She called her son in and his girlfriend and they stood there apprehensively dripping on the carpet, shivering a little, their shoulders narrowed under their towels, which were draped over them. “Cavorting in the pool like that with no one here to chaperone you will make the neighbors talk,” she said. “Go up to your room.” The girl looked from her to her son incredulously and then followed her son, who had already started up, to his room.
Mrs. Fiberung hoped they took full advantage of this chaperoning. She was an expert militant chaperone and believed in the full exercise of the seditious power a chaperone was in position to wield. While she had thought her son homosexual she had of course maintained there was nothing really wrong in that, but she now discovered a very strong sense of relief in herself, almost a joy, a high that she sought to confirm and prolong and deepen by sending the two of them to a private room. They were nearly pickled by the chlorinated water anyway, she had noticed.
She put on a trench coat her husband had left and modeled in it before a full-length mirror, looking like a spy. Some odd words and ideas came nearly to her mind that she could not completely grasp or assemble: furtivclature was one of them. She took that thought out to the pool and got in a chaise, still in the coat, with a drink, and found that furtivclature had shifted to numenboles or numenbolus. These entities in her head, whatever they were, suggested to her the idea that she wanted to become a radically different person from that she had been to this point in her life. Was that possible, or was it only an idea that everyone entertained once in a while and, like these oddball words, could not quite really possess or effect? Did the urge just not leave you, like these new words, incomplete and unformed and undefined? Was it not the case, for example, that in launching into a “new you” you typically got about as far as drinking by your pool in a spy coat in the middle of the afternoon and hoping your son was seizing the day upstairs in his bedroom? Was it not more likely that the two of them would be regarding her now through the slit blinds of that room and speculating as to what was wrong with her, and that soon she would abandon the poolside chaise and return the coat to its hanger and be back exactly to herself after the girl went home properly unmolested?
I suggest we leave Mrs. Fiberung upon the horns of her little dilemma on the grounds that she is as capable as we are of solving what are, after all, her trivial problems. We have problems of our own we might be better advised to inspect. To the extent that they too are trivial, we might well advise our ownself to abjure them too. To hell with Mrs. Fiberung and her little problems, and to hell with us and our little problems, and let us get on with it.
The odd volleyball net is before us beside the pool that Mrs. Fiberung has quit. Husbands do leave, boys do stray, girls do play, the Wide World of Sports will cover about anything. Buttocks. Buttocks in spandex. Before the buttocks develop that large-curd cottage-cheese dimpling, one of the saddest things on earth and one of God’s chief oversights. On the other hand, the buttocks before the curding is one of His proudest moments and indeed one of the signal arguments for His existence. To see Him working his way toward the human buttock, whether with the hand of the Darwinian selector or not, traveling from the hairy hind of quadrupeds to the fulgent, obscene turquoise and carmine noise of the baboon’s operatic ass to the smooth, domed, cleaved, in-the-beginning firm-as-Jell-O and perfect-for-spanking human buttocks is to see a great mind at work, and to place the buttocks in that relation to the shitty rump of an ox or to the cloaca of the slithering beast is not less than placing the sun in relation to a planet. Because of the butt, God exists. I have a butt, or had a butt, therefore I am the son of God.
Gift
Put on these Indian flyer things here.
What are you talking about?
These.
Put them where?
On your ears, I guess.
Have you lost your mind?
No. Why?
I am not putting those on my ears.
I think that’s what they’re for.
You think those are earrings?
What else are they?
They look more like bagpipes, or porcupines. Put them on your ears.
I got them for you.
Well take them back.
I can’t.
Why not?
The Indians said they would kill me if I tried to exchange a purchase. Tribal law allows this, owing to the long history of broken treaties, etc.
The earrings are moving.
Good God.
Those are porcupines. They sold you drugged porcupines. You are a fucking idiot, even before you announced I was to wear them.
How was I to know what they are? All I know about porcupines is that they eat buildings.
That is probably why the Indians won’t exchange them for something that does not eat buildings.
Why didn’t the Indians just kill them?
Instead of get money from you to take them away?
Yes.
I don’t know. That’s a hard one.
I couldn’t see them well. They were half in the box, in tissue paper.
Something in a Dell computer box, weighing forty pounds, they tell you is earrings, and you buy it.
They said it was some kind of “flyer things,” they mumbled, I thought they meant some kind of ceremonial headdress, not mere earrings, I don’t know.
I think this is a transitional relationship.
What is?
You and me. You and I.
Transitional?
Yes. Crossing.
Into what?
Into not a relationship.
Because I bought you some earrings that turn out to be live animals? You regard that as an infraction?
That you expect me to strap twenty-pound balls of deadly quills to my head, yes, that is an infraction.
I don’t expect it now that I see what they are.
That makes it even worse. You’d be somehow less stupid if you drugged me now and tied these things to my head.
You fly off the handle at the least provocation. I think you are right. The relationship is ABC. I will find a woman who does not freak because you buy her a surprising gift.
I’ll have a lot of fun telling people about my ex who bought me porcupine earrings, whole porcupine earrings.
A gross distortion. They’ll know you are crazy.
I won’t be able to deny it, for having been with you up to that point.
Your whole life will become a fabric of lies if you start saying shit like that.
Shit like what?
Forget it. I bet these guys make good pets if you can keep them from eating the house. I think I’ll ride out to the rez and thank the Indians profusely. They’ll be laughing at me and it will be perfect. I’m in a new zone. We’re all stupid, finally, baby doll, so you might as well get free in the deep end. Where you can maneuver.
Sisters
You won’t believe what Steve did yesterday.
Steve who?
Steve Peanutbrain.
What?
He bought two porcupines and expected me to wear them as earrings.
So? Did you?
I did not. They weighed twenty pounds apiece and started moving. For starters.
Ralph the boinkologist last week invited a squirrel to breakfast in our house and fed it eggs and jelly at the table. I said what the hell was going on and Ralph said, “Hey, this guy went to the fifth grade.” The squirrel looked up from the industry of chewing through a jelly pack and tipped his hat to me. Ralph had put a hat on him. He was the size of a small bear.
Maybe he had been to fifth grade.