The Son of a Certain Woman (16 page)

I threw off the blankets, climbed down the ladder of the bunk bed and put my ear to the door. I heard what sounded like a gasp followed by a series of whimpers. I wondered if Pops or my mother was sick. Then it occurred to me that they might be doing
it
. My mother had said it was “no picnic” doing it with Pops.

I eased the door open and heard the same sounds, louder, unmistakably now of two people. They sounded as if they both had
bellyaches and were commiserating with each other and suffering and having fun, all somehow at the same time. I went out into the hall and saw that the door of my mother’s room was slightly open, a thin slant of light lying across the floor of the hall. I hurried to the door, no longer taking care to be quiet. My hand was an inch from the doorknob when I saw them.

They were lying side by side in my mother’s bed, on top of the blankets, naked and making funny noises. I saw my mother’s wide bare back and backside, one leg lifted to accommodate Medina’s hand, which was buried in her to the nether knuckles as my mother’s looked to be in her. I supposed they were kissing, though it looked more as if they were biting each other’s lips. Medina, who was facing me, had arched her back, smiling, her teeth parted, her head tilted, corkscrewing into the pillow that was pressed against the wall. She arched more and more until it looked like her back would break, and her breathing,
their
breathing turned into a series of rasps, as if they were soon to perish in each other’s arms.

I turned, desperate to tiptoe away, but my elbow hit the door. Brushed it maybe. I wasn’t sure I’d made a noise until the sounds inside the bedroom suddenly stopped. I ran back to my room, but in my panic I crossed the hall and wound up in the kitchen, racing through it to the basement door. I could hear nothing now but the thumping of my heart, the pulse of it pounding in my head. I opened the door, turned on the light and hurried down the basement stairs. I swung round at the bottom, one hand on the newel post, and made straight for the sump pump hole, my concocted-in-an-instant plan being to claim that I had heard a Vat Rat in the basement, had come down to investigate, only to see the rat escape into the sump pump hole. I all but posed at the hole, pointing down at the water, where I saw what for a second made me think I was still asleep and dreaming: there
was
a Vat Rat. It had tried to climb in through the sump pump drainpipe and had become wedged in the pipe so that half of it protruded
from the pipe into the hole and half of it was still inside the pipe. The half that was sticking out consisted of the head and forefeet and upper torso.

The rat was unmistakably dead, its mouth open so that its teeth were bared, its eyes two narrow slits, its face a rictus that conveyed all the fury and frustration of its final confoundment.

It was not difficult, what with this sight following so closely the one in the bed, to let loose and start bellowing for my mother. “Mom, Mom, Mom!” I was on the verge of shouting for Medina too when I caught myself and called out for Pops instead.

I heard my mother running down the stairs. “Percy, Percy, what’s wrong?”

Still pointing down into the hole, I said, “Look, it tried to get in and it got stuck.”

“What?”

She joined me beside the sump pump hole. She wore a bathrobe. Her face was flushed and sweat shone on her forehead.

“Merciful God. It must be the size of a cat. Poor creature.”

“It’s not a poor creature, it’s a rat!” I said angrily.

We turned when we heard Pops coming down the stairs.

“Was that you shouting, Percy?” he said. “Or was it Iago trying to wake up all of Venice?”

“Look, Pops,” my mother said.

He joined us beside the hole. “Well, there’s one that’s had its last meal of barley malt.” I threw my arms around my mother and pressed my head sideways against her stomach. I smelled Medina’s scent and caught the scent of something else I couldn’t name. My mother ran the fingers of one hand through my hair.

“You said it tried to get away?” she asked. I nodded into her bathrobe.

“It may have tried about three days ago,” Pops said. “That’s about how long it’s been dead.”

“I was in bed and I heard a noise in the basement.”

“Well, you didn’t hear a peep from this fellow,” Pops said. “Smells like last year’s cabbage. Don’t think he starved or died of thirst. Suffocated probably.”

“Maybe I heard another rat.”

My mother put her hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length. I was sweating. I felt my hair matting to my forehead. “Are you all right, Perse?” I looked in her eyes. I wondered what she saw, if she saw that I had seen her and Medina. She turned me around. “Upstairs to bed. I’ll be up soon to see how you are.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m pretty sleepy now.”

“Are you sure?” She sounded relieved. I nodded.

“I’ll see if I can get this beast out of there,” Pops said.

“Do you need any help?” my mother asked.

“No,” Pops said. “You know what they say about too many rat removers.”

“What do they say?” I asked.

My mother rolled her eyes. “They
say
: ‘Too many rat removers exponentially complicate the effects of rodent entrapment and consequent morbidity.’ You get perfect grades and you’ve never heard of
that
expression?
I
could rattle it off by the time I was five. Off to bed now.”

Climbing the stairs, I also noticed the smell of beer, from my clothes, my hair. She’d been drinking.

I had heard from boys at school about “lizzies,” about women reputed to be lizzies, two middle-aged women in particular about whom the parents of the neighbourhood exchanged coy smiles, furtive winks, describing the women as “friends,” two spinsters who lived together for companionship, who were tolerated because of their matronly appearance and absolute discretion, because they kept to themselves and didn’t
look
the way you would imagine women like that would look, or as if they were capable, even in perfect privacy, of doing such things as were known to be favoured by “lizzies.” I doubted that such tolerance would be extended to
my mother and Medina, a mother carrying on with the sister of her ever-absent fiancé under the same roof as her child, just feet away, in fact, from where her young son slept, especially if it came out that they were so flagrant that the boy had caught them in the act, the Primal Scene à la Lesbos.

I scrambled up the ladder, lay on my upper bunk on top of the blankets.

The urge to sleep usually trumped everything. I had often nodded off with tears still streaming down my face, only to wake in the morning as fretful as I had been the night before, expecting my mother to convince me that she could somehow restore everything to normal. But nothing could rid my mind of the funny sounds I had heard her making with Medina, or the sight of Medina looking as if she were trying to grind like a corkscrew through the headboard. I had nothing on which to base a guess as to how, if at all, these sounds differed from the sounds a man and a woman lying side by side or otherwise disposed in bed might make.

My mother and Medina. Lizzies. That word from school was all I had. Lizzies. Was it just the once? The first time? Could they have been so unlucky that, while doing it for the first time, they’d been caught? Perhaps it would be the one and only time. Especially if they
knew
they’d been caught, and by whom.

I assumed Medina was no longer in my mother’s room, that she’d cleared out, fled the house as quietly as possible when the rest of us were in the basement. She was probably home by now.

My heart pounded. My dick was stiffer than it had ever been. I tried to understand what exactly had been going on, what my mother and Medina had been doing to each other. I thought of Medina, her mouth wide open, eyes shut as if she were relishing the taste of her favourite food. I thought of my mother’s wide bare back. Then I wished it was she who’d been facing the door, her tits in full view, the nipples whose shape I had so many times seen outlined through her bra and blouse at last revealed. I found
myself rubbing the back of my dick with my thumb, wondering how my mother had made Medina feel what she must have felt, judging by her face and the sounds she made and the way she undulated on the bed, which was so much more than I ever had while precociously self-experimenting. I imagined my hand was my mother’s hand, my thumb her thumb. I felt something inside me shudder, and shudder again, and then, swollen past all times before, I spurted onto my hand, my fingers and my belly, my first
real
time, it seemed, the first estimable come of my life, for I’d never so much as woken this wet even from a dream.

The rest of the night I couldn’t sleep for wonder of their bodies in the bed. I knew that, from now on, I would see Medina when I saw my mother, smell her mix of musk and sweat on my mother’s clothes and in her hair, the blend of their lipstick and my mother’s perfume.

I was terrified too: I was certain that if people found out, I would be taken away from my mother. I knew of two boys who’d been taken from their parents who’d done nothing worse than drink too much. I wiped tears from my eyes with the heels of my hands. I wondered if they had heard me, even seen me, at the door. They might have heard
someone
and now be wondering if it was me or Pops.

Word would quickly spread through the school and the neighbourhood about the Vat Rat that had almost made its way into our house, the frightful ingenuity of its assault upon the Joyces, its vicious determination and grisly battle to the death with our drainage pipe. Pops would tell the other teachers. My mother and Medina would tell the neighbours. And every time I overheard the neighbours talking, I would think of the wicked, illicit, inscrutable scene I had witnessed just before discovering the Vat Rat in the sump pump hole.

At breakfast the next morning, I kept my eye on my mother, and I was far from subtle about it, though I’d warned myself not to stare at her or even Pops.

“What are
you
looking at?” my mother said.

“You,” I said.

“I can see that. I meant
why
are you looking at me? Jesus, Perse, must you always be so goddamned literal?”

I shrugged.

At first she seemed unfazed, more concerned about me than otherwise. “Perse, you look like you didn’t sleep a wink.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the Vat Rat,” I said.

“The Vat Rat’s gone. Pops heroically disposed of it.”

“Another one might try to get in the same way.”

“It would have to be a slightly smaller or an even more determined one,” Pops said. “I had to use a screwdriver on last night’s beast. Came out in pieces—”

“That’ll do, Pops.”

“I feel sorry for the Vat Rat,” I said.

“You didn’t look sorry last night,” Pops laughed. “You wouldn’t feel sorry for one if it climbed up the ladder of your bed and bit off your—”

“Pops, will you for Christ’s sake shut up?”

“Sorry, Paynelope.”

“It’s not
Pay
nelope, it’s
Pene
lop
ee.”

Pops, face and neck flushed, got up from the table and left the kitchen, mumbling something about getting his lab coat and doubting that she had ironed it for him as she was always promising she would but never did.

My mother looked at me. “There won’t be any more Vat Rats.” It didn’t sound like reassurance so much as a warning to avoid any further mention of them. But I couldn’t help trying to get a rise out of her, to provoke her into blurting out something about last night.

“We can’t block up the sump pump pipe”—I darted a glance at her— “the basement will flood.”

My mother glared at me and I glared back. “What’s wrong with you this morning?” she snapped.

I wondered if it might after all have been the Vat Rat that had so upset her. If she and Medina had seen or heard me at the bedroom door, she would have been careful not to lose her temper with Pops. I realised she didn’t know.

In my room, I tried to mimic what I’d seen, looking at myself in the mirror, chewing and moving my head from side to side. Why did they prefer
that
? Why did they like it at all—Medina who had never had a boyfriend and my mother who no longer had a fiancé? I got hard at the very sight of a bare-legged girl from Mercy Convent. I’d all but go off at the sight of scores of them on Bonaventure trying to control their tunics in a gale of wind. My father’s sister and my mother. I felt certain it would never have happened if my father hadn’t run away and left us. But it also seemed like a betrayal of him in spite of what he’d done to us. And more Medina’s fault than my mother’s, who had once been engaged and had a child. I told myself Medina would do anything when she was drunk. There might be nothing more to it than that—something women did when they were drunk, and didn’t even remember afterward.

But when I looked at my startled, wonderstruck face in the mirror, I knew that if either of them was more to blame, it was my mother, on whose every word and deed Medina hung, as if on an older sister’s.

I supposed they didn’t have to worry much about being discovered by Pops. His bedroom was farther from my mother’s than mine was. And Pops drank six or more beers every night before he went to bed and always kept the door of his room closed after lights out. I kept my door closed as well, for there were nights when my mother and Medina noisily played cards in the kitchen until well after midnight. My mother usually left the door of her
room partway open so that she’d hear me if I called out to her or needed to be consoled about a dream. She wouldn’t have left the door open on purpose when Medina was in there. In fact, she would likely have locked it; I knew her door could be locked from the inside simply by turning and pushing the knob.