He rubbed his hand over his forehead. The conversation a couple of days before, with Mrs. Brikel, came back to him in snatches, though he remembered more what she looked like, the view from the window of the tiny restaurant, the missing letters on the shop across the street: JOH DEER. AS he and Mrs. Brikel talked about things left incomplete, the fragment of the sign above her head, across the street, had riveted his attention. Mrs. Brikel’s love affair gone wrong. His insistence, in the face of no opposition from Mrs. Brikel, that he and his wife confided easily in each other.
Hadn’t she led him to a chair when the bee bit him?
But what did that have to do with sharing confidences?
He tried to conjure up Fran’s presence in the house, but it was slow in coming and vague when it seemed to be there.
“Frannie, Frannie, Frannie,” he said aloud, though he had not used her nickname in years.
7
He snapped a branch off a bush, threw it to the ground, and walked past the blue clapboard house where the painters had been scraping wood for what seemed like half the summer. The shutters had been removed and were stacked in the carport, the Audi backed out in the driveway. One of the men was getting a drink of water from the hose and made a motion as if to spray him as he walked by.
He waved. It was the house of the woman who sometimes sat with him in the evening, Mrs. Torius. Her name was much longer than that. She was a Greek woman with a name too long to spell and too hard to pronounce, so he called her Mrs. Torius. He had laughed about it when he found out that Spaniards called bulls toro. Most of what he knew he had found out from television, although his mother still insisted on reading school books to him as if he were small. He was five feet ten inches, and twenty-six years old. For twenty years his mother had been thinking over whether he could have another gerbil, because he had killed the first one. He didn’t care anymore, but it was something to keep after her about.
“Get on home, Loretta,” he squealed. There were many things the Beatles ordered people to do that he liked to hear. “Don’t leave me standing here” was another, though he could never get the cadence of that one right, so he just shouted it.
“How ’ya doin’ today, Royce?” the mailman said.
“You’ve got the mail,” Royce said.
The mailman walked on. In the cartoons, dogs bit mailmen.
Royce, after promising he wouldn’t go out, had left a note for his mother (he had whirled the yellow crayon around and around in a circle, so she would know he was taking a walk around the neighborhood; it had cut the paper, and he was going to be in trouble for getting crayon marks on the kitchen counter, which was not where he was supposed to color). In his note, he also told her, in purple Magic Marker, that he was going to bring home a fish. He liked fish very much, but his mother would only buy fish sticks because it disgusted her to see the way he chewed and chewed so carefully to make sure there were no bones, which would kill him if he swallowed them.
“Get on home, Loretta,” he said again, to a cat crossing his path. The cat could have run away from a Dr. Seuss book. Come to think of it, he could be the man in The Cat in the Hat because he had put on a top hat for his stroll. A walk was a stroll if you went slower than you normally walk. He slowed down even more, putting the heel of one red-laced high-topper against the toe of his other shoe, and alternating feet so he moved forward one footstep at a time.
John, his second-favorite Beatle, was dead.
Royce stopped to practice the Heimlich maneuver on an imaginary victim of choking. Then he metamorphosed into Batman and the bad guy fell to the ground, knocked unconscious. He put his arms above his head, knowing full well that he wouldn’t disappear like Batman, and he didn’t. He had seen Batman three times. The first time he saw it he sat through it a second time. He made such a stink that his mother couldn’t get him to leave and gave up. The other time he had to promise all day that he would only sit through Batman one time, if she allowed him to go. She did not go inside with him, having also made him promise that he would sit alone and not say anything to anybody. His mother was crazy if she thought he always had something to say. He didn’t.
His favorite pies were cherry, apple, blueberry, peach. In the order: apple, cherry, peach … and he could not at the moment remember the other kind of pie he liked.
He poked his finger in the air to make a decimal point. Ralph Sampson got to it, though, and once his hand touched it, it became a basketball. Score one victory. Jump off the ground and fly it up there, Ralph. Easy come, easy go.
That was what his mother said when he got his footprints on something, like the bed sheets or the dining-room table, which he was forbidden to stand on. The Cat in the Hat propped up one side of the recliner chair he sat in to watch TV. The house was old and the living-room floor sloped, but he liked sitting on the most sloping part. And the book made the tilt better. He teased his mother by leaning way over the side of the chair and waving his arms, saying “Whoooooooooo” sometimes, pretending he was falling off the side of a ship. He could always make her ask why he didn’t sit elsewhere.
His plan for catching the fish was to puff up his chest and dive into the Mediterranean Sea and get one from one of the frogmen who hunted fish at night with spears. He had just seen a show about night fishing off the coast of Italy. The men put on black suits and floated in shallow water, looking for what they wanted. He intended to see what he wanted by going to the water’s edge and peering in. It was very bad to go out when he had promised to stay home, but even worse to go near water. Therefore, he would carefully peer in. At the curb, he tested: he leaned slightly forward, like an elegant, myopic British gentleman about to meet someone of importance. The night before, on television, he had seen a movie in which an Englishman with a monocle eventually reached for some princess’s hand. People in that movie had been wearing top hats. His mother had had her father’s top hat in a box on the top shelf of the closet for years. He had brought it down with his magnet-vision. He just looked at a thing and it came to him. This only happened when his mother was not at home, though.
One of the boys in his crafts class, where he made belts and pouches and might be allowed to make a pair of moccasins, wore a diaper. A few days before, the boy had unbuttoned his long pants and let them drop around his ankles while the teacher’s attention was elsewhere. Mothers always liked buttons better than zippers, because they were harder to undo.
He thought that he had been on the corner long enough. He put one toe in the water. It was dry. He looked both ways. No fish yet. He decided to swim across the stream, but in case anyone came along he wouldn’t want to appear to be swimming, because they might tell his mother. What he would do would be look left and right and then hurry across the stream with only his invisible arms swimming.