The Lonely (9 page)

The Feasts

The one thing that was typical of The Father, or at least of what I've seen of fathers on TV, is that he was painfully cheap. And this cheapness was like a powerful seasoning to him, or some kind of unique palatal mutation that allowed him to enjoy things that were about to turn rotten and tasted like feet. He could often be found in the kitchen, checking the labels of things deep in the recesses of the fridge, his folded, black-rimmed glasses held up to his face as he considered the date. Would it make him sick? If so, how sick? Would he pay the cost of said item to
not
vomit? This, he told me once, was the true determining question.

He would carefully arrange his feast on our kitchen table, which was wooden and blemished with deep gouges from where I used to grate the bottom of my spoons and knives and forks into it. Julia never did this. She was always a good eater. And to show for it she hadn't left a single mark on the table, not a gash or a scallop or even a bruise.

He would arrange the jars and containers into a little kingdom: castles of boxes and cartons and jugs with moats of opened salad dressings and jams emitting their own almost-salad-dressing or almost-jam-like smell, but not quite. No, everything was always noticeably off, even if only a little bit. He sat at the head of the table, the devouring king of all that lay before him.

I would sit with him for as long as I could stand watching him eat the stuff, finding the edible centers of things unrecognizable with mold or hard discolorations. Scraping and ripping and breaking things apart. It was because I sat there and insisted on bearing witness to his obsessive finishing off of things that I was served the nearly rotten pudding, which I refused to eat, which made him insist that I get a job and learn the value of a dollar, which is why he first suggested I work at the Miniature Wonderland with Mortimer Ungula. Mr. Ungula to you. And to me.

Mr. Ungula and the Miniature Wonderland

Mr. Ungula had hair that was always reacting rhythmically to his movements, like water carried in a too-small bucket. It was dense as a tongue and once, I swear, it lapped the end of his nose. Which is really quite a feat when you think about the size of Mr. Ungula's nose: a long, twisted affair with whiskery wrinkles running along the sides and up to the delicate inner corners of his eyes which were very brown and very wet and very twitchy like a pair of large squirrel noses. The bags under his eyes were loaded with flesh: pouches, soft and begging to be squeezed, the way that a baby's big soft cheeks urge you to stroke them.

A stripe of beard made a line down the center of his chin and curled at the end like a fiddlehead. He wore shiny shirts the whole year round, which pattered over with sweat in the summer and peeked from beneath tattered old blazers in the winter. His hands were all knuckle, fingernails embedded with dark model paint. He kept naked scotch mints in his pockets and sucked on them animatedly whenever he wasn't smoking the long brown cigarettes that he rolled himself on the back porch of the Miniature Wonderland.

It had been the Miniature Wonderland for as long as most people could remember, though everyone was aware, in one way or another, of its previous life as an army barrack. For one thing, it looked like a barrack: long and straight and windowless, straddling the perimeter of town. For another, it was the site of an often-whispered-about scandal involving an initiation ritual and an unlucky goat. Either way, as an army barrack or as the Miniature Wonderland, there it sat, in a pool of gravel parking lot overrun with grass, a front door on one end, and a porch built into the side toward the back.

The Father had become acquainted with Mr. Ungula at the music store. Not friends, mind you, just acquaintances. Both of them would remind me of that on my first day. They each played rather obscure instruments: The Father his clarinet and Mr. Ungula, I would come to learn, a large antique organ. Somehow during one of their conversations, The Father learned that Mr. Ungula owned the Wonderland. Bought it forty years ago from the city and had been working inside it, more or less alone, ever since. Over the past few years, however, the barrack and Mr. Ungula had begun to age at the same pace, both reluctantly requiring more and more assistance all the time. And that's how I ended up with the job.

When I told Julia about it she was sitting upside down on the couch, her legs over the backrest and her head hanging and bloating with blood.

She laughed and said, “We're not getting a job, Easter.”

“I know. I'm getting a job. Just me.”

“What do you mean, just you?”

“I mean you're not allowed to come.”

“Why not?”

“Because Dad said so,” I lied.

“Easter, you're such an idiot.”

“Why?”

“That was just about the worst lie I've ever heard.”

“Okay fine, Julia, I don't want you to come because I don't wanna mess this up.”

“Why? Because he got you the job?”

“Well, yeah, what's so bad about that?”

“Easter, he's not going to like you more just because you suck up to this weirdo friend of his. You can't do anything to make him like you more. He just doesn't like you and that's it.”

“Weirdo acquaintance … ” I muttered.

“What's that?”

“Nothing.”

I wanted to tear her hair out, first with my hands and then with my teeth and not stop till her brains were showing.

“Pass me the mirror, please?” she asked.

So I did. And she covered the top part of her face so her chin looked like a head and she asked me to draw eyes on it and hair all the way down her throat.

I should take a minute to describe the Miniature Wonderland a little bit better. Mr. Ungula had separated the ex-barrack into four themed rooms depicting Our Town Over Time: Early Our Town, Later Our Town, Later Still Our Town, and Present Day Our Town, in order.

Most of the replicas covered the span of two wide dining room tables side by side, and Mr. Ungula took his time to make sure that every little detail was represented in every little room. Doors opened wide, cups could be raised to lips, leaves rustled, plants seemed to grow, and all of the appropriate documentation was represented: deeds to houses, permits for weapons, driver's licenses in wallets.

Mr. Ungula was always in the process of updating and adding to the Present Day Our Town model. For an hour each morning he would drive through town to make sure that everything was still the same. If something had changed, a banner at the used car dealership, a giant, inflatable gorilla in front of the mattress store for “We've Gone Bananas” month, Mr. Ungula would take a dozen pictures of it and adjust the Present Day Our Town model accordingly. Of course, by the time he finished the miniature alteration, the new thing had already been taken down and something newer erected in its place.

Mr. Ungula might have been the most detailed miniature builder to ever walk the earth, but we'll probably never know because most miniature builders aren't really the competitive type.

The Miniature Wonderland was one of the quietest places I'd ever been. But it was an odd quiet. A recipe of constant little noises that imitated quietness: creaking floorboards, ticking clocks, a frame aching with age. Every nail and floorboard in the place still hard at work keeping the place together seemed to groan, a plea for some merciful meteor to smash it to death. But somehow the place seemed all the more quiet because of these sounds.

The only thing able to splinter the “silence” of the Wonderland was a loud train whistle that came from a station south of town. I'm not sure what was carried: people, livestock, explosives; but I did know that it blasted the Wonderland every day at twelve o'clock, three o'clock, and six o'clock. Twelve o'clock, three o'clock, and six o'clock.

The whistles seemed to bring light into the Wonderland, make it more clear, dust its shoulders, straighten its tie.

And Mr. Ungula would reset himself when he heard it. If he was getting very mad or frustrated or upset, when the whistle blew he became immediately composed, flattened the front of his shirt with one hand, and cleared his throat, a quick smile twitching into his face. Once I dropped a pot of paint into a filing cabinet, soaking a stack of miscellaneous papers in lime green. I thought he was going to kill me, sweat exploding from his pores, his skin shaking over his bones, but then the whistle blew and he relaxed. His pores sucked the sweat back in and his eyebrows unwound themselves. A hand slicked flat his hair, then off to the back porch to smoke it off.

He kept an immaculate log of the people who came in and out: how much money they spent, where they lingered, where they smiled, where they laughed, where they gagged, where they covered their children's eyes, where they stormed out, what they were wearing, how they smelled, the insults that a few scarred souls needed to hurl at him as they left, etc. Most often it was families: mothers or fathers, or both, with their children. Other times it was run-down middle aged women, some wearing Winnie-the-Pooh attire, pockets full of scratch tickets presumably, assisting or rolling their elderly parents through the tour. Sometimes a child accompanied, pushing an oxygen tank connected to their grandparent's nostrils.

I was the first spectacle of the tour, sitting like a rubber duck behind a round wood desk, paneled and ornamented with a sign that scrolled
RECEPTION
across its center. A cymbal-like lamp hung over my head from a long wire, which caused the dim, orange light to cascade into blackness in the corners of the room. I was instructed to smile, so I was smiling, and sometimes Mr. Harp the handyman smiled too; big and leaning in a dark doorframe, his pudgy triceps a cushion to his shoulder, causing fat to accordion up his neck all the way to his cheeks.

Mr. Ungula instructed me to write down the first things they said, how they reacted to the entrance fee, what they looked like, the acute change in atmosphere that accompanied them.

Day 9,321 (three customers):

The ugliest man alive came in today. He was as ugly as someone could possibly be before it's considered a real deformity or a disability even. Are people with severe facial deformities considered disabled? I wonder. His name: Peabody. His occupation: “Appreciator of fine things,” he'd said. His face: A melting Clint Eastwood type. His mouth: A large, drooping frown weighted with heavy jowls. His smell: Musty, like a room once flooded, now drained and dried. His aura: Also drained and dried. His business: To examine Mr. Ungula's craft, write an article on it, submit it to a journal, and appear vicariously unique and creative for having found such genius and beauty in something so strange. The first thing he said to me was, “Well, aren't you just perfect.”

The next customers to come in that day were a pair of young brothers. Probably close to my age. They both wore jeans and white T-shirts and were munching down Popeye Cigarettes to their ruddy fingertips as they spoke.

Names: Billy and Sol Hornburger. Occupations: Kids. Faces: Round and red. Aura: Also round and red. Smell: Coppery, sharp. Like park dirt and pennies and bloody noses. Business: “To check out the view,” one had snickered. “Two please,” the other said through wood chipper teeth, clouds of white, sugary dust billowing from the sides of his mouth as he inserted the candy smokes horizontally inward. “Ten bucks,” I replied. He slapped two fives on the table and took the key I handed him and they trampled off together through the first door. It was actually only four bucks, but I knew they'd come to peek at the naked women through some of the Our Town windows and for that the price doubled.

Mr. Ungula was uncommonly loud and very stubborn. He didn't believe in knocking on doors and butted his way through most of the Wonderland, announcing himself with a deliberately cleared throat seconds before he entered a room, which made you feel guilty about whatever you were doing even if it was something perfectly innocent.

He had seven sisters who called him many times a day, always worried about him or furious with him or trying to make him feel guilty. He spent a lot of time with his feet on his desk in his workshop, his head hanging backward over the top of his chair, one hand steadying the phone next to his ear, the other hand pulling down on his sallow cheek, exposing the red that cushioned his eyeball. I felt awful transferring the calls.

They were constantly setting him up with their friends and neighbors and manicurist's older sisters and their names were Nora, Nikki, Layla, Helen, Mona, Alice, and Brenda. Nora was the oldest and called him the most, Mona was the smartest and called him the least. When Nora called, she let out a yawn and encoded within it were the words, “Izzy in?” Just one yawn. And then she hung up as soon as the words “yes” or “no” left my mouth.

Nora liked to carry conversations with Mr. Ungula toward the subject of morality and then scream at him for being such a heathen. You see, Mr. Ungula didn't believe in marriage and had sympathy for pedophiles. When he read about either incident in the paper he would say, “Those poor sick bastards.” Then flutter closed the newspaper and steal to the back porch to roll a cigarette.

When Nikki called I heard the flapping of her eyelashes, “Hi Esther, is my bruddadaya?” Her voice sounded pink, through wet, bubblegummy lips. I never corrected her about my name. It didn't seem worth the trouble.

Layla had six sons and she would command me to “put Morty on the phone.”

Helen had six daughters and she would say, “Oh hello, Easter darling, how are you? Is my brother around? I hope he is this time, I wouldn't want to have to call again just to speak to my own brother, you understand. Isn't it funny? I was always Mortimer's favorite and now I have to fight to get a phone call with him. Is he there, sweetie? You can tell me, you know. I won't tell him you told me. But is he there? Just, shhh, don't tell me. I think I know.”

Mona played softball and mumbled quietly into the phone, “HelloEastercanispeaktomybrotherplease?thankyou.”

Alice and Brenda lived together and shouted at me through speakerphone. “Hey there, is he in?” one of them would squeal and the other would say, “Has Nora called?” “Yeah, did Nora call? What did she want?” I would tell them that I didn't know what Nora wanted, that she hadn't told me, she never does, she never speaks to me. And they would tell me that Nora was a bitch and never said thank you to anyone in her life, but not to tell Morty they said that, or Nora for that matter, but of course I wouldn't get the chance to tell Nora because she's such a bitch when she calls. Ha ha!

I liked to chat with Alice and Brenda from time to time, but they made Mr. Ungula the angriest. He would munch aspirin as they spoke over each other into his ear.

Julia hated when I was away at work and kept me up all night over it. Kicking me just when I fell asleep or pushing me out of bed. She even brought back a terrible dream that used to keep us up all night when I was small.