THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PLUTO AND GOOFY by Michelle Brooks
The night my brother Josh took a razor and carved a grin underneath his mouth, I fell off a car. Fourth of July, watching fireworks over the lake in a marina parking lot, drinking gin and tonics with my married boyfriend Kevin, and without warning, I passed out. When I awoke, it was to an anxious wreath of faces peering down at my pounding head. Because I didn’t know I was falling, I didn’t make the classic mistake of holding out my arms to protect myself, so I didn’t experience any injuries except scrapes and bruises, marks that you can see for a few weeks after, the ones that make people ask, what the hell happened to you?
Which, of course, is what I wanted to ask Josh. His new grin ran from cheek to cheek, a deep cut that severed a tendon. It was nothing like the polite smiles we’d given our parents over what I now refer to as the last supper, the fleeting smiles of employees imagining that an unpleasant task was almost done, only to find out that they had only scratched the surface of what would be demanded of them. My parents announced they were moving back to Detroit, quite possibly within the next few months. They hadn’t lived in our city for almost ten years. We were at a restaurant that didn’t stay open very long, an expensive soul food place called Jada, where we’d paid a lot for ribs and okra, collard greens and sweet potato pie, my parents insisting on trying whatever seemed adventurous. They lived in Atlanta, and their infrequent visits were punctuated with outings that proved to be short and filled with ideas about how the next one might be better, the things we are all trained to say, the things we couldn’t possibly mean.
So here I am living with Josh once again because I do not trust that he won’t do something worse, although in this case, I do not want to imagine worse. For once, I am thankful that there is no one in my life who cares where I live. I remembered how Josh and I shared a room as children, before my parents had money, and we’d take turn staying awake so that if we heard our father creeping around, wanting to say goodnight, we’d be prepared. I remembered Mother saying, You need to be careful. Men can’t be trusted, and that goes for your father. I don’t want you crawling in bed with him while I’m gone. She was a nurse. We never crawled into bed with him, but I can’t say we were always good at keeping him out of ours.
Our parents had left a few boxes at Josh’s duplex, telling us they’d come back for them when they moved here for good. When I moved in with Josh, I had to make room. I started with those boxes, moving them to the basement when the bottom fell out of one. I stuffed all the shit back in, looking for something that would explain the way Josh turned out, but everything seemed so normal, but you’d never know my father from his things.
I thought about a night when my father didn’t come home and my mother called the police, telling them he was missing. They searched the block, got the neighbors involved, called for him. I didn’t say anything, but I saw him across the street, hiding in a wooded area where Mother forbade Josh and me to go. Men hide in the woods and they wait for women so they can slash their tendons and hurt them, she said. You can’t move when someone slashes your tendons. We nodded. My father came back the next day, leaves in his hair. I don’t know what he told Mother. Mother would phone her girlfriends and say, I know he’s got some whore. I thought about that as I heard my father’s name called that night, over and over again.
And now I was someone’s whore. The symmetry did not escape me, though seeing Kevin was perfect, in spite of the obvious problem of his marriage. I thought it was good I had never met his wife, that an actual person would only make me crazy. The last time I lived with a man, I would look at pictures of his former fiancée, whom I had only met a few times. He’d devoted an album to her, and it seemed realer than things that had happened to us. I looked at that album with a regularity that can only be described as disturbing. By the time I realized that this ritual was making me sick, it was impossible to quit, like reading someone’s journal – no matter how miserable it makes you, you can’t stop until you’re to the end of what’s there.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Josh asked, as he walked into the living room, his Doc Martens loud on the wood floor. I tried not to look at his face.
“Just sorting things. Do you care if I move some of your boxes to the basement?”
“Do what you want,” Josh said. He plunked down on the couch and switched on the television with a remote bigger than any I’d ever seen. He called it The Commander. As in, The Commander wants respect. The Commander thinks this show sucks. It was strange how Josh and I got along so well, despite being so unalike. We don’t even look like brother and sister; he’s tall, big, shaggy, and had a beautiful face. I’m tiny and plain, like a miniature someone forgot to make exquisite with the right heartbreaking details.
“Josette,” he said. He never called me by my name unless he was tired. “Feel free to move anything you want.”
I sat down and tried to relax. Josh changed the channel.
“This is one of those movies where it looks like there’s going to be boobs, but there just isn’t going to be boobs.” He continued to drink his Coors, nowhere near the beautiful streams featured in their commercials.
“I thought we got the complete cable package so you could find something you liked.” I started to arrange things in the room to make it look better.
“It’s a wasteland. I’ve seen everything too many times.”
It started to rain, hard, without warning. The lights went out, then the television.
“Now what?” Josh asked.
“Josh, why do you think they’re coming back?”
He picked at his nails. I tried something else. “Why didn’t you marry Annie?” Annie had been Josh’s girlfriend right up until the cut.
“I don’t know. She’s not the type of person you want to marry. I should have married Coley.” Coley was the one before Annie. They seemed pretty alike to me, both underfed and hopeful, like happy children who wanted more attention.
“They’re both women, right? I don’t get the difference.”
“It’s like saying Pluto and Goofy are both dogs. Goofy is Mickey Mouse’s friend, whereas Pluto is Mickey’s pet. I mean, there’s a difference.”
“That clears it right up,” I said. “Do you think I’m doomed to always be Pluto?”
As if by cue, I could hear thunder.
“You want me to call to see how long we’ll be without power?” I asked.
He shrugged, so I dialed. I didn’t like sitting around with nothing to do, no air-conditioner, no lights, no music, no television. It struck me all at once how limiting and claustrophobic this situation was. I didn’t speak to a person on the phone, just the automated help line. I kept hearing the voice say, “We are sorry you are without power. We understand the importance of knowing when your power will be restored,” followed by an estimate of how long it would take before things would start working again.
Josh lit a candle and got a book from the shelf, a biography of Tolstoy. I couldn’t get comfortable. I wanted to call Kevin, but I didn’t know if he was home. Or alone. I’d never been inside his house, even though I knew where it was. I thought about confronting his wife. At least, I thought, maybe something would happen.
I looked outside, our duplex right on the border of Detroit. Like all borders, this one felt scary and powerful, like change might happen in any second. We’d have to drive into the suburbs to see Kevin, but it wasn’t all that far from danger to where he was.
“Do you want to go somewhere? A drive?” I asked. The rain had stopped. I didn’t hear anything going on outside.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to see if Kevin’s home.”
He looked at me, his carved grin like a jack-o’-lantern that I couldn’t turn off. “Is he alone?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
As we drove, it occurred to me that this was a bad idea. The trip felt slow-motion, Josh in the driver’s seat, me looking out the window, noticing the way everything seems brighter after a storm. I knew what I was doing was reckless, stupid, but I couldn’t stop. I saw my opportunities to turn around and quit recede as we got closer. I knocked on the door, a tap so light I couldn’t imagine anyone hearing it. When I turned to go, I heard the door open and felt compelled to stop and look, the pillar of salt thing.
“Can I help you?”
The woman at the door looked like someone’s sort of attractive mother, a woman who made grocery lists, who drank no more than one glass of wine with any meal. A wife.
I shook my head. A wasp landed on the birdbath. It was poised on the water like a plane ready for take-off.
“Are you looking for something?” she asked. She picked a thread off her khaki shorts. “Who are you?”
I considered the various ways in which I could answer that question before I heard a sucking noise and felt water. An automatic sprinkler.
“Nobody.”
I ran to the car before she could ask anything else, shaking with the same sensation I’d get after throwing up. I couldn’t cry, so I’d throw up instead, which didn’t have the same social grace. Josh sat in the car, smoking, flicking his ashes onto the road. When I got in, he dropped his cigarette and drove.
When we returned home, the power was still out but only for a few minutes. After we sat down, the lights and television came back on, and I startled, surprised by the sound of everything starting up again.
* * *
The next week, I forgot about the visit to Kevin’s house, the way you forget about a bill that you can’t pay. Instead, I worked as many extra hours as I could at Planned Parenthood, my latest in a series of jobs, spending the nights too tired to do much. I thought about the girls I saw during the day, many of them in for their first Pap smear in order to get on the pill. They looked nervous, excited. I didn’t want to tell them what’s ahead, that it’s not what they imagine. Instead, I thought about the first man I loved enough to get a Pap smear for, how happy I was, how even the scraping felt comfortable, something I was doing for love.
Kevin didn’t call until Wednesday night, four days after my visit. My parents called before Kevin did, told me that they wouldn’t be moving after all, wasn’t it too bad. I never told them about Josh and his face. They’ll have to see it for themselves, I thought, it would be something I wouldn’t be able to hide from them. I’d been hiding his problems for years, and it was an oddly liberating position to have something I could do nothing about. I told Josh the good news, but he didn’t respond. For once, I didn’t know if he was happy or not. The phone rang again, but I didn’t want to pick up. Josh did. We took turns doing the things we didn’t like, just as we had when we were younger.
“It’s for you,” he said.
“What do you want from me? I thought you understood,” Kevin said. I could see him by the phone, hand up in the air as if he’s drowning. It was how he gesticulated when he talked to his wife when I was around.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s over. I can’t tell you what a bad position this has put me in.”
“It’s been great for me,” not sure if I meant it or not. All I knew was that I felt the old sadness settle in, like a vivid dream that bleeds into the day. The night before, I dreamt that I was working at a stockyard, lost among the cows and pigs, waiting for someone to pick me up and drive me home. In the dream, I started to cry because I didn’t think anyone would ever love me enough to pick me up from such a horrible place.
“Who was on the line?” Josh asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s play Head on a Stick,” I said. Josh looked startled, but he smiled, a real smile above his carved one.
“What made you think of that?” he asked.
“It’s been a while,” I said. Head on a Stick was a game we played until we moved out of our parents’ house. It’s fairly basic in the particulars. When one of us felt like it, we’d yell, “Head on a stick.” That meant you’d been paralyzed in an accident from the neck down, and the other person had to do everything for you that you couldn’t do as a result of your condition. The game could go on for hours. I remembered feeding Josh, him feeding me. I missed it. “Head on a stick,” I yelled.
“What do you need?” he asked, the beginning of all Head on a Stick games.
“I want to go to bed.”
He picked me up, not much more difficult for him now than it was then. He set me down on my comforter and sifted through some T-shirts he knew I wore to bed.
“You need to change,” he said, holding up a couple of T-shirts.
“Do I get to pick which one I want?” I nodded at the red one.
He brought the T-shirt to me and took off my clothes. I didn’t make it easy for him. After all, I couldn’t move anything below my neck. After he tucked me in, he walked to the edge of the room and turned off the overhead light.
“Is there anything else?”
“I want to hear a story.”
“About what?”
I didn’t say anything. I could only look at him. There wasn’t anywhere I could go in this condition. “Tell me about your face,” I said.
He picked up my hand and traced the grin even though I wasn’t supposed to have any feeling in my hands. I couldn’t imagine how he’d done this to himself, how his neighbor had found him on the porch that they shared and called to report an emergency. I thought about that night, how I’d taken three sleeping pills before I could go to sleep, how hard it was to wake up when the hospital had called.
“It hurts to talk,” he said. I nodded, the only action I could perform in this game. He got in bed next to me, arms by his side. I closed my eyes and listened to all the noises outside, the sounds of sirens and yelling, the sounds of screeching tires against the pavement, taking comfort in the fact that other people also sometimes found it difficult to stop.
Michelle Brooks’s work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blue Mesa Review, Madison Review, Other Voices, Phoebe, Cold Mountain Review, and Long Shot. Her chapbook, Such Short Supply, was published in 2004.