Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (8 page)

In an ideal world, the raccoon would give Clare advice. He would speak to her like Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion and mercy. Or he would speak to her like Saint Paula, the patron saint of widows, about whom Clare has heard so much lately.

Clare says, without moving, “And why is Saint Paula a saint? She dumps her four kids at a convent, after the youngest dies. She runs off to
hajira
with Saint Jerome. How is that a saint? You’ve got shitty mothers all over America who would love to dump their kids and travel.”

The raccoon nibbles at the crust.

“Oh, it’s very hard,” Clare says, sitting down slowly and not too close. “Oh, I miss him so much. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that I would be like this, that this is what happens when you love someone like that. I had no idea. No one says, There’s no happy ending at all. No one says, If you could look ahead, you might want to stop now. I know, I know, I know I was lucky. I was luckier than anyone to have had what I had. I know now. I do, really.”

The raccoon picks up two large crumbs and tosses them into his mouth. He scans the counter and the canisters and looks closely at Clare. He hops down from the counter to the kitchen stool and onto the floor and strolls out the kitchen door.

*  *  *

Clare told Nelson about the raccoon and they encouraged him with heels of bread and plastic containers of peanut butter leading up the kitchen steps, but he didn’t come back. She told Margaret Slater, who said she was lucky not to have gotten rabies, and she told Adam and Danny, who said the same thing. She bought a stuffed-animal raccoon with round black velvet paws much nicer than the actual raccoon’s, and she put him on her bed with the rhino and the little bird and William’s big pillows. She told little Charlotte raccoon stories when she came to babysit (how could Emily say no to a babysitter six blocks away and free and generous with her time?). She even told Emily, who paused and said, with a little concern, that raccoons could be very dangerous.

“I don’t know if you heard,” Emily said. “My mother’s getting married. A wonderful man.”

Clare bounced Charlotte on her knee. “Oh, good. Then everyone is happy.”

Opening the Hands Between Here and Here

On the dark road, only the weight of the rope. Yet the horse is there
.

—J
ANE
H
IRSHFIELD

BETWEEN HERE AND HERE
For ESBL

I had always planned to kill my father. When I was ten, I drew a picture of a grave with
ALVIN LOWALD
written on the tombstone, on the wall behind my dresser. From time to time, I would add a spray of weeds or a creeping vine. By the time I was in junior high, there were trees hung with kudzu, cracks in the granite, and a few dark daisies springing up. Once, when my mother wouldn’t let me ride my bike into town, I wrote,
Peggy Lowald is a fat stupid cow
behind the dresser but I went back the same day and scribbled over it with black Magic Marker because most of the time I did love my mother and I knew she loved me. The whole family knew that my mother’s feelings were Sensitive and Easily Hurt. My father said so, all the time. My father’s feelings were also sensitive, but not in a way that I understood the word, at ten; it might be more accurate to say that he was extremely responsive. My brother, Andy, drew cartoon weather maps of my father’s feelings: dark clouds of I Hate You, giving way to the sleet of Who Are You, pierced by bolts of Black Rage.

Most of the mothers in our neighborhood were housewives, like my mother. But my mother was really a very good cook and a very accomplished hostess, even if the things she made and the way she entertained is not how I would have done it (red, white, and blue frilled toothpicks in lamb sausage pigs-in-blankets on the Fourth of July, trays of deviled eggs and
oeufs en gelée
—with tiny tulips of chive and egg yolk decorating each
oeuf-
—to celebrate spring). My mother worked hard at what she considered her job, with no thanks from us and no pay, aside from the right to stay home.

Five minutes before the start of a cocktail party or bridge night, my father would make himself comfortable on the living room couch, dropping cigar ash on the navy-blue velvet cushions, or he’d stand in the kitchen in his underwear, reading the newspaper while my mother and I put out platters and laid hors d’oeuvres around him. Sometimes, he’d sit down at the kitchen table and open the newspaper wide, lowering it almost to the tabletop, so we’d have to move the serving dishes to the counter. One July Fourth, when I was about twelve and Andy was ten, my father picked up an angel on horseback as my mother was carrying the tray past him. “What is this, shit on a stick,” he said, and knocked the whole plate out of her hands, and then there we were, my mother and Andy and me, scrabbling to grab the hot, damp, oily little things from under the sideboard and out of the ficus plants. My father picked up a couple and put them in my mother’s apron pocket, saying, “You kids crack me up.” He was still chuckling when the doorbell rang and my mother went back into the kitchen and Andy and I went to our rooms, and he was still smiling when he opened the door for Mr. and Mrs. Rachlin, who were always the first.

When I got to college, other people’s stories were much worse. A girl down the hall told her parents she was pregnant her senior year of high school and they drove her to a home for unwed mothers on Christmas Eve and moved out of town. A boy I liked had a long, ropy scar on his back from a belt; my roommate had cigarette burns on her instep. Gross cruelty with canapés and bad temper hardly seemed worth mentioning. (Amazingly, my brother chose to come out to both my parents his sophomore year. He said my mother wiped away a quick tear and hugged him and thanked him for telling her, and just as I was about to say, Good for Mom, Andy told me that Dad had lowered his newspaper, poked him in the stomach, and said, “A fat fag? Not much fun in that,” and gone back to his paper.) In law school, at night, over drinks, everyone told funnier family stories and no one pulled up their shirt or rolled down their socks to show their scars. When it got really late, a few guys told my kind of stories and then they would say, frankly or sadly or fondly, that these things happened only when the old man had been drinking.

My father didn’t drink. He had a glass of white wine at the cocktail parties, and in the summertime, when he was grilling hamburgers, he’d have a beer. One glass of wine. One beer. I didn’t have to watch to see if this was the drink that turned Good Daddy into Bad Daddy; there was no slow, nightly disintegration of the self. I never had to tiptoe around Daddy Sleeping It Off, because my father took a four-mile walk every day, and if it rained, he spent an hour on the rowing machine in the basement. Andy and I always caught the late bus home, and after dinner we did our homework in our rooms, and when I got a stereo for my fifteenth birthday, Andy and I would lie on my floor and listen to loud rock and roll, very, very quietly.

“Am I talking to myself, goddammit?” my father said one night at dinner, and in the silence Andy said, “I guess so, Dad,” and I laughed, which I knew was a mistake even as my lips parted, and my father stood up, hands wandering from head to head, unable to choose which one of us to kill first. I pushed Andy under the table and pulled him down the hall to my bedroom and pressed the lousy little push-button lock on the door. My father threw our dinners on the floor. My mother was still sitting at the table, trying to be calm, which did sometimes work, and sometimes not, as when he took her two favorite silk scarves and used them to stake his tomato plants, or another time, famous in our family, when he drove her car to a used-car lot, sold it, and took a cab home with a bag of cash in one hand and a box of pizza in the other.

“You could kill yourself on these creamed onions,” he said, stepping over them, and I could hear my mother murmuring agreement and I heard him say, pleasantly, that sometimes the kids were too smart for their own damned good. I heard my mother agree with that, too, and my father said he would catch the tail end of the news. About an hour later, my mother knocked on my door and handed us two plates of plastic-wrapped dinner, the meat-loaf slices reconstructed and carrot-raisin salad instead of the creamed onions.

I dated a few boys of the kind you’d expect from a girl like me with a father like that, with no real harm done, and in the middle of law school, I met Jay Johnson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team. When we went to his family in Wisconsin to announce our engagement (on our side, my mother took us both to lunch at her favorite restaurant on Northern Boulevard and my father met Jay the night before the wedding), I found a second family; the Johnson women were good, tireless cooks and all the men, including mine, could build you a willow rocking chair or a pair of handsome nightstands in just a few afternoons. And, as it happened, almost all of them were recovering alcoholics. I fell in love with them all. The Johnsons drank coffee and Diet Coke all day (even the toddlers had highballs of fresh milk with a splash of black coffee at breakfast) and at cocktail hour my mother-in-law served Ritz crackers with cheddar cheese and a giant pitcher of Virgin Marys with Tabasco and celery sticks for garnish. You could smoke a pack of cigarettes or eat an entire sheet of crumb cake if you wanted and no one said a word. Most of the Johnsons are obese chain-smokers, and if, like me, you are not, and on top of that, never drank to excess, you are admired almost every day, from every angle. I am the Jackie Kennedy of the Johnson family and it’s been a wonderful thing. We still go to Racine for the major holidays.

My brother went a different way, as casting directors like to say in Hollywood, which is where he settled and what he became. After twenty years of smoking pot every day, for his health, as he put it, Andy found himself at a dinner party in West Hollywood, seated next to a handsome tree surgeon in good, but not coke-fueled, spirits, with compatible politics, no diseases, and absolutely no interest in celebrities. According to Andy, who was calling me with updates from restaurant vestibules, men’s clothing stores, and his own bathroom, they had amazing sex fourteen days in a row, without pot or liquor, at the end of which Andy said, Please, marry me, and Michael said, You bet, and they bought a house in Silver Lake the day it went on the market. Andy said that if Michael and affordable housing weren’t signs of a Higher Power, he didn’t know what were and he quit everything cold turkey the day they moved in, dropping off a four-hundred-dollar Moroccan hookah and a bunch of hand-blown glass bongs at the men’s homeless shelter on the way. For the last eight years, he’s been doing an hour of yoga every morning, much the way the Johnsons drink coffee, bake, and whittle. Aside from being in much better shape than he used to be, Andy is the same good and dear person he always was, although Michael says, when I’m visiting, as I’m sure Jay says about me, it’s not all sweetness and light. You will have noticed that neither of us has children.

I’d been waiting for the call about my father since he turned seventy. I thought that would be a nice gift from the universe—ten or fifteen healthy years of widowhood for my mother, traveling with friends, taking courses at the Elderhostel, and winding up in her eighties on a hotel veranda sipping a tall, fruity drink with someone who looked like Mr. Rachlin. I hoped Mr. Rachlin was still alive and I hoped that my father wouldn’t dawdle in shuffling off this mortal coil. He’d had a fairly serious car accident when he was sixty-eight, which left him limping a little, and he was a heavy cigar smoker, which seemed promising. I sent him crystal ashtrays and silver cigar cutters for his birthdays, expensive humidors and a subscription to that stupid cigar magazine for Christmas, and when friends went to Cuba, I’d ask them to bring back a box for my father. I was, roughly speaking, watching the clock.

Their next-door neighbor found my name on the tiny phone list my mother kept taped to the kitchen wall. Your father’s too upset, Mrs. Cannon said, so I’m calling. Andy and I met at the airport and rented a car and drove to our house. Mrs. Rachlin greeted us very warmly and Mr. Rachlin waited in the living room, sitting next to my father, who was reading the paper. Mr. Rachlin jumped up to hug us. He jerked his head toward my father. “It hasn’t really sunk in,” he said, and Andy and I nodded. My father said, “Hey, kids.” Mrs. Cannon left a lasagna on the kitchen table. Broadway Delicatessen delivered platters twice, fried chicken from the hospital where my mother volunteered, and right before dinnertime, six pounds of corned beef and pastrami, with a pound each of cole slaw and kosher dills, from my father’s law firm. We let the Rachlins go home and I gave Mr. Rachlin a little kiss for my mother’s sake. My father unwrapped the corned beef and made himself a sandwich.