Make Something Up (13 page)

His voice pointed elsewhere, he says, “April, honey. Do you remember what a flu shot is?” He says, “Do you remember when you had to get a shot so you could go play at Easter camp?” Silence answers. Rachel shuts her eyes in order to hear more. All she can detect is the hum of the fluorescent bulb in the bedside lamp. She stands up from the bed to shut off the air conditioner, but before she takes a step Ted's voice is back.

“Can you get Daddy the sewing basket?” Nothing seems to happen, but now his voice comes full into Rachel's ear, “Are you happy? Does this make you happy?” His footsteps sound in the hallway. “I'm going to the bathroom.” His delivery is singsong, like a lullaby. “I'm getting the rubbing alcohol to torture our daughter.” He sings, “Rach, you can stop this at any time.”

But Rachel knows this isn't true. Nobody can stop anything. The people will always be humping next door. The burning cat will always be rocketing like a comet around every house in which they'll ever live. Nothing will ever be resolved. Again, it crosses her mind that Ted might be tormenting her. April is upstairs in her room or playing in the backyard, and he's only pretending she's there. That's easier to swallow than the idea that her own child despises her.

“You don't understand,” Rachel tells the phone. “I need you to hurt her to prove she's alive.” She demands, “Hurt her as proof of how much you don't hate me.”

Before the TV can sell another thousand diamond wristwatches, April screams.

Not a beat later, Ted asks, “Rach?” Breathless. The scream echoing in her head. It would echo in her head forever. A caterwauling. The shriek of Belinda Carlisle. It's the same squeal April had made when she was born.

“You did it,” she says.

Ted replies, “You screamed.”

It wasn't Rachel's scream or April's. It was still another sex noise from the next room. It's another stalemate. The bag will always be half full. Ted will always be cheating.

Rachel asks him to put April on the phone. “Make sure she's got the phone to her ear,” Rachel says, “and then I want you to leave the room.”

“Your father doesn't understand.” Into the phone, Rachel says, “He owed more on that house than it was worth. Someone had to make the ugly choices.”

She explains to her daughter how the only problem with marrying a spineless, lazy, stupid man is that you could be stuck with him for the rest of your life. “I had to do something,” Rachel says. “I didn't want you born dead
and
blind.”

It doesn't matter who's listening, Ted or April. It's another mess that Rachel needs to clean up. She describes how she'd combed hair spray into the cat's fur, simple cheap hair spray, every day for weeks. She knew it was using the fireplace as a toilet, and she hoped the pilot light would be enough. Rachel overfed it so the cat would need to defecate more often. She crossed her fingers that an increase in intestinal gas might do the trick. She was no sadist. On the contrary, she didn't want Belinda Carlisle to suffer. Rachel had made certain the smoke detectors had fresh batteries, and she'd waited.

“Your father,” she begins. “He thinks that if the dishes and the toilet are black to begin with they never get dirty.”

Their last night in Ted's house, Rachel had stepped into the living room. She'd rushed inside from the cold. She'd intentionally turned down the thermostat, hoping to make the pilot light more attractive. To set her trap, she'd buried tuna fish in the crushed gravel. That night, she'd walked into the dark room, into the shadow cast by the Christmas tree, and seen two yellow eyes blinking at her from the fireplace. A little drunk, she'd said, “I'm sorry.”

On the phone in Orlando, very drunk, she says, “I wasn't sorry.”

Rachel had told the cat good-bye, and she'd flipped the switch. The click-click-click, like the tapping of a white cane. The banshee scream. Flames raced up the living room curtains. Flames raced up the stairs. Eventually the insurance company couldn't prove definitively that any chemical residue wasn't the scorched remains of dry-cleaning plastic.

Saying this, she senses that April has become a stranger. Someone separate who must be respected and deserves to know the truth. April has split away to become another person. “Your daddy's stalling is the reason why you'll never see a sunset.”

The silence could've been anyone or no one. If it's April she won't understand, not until she's older.

Rachel says, “I only chose your father because he's weak. I married him because I knew I could push him around.” She says that the problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you. Only then, over the phone, clear and unmistakable, does Rachel hear Ted begin to weep. It's nothing she hasn't heard before, but this time his sobs build until, like blasts from a whistle, a child screams. Like a smoke alarm, a high-pitched frantic child's shriek erupts, sirening from the telephone.

Rachel's goading has worked. He'd bullied her, coerced, controlled, and steered her into hurting something innocent. Now they were even.

With her child's screams and her husband's weeping still loud in her ears, Rachel gazes at a gigantic revolving diamond, entranced, trying to divine the new future as she whispers, “Good night.”

Troy's father was determined to do better than his own father had. When his dad, Troy's granddad, had explained the birds and the bees, he'd told it like a joke, asking, “What's the difference between anal sex and a microwave oven?” Troy's dad had been six years old at the time, the age Troy was now. Troy's dad didn't know so his own dad had said, matter-of-factly, “A microwave won't brown your meat.”

That was it: the facts of life. So when Troy climbed into the car after school one afternoon and announced the second graders were doing a module on Unsafe Sex, his dad recognized a teachable moment. The school hadn't even covered sex, and already they were telling kids what not to do. Nonetheless, Troy's dad knew what all politicians know: You don't answer the question you're asked, you answer the question you wish to be asked. When it came to Unsafe Sex, Troy's dad had written the book.

They were in the car, so that seemed as good a launching pad as any. They were driving home so Troy's dad had to watch where he was going. He told Troy that sometimes when mommies and daddies love each other very, very much, they want to be alone. He said how, when they're only high schoolers, sometimes the only place to be alone is in a car, even if it's a Dodge Dart with sticky duct tape covering the rips in the vinyl upholstery, and even then they need to buy tickets to a drive-in
movie—something
almost impossible to explain to a kid these days, except to say it's like a television set so big it could cover one whole side of the building where Daddy works—even if the movie playing that week is
The Getaway
with Sally Struthers, which is almost beside the point because the only reason mommies and daddies go to drive-in theaters is to be alone, and when they're in high school, the urge to be alone together and kiss and touch and torch a little weed and wrestle around like two freshly skinned porn stars on a bed of hot salt, well mommies and daddies in that situation would buy tickets to watch paint dry if it guaranteed them a couple hours of being out-from-under everyone's thumb, even if what they have is a real, true eternal love that older mommies and daddies have forgotten is even possible, even then a Dodge Dart isn't the best set of hookup wheels because some dipshit previous owner had replaced the front bench seat with two bucket seats, and the backseat offers only room enough to do it front-to-back, pitcher-catcher-style, lying on their sides, not the best of positions because the mommy says it always, always puts too much air inside her, even now Troy's dad is watching the road and not seeing his kid's reaction, even when he says pitcher-catcher is the mommy's only position because if she tried cowgirl even once she'd be sitting up, bobbing up and down for everyone to see, her tits and hair flopping until the whole drive-in would flash on their headlights, high-low, high-low, and honk and yell rodeo giddyups until the story would be all over school, even then this daddy at the drive-in nominates they try a little sixty-nine to get the party started even as he's describing them stripping off their clothes and wrestling around the backseat, even then his little boy, Troy, asks what this has to do with where babies come from even if his dad has reached the moment where the mommy takes the daddy's danger zone between two fingers of one hand like she's picking up used trash off the floor of a public bathroom and she says he's not smelling as fresh as she'd like and she's having second thoughts even after he's explained and explained about how clean he is and the nature of foreskin, even so she's not buying it even when he throws out his old argument about “What makes it only genital mutilation when it happens to girls?” even then she's frosting over even when he says, “Genital mutilation is genital mutilation no matter how you slice it,” even that doesn't make her laugh even when he winks to indicate he's just kidding, even then she's dug in her heels regarding the possibility of copping his junk so he climbs his top half into the front seat and pops open the glove compartment and digs around the old road maps even if that means explaining a road map to his kid, a generation of kids who have GPS everything so they'll never know the origami nightmare of trying to refold some old paper at night in the wind, even then he's searching for a condom and something, anything, to cover the smell, even if that smell is nothing but the way a healthy pre-mutilated danger zone is supposed to smell, even then all the daddy can locate is a big bottle of hand sanitizer left over from the last winter panic about Asian bird flu, and even though that was a decade before the kid was born, his boy wants to go off on a tangent about what-was-bird-flu? and what's-a-bucket-seat? even if none of that matters in the big picture, even now he's explaining how this daddy shows the hand sanitizer to the mommy in the backseat covered with duct tape and he offers to sanitizer his entire danger zone if that will make her happy, even her frosty heart can't not melt when exposed to that big of a romantic gesture, even so he's worried this is going to hurt because the bottle says it's a big percent alcohol, even then his danger zone is aching with a need so bad it overrides his common sense so he squeezes out a jumbo handful of this clear, cold, slimy gel and uses it to jack his danger zone, and even with almost a hundred germicidal ingredients listed on the label, not counting a trace amount of aloe vera, even then it doesn't hurt as much as he'd imagined, not as much as his zone is already aching, as if he might die from an impacted sperm, like a wisdom tooth but between his skinny teenage legs, the pain's not so much that his danger zone changes its mind even when the mommy still won't give him throat, even then his danger zone is still as rock hard as the nose on his face even when he face-plants dead center in mommy's danger zone and goes to town, playing this game they used to call “Flipper” which is based on a TV show so old that even Nickelodeon won't touch it, even then this mommy won't put her lips to work because now she's worried about being poisoned by chemical compounds, even then, instead of giving up, the daddy stays facedown, holding his breath, playing Flipper, treading her water with his tongue because he knows if she's hot enough she'll agree to anything, even now Troy's dad keeps his eyes on the road while he senses a tidal wave of questions building up from his kid, even then the drive-in daddy doesn't come up for air, only dog-paddles with his tongue until the moment she's so flooded he can flip his face back so fast a spray of her mommy juice will fly off the end of his nose in a sloppy arc of splash while he squeaks a fast Eee-Eee-Eee-Eee of dolphin laughs and claps his hands together like little dolphin flippers like every time they watched that show growing up on TV, even then his danger zone is full-to-bursting with about two thousand pounds per square inch of pressurized daddy juice when smell-or-not this mommy wants nothing more in the world than pitcher-catcher, front-to-back on the rear seat of his Dodge Dart, air or no air inside her, even then what's left unsaid is how her monthly mommy time is no fewer than eleven days past its normal ETA, even then she's telling herself it could be from throwing up one too many corndogs, even if she's done the math in her head and pictures her mistake already the size of a cell cluster, even then his kid, Troy, asks, “Was that the start of me?” still trying to steer the whole birds-and-the-bees routine, even then the daddy in the Dart is slamming danger zones with the mommy, such sweet perfect memories, with Sally Struthers saying something to Steve McQueen on the drive-in movie screen, even then he's got no idea he's already a daddy, no he's just slamming away with dried Flipper water making the skin tight across his face until he hears the mommy squeal like every Christmas morning rolled into one, and he lets himself go, and even then he wants to go again, but she says to first smoke a fatty she's got in her purse and crawls out from next to him and pinches out this blunt and sparks a lighter, paraquat and malathion be damned, and even then she's complaining about the air he's trapped inside her, even as she torches the blunt and they can hear it's not great stuff because even with Sally Struthers squawking about something they can both hear the seeds popping when she takes a long drag, even as they start swatting together their danger zones again, because in a daddy's high school years it never really goes all-the-way soft, even then the kid, his kid, Troy, wants to know why they'd smoke a fatty at the risk of giving him unborn brain damage, and isn't this just like a kid to ask a question and not wait for the answer and to be so self-involved, even with his kid lecturing about Unsafe Sex and the effects of THC on the first trimester, even then he's describing how this one seed pops, loud, pops and sparks like July Fourth and showers sparks down until these sparks land in the mommy's bush.

The next part is pretty. A pretty glow. Like a flickering blue Bananas Foster or a Crepe Suzette served tableside. Like a Spanish coffee when the bartender showers it with cinnamons that light up like fireflies so pretty the daddy and the mommy can only gaze down at this blue nimbus like from a black-and-white television showing old movies, this spellbinding blue light that dances down there in her lap hair which must be drenched in secondhand hand sanitizer because that stuff never fully evaporates and because her bush explodes like napalm in the morning behind Charlie Sheen in a second feature, even then the mommy and daddy don't think to stop-drop-and-roll, stop-drop-and-roll like Bill Cosby told them their whole growing up, instead they scream and even the mommy's danger zone screams with all the air the daddy's put inside her, until this blast of air blows fire like a fire-breathing dragon, like a Vietnam War flamethrower or Lieutenant Ellen Ripley chasing the Alien around in the dark, a total kick-ass feminist hero the likes of which nobody had ever seen before until she turned out to be just Sigourney Weaver, even then that fire shot across the backseat to set fire to the daddy's hand-sanitized danger zone, not just the hair but the skin parts, too, which are still stuck straight out under internal pressure, until having extra foreskin is the least of his worries, even then he's trying to do justice to how this looks, even if the expression on his kid's face, Troy's face, is abject horror, Troy's dad says it's like when they go camping and get their marshmallows too close to the flames and they're left holding this spitting, dripping blob of melting, sizzling mess nobody can extinguish, tons worse than just browning his meat, even then the mommy's monthly time decides to come, even when it's not her time, that's how the ladies do if something startles them, like a spider next to the kitchen sink or a scary Halloween mask, they contract all their muscles in a defensive maneuver, the way a squid will squirt ink to create a smokescreen so she can make her getaway, the mommy gushes out this volcano of blood encircled by a ring of fire. Even that doesn't help when the Dodge Dart's interior ignites making this a fiery fire within a fire like a fireplace inside a burning-down house located in a subdivision of Hell, even then the daddy's so close that when he's pulled out he still spits his spermatozoa only on fire from hand sanitizer, shooting pow, pow, pow like tracer bullets, like July Fourth, even then the mommy's not feeling this big rush of not-pregnant relief, even then the mommy and daddy just jump around the backseat of the Dodge Dart until every headlight behind them is flashing high-low, high-low, and everyone is making rodeo whoopees and shouting, “Let 'er buck!” not knowing it's a danger zone conflagration, not until the mommy tumbles out one back door of the Dodge and the daddy tumbles out the other back door and even then the idea of stop-drop-and-roll is the last thing that comes to mind, even when they're both running on fire, trailing burned bits of marshmallow, smoldering, dropping off Bananas Foster gobs that sputter in the drive-in movie gravel, setting fire to paper napkins dropped by litterbugs, even while they keep running to where the faces of Sally Struthers and Steve McQueen just keep kissing bigger and bigger, even then his kid's face, Troy's face is one big question mark, even then the kid asks, “Is that where I came from?”

By this point they're home, parked in the driveway where Troy's mom waves at them from the kitchen window. What's left of her. Even then Troy's father is so determined to outdo his own dad's lame performance that he says, “No, my son.” He says, “That's why you're adopted.”