Final Vinyl Days (5 page)

“Well, one's a phony buck,” Ronald said, his arms opening wide in some gesture of confidence or ownership. “Get it?” Our mother had a blank look on her face, and I was trying to think of what I'd tell her the joke meant later
that night when surely she would ask me. Ronald was drinking martinis to celebrate his latest whiplash case. Tomorrow morning he would sue a dentist for a faulty root canal, go to the chiropractor to whom he sent a steady stream of clients, and in the afternoon he would sue a family of five for leaving a roller skate on the front walk causing the fall of the realtor who had stepped onto their property to take a photo for a comparable file.

“He was trespassing,” Doug said.

“All legal,” Ronald said. He and Twyla looked like those little wind-up toys; they reminded me of those sets of teeth you can wind up and then let go, overbites chattering across table and floor.

“Trespassing.” My mother was sitting there with the
TV Guide
. “Your father did a lot of trespassing.”

“Forgive us our trespasses,” Ronald said and strutted his way over to the martini pitcher. “That's from the Bible. I know a lot of Bible. You have to be well rounded to get into law school.”

“It's from the Lord's Prayer,” I said and then was sorry, because now either my mother or Twyla would remember to recount my singing in the high school talent show. There was so much of my life that I hadn't wanted to tell Doug about. I had never told him about seeing my mother in the laundry room that time, and I had never told him
that my father made me wear a George Wallace banner and hand out bumper stickers outside of the Thriftway Grocery, which was where our precinct went to vote, and I had never told him that I sang “The Lord's Prayer” wearing white sandals and called it talent.

“That's right. And where is the Lord but in the Bible?” he asked. “Just where do you think the Lord is?”

“Not in this kitchen,” I said.

“I love you, Tina. Now swear to God,” my mother struggled up a little from her pillow and squeezed my wrist. I didn't trust her as far as she could spit, which at that moment was no further than her bottom lip. I didn't trust Twyla, who paused in her sobbing to stare at a young doctor passing in the hallway. For what rose up in my mind now was the time I'd seen my mother standing there in front of her avocado-colored Maytag washing machine; I guess that was the only other moment I ever saw her completely stripped of her appearance, and it had left me feeling a little queasy and terribly sad, just like now.

I squeezed her hand, nodded that, yes, I would stay with Doug for all of eternity. She slipped back into sleep, her room a symphony of unpleasant sounds as the team of doctors, followed by Twyla, who was checking out all the left hands for rings, left the room. I waited until the
door whined shut, and then I turned on my unconscious mother. “How dare you,” I hissed. “You know something about Doug. You must. You have never pointed me in the right direction my whole life.” Her eyes were closed, her mouth hung slack. If she hadn't been about dead, I might've slapped her, shaken her; before I could even launch into the humiliation of stinky scorched hair and performing a nontalent that set off a church-and-state debate, it was all over. As if at a green light (was there some such death beeper attached to her?) the people poured back into the room; Twyla collapsed in the corner, black lacy legs sprawled and showing way too much thigh. Somehow all the activity took on a rhythm in my head, the humming and bumping and beating. I was hearing the spin cycle of another time.

I spent the next morning taking care of Mama's arrangements, even though I was still furious at her for making me swear to God such a terrible swear. I felt myself studying every aspect of Doug, questioning every word that came out of his mouth. I tried to make him go on to work and leave me by myself, but he took it as an emotional outburst without real bearing and spent his morning opening the door to neighbors and friends of my mother's, who filled her living room with cigarette smoke
and ceaseless talk of disease: tumors and masses and malignancies. They seemed to enjoy it so much I was afraid they'd never leave.

“That Doug's a doll,” Mrs. Gladys White kept saying and nodding knowingly. She was one of Aunt Rochelle's crocheters, the one who had threatened to quit when Rochelle pointed out that her beading on the panties looked a little risqué.

“What did my mother tell you?” I asked Gladys White after about the fourth time. I pushed her right up against the pantry shelves, her head flush with a box of Quaker Oats Grits while I interrogated. I told her that I had heard all about that nasty, nasty, bathing suit she had designed. “You dirty old woman,” I said, “you know something.” I pulled on her little scarf by Vera just as my mother had pulled on my father's tie. Doug rescued her. He said something about stress, pressure, grief, and the whole time I studied his eyes for lies and deceptions; I sniffed all of his clothes in the hamper to see if I could smell quick afternoon sex. My mother had believed in signs and warnings, gifts from the great beyond. She believed that my father's death was fate, a grand scheme to bring justice to her life.

I was no sooner all calmed down when Twyla came over, dragging a man she had just met at the convenience store down the block from her house. She always has
picked up people the way you might a loaf of bread. I studied him as he stood there in his Exxon uniform and imagined how he would affect Twyla's malleable personality. She would start talking garage talk: a cup of coffee would be a jump-start, a full tank; at the end of the day she'd be out of gas. “Why have you brought a date?” I finally asked her while Ted was in the bathroom. Her stare was so blank that I realized I was seeing what I'd never seen before—a moment when no one's light was being sent through her. I saw the void. Maybe my mother
had
tried to influence her. Maybe the suggestions just blew around in there and came out all twisted. Maybe there had always been people like Pete Ray or Ronald, P.I., or the Exxon man to get to her first.

It was a Wednesday morning when I saw my mother there in front of the washing machine. It was a day just like what's become in my memory the typical day of my adolescence. The house smelled of bacon and Pledge, the heat from within clouded the windows, and my mother stood before the window with the fire prevention safety tips decal on it and sorted clothes. Lights, darks, solids, lights dark solids. There was a pile of underwear at her feet, covering
her
white patent-leather barefoot sandals. Her painted lips turned down as she worked. I came upon
the scene, unknown to her. She was holding a pair of size forty, ratty-around-the-edges boxers. A flash of red clung to the leg of the shorts, a red as red as my mother's lipstick. She pulled the thing off and then stood there staring into her open palm. Her eyes went blank and flat, as blank as Twyla's do, as fearful as a child's, and then her head started shaking. There was recognition, rapid nods.

It was not until my father was dead that she told this story, told how she had found a Lee press-on nail clinging to his underwear. It all fell into place for her then, she said, the knee-high hose she had found in the floorboard of his truck, the skimpy black tank top she found in the duffel bag that he took to and from the firehouse on his duty nights. She told us he'd explained these as little jokes planted by the boys. She told us she'd said, well, she sure didn't think of knee-high hose as some kind of sex item. Oh that,
that
was related to real business, that little rolled-up piece of dirty nylon belonged to an elderly woman who had broken her hip and called the department for a lift to the medical center.

“Can you believe it, girls?” my mother had asked us many times. “Can you believe what a son of a bitch fathered you?” This was right after we'd watched her being interviewed on the six o'clock news and just before she and Aunt Rochelle cranked up the hedge trimmer. “I don't
see how the nail stayed there,” Twyla said. “I mean I've used Lee nails, and I sure would feel it if one was to rip off that way, you know?”

But there was something wrong with that picture of my mother in front of the washing machine. Was it that it was a rerun? Had I seen it before? A long time back, when her hair was cut in a soft chin length and her makeup was sparse and clean-looking, I saw her in that same spot. She was wearing yellow shorts and a white midriff top. The fire rules showed behind her on the window while a big man with hair that ran down his neck leaned into her. This man stood still, moaning as my mother catered to him, her hands pressing the front of his trousers. As a child I thought he was deformed and in great agony. I thought
my mother helps the needy
.

The night after my father died, I wanted to ask who strayed first, but by then Twyla was crying on the phone to her latest boyfriend, who was being kept a secret (except for the clue that he was a big Lou Reed fan and his daddy worked on feet), and my mother and Aunt Rochelle were hanging clothes all over the house so that they could lop off a particular part of each item. There goes an arm. There goes a crotch. It was a little disturbing.

My mother had at hand all the reasons as to why my father deserved to go out with a freak stroke of nature, a sudden storm spurring tornadoes that touched down without any warning. He had said he was going to play a little golf with the boys since the forecast was for such a clear brisk day. My mother always said she had spent years trying to catch him in the act, and
in three seconds a big gust of wind did it
for her. It was appropriate, the perfect choice.

She never forgot to mention the time he drove us way out into the country to show us the
damnedest
thing he'd ever seen: a huge oak tree in the middle of a tobacco field, split through the middle with a precise blackened stroke. He explained that lightning had done it. I looked at the sight, the charred limbs against the then bright blue sky, and was struck by the contrast. I was proud that my father had brought us, that he was excited just the way he was when he used to take us to the Dairy Bar for a sundae. “Wow, Dad,” I said, but that was before Twyla looked up from her
Archie
comic and screamed, before I saw the cows, their stiff frozen legs sticking out from them, in the shade beneath the tree. There were flies, too, in a thick black swarm.

“You see,” my father spoke with authority. “The lightning went down into the ground and came out through
the roots.” It was the same voice he used when he let kindergartners slide down the firepole. “Now the bull, that smart old bull.” He pointed off to the far edge of the pasture where the old brown bull, head lowered and horns shaking from side to side as he grazed, “That old bull knew that he should not come in from the rain.”

“How smart.” My mother said and fanned herself with the comic she'd snatched out of Twyla's hand. “Isn't the bull just so so smart.” She reapplied her lipstick, and then turned back to him. “I suppose he'll just hop off to a new pasture and start over, huh?”

I was the only one looking back as we drove away, the bull seemingly unaffected by the fact that he was grazing in a death field.

Aunt Rochelle came over as soon as she heard about my father. The first thing she did was compliment the floral Qiana jumpsuit my mother had purchased for me at Bargain Wear USA. The second thing she did was tell how she had been widowed twice (like none of us knew by heart the intimate details of her life) and so knew how to take care of things like wills and a dead man's clothes. My mother said she didn't want his old underwear and socks left there in the drawer or his old shirts and mess left hanging in the closet, especially the tight polyester pants
he bought for himself right after he saw
Saturday Night Fever
.

“If I were you, I'd burn this crap for fear something is crawling around in something.” Rochelle stood there with her long brown cigarette up near her cheek. “I mean considering how and
where
he died.”

The day my father died, the weatherman was on the news all afternoon, more or less apologizing for his error. His name was Joe Johnson and he was all right, curly blond hair and a nose a little off to one side, like a hockey player. Twyla decided she would write in and ask for his autograph. My mother said she certainly intended to write him a card and might even send a leftover floral arrangement.

Channel 11 ran the footage of my mother as she stood in the rubble being interviewed over and over. Just ten feet away from where she'd stood with the microphone in her face was my father's naked, sheet-draped body. She had come to identify him, with an abrupt
yep
at “the scene,” as they kept calling it. My father was stretched out on the ground between a toaster oven and a fluffy piece of pink insulation. They told her there was no reason to announce that my father was naked, but she disagreed.
She told them that the truth should be fully exposed.

As the three of us watched, she said she sure wished she had worn something different to go on television. But who would've thought that morning when she put on her yellow knit gardening shorts and matching shell, that within four hours—just barely after lunch—the sky would turn black and the wind would start whipping like the end of time. Who would've thought that when that infamous tornado sound—like a locomotive—hit my father's ears, he'd be bathing in the afterglow of … whatever.

My mother said she felt a rush of gooseflesh watching “the scene” on TV. She said it wasn't what had happened to him; nothing he did surprised her. No, it was the sound of her own voice, flat and slow, hitting her own ear. “Well,” she said to the TV camera and gestured over to where his body was. “I sure didn't know he was here, if that's what you're asking.” She pointed to the girlfriend who was all asob and riffling through her belongings. “Ask
her
what my husband was doing here naked.” The girlfriend froze, her hands full of silverware, toilet paper stringing from her spikey high heels. She'd seemed more upset about her parakeet, having burst into violent sobs when she found its little body had been flung from the face of the earth, feathers all over the misshapen cage
door. “It's not funny,” she'd said and shook that cage at my mother.