I walked out in a bathrobe to help the cashier to her feet. I escorted her to the car and kissed her like a man on his way off the plank. Afterwards I turned to face Edith head on. This is the moment I’d been born for, I’d decided. I stood there in the driveway, undid my robe, and stared her up and down. I studied every nuance of her face—the way her florets were swollen shut, how her stalk fought a losing war with gravity, the chapped broccoli leaves that threatened to bleed out. I kept my robe open and let her take it in.
The watchdog god did not blink.
That afternoon Edna received three visitors bearing gifts. All three noticed the wet bathrobe I’d left in the driveway. Each stepped gingerly over it and glared at the bathrobe like it was a leper begging alms. When the one I took for a daughter or niece left Clara’s house she picked the bathrobe up with a stick and carefully walked it down the driveway. She was holding an umbrella in one hand and the robe was dangling from a stick in the other. The wind and rain were tossing her around and she had to fight to maintain balance. A tornado was dancing its way down the street, hurling cars and trees—everything not tied down or boarded up. Hailstones the size of cabbages peppered the ground. Edith’s daughter dodged first a German shepherd and then a front porch swing and then a tire iron. From where I was it looked like she was questioning her way of life. It looked like she was about to leave Edna for good, drop the stick and bathrobe and fly to the lumberyard to build herself a boat.
I stood naked and watched the world end from my kitchen window.
In this way it was better than television.
OLD MAN’S HANDS
USUALLY I LET MY BEARD GROW THANKSGIVING THROUGH CHRISTMAS. No one in the family likes me with a beard. They tell me this every year. They say, we don’t like you with a beard. I always apologize when they say this. I say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Then they say with a beard I look like my grandfather, which is probably not true, but I don’t mind. I don’t think my grandfather minds either. He hasn’t spoken in ten years. The family thinks it’s from the stroke but I think he’s run out of things to say to these people. I’m the same way, with or without a beard. I don’t think the family likes my grandfather with a beard either, but I’ve never heard one of them say so. Every day for my grandfather is uncalled for but his beard is handsome, groomed. He looks like someone who used to be in charge of big operations, of people. The hairs on my face run all haywire and I haven’t a single responsibility. Nevertheless we are kindred, the two of us. Neither of us accepts nor distributes gifts of any sort, even cards. Like him I wear flannel shirts, blue work pants tied with a rope around the waist, black shoes and white socks. His face hangs off his skull and looks like it would slide right off if he could stand up straight. When he sees me he pats my head and cups my hairy chin with both hands. He’s got the old man’s hands, stayed in the bath too long. Someone always puts a Santa hat on him but I always take it off and then we sit together and look out the window. We do this until someone says it’s time for dinner. We sit at the kid’s table and wait for them to pass us the turkey and whatever. The people in the family rarely have anything to say to either of us. One aunt says I look like a terrorist. To my grandfather and me it makes no difference. He is old and looks nothing like a terrorist. And the rest of the year I shave nearly every day and am said to have an appealing, almost baby-like face.
HELL ON CHURCH STREET BLUES
THIS IS ONE THAT IF YOU SKIPPED TO THE END YOU WOULDN’T MISS ANYTHING. What takes place between here and there is both no one’s business and beside the point at the same time.
The middle part concerns a round woman whose dog died on a transatlantic flight. The dog died in the woman’s arms right there in business class. It was very sad.
What happens next is the woman tells me the news in a delicatessen two weeks later. I was there for a turkey sandwich and french fries. I tell her I’m sorry and that it’s awful.
The real story, of course, takes place over those two weeks.
I find it helps to imagine the worst and work your way down.
For my part I spent each day of those two weeks waiting for the next to come and go gracefully. Then I attended the wedding of two friends. I overheard people talking about the chicken and fish, the oysters Rockefeller, the centerpieces, the hall, the bride and groom.
Everyone said they were a lovely couple and everyone was probably right.
MORNING EXERCISE
FINALLY, IN THE THIRD GRADE, OUR TEACHER MISS CANSINO, who was something of a psychic herself, had all the third graders write down a secret word on an index card at the beginning of the last day of class. At the end of the day she had each student read his or her secret word. Eighteen of Miss Cansino’s twenty-two students had the same word written down. The other four were; window, baseball, transfusion and flabbergasted.
YOUR EPIDERMIS
THEY KISS.
I am disappointed in you, she says.
I am a disappointment, he says.
You should know better, she says.
I am trying, he says.
She likes the way he walks, like an ape with his arms barely moving, his shoulders alternately rising and falling and his knuckles dragging on the floor behind him. He lumbers. He has a bucket head and wears black boots.
He likes how she isn’t scared of him.
His hands are resting on the lower part of the steering wheel. He is breathing evenly. The day is brilliant and blue and he is looking at it through the windshield. She is next to him.
Perhaps I should employ the Watkins method, he says.
Spare me the Watkins method, she says.
The Watkins method is proven, reliable like a Volkswagen, he says.
Lovely, she says. A Volkswagen, she says. Do you ever listen to yourself? she says.
That is something I’m working on, he says.
That is something you are failing to improve upon, she says. I just don’t see improvement here, she says.
The results of the work are not necessarily tangible but they’re there, he says. He runs his hands through his hair then places them on the lower part of the steering wheel, like they were before.
You sound like you work for the government, she says. Or Gertrude Stein, she says.
I sound like I work for Gertrude Stein?
You sound like Gertrude Stein, not like you work for Gertrude Stein, she says. Jesus, who would say such a thing? she asks.
How is it I resemble a dead lesbian? he asks.
You are the missing link, she says.
And what does that make you? he says.
The day before:
He is watching a baseball game with the sound turned down because sports announcers should be neither seen nor heard. He is reading a jaundiced copy of Das Kapital borrowed from the library and chilling the last two beers left in the refrigerator in the freezer and telling himself to remember to take them out before they freeze solid. The trouble with motel refrigerators is they are always too small. The empties are all lined up on the dresser except for the one he is using as an ashtray. He rolls his own because he likes to say he rolls his own and he likes when people watch him roll. He rolls his own, also, because it is less expensive. He is wearing a pair of cut off sweatpants with no underwear underneath. He is not wearing a shirt. He sticks his left hand inside his cutoffs and leaves it there, cupping his belly.