Short People (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  It would take a lot of catch-up, but we were ready, and when Suzy, our sympathetic friend, was in the mood, we could get her to tell us what we’d been missing. She’d already begun to teach us about prime time. When we’d mastered that, we would tackle daytime. Then the grown-up shows that came on after bedtime—even kids who owned TVs weren’t allowed to watch them. Eventually, we hoped, we’d be so on top of the current season that we could move on to TV history, sneaking peeks at reruns of what we’d missed, though Suzy said the best shows—the ones that were canceled after thirteen episodes—would be lost to us forever and that we’d probably never catch up, what with cable and all-new, never-before-seen episodes of one or two or sometimes a whole bunch of essential shows every single day.

  She quizzed us during the commercial breaks. This morning, just like every other, we had done miserably.

  “Who’s on Family Ties?”

  “Um, that guy from that movie. Uh . . .”

  “I know it, Michael A. Fox!”

  Suzy rolled her eyes and bopped me on the head with the Nerf thing. “That’s who he is in real life. Who is he on TV?” She banged it impatiently on the ground and clicked her tongue. “I told you before.”

  “I know it. I just have to remember.” My sister twisted at her eyebrow. “A. It’s an A name.”

  “Al-ex!” Suzy sing-songed. Then she bonked each of us on the head. “That’s so easy!”

  My sister crossed her arms and pouted. “If you let me think! I knew that—”

  “Chip ’n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers!” Suzy shrieked.

  We were transfixed.

  At the next break, Suzy snapped right back. “Who’s on Charles in Charge?”

  “We haven’t got done with Family Ties.”

  “No, cause you have to do Charles in Charge cause it’s more real to life and there’s girls more our age in it.”

  “I never heard of Charles in Charge.”

  “Uh-huh, cause I told you before, memember? It comes on two times: on Saturday on nine at three and on Sunday on five at six?”

  My sister clawed out of her sprawl on the couch and, coiling sullenly into a ball, dug her chin into the palms of her hands. “No, you didn’t.”

  “You just don’t memember.”

  “You never told us.”

  “Cause—”

  “Cheater.”

  Suzy stuck her bottom lip out in disbelief.

  Denali struggled to make herself clear. “You’re trying to make it so I think I’m stupid.”

  “I told you before—you just forgot.”

  “Nut-uh.”

  “Yeah-huh.”

  Throughout the repetitive argument that ensued, Suzy periodically glanced at the TV, and when Chip ’n’ Dale returned, she disengaged with an uncanny nonchalance—just a “humph” as she flopped toward the screen. My sister tried to follow her cue, but she was too angry. She kept turning back to say, “Nut-uh cause you never did.” This wasn’t helped by Suzy’s under-breath chides (so quiet she could deny them) of “Yeah-huh” each time my sister appeared to be over it. At the end of the show, as the credits flashed over a frozen frame of Chip flying a biplane, dragging Dale behind him by a frayed rope, they lunged right back in where they’d left off and kept at it until my sister broke. “I don’t care. I don’t care about stupid Charles in Charge—”

  Suzy bit back a smile and glanced at me from the corner of her twinkling eye. She crossed her legs Indian style and primly seesawed on her hands. “Ed Grimley’s on!” she said. The half hour tolled with the opening chime of another theme song.

  Maybe if Suzy hadn’t been so gleefully triumphant, Denali would have been content to sulk. Maybe she would’ve just glared at the TV and brooded about Suzy’s cruelty and selfishness. Instead she threw out a challenge. “I know stuff you don’t know too,” she said.

  Suzy spun around—“Shhh”—and then back in time for the first line of dialogue.

  “I know what mommies and daddies do when they go sleepy-time.”

  “I don’t have a daddy.” Suzy’s voice was chipper.

  “Zack knows too.”

  Suzy gazed at the TV, oblivious. She giggled at Ed’s silly dance for a moment, then scrunched up her pudgy face and shouted, “Rerun!” raising the remote and aiming around her head like a hot-shot sharpshooter to zap the channel.

  “I haven’t seen it,” I said.

  “Zack, remember what mommies and daddies do?”

  Seeing me pout, Suzy started to sing. “This is my house / This is my house / I get to watch / What I want.”

  “Zack, don’t you remember?”

  “Shhh—Mighty Mouse.”

  I wanted to disappear. With little inching motions that I hoped would go unnoticed, I sank lower and lower into the papasan’s cushion and watched Suzy watch the cartoon. She giggled at the artisan mice scurrying through the quaint town, fear and anxiety playing on their faces, hammers and anvils dropping behind them. They gazed at the sky and prayed for Mighty Mouse to rescue them.

  “You have to be not wearing any clothes to do Mommy and Daddy sleepy-time things. Remember now, Zack?”

  I tried to pull myself up, but the papasan’s basket tipped and the cushion slid out from under me. I toppled to the floor, then flopped onto my stomach and propped myself up to stare at the TV as if I’d done all this on purpose.

  “Tell her, Zack?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and kept my eyes fixed on the screen.

  “Tell her—tell her what we saw.”

  “They . . . yeah. Were doing stuff.” I picked at a Lite-Brite peg caught in the carpet.

  Suzy was unimpressed.

  Denali’s gaze hopped from the TV set to me to Suzy. “Okay, fine, I’ll show you.” She pulled her pink t-shirt over her head, kicked off her bobby socks and stretch pants, then yanked her panties down and flicked them onto the pile.

  I’d seen her naked numerous times, when we’d been shoved together, under duress, into the bathtub and then when we’d streaked across the backyard in attempted escape. Even so, I was shocked. Previously, there had always been some other obscure yet immediate danger commanding my attention. Now—with the fluorescent lights of Suzy’s playroom casting her nakedness into high relief—my sister’s body itself seemed dangerous. And this pointed toward a frightening thought: maybe the hugging and kissing and rubbing we’d seen through the crack in Mom and Dad’s bedroom door that morning was the dangerous thing we’d run from all those times before.

  “Zack, take off your clothes too.”

  I heard her, but also didn’t hear her. There was nothing inside me with which to answer; I was too busy gawking—as Suzy was— at my sister, naked and belligerent in the middle of the room. My eyes tingled. My vision blurred. I didn’t want to be naked like that. I didn’t want Suzy and my sister to examine my hairless body. But also, I sort of did, and I didn’t know why, which made me not want to more; it felt like fingers were picking through my skin and dancing up inside, probing, trying to yank I wasn’t sure what from me and then I would be without it forever.

  “I can’t do it all by myself,” said Denali.

  Suzy clobbered me with the Nerf thing. “It’s not fair if you don’t play.”

  The commercials were segueing back to the show with a bubbly Casio rhythm. My sister and Suzy were huffing and wheezing. Suzy emitted a slight popping sound from the back of her throat every time she exhaled. The fluorescent tubes crackled. The whole room arched toward me expectantly.

  Standing, I pulled down my shorts, then pulled them back up. I unvelcroed my shoes, yanked them off and pulled down my shorts again. I held my breath and I pulled down my underpants. My t-shirt hung to my thighs. I dawdled. Suzy yawned and my sister scowled. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was alone as I pulled my t-shirt up over my head.

  “You have to take your socks off too.”

  My sister and I stood across the room from each other. I wondered what she and Suzy were seeing as they stared and stare
d at my body. I studied Denali’s belly button. The more I let myself contemplate her, the less I worried about their contemplation of me. This helped me ignore the way my skin was telling me exactly where they were looking.

  My sister directed.

  “So, cause I have to lay down like regular sleepy-time. I’m gonna . . . like that, all sprawly, and you have to be on top of me . . . not like that . . . not like that, either. You’re too far to the side . . . No, Zack, you have to come this way.”

  “If you throw up,” Suzy said, noticing the sick look on my face, “you have to go to the bathroom first, okay, promise?”

  “No, not there! Zack! Do it right! Umph—I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”

  I rolled to the floor.

  As Suzy’s interest gravitated back toward the TV, Denali’s face flared purple with rage. I remembered the time she had whipped me with the willow branch and I searched the room for something to push this thought from my mind. Easy-Bake Oven. Snoopy Snow Cone. Dried clumps of Play-Doh the size of hand grenades. Girl toys were scattered everywhere.

  “Just do it right, Zack!”

  Suzy flipped the channels.

  “Suzy, no. Suzy, watch.” Denali splayed her legs, and following her orders, I pivoted back and forth on her hipbone. “See, Suzy? Like sleepy-time stuff.”

  “I seen that before.”

  “Zack, you have to make the noises.”

  “No.”

  “You have to! Make the noises, Zack. Like ‘un-n-ngh’ and ‘uhuh-uh-aaah’ and like that.”

  “I seen that on TV.”

  “Do the noises, Zack! Now!”

  I grunted feebly.

  Suzy was won over. “You’re doing it!” she shrieked.

  “No, Zack, go more faster.”

  “You’re doing it!”

  “First slower, then faster. And then more and more faster— don’t you remember? And I have to look over at the side like I’m sad and stuff.”

  “That’s it! You’re doing IT!” Suzy pounded her Nerf thing on the floor in glee.

  Denali glared at her suspiciously. “You never seen this before.”

  “I did on TV, but never for real.”

  My pelvic bone was sore. My back ached from Denali hitting me when I made mistakes. There was a pressure and pinching in my groin as I teetered over my sister. Most of all, my stomach hurt. It occurred to me that this was no fun, but also that none of us were watching TV. It was just there, making noise in the background, flashing purple and red, green and yellow. It was just there, like Suzy’s mother was there.

  For the first time in the many weeks since we’d been sneaking over to watch cartoons, Suzy’s mother was there in the playroom. Her hair was bent and knotted, weirdly cowlicky. She shielded her eyes and squinted as she stepped into the blaring light. She blinked at us, not really looking, then blinked at the TV, then blinked again at us. Her expression changed, tensed and puckered.

  Suzy, her mother, Denali and I were all petrified, our bodies leaning away from each other like we were at the top of a roller coaster. The moment would come soon, we didn’t know when— right when we decided maybe it wouldn’t—for us to descend at a rattling speed. Suzy’s mother lunged and snatched my sister and me by the wrists. My back scraped the length of the molded wood banister. My ankles bounced and burned against the five carpeted steps to the front door. Suzy’s mother kicked at the screen door and, as it snapped back, it pinched Denali’s forearm. She screamed, and Suzy’s mom kicked the door again and again, bouncing it off the aluminum siding until finally she’d wrangled us onto the lawn, tripping, spinning, ashamed of our nakedness, dragging us behind her as she sped across the street and plopped us like trash bags on our own front stoop.

  Juggling our clothes, Suzy chased after us. She was crying. While ringing our buzzer, her mom picked her up and straddled her on her hip, innocently, tenderly.

  Suzy’s wails drowned out her mother’s words, but the contextual clues were raw and her meaning was unmistakable. The way her eyes constricted into taloned crow’s-feet. The way Dad stared off with his nose in the air, as toward the frontier, like he was trying to make out the ferocity of the storm that was about to overtake him. The way he flinched and took it as she continued hammering him.

  Dad nodded gravely and raised his hand, a silent plea for mercy. A strained lipless smile passed across his face.

  Suzy calmed to sniffles, and her mother ran out of things to say. She readjusted her daughter on her hip and just stood there in contempt.

  “Thank you,” Dad said. “Thank you for telling me. I wouldn’t want not to know. We’ll . . . we’ll talk to them.”

  “I think it’s more than talking that they need.”

  “I . . . yes. Well. Thank you. We’ll . . . take care of it.”

  Still, Suzy’s mother refused to leave. I wished that I had some clothes on.

  “Really . . . we can handle it from here. Thanks for bringing them home safe though, um, sorry about all this.”

  “What,” Suzy’s mom said, “is wrong with you people?”

  Dad pulled his thin lips into a smile and nodded his head, imploring her to understand, please, be kind now, to please go. Shielding her bloodshot eyes with her free hand, she reluctantly staggered back across the street. Suzy, her mouth pressed to her mother’s bathrobe, peered back at us and flapped her fingers goodbye.

  Then Dad ushered us into the house and around the half wall to the living room.

  There was Mom, looking frightened and lost, in the rocking chair—creaking back and forth, a coil of tension. She noticed nothing.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” Dad drawled weakly.

  In our own ways, we all understood where she was. She’d been there before—was almost always there.

  Dad barked directions. “Go get the phone book, Kat. Kids, get some clothes on—now. I don’t want to see you do anything— nothing, understand?—until we come out of that room.” He pointed toward their bedroom. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  III. Mom and Dad Grow Up

  So here we were, Denali and I, in oversized t-shirts, crouching for the second time that day outside their door. Making funnels out of our hands, we held our ears to the wood to listen. We could hear pacing. Muffled and tense conversation. The foghorn bellow of Mom crying. And then that single intelligible sentence: “You raped me.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was something incredibly bad. “Is that what we did?” I asked Denali, but she punched me and hissed, “Shut up,” which I guessed meant yes and explained why I’d felt so queasy while doing it. Something smashed against the wall, and when Mom sobbed, “I want to hold my children,” I wanted to shout out, “Yes, hold me, Mommy. I’m scared too,” but that seemed like a breach of a different sort. Anyway, my sister poked me—“They’re coming”—and we scurried off to find some innocent thing to pretend we’d been doing while waiting for them.

  Dad, reeling from Mom’s accusation, and fumbling for something to moor him in place, picked up the pieces of the phone. Everything seemed unfamiliar to him, slightly shifted, the perspective skewed, diced and cubed, and he wasn’t sure when or how this had happened. Three syllables from someone known to exaggerate shouldn’t have the power to shake a man of dry, stoic principle. The phone, though, with its cracked plastic casing and exposed primary-colored wires, was tactile, simple. If he didn’t know how to fix it, at least he knew how he had broken it. He twisted the wires farther from the casing so he could study the workings inside. Guessing where the dangling mike might fit, he tried to wedge it back into place and roughly stuffed the wires around it. He snapped the batteries into their compartment. Meticulously straightening the antenna, he tried to knead out every kink, but the dents, like cracks in ice, extended with agitation and it broke off. He gave up, placed the phone into its cradle and lumbered out of the room.

  Where were the children? What further havoc were they wreaking now?

  Slowly, so slowly, he moved down the hallw
ay. This was a new depth of degradation. This was a place of self-loathing. He fell and fell. The details of what had come before this instant—his children’s actions, his wife’s, everyone’s—had been left up above on the rock face, replaced by a cold, burning sensation.

  Denali and I sat cross-legged, silent, thumbing through magazines— Omni, The Utne Reader. When Dad appeared at the edge of the room, we overreacted—too much surprise, too much teeth in our smiles, the conspicuous, false cheerfulness that only a guilty child can muster. We tilted our heads and gazed up at him in an adoring, approval-begging way we had learned from our dog. But he ignored our plays on his sympathies.

  He seemed twice as big as himself and he watched his feet as he walked. His body jerked like a car with a faulty transmission, staggering forward, in constant danger of freezing up. Finally, he sank to the fireplace hearth and sighed.

  “Hi, kiddos,” he said.

  A saggy, tired look of love crossed his face as he finally looked up.

  I’ve been trying to understand this from Dad’s point of view. I didn’t have one of my own at the time; I was too young and was still moving forward. And if I’ve been flip, if I’ve been unfair to him, it’s only because I can’t fully erase the version of this story Mom later taught me to believe. I’ll try to be better now and look at Dad from a less biased perspective.

  You could have called our family a social experiment. Dad was trying to lead us through to the next step in evolution. As much as this came from his philosophical beliefs, it was also a political act; for Dad the two were intertwined. He was convinced that all people were equal, that we were all on a journey that—if only there were quality education and truly equal rights and compassion and help for those who still couldn’t take care of themselves— would lead us to enlightenment, a universal respect for life, a better world. He aligned himself with the underclass but wanted them to be more like him, like the person he’d turned himself into. He couldn’t see this, of course. He thought of his politics as liberal and social, but he disapproved as the disenfranchised and culturally diverse masses swarmed onto the radio and TV and filled the air with a hundred conflicting backbeats. In truth, his politics were culturally conservative: he believed everyone should strive to live like the elite of yore. Thus, his bias against pop culture and his attempts to educate us in the great musty art of the past. Liberal in thought, conservative in deed.