Your Body is Changing (9 page)

Because we live in an official historic district, we are required by the city to sign a pledge that we will treat our property in certain ways. One of the most important is that each house must be painted in a shade—honeysuckle, mint julep, stardust, johnny reb gray, and so on—exactly consistent with the decorating practices of antebellum days. The city has gone to a lot of trouble to scientifically reproduce an abundant registry of authentic colors, but apparently none of them had been good enough for the new fellow across the street.

I walked over to commiserate with Roger.

“Look at that,” he said. “I’ve called the city three times, and nothing. And I’ve been watching. Hell, I spent half the day yesterday standing at the window, waiting for a city car to pull up, and all I saw was that damn woman picking up sticks in the yard, which was not a pretty sight when she bent over, let me tell you. He probably just waved some cash in their faces, that’s all, that’s probably how he got the house to begin with. The only place you’ll find a color like that is if you go down to south Broad Street and look at a row of n——-r houses.”

I guess it was bad of me, but I didn’t object to his language at the time because he was so obviously upset. And anyway there is no denying the pitiful state of those houses on Broad Street. Hell, that’s just a simple fact, and if that makes me a racist, well lock me up. Personally, I would never use the word that Roger used, but you can’t say anything true nowadays because of this political correctness they have going around.

Roger reached down and pulled up a clump of weeds.

“I’m letting the whole place go to pot. Used to be there was nothing I liked better than getting out in the yard, puttering around, do a little gardening, a little landscaping. Sally would say, ‘Why don’t you just hire a yard man?’ and I’m going, ‘Oh, no, honey, I enjoy doing this.’ Well shit. Now I don’t even care. You look at that shit across the street and you think, ‘What’s the point?’ Picking up sticks in the yard. God! Have you seen that woman? She’s as big as a barn and she wears halter tops. She looks like a piece of white trash fresh from the trailer park.”

“They’re not married is what I hear,” I told him.

“That’s perfect.”

Roger dropped the weeds and dusted off his hands. He headed back for his house. The door slammed behind him. I didn’t think much of it at the time. He had a right to be upset. I finished my cigar and went inside.

That evening there were four or five police cars parked on the street and in Roger’s yard. I was already down the steps to check it out and Meg was standing in the doorway when a man came up the walk to meet me. He showed me his badge and asked if we had heard anything unusual in the past hour or so.

I looked back at Meg. “We’ve been watching television,” she said, sounding shaky. Her arms were crossed tight.

“What happened?” I asked.

What had happened was that Roger Hill had shot and killed his wife and himself.

It didn’t seem like any fun to watch HBO after that. We went upstairs and sat on our bed in the dark. Periodically, one of us would get up and peek through the blinds. Once, Meg stood there a long time and I finally said, “What?”

She whispered, “They’re bringing them out.”

By the time I got to the window, they were shutting the ambulance door.

I guess I made a disappointed noise. Actually, what I said was, “Shoot.”

Meg looked at me.

The phone rang. Meg said to let the voice mail pick it up. It rang again. It kept ringing. Meg turned off the ringer, and our cell phones, and everything. I had the urge to chew the fat with some of the other key people on the block. Meg wanted quality time instead. She sat on the bed again. I looked out the window.

“Everybody’s down there,” I said. “Nobody’s running them off.”

“Quality time,” said Meg. So nothing happened. That’s what quality time is.

The news had the whole story by ten. They reported that Roger and Sally had been in the middle of a difficult divorce. The children were in Atlanta on a visit with Roger’s parents. Roger had called the elder Mr. Hill and told him something like, “I’ve just shot Sally and now I’m going to shoot myself.”

Well, the neighborhood was in shock. No one had an inkling that Roger and Sally were getting a divorce.

We all chipped in to take care of Roger’s lawn. The new fellow across the street even waddled over once and offered to help but we told him no thanks, we had it under control.

*

Christmas came up fast. We were in the family room, where the tree was. Charlotte and Nathan had their gifts spread all over the floor. Nathan spent most of the time putting together his microscope and taking it apart again. He is an incredibly intelligent six-year-old who is enrolled in a school for the gifted. Charlotte, seven, is not too bright.

Also present were Meg’s parents, down from Hilton Head, as well as Meg’s brother Chip, who is a prominent gynecologist up in Charleston. Chip brought his teenage son Josh, of whom he has full custody because his ex-wife is crazy. Josh, as I understand it, is a recovered or recovering drug addict.

Meg sipped a g-and-t and told how Roger had gotten all the honeysuckle out of a rosebush for her. “He was so thoughtful. I can’t imagine him doing something like that—the, you know, violence.”

“Well, you know what Kafka said,” Chip told her. “People either die of boredom or shoot themselves out of curiosity. Or wait a minute. Was that Kierkegaard? One of those K people, anyway. They’re all depressing.” He laughed.

“I wish you wouldn’t joke about it,” Meg said.

Chip got up for more bourbon. He waved Meg off. Josh, who had been propped in the doorway with his mouth clamped shut all afternoon, said, “It’s like corn.”

“Good God Almighty, a voice from the grave!” Meg’s father said.

“What was that, son?” Chip asked, pouring.

“Remember that band Korn? They like start with a K, and they’re like all angry and energetic and stuff like you’re talking about.”

“That’s great, Dumbo. I liked it better when you were doing your Helen Keller act.” Chip went over to the loveseat where Meg was sitting, and perched on the arm.

“Look, honey. You think I’m cruel because I joke about a terrible thing. You must understand that once we reach a certain point of sophistication that’s the way we deal with life. You’ve heard the business about laughing so you don’t cry and blah blah blah? It’s like South Park.”

“Helen Keller wasn’t depressing and she starts with a K,” said Josh. “She was like a hero or whatever.”

“Oh yeah,” said Chip. “Some blind girl smashing into everything and making those weird noises—ahwah yahyah yah. That’s not depressing at all. Right. Can’t you just imagine her crapping on herself?”

“Oh my goodness, Chip,” said Meg.

“I’m using that as an example of spoofing. Nothing should be off limits. They have another one on the comedy channel about this big he-man superhero and all these other comic-book characters, like Betty Boop. And one time the he-man dresses up like a girl and gets gang-raped. Aw, don’t you get it? It’s a spoof on Jodie Foster, all those movies she used to make about boo hoo hoo, I got raped. I swear, sometimes I think I’ve got more of a young spirit about me than this sensitive little genius over here. What’s the matter, genius, are you in love with Jodie Foster? Sorry I made fun of your girlfriend.” Chip put this last zinger to Josh.

Josh looked away in a supposedly cool fashion, but I think everyone could tell he had been bested. Chip turned his attention back to Meg.

“I’ll give you an example. When I was interning, these doctors who bossed us around, they had code words for everything. ‘Gomer’ was a big one. ‘Gomer.’ Do you know what that is?”

We all said no.

“It’s an acronym. It stands for Get-Out-of-My-Emergency-Room, and it refers to the pathetic old geezers who tend to clutter up the place when they should really just go home and die. Now Gomers are divided into two categories: the Os and the Qs. Os are the ones who are so far gone that their mouths just hang open. That’s the O.” He demonstrated, tilting back his head and letting his jaw drop so that his mouth formed a round hole.

“And here’s a Q.” He did the same thing, except that he let his tongue dangle out.

Josh didn’t laugh, but the rest of us did, including Charlotte.

“They’re even worse,” Chip said, talking about the Qs. “Within a week we realized there was nothing we could do to help them, they were just getting in the way. We were hollering ‘Gomer’ right along with everybody else. And this is years before South Park.”

“That’s real funny,” said Josh. “Don’t you think you might have hurt those old people’s feelings or whatever, talking about them like that?”

“Believe me, son, they were beyond any conception of what we were saying.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

“It’s impossible to know for sure what’s going on in somebody else’s mind.”

“Oh, what a wonderful insight. Well, you’re mistaken, son. That schoolyard crap about who really knows what a dog is thinking and so on is bullshit. And I’ll tell you something else. When you’ve got children coming in with head trauma, gunshot wounds…”

“That’s not exactly where you stick your fingers now, is it?” said Josh.

Chip jumped up and screamed, “I am a doctor!” His drink went everywhere.

Josh said big deal and left. The front door slammed.

“Well, Happy Birthday, Little Lord Jesus,” said Meg’s father. I could see Josh through the bay window, standing on the porch, lighting a cigarette.

“Shit, Meg, don’t worry about your carpet. Most of it’s on my pants.” Chip slurped the bourbon off his fingers and went back to the bar. “You know why an alcoholic gynecologist is best, don’t you?”

He started to make a crude joke but Meg cut him off. “Chip! Nathan is very impressionable.”

“No I’m not,” Nathan said. We adults laughed because you don’t expect a normal six-year-old to say something like that. “I like it when Uncle Chip tells stories. Do you want to hear a story I know?”

“Yes by God we do!” said Meg’s father. He patted his knee and Nathan came over and sat on it.

“Okay. It’s like this. There was this little boy and his parents died and he had to live in a cage.”

“Lord have mercy!” said Meg’s mother.

“It’s true, too,” said Nathan. “It’s a real story of real life. One day the little boy got out of the cage and he went to live in the woods like a bear. One day some nice people found him and they adopted him and took him to live with them. They had a nice house and they already had a little girl.

“But the little boy was too crazy to live in a regular house. He just ran around like a nut and broke everything so they had to lock him up in the attic.

“Okay, and the little girl’s room was right under the attic and every night she heard a scritch-scritch-scratch and her parents told her it was rats. One night it got so loud that she went up the stairs and peeked through a crack in the door and there was the little boy, skinny as a skeleton, and he was taking his long fingernails and making a scritch-scritch-scratch on the floor.

“The little girl felt so sorry for him that she went to the kitchen and fixed a great big picnic basket of all the food she could find.

“The next morning her parents went to get her up for school and there was nobody in her bed. They looked all over the house and then they looked in the attic. There was the little boy scrunched up in the corner eating something. And there was the picnic basket and they looked in it and all it had in it was bones. That was the little girl’s bones.” Nathan shrugged and grinned. “He ate her up!”

“Merciful heavens!” said Meg’s mother. Chip let out a good long laugh.

“Do you want to give your sister a nightmare?” said Meg.

Charlotte had tears in her eyes and a finger up her nose. What a mess. Sometimes I just don’t know.

Meg went overboard and sent Nathan to his room. We could hear him up there, crying and breaking stuff. Before long it seemed like everybody was crying about something. “Hey, Meg, what’s eating you?” said Chip. “Get it?”

The next day everybody felt like crap. The sound of working woke us up. Who works the day after Christmas?

It was a bunch of blacks. They were climbing all over that house across from the Hill place, repainting.

Gosh, if only Roger could have held out for a few months. It looks like magnolia.

Henry and his mother returned home from Wednesday-night prayer meeting to find an enormous owl eating sausage biscuits out of a torn sack on the kitchen counter. When they walked in the door, the owl turned its head all the way around on its neck and looked over at them just as calm as could be, and it was holding a biscuit in one set of talons like a man eating half a sandwich.

“Uncle Lipton!” hollered Henry’s mom. Those were Uncle Lipton’s favorite biscuits, but Uncle Lipton was nowhere to be seen.

The owl knocked a whole slew of stuff off the counter as it craned and shook its broad wings. Henry’s mom went for the broom. She tried to tell Henry what to do but he became confused and ran screaming down the hall.

The owl took off after him, emitting a constant stream of silky yellow defecation, but the short and narrow hallway did not accommodate its wingspan. It lost control, destroyed a row of family photographs, and barreled into Henry’s back. Henry fell on his chin, splitting the tip of his tongue down the middle.

Henry rolled over to see the owl careen into the small, pale bathroom. It tore off the shower curtain and, wrapped and blinded, flew into the mirror on the medicine chest, smashing it into diamonds.

Henry scrambled up and shut the door.

“What have you done?” said Henry’s mother.

“Now it can’t get out,” said Henry.

“But we want it to get out,” said Henry’s mother.

Henry spat a great bit of blood onto the floor.

They found Uncle Lipton curled up in a cabinet under the kitchen sink, next to the bug spray and Mr. Clean. His eyes wouldn’t open all the way and he was humming a tune.

Just a few days earlier everything had been like normal. The chapel smelled like furniture polish. If Henry squinted, Amy Middleton from the eleventh grade looked like Polly Finch from behind, the American hero who had been exploded in a methamphetamine lab as part of the war on terrorism.