She pouted. “I haven’t entered a contest.”
“Tomorrow, that’s what we’ll do, we’ll enter a contest. Now’s time for sleep.”
She jerked away. “No.” She held up her index finger, left hand, as if making a point. “I have a chip.”
How was I supposed to handle that? “In your nail?”
“Everyone says my hands are my finest feature and I have a chip.”
“We’ll fix it right up first thing in the morning.”
“To hell with you, Mr. Solicitatious to the Drunk. We’ll fix it now. I may be stuck in the hell hole of the West, but I will never let myself go.” This from a woman who was on the verge of sleeping in the same clothes she’d slept in last night.
Her head nodded at the book boxes spread across the floor. “I was looking for my nail kit.”
“And the TV?”
“It slipped.” She stood up too quickly and sat back down. Then she stood up again. “The bathroom.”
“I’m tired and sleepy, Lydia. Use verbs.”
“My nail kit that Mother Callahan gave me is in my overnight bag in the bathroom.” Getting out an entire proper sentence must have exhausted her because she sat back down again. “Help me to the John, honey bunny.” She held out both arms.
“Nope. If you can’t walk on your own you can’t play with scissors.”
“Bastard.”
“What’s that make you?”
Lydia bounced off both walls on her way down the hall, then through the open bathroom door. When I got there she was leaning over the sink with her forehead and nose propped against the mirror, staring into her own eyes a half-inch away. Lydia stuck out her tongue and touched the tip of it to the mirror.
I said, “You’re licking the mirror.”
“I’m making contact.”
“With who?”
“Myself.”
“You’re licking the mirror.”
The bathroom was actually the niftiest room in the house, although I tend to think that about any house. It had this claw-foot bathtub and a commode that sat about two inches higher than what I was used to. Made crapping feel awkward until I discovered The James Beard Cookbook turned into a footstool brought my body back to the right angle.
A big stump rested next to the toilet, acting as a table or counter space or some such, and Lydia’s overnight bag sat on the stump. While Lydia went into close-range self-hypnosis and connected with herself, I decided to sit on the side of the bathtub and watch.
She suddenly turned to me. “Sam, have you ever had a hard-on?”
“Mom.”
“I was thinking about the hooker’s twats on Les. Have you ever experienced a hooker?”
“I’m thirteen, Mom.” That twat talk was all bravado, like most of my off-color language. Women had twats, I was certain of that, but I wasn’t certain exactly to the inch where they were located or what they did.
“And I realized I hadn’t seen your little thing in years. It was so cute when you were a baby. We had this black speckled basin I used to wash you in, and you’d always pee straight up, then we’d both giggle and have the nicest time.” Her cheek was stuck to the mirror now, in the center of the fog circle left by her breath.
“Lydia, don’t you know how much it embarrasses kids when their mom talks about cute naked stuff they did as babies.”
Her head slid down a notch. “Then you went to grade school and came back a smartass.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there, hoping this kind of crap wouldn’t warp me when I grew up.
Lydia kind of lunged-fell sideways into the overnight bag, and junk exploded all over the place—toothbrushes, combs, curlers, Vaseline, spray deodorant, my Clearasil, gum, pens, female hygiene objects I’d never seen before—and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol hit the floor and broke. Pink blood oozed under the tub.
Lydia said, “There,” and fell to her knees, bopping her forehead a good one on the edge of the sink.
I reach out, but she growled at me—like a cat. “Stay away.” She was crouched in sort of a cave under the sink with the toilet on one side and the tub up the wall on the other. By kneeling off to her left, I could see what dear old Mama was up to under there.
The leather fingernail kit lay against a drain pipe, zippered side to the wall. Carefully, Lydia reached out, picked it up, and turned it around counterclockwise. She seemed to take forever pulling the zipper, sliding out the scissors. I touched her shoulder but she growled again.
She bit her lower lip hard as she slow-motion trimmed the fingernail back the thinnest sliver, then slid the scissors back into their slot. File next. Right side first, working her way up the nail, tapering the top just right, then down the left. Pink Pepto-Bismol flowed into view from between her legs. Lydia ignored it.
Her voice was only a whisper. “I didn’t let myself go.” Then she slid the file back into the case and, as slowly as she’d opened it, zippered the kit shut. Lydia placed the leather case on the floor and, using it as a pillow, fell asleep.
I went back to bed.
4
Caspar looked like a short Mark Twain, which is maybe why I don’t care for Huckleberry Finn. He did a lot of things I hated to Lydia on purpose and a lot of things I hated to me accidentally, but his one unforgivable sin was being short. That stuff is hereditary as hell.
Caspar had a gray hearing aid that he kept turned down except for when he was talking, and he wore a white suit year round, Southern as all get out. Every day, he stuck a fresh yellow mum in his lapel. I used to think the mum had something to do with Me Maw and he’d once had a heart, but Lydia said it was part of some spiffy self-image thing, and if Caspar ever had a heart, he sure wouldn’t advertise the fact.
The day we left Greensboro, after these ape-men-redneck movers piled all our stuff in a truck and went away, Caspar came out on the porch to deliver some sort of farewell to the family. Lydia was sitting sideways in the porch swing, reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and painting her fingernails black. I read the book on the drive west and decided not to ride any horses. The black fingernail polish was a Lydia statement to Caspar, but he missed it.
I was on the plank floor sorting baseball cards. It was late in the summer and there’d been a rash of trades before the final pennant drive, which meant I had all kinds of guys in the wrong place. Willie Mays had collapsed in the batter’s box the day before we left so his card was out on top.
Caspar drew himself up into what passed for posture. He fingered his hearing aid and gave out a little snort. “The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation.”
I looked at Lydia who shrugged. “You been in the library again, Daddy?”
He hovered over me, looking like an old man pretending to be an even older man. “Do you know why I’m sending you to northwest Wyoming?”
I stared up into his permanently black fingernails. No matter how much Caspar played at Southern gentility, carbon in the cuticles would forever show his roots. “Because Lydia messed up again.”
Lydia coughed real ladylike into her hand. Casper wasted a glare on her before going on. “Because I measured in the Rand Atlas and Jackson Hole is farther from a major baseball team than any other spot in the country.”
“Oh.”
“And you are leaving those cards here.”
“Caspar.”
“There will be no discussion. In Wyoming you are to mature into a gentleman. You will think carbon paper, not baseball.”
Lydia almost stood up to him. “Daddy, don’t take it out on Sam. He’s innocent.”
The old goat actually hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. “Nothing you touch is innocent. One mistake out there and he goes to Culver Military Academy. Are the implications clear?”