Lit Riffs (24 page)

After that the only sound is the musical-shakerish cha-cha-cha of Plates writing. His hands are fat, pink hands.

Pritchardville, where I live, was said to be birthplace to the hokeypokey, not a rock-and-roll town. That’s probably one reason that I’m not into music as much. Just sometimes The Black Crowes, to help me when I get stressed. “Hard to Handle”
has
to be about my boys. (It was just one more disappointment to learn that the Crowes didn’t even write that one.) Anyway, I thought people here in Pritchardville didn’t butt into other lives.

Plates called to set up a few more “talks.”

It wouldn’t be on any schedule, he said—maybe two next week, the week after, then more. We’d see. They’d operate around my calendar. I wondered who the hell “they” were. “More people like me,” Plates laughed—
glug, glug, glug
, like Coke going too quick from a bottle.

The first meeting was set for a Wednesday, 9 a.m., at the Human Services building in Palmetto Bluff.

“Sure, come in late Wednesday, I don’t mind,” Mrs. Crailt yawned toward the massive bookstacks that are going to come crashing through the third floor one day. “Assuming, that is, Nanette, that you have periodicals
E
through
H
re-tagged.”

The night before the meeting, the kids watched
Rugrats
. At the commercial, Dyl’s voice cracked as he asked what the FBI was. He sat chewing on the sleeve of his Jimi Hendrix footie pajamas.

“A bunch of squares, that’s the FBI,” I say.

Dylan whines, “I
told
you, Mo”—as insecure as unexpectedly victorious little brothers always are. When the kids had been younger, it was adorable the way they’d acted together, Mo cheering while Dylan walked with a magazine balanced on his head. Now Morrison’s shooting Dyl a look that says, “Shut up, asshole.”

Dylan tells me that the elementary school principal, along with some other men, had questions—about me. And the way Morrison’s staring into his hands, I know someone’d grilled him, too.

“So, what’d they ask you guys?” I try for casualness:
Hey, look, your mom doesn’t give a shit about the stupid principal’s office
. On the tube, the Rugrat with Charlie Brown-ish head and hair is laughing like a full-grown individual.

Mo’s eyes are doing this slow side-to-side—just like The Rave does when
he’s
nervous.

“Well,” he says, “this guy was going, ‘How does your mommy treat you,’ and I was like, ‘
Mommy?
We just say Mom or
Nanette
. I was like, Our place’s not the same as other kids’ places, but it’s awesome sometimes, too.’”

Little Dylan arches his back and interrupts, “Like, um, when you let us pick CDs to listen to at dinner, and how you don’t yell so much when I pee on the floor—and I know I gotta stop doing that, Mom—and he said, ‘She sounds nice,’ the guy. I didn’t tell him about you and Dad, or when you punished me for when Mo broke the glass, but you thought maybe I did it, too, even though I didn’t.”

“Oh,” I say. Either Mo or Dyl seems to have put the TV on mute. “Oh, good.”

In South Carolina, wherever a building rises three stories or more, worn-out shops or houses squat around it, jealous as groupies. That’s how it is with the Human Services building—a tall, yellow-trimmed ex-mansion with high cheek-bones.

At five to nine, the lights are bright in its eye-windows. It’s almost welcoming—nothing like what I’d imagined. Inside, there’s gleaming wood. Still, I’m a little pissed as soon I walk in; no one’s told me which room to visit.

A tubby in a cheap orange blouse gives me a dirty look as she marches down the carpeted stairs that I’m marching up. But then a fat, pink hand settles on my shoulder.

“Mrs. McQuaid.” Plates’s voice is deep in my ear. He stands at my back. “Come on, come on, we’ve been expecting you.” It’s nine on the dot.

“Oh, but-”

“Did you bring your boys?” Fat hand on my tailbone, Plates is walking me up the stairs.

“Did I—no, nobody told me—”

Plates sidles next to me at the start of the second-floor hallway, his breath minted by mouthwash that’ll burn away by noon the latest.

“Oh, well, I guess that’s fine, then. But Mrs. McQuaid”—he’s looking at his watch—“who takes care of the kids when you’re out?”

“Well, they’re in school.” Like that, my underarms go sweaty. Should kids be somewhere besides school?

“Of course they are.” Plates, moving his lips as if he had a mouth sore, looks anything but mannish. “Sorry—I have to ask these questions, you understand.”

“Yes.” I’m nodding a lot. “Of course.”

“This way, please.” Plates has teeth that lean into one another and jostle for a better view of the world outside his mouth. He takes me by the elbow down the stairs again. My own teeth are no great shakes, I know that.

If the Human Services building once was an old mansion, what is now the empty waiting room must’ve been the broom closet. The receptionist has blond hair only a laboratory could invent. She keeps having to finger up her bifocals as she wheeze-laughs through a personal call. Plates and I stand waiting in place until my back starts to ache. The
Far Side
taped to her monitor features a moose with a bull’s-eye for a birthmark.

When Receptionist hangs up, she and Plates start to gab—she calls him Hot Plates. The whole time, someone’s piping in Muzak of Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” a version with strings and keyboards like thick gloves that dull its punch—where’s the Fender Rhodes, voice box guitar, the fuzz-toned lick that lifted a thousand skirts? White-washing like this is what separates good from evil, ask anyone. In the meantime I’m standing here like a jackass, breathing in the dead air, trying to shut my ears to this dead music.

Finally Plates asks Blondie, “Stampp’s in, huh-3B?” Back on the second floor, Plates—now a three-year-old shy to wake his parents on Christmas morning—taps on the open door of a conference room. Inside, this old, fat guy’s sitting on the lip of a metal desk that could be from the Eisenhower administration.

“Mrs. McQuaid?” says the guy that I don’t know yet. ‘You’re quite tardy.”

All Plates does is frown and shake his head. I take a breath. “I’m here now, though, sir.” My biggest smile. “I was with Mr. Plates for a bit.” Again, Plates says nothing to back me up. Trying not to lose it, I turn to the window, where the top of an elm is shivering like a humiliated thing getting yelled at.

The fat guy on the desk sighs—“Twenty minutes is twenty minutes”—he jumps to his feet and offers me his hand. It gives like a bag of flour. “Do you know what I mean?

“Well, Mrs. McQuaid.” The guy rattles the phlegm in his throat. “John Stampp. FSACWCCA.”

And Plates stage-whispers, “Federal Sub-Agency of Child Welfare, Child Care, and Abuse.” You’d guess something’s tugging inside his cheek, the way half his face hollows up when he shrugs.

Meanwhile, this guy Stampp is saying, “This won’t be too
prickly
, I hope.” He hesitates before
prickly
, worming his eye-brows as if he’s being naughty.

It’s anger or nervousness that has me scratching my palms.

Mr. Stampp: Stick a pair of hairy ears on an egg, glue it on top of a potato, don’t worry about a neck, and there you have him—plump in the way friendly neighbors are, imagine a David Crosby shaved clean. I try to look for something human in the guy’s face, but what can you expect from the eyes of a man who has not an ounce of life in him?

“Sirs, can I just say something?”—sounding, I hope, not overconfident but not insecure, either. I have a flash of how they see me: middle-aged and lonely, a package of things you can’t hide no matter how you talk. “I’d like to say something in my defense.”

Stampp smiles and it almost seems a real smile; his cheeks gentle into ballish little circles. “Of course you may, Mrs. McQuaid.” But his eyes look no more humane than smudged marbles.

“Sirs, I love my kids.” I want this to sit for a while. The black-and-white George Bush tacked to the wall is the older one, the father. And suddenly, out the window, what looks like a flock of envelopes glides by with a floaty whoosh, hundreds of them swimming in the air, for some reason twirling, apart and together, papers gone bright with the sun. I want to make a big deal out of this—there’s a pack of glowy little ghosts boogying just outside—but it’s only Plates and Stampp with me in this wood-paneled room, and the sight would be gone before I could explain it.

“I just wanted to let you know that, sirs.” I stop myself from chewing my lip. “I mean, my children are happy.” What I’m saying is true, but the quake in my voice marks me as a liar.

“Ma’am, how often do the children see their father?” Smiling Stampp’s voice is as bouncy as his jowls.

“Every three weeks—two and a half weeks,” I say. “Every two, two and a half weeks.”

I want to cut my own throat immediately. Either I should have told the truth (“almost never”) or said once a week.

“Mr. Stampp is going to ask you some questions now,” Plates says.

“Shoot,” I say.

And he gives me a third degree, a blur of words, all my answers on the heels of new questions like cats chasing dogs: So, I see you are a musician, No, Mr. Stampp, I’m the associate librarian at the Pritchardville Library. It says here you’re an entertainer, Well, sir, I’m a librarian. May I ask how much an associate librarian job receives a year by way of salaried compensation, Do I have to get into that, sir? I can check the IRS records if I have to, It pays twenty-four-six a year, sir. And I have no doubt you’ve a good reason for not bringing your kids here this morning, Yes, sir, I thought, I didn’t know—And, Mrs. McQuaid, you are not yet divorced, Close to it, sir. I see your husband’s name is David McQuaid and is it true that he makes his living as the percussionist in a rock-and-roll outfit and as a hand model, Well, sir, my ex wasn’t a beauty, but he was all right, I say.

“Springfield,” Stampp mutters, bending over his desk to jot something.

“Steen,”
I say. “There’s Rick Spring
field
, who’s no Bruce Spring
steen
.”

Plates gives me this openmouthed stare as if I just dropped a china plate. By now my heart’s a grimy balled-up sock. “So, can you tell me why I’m here?” I ask.

“I guess you’re the comedienne, why don’t you tell us?” Stampp turns back to me, his eyes showing their first spark of life. “Tell us a joke about selling kids on-line.”

“No, no,
no
,” I say—screw this sick-to-my-stomach feeling—“I’ll tell you what is a joke. Getting a working mother out of the library to come here for nothing. Scaring kids at school for no reason.”

Stampp blinks as if I’d shook him from a long sleep.

Which gives me more backbone. “I can’t believe this! Mr. Plates here dawdles around with the secretary downstairs and makes me look tardy, plus, for Christ’s sakes it was a
joke
, the auction thing. And coming to my boys’ school? Is that allowed? Do you intimidate little boys to get your jollies? Do you have like a quota of honest people you have to mess with every month?”

“Mrs. McQuaid—”

“I’m a taxpayer!” I even stomp my foot, a little. This isn’t me: more often than not I’m by the card catalogs forcing a sweet grin when comb-over perverts breathe garlicly in my face. But now anger’s lifting a sob halfway up my throat. “I am a
taxpayer
!”

“Mrs. McQuaid—”

“Mr. Stampp, I have a really good girlfriend at the
Palmetto Standard
.” Which is a lie. But it seems to work; Stampp’s started to rub his forehead. I take a step toward the door. “You know I did nothing wrong, Mr. Stampp. I have rights. I also have my congresswoman’s phone number.”

“All right, Mrs. McQuaid.” He chuckles sadly—I take that as a good sign. “All right now.”

Plates gazes at me with this heavy-lidded, almost-smiling look that—I could swear—seems halfway dirty. It reminds me of some smirks that got me into trouble in the old days. But I’m out the door so fast, it’s like Plates’s own fat hands are pushing me from behind.

When I get home, Dylan’s standing to greet me, his teeny Oscar Mayer out, the floor a puddle behind him. I want to yell, but I’m afraid to, as if they’d bugged my house or something.

That Saturday, someone rang our bell. I answered in my robe, and there stood my ex, Dave the Rave.

“Hey, kitten,” he says, this close to pornographic with those jeans two sizes closer to my measure than his. His mindless blue eyes still look right inside me. Of course he’s doing his normal, droopy-necked lean-in, and his face—which has gotten a little puffy—moves too close to mine. Dave the Rave deals in the discomfort of women.

It’s noon, I haven’t brushed my teeth, so I aim my talk away from his nose. “What
now
, Rave?”

“That’s it?” His voice comes as a raspy warning about how far desire could throw you if you let it. He’s wearing a giant, silvery belt buckle. Had he always been so damn pale? He says, “That’s all you got for me, Nan, in my old bathrobe?” His belt buckle reads,
rhythm rave
.