“And that poor dumb boob was me,” Tom finished, as he always did.
“I can’t do this anymore,” said Mrs. Wellingham. “Let’s just frost what we’ve got. Why don’t you mix up the gunk? I’ll keep pulling my hair through the holes until you’re done.”
Tom put on the plastic gloves. He took the two gunk packets over to the sink and mixed the contents in a little plastic tub. The fumes stung his eyes.
“It stinks of brimstone!” said Tom.
“It hardly smells at all,” said Mrs. Wellingham. “They’ve made great improvements over the years. It doesn’t smell nearly as terrible as a permanent wave.”
When the gunk was ready to go, Tom came over and rubbed it on his mother’s head. First he used the little spatula on the opposite end from the hook, as was illustrated on the instruction sheet, but it proved awkward, so he switched to a manual procedure with his gloved hands. He told his mother about all the foreign objects that had been found in bottles of Mugsy over the years, and the special division of the company that existed solely to investigate all such claims. He told of some celebrated cases in which fraud was proven, and some that turned out to be legitimate, such as the six baby opossums, and how the company had successfully hushed it up while still doing right by all afflicted parties, save for the opossums. He told her about all the trouble that Mugsy had been in with Third World countries. It was politically incorrect to sell a vacuous food item where people were starving to death. So Mugsy had come up with Mighty Mugsy Hercules, a beverage they sold only in Africa. A man could live on six bottles of Mighty Mugsy Hercules a day, and live quite comfortably — and get all his nutritional requirements, by the way. One day Tom’s friend Danny had brought a bottle of Mighty Mugsy Hercules into the office and asked Tom to have a sip. It was terrible!
That was the funny part of the story, but no reaction was forthcoming. His mother had fallen fast asleep listening to the stories she had claimed to want to hear.
Tom didn’t take it personally. He went into the pantry and got his father’s wine. The bottle was almost full. Tom chose a big water glass from the drainer.
He walked into the dark, mysterious dining room and sat at the table. Things glinted at him from a china cabinet in the dark.
His father had always been a teetotaler, but after his friend Marty suffered a stroke, Mr. Wellingham Sr. had begun having a glass of wine every night, the way the medical community advised.
Tom drank the wine and it made him think of his conception. The terrible honeymoon night of Mr. and Mrs. Wellingham was a traditional family tale. They had gotten into an argument because Mr. Wellingham was driving through town trying to get the car up on its two left wheels. Later Mrs. Wellingham had stormed out of the room and into the hotel bar, where she discovered a drink called the Tom Collins. It tasted like lemonade. Mrs. Wellingham had never had a drink up until that point, when she had ten of them. Had his mother even been conscious during Tom’s conception? His father would have been cold sober. This was implication of the story that no one seemed to consider amid the merriment of the Thanksgiving table.
Once he had been at a party with Sam when one of her female friends started going on and on about her mother’s problems with vaginal dryness. What kind of conversation was that? Tom stood there acting as if it were normal. Where did the girl get such information? From her own mother? Dear, dear.
“I hate my mother,” Sam had contributed at that time.
He tried calling Sam. She didn’t answer. He had seen her in the act of not answering her phone when people called, people she found distasteful.
Once Barry Wick had asked Tom where he was from, and Tom had told him. Then Barry Wick said, “Wow. That sounds real huckleberry.”
What did that mean? It seemed designed to make Tom feel like a fool. Tom didn’t know what to say. Barry Wick had a nice smile on his face. Was it a friendly remark?
There was an undertone of hostility, Tom thought, but he couldn’t be sure. He still considered it from time to time. It occurred to him that maybe it was something Barry Wick had been saving up to say for a long time, a new piece of slang he had overheard or invented, a line he wanted to try out, and Tom had provided him with a good opportunity. If true, this theory would make Barry Wick a very shallow person, more concerned with how he came off in other people’s eyes than with any real content of his own soul.
What about the time Sam had hiked her skirt and peed in a parking garage? At the time it had seemed bold. You never think about how much a person pees at one time until you see it spread out on the concrete. It looked like a map of North America. What had Tom found so commendable? Sam and her friends had made a cultish virtue of behaving like infants.
In their movies, Sam and her friends had a lot of dialogue about how life was about to change because they were turning twenty-four or something. One day they would be twenty-seven. They shook their heads at the thought. In Sam’s movies, every character was worried about turning twenty-seven. Then they stripped off their clothes.
Often there was a foolish character, a boss or some other authority figure, played by a young man of thirty or so — an ancient. He told boring stories. He talked and talked and the protagonists rolled their eyes behind his back or dozed off.
A sudden, vivid memory was triggered. Tom couldn’t make a conscious connection, but there it was, from back when he had first joined the Mugsy Beverage family, oh my gosh, twenty-five years ago. He had been considerably younger than Sam was now, but with so much more responsibility.
His first convention. New Orleans. Everyone was having vodka drinks and rice wine and malt liquor and BC Powder and something called a hurricane that tasted like fruit punch. Everyone was combining each of these things all at once. The drunken mother of one of his coworkers showed up, which didn’t seem entirely professional. She appeared to be interested only in the free food. The free food was all she could talk about until she grabbed Tom and said, “Do you know who you look like?”
“No, ma’am,” said Tom.
“You look like that little squirt on that famous TV show,” said the drunken mother of Tom’s coworker.
There were a lot of people standing around, listening. Tom tried to think of something smart to say but he was only a young man.
“Thanks, I guess,” he said.
“No, it’s a compliment,” said the woman. “He’s going to make a cute little man when he grows up. But your parents didn’t do you any favors when they didn’t have your teeth fixed.”
If Tom’s mother had been there, she would have said something quiet and gracious, and her simple, nonjudgmental tone would have made the other woman ashamed.
Tom was glad he had a nice mother.
Over the years, the incident would pop into his head and he would try to think of what he should have said instead of standing there with egg on his face. The best he had come up with so far was, “At least I’m not an old drunken slattern.”
Sometimes he even let himself think that maybe the old drunk had a point. Why hadn’t they done something about his awful teeth? Now he wore the braces that Sam had talked him into. They hurt all the time.
Tom finished the wine. He took off his shoes and padded through the kitchen, where his mother was still nodding on the tall stool at the counter. It didn’t look safe, quite, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it. He couldn’t pick up his own mother and carry her to bed! There were two more bottles at the back of the pantry. Terrible stuff. Wine from Oklahoma. He opened one of the bottles and drank a good bit of it in the guest bedroom, where he stared at the flatscreen TV, which, as he could plainly see, had never been taken out of the box. Eventually, he passed out.