Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (9 page)

~

I know you don’t respect me for this. But I don’t care.

I live with it.

You try living with it.

S
AMMY
GETS
his blue stool and carries it over to the toilet. We have one of those plastic things to put on top of the toilet to keep Sammy from falling in. I help Sammy get his pants down.

When he’s got himself sitting down on the toilet, I ask him if he’s okay there all by himself. I tell him I’m going back to have my dinner. If he needs me, I tell him, he should call.

He’s in there singing Christmas carols. We have a Christmas tape going in the living room. Sammy is sitting on the toilet, singing along to the Christmas tape playing on the tape machine in the living room. I wanted to tell you about this, because I wanted you to know something. Sammy is alone in there. He is in there alone in that bathroom, sitting there on that toilet, and he is singing.

~

Dad goes, “Where are the clips? The wind is blowing the tablecloth off the table.”

Dad’s second wife, Gretchen, says, “You were supposed to bring out the clips.”

“No,” Dad says. “I was supposed to bring out the wine and the salad. The person who brings out the tablecloth is supposed to bring out the clips.”

“Dad,” I call. “I just dropped your burger into the barbecue. You got another one in there?”

“No,” Dad says. “That was the last one.”

Dad eats these special burgers. They are called veggie burgers. They come in a powder. You just add water and then put them in the frying pan. After that you can barbecue them if you want, according to the box. From my limited experience, I find they tend to fall apart and drop between the bars of the grill, into the coals of the barbecue. So far tonight I have lost one hot dog and Dad’s veggie burger in the coals of the barbecue.

“That’s it,” Dad says. “I guess I’m not eating tonight.”

“You could have some salad, Dad,” I say.

“I don’t want any fucking salad,” Dad says. “I hate salad.” He stands at the picnic table, looking down at his plate. He’s holding his fork in his hand. He looks very tall standing there by the table. Everyone else is sitting down, but Dad is standing. I’m over by the barbecue.

“I was going to propose a toast tonight,” Dad says. “I guess there’s not much point in that now.” Dad steps away from the picnic table and goes into the cottage. “Fuck it,” he says.

“Can you get the clips and bring them out as long as you’re in there?” Gretchen calls. But the door slams in the middle of her sentence and Dad never comes back out with the clips.

~

I could have said “Hi.” Just “Hi.” She might have answered. She might have said “Hi” back.

What else could I have said, though? “Nice shorts?” “Nice white legs?”

I think she was trying to look as if she had someplace to go. I’ve seen Tutti walk that way. I know that walk. I knew the moment that woman got beside me that she was trying to walk that walk that Tutti walks. I knew that woman was afraid. I don’t know where she came from. She seemed so small beside me.

~

In the end it’s just him and me at the kitchen table with all the lights out and the blinds closed because it’s so hot. All I can see are his eyes and the way his lips curve.

What I hear is something from a long time ago, a word, or a series of words, leading like crystal to the end of everything.

Before I take him to the airport Sammy stands in front of him with his hands together and says, “You’re going to the airport now.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Bye,” Sammy says. He goes around the corner and out the front door.

~

It’s not that I’m young or naïve or anything. But it seems to me all the stories people tell me these days are one line long and begin with: “I bought these things.”

O
NE
DAY
Betty bought a cactus. It was a lovely little cactus, emerald green with tiny white spikes, like sewing needles. It was globe shaped. Betty thought it looked like a little green head. She thought this must be what a Martian head would look like.
You wouldn’t want to mess with a Martian
, Betty thought,
because he would only have to knock his head against you for you to be impaled on all those tiny, needle-like spikes
. Betty laughed to herself as she put the cactus in a planter and set it on the windowsill above the kitchen sink.

“This is the nicest little cactus there ever was,” Betty said to herself as she stood in the doorway of the kitchen, admiring it.

In truth, her cactus was much like a thousand other cacti in a thousand other homes across the country, and Betty was nothing but a deluded lonely housewife whose husband no longer came home Thursday nights.

~

Excuse me. I’m sorry. Just a minute. Could you excuse me for a minute?

~

Battle Cat was this kitten we had for a while. We couldn’t keep him because we already had a cat. For two weeks, Tutti and I tried to find a home for Battle Cat. Mornings, while Tutti and I were trying to get ready for work, Battle Cat would chase us around the apartment, attacking our ankles. He would grab on to our socks and hold on as though he wanted to try to keep us there.

Finally, Tutti found a home for him. We loaded Battle Cat and his little dish and his litter box into the car and we drove downtown to an apartment building. We took Battle Cat up the elevator and gave him to this old lady who lived in the apartment. On the way back down in the elevator Tutti cried.

~

I’m trying to tie my shoe. I’m bent down. My cheek is pressed against the top of my desk. I’m groping around under the desk, trying to grab my left shoelace. I can’t find it. “Fuck,” I say. Just then someone comes up beside my desk. I’ve just got my hands on my shoelace. I try to move my head around to see who it is who is standing beside my desk, but my face is locked to the desk. I form a loop on one side of the lace and wrap the other side around.

“Who is that beside my desk?” I say.

“Rebecca,” a voice says. “The new girl.”

“Could you come back in five minutes, Rebecca?” I say.

“I’m pretty busy right now.”

“That’s okay,” Rebecca says. “I just wanted to meet you. I’m introducing myself to everyone in the office.”

“Glad to meet you, Rebecca,” I say. I slip the one loop under the other loop and pull on the ends of both loops and right away I can tell I’ve done it. I’ve tied a bow under my desk. I pull my cheek up off the desk and realize I’ve been sweating and my face is stuck a little. It makes a popping sound when I lift it off.

“I did it,” I say out loud. Some of the bozos at the desks in front of me turn around to see what I’ve done.

~

Tutti is sitting beside me, stuffing this stuffed cat she is making.

Tutti made one of these stuffed cats before. I watch her stuff the stuffing in.

The last time Tutti made one of these stuffed cats, she gave it to my sister. This one is for Tutti’s sister.

“Do you think we’ll be here for the rest of our lives?” Tutti asks.

“You mean here here or here anywhere?” I say.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Tutti says.

~

One day, I go to work and my desk is gone. There’s a space on the floor where it used to be. The chair is gone, too, and so is my picture of Tutti.

All my pens are gone, my paper, my coffee mug with the picture of Gandhi on it, which I got from Texaco, my Big Mac coupons, my naked-lady letter opener, gone. All of it. Gone.

I go into the washroom, turn on the water, roll out some paper towels, blow my nose, flush the urinal, pace around, look up at the ceiling, look down at my toes, wring my hands, lock myself in the stall, and begin to weep.

After I have my little weep, I go back out to the workroom and do what work I can without my desk, which is no work. The manager calls me into her office and fires me, so I go home, have a lemonade, and sit at the kitchen table reading grocery flyers. I kick off my shoes and put on some music. I daydream about this one time, years ago, when I was a rock star and people wanted important things, like my autograph, or a piece of my underwear.

~

I was thinking about Dad and suddenly I started trying to think about what it would be like to think about Dad if it was not Dad I was thinking about.

O
NCE A
small boy went into a convenience store and bought a cherry popsicle. He took the popsicle out to the parking lot of the convenience store and ate it, sitting on the cement parking abutment. When the popsicle was gone, he stuck the popsicle sticks in his pocket. Then he went back into the convenience store and bought another cherry popsicle. He went back out to the parking lot and ate this cherry popsicle, too. He kept on doing this all night, until he felt like a bag of shit. At seven in the morning, with the sun coming up, he looked like a bag of shit, too. He was a fat kid, with not very many friends, and his pocket linings were stuck to the skin on his legs from all the cherry popsicle sticks he had stuck in there. He looked as if he had been shot in the legs, and he sort of walked that way as well, from how gross it felt having the skin ripped off his legs as he walked along.

When the fat boy got home, he dumped all his popsicle sticks on the table in the living room. He went and got a tube of white glue and started gluing. His parents were upstairs in their bedroom, asleep. When they came down, they found their tubby son asleep on the couch with his pants off. Nearby, a bunch of popsicle sticks were glued together to form what looked like an abandoned shack in the Ozark Mountains.

The tubby boy took the shack in for show-and-tell at school. Nobody liked him anyway. Girls stuck their finger in their throat when they saw him coming. He took his shack up to the front of the class and set it on the teacher’s desk. He stood there at the front of the class, grinning.

I
AM
having these thoughts about what the waitress is maybe thinking about all these crumpled napkins on the table, and all these little ketchup packets torn open with the little corners torn off and sitting in little clusters in various places on the table, leaking. I keep asking the waitress for more of these little packets of ketchup. The waitress keeps bringing me more coffee and I keep opening the little packets of cream, trying to see where I can put these little packets of cream on the table once they are empty. Sammy keeps saying, “I’m Sammy. I’m two.” Every time the waitress comes to our table, she smiles and gives me more coffee. I am holding on to one of these little packets of cream, which is empty now because I have put the cream into my coffee, and I am trying to see some place on the table where I can put the little packet down where the waitress will not come by and look at the table and say to herself, “Oh my god!” Sammy is dipping his sleeve in the ketchup and I am trying to wipe the ketchup off with napkins and pretty soon the napkins are all crumpled up and lying on the table, covered in ketchup, and I am getting napkins off of other tables where no one is sitting and there are so many napkins and they all have ketchup all over them and I am trying to think where to put this empty packet of cream.

~

Whenever Sammy slept, I would go outside quick, before he woke up. I felt that terrible power that flies out of you as soon as it gathers. Sammy liked to get a stick and smash it into the bushes in front of the house. We live in a town house, so we share the front bushes with the people who live next door. He felt love for his children. We would know it, that it was enough for people in this world to feel love for their children and that this would be enough. I would tell Sammy to stop smashing the bushes and he would stop. He would start smashing the tree out front, which we also share, and the bark would come showering off. You didn’t have to do anything. Consequently, I came to believe there wasn’t any such thing as love. I said, “Don’t you want to keep things nice?” Secretly, I was glad he was doing it. I thought that love was a thing that could exist only beyond itself, in the moments that generate it, and that the moments that generate love themselves obliterate it.

~

I was trying to write a poem. It was going to be about everything. Just a simple description of everything in my life. Some of the things I have been watching on TV, for instance.

I have to go to work now.

~

Jane was alone, washing the dishes, and she turned around and looked at me.

“Everyone is gone,” she said. “They left me to do the dishes.”

“I’m going home,” I said.

T
HEY
GAVE
her this job where she carried the wooden A-frame up the wheelchair ramp and set it in front of the theater entrance. Then she went back down the ramp and got the sign and carried it up the ramp and put it on the A-frame. There was a guy at the top of the ramp who kept looking at her. He kept looking at her tits. She never said anything to him.

I
HATE
these bastards. You know? Can you hear this? Listen. Look at this. You see that space there? That’s the guy’s mouth. The guy in the painting, on the bridge, with the mouth. Do you know that one? I use that same mouth, the “o” mouth, on the ghosts I hang in the front tree for Sammy on Halloween.

~

First, Tutti tells me I should take the eggs out of the pot and put them in a bowl.

Then she tells me I should put the eggs in the fridge.

Then she starts telling me about some fat kid she knows who she says drinks too much pop.

I tell her to quit telling me how to make egg salad sandwiches.

I tell her, “Leave me alone. I can make egg salad sandwiches myself.”

“I don’t want mayonnaise,” Tutti says. “I want Miracle Whip.”

I get the Miracle Whip out of the fridge. I get a fork and stick it in the middle of the Miracle Whip.