Читать книгу Replacing Dad - Shelley Fraser Mickle - Страница 4

I didn’t choose this place; it chose me. We’d been driving down the coast of Florida, George and I; I was three months pregnant with Drew, just enough to know for sure—which I hid from my mother and, God knows, forever from my father. A week later I would tell them I had eloped, then remind them how much a real wedding would have cost. (And for anybody who thinks like my mother, I’d like to add that getting pregnant before the ring is wound around the fourth finger doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a hussy, slut, or whore. It took me a long time to convince myself of that. And I never did, my mother.)

So George and I were looking for a romantic place where we could be married. The only place we could afford was here, not in a ritzy part of Florida, but on the mud coast, as it is called. Or the Redneck Riviera. I didn’t know that then, had never heard it called anything, but it was a place definitely out of the way; and it was the sky at Palm Key that chose me.

Standing on a pier that jutted out into the Gulf, as though with one more step westward we would fall off the earth, George and I looked out at the sky and the late afternoon sun. The tide was in, and the lap of water was all around under me. Two porpoises fed in the gray water just in front of us, breaking through the surface, then disappearing under it, in and out as if they were curved needles sewing the Gulf. And as far as I could turn my head there was sky, all sky. As I moved my feet, turning more, hearing the gentle tap and scrape of my sandals on the gray weathered pier, still there was more sky. It was as though I was standing inside a glass bowl, slate blue, clear, and forever changing. The clouds sat like huge swirls of cream with the sun going down through them in streaks of pink, reminding me of juice dripping from a sliced strawberry, while quietly beside me a big brown pelican landed on a pole near the pier, and looked around, too. For a second his eyes and mine met: the sharp black buttons of a fish hunter, and the girlish pools of a mother-to-be, a little anxious, yet anchored by love.

The sunset was so beautiful it made me know who I was: small and finite, a privileged watcher of porpoises and suns and pelicans landing now and then. And all of this was punctuated even more by the small tender swelling of Drew inside me.

George’s arm was around my waist, his hand riding above my hips, his fingers warm against me. So gentle and sweet. Simply, it was, I guess, a sky and place we could not say no to—or leave. And George decided right there and then that he would apply to the local school for a teaching job, while I saw in the sky the colors of paintings that would fill my lifetime. We gave ourselves and our lives to this place so easily, so determinedly, adding the final touches in a ten-minute ceremony at City Hall: married.

The story of the goose who laid the golden egg is suspect. It’s what she does when she lets loose with a brown one that’s real.

All along I should have been suspicious of how George kept his things. His personal things: his socks and his tools, his books, and his cars. He never let himself have more than two of the same kind, or color, or make. Or loves. George was a barracuda after clutter.

I had Drew here; or at least in the next county. There was no hospital or clinic or anything in Palm Key then. But he grew up here, was my first baby here, was my first offspring of love who got to watch me turn from girl to mother, a sometime playmate or drill sergeant, an occasional fishing mate. It was an easy place to raise him. And it was still easy when Mandy came and then George the Second. No traffic to speak of, no kid-snatching maniacs. There’s something special about a place that declares a dog an official speed bump. Our dog, Lolly, got old and had arthritis so bad that he layout on the warm pavement all day, so cars had to go around him. No one complained; the weekly paper just wrote him up and declared him an official speed bump.

How could I leave a place that was so much a part of me? And yet I could no longer feel it. I could no longer see it as it was. I could no longer bear to see it as it had once been.

I was hanging over Palm Key like a kite that had gotten loose. I knew I should leave, and yet I couldn’t. My children’s father was here. I couldn’t make them leave where once George and I had been as one. I could not bear to think that also here they had witnessed the death of us.

By the time all the lawyers and proceedings got through with me, I didn’t have a pot to piss in—as Lucille Duffy said. Lucille ran The Love ‘em and Leave ‘em Day Care up on Highway 40, where I had to put George the Second when I got a job. I hate to admit this, but when George and I were in college together all I had on my mind was him. And he sure was a pitiful thing to major in, which only shows how dumb I was. I dropped out of college to marry him; of course, I accidentally got pregnant with Drew. I don’t ever tell Drew I got pregnant accidentally. He’s a smart boy (not book smart but lots of common sense), and he figured out a few years ago that his birthday comes too close to the date of George’s and my first anniversary. George’s own mother, Drew’s grandmother, spilled the beans one Christmas when she reminisced how George and I were married in the spring of 1975, and then of course Drew himself counted up that coming in September of 1975 meant he was either way premature or the spur for the wedding date. Naturally all mothers have times like that when their child comes to them and pumps them for some truth you don’t especially want to tell. So what do you do? Make up a story that is not only truer than the real one but also way the hell better. So I told him that he just drew us together. He was our love child. Our own Drew who was our beginning and would always be the center of our love. Of course his real name is Andrew, but from day one, to me and George, he was Drew.

So just how do you suppose he feels now after I fed him that sweet little number? Why did I have to make up such a good story? Why didn’t I just tell him he got dropped off by some migrating stork on the way to Miami? How do you suppose he feels now that his father has taken off to make the center of his love a five-foot­eight-inch hussy with pink hair? Cotton candy torch, Lucille Duffy calls her.

Please pass the matches.

Now right here, I just have to be cut a little slack, because I can’t speak generously about the woman who was teaching my child and kept calling my husband in for private conferences. I know George the First didn’t have to attend; I know he didn’t have to answer every one of her requests to see the principal, but it’s just a part of their whole mess that along with him, I burn her, too.

Shoot! We all knew George the First was weak, a Man of the Flesh.

All the time I should have just warned every woman who saw him coming. Put a flaming letter across his chest. (I might seem tough, but the truth is it took me almost six months just to call the kettle black.)

And so that’s where all that left me: two years of a beginning major in art and, unfortunately—or fortunately, however you want to look at it—the ability to type. The only job I could get right after the divorce was as a clerk in the payroll office of the county dump, which was an hour’s drive from my house and to Lucille Duffy’s, where I could leave George the Second.

Let me tell you, none of that was fun.

George the First was, and still is, good about the child support. There was just not much of anything for any of us and nothing left for me.

Even if I could have gotten George to agree to send me back to school so I could finish my degree, he didn’t have enough money to. It’d have been a lot of lawyers maneuvering and then finally seeing they were just pissing in the wind. (The kettle was always way too empty to ever pour.)

In my opinion, if a man can’t afford two families, he ought to get out of the family business. What did he think he could do: put us on Visa?

That day I met Mark, Drew and I were driving back from the Highway Patrol Station. Drew had taken three tries to pass the driver’s test. Third time’s the charm, I told him. And he said, well, that’s sure not true about George the Second—which, to me, didn’t disprove that old saying in the least.

Even though my third child, George, is, I guess, the epitome of what gives meaning to the words pistol, pill, live wire—to me he was, is, and always will be, charming. And Drew was driving along just fine up Highway40 to Lucille Duffy’s so we could pick up George the Second on our way home.

We pulled up to Bill and Lucille’s Handymart. That was easy for Drew. No one else was there. Plenty of room to park.

Lucille is big and wears her hair in tight curls all over her head, and during those first hard months after George moved out, I don’t think I would have made it without her. She and Bill lived in an upstairs apartment over the Handymart. Along with gas and groceries and snacks and lottery tickets, they specialized in fishing gear. In the back, the yard was fenced in with a swing set and sandbox and picnic table where Lucille ran The Love ‘em and Leave ‘em Day Care.

Drew held the door open for me—he’d started doing that lately—and I passed beside the plant where Lucille filed away her losing lottery tickets. It was a Spanish bayonet, a dusty green thing with long spikelike leaves that had, on each one, a ticket spiked through the heart. It looked like some kind of strange creature, a symbol of comfort or despair—however you wanted to see it—for all losers.

Lucille came in from the back to meet us. That day she was wearing a T-shirt that said PLEASE LORD LET ME SHOW YOU THAT WINNING THE LOTTERY WON’T SPOIL ME. And she grabbed Drew across the shoulders and pulled his head into her large bosom. (I myself had begun to wonder if Drew was not too old for that. I didn’t want for me, or Lucille either, to get in the way of his budding sexuality. As though I knew anything about budding sexuality, seeing as how my own had budded up so long ago, then had gotten snipped while blooming—and was now compost.)

“Well, just look at this,” Lucille said, smiling. “Driving up here good as Mario Andretti. Looking pretty as a pretty Italian, too.” She ruffled his hair.

Drew turned pink under that beautiful skin of his. His eyes are gray like mine. George used to call mine Sea Wash, the name of a paint I used a lot. A paint he said made my watercolor skies look like captured raindrops. (Should have drowned him when I had a chance.) My whole life with George is now like a footnote. It creeps in in tiny little minutes in which I remember what he used to say, the way his hair curled around the back of his ears; the yellow flecks in the irises of his eyes that, with his head on a pillow, were enhanced like chain links of gold. Even as I looked at Drew, right then, the exact curl of George’s hair was behind his ears. “He did great,” I said. “Passed with flying colors.”

Drew turned pink again and glanced at me. Well. . . flying colors is always relative.

Bill reached over the counter and handed Drew a key ring. It was plastic in the shape of a swordfish. “Here’s a little something for your birthday,” he said. “We got to take a day off soon and go fishing. What you say?”

Drew smiled, his head half tucked like a rising bean shoot. He was so uncomfortable in his new big body and in those occasional moments, which reminded us all that he was two seconds from taking charge of his own life, that he seemed to sneak looks at us like we were spectators on a beach. “It’d be great,” he said. Eyes up, then down. “And thanks.”

Bill grinned again and handed Drew an unopened Chap Stick. “Case you get to drive around in somebody’s convertible,” he said. Bill could never give anyone enough. As well as selling lottery tickets in the store, and buying them themselves, he and Lucille had also gotten into the cheering-up business. They were situated at the intersection of two highways, fifteen minutes from the middle of Palm Key, where they’d have more traffic. Bill had a sign in front of his cash register: WANTED: ONE GOOD WOMAN WHO CAN COOK AND CLEAN FISH. WITH A BOAT AND MOTOR, WHO CAN SEW AND FISH. PLEASE SEND PHOTO OF BOAT AND MOTOR.

Just then George the Second came in the back door, his voice high and fast like a soup pot set on high, boiling over. “Did Drew pass? Did you pass, Drew? You driving, Drew?”

Drew held up the car keys looped over his finger. I swear, the smile on his face could have rivaled a watermelon slice.

George the Second was four then, little scrawny, scraped knees. I could never get him clean. The insides of his ears looked like sweet potatoes. Both Lucille and I had just about given up. And I often dressed him in pinstriped overalls, like a tiny train engineer. I wanted him to look cute so he’d have a little protection. Because sometimes George could push just about anybody close to wanting to kill him. He was a walking contraceptive. Five minutes with him, and you might run out and get yourself fixed.

But given a choice, I’d still have five more just like him. (At least, after a good long rest.) Which, I guess, just proves for good how crazy I am.

“I want to sit up front with Drew,” George was saying, opening the car door.

“Fine.” I got in the back, wondering if the learner’s permit said anything about me not being in the front. But then, being in the back would be like giving Drew even more of my total vote of confidence.

“Buckle up,” I said.

The car was nothing fancy. A Ford sedan, sensible and not too fast. It was late Friday afternoon, and we had forgotten that the next day was the beginning of the Palm Key Shrimp Festival. Tourists from all over were on their way into the town, ready to fill up the hotels and get an early start on the booths of shrimp that would open the next day and fill up the main streets and the park. Shrimp pie. Shrimp salad. Fried shrimp. Boiled shrimp.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Drew, “you’re doing just fine.” His hands were tight on the wheel, and the side of his jaw was working. His ears had seemed to have outgrown his head—or his hair had been cut too short above them—those seemed to be already the ears of a man. I stared at the edge of his face, from what I could see from the backseat. I still couldn’t quite believe he had started shaving. Once or twice a week, but still, shaving. The traffic was bumper to bumper on the one highway that leads into Palm Key.

“Go ahead,” I said, “put on your lights.” My voice was low and calm. It was only dusk, the sky gray fuzz, but I figured having the car lights on would help everybody to see us coming. And if I sounded like I was trying to get into The Guinness Book of World Records for being the sweetest backseat driver, ever, my feet were putting on the brake plenty on the floor right behind Drew.

I put my dark glasses in the pocket of my suit and switched to regular ones. George pointed to three birds sitting on the wires between two telephone poles beside the road. “Why don’t those birds get ‘lectrocuted?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” I said. Then, “That’s fine, Drew; just let him pass. If he’s got the hots for shrimp that bad, let him go on around.” Drew had us so close to the right side of the road, I was afraid we’d fall off. We were close to the bridges now, the wide expanse of water on either side with marsh grass sticking up like swirls of fur.

“So come on, Mom, why don’t those birds get ‘lectrocuted?” George was riding face forward, but he was turning sideways to throw his voice back to me, and his little index finger pointed out the window.

“I don’t know exactly, George.” It was never my style to not say that I didn’t know something. And besides, speculation was my strength. “I guess it has something to do with insulation,” I said.

“What’s insulation?”

“A coating around something. Something that gives protection.”

George turned his head so he could glance at me. “If I get ‘sulation, can I sit on wires?” he asked.

“No, you’re too heavy.”

“How does the ‘lectricity get in the toaster?”

“Through a wire.”

“What does it look like?”

“You can’t see it.”

“Why can’t you see it?”

“It’s like one of those things you just can’t see, George. Like air. Or God. Or a virus.”

“Then why does it need wires?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to look it up.”

“You never look it up. You always say you’re going to look it up.”

“I will, George, I promise. Right after supper.”

Drew laughed. “Why don’t you tell him the same thing you told him about the TV?”

“What did I tell him about the TV?”

“You told him Socrates made it work. Old Socrates.” He laughed again. The back of his neck was like a little tree, reaching up. He was trying so hard not to look nervous over the steering wheel.

‘’That’s a thought,” I said, which made George turn around in the seat and stare at me. Ever since he could talk, he’d driven me nearly to the end of myself with questions, and usually at the worst times. The year before I had written him a poem that, every once in a while, I’d recite, when my batteries were running low.

You are three, George.

And all day have queried me

with the intensity of Socrates.

And you know what happened to him.

The first time he’d answered: “I don’t know Socrates. He live in Palm Key?”

Quickly and without thought, as though George was fifty years old and sitting at my right hand in Hell as my punishment, I had thrown back: “Keep it up, and you’ll find out.” Which meant that immediately afterward, I bought him two packages of Oreos out of a vending machine, along with three packages of gum, which, when they ended up stuck to the living-room rug, I cleaned up without a bit of complaint.

But now I was brought back to thinking about the road and to what Drew was about to do to us. I screamed: “Slow down, Drew! Slow down! You don’t have to kiss his bumper!” Drew was gripping the wheel, his knuckles like clamps. “I don’t want to look like a wuss,” he said. “You’re not a wuss,” I said. “Yes, he is a wuss, “ George looked at Drew. “Pass him, Drew. Pass the old fart.”

For three weeks, George had latched onto the word fart with the same sort of attachment he had given to his pacifier. I had, with great calm, explained to him that it was not a word adults liked hearing little children use. That didn’t do it. I had, without calm, told him that if I heard him say it again, I would give him Time Out in his room and no cookies for a week. That didn’t do it.

Every time I brought attention to his using it only seemed to make it more attractive to him. It was a word I had decided I was going to have to just wait out. And meanwhile keep him out of public as much as I could.

“Why do the license plates have different colors?” George pointed in front, then whirled around and pointed in back.

“They’re from different places,” I said.

“Why are they from different places?”

“Because they have jobs there.”

“Who got them the jobs?”

“Socrates. “

‘’Socrates is an old fart,” he said.

I sat in the back, watching the back of his head. Maybe I’d be a better person if I had plenty of money and understood electricity. And for certain if I ever won the lottery, I’d have to give it all away to the Child Abuse Society.

Just before the main intersection in Palm Key, Drew turned right and headed to the First (and only) Palm Key Methodist Church. From a block away, we could see Mandy sitting on the top of the concrete steps. The car lights lit her up, and the church porch lights threw a circle behind her. Her little body in her new green Girl Scout uniform (she had just flown up from Brownies) looked so lonely that I had to swallow. Of all my children, Mandy is the most like me. She has George the First’s blond hair and his nose. But her eagerness to please, her desire for a world where there is only peace, no pain, and for all eggs to be laid golden, without a whiff of rot, is—up and down and all over—me.

Behind her, Mrs. Farrigut, who was up for the Volunteer of the Year Award and had won it for the last five years, and who was now also the scout leader, stood guard over Mandy. I leaned out of the window, ‘’Thanks for staying with her.”

“No problem.” Mrs. Farrigut patted Mandy on the back. “I just had to call and cancel a dental appointment and tell Fred to pick up some fast food and reschedule my Blood Drive meeting. But I wouldn’t have left one of my girls here alone for anything in the world.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Mandy got in the back beside me and handed me a potholder woven out of fat tubes of yarn.

“Why’re you so late?” She had an edge of complaint in her voice that I’d noticed when she started the sixth grade.

“It took a long time for Drew to get his permit.”

“So, he bombed it.”

“No.”

Drew was pulling into the church parking lot to turn around. “What else would you call it?” he asked.

“I didn’t know he bombed it.” George the Second looked at Drew. “You didn’t tell me you bombed it.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “Except for a while. And it’s not what you need to tell anybody, anyway.”

“Yeah, I had to take it three times,” Drew added. “A lot of people do,” I said. “Your own father had to take it five times.” Mandy and George turned to look at me, and Drew would have, but he was too busy pulling the car into a vacant place and backing out headed in a new direction.

“He did?” George asked. “Did he really?” Drew added. And then Mandy: “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the truth. Ask him,” I said. One of my favorite pastimes had become pinning a less-than-perfect past on George and then enjoying imagining him getting out of it in front of the kids.

Mandy leaned against me. I could feel the tiny little swellings of her breasts as she pressed against my arm. In the last few weeks, her body had begun to change, her breasts becoming about the size of infected mosquito bites. And they seemed as foreign to her as my own had become to George the First.

About a dozen cars were lined up at the stoplight at the main intersection in Palm Key.Drew put on his left blinker, so he could turn toward our house. There was no green arrow at this light. Palm Key would never get so busy or complicated to add that. It was just a plain old light, three colors, and half the time even turned off. But today there was too much traffic for it not to be on: too many tourists, bumper to bumper, coming toward us. “Go ahead, inch out,” I said to Drew. I pointed. ‘’That’s right, just sit here under the light and, when you get a chance, turn.”

But the line of traffic was so long, he didn’t get to turn before the light changed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just put it in reverse and back out of the intersection. We’ll be first in line when the light changes again.”

“Wuss,” George said. “Shut up, George,” said Drew. His ears were red. “It’s all right, Drew,” I said, patting his shoulder. “We all have to remember that George is only four.” “May not live to five,” Mandy said.

I pointed as the light turned. None of us knew it, but Drew had left the gear in reverse. So when he put his foot down on the accelerator, we knocked the hell out of whoever was behind us. And ourselves. I sat up, grabbing my head, my neck still wobbling.

Smoke was oozing out of the hood of the car behind us. George was bracing himself against the dashboard. Drew looked sick. It was a good thing we’d all been wearing seat belts.

The car behind us was an old Mercedes, and in the streetlights overhead I could see that it was humped and rounded, probably more than twenty years old. Its grill was now mashed back into itself like the mouth of a fish.

“God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mom.” Drew opened the car door to get out. “God, why did it have to be a Mercedes?”

I unbuckled myself, then checked George and Mandy to see if they were really all right.

“Boy, you sure hit the fart, Drew. I mean you really hit the fart!”

Drew was standing beside our car. Smoke was coming up out of the one we’d hit, and we could hear the Palm Key fire siren. The station was only half a block away.

Mandy walked up to the man who was getting out of the Mercedes, and she stood beside him while he, too, stood looking at the front of his car. He was really tall. That was nearly all I thought about. And that we hadn’t killed him. Or maimed him. In fact, he seemed fine. Long blond hair, a good way over his collar in back, and a mustache. And then I realized that I knew who he was. Last week his picture had been in the Palm Key paper. He was the new and only physician Palm Key had. The one the town council had recruited. And they’d had a pretty hard time getting some doctor to come to Palm Key, too.

I went over closer to him. “How bad do you think it is?” He looked down at me, then back at his car. “Oh, I don’t think it’s too serious. The smoke makes it look bad.”

“I know you’re upset.” I was staring at the Mercedes. Mandy moved next to me and, even though I thought she’d outgrown this, she reached over and held a fistful of my skirt. ‘’This is obviously a fine car,” I said, my voice running on, fast. “Being so old, it’s probably worth a lot—at least to you. It’s probably real valuable and you love it. And, well, my son, Drew, he just got his learner’s permit. I mean, really just got it—this afternoon.”

“He failed the test two times,” Mandy added.

“And I wonder,” I went on, “do you think we could just not make too big a deal out of this? You know, it might really blow his confidence. I’d really appreciate it.”

I was sounding great. But when I came to the last part of my speech, my voice cracked. I was telling myself; You cry, sister, and you won’t see another sunrise. I switched glasses again, reaching in my pocket, and getting out the dark ones.

He stood there, listening to everything I said. Then he looked back at his car. We both did, just stood there and stared. In a few minutes, he walked toward it. ‘’Why don’t I see if it’ll start?” He got in, and the firemen surrounded it.

“Aren’t you afraid it’ll blow up?” I followed him to the car as he opened the door. Mandy was practically riding my feet. I was ready, though, to run back at the first sound of a pop, throw my body across Mandy, Drew, and George the Second.

The firemen raised the hood and were looking down in it, holding fire extinguishers. Drew was hanging onto George by the hand, just standing there in the middle of the street like he was about to be hanged. The whole town seemed to be watching us. A fireman squirted something into the hood, and the car hissed and the smoke stopped. The new doctor was grinding the motor, and then it caught.

By then the editor of the Palm Key Sentinel was walking around us, taking photographs, using a lot of flashbulbs because it was pretty dark.

The new doctor leaned out of the car window and said to me, “I think it’s going to be fine. But we ought to exchange names and phone numbers and who our insurance companies are. Your car doesn’t look much better.”

I turned around and saw that, as far as a trunk was concerned, my car had just been relieved of one. In fact, the whole back end was just about gone. Good, I thought. George the First had bought that car right before he moved out, and it’d been part of my settlement. I’d always even wondered if he’d driven that tart somewhere in it and they might have even. . . in it. And now it was just one less thing between me and him.

Then, just as though to add the final topping to publicly knocking the hell out of the new Palm Key doctor, George the Second got loose from Drew and circled the Mercedes. “Boy, we sure knocked this fart, didn’t we? It’s an old fart, too, in’t it?”

I had to stand there and watch that: the Palm Key firemen and this new doctor, listening to my child call everything and everybody farts, right after my other son had caused the only wreck in Palm Key in three years.

When I got back in the car, I dug around in the bottom of my purse for loose change. It was clear: We were going to have to drive through some place for some fast food, quick. I was too shot to eat, much less to cook. But, as usual, George the Second wouldn’t be.

And I probably don’t need to add, I guess, that when I got home, I didn’t really sleep much that night, or even for the next few weeks.