly. First I stared at the hands, as if sussing out whether to call for the jaws of life rather than just letting go. Then, I just let go.

Probably it was the comical slowness of all this that made Barbara giggle and look at me strangely. But it was her own unusualness that made her try and help me out.

“You are preoccupied, Elvin Bishop,” Barbara said, and when she said it, everything stopped proceeding normally, the dogs stopped their snuffling on the other side of the door, the chatter stopped filtering out of the open kitchen window above and behind us. Traffic out on the street slowed to the point where cars still went by, but you could hear the suck of their tires on the pavement as much as you could their engines. I lost the ability to blink. Barbara, even her gestures and the movement of her mouth, slowed down just like in slo-mo film, only her voice didn’t sink down into slo-mo deep-devil voice, thank god. Though even that wouldn’t have changed my mind much.