Lydia (16 page)

Lydia tore open the packaging on an alcohol-prep gauze strip and threw both the packaging and the alcohol strip into the garbage. She unscrewed the top of her plastic cup, entered the one and only stall, turned, and dropped her jeans and panties. Brandy Esptein had explained in graphic detail the secrets of the clean catch, as if Lydia had never been to a doctor in her life, never peed in a cup.

“Wipe the area thoroughly with the sterile pad, then urinate for two seconds, stop, hold the cup in its position, and resume your urination.”

Lydia said, “Yeah, right.”

Lydia had no intention of giving a clean catch. In her experience, a clean catch only applied to the urine in the cup. There was nothing clean about the urine on her fingers, her thighs, the toilet lid. What kind of person lets go for two seconds, then stops? A desperately ill person, maybe, searching for solace in a medical test. Not a convicted felon pissing for the amusement of her rabid parole officer.

So Lydia skipped the start, stop, start again. She splattered anyway, and the cup came dangerously close to overflowing. She’d been late leaving the house after lunch, and the fear Brandy would write her up for lack of punctuality made her hurry when she should have used the can. She exited the stall, balancing the cup carefully, and crossed to the sink to wash her hands. Before screwing the lid on the plastic cup full of wheat-colored liquid, she spit in it.

She said, “Analyze that.”

Back in Brandy’s office, Lydia found Brandy typing away on a computer the size of a small car. Lydia resisted the terrible temptation to spill on the computer or Brandy’s lap or both. She needed cooperation today, and a spillage wasn’t the way to get it.

Lydia set the urine cup on the edge of Brandy’s desk. “Did you ever stop to think this is a sick way to make a living?” Lydia said. “The essence of your existence is other people’s wee-wee.”

Brandy glanced up from her computer. She was wearing a home-knit sweater—no doubt a gift from a relative with too much time on her hands—and chewing gum. “Did you happen to look around during your visit to the powder room?”

“Your facilities need a good cleaning, if that’s what you mean.”

“Did you take note of the video camera? Should you bring in substitute urine or add foreign liquid to the collection cup, I will know.”

“You not only get your jollies playing with my number one, you also watch me do it?”

Brandy stopped typing and focused her attention on Lydia. “Let me assure you, nothing in our relationship gives me jollies.” Brandy swiveled in her chair, opened a two-drawer file cabinet, and pulled out, presumably, Lydia’s paperwork.

“How did we get from GroVont to Jackson today?” Brandy asked.

“My son drove me in the company van. I don’t know how you got here.”

Brandy squinted at the paper. “You only have the one son?”

“Sam’s sitting outside, or he’s probably gone over to that new coffee place on the square. Sam loves yuppie coffeehouses. Makes him feel like he’s somewhere else.”

Brandy clicked her pen open and wrote in the file. “There’s a rumor going around that you’ve been seen driving.”

“You’re new here,
Brandy
,
so maybe you don’t know. Rumors in this valley are all lies. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve had said about me to my face. One shudders to think of the wild accusations locals make behind my back.”

Brandy touched the tip of her pen to her ear, which was encircled by a whorl of new penny-colored hair, sprayed stiff against the Wyoming wind. To Lydia’s astute eye, Brandy seemed to be choosing her battles.

She chose to pass on this one. “Just keep in mind, you have no license.”

“How could I forget when you remind me twice a week?”

Brandy pretended to ignore Lydia while she entered information into Lydia’s paperwork. It must have been quite a bit of information, because the scratchy-pen silence stretched out past Lydia’s comfort zone. Even though she knew Brandy was faking distraction, Lydia could not tolerate being ignored on any terms.

“Aren’t you going to ask how many bombs I purchased recently?” Lydia asked.

Brandy didn’t look up. “How many bombs have you purchased?”

“None,” Lydia said. “I did, however, file a discarded toothbrush into a serviceable shiv. I learned a lot about the making of shivs, in the big house. You can manufacture one out of practically anything. I had a cellmate who turned a tampon tube into such a weapon she could have skewered an entire Brownie troop, like shish-kebabbed onions.”

Lydia leaned forward, trying to catch Brandy’s eye but failing. “She would have too. Shish-kebabbed a Brownie troop. If they were white. The woman hated with an intensity you don’t normally find in the general population. The two of you would have made the greatest of friends, had you but known one another.”

Brandy sniffed. Lydia tugged a Kleenex from the box on the desk between the computer and her clean catch. She passed the Kleenex across to Brandy, who blew into it, making a sound not unlike a kazoo with a mute on the tip hole, and said, “How much progress have we made with the oral history?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

Brandy finally looked up at Lydia across the Kleenex wad. “Don’t even dream you can wriggle your way out of this.”

“Of course not.”

“Just so you understand reality.”

Lydia took that a couple different ways before she went on. “I know your heart is hardened where I am concerned. We got off to a bad start.”

“My heart hasn’t softened since then,” Brandy said.

Lydia oozed a low sigh. “I am resigned to completing the oral history, but the challenge is doing it by Oly Pedersen Day.” She stared at the crease in Brandy’s forehead. Lydia had been lying for over fifty years, and she was good at it. She knew intense eye contact is met with as much suspicion as none at all. You have to fake eye contact in order to gain trust. Focus should be on the eyebrows, only Brandy’s eyebrows had been plucked to oblivion, so instead Lydia made contact with the vertical fold running through Brandy’s third eye.

“Oly hasn’t left out a detail since birth. We’re stuck in the Great War, and at this rate, by August, when Oly celebrates his happy hundredth, he and I shall be mired in the Depression.”

Brandy’s eyelids narrowed and flattened—the sign of doubt. “I’m not going to tell him to skip decades, not for your convenience.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it.” Lydia smiled, which only increased the doubt. “Oly’s life has been a fascinating journey. We must record every pothole in the road, for posterity.” Lydia saw she was spreading it a bit thick. She’d have to flash cynicism or Brandy would never buy the bottom line.

“Let’s face the ugly facts,” Lydia said. “The troll may flatline at any moment, and you, being a sadistic government flunky, would make me start over on some new codger.”

Brandy blinked. Lydia came off as so much more truthful when she insulted than when she talked posterity. “What’s your point, Mrs. Elkrunner?”

Lydia didn’t rise to the Elkrunner bait. “My point is, we should concentrate the sessions. With your permission, I want to take Mr. Pedersen out of Haven House over Memorial Day weekend. I want to bring him into my home, install him in my son’s old bedroom. In three days of taping, we could finish this odious chore and I could get on with my rehabilitation before the turning of the millennium.”

Lydia stood up, for emphasis. She nested her fingers on both sides of the urine cup. “I want to become a Goddamn model citizen, and it’ll never happen at two hours a Goddamn week.”

Lydia sat back down with a
plop
. She said, “So to speak.”

Brandy didn’t budge.

Lydia said, “As it were.”

Brandy tapped her government-issue pen on the desktop.

Lydia said, “In point of fact.”

***

“That woman embodies every cliché circulated about people from Philadelphia.”

I fidgeted with the tiny spoon that came on a tiny saucer with my cappuccino. It was similar to a coke spoon owned by my distant first wife, way back in another world. Once every year or so, I wondered what had become of her.

“Is Brandy from Philadelphia?”

“How should I know? My point is that she embodies the clichés, not that she ever lived there. As a matter of course, I heard her people came out of Delaware or Vermont or someplace. One of those minute Yankee states that would fit in Yellowstone Park.”

Wanda was my other wife’s name. It took a moment to come up with it. “I’m not certain Vermont fits in Yellowstone. Maybe you’re thinking of Connecticut.”

“We are not discussing small states, Sam. I’m telling you what a tight twat Brandy Epstein is.”

“That must be a cliché I missed. The one about women from Philadelphia having tight…you-knows.”

“
Twat
,
Sam. It’s a perfectly good word. Far more specific than
you knows
.”

My mother and I were drinking fancy coffees on the deck of a new place called Cowpoke Grinders. Outdoor dining was new for Jackson, Wyoming, where snow covers the ground seven months of the year and it’s too cold to eat outside four of the other five.

The moment Lydia had seen the place, she’d ripped the name. “
Cow poke
is obscene, Sam. The mental picture it conjures is horrendous. And matched with
Grinders
? I shudder to think what nightmares I shall have tonight.”

Then she ripped the latte I bought her.

“What is this?”

“Latte. They’re popular these days.”

She sniffed the lip of the cup. “It smells like a concoction the Navajos brewed down in Canyon de Chelly.”

“I’ve heard Native Americans invented the latte,” I said, not meaning it.

“My friends didn’t drink the stuff. They poured it in cracks to kill spiders. And Indians hate the term
Native American
.
They would go apoplectic around any tourist who dared use it.”

“Writers like me call that reverse political correctness.”

“Red Mesa High School is the home of the Redskins. How’s that for reverse political correctness?”

Before I could react, Lydia went on to rip Brandy Epstein—the Philadelphia-cliché thing. So now we’re back where we started.

“She’s an idiot, in the bad sense of the word.”

Typical of Lydia to think
idiot
came in more than one sense. “Did she give the okay to take Oly Pedersen?”

Lydia sipped latte and pressed her lips primly together. She seemed to enjoy the drink, in spite of comparing it to spider poison. “
Fi
nally.” She blew air on the first syllable. “But only after I stuck my tongue up her fat side.”

The mental picture was disturbing, far worse than
cow poke
.
“Is that literal?”

Lydia cocked her head to look at me, as if in a new light. “Sam. You have multiple flaws, as we know, but in my opinion, the greatest flaw of them all is this tendency to fake stupidity.”

“Sometimes I’m not faking.”

“See. You’re still doing it.” Finished with sizing me up, she looked back down at her hands on her latte. “Brandy said only the hours the microphone is turned on and Oly is speaking count as community service. She said I’m not being paid to baby-sit.”

Lydia dropped into silent moodiness while I played with my tiny spoon. I knew she’d get on with what she had to say soon. She didn’t need leading questions from me. What I wondered about was the weather. We generally suffer through thirty days of rain and snow, either in May or June, and so far May had been sparkling blue, which didn’t bode well for June. One thing I’d learned about weather—and therefore life itself—when the times are good, you’d best brace yourself. Soon, it will all go tits up.

Lydia sighed, a sound not unlike a door closing on
Star Trek
.
“This is such an odious task. I cannot abide being nice just so people will give me what I want. It’s an awful position to be in.”

“I can’t help but wonder about the motivation here.”

Lydia went on, as if she hadn’t heard me, “I know what you are thinking. You think I’m nice naturally, so it shouldn’t irritate me to be nice for a purpose.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.”

“I simply don’t like civility forced on me. It should be graciously given. Not dragged out against one’s will.”

I tapped the spoon on the edge of my cappuccino cup like a toastmaster asking for attention. “Here’s the part I’m not catching, Lydia. This road trip with Oly and Roger is high risk. You could lose your freedom, and I don’t see the point.”

“Must there always be a point?”

I considered this fairly. “If you’re taking a chance on going back to prison, I would say yes.”

Lydia reached into her purse, which today was a velvet bag that originally came on a bottle of Crown Royal, and pulled out a file. To me, Lydia filing her nails in the middle of a conversation was one of those tells, like poker players use on each other. We were about to enter the realm of faulty rationalization.

Lydia filed, right hand on left forefinger. “Roger needs me, poor boy.”

“I’m your son. I know how you feel about being needed.”

Lydia’s attention went to her middle finger. “I’m making an exception for Roger. He must find his past in order to complete his future. How would you feel if you didn’t know who your parents were?”

Unresolved issues crept into my mind. “I don’t. Not both of them, anyway.”

“We’re not talking about you. We’re talking about Roger and the horrendous events that brought him to Jackson Hole. He deserves the truth.”

I drained my cappuccino. “Speaking of telling Roger the truth, I dug out my Chevron USA map and discovered Santa Barbara is forty miles from the Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility.”

“That has nothing to do with me.”

I watched Lydia’s face. She appeared calm yet alert, like a deer that suspects the next clearing contains a blind. It occurred to me that my mom was more comfortable talking to people she’d just met than she was talking to those of us who knew her.

“When are you planning to tell Roger?” I asked.

“Tell Roger what?”

“That the reason for this trip has more to do with Hank Elkrunner than Loren Paul.”