Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(22)

“Mr. Potato Head?” she says.

But he pays no attention to that, because he’s moving through the air towards her, very quickly. She doesn’t get any nearer: she must be flying away from him at the same speed. Faster, he urges himself, and then he closes the gap and zooms right up close, then in through the black pupil of her blue, bewildered eye. Space opens up around him, so bright, and there is his Constance, young again and welcoming, the way she used to be. She smiles happily and opens her arms to him, and he enfolds her.

“You got here,” she says. “At last. You’re awake.”





DARK LADY




Every morning at breakfast Jorrie reads the obituaries in all three of the papers. Some of the write-ups make her laugh, but to the best of Tin’s knowledge none of them has ever made her cry. She’s not much of a sniveller, Jorrie.

She marks the noteworthy dead people with an X – two Xs if she plans to attend the funeral or the memorial service – and hands the papers across the table to Tin. She gets the real paper papers, delivered right to their townhouse doorstep, because according to her they skimp on the obituaries in the digital versions.

“Here’s another,” she’ll say. “ ‘Deeply missed by all who knew her,’ I think not! I worked with her on the Splendida campaign. She was a sick bitch.” Or else: “ ‘Peacefully, at home, of natural causes.’ I doubt that very much! I bet it was an overdose.” Or: “Finally! Creepy Fingers! He groped me at a company dinner in the ’80s with his wife sitting right beside him. He was such a lush they won’t even have to embalm him.”

Tin himself would never go to the funeral of someone he dislikes, unless it’s to comfort some needy survivor. The early days of AIDS were hellish; it was like the Black Death: wall-to-wall funerals, widespread numbness and glazed disbelief, survivors’ guilt, a run on handkerchiefs. But for Jorrie, loathing is an incentive. She wants to tap dance on the graves, figuratively speaking; neither of them is up to the actual dancing any more, though he at least was an agile rock ’n’ roller in high school.

Jorrie wasn’t agile, as such; more like enthusiastic. She was rangy, she was coltish, she flung herself around, and her hair slipped out of restraint. But the gang thought it was neat when the two of them took the floor together, on account of their being twins, and he could make Jorrie look like a better dancer than she was: it was his calling from childhood to defend her when possible from her own impetuousness. Also, dancing with her gave him a short respite from whatever belle of the ball he was supposed to be going out with. He had his pick, he played the field. Best that way.

Astonishing to him how popular he’d been with the teenaged lovelies; but not surprising, when he comes to think of it. He’d had a sympathetic manner, and he’d listened to their plaints, and had not tried to disrobe them violently in parked cars, though he’d done the mandatory spate of post-dance necking so they wouldn’t think they had halitosis. When extra favours were offered, including the unhooking of the pointy-titted wired bra and the peeling off of the adhesive panty-girdle, he would considerately decline.

“You’d hate yourself in the morning,” he’d counsel them. And they would have hated themselves, and cried on the telephone, and begged him not to tell; and also they would have feared pregnancy, as kids did in those days before the pill. Or they might even have hoped for it, with a view to trapping him in an early marriage – him, Martin the Magnificent! What a catch!

Nor did he ever tell boastful fibs about his dates, as lesser, pimplier youths were in the habit of doing. When the subject of his previous night’s adventures would come up in the chilly, no-frilly, naked-willie boys’ locker room, he would smile enigmatically, and the others would grin and nudge one another and wallop him on the arm in a brotherly fashion. It helped that he was tall and nimble, and a star at track and field. The high jump was his specialty.

What a rascal.

What a gent.



Jorrie doesn’t want to tap dance on the graves alone because she doesn’t want to do anything alone. If she keeps at it she can nag Tin into attending these doleful bun-fests with her, even though he says he has no desire to be bored out of his occiput by a crowd of faux-gloomy old farts gumming the crustless sandwiches and congratulating themselves on still being alive. He finds Jorrie’s interest in such terminal rites of passage excessive and even morbid, and has told her so.

“I’m only being respectful,” she says, at which Tin snorts. It’s a joke: neither of them has ever made respectfulness a priority except for outward show.

“You just want to gloat,” he replies; and Jorrie snorts in her turn because this is so accurate.

“Do you think we’re brittle?” she’s been known to ask him. Terrific sense of humour is one thing, but brittle is another.

“Of course we’re brittle,” he has answered. “We were born brittle! But seek the bright side: you can’t have much taste unless you’re brittle.” He doesn’t add that Jorrie fails to have much taste anyway; less, as time goes on.

“Maybe we could have been brilliant psychopathic murderers,” she said once, perhaps a decade ago, when they were barely in their sixties. “We could have committed the perfect crime by killing a total stranger at random. Pushed them off a train.”