King Dork Approximately (3 page)

I was just shooting Amanda a puzzled look concerning the jar when I heard the voice of Little Big Tom, husband to my mom and fake dad to Amanda and me. And all became, well, not clear, but about as clear as anything ever gets around here.

“If you don’t tell me what it is,” he was saying, “how am
I supposed to know how to respond?” His customary placid voice twisted into a slight whine on the word “respond.”

As though in answer to my puzzled look, but really, in fact, just to be a dick, Amanda cupped her hand at her mouth and stage-whispered:

“If she doesn’t tell him what it is, how is he supposed to know how to respond?”
She shook her head in mock concern, but underneath it all she was practically beaming. She is not a fan of Little Big Tom, and she loves it when my mom argues with him, even a little, about anything. My hospitalization had brought us all closer together for a brief time but as far as Amanda was concerned the truce was over, and hostilities resumed almost as soon as I returned home. In a way I couldn’t blame her. Little Big Tom is not a bad guy, but he can be hard to take, even at his best. I find it difficult not to feel sorry for him, even though I’m not above mocking him with sympathetic regret. We all do it, even my mom. But Amanda seems immune to sentimentality when it comes to family matters. “Sympathy is for the weak,” her steely eyes seem to say. Well, I mean, with regard to her eyes: they’re as steely as brown eyes ever get.

So my mom and my diminutive stepfather were having a Special Moment, and Amanda, the phone-baby, and I had barged in on it just as my mom was spicing things up by taking her frustration out on a defenseless jar. This would have been an excellent time for me to exit stage left, sans sister-phone, but Amanda’s whisper had given us away.

“Hey, sport,” said Little Big Tom. “Taking care of business?”

He spoke in a much jauntier manner than you’d expect from someone who was in the middle of playing Try to Guess What I’m Mad About. (This game is played all the time around here. No one, including me, ever seems to learn that the only winning move is to turn around and leave.)

I have to say, it’s quite impressive how Little Big Tom can manage to have two entirely separate conversations at the same time, especially conversations with two such wildly different moods. If you’ve ever met him, you’ll know that the key to Little Big Tom is body language. He throws his whole self into conversation, as though he’s worried that words are not enough. Which is pretty astute, because what he says, in words, can be the most contentless blather, usually something along the lines of “Everything happens for a reason” or “Hang on to your dreams.” His body, on the other hand, puts so much into getting the otherwise forgettable message across that it can leave you in a state of stunned bafflement that will stick with you for years to come. He would have been great in silent films, especially a silent film about a man who was split into two halves, such that his left side could have an argument with his wife while the other side could simultaneously make a sandwich one-handed and encourage the little children to do more, strive more, and be more. It’s a bit like juggling, I suppose.

So Little Big Tom’s right shoulder was slumped in a defeated way, and his eyes looked to my mother with pleading frustration. At the same time, he looked at me with his head cocked, his index finger in the air, and the rest of his face in that frozen half-frown it sometimes assumes when he’s waiting for an answer. If you respond the way he likes, the head descends, the frown smiles on one side, the finger comes down and points as though hitting a little target hovering in front of
him, and he winks and says something like “That’s the stuff.” And he may shoot you with finger guns. He was waiting to learn whether I was, in fact, taking care of business at that particular moment.

The scene before me was distracting, but I did my best.

“You got it … chief,” I said, deadpan, haltingly, unable, despite Herculean efforts, if those are the kind of efforts I mean, to keep the irony out of my voice. And my halfhearted finger gun wound up looking a good deal more sarcastic than I’d intended as well. I’m not capable of sincerity when it comes to things like finger guns and saying “chief.” People should just know that about me.

But it was good enough for Little Big Tom, or at least, it was good enough for the half of Little Big Tom that was talking to me. The head and index finger came down while the mouth corner went up, and yes, there was some quite exultant finger gunning too, even as he reached to put his arms around a stiffened, uncooperative Carol Henderson and nod sympathetically into her cheek.

“Nicely done,” he said, to me, evidently pleased with the confirmation that business was being taken care of. “Good stuff.”

My mom disengaged from her half of Little Big Tom and put the jar down. She picked up the three-quarters of a cigarette that had been balanced on the edge of the counter, tipped the ash in the sink, and took a deep drag on it.

“How are you feeling, baby?” she said, placing the back of her non-cigarette-holding hand on my forehead with surprising tenderness and motherliness and considerately turning her head almost all the way around so that her exhaled cloud of cigarette smoke landed somewhere other than in my face. Which I appreciated, even though, technically, that hand-to-forehead procedure is meant to determine whether someone is
feverish, and there not being any chance at all of my having a fever, it of course served no practical purpose. But as an empty, vague demonstration of concern and affection I still ranked it highly. It didn’t happen too often. But it hadn’t been all that long since I was in the hospital, and everyone was still making an effort to be nice to me. Well, everyone except Amanda, who said, just before scampering off with the phone-baby:

“Don’t worry about him. He’s a
live wire
and he’s going to set the world on fire.”

I could almost see the gears turning in both of my parents’ heads, their argument temporarily forgotten as they tried to work out whether to worry that I was going to set something on fire right there. I’m sure they wouldn’t have put it past me. In their world, any person who was not that interested in sports was capable of anything, arson being the least of it. But then they seemed to realize I was just being mocked, in a sisterly sort of way.

“She heard me singing a song,” I said, just to make sure they got it. I explained that “setting the town on fire” was merely a metaphor for making things happen, helping your fellow man, and making the world a better place. I gave them the look that says “It’s really a very positive message.” Laying it on thick, I know, but the last thing I needed was to be put on pyromaniac watch.

Then, anticipating the next thing Little Big Tom was going to say, I added: “And plus, I’d rather not ‘lay it on you’ right now … chief. Still working on it.” Of course it was AC/DC, not one of my own songs, as I implied, and it had been “finished” over twenty-five years ago. And if I knew Bon Scott, he’d have set a hundred towns on fire, quite literally, and Little Big Tom as well, without blinking. But there was just no way I was going
to stand there singing “Live Wire” in front of my mom and Little Big Tom and try to defend it beyond a reasonable doubt. They’d put some kind of watch on me then, no question.

To my slight amazement, they bought it.

“The integrity of the artist,” Little Big Tom was saying, nodding sagely, while resuming the marital strife process by glancing at my mom with a bitter but kindly “the fuck?” look on his face. “Very cool. Very,
very
cool. Any time you’re ready, maestro. I’ll be all ears.” He wiggled his fingers at his ears, then said, “Go easy on your sister, chief. It’s not easy being a twelve-year-old girl.”

Thank the good Lord he didn’t try to do some kind of hand gesture to illustrate “twelve-year-old girl.” But I had to suppress a laugh anyway, because the earnest, solemn way he said it made it sound as though he were speaking from experience, and also because I was on edge. A few minutes of Little Big Tom’s relentless jocularity, shot through with a rich vein of marital disharmony, can fray a person’s nerves to the point where he’s likely to shoot off an involuntary giggle or two at the least appropriate moments. Even my mom broke character and gave him a look, but she remained pointedly silent when he added, rather unwisely, it seemed to me, in her direction: “Am I right, honey?”

So now they were both “the fuck?”–ing each other. With their faces, I mean.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what the argument was about, but whatever it was, it must have been pretty serious. No matter how annoyed I am with Little Big Tom, he desires acknowledgment so fervently, and is satisfied with so little, that it is nearly impossible to resist throwing him some sort of bone in the end, even if it’s only a grudging
“You betcha” or a fraction of a second’s worth of ambivalent eye contact. My mom wasn’t giving him anything, though. A tough cookie, I think the phrase goes.

“Don’t forget your medicine,” she finally said, to me, and left the kitchen without another word or glance at either of us. As I said, when it comes to the T. T. G. W. I. M. A. game, the first person to leave the room wins, and she almost never loses. Nerves of steel, that’s what it takes.

Little Big Tom did this lip-pursed “it is what it is” thing with his face, picked up the olive jar, placed it, with resigned precision, in the cupboard on top of a tomato sauce can, and sighed heavily.

“Rock and roll,” he said, the words infused with extraordinary sadness.

Now, in order to explain the next thing that happened, I have to make sure you understand something. When Little Big Tom first started hanging out with my mom and spending time around here, I was a little kid, and he, though tiny for a grown man, was still quite a bit taller than me. I guess he wasn’t all that used to being taller than someone, and got a little drunk with power over it, because he rather recklessly decided he wanted to be called Big Tom, to distinguish himself from me, whom he called Little Tom, or sometimes Little Dude or Little Guy. It was annoying, but as it was an accurate reflection of our relative sizes, perfectly legal according to the United Nations or the Marquess of Queensberry or whoever it is that administers the rules of who can call whom what and what they can hit each other with.

Soon, however, I started to grow up, as people do, and it wasn’t too long before I was not all that much shorter than him. That’s when I started to call him, in my head, though never to his face, of course, Little Big Tom, because it was funny and
there was nothing the UN or the Marquess of Queensberry could do about it. Now I’m just slightly taller than him, and though he may be a bit wider than me in the middle, there is pretty much no other sense in which he is big compared to me. I could call him Little Dude, but I don’t because, as annoying as he is, I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings that bad, except behind his back. But that’s why, by unspoken agreement, we’ve been saying “chief” and “sport” more often lately, so the subject of our relative heights won’t come up, even though everyone’s probably thinking it, most especially him.

So you know the thing where the dad-type figure will rumple the hair of the kid-type figure as though to say “You’re a good kid and I was your age once, so run along now”? I’m way too old for that, but Little Big Tom still likes to do it, especially when he needs cheering up, and it was plain he wanted to do it now. In fact, he was all but begging for it, making the well-known “it would mean a great deal to me to rumple your hair if you could find it in your heart to allow me that one simple pleasure” face with imploring eyes. Well, my nerves must be made of something other than steel, because I just didn’t have the heart to refuse, and win, by leaving the room.

Performing this operation these days involves his drawing himself up as tall as he can without too obviously standing on his toes, while I slouch and lower my head, like he’s the queen and I’m bowing in preparation for being knighted.

I’ll tell you what: it’s not easy being anyone.

Little Big Tom had looked at me blankly when I asked him if I had received any letters from Sam Hellerman.

“Why would he need to send a letter?” he had said. “You guys are practically joined at the hip. He could save a stamp and just hand it to you.” (Little Big Tom had actually mimed the “hand it to you” part instead of putting it into words, presenting the invisible letter with a flourish and a bow, as though to say “Your missive, my liege,” and making a whistling sound. Actually, you know what? Describing Little Big Tom’s gestures, funny and profound as they are, is going to get pretty cumbersome if I take the time to do each one like that. From now on, just try to remember to assume that anything Little Big Tom says is going to be mostly mime, with some whistling and tongue-clicking sound effects thrown in. I think that’s a good plan.)

I bristled at that “joined at the hip” remark, but he had a point: there was no reason for Sam Hellerman to send me a letter. There was no reason for him to call to remind me to meet him at Linda’s at one p.m. either, as we met up there around that time pretty much every day during Christmas vacation and we had already made a specific plan for today because we were going to go from there to band practice at Shinefield’s house.

Beyond that, both Sam Hellerman and my mom knew full well that there was little chance I was going to forget my medicine, otherwise known as “the stuff.” I had it in my front pocket, all ready to go in little envelopes. Of the three kinds of pills I had been given at the hospital to take home, one was just an anti-inflammatory thing that was of no use to anyone who wasn’t inflamed in some way. But the other two, a muscle relaxant and a painkiller with codeine, were of keen interest to Sam Hellerman. They were only to be taken “as needed,” and I didn’t need them all that much. Sam Hellerman, though: that boy had needs. For him, “as needed” comprehended the
universe, if I’m using that phrase correctly. So before you judge me, remember: I was just following the instructions on the bottle.