Those Who Are Able We Invite You to Rise

On the way home Roman sat in the passenger side of the pickup with his head leaning against the window. He tapped his knuckles against the door paneling in time with the passing of lampposts and telephone poles. Olivia’s eyes were fixed ahead and there was a standoff as each waited on the other. Roman reached to turn on the radio. Olivia hit the brakes, coming to a sudden stop in the middle of the road.

“Jesus,” said Roman.

She took his chin in her hand and roughly turned his face to hers. “Jesus,” said Roman again.

“I will cut you off without a cent,” she said. “You think I won’t?” He looked at her without saying anything.

“You think I won’t?”

Her fingers made white bruises in his jaw. The breath from his nose rolled over her knuckles. He cast his eyes down.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

She released him and rested her hand on the gearshift. Her hand was shaking. “I just—” she said, “all I want is—”

She didn’t finish the sentence as her eyes drifted to a malfunctioning lamppost, the light waning to a glow of filament and then sputtering out and then flaring once more, and the shaking of her hand passed through her body in a shudder. Her eyelids fluttered.

“Mom, are you okay?” said Roman.

She inhaled sharply and her eyes refocused. “Mom … I see them too,” said Roman.

Olivia started the engine again and put her hand on Roman’s knee. “All I want in this world is what’s best for my baby.”

* * *

From the archives of Norman Godfrey:

From: morningstar314@yahoo.com

To: ngodfrey@hacres.net

Subject: none

To begin, a blunt admission, because there is hardly any point proceeding without it. Upon reflection, that you and Mother should have a—what dismay in giving irrevocable shape to the words—sexual affair is, on its face, unsurprising. Terribly banal, even. Is there a commoner platitude: these things happen. As though commonness in any way trivializes it. Birth is common, the hour before sunrise.

Betrayal. What could be commoner?

But an accounting of your heart is neither my place nor purpose, I simply feel I must be honest with you because if I was not it would mean irreparably to lose you. So please forgive my honesty in order that I may forgive you. I cannot lose you, Uncle.

Especially now, my purpose in writing not my own unhappy discovery but another of larger consequence.

To begin, Roman was arrested last night. He was caught on the mill property (in the company, one might surmise, of Peter Rumancek, but as to the purpose of their errand your guess is as good as mine), where he earned, in Roman’s inimitable fashion, the disfavor of a pair of policemen who brought him in for “malicious mischief.” Suffice to say the incident did not lighten Mother’s disposition. For my part, I was actually greatly relieved: I had cloistered myself in my room all evening and thought some ongoing row might further divert attention from me. But today relations reached a striking armistice. Roman’s manner was polite, even solicitous, in an unspoken (not to mention out-of-character) gesture of contrition, and Mother’s rancor (also uncharacteristically) showed no residual traces. By lunch they were conversing idly about Monaco or Provence for Christmas, the whole time my own head was lowered as I counted the seconds before I could excuse myself without attracting notice.

But just when it became possible to inconspicuously leave the table, I felt it, the first tickle. A single mote of dust: fate’s siege engine. And then I sneezed—hopelessly disrupting my most deliberately fashioned hair.

Roman gave his blessing, before seeing. And then he stared, alongside Mother.

And here we must back up to yesterday afternoon when, once alone, I made an illicit expedition to the mall, where my wonderfully wicked Jenny was only too delighted a coconspirator in a petulant revenge against Mother for, well, being Mother. And yes, if I was so anxious after consideration of the consequences I could have more easily removed and discarded all evidence of its doing, but one needs no advanced expertise in unraveling psychic mysteries to see that the dread of discovery did not overwhelm the desire—no, necessity—for it. And this something more than childish spite—when Jenny first brandished the mirror and I experienced the simple feminine thrill of wearing something made to make a woman feel like a woman …

I am ugly, Uncle. There is no other way to put it. But that does not mean I am without pride, without joy, without the same entitlement to feel deserving of love from those not obligated by blood to give it. I may be ugly, but I can hardly imagine a reason to act like it.

Mother, of course, has always had a different opinion, insisting I keep my dress and hair as plain as possible (this in a family where more is spent per annum between her and my brother on plumage than a low-income family’s total expenditure). But not as some arbitrary tyranny, no: out of concern that any attention I call to myself—even the audacity of wearing the costume of a normal person—would only expose me to unneeded ridicule and heartache. It is only my happiness she has in mind in extinguishing the notion of dressing the part of anything but a pitiful grotesque. Without question the kinder of cruelties.

So you might picture her face. Not half a day after retrieving her son from the sheriff’s office, this new sedition. The shock and blow to her sovereignty.

“What,” she said, once words returned, “have you done to yourself?”

Lacking a credible response, I vainly and foolishly bowed my head and covered my ears with my hands. She strode over and pried them off, taking one lobe between her fingers with furious delicacy.

“You perfectly idiotic creature,” she said. “You great, lumbering dolt.” She turned to Roman and demanded if he had had any hand in this.

He appeared conflicted, as though tempted to share and thereby ameliorate guilt but ultimately knowing his own standing too unsteady. He denied it, and of course I was partially disappointed he did not come to my rescue, but glad also: I had made a decision and it was my own.

“I—” said Mother, her attention back on me, “I am simply perplexed. You want to make a mockery of yourself? You would connive to demean yourself? At least I thought you had a [EXPLETIVE DELETED] brain. At least I thought you had that.”

In the past there have naturally been times when I have caused Mother’s frustration to flare, but never, quite unlike Roman, with deliberate forethought. And Mother, for whatever shortcomings she may possess, has made an effort of patience and consideration with me that is a great strain on her nerves. It must be said this is not easy on her.

She has never yelled at me.

I sobbed, helpless. She continued.

“Do you know what true deformity is, Shelley? The most intolerable and repellent of them all? Stupidity. Do you think for a moment I thought you were too young to understand what your father used to call you?”

The “abortion.” She used to tell him not to call me that.

“This travesty ends now,” she said. “Remove the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] things.”

I fumbled for my ears, but my fingers, not the nimblest in the best of circumstances, had no hope the way they were shaking. She watched, her impatience excoriating as my clumsy efforts became all the more pitiable. Mercifully her vexation overtook her and she seized my wrists to do it herself.

And that’s when it happened: the entire edifice of our home dissolved in one word:

“Stop.”

Stated, not vehement, but with what I believe could fairly be described as heartbreak, Roman told her to stop.

“Stay out of this,” said Mother dismissively.

But Roman repeated himself. Looking at neither her nor me, his face lacking in affect like some ventriloquist’s tool.

“Let go of her,” he said.

“Excuse me,” said Mother, less dismissively, “was that a command?”

He folded his hands on the table and now he met her face. “Leave her alone,” he said.

Mother laughed like a nail. “Amazing,” she said to some imagined and equally unbelieving audience and reached once more with that terrible delicacy for my ear. “Hold still.”

Roman put his hands flat on the table, pushed himself back, and came around to us. He clamped his fingers around Mother’s forearm. My head was a helium balloon that had slipped its knot and my breath came in shallow gasps.

“Let. Go,” said Mother.

“Leave her alone,” said Roman.

She struck him with the back of her free hand. He closed his other fist around that arm. She tried to wrench free, but he held. My head fell and I began rhythmically to lift it an inch, two, and let it drop on the table. Dishware rattled.

“So help me,” said Mother, “you will end up in the gutter, you [EXPLETIVE DELETED] little rodent.”

A spherule of blood beaded at the corner of his mouth from where he had been struck.

“I’ve seen the will,” said Roman.

Mother was quiet. My percussions sent a glass over the end of the table and it shattered.

Roman released her but she did not move. I held my head suspended, confused by the significance of this admission.

“Last year,” said Roman, “when you didn’t like the settlement Annette got you for the Black Derby incident.” (Referring, in case you have forgotten—or, for that matter, were not in her company—to legal complications arising from Mother, dissatisfied with the service at a cocktail bar, entering into a dispute with the bartender requiring stitches for the latter.) “Do you remember what you called her? Not everyone likes being talked to that way. She called me into her office and showed me the will just to spite you, you psychopathic [EXPLETIVE DELETED]. I know.”

Mother sank into his empty chair and he said the words that unglued what mutual understanding had ever existed among us.

“It’s all mine,” he said. “I’m sole beneficiary. And on my eighteenth birthday I gain control of the entire trust. Everything is mine. It’s my house and my money and it always was.”

He picked up a napkin—his napkin—and dabbed the blood from his lip. She looked past him. A fragment, a small diamond rainbow, flickered on the table—his table—refracted from the chandelier. This is what held her attention.

He backed away from her and lit a cigarette. Cigarette smoking was never tolerated in the dining room. Mother looked at that diamond and Roman smoked his cigarette. I wanted instinctively to reach for her, but in that moment it was understood by each that Roman alone had freedom of movement. He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out. He was as afraid as the rest of us of where we went from here.

Outside, a cloud must have passed over the sun and the diamond vanished. Mother’s head snapped as though she’d been nodding off. We remained there in a silence that had begun some time before the beginning of the world, and though Mother adjourned wordlessly to her (or, Roman’s) room where she remains, and I am in my (Roman’s) attic, and Roman off to devices of his own in his fiefdom, in that binding silence we remain, just as I remain

Yours,

S.G.

* * *

Roman stood in the doorway. She sat on the top mattress hunched and facing the window. Her back was as broad as a child with fully outstretched arms, and a glow under her shirt evanesced with her breathing. She did not turn to him. The mattress curled around her in a smile.

“That’s not what I wanted,” said Roman. “I didn’t want to do that.” She didn’t respond.

“I would never do anything that would hurt us,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?” She turned now and looked at him. It was the first time she had called him a liar. “I’ll go,” he said.

She grunted no. He went to the bed. She lay back and he lay behind her, working his arm under her head. She knew his arm would be crushed numb in moments but he could live with it. He saw she had removed the earrings. He shut off the bedside lamp and the star and moon stickers glowed.

Later, when her breathing had become a regular saw, Roman extricated his arm and rose. He went to the door, shaking the needles from his arm. The easel caught his eye. She’d been working on this one awhile, it seemed nearly finished. A single vertical white bar against a dark muddle of night, and directly beneath it some subterranean chamber within which was a ring with a sort of node at the top.

A snake—a snake eating its own tail.

Roman took his hand from the door and went back to the bed and climbed on with his arms outstretched and laying his cheek flat against the echo chamber of her heart.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 639