Unsightly Bulges Read online

  “Look at this. It says here that prairie dogs make great pets. They’re calm and good natured, they train well, they’re clean. But oh...” I leaned forward and read closer. “The practice of keeping them as pets was banned after the outbreak of monkeypox in 2003.”

  Monkeypox. What a silly word. It made me laugh a little. I looked at Frank. “Monkeypox,” I said again, giggling.

  He was deadly serious.

  “Frank, it’s fine,” I said, trying to smother the laugh. But nothing has ever struck me funnier than trying not to laugh. I shrugged and tried to pass off the laugh as me trying to lighten him up. “Come on. It was not a big deal. I wasn’t even there very long.”

  But it was no use. The laughter was bubbling up by now, and my mind started screaming, “Monkeypox, monkeypox, monkeypox!”

  I lost myself in a gale of giggles. “Come on,” I said again. “Just say monkeypox. Just...you have to actually say the word. Say it. M-o-n-k-e-y...Please. It’s the physical act of saying it that makes it so funny. Try it. Come on.”

  He stared. That made me laugh harder. How could he not see how hilarious this was?

  I couldn’t breathe. I clutched my stomach and wiped tears from my eyes. Oh, my gosh. I’d only ever heard of chicken pox. Was there actually a pox for every animal? What other kind of bizarre poxes did I not know about?

  “Monkeypox,” I said again, weakly.

  He waited until I ran out of steam, then he said again, “You were in a bar.”

  “I didn’t drink,” I said lamely. I glanced back at the computer but I didn’t look very closely, afraid that I was launch into a fresh fit of giggles.

  Frank and I had never discussed my recovery, mostly because we didn’t discuss things beyond him telling me what kind of bugs Stump had eaten while I was gone, and me telling him what was for dinner. But I’d talked about it in front of him plenty of times.

  “You can’t be going to bars,” he said.

  “I know, I know. But it was okay. We weren’t even really around the alcohol. I was fine, really.” I wasn’t fine. I’d been thinking about a drink all day, and how there were lots and lots of times I had been drunk and hadn’t done a single thing I regretted.

  We talked a lot in AA about what experts we all were at lying to ourselves, and about how, once the shame from one binge began to wear off and the urge to drink grew stronger, we justified our actions. We told ourselves what we’d done wasn’t really our fault. If that guy hadn’t done this, or that girl hadn’t said that, we never would have done what we’d done. It wasn’t us and it wasn’t the booze, it was everyone else around us – the circumstances. It wasn’t really that bad, what we’d done, what we’d said.

  One guy said he taped a sign above the doorknob inside his apartment. It said, “Yes, it really was that bad.” He looked at it when he had the urge to go out. He wanted to make sure he had no chance of lying to himself.

  “You can’t go into a bar,” Frank said again. “You get in there and bad things are going to happen to your petard.”

  I stopped in mid-nod. “Yeah – uh, my what?” I tried to remember a Spanish word petard.

  “Your petard. Remember, from Macbeth? When that guy was saying he’d been hoisted on his own petard?”

  “Uh...” I really wasn’t sure what to say to that. “You’re quoting Macbeth?”

  “Didn’t you have to read that in high school?”

  “I was drunk in high school.”

  “Every day?”

  I thought about it. “Pretty much, yeah. What’s a petard?”

  He shrugged. “I think it’s, like, an ass. The guy got hoisted on his petard, and our teacher said that basically, he got cocky and it knocked him on his ass.”

  I nodded, feeling disoriented. Frank, quoting Shakespeare. Had I crawled out of that dumpster behind KBST and into an alternate universe? “Do you remember anything else?”

  “Just this one: neither a borrower or a lender be. That one stuck in my head because I always wanted to know – neither a borrower or a lender be what? You know? But he didn’t say, so you always have to wonder.”

  I nodded like I got what a shame that was, but really I was still back on the fact that Frank knew Shakespeare. Frank knew who Shakespeare was – Frank, with his 70s hippie hairstyle and love of professional wrestling.

  I did a quick check of my brain to see if I remembered anything from high school.

  Nope. The only thing that came to mind was “Stop Drop and Roll,” and I was pretty sure that was from a public service message on Saturday morning cartoons.

  “Anyway,” Frank said. He took a breath and leaned in close, his eyes stern on mine. “No bars.”

  I nodded meekly. “You’re right. No bars.” I sighed and looked around at my alternate universe. I lived in a trailer in this one, too, which kind of sucked.

  “I’ll just get started on the broccoli,” I said.

  I woke in the middle of the night, gasping and flailing from the dream I’d just had. I’d had the same dream a lot when I was a kid, but not for a long time. It was always the same – I was in the middle of a grocery store, shopping with my mom, when I realized she was gone and I hadn’t seen anyone else for a while. I ran to the end of the aisle. No Mom. No people. I started to get scared then. I thought that maybe something had happened, like a bomb scare or there was a lion loose from the circus or something (the odds of this happening had seemed quite high when I was a kid) and everyone else had run for safety and left me there. I ran up and down the aisles of the grocery store, growing more and more frantic, and the store seemed huge and I felt like I was open, exposed, like whatever had gotten rid of the other people was watching me. I ran for the door, into the parking lot, and all that was there was bright sunshine, haphazardly parked cars, and stunning silence.

  I was alone in the world. Well, it was just me and whatever Thing now lorded over the world – some malevolent force that was watching me like a cat watched a mouse before it pounced.

  The dream had changed a little now that I was grown, but not much. In this dream, I didn’t think “lion loose from the zoo!” but I did feel that same crushing sense of aloneness and exposure.

  I sat up and scooched to the top of the bed, plumping the pillows and switching on the lamp. Stump opened one eye, then crawled toward me and licked my hand. I must have looked as awful as I felt, because Stump loved me, but she had no patience with anything that disturbed her sleep.

  As I told myself over and over that it was just a dream, feeling my pounding heart slowing by small increments, feeling the relief seep in, I realized that the dream must have been triggered by reading the messages on the Friends of Joshua bulletin boards. Loneliness – that was the theme running through all the stories. A person alone, even – or especially – in the middle of a group of people, having no place to belong.

  And then that feeling triggered a memory, not of a dream but of a real event that had happened during my childhood, and I realized what must have started those first nightmares when I was a kid.

  Mom had been dating this farmer named Cliff, and we had moved out to the white clapboard house he rented. It was the middle of absolutely nowhere, and I remember Mom and me driving winding back roads for what felt like hours any time we had to come to Lubbock for groceries or to visit G-Ma. Cliff was basically a decent guy. He hadn’t tried to mess with me, and that was rare for Mom’s boyfriends and husbands. But he didn’t really know how to deal with me, either. I had always thought he was as uncomfortable around me as I was around him. I think I was around seven, but it was hard to be sure. There were lots of husbands and boyfriends, and they kind of ran together after a while.

  Anyway, it was either Christmas or Thanksgiving, one of the cold weather holidays. I knew this because I was dressed up in a furry new coat, and I was carrying a bag of food on my lap as Mom drove too fast over the curving back roads into Lubbock. We were going to G-Ma’s motel for the holiday meal. Mom had promised to bring a corn casserole and swee
t potatoes, but she “forgot,” so we had fried potato wedges and a couple of cans of corn from the convenience store in Idalou. Mom was furious that no real stores or restaurants were open so she could buy decent food. She’d had a fight with Cliff that morning, and she knew G-Ma was going to complain about the food she’d brought, and she was just not in the mood for dealing with all the crap she had to put up with. I sat silently in the front seat, looking out at recently harvested cotton fields, anxious to get to G-Ma’s because Mom would lighten up a little bit on the ranting once we got there.

  “I don’t know why it’s so much to ask that I get a break every once in a while from everyone being on my case. A break, you know? A flipping break? Could everybody just quit criticizing everything I do for five flipping minutes?!”

  Then I was clutching the bag of corn and potatoes with one hand and bracing myself from being slammed against the dashboard with the other. She had slammed on the brakes and we were skidding along the shoulder.

  “You’re not even listening to me!” she screamed as the car slid to a stop. “You’re just tuning me out like everyone else!”

  I remember sitting there, my heart pounding in my throat, terrified that we’d almost wrecked, and terrified at the way she was glaring at me, wild-eyed and furious, waiting for me to say something.

  “I’m listening,” I said finally. “I’m sorry nobody will give you a flipping break.”

  Her mouth moved, her lips pursing over and over, but she didn’t say anything. Then, jabbing a finger toward my door, she said, “Get out.”

  I froze. “What?”

  “Get out! Get out of my goddamned car!”

  We were on a curve in the middle of a two-lane blacktop. I looked around. No houses, no other cars. The nearest tree was two hundred yards away.

  “Are we going – ”

  “I said get your ass out of my car!” She reached over and jerked the door handle, pushed the door open, then shoved me. I scrambled to keep my footing, stumbling in the gravel at the side of the road.

  The car door slammed, and she roared down the road.

  The silence was huge. I remember thinking I should go somewhere. I couldn’t just stand there. I was a kid and I couldn’t stand at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I clutched the plastic bag, feeling the warmth from the potato wedges as it slowly seeped away. My feet would not move. I knew I couldn’t stay there, but I was too scared to move.

  The grass beside the road was brown but tall from the summer, wilted over in the cold sunshine. After Mom’s scream quit ringing in my ears, I started to hear some bugs or something, I wasn’t sure what, chittering and chirping in the grass. I looked behind me, fearful of snakes or some kind of big bug, like those big green grasshoppers that flew. I kept thinking I heard something, and I would spin around, heart in my throat, terrified that some wild creature was about to grab me.

  After a while I realized I wasn’t sure which way we had come, I’d spun back and forth so much I had my directions confused. I wanted to leave that spot and find shelter somewhere. I didn’t know if I should head for back for home or forward to G-Ma’s, but even if I decided, I wasn’t sure which way to go. I knew there was an intersection at some point on this road, because I remembered someone had painted graffiti on the stop sign, but I didn’t remember if we’d passed it yet or not, or which way to turn if I found it.

  I had started to wonder if I would just have to live there, right where I was. The summer before, I had gone to Vacation Bible School at Idalou Baptist Church. We had made these placemats by weaving together colorful plastic straw, and ever since then I had this vague notion that I could make pretty much anything. I thought that, if I tried, I might be able to clear out some space along the ditch and weave enough of that tall dried grass together to make some walls. Maybe I could find some sticks for tent poles and weave really big mats out of dried grass to make walls. Then I could live there. The prospect actually seemed kind of nice – I’d have my own little space in the world, with nobody screaming. I could make it cozy. I even had some food to last me for a while. I opened the plastic bag. Those potatoes would last for a while, if I only ate a couple a day. I didn’t have a can opener for the corn, but maybe I could fashion one out of a very sharp stick or something.

  That’s what I was doing when Cliff drove up – gauging how long the potato wedges would last me and planning the layout of my roadside home. I heard his truck and slammed the bag closed guiltily.

  I guess he saw me when he came around the curve, and he slowed and pulled over. He leaned across the seat and opened the door.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking around.

  “She told me to get out of the car.” I still wasn’t sure what to do. I was weak with relief at seeing him, but I was also afraid of what Mom would do if I went with him. She would see it as me siding with him against her, or some other nonsense that would make everyone else the bad guy and her the victim. I was a kid but I was already familiar with her twisted thinking.

  “Where is she?”

  I shrugged. “She drove away.”

  “She drove away,” he said flatly.

  I nodded. “I have the corn and potatoes,” I said, holding up the plastic bag. My heart thudded with fresh guilt at the knowledge of how close I’d come to eating one of those potatoes. That would have been a complete disaster.

  “She drove away and left you here by yourself?” He looked up and down the road. “At the side of the road?”

  Something clicked inside me at the look of disbelief and disgust on his face. Until that moment, even though I was scared to death and mad at my mother, a part of me had figured that I was at fault. But here was another adult, a person in charge, who clearly thought what had happened was not right.

  I wanted to say, “I know, right?” Instead I just said, “Can I come with you?”

  “Yes, yes of course,” he said, motioning for me to get in. I climbed into his truck and he swung a wide U-turn in the road.

  The memory grew a little fuzzy after that. I remembered hiding out in my room, afraid of what was going to happen next. I was afraid my mom was never going to come home, but also afraid of the moment she did.

  She did come home, of course, and I heard her and Cliff in the living room yelling at each other for a while. Then he stormed out carrying an overnight bag, and I went to stay with G-Ma at the motel until Mom could figure out where she was going to live. The house belonged to Cliff’s boss, the owner of the land he farmed, and he certainly wasn’t going to let Mom live there. She threw all my stuff into trash bags, cussing and complaining the whole time. The way she glared at me made it clear she blamed me that she had to deal with finding a new place and a new boyfriend.

  G-Ma wasn’t thrilled to have me at the motel, and I knew it was a big inconvenience for her, but she didn’t yell at me and she made sure I had something to eat and got to school every day. I was pissed off when Mom came back a month before school let out for summer, all excited about the new place we were moving into and the new boyfriend who was so much better than Cliff, who had turned out to be “one big boring drag.”

  Stump licked my hand again and I snuggled down in the bed beside her. The dream wasn’t real, and the past was the past, I told myself. I wasn’t alone. I had Stump. I realized that my mother’s craziness had never been my fault. I was just a kid and she was completely clueless about how to handle her life. It wasn’t my fault. I was comforted to think that, but I still cried myself back to sleep.

  Five

  I woke Thursday morning with anxiety-fueled howler monkeys jumping around in my head.

  Tonight was the night. My date with Tony.

  I briefly considered praying, but the very idea of sitting down and listening for some still, small voice, terrified me. I didn’t even want to think about why. I wanted to not think.

  I picked up the phone and called Viv. I didn’t worry about waking her. Viv had stopped sleeping eight or ten years ago. When she picked up,
she didn’t sound sleepy.

  “What’s on the schedule for today?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” she said. “Check a few more off our list of hate groups?”

  “I was thinking maybe we could start by going back to the scene of the crime.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  I got dressed and paced through the house. Stump moved from the bed to the sofa so she could keep better tabs on me, but she should have known better. I had learned a long time ago not to leave her in the house by herself.

  I stopped and considered that for a moment. I had no idea of what the day held in store, and it would be easier if I didn’t have to lug Stump along with me.

  “How about if we go visit Frank?” I said brightly. I smiled and raised my eyebrows

  I, however, had not raised a fool. Her ears rose on the word “go” but fell again on “Frank.” “Go” and “Frank” were two words that didn’t go together. “Frank” was really more of a “stay” kind of guy.

  She’d been to Frank’s trailer before, of course. She came back unimpressed. She was okay with sitting beside Frank, in the recliner, or in front of my TV. And she was okay with being with me, wherever I happened to be. Those were the two places her own personal howler monkeys didn’t take over.

  “Let’s go see if Frank is home to come over and stay with you while Viv and I do our investigating.” I stepped toward the door.

  Stump yawned and thumped her tail, but didn’t move. I knew what she was thinking. It was my day off. On my day off, we slept late, moved slowly around the house in our (my) pajamas, and watched TV. We read. We took it easy. Days off were not days of needing Frank.