The Lonely Polygamist (7 page)

Of Golden, big as he was (and whose presence at these meetings was considered more or less irrelevant), there was simply never enough to go around.

Often at these meetings Nola and Beverly, whose relationship had developed into one long rivalrous dance, would lock horns over who had been shortchanged the week before, which wife deserved an extra night that week, which child had been deprived of her father’s presence at something so emotionally formative as the county spelling bee. Trish and Rose-of-Sharon made it a habit to stay out of the way, occasionally making a point or taking sides in a way that favored their own particular agenda, taking whatever leftovers they could get. Never once had they had a run-in until, it seemed very likely, right now.

Rose-of-Sharon had begun to talk in a way Trish had never heard before, a kind of breathy, headlong chatter, about Pauline’s recent ascension to first chair in the high school band, and her advances in the French horn,
which is the most difficult of all the brass instruments by the way I don’t know if you knew that or not and because of its mellow sound was often included with the woodwinds and anyway Pauline is so excited about going to Cedar City for regionals that she hasn’t slept in two nights! and oh she’s been practicing like MAD for a month and it’s going to be quite a treat to stay in a motel and see the sights without the rest of the children tagging along…

As she spoke, her trembling hands had begun to grip Trish’s head, her fingertips slowly increasing the pressure until it felt like a bird of prey had sunk its talons into her skull and was attempting to lift her bodily out of the chair.

“It’s a big deal for her, a very important event,” Rose said, her voice thin and distressed.

“Yes—oh, ow—I can imagine,” Trish said.

“She’d really like it—it’d really be nice, you know…”

Here it comes
, Trish thought, hoping it would come very soon, before Rose-of-Sharon’s fingernails pierced her scalp.

“…if she had her
family
there, besides just me…”

Come on
, Trish thought,
get to it
, please.

“If maybe. If her…”—she seemed to hold her breath for a moment and then let it out in a rush of words—“
father
-could-be-there-oh-it’d-be-something-she’d-never-forget.”

Trish grabbed Rose’s hands, now locked into paralysis, and with some effort pried them from her head. She sat up and tried to look her in the eye, but Rose stared resolutely at the swirl of water disappearing down the sink’s drain.

“He hasn’t been over in two weeks,” Trish whispered, even though now that the dryer had rattled into silence her words carried easily into every part of the room. “I’ve seen him twice in the past month. If I don’t see him tonight, who knows how long it will be, you understand? Rose? I’m beginning to think he won’t even recognize me anymore.”

She laughed—a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood—but Rose only nodded. Unable to speak or make a gesture of condolence or regret, Trish sat in the sunken chair, a black-hearted villain in her bank-robber’s mask, her shameful features hidden from view. Nola, whose scissors had been poised above her customer’s springy hair during the entire exchange, sighed and resumed her
snick snick snick
. Rose eased her hands from Trish’s grip and gently dried her hair with a towel.

She did not wait for Rose to comb out her tangled hair, did not wait for her turn in Nola’s chair. A bitterness had risen in her throat, sudden and hot—that she should have to feel
guilty
for wanting to be a participant in her own life, that she should be
ashamed
of wanting to spend a few hours with her own husband!—and she knew she should leave immediately. She made an excuse about a forgotten appointment at the clinic and on her way out made sure to slip the
Cosmo
from underneath the teetering magazine pile and tuck it under her arm as if it belonged to her. She stepped out into the bright day, the sidewalk scorching white beneath her feet, the sky a pale panel of blue over her head, and walked slowly at first, her hair wet and wild, her face still covered with the handkerchief, and then began to run, making a break for it like the outlaw she was.

T
HEY CAUGHT HIM IN THE UNDERWEAR. HE HAD JUST SLIPPED HIS
foot into a pair of nylon tights when that little bubble-eyed freak Louise peeked in the room and ran down the stairs screaming her head off, “Rusty! Oh no! Rusty! He’s in the underwear! Rusty’s in the underwear!” Like she was Paul Revere telling everybody the Russians were coming.

He happened to be wearing some panties over his jeans too, he wanted to see how they looked, kind of like an experiment. They were made of a smooth blue satiny material with a tiny bow on the band and were so small he had a terrible time getting them off. He yanked and pulled and had them down to his ankles when Aunt Beverly walked in and scared him so bad he tipped backward and cracked his head on the edge of the dresser.

Even though his head hitting the dresser had made a noise, and he was now in a lot of pain, Aunt Beverly didn’t say,
Are you okay, Rusty, hmm, you want an ice pack or something on that?
She just watched him squirm around on the floor trying to stretch the panties around his feet. Rusty thought,
Aunt Beverly, you old witchy woman
, which made him feel a little less like he might crap his pants in fear.

Someday, when he had discovered his own mysterious personal superpower, which would most likely be chemically radioactive laser beams that shot out of his eyes, he would do battle with Aunt Beverly and blast that witchy stare right off her fat face until her hair caught fire and she had to jump through a window and into the cow trough outside to put out the flames. And all the brothers and sisters would run screaming before him and his deadly laser beams, and he would blast one or two of them in the back before he said,
Come on back, guys, I’m just kidding, ha ha, I won’t harm the rest of you as long as Aunt Beverly apologizes for all her wrong actions and crimes against humanity
, and Aunt Beverly would come up to him all wet from the cow trough and her bald head still smoking and say,
I’m sorry, Rusty, please forgive us all, won’t you, we will do whatever you say as long as you’ll allow us to keep our precious lives
.

Now there was a bunch more girls gathered in the doorway laughing, oh, so insanely happy about what was going on here, it looked like their big white teeth were going to pop out of their mouths. Rusty laughed too, just to show them he understood how funny this underwear situation was, but instead of laughing he snorked, which made them laugh harder, which made his face get hot and itchy. Aunt Beverly trained her witchy-woman stare on them for a second and they ran away howling and giggling,
Hee hee, oh my gosh! Stop it! Shhhhh!
and in about thirty seconds everybody in the family, including the neighbors and other innocent bystanders, would be up to date on the underwear thing. What a gyp.

Aunt Beverly stood right over him and asked what he thought he was doing, creeping around in the Big Girls’ room like some kind of pervert, trying on their underwear.

Rusty held his breath and had to concentrate extremely hard not to let her make him cry. When he had to breathe again he tried not to snork, which was what came out anyway.

“This is funny?” she said. “You think any of this is amusing?”

No, Rusty didn’t think any of it was funny, especially not the snork. He mumbled that he had been looking for his tube socks in the Big Girls’ drawer because they sometimes took his socks just to make him mad.

“Honestly. You want to blame this little abomination of yours on the girls now? You sneaking through their drawers and putting on their intimate items is their fault, is that what you’re saying?”

He looked down at his shirt, which was too small with a tear-hole and grease spots on it, not that anybody cared. And come to think of it, weren’t his own underwear gross and ratty too? Gray and full of holes and so stretched out the Jolly Green Giant could wear them under his little skirt thing no problem? Of course the girls’ underwear was clean and fresh and extremely elastic. If he had good underwear, the nice tight kind that looked sharp and made you feel good about yourself, then maybe he wouldn’t have to go trying on other people’s intimate items, would he?

Aunt Beverly told him he was to go to his room, where he would stay for the rest of the day, until she and the other mothers decided on an appropriate punishment.

Appropriate
. This was Aunt Beverly’s favorite word, her power word, the word that granted her her awful destructive might, which she would surely lose forever if she didn’t say it at least fifteen times a day.

That sort of talk isn’t appropriate. Let’s find a more appropriate activity, children. We’ll discuss this at an appropriate time. Your shoes, Rusty, do not smell very appropriate. How about
, Rusty thought,
you kiss my appropriate behind?

“What?” said Aunt Beverly. “What did you say?”

What? He hadn’t said anything! Had he? He turned his head away so she could not look into his eyes. The possibility that Aunt Beverly might be able to see deep into his inner brain with her witchy-woman stare did not surprise him at all.

“Not only will you stay in your room for the rest of the day,” Aunt Beverly said, “but you will go without dinner tonight. And no dessert for the rest of the week. One more word from you and you will be grounded for the rest of the month. I will not allow this kind of perversion in my house.”

At this, Rusty just stood there like a big buttfudge bawling his fat brains out. He thought about his own sorry stretched-out underwear, which made him cry harder, and how everybody would know that he was trying on girl’s panties in the middle of the day, and the worst, no dessert for a week.
What a big dang gyp!
He cried so hard he began to cough, and slobber came out of his mouth, which often happened because he had some kind of condition that made him have too much spit in his mouth. But Aunt Beverly did not hug him, or say,
now-now
, or make him a glass of chocolate milk on ice like his own mother would’ve, she just gave him one last stare and went out the door.

Well, crying like that made him feel a little better, and staying in his room wouldn’t be so bad—at least he wouldn’t have to do chores. Out in the hall, Parley was waiting for him. Parley was two years older and could run faster and throw farther and make musical armpit farts everyone thought were hilarious. Rusty tried to walk by, but Parley stood in his way with his arm against Rusty’s chest, and whispered,
Fag
. Rusty pushed past him, but Parley stayed right with him, doing the musical armpits and singing,
A-Faggety-Fag-Fag-Fee, A-Faggety-Fag-Fag-Foo.

One of the sorriest things about Old House was that it was really
old
, with squeaking floors and clanking radiators, but the worst part of it was you had to march up about six hundred stairs to get to the Tower, which was where they made Rusty stay, most likely because they wanted him to reduce in size his sizable love handles. So he climbed, huffing and stopping once in a while to let some spit dribble out of his mouth, while Parley was with him step for step calling him the world’s most out-of-shape homo.

Rusty spent the next two hours in the Tower bedroom, which was not his bedroom at all, but a room that belonged to Parley and Nephi, who promised to murder him in his sleep if he kept up his snoring, which was why he now slept with a hammer under his pillow. They had sturdy beds with nice fluffy pillows, while he slept on a foam rubber pad on the floor.

For the thousandth time, Rusty read the sign hanging above the dresser. A few months ago Aunt Beverly made a bunch of them and hung them up in everybody’s bedroom, even put one in the bathroom. In her flowery, old-style writing it said:

Christ Is the Head of This House

The Unseen Guest

at Every Meal

The Silent Listener

to Every Conversation

See if that doesn’t creep you right out.

No, this was not his bedroom, or his house, and Aunt Beverly, no matter what anybody said, was not his mother. His mother was back at Big House, where he belonged with his
real
brothers and sisters, who were all, honestly, a bunch of a-holes too. He had to live in Old House with Aunt Beverly’s family because somebody had the big idea to do an interfamily exchange program, where children from the different mothers went to live at the other houses, so they could all love each other and understand each other, and have no divisions or strife among them, which was all a big fat gyp.

People said the exchange program was his father’s idea, but Rusty and everybody else knew that all of his father’s big ideas were really Aunt Beverly’s, and that Aunt Beverly got this idea from the Jensens, a family in the church who were always trying to be cooler than everyone else, with their brand-name clothes and Six Flags vacations. Last year the Jensens signed up for the Foreign Exchange Program and got two Japanese kids: a sister and a brother. You should have seen them dumb Japanese kids! One minute they’re back in their little paper house in Japan eating Chinese food with chopsticks, and the next thing they know they’re in the Jensen compound with eighteen new brothers and sisters and four mothers and having to stand in line for a bowl of cornflakes! They were only there for a couple of weeks before somebody alerted the authorities, who took them to a regular American family in Colorado where they didn’t have to wait half an hour for a chance at the toilet.

So now that Parley was gone, Rusty sat on one of the beds that wasn’t his and looked out the window. It was a bright day, the sky blue and without a cloud, but cold enough that there wasn’t a lot going on in the side yard or the pastures beyond. He watched a couple of Brother Spooner’s cows trying to hump each other, which was fun for a while until he realized that they were doing it only because they were as bored as he was. He watched Raymond the Ostrich strut around in the smaller pasture next to the Spooner home. People said Brother Spooner used to have dozens of ostriches at one time, he was planning to make millions of dollars selling them for ostrich hamburgers, turning what was left over into cowboy boots and those feathery scarf things dancing ladies wear, but it turned out there weren’t a whole lot of people interested in eating something that looked like a giant mutant turkey. So Brother Spooner had gotten rid of all his ostriches, except Raymond, who had once attacked a kid from town who was trying to siphon gas from the Spooners’ tractor, and because Raymond had run the kid down and kicked the living dookie out of him and defended the Spooner way of life, he was now considered part of the family.

After the cows stopped humping and Raymond disappeared behind the feed bin and Rusty could not look out the window a minute longer, he crossed the room and regarded himself in the mirror on the closet door. His face was still red from crying, and blubber showed through the gaps in his shirt. He was sort of fat all right, and the owner of a shirt so raggedy and stained it looked like he had stolen it off a dead hobo, but he was no fag.

“Fag, you say?” he asked in his Scoundrel accent, which always made him feel better, doing the squinty-eyed thing while taking a drag from an imaginary pipe. “Get a hold of yourself, man, you may be many things to many people, but a
fag
? My dear man, I dare say
not
.”