Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (18 page)

In the house Manson's territorial imperatives were respected whenever possible. If he was napping on one end of the couch, the entire couch was off-limits to the whole family. If he sprawled in front of the bathroom door the men in the family would relieve themselves in the backyard—a practice that humiliated Mr. Nelson. The women would try to sweet-talk Manson away from the door with promises of his favorite biscuits.

By the end of his first year with the Nelson family, however, all four family members had been sewn up at the hospital, thanks to Manson. One simply never knew when the surprise attack might occur. One night Cindy came home late from a date and tripped over him in the dark. Manson tore at her upper arm savagely and would not let go. The whole family awoke and turned on lights and swatted at the animal with brooms and other long-stemmed instruments until he turned on each of them, releasing Cindy only at the thought of more fresh meat. He quite literally
terrorized the entire Nelson family, and yet they loved him. They laughed themselves silly after each incident.

Of course they were no longer able to have house guests or dinner guests or visitors of any kind for fear of injury and lawsuits. Mr. Nelson was adamant about this. He wasn't going to have his modest lifesavings pulled out from under him by some senseless canine felonious attack. Why, even the roof over their heads would be taken away from them should a non-family member suffer the kinds of injuries each of them had experienced. At times they all thought they were insane. They were the fourth family to have rescued Manson from death row. The others had taken him back after a day or two. The Nelsons took some pride in their tolerance and durability, the fact that none of them had actually
died
in Manson's jaws.

Before he had come into their lives there was some question as to who ruled the Nelson household, Mrs. Nelson being a very strong lady herself, and Mr. Nelson known, at least to his children, as an intractable, if respectable old coot. Now there was no question as to who ruled. Manson had established that within minutes, and held without sway the crown and scepter for a full decade, a dramatic and dangerous reign of unpredictable violence that earned him the love and respect of his lowly slaves and peons, collectively known as the Nelson family. It made no sense to anyone who knew of the situation. Friends were lost. Packages were undelivered. The milkman quickly scratched them off his list of customers.

And the more isolated they became, the happier they seemed to be. Tim and Cindy stopped fighting and teasing one another
and formed a kind of Manson fan club, they brought him presents and took pictures of him which they had framed and hung on their bedroom walls. Mr. Nelson had never really been comfortable with Mrs. Nelson's dinner parties and was relieved when they stopped of necessity. And Mrs. Nelson got to play Florence Nightingale all the time now, a role she enjoyed, cleaning wounds, applying disinfectants, bandaging. She especially cherished bandaging. They were brought closer together by this cantankerous spaniel with jaws of steel.

One day during Cindy's senior year in high school neither Mr. Nelson nor Mrs. Nelson were feeling well and they asked Cindy if she would mind taking Manson for his walk. Always before they had thought that only themselves were sufficiently responsible and strong to make certain no catastrophe befell their household as a result of these daily outings with Manson. But Cindy convinced her parents that, at eleven years old, Manson no longer had the wherewithal to break her grip on the choke chain and that she was shrewd enough herself to avoid situations that would ignite the devil in old Manson.

But of course she was still only a teenager. The first block went well enough. Twice she had had to distract Manson from his temptation to lunch on smaller dogs running loose in the neighborhood. And once she hid him behind a parked car so that he would not be incited by the sight of the mailman.

Manson dragged her from tree to tree, where he insisted on leaving his mark on each and every one. He even attacked several oaks and actually bit the bark off of them in great anger at something only he could detect, such as the possible existence
of other dogs in the universe, a thought which clearly enraged him.

Cindy was panting for her breath when a police car pulled up beside her. The young officer inside reached over and unrolled his window. “Excuse me, young lady,” he said, “Could you tell me where . . .” Manson crouched and, with horrendous force, snapped the leash and hurled himself through the air and into the police car window. Cindy lay face down on the sidewalk and heard what sounded like a tremendous explosion. Her knees and elbows were burning with cuts, but she did manage to stand and brush herself off, still dazed. The officer was clutching his face and mumbling to himself over and over and over, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.”

“What happened? Are you all right?” Cindy ran over to his window and the officer slowly lowered his hands to reveal a bloody map of Manson's dental charts.

“Oh my God, Oh my God,” she couldn't find the words.

The family mourned Manson's death for weeks, for months, really. He was given something of a state funeral in their backyard, one befitting a great dictator. Each of them tossed a red rose into the earth before shoveling the dirt over old Manson's remains. And each had a few words to say about the beast, and all of them, even Mr. Nelson, shed a few tears. An era had passed and, while no one spoke the thought, they knew nothing stood between them and the world now. Their one excuse had been removed, a bullet through his heart. They had their scars and little else to defend themselves against the multifariousness of the world.

I
t was an incredible fight that went on for three days. Frank had thrown all of Stephanie's clothes onto the front lawn. She responded by breaking his favorite pieces of Mayan statuary. He countered by hurling chairs and tables and bookcases through the front door. She bit his ear with all her might, nearly severing part of it. Then she hit him on the head with a tricycle and they made love.

They made love for three days. They did things to one another they had never tried before. He smeared her vagina with his favorite apricot jam. She made a chocolate cast of his penis. It was amazing, worlds opened up to them. Just as he thought he could not possibly achieve another erection, Stephanie had another idea. Frank thought he just might die. Both of their genitals were finally too raw for further use. That's when she suggested that they have another baby. Frank looked forlornly at his withered member and said, “How?”

And that's when Stephanie informed him that she hadn't been using anything during the whole three day orgy. She laughed and laughed at how she had tricked him again. That's how the other three were conceived, after big fights. Because Frank didn't really like children. But then again, neither did Stephanie.

On his way to work the next morning Frank fell asleep at the wheel and narrowly missed a head-on collision with a logging truck. When the driver's horn woke him, not a moment too soon,
he almost wished it had been allowed to happen. Each time he had been on the verge of leaving Stephanie she tricked him into staying with another pregnancy. There was never a right moment, she saw to that with her sexual bait. His career as a politician—a city councilman on the rise—no longer mattered to him as it once had before he met Stephanie. He had once said he would be a United States Senator before the age of fifty. That was before he discovered “the mush”—his words—at his core. Stephanie knew about it, and that's what she worked on, Frank's mush.

She liked being married to a city councilman, and she still dreamed, indeed she believed the dream, that he would someday rise above local politics and into national prominence, and she would be there by his side with her brood of little ones. It wasn't the money and all the special perks she wanted but an affirmation that she and Frank were special. Meanwhile it took all the wile and guile she could muster to keep Frank from disappearing into Mexico and losing all trace of him forever, and she knew—though she did not like to acknowledge it in any way—that that was his obsession now. So she was going to make him another baby now. One month later the tests made it official, and Frank was congratulated by everyone in the office. Jokes were made: “Looks good, Senator, father of four, family values. There's no stopping you now.” His head was full of obscene panic; he assumed everyone could see the awful mess in there. He even thought of throwing a few of the gawkier ones out of the window or setting fire to his secretary's hair. She knew everything, he was more and more certain. Perhaps she was even to blame, as it was she, Iris, who had introduced him to Stephanie five years back. Yes, Frank was seriously thinking of immolating Iris.

Frank treasured the long drives to and from work, forty minutes each way. At the beginning of each drive he had a choice to make: to examine the mush, to rake it over again and again for some clue, some tiny opening out, or to not examine the mush, a much more pleasant choice. If he chose not to examine, he could wake up an old man in Chiapas or Tehuantepec and smell the morning coffee brewing and hear the canaries singing. But then he would be that much further away from actually escaping from Stephanie and the ceaseless caterwauling of the children.

Stephanie greeted him each day with a list of chores it was necessary for him to perform that evening if their common ship was to stay upright and not drift off course. And then she recited all the problems with which she had to contend all day: the babysitter was sick, the washing machine ate three diapers, the plumber had not even bothered to return her calls, her mother had called and was threatening to visit, until Frank thought he was going to explode. He detested domestic trivia, especially Stephanie's, and it was Stephanie's as far as he was concerned, and not his own. He had not asked for any of this. The woman would not be satisfied until she had melted chocolate into his brain and devoured it. How had all this got started? he had asked himself ten thousand times. He could tell the story a thousand ways to himself, but they were all lies. The truth can sometimes be so small and embarrassing, he thought to himself, that it is often not worth mentioning. In this particular case it was tits. He had wanted to suckle from them from the first night she had shown them to him. He had wanted to give up everything and just suckle.

As the birth of the fourth child approached Frank was beginning
to make mistakes. Iris was keeping a close eye on him, she was actually keeping a daily diary on his behavior. She justified this by telling herself that she was “covering for him,” that is, she was noting mistakes Frank had made, phone calls not returned, conversations that Frank had with various committee members that would have to be smoothed over by her, or by Frank himself if he was still capable. Iris' brother had committed suicide several years back and she knew some of the signs to look for. “Frank is a walking time-bomb” is how she put it to her best friend. “And does his wife, Stephanie, know?” her friend replied. “Stephanie? Are you kidding. Stephanie just wants to be Mrs. Senator. She can't see beyond her big tits.” Iris did not usually use that word, but she knew how Stephanie corralled Frank, and she had the burden of her own guilt for introducing Frank to Stephanie. She wished she had made a move on him herself, things would have worked out much better.

When the call actually came from Stephanie saying that she had begun labor, Frank rushed from the office like any expectant husband. But then Stephanie called back again an hour-and-a-half later to ask when Frank had left. And that's when Iris began to worry in earnest.

Mush/not mush. Mush/not mush. Mush/not mush
. He raked it over and over all the way home through the traffic, but could no longer even decide which was the choice for today, and he circled and circled the block around their house, trying as hard as he ever had in his life to decide what to think about,
mush or not mush
.

S
he had placed the turkey in the garage two days before Thanksgiving, just as she had for years without any untoward consequence. The crisp, late-November weather was perfect for storage. But something was different this year, something deep and basic had altered the very central fact of her life: her only child, Steven, had left for college, and her husband, Nicholas, had finally moved out and filed for divorce.

And yet, on Thursday, it would still be the three of them at table, Nicholas drinking too much, and Steven, more than likely, stoned on grass, while Anna served the same meal she had for 18 years, inwardly terrified of botching it all for the two most important men in her life. Nicholas's derision could be scalding, she had suffered it for all those years only to discover she was addicted to it. It defined her; in her mind it was all that kept her from disappearing into her own Sargasso Sea. She was still stunned by the divorce. She had assumed he was as crippled by indecisiveness as she, that he would have clung to at least one wonderful memory from the distant past, because no one clung to the past like Anna. She could not let go, she didn't want to let go. And then Nicholas sprung it on her: it was over.

What future could there be, with Steven drifting away, and Nicholas filled with contempt for her incompetence, her frightful dependence on him. Oh his terms were generous by almost any standards: she could keep the house, he would pay for all her insurance needs, and of course he would put Steven through college and pay for Steven's car. Beyond that, she was on her own.

He wanted a clean break, as clean as possible. From his point of view, they simply should have never married. He wasn't the marrying kind and he knew this, he knew it from the beginning. The pregnancy had been an accident, and while he loved his son and had worked at being a good father, there was nothing domestic or normal about Nicholas. He came from a large Eastern European immigrant family, and all his brothers and sisters were geniuses or near-geniuses, powerful fanatics of one sort or another. And now Nicholas just wanted to be left alone to find out if anything good might come of his own unruly fanaticism.