Still Life with Plums (3 page)

Dad hunched down in his seat and punched the gas pedal, hard, sending Duff and me into the cargo hold, but instead of turning into the parking lot, Dad drove straight.

Duff and I righted ourselves as Dad veered right onto Main Street and headed east, revving the engine as if he were torquing his nerve.

“Where are we going?” Duff whispered to me.

I shrugged, turtleneck tightening as we sped away from the station, from Grandma’s train maybe pulling in that very minute, her face pressed against the window of the passenger car as she looked for her daughter and her daughter’s brood.

“Dolan, where are we going?” Mom asked, hands gripping the dashboard.

“Can’t afford an Easter ham,” Dad seethed.

The windshield wipers whined and the ignored turn signal tick-ticked.

“Mother’s train,” Mom said, the words thin and wispy.

“Can’t fit a piano in our house,” Dad said. “I’ll show you kids what real poor looks like.”

Meg and Mary looked at each other practically nose to nose. I wondered if they were as alarmed as Duff and me until Mary mouthed:
I’ll show you what real poor looks like!
which sent Meg into a giggling fit.

“You kids be quiet back there!” Dad said, propelling us forward like a torpedo barreling over winding roads that dipped and swelled, my stomach dipping and swelling, too. My mind mechanically calculated numbers to distract my quivering gut.
5 x 5 = 25; 6 x 6 = 36
.

Dad finally slowed down and I knew where we were by the row of narrow boxes pretending to be houses. Shantytown.

There they were. The stuff of myths. A dozen of the tiniest houses I had ever seen all lined up in a row. Each box was maybe twelve feet wide by thirty feet long. Even our house was bigger. I tried to imagine the internal layout, if there were walls that separated one room from the next, or if everything was out in the open: unmade beds, the kitchen table, the commode.

Dad stopped the car in the middle of the road and rolled down his window to better gape at the spectacle, the wet wind blowing in and whirling around the car, ruffling his hair, and Mom’s. The twins huddled together in the middle seat, their blonde hair whipping Duff and me in the face, stinging our eyes. They tried to capture the loose tendrils and hold them in place.

“Close the window!” they yelled.

“Take a good look,” Dad said. “Maybe then you’ll be grateful for what you have.”

Meg and Mary didn’t take a good look, but I sure did. There were lights on in windows and I saw people inside going about their lives, oblivious to the carload of gawkers appraising their poverty. In one house five kids were crammed onto a couch, flickering lights from the black and white TV pulsing against their skin. In another a whole family was squeezed around the supper table, elbows and mouths flapping wildly until they all started laughing, every single one of them, even a fat-cheeked toddler strapped into a high chair.

“How would you brats like to live out here?” Dad said, jutting his chin at the display.

Duff gripped my knee. “Us too?” he whispered, tears already rimming his frantic eyes as he peered into the dilapidated shacks, no doubt searching for a tight cabinet under a bathroom sink.

“You kids have it pretty good,” Dad said. “A nice house. A new car.”

“I’m not moving in with a bunch of coal niggers,” Meg muttered.

Mom whipped around in her seat. “What did you say?”

Meg didn’t have time to answer because Mary pointed her finger at a lanky boy trotting up the mud path that served as a sidewalk. “That’s Mark Bailey!”

“I didn’t know he lived down here,” Meg said about their classmate. “His daddy’s not a miner.”

“His father works with you, doesn’t he Dolan?” Mom said, trying to deflate the tension.

Dad looked at the kid ambling up the front steps of one of those houses and entering without knocking. Dad gripped the steering wheel and nestled his rump in the seat. “That’s not Bailey’s house.”

“Sure it is,” Mom said. “That’s Hank sitting right there in the living room.”

“In his underwear!” Meg said, exploding in laughter.

“He probably can’t afford pajamas,” Mary said.

Dad slunk even lower. “You kids think this is funny? I’ll leave you here right now,” he said, a hint of fierceness drained from his voice.

“I see London. I see France,” Meg said, snorting.

“You hear me?” Dad said to the twins who only tipped their heads together and giggled, their hair wildly whipping. “I’ll leave you here right now!” Dad said.

“Nuh uh,” Meg said. “We’ll move to Pittsburgh and live in Grandma’s solarium!”

“No!” I blurted, immediately clamping my hand over my mouth.

“The hell you will,” Dad said, fierceness fully inflated once more. “I’ll toss you to the curb this very minute! I mean it!”

“I mean it!” the twins echoed as if they didn’t believe a word he said. “We’ll sleep on her wicker couches and sip lemonade in the sun!” Mary said.

Dad twisted around in his seat to better glare at his prized girls, his power circling the drain. The twins lifted their impervious noses and the only thing left for Dad to do was look past them at Duff
and me trembling there, believing him utterly.

“You hear me back there, Duff! Doreen! If you two don’t appreciate what I provide I’ll put you out right here and let you fend for yourselves! You hear me?”

7 x 7 = 49
.

“Yes,” I answered for both of us since Duff had no voice to offer.

“I’ll do it, too!” Dad swiveled back around and looked at Mom who was slouching so far forward she looked headless.

I spun around in the rear-facing bench seat, the turtleneck a tight hand wrapped around my throat as I glared out the back window. Dad sped away, the row of shanty houses disappearing in the gray rain as if we were tunneling deeper and deeper into a mineshaft, away from Grandma’s bright solarium filled with streaming beams of sunlight that my sisters had already claimed.

Duff turned around, too, still trembling, and nestled close to my side. Too close.

“He doesn’t mean it, does he?” Duff whispered to me.

I looked over at my little brother trying to twine his fingers through mine. But looking at him only made my gut clench until I felt something crack open deep inside. A burning wave rushed through my stomach, legs, arms, head, a hot heat that demanded release, the pressure building as the turn signal ticked, the windshield wipers screamed, the turtleneck tried to choke me to death.

The only thing I could do was wrap my fingers around Duff’s closed fist and start squeezing. He looked up at me, startled at first, accepting, even as I squeezed harder and harder.

“Stop it,” he whispered, finally trying to tug free.

But I wouldn’t let go. I leaned close to his face and the more he whimpered the better I felt, so I squeezed even harder,
8 x 8 = 64; 9 x 9 = 81
, imagining his delicate finger bones splintering. I was immune to his pleas: “Stop it, Doreen. It hurts.”

Which only made me angrier so I leaned close to his ear and seethed: “You’re nothing but a stupid-ugly Montserrat nigger. You know that?”
10 x 10 = 100; 11 x 11 = 121
. “A stupid-ugly Montserrat nigger. Say it. Say it.
Say it!”

This bridal shower sucks, truly, and my shorts are too tight—my
fat
shorts, pinching my belly rolls (yes, plural), my crotch, and I can hear my ex-husband shouting across three states:
I can’t believe you went out in public wearing that!
He is right again, naturally, since I am once again underdressed in a roomful of shift dresses and well-ironed skorts. Tidy hairdos and pert sandals. No three-second ponytails or clodhopper Birkenstocks—other than mine, of course. So I hunker over a bowl of mixed nuts, elbows on the table, picking out cashews, every single one, never mind my assigned game partner Aaaandreaaaa’s (that’s how she pronounced it, I swear) disgruntled snorts as I ram spit-coated fingers into the legumes to rummage and root.
Get your own damn nuts
.

“My door prize,” I say, indicating the bowl, hard-won cashew glob stuck in my teeth, I’m sure, but I don’t care as I ogle Aaaandreaaaa’s bow-tied photo album
and
a potted geranium, her legitimate trophies for knowing not only how the impending bride and groom met (at a Red’s game), but their honeymoon destination as well (Curaçao).

I suck the salt from my fingertips in a most unladylike fashion, annoying
Andi—my new de-snootified pet name for Aaaandreaaaa—further, though she’s already quite peeved at me for not playing nice during the introduction game. I lied every single time.

Andi dealt the first index card inked with the hand-scrawled query: How do you know the bride?

I’m her bridal consultant. She flew me in all the way from gay Paree
.

No! Andi said, eyeing my only slightly wrinkled, dog-hair-coated T-shirt.

Oui! At the reception we’ll be serving snail brains in a light cream sauce
.

Her patience waned as the interrogation persisted. Are you married?

But of course. Le nom de mon mari est Jacques Cousteau
.

Do you have any children?

No. I can’t stand clingy people
. Thus ending the tête-à-tête.

Maid-of-Honor announces that there will be yet another game.

Oh, joy
.

“Oh, goodie,” says Andi.

M-O-H has to yell over the cackling horde of thirty woman gathered in this dank church basement, cerulean and fuchsia crepe paper looped from the drop ceiling, smashed strawberries and bakery-cake frosting smeared across the linoleum. “What will the happy couple name their first baby?”

I poise to guffaw, but someone beats me to it. “They’re not even married yet! And maybe they don’t want children!”

It’s a woman standing slightly apart from the madding crowd, in shorts and huaraches, not Birkenstocks, exactly, but close enough for me, and it’s empowering to know that I’m not the only smartass in the room. She’s brave to bellow that out loud in front of these optimistic women, some with toddlers or infants strapped to various body parts. “Hear, hear!” I add. We tip our punch cups at each other and take sailor swigs while several of the
ladies
roll their eyes.

Someone yodels, “Is it a girl or a boy?”

“One of each!” M-O-H jubilantly predicts.

“I know this! I know this!” Andi trills, cupping a hand over her paper so she can scribe the names in secret.

This pisses me off, of course, so I pull my paper close to my chest and drape an entire meaty forearm across it as a fortress. Let’s see. Appropriate names for the happy couple’s twins: Bonnie and Clyde, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harold and Maude. The last movie pair not
real
, exactly, but then neither are the twins, not yet anyway, maybe not ever.

I look at the twin-less bride-to-be, Pam, the dog groomer I hired seven months ago to work in my kennel, one of three groomers now since business is growing. Opening my own canine
salon
was my only defense against being perpetually scheduled to work nights, holidays, and weekends in every other job I’ve endured on the planet, because childless women apparently have nothing else to fill their dull, meaningless lives. If I’m going to have to pull long hours, which I do, at least the profits are mine. And now there sits blushing Pam, the reason I got sucked into this festive torture—employee morale, yadda-yadda. That and the promise that it wasn’t a fancy affair, chicken salad and carrot sticks. The sweet lure of cake. Pam got the food right, but the attire, well… I again try to tug down my shorts, drawing Andi’s attention to my thighs, two jumbo rolls of rippled white tripe, then we both look at her well-toned, tanning-bed thighs, the comparison test, half the size of mine. She wins again.
Bitch
.

While Andi is distracted by her winning gams, a woman across the room belts out the twins’ correct names (Madison for a girl, Aidan for a boy—or vice versa) capturing the grand prize: a gi-gundo shrink-wrapped basket of toiletries (which I recognize from Sam’s Club, thank you very much—though I only went there once, with my mother, under duress).

Andi is sorely disappointed and her loss makes me feel all light and fluttery.

I stand to announce, “I’m going to the ladies’,” waistband of my shorts cutting furiously into my punch-bloated bladder.

“Fine,” says Andi. As I turn to leave I think I hear her mutter, “Thank God.”

I am directed to the bathroom by several women in the kitchen with their arms up to the elbows in dishwater, keeping up with the punch glasses. Church ladies, I can tell, because I am a churchgoer (yes, women without children often believe in a Supreme Being). I have been mightily snubbed by church women. Passed over as Sunday school teacher and Vacation Bible School director because what could I possibly know about children? Point taken, though I’ve certainly bought enough Girl Scout cookies and Boy Scout popcorn from those same church children to support the troops. I also take offense at only being assigned prepackaged food for potlucks: potato chips, maybe, or a bag of ice. Childless women certainly don’t cook.
Oy
.

When I come back through, waistband no longer feeling so snug (leaving the distinct possibility for more cake), one of those hallowed women is struggling to pull a trash bag from the can, her spindly, bone-density-loss arms no match for the Hefty overstuffed with paper plates, foam cups, plastic two-liters, and empty Kroger containers for coleslaw and potato salad (even I could have managed that deli-served fare). “Don’t believe in recycling?” I mutter.

“What’s that, dear?” she asks.

I don’t have the heart to repeat it because the woman looks spent. “Allow me,” I say.

“Thank you, precious,” she says. “Now don’t hurt yourself.”

I’ve hoisted 150-pound Mastiffs onto slick metal tables. I lift the trash bag out effortlessly and even tie off the top. “Where to?” I ask,
because I can’t imagine this worn soul lugging it very far.

“Right outside that door,” she says, patting my arm. “You’re a treasure.”

Precious! Treasure! Wow. I float on those epithets all the way outside into the heat where metal cans are lined up in the side yard. I plunk the bag in, settle the lid, and turn toward the ring of children sitting in a circle in the grass. They’re blowing bubbles and making clover chains, and I recognize some of them from inside. Two teenage girls have been roped into babysitting. I hope they’re getting paid, at least, and aren’t just collecting God points, jewels for their crowns, as my late grandma would say.