6.08 Let Your Balalaikas Ring Out.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The New Yorker, January 12, 2007, New Writer's Edition
An excerpt from Subsect, a novella by JW Mariano
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
She'd used her dead mother's ring when she got married. Every time.
The first time, when she'd gotten knocked up, her father had given it to her so she could marry the bum, 'cause that's what had to be done---the right thing. She hadn't been able to meet her dad's eye when he'd silently pressed it into her palm, but she'd taken it anyway. He was pretty thin and worn down with the chemo by then, and it terrified her. So she was glad to take the ring. Glad to get the guy she thought she loved. Glad to get out of the house and away into the world. Glad to have found all she needed at last.
By the time Number Three had dropped from a heart attack, she was still wearing it: The slim, plain, fourteen carat gold band with the small square cut diamond (a whole eighth of a carat).
There were plenty of times she should have pawned it. One of the times she did, it had been to pay the vet bill when her friend Naomi's parrot Jasper got sick. But Number Three got it back for her so they could get married. She'd stayed sober for fourteen months for him because of that. That's just how sentimental she was.
When Number Three croaked getting a beer out of the 'frig in the kitchen on September twelfth at seven thirty in the evening, she had been talking to her friend Peg about reflexology on the little back patio where they stood in down jackets while Peg smoked.
The following week, on Peg's advice, she'd carefully cut the thick callouses from the bottoms of each of her big toes with cuticle scissors before going to the funeral, to keep her head clear.
"You need to feel the pain direct, honey, or you'll never get over him," said Peg sagely, "Bottom of the toe's a direct link to the head."
"Oh, Peg," she whispered, "I don't think I can ever look forward to anything ever again."
When he heard that, he wondered what part of the body corresponded to the heart.
When she got home from the wake, she'd stayed high for three straight days (Number Three's buddy Frank had forfeited his stash as a gesture of condolence).
The whole fucking funeral had sent her right over the edge.
It was about that time he realized that people always see what they want and do what they want, no matter what.
When Number Three's brother drove in to stay for a week over the funeral, she'd made him give over the cot in the living room where he usually slept, and handed him the old army surplus sleeping bag that smelled like mothballs.
"You can pretend you're camping," she told him.
He'd never been camping so he didn't have much of a reference for that, although the Hardy brothers often camped while working on a case. So he tried picturing that in his head as he lay in the dark living room listening to them all talk around the table, planning the funeral.
"He liked red," she told them all mistily, "I should get red flowers. Lots of red flowers."
"Oh, honey, that's beautiful," said Peg, "and red's a very powerful color."
"Flowers cost a helluva lot," reminded Number Three's brother. "The collection they took up at the garage won't run to flowers."
"Hey, Lizzie, you have them play some nice music too. Maybe you could get a band. He would have liked that," added Peg as she cracked open another beer.
"Yeah, a band," agreed Frank.
"We got to be practical," insisted the brother.
"What am I gonna do without him?" he heard his mother croak.
Followed bythe crying.
The crying that was an odd sort of comfort to him for its consistency in his life.
He thought then how she'd often told him about his grandparents. About when they'd been alive and together. In some small stupid town she hated when she was a girl.
She'd be drunk when she talked about them and drunk made her talkative. Chatty. Babbling. She always was that way after she and Peg or Naomi (when she was between husbands herself) had been to Tankards on Saturday night.
She'd come in to wake him when she got home, whatever the hour, needing to talk and talk and talk.
"Oh, baby," she'd moaned as she lay next to him, her arms wrapped around him. He would smell the beer and smoke wafting from her sweater as she squeezed him, but didn't care much because he liked it when she held him.
"Oh, baby. Where-oh-where and why-oh-why?" she'd begin, often followed by a sigh. "He doted on her, my old man. Doted on her. The sun rose and set in her. That's how much he loved her, Jessie. He was never happier than when he was digging her a garden, or fixing some little knob or hook or hinge to make her life easier. And she would laugh and laugh. She had a big laugh, my mom, and he would smile... just beam..."
He learned the next part by heart, so many times he heard it through the years. So many times, and always in a drowsy surreal kind of state, his shivering mother cuddling him close as a child might her doll.
He'd learned quickly, though, that there were no words, none that he knew then at six, or later at nine, or ever really that could assuage her.
And no man that would care for her as her father had her mother. So, he also figured out early on, she just went about her life seeing what she wanted. Seeing what she wanted, always in men, until the truth was undeniably written in the weary circles under her eyes.
Novels could be read in those circles.
"Heart-broken when she died, Jess," the litany went on. "Heartbroken, sweetheart. Didn't fix knobs for a long, long time. Got sullen, got quiet. And I did what I could. I did what I could, baby. My brother became a ghost while I screamed and cried, but nothing changed him back. That's what heartbreak does, Jess. That's what it does... "
And soon she'd be asleep and he'd listen to her breathe, glad that she was close.
And later, when he was older, he got pissed about it all. And, yeah, he knew later in life that teenagers sometimes gotta be dicks to figure stuff out. But, boy, was he was pissed. Pissed that she needed some man to fix knobs, or dig gardens. Pissed that she couldn't just do it for herself. Or for him. Pissed that he'd become the ghost.
Pissed when she exorcized him and sent him away.
But on this dark night years before all that, as the plans for Number Three's funeral were debated at the table, as she begged for red flowers and he lay pretending he was with Frankand Joe on a case in the woods...
The Case of the Dead Stepfather...
...He wished, again, for a bed of his own. A room of his own with a bookshelf.
"Red flowers," she broke in at the brother again, "I tell you I want red flowers!"
"Well, you're gonna have to find the money for them yourself because I'm telling you there ain't any left after that fancy casket you picked out!"
"He was your brother!"
"Lay off her, man!" commanded Naomi.
"He didn't need no damn painting of the Last Supper to stare at for eternity plastered inside the lid. He hadn't been to a fucking church since he was nine years old!"
"He loved that painting," she whispered, her red eyes wide.
"Three hundred extra dollars that cost!"
"I don't care!" she cried, and fled to the bed in her room.
He tried to think what the Hardy Boys would have done on a night like this, though he knew better. The Hardy Boys would never be here.
And, two days later, as he sat in the front pew wearing the one collared shirt he owned, its cuffs creeping up beyond the little bones of his wrist, he inhaled deeply, catching the peculiar, unsweet odor of the abundant red carnations...
His mother's bare hand clutching onto his for dear life.