Mother said, “Wowser.”
Kurt was blinking, his nose making a tiny figure eight, but he didn’t jump out the window. So I started seeing Mother on my own. I didn’t try to make anything happen when I was with her, and we mostly just sat in silence. She would look at me for a long time with a watery unregistering look, and then, once in a while, I’d see her eyes darken and focus on me with a kind of intensity that lasted for a good long time. I think I knew what was going on, but I was darned if I would start yammering at her like Kurt did to get her to put into words what couldn’t be put into words and only produced some crazy non sequitur from her deepest past. Of course if it featured Wowser, Kurt was on the warpath. If she just chattered about this, that, and the other without naming names, then Kurt would announce she was talking about Dad. But mostly he couldn’t handle her obvious mental absence.
“Mother, I just heard the sprinklers go off. Now that’s summertime to me. Mother! Are you listening to the sprinklers? It’s summertime!”
“Kurt,” I said. “It’s not registering.”
“Mom! The sprinklers! Summertime!”
Kurt had a brainstorm, and it turned out very badly. I say this not knowing how it went down, but I know it wasn’t good. He decided that since Mother was mistaking him for Wowser, he would just go ahead and be Wowser—“Wowser for a day.” He came home shattered. I really don’t know what happened, unless it was Mother’s golden boy turning into some vanished adulterer, a role in some ways similar to the one he’d been playing around town and in his safe houses for years. Finally, and without telling me anything, he calmed down. He said, “I think I have a headache. Do I? Do you think I have a headache?” It was getting to him.
When we were young, I was always a little stand-offish. That is, I was a social coward. But not Kurt. By the time he was twelve, he’d be sticking out his big paw and telling grown-ups, “Put ’er there.” They liked it, and it kind of made me sick. Now he revealed an uncertainty I hadn’t seen before; but it didn’t last. He was soon on the muscle again. Kurt: “I see literally — literally — not one thing wrong with my taking on the identity of Wowser in pursuit of truth.”
Mother’s love of excellence was not something I always embraced. It certainly raised Kurt to the pedestal to which he had become accustomed, but it unfairly cast my father in a negative light. Truth be told, I was far more comfortable with Dad than with our exalted mother. What you saw was what you got. He was a sweet man, and a sweet old man later, who was not at war with time. He noticed many things about life, about dogs and cats and birds and weather, which were just so many impediments to Mother. Kurt was right: left to Dad we would have probably not gone very far, nor been nearly so discontented.
I’m on the hot seat looking into the piercing eyes of my boss: “Earl, how long have you been with the bank?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“Like to see twenty-three? Not much coming over your desk except your paycheck. Desks like yours are financial portals. You know that.”
“My, what big teeth you have.” I was fired that day.
Where had I been all my life? I had grown up under so many shadows they were spread over me like the leaves of a book. Only Dad and I were equals, just looking at life without being at war with it. There was no earthly reason I should have been a banker beyond serving the shadows. By all that’s reasonable, I should have been at the post office like Dad, taking packages, affixing stamps. Reciting harmless rules, greeting people. I loved greeting people! In my occupation, you had to screw someone every day, even if it was your own family.
I went to see Mother on my own on a beautiful day with a breeze coming up through the old cottonwoods along the river and cooling the side street where the rest home sat in front of its broad lawn and well-marked parking spaces. The American and Montana flags lifted and fell lazily. It was hard to go indoors. A few patients rested in wheelchairs on the lawn, the morning sun on their faces. I recognized old District Court Judge Russell Collins. He had no idea where he was, but his still-full head of hair danced in the breeze, the only part of Judge Collins moving. The others, two women who seemed to have plenty to talk about, barely glanced at me.
I sat with Mother in her room. It seemed stuffy, and I got up to let in the air. A glance at the spruces crowding the side lawn made me want to run out into the sun as though these were my last days on earth. I was unable to discern if Mother knew I was in the room. She rested her teeth on her lower lip, and each breath caused her cheeks to inflate. It was very hard to look at, which doesn’t say great things about me.
I’d had enough of these visits to feel quite relaxed as I studied her and tried to remember her animation of other days. Why had she married Dad? Well, Dad was handsome and for thirty-one years held the Montana state record for the 440-yard dash. He looked like a sprinter until he died. His luck and happiness as a successful boy lasted all his life. Even Mother’s provocations bounced off his good humor when she attempted to elevate his general cultivation with highbrow events at the Alberta Bair Theater in Billings. Dad liked Spike Jones, “the way he murders the classics.” I remember when he played “Cocktails for Two” on the phonograph when Mother was at a school board meeting. I loved the hiccups, sneezes, gunshots, whistles, and cowbells, but Kurt walked out of the house. I thought Dad held his own with Mother. Kurt thought she made him look like a bum.
Kurt asked me to come over and help him get some things out of his garden, a jungle of organic vegetables that he plundered throughout the season as part of his health paranoia. He said that he intended to share some of this provender, as though to suggest that I would be suitably compensated. He was pouring with sweat when I got there, shirtless, his ample belly spilling over the top of his baggy shorts. He had on some kind of Japanese rocker shoes that had him teetering down the rows and doing something or other, strengthening his calves or his arches, I don’t know. He took me to a cucumber trellis that was sagging with green cylinders of all sizes and told me to take my pick. I had a big brown shopping bag, and I started tossing cukes in there until he insisted on picking them himself, giving me the worst ones, ones with bug holes and brown blemishes.
“Doozy has completely confused me with Wowser.”
“I think you’re encouraging that, aren’t you?”
“I’m learning way too much about Wowser, Earl. All their adventures. Roadhouses, et cetera. God-awful barn dances in the boonies. I imagine Dad is spinning in his grave.”
Maybe Dad strayed, too. I didn’t think so, and it wouldn’t really fit for him. Dad was as plain as a pine board; but Mother, with her art and opera and shiny pumps — well, I could see it. Ambition is never simple. “Kurt, she has dementia. She could be making this all up.”
Then he was right in my face. I could feel his breath as he rapped my elbow with a trowel. “How little you know. Dementia means she can’t make it up.”
Kurt wanted me there to knock down his potato pyramid: he’d start his plants in an old car tire, and as they grew he began stacking tires and adding dirt until the whole assemblage reached eye level. Now was the payoff, and he wanted me there. “Ready?” I said I was, and he pushed over the stack of tires, spilling dirt and hundreds of potatoes at our feet. He put his hands on his hips, panting, and smiled at the results. “Take all you want.” I took a few. He’d be hiking up and down the street giving the damn things away.
I had a sudden insight. “Kurt,” I said, “you seem to be competing with Wowser.”
He slugged me. The cucumbers and potatoes fell from my hand. He must have fetched me a good one because I could hardly find my way out to the street.