The Best of Me(30)
“They’re not little creatures!” I yelled. “They’re tool people!”
“What the hell difference does it make? In the eyes of the law you’re just some nut with a knife who sits in the pancake house staring at a goddam stopwatch. You dress that girl in something other than a tube top and prop her up on the witness stand—crying her eyes out—and what do you think is going to happen? Get that mother in on the act and you’ve got both a criminal trial and a civil suit on your hands.”
“You watch too much TV.”
“Not as much as they do,” she said. “I can guaran-goddam-tee you that. You think these people can’t smell money?”
“But I haven’t got any.”
“It’s not your money they’ll be after,” she said. “It’s mine.”
“You mean Dad’s.” I was smarting over the “little creatures” comment and wanted to hurt her, but it didn’t work.
“I mean our money,” she said. “You think I don’t know how these things work? I wasn’t just born some middle-aged woman with a nice purse and a decent pair of shoes. My God, the things you don’t know. My God.”
My new apartment was eight blocks away, facing our city’s first Episcopal church. My mother paid the deposit and the first month’s rent and came with her station wagon to help me pack and move my things. Carrying a box of my feather-weight balsa-wood sculptures out onto the landing, her hair gathered beneath a gingham scarf, I wondered how she appeared to Brandi, who was certainly watching through the keyhole. What did she represent to her? The word mother wouldn’t do, as I don’t really think she understood what it meant. A person who shepherds you along the way and helps you out when you’re in trouble—what would she call that thing? A queen? A crutch? A teacher?
I heard a noise from behind the door, and then the little moth voice. “Bitch,” Brandi whispered.
I fled back into the apartment, but my mother didn’t even pause. “Sister,” she said, “you don’t know the half of it.”
Repeat After Me
Although we’d discussed my upcoming visit to Winston-Salem, my sister and I didn’t make exact arrangements until the eve of my arrival, when I phoned from a hotel in Salt Lake City.
“I’ll be at work when you arrive,” she said, “so I’m thinking I’ll just leave the key under the hour ott near the ack toor.”
“The what?”
“Hour ott.”
I thought she had something in her mouth until I realized she was speaking in code.
“What are you, on a speakerphone at a methadone clinic? Why can’t you just tell me where you put the goddam house key?”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I just don’t know that I trust these things.”
“Are you on a cell phone?”
“Of course not,” she said. “This is just a regular cordless, but still, you have to be careful.”
When I suggested that actually she didn’t have to be careful, Lisa resumed her normal tone of voice, saying, “Really? But I heard…”
My sister’s the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline. She remembers that applesauce can kill you but forgets that in order to die, you have to inject it directly into your bloodstream. Pronouncements that cellphone conversations may be picked up by strangers mix with the reported rise of both home burglaries and brain tumors, meaning that as far as she’s concerned, all telecommunication is potentially life-threatening. If she didn’t watch it on the news, she read it in Consumer Reports or heard it thirdhand from a friend of a friend of a friend whose ear caught fire while dialing her answering machine. Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it’s not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it’s certainly under investigation—so there.
“Okay,” I said. “but can you tell me which hour ott? The last time I was there you had quite a few of them.”
“It’s ed,” she told me. “Well…eddish.”
I arrived at Lisa’s house late the following afternoon, found the key beneath the flowerpot, and let myself in through the back door. A lengthy note on the coffee table explained how I might go about operating everything from the television to the waffle iron, each carefully detailed procedure ending with the line “Remember to turn off and unplug after use.” At the bottom of page three, a postscript informed me that if the appliance in question had no plug—the dishwasher, for instance—I should make sure it had completed its cycle and was cool to the touch before leaving the room. The note reflected a growing hysteria, its subtext shrieking, Oh-my-God-he’s-going-to-be-alone-in-my-house-for-close-to-an-hour. She left her work number, her husband’s work number, and the number of the next-door neighbor, adding that she didn’t know the woman very well, so I probably shouldn’t bother her unless it was an emergency. “P.P.S. She’s a Baptist, so don’t tell her you’re gay.”
The last time I was alone at my sister’s place she was living in a white-brick apartment complex occupied by widows and single, middle-aged working women. This was in the late seventies, when we were supposed to be living in dorms. College hadn’t quite worked out the way she’d expected, and after two years in Virginia she’d returned to Raleigh and taken a job at a wineshop. It was a normal-enough life for a twenty-one-year-old, but being a dropout was not what she had planned for herself. Worse than that, it had not been planned for her. As children we’d been assigned certain roles—leader, bum, troublemaker, slut—titles that effectively told us who we were. As the oldest, smartest, and bossiest, it was naturally assumed that Lisa would shoot to the top of her field, earning a master’s degree in manipulation and eventually taking over a medium-size country. We’d always known her as an authority figure, and while we took a certain joy in watching her fall, it was disorienting to see her with so little confidence. Suddenly she was relying on other people’s opinions, following their advice and withering at the slightest criticism.