Short People (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 8

  I didn’t even think of escaping from being grounded before that, but now I bet everybody knows I’m gone and I bet my dad’s already there to get me and they’re all mad and calling me a fag again. But I bet my dad’s mad at them for losing me and he’s making them look for me and saying how he’s gonna sue them and stuff. I bet Mr. Schultz is so scared he’s peeing his pants . . .

  Since I escaped, I got the idea to go across the lake and see those girls and talk to the Becky one but then I thought Jake and Chewy might be over there too, and they’d get me caught. And the other thing is they probably already told the girls how I went to the bathroom in the lake and everybody would laugh at me, so I didn’t do that. I know what I’m gonna do now though and then they’ll be scared of me and have to be my friends again. What I’m gonna do is climb to the top of the tower and then take my Scout knife and cut off the foot parts of the ladder. Then I’m gonna tie them back up except not as good in like slipknots or something so after a few times of people climbing the foot parts will get really weak and then start to fall off and stuff. And then whoever’s climbing on it like Mr. Schultz or Chewy or Jake, I hope Jake, will fall all the way down sixty feet to the bottom and cry and feel bad for being all mean to me when I’m supposed to be his best friend and then after that I’ll come out from where I’m hiding and make him say sorry and I won’t even get in trouble from Mr. Schultz cause my dad will be there and Mr. Schultz never yells at you in front of your dad.

  Who’ll be the fag then? Not me.

  Mandel, BG u32.3691235

  A court-ordered injunction will be issued after her mother, attempting against the social worker’s advice to fight for custody, presents enough self-incriminating evidence—the girl’s emaciated body alone will convince the judge—to ensure that she is barred on the spot from ever seeing her daughter again. She’ll be pulled like evidence from their last hug in the courtroom, but not before her mother invokes their private language one last time and whispers a final secret into her ear. The words will make the girl smile. She’ll be confused for a moment, believing her mother is playing another of the silly games in which the rules are made up as they go along; she’ll know Mommy’s sad, and they play silly-billy when Mommy is sad, so she’ll wave and her face will gleam. Then as her mother bows her head and turns away, the girl will understand what’s happening. She’ll let go, screaming as loud as she can, but the walls will absorb the noise and she’ll sound even smaller than her little body appears. The first foster home will be meant as a three-month stopgap while a permanent place for her is being located, but she’ll stay for less than a month before she is placed in the second, also a stopgap, but this one more accustomed to recurrent bed-wetting and the spitting of chewed food onto the high chair’s detachable tray. Here, too, she’ll find a way, scratching deep furrows into the antique furniture, to ensure that her stay is cut short. She’ll experience brief moments—say, in the kitchen, playing with a hand-me-down doll on the floor as the mother of the house prepares the family dinner—when she feels the urge to babble in a language she vaguely recalls from a time long ago when comforting herself was not such a hard thing to do. She will be afraid, if she gives in to this urge, of being told she must be a big girl, speak English; she must make herself understood if she’s going to get what she wants in this world. She will keep mum and instead she will rip the doll’s arms off, pull the matted stuffing out of its chest until it devolves into a mass of white fluff and fabric. Her behavior will reach a new depth with each new house, dipping far enough into the antisocial to appall and offend the whole family, to smash the limits of what is acceptable from a waif taken in out of pity and guilt. They’ll throw her back into the gap, which will never be stopped effectively—just a whole lot of caulking and no other side, just a conviction that somewhere there’s someone who loves her. But she’ll have no hope of recalling who that could be. The language will be forgotten.

  RED LOBSTER

  Our father is in town for the weekend and has decided to take us all out to eat. We’ve been wigged out all day, racing through our houses in search of our favorite blue jeans and our dressiest sweaters. We are putting on our happiest faces and wondering if he will look the same as we remember him. We can’t wait to see him. We’ve starved ourselves so we’ll be ready to pig out. We don’t want to disappoint him. We must be ready to have fun—to laugh our heads off, which won’t be hard; our father is a very funny man. He makes us all laugh all the time—all except Timmy, who takes Dad’s jokes way too personally. When Dad calls Timmy “Tubby,” it’s funny. I’m sorry, it is. Timmy’s face turns red and he gets defensive, and this is funny too. Sometimes we wet our pants laughing, which only makes it funnier. After a while, Timmy starts bawling. He stops being funny when he does this; he becomes obnoxious. He thinks we’re laughing at him, but we’re laughing with him, we are. We can’t understand why Timmy can’t just be happy like we are to see our father—God knows he doesn’t breeze through too often.

  Timmy, laugh a little. We’re laughing because we love you. If you can’t have fun, we should leave you at home.

  None of the rest of us gets upset at our father’s jokes. We think they’re hilarious. He’s always got the newest one about the president’s wife. He’s got leper jokes, quadriplegic jokes, Helen Keller jokes, everything. You name a topic, and he’s got a joke. It’s an art to him. We’re all jealous; our jokes don’t match up. Stevie once tried to get him to pull his finger so he could auto-respond with a box on the ear, but Dad already knew that one; he pulled Stevie’s finger and hit him at the same time, yelling, “Gotcha, too slow,” as Stevie fell to the floor with a hand to his head. We all laughed, and Stevie laughed too. He said, “That didn’t hurt.” Later our father taught him how to knock people in the nose by pointing at a make-believe stain on their shirts. Stevie thought this was great and used it on almost everyone he met for almost a whole year. He was still using it the next time our father stopped into town, and they shared a misty-eyed moment over this; Stevie thanked Dad for his parental guidance and our father blushed and beamed, bowed his head.

  Stevie gets Dad’s jokes, Timmy, and he’s three years younger than you, and your mom’s prettier. Don’t be such a baby.

  He picks us up one by one in his new van. When we’re all packed in, he stops and dares us to dare him to do a wheelie. We do dare him, but then he hedges like maybe he won’t, like it might be inappropriate behavior for a man his age. Timmy, who’s a whiz with cars—auto shop is the only class he’s ever gotten above a C in— thinks it’s impossible; he thinks our father’s toying with us and he tells him so. Dad grins at him. His foot to the floor on the gas, he pops the clutch and, to our glee, we lurch into the air. Our stomachs tingle and we come down giggling. Even Timmy’s in awe of the wheelie; he hadn’t counted on all the motor work our father had done expressly to pull off this trick.

  We beg him to do it again. We’d be happy to forget all about eating and just speed around town spinning out on the ice in the grocery store parking lots, burning rubber at stoplights, doing wheelie after wheelie after wheelie and listening to our father tell jokes all night.

  He says no, though. We’re going to Red Lobster.

  Putting Little Petey in his lap to turn the wheel, our father asks Lisa to crawl down between his legs and push the pedals with her tiny hands. He shouts commands, and we bounce, in their creaky control, toward the restaurant. Half a block down the street, Lisa gets confused between the clutch and the brake. She stops abruptly and knocks her head on the steering column, but she doesn’t complain and she doesn’t give up. She corrects her mistake quickly and has no problem the rest of the way. When she climbs out, we can see that a slight bump is growing under her hair, but she waves our attention away with a laugh. “No pain, no gain,” she says. We think that’s not bad for a six-year-old who has yet to break her first bone, and we laugh along with her. When Stevie teasingly taps the welt, she refuses to flinch.

  Before we go in, our father ha
s something to tell us. It’s nothing bad, he says, but he wants to get it out of the way before we’re so swept up in fun that there’s no room for serious stuff. He corrals us into a corner of the parking lot and waxes ambiguously about the new mystic faith he’s been trying to apply to his life. He says it’s helping him get himself together. He says he’s accepted that he’s a simple man who’s made mistakes and has many regrets, that he’s learned to forgive himself and keep moving onward, that he’s learned to live with the fact that life will never stop being confusing. He’s not very specific about what all this means, but it somehow relates to the guy with the funny Arab name he keeps mentioning. We don’t get what he’s saying—it sounds like a twelve-step program to us—but it doesn’t matter. We sense how important this stuff is to him and his words are like silk; we tangle ourselves up in them, writhing ecstatically. He finally says something we all understand: he says if he could make all his mistakes over again, he would. We know he means us. He means that he loves us. We can’t remember him ever trying to say it out loud before. He says he’s going to try to make sure he sees us more often from now on.

  Timmy, I’m going to punch you if you don’t watch out.

  We’re all wistful now. Tammy is pale; her body sways like she’s about to pass out or run and hide, something she does often when she’s very happy or very hungry. Stevie smiles smugly, convinced that our father was looking at him alone. Lisa rubs her welt and giggles with every wince; she’s already fond of the memory. Little Petey jumps into our father’s arms, where he’s bounced benevolently on the same hip we each felt safe against when we were younger.

  Before we can sink into deeper realizations about how soon he’ll be gone again, our father raises his fist in the air and yells “Charge!” sending us off like a handful of marbles to ricochet through the restaurant doors.

  It takes the staff a good fifteen minutes too long to pull enough tables together for us to be seated. We’re impatient. Our fun’s too important to be slowed down like this. Stevie, unable to get a freebie, rattles and almost breaks the gumball machine between the outside doors and the inside doors as the rest of us squirm, some on the floor and some on the bench by the hostess stand. It’s a good thing that our father is already lecturing the manager—calmly but sternly—about how to run his restaurant, because we could easily cause a real scene.

  Despite the manager’s many yes-sir-right-away-sirs, by the time we’re all seated and bibbed our father’s face is flushed with anger. He has a right to be upset; he made reservations and they should’ve been expecting us. Even though most of us will be ordering off the kiddie menu, the bill for this meal is going to be huge. They better go out of their way for us from here on out if they expect to get a tip.

  Our father silently mulls over the menu. We can’t tell if he’s really reading it. Afraid he is sinking, we no longer squirm. We sit up straight, flush against our hard-backed chairs. The worst thing that could happen would be for our father to begin to suspect that we’re disappointed. We know how much time he’s spent thinking about all the fun we’ll have tonight. He’s imagined every second and if anything goes wrong we’re sure he’ll dwell on it until he’s convinced the night’s a fiasco. Instead of trying to make us laugh, he’ll snap at us and at everyone else. We’ll all feel responsible. It’s already started to happen.

  We wish we could think of a joke that would bring him back, but we know that we can’t. If any of us tries to talk him out of holding a grudge, he’ll only clutch it tighter. There is nothing we can do for him. We are his tiny yes-men and we can’t disagree with his moods; they’re too delicate for us to carry anywhere he hasn’t already carefully placed them. The youngest among us instinctually knows that all we can do is sit up straight, avert our eyes and wait for him to pull himself out of it.

  “Okay, gang,” he says with a forced, fun-loving tone that strains to keep up with his words. “You can order anything you want, but you have to clean your plates. If you don’t, you’re gonna have to pay for your meal yourself. I don’t make enough money for us to be wasting it . . . I’d give you everything I have in the world but if you throw it away, it won’t come back. I’m not a money tree. I don’t want you to feel like there’s anything off-limits, though. I love you guys—and girls . . . so order anything you want.” He smiles wanly.

  We breathe a collective sigh of relief. If we show him we’re happy, he might snap out of it. Our eyes scamper over the menu as we do our best to find the dishes that taste good but are also expensive. Most of us settle for compromise: the little kids give in to their honest urges for hot dogs or spaghetti; we who are older go for tuna and salmon, shrimp cocktails all around; Stevie, just over the cusp of the kiddie menu, his new adult status still struggling to control the child inside him, settles on a chicken breast sandwich with a side of potato chips and a Shirley Temple—dry. Only Timmy takes Dad’s game at face value; grinning with pride, he asks for the most expensive item on the menu—the one that goes by the pound at “market price”—a fresh lobster. He gets to choose it himself from the tank.

  That’s the way to do it, Timmy. Pick the biggest one.

  Our father’s eyes twinkle mischievously as, at his bidding, we catch him up on our lives. He listens with an ear to the punny opening, sometimes interrupting the first sentence of our heartfelt explanations of the confusion we feel at sixteen (or six) to twist fart jokes or pull double entendres out of the few words we’ve managed to say. Except for Timmy, who protests by pretending that his life is perfect, none of us is too disappointed by our father’s lack of interest in our, we admit, trite struggles. He picks up a lot despite himself. Last year, when Tammy admitted to sticking her finger down her throat after every box of Corn Flakes she ate, he may have had a joke for every orifice and a lot of funny anecdotes about women and weight gain, but he also, over the course of that long weekend, went out of his way to force-feed her well-balanced meals and whisper in her ear how beautiful she was, all of which helped her try to kick the habit; she’s failing, but she’s added raisins to her diet and she openly credits him for this. We like him this way; when he laughs at us, he forces us to laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t take us long to tell Dad our sagas. They are pretty uneventful; nobody’s going through any major turmoil right now. Two months ago, he would have had his hands full with Stevie’s suspension from school for the throwing stars and hit list that were found in his locker and Little Petey’s escapade through his mom’s underwear drawer, but these things have already been cleared up; spring is coming soon and, even if we did have problems, we couldn’t be happier than we are this weekend.

  Our father launches into stories about his life, which is much more interesting to everyone. His job—somehow related to business or science or medicine or something; we’re not sure; each time he explains it, it seems to be different—has taken him all over East Africa. From what he tells us, the people there do very funny things. He says he once saw a car full of government bigwigs in Kenya drive a full mile in reverse before they bothered to turn around, and then they were still on the wrong side of the road! He teaches us the Swahili words for fart, asshole, whore and fuck you, which are all the Swahili words he knows, he says, but he’s going to learn more when he goes back next month.

  Enraptured, we almost forget to eat. He never runs out of stories, and without the bits of reminder that periodically fall to his plate, we’d be forced to snarf down cold fish when he decided it was time to go. Our baked potatoes would be waxy with recongealed butter. Instead, we chomp along with him, and by the time he’s run out of safari tales, all our plates are empty. Lisa, who ordered spaghetti, has even licked hers clean.

  Thinking our father might take us to a movie or have a surprise adventure planned for after dinner, we’re antsy to leave now. For some reason, he’s dawdling. He asks for a refill of coffee. With the tip of his knife, he absently stirs designs in the rosemary-sprinkled grease that’s left on his plate. The way he puts off asking for the check convinces
us that this is it, that he doesn’t want dinner to end; afraid of the separation, he wants to savor us for a while longer before bringing us home.

  He takes a short sip of coffee and—his eyes beginning to twinkle again—folds his hands under his chin. Gazing mischievously at Timmy, he says, “You gonna finish that?”

  “I did!” Timmy says, as if he knew this were coming.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I did. I did finish. Everything’s been ate!”

  “Because if you don’t clean your plate, you have to pay your own way. That’s the agreement we made.”

  “I cleaned my plate!”

  Pretending to be deep in thought, our father rubs his chin. “Well, okay. I can ask for two checks if you want.”

  Timmy tips his empty shell toward our father.

  “Dad, look, it’s all gone! What do you want me to eat?”

  Our father doesn’t answer. He straightens in his chair and pretends to look around for the waitress.

  Timmy has begun to shake. “Unless you want me to eat the shell!” He looks through glazed eyes at the rest of us. He thinks we are all against him now.

  “Look, I don’t want to argue with you, Timmy.”

  Our father can’t get the waitress’s attention, but he doesn’t really want to yet.

  “I can’t eat the shell.”

  Ignoring this, our father stands up. He cranes his head around as if he’s worried that the waitress has disappeared, though she’s still less than halfway across the room.

  Timmy, don’t be an idiot. Hide the shell under the table now, while he’s not looking—that’s why he’s not looking! Then, when he looks at you again, lick your lips and laugh and tell him in detail how great it was. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you, Timmy.

  Realizing our father’s stopped paying attention, Timmy gives up his whining. He stares at the shell and periodically blinks away tears. We watch his Adam’s apple jump in his throat as he steels himself against the outside world. In slow motion, he picks up the shell, squeezes his eyes shut tight and bites.