NOBODY’S BUSINESS by Victoria Patterson
Stan was sitting cross-legged on the floor, having woken a few minutes earlier in his mother’s walk‑in closet. He’d been kept warm by her clothes pulled loose from their hangers, and her jacket rolled into a ball had served as a pillow. Last night, cocooned inside the closet, he’d gone on one of his private crying jags, the worst so far: limbs loose, eyes like rivers, and then – he wasn’t sure when it had happened or how much time had elapsed – he must have fallen asleep. But nothing really shocked him anymore.
The closet door was open, sun shining through the thin curtains near a dresser, light striping the carpet, and if he listened carefully, he could just barely hear Rita, the caretaker who came on Tuesdays and Thursdays – the T days – bathing his mother in the downstairs’ bathroom. Water lapped in the bathtub, there was the faint whish of the showerhead: his mother probably slumped on the steel bench – Rita running a washcloth over her, and then rinsing shampoo from her hair, soap running down the bumpy line of her spine. When his mother had first lifted her nightgown for him to bathe her – her nipples surprisingly long – with his embarrassment, he’d also felt a sense of privilege. She was letting him see exactly what it was like, hiding nothing, as she’d always done with him.
He took a long breath, hands at his knees (he wore the same jeans and shirt from yesterday), and then he let the air out through his nose, collecting his thoughts, his strength. The phone rang: he thought he’d let it go to the machine, but his father depended on him to answer, calling every morning, and he rose to reach the phone before the fifth ring. Their conversations were perfunctory, usually concerning money and practical obligations. Most of what his father said didn’t even attach to Stan, his voice falsely upbeat, and now he was congratulating Stan on passing his driver’s test, asking whether he would try out for the soccer team – Stan giving monosyllabic yes, no, thanks responses – and then his father said, “Sullivan’s, right?”
“Five to ten,” Stan said, knowing that Howard was proving that he knew Stan’s work schedule. His father wanted him to quit the restaurant job – he gave them plenty of money – but Stan liked going there because no one asked him how he was doing or how his mother was doing, and the hours were eaten away in a comfortingly dull routine.
“How’s she doing?” his father asked, his voice lowered.
“She finished her bath, I think.”
He heard a yip: his mother accidentally hitting her dog, Peanut, with her wheelchair again. Peanut hovered around Vanessa like a cloud. His father wanted more information, but Stan didn’t have anything to say. More than two years ago, after three months of unexplainable arm and leg twitching and a series of falls, she’d been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease; certainly not what his father had in mind for his beautiful younger wife, his third wife, his wife to have fun with, having already acquired two bitter ex‑wives and four grown daughters, three of them older than Vanessa.
His father asked him to put Vanessa on the phone, and Stan went downstairs. She was in her wheelchair in the den, patches of dark showing in her robe where Rita hadn’t dried her well enough – fuck, how many times did he have to tell these people to do it right? Big wooden doors separated the den from the hallway, and the heavy curtains were kept closed, giving it a perpetual timelessness, slightly dank and dark – a medicinal smell.
Peanut was becoming more neurotic, his little legs trembling as he peed on the wood floors, as if unable to hold in his fear, leaving puddles that the caretakers blanketed with paper towels. But now Peanut was on Vanessa’s lap, the tip of his tongue poked out – fingernail-sized and pink – and his entire body shivering. He looked like a retarded rabbit.
His mother slowly shook her head when she saw the phone, and she kept her eyes on him, a finality in her stare, a connection – all his. In her wheelchair, which she’d named Tara because it was so big and expensive, she was just a slip of a person, giving the impression of strength and weakness, like a child driving a towering truck. She’d adopted Peanut from the pound four years ago – a scraggly small white mutt with a broken leg – and two weeks ago, while they’d been watching I Love Lucy, she’d kept her eyes on the screen, Peanut whimpering and trembling on her lap, and in a slow strained whisper had told Stan that he needed to “put Peanut out of his misery.” When he watched television with her, it was almost like they were stoned, a mutually connective stupor. She could ask him to eat his foot and he wouldn’t blanch. But this time his heart had stiffened, although he knew that it made sense: Peanut snarled and snapped at everyone else (he’d bitten Stan twice and nipped two of the caretakers), and the more his mother’s body deteriorated, the more the dog lost his mind.
His mother couldn’t eat much and she didn’t talk much, but since then, she reminded him all the time of her request, a constant hum in her eyes. Now he tried to pass her the phone, but she bowed her head like a kid refusing medicine. She’d always been detached with his father, even in the beginning when Stan was a child, and she wasn’t angry with him for deserting them, which made it difficult for Stan to be mad at him.
“She won’t take the phone,” he said, embarrassed for his father. There was no answer, and he knew that his father was taking the information in. He heard the swoosh and flap of Rita shaking out a sheet. His mother was clever, more so than his father, even though she’d never been to college, and she was cavalier, indifferent – dramatic eye rolls and sighs when Howard visited or kissed her – as if now that she was dying, she didn’t have time for such nonsense.
He turned his back to her, wanting to somehow give his father privacy. “All right,” Howard said. “I love you, Son. I’ll call later.” Stan was a coward like his father because he said, “Goodbye,” when he was thinking, Goodbye, asshole. It bothered him, this need to protect his father. Where did it come from?
He set the cordless phone on the desk, and when he faced his mother, she crooked her head. Her skin was so transparent that he could see blue forking veins on her forehead. Often he impulsively answered her while watching her mouth work to dribble words out. “I’m not late,” he said. Her eyes had become fiercer: he saw flashes of light sometimes. She tapped her head with a fingernail, and then, tired out, placed her arm back on Tara’s armrest, her hand curled inward. Sometimes she wore his socks on her hands. “I don’t need a shower,” he said, and when she grimaced, he said, “fine, I’ll take one.”
She’d taken him to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Japan when he was a kid, taught him to drive when he was six in an abandoned parking lot, letting him sit in her lap and steer. Once, when he’d crapped his pants at school in the second grade, she’d told him to get used to it, that it wouldn’t be the first time he’d be humiliated, and that life was all about heartbreak and loss and humiliation, and the sooner he became acquainted with these, the less they could overtake him. But she’d also said that hell was a made up place, it didn’t exist. When we die, she’d said, we just start over again. She’d pull him out of elementary school on whims, make excuses for the grim office ladies – untimely deaths of relatives, doctor and dentist appointments – and then bring him to museums, the zoo, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm. And she’d told him about condoms, STDs, erections, wet dreams, way before the other kids had started talking about these things, warning him that his voice would crack, he’d grow pubic hair, but that the worst part – the part that no one could prepare him for, no school film or sex education class – would be that he’d eventually get his heart shattered and shatter someone else’s heart in return.
She liked for him to notice things: the way the sky at dawn appeared to be holding on to the night; harvest moons and hunter moons; how people loved freaks in movies but in real life they shunned them. She said that there were two kinds of people: those who asked why and those who asked what’s in it for me, and that it was best to avoid the latter because they were dull.
Her hair was tangled and wet, and he decided he might brush it. He had the time: he could be late to school. Besides, although Rita was one of the more conscientious caretakers, the caretakers were inferior when it came to the details of caring for her. He was privy to her inner life, the one that his father wanted to know and would never know – limitless and unexpected – as if she were whispering in his ear, including him, preparing him. Like his heartbeat, she was always there, and when he tried to imagine her dead, he could not.
She’d been a model. She used to make him laugh by chucking triangular slices of toast at her photographs that Howard had displayed around the house. At her request, the photos were now stacked, face down, in the garage beside her tennis racquets. In most of them, she had a mocking expression, seductive and cruel. When the modeling jobs had slowed, she’d married Howard. Stan had been part of the package, a brooding seven-year-old. He’d always wanted a father, and, fortunately, Howard had always wanted a son. With Howard came a home, calmness and a routine. Almost immediately, he’d called Howard Father, like the position was a formal one, never Dad or Daddy, and Howard had returned the favor, calling him Son. They’d stepped easily, happily, into their roles.
But when Vanessa got sick – really sick – eight years into the marriage, not just the arm and leg twitching and unexplainable falls, but after there was a name for it and right about the same time she could no longer drive the white Corvette Howard had given her, that was when Howard had moved to an apartment – “an extended business trip” – abandoning her to the caretakers, and to Stan.
Stan had originally gone into her bedroom last night to play the one message of hers that he’d discovered on the answering machine – voice confident, quick, laced with wit – “Hey, Honey, I’ll be home soon, after I – hmm – let’s see – hit Vegas, play the slots, maybe go to Paris, I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll be home soon. Bye!” He’d re-played it again and again, her bedroom an eerie museum with its shiny steel workout machines and mirrors, her walk‑in closet full of the clothes that she no longer wore.
Ditching high school was a fairly new habit for Stan, and Nelson was his ditching companion. Not a jock or a druggie or a drama kid, but an unconventional sophomore, like Stan, a surfer who’d recently lost his plastic-surgeon father – whom he openly admitted to hating – to a heart attack; and whose goal in life was to make headgear and belly-dancing skirts and bikini-like tops from hemp and other flora, for the countless women in his future that he planned to seduce and then photograph with them wearing his creations; who smoked pot and talked about “leaving the earth all together some day and living in the true glory of the cosmos.” Tall and handsome, with long blond hair and blue eyes, his charisma and looks and guilelessness made up for his deficits; he was so incredibly polite and charming with teachers that he usually got away with trespasses, and his grades were bumped up, to keep him academically afloat. Parents liked him. He was popular with his peers as well, able to float past the typical cliques; and by bestowing his friendship on Stan, he’d increased Stan’s status within the high school, while at the same time, blessedly, the students and teachers usually left Stan alone.
“Dad, I miss you,” Nelson said, reciting a tribute he’d written for his father during his math class, in accordance with his therapist’s instruction. Reclined on the sofa next to Stan, he slapped the paper, making it rustle, before continuing: “You know your 1957 Mercedes Benz 300SL that cost as much as a house? I’m glad you gave it to Doreen. I didn’t want it anyway. Even if you never gave me a fucking thing. Not even your love.” Doreen, Nelson’s stepmom, was working-out in the family gym – a frantic pulse of music coming from that room – having ignored them when they came inside, despite the fact that they were home at 10:15 a.m. on a school day. “Hey, by the way: thanks for the child abuse, Dad! It’s what made me who I am. Remember when you shoved me, made me fall against the cabinet? I’ve got the scar on my head – you know, the one near my ear, seven stitches. Well, thanks Dad. I mean it. I’m a lover not a fighter! I’ll always remember you, Dr. Fuckhead.” He smiled, and Stan was tempted to say, Man, that’s really sad, and acknowledge the grief and pain underneath his bluster. Nelson noticed, looking somberly back at him. Then he laughed, shook it off. “There’s more,” he said, looking at the paper. “And I drew a picture” – he displayed the backside of the paper, so that Stan saw a stick figure man with a large head, holding a baby, presumably Nelson. There was a heart inside the baby, and the stick figure Dad was gripping it with his hand, as if to pull it from the baby’s chest.
“I’m thinking of changing my name,” Nelson said, folding his paper into a tiny square. He twisted his hips and extended his leg to slip the square inside his jean’s pocket. “Something more artistic. I don’t want his name anymore: Nelson Morgan the third. C’mon, man. That’s just not right.”
Stan was silent.
“Any ideas?”
“No,” Stan said.
“What about Hee Chee Chong Ching? How does that sound?”
Stan didn’t answer.
“Hey, man,” said Nelson, reclining further into the couch. “I looked it up, that disease your mom has.” He paused, serious. Stan’s temples clenched. He knew his mother was dying but he couldn’t believe it. With an embellished accent, Nelson said, “The French call it Maladie de Charcot.”
“I sort of wish you hadn’t done that,” Stan said.
“Dude,” Nelson said; and then he exaggerated the word – “Dude” – as in, Are you okay? That’s some serious shit.
Stan waited, face down, for the emotions to pass. Since he’d fallen asleep in his mother’s closet a week ago, he’d felt himself turning inside. Even when he was in class, answering a teacher’s question, or ditching with Nelson, or, right now, scratching his arm and licking his bottom lip, he sensed that he was folding up on himself, like Nelson’s little square of paper. Soon, he’d fold himself so tight that like a magic trick, he’d disappear.
“Thing is,” Nelson said, “I’ve been thinking about her, about Peanut. We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to.”
In a moment of weakness, wanting to retain his friend’s attention, Stan had told Nelson about the dog death request, and almost immediately, he’d regretted it. He was incredibly private about his mother, even breaking up with his girlfriend because of her sympathy. He’d been stroking and kissing Tina on his bed one afternoon, his knee between her thighs, hand up her blouse, when his mother had called out for him (Rita somewhere outside on a fucking smoke break); by the tone and urgency of her voice, he knew that she needed immediate help with the bathroom. Tina sat on his bed waiting in his room while he helped his mother to the toilet, lifted her nightgown, held her steady as she shit, and then wiped her ass (avoiding her knowing stare). But it had been like Tina was in the bathroom with them, and he’d decided never to bring anyone to his home again. It was nobody’s business. When he returned to his bedroom, Tina’s look of compassion had sickened him, humiliated him, and he’d wanted to throw her down on the bed and fuck the sympathy from her. When he’d asked her to leave, he was so angry, hurt, and embarrassed he could hardly speak. He missed the oblivion of sex but not Tina.
“I can’t exactly explain,” Nelson said, “but I want to feel useful. I want to do this for your mom, for you. I have a plan. A good plan. It’s like, well, like I need to do this, to prove it, like my dad will be watching, you know, like: you’re dead, motherfucker, but watch this!”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Stan said, and he figured that Nelson would let it drop.
After a few days, Nelson still wouldn’t forget about Peanut, and he grew impatient with Stan. The next Thursday, when Nelson pulled out his bong and tried to pass it to Stan, Stan refused, and Nelson watched him judgmentally over the bong, his mouth sucking at the head. He was barefoot and he’d sloppily painted his toenails and fingernails a slushy purple color, the polish fringing the skin around his nails. He let the smoke out, and said, “You’ll feel better! What’s your fucking problem? I’m so sick of your sorry ass fucking pussy do nothing loser attitude, you pussy-ass motherfucker. Why don’t you trust me?”
“I’m leaving,” Stan said, but oddly, he wasn’t that angry.
“Good,” Nelson said, face contorted like he wanted to cry.
Stan was relieved to go to Sullivan’s and bus tables that evening. Outside the wind blew with ocean, a steady whispering howl, which, along with the dark clouds, predicated a storm. Storms made Stan more alive, alert. And his emotions seemed more manageable at work, less likely to spill out from him, with the indifferent customers, the waiters ordering him around, bossy. Sullivan’s was a steakhouse with dark wood booths, candlelit and pleasing to the eye, a large bar taking the side of the restaurant, with five giant TVs playing sporting events at low volume, and his shift passed in a numb reprieve. A long plastic table in the back alleyway beneath a partial awning was where the employees ate on their breaks, and as Stan carried a plate of steaming spaghetti with some forbidden shrimp hidden under the pasta, he saw that Nancy, the hostess, undaunted by the cold weather, was the only one sitting there, her back to the restaurant, a book open at the table. Her black hair whipped in the wind, and she wore a man’s large green fleece jacket. She wasn’t pleased to see Stan, but no less than she would have been to see anyone, obviously enjoying her solitude. “Excuse me,” Stan said as he seated himself opposite, because it would have seemed rude to sit away from her.
“You are excused,” she said with a strange emotionless smile, her eyes downcast. And then she began flipping through the book – an Intermediate English textbook – but with the wind flapping the pages and his distraction, she finally gave up and closed it. She looked at him for the first time with curiosity, and after some time had passed, she said, “Community College, to better my English.”
“You speak well,” he said, and it was true. She spoke English, her second language, more carefully, thoughtfully, than anyone he had ever known, almost as if she were imbuing the words with the meanings they deserved. She also dressed differently than the other girls he knew, more ladylike, genteel, not so casual, with skirts and dresses and belts and high heels and matching accessories (even hats and gloves), and he imagined she planned her wardrobe with great care, setting the clothes on a chair the night before. And she wore more makeup: he could see the finish of foundation and powder on her face; her lips were carefully lined; and her eyes were surrounded by dark blue eyeliner, eyelashes thick – almost pudgy – with mascara.
She took his compliment with a steady look, an acknowledgement. And then she said, “Many are so lazy in this town. Don’t you think? All these opportunities, everyone complaining, complaining. Oh, my life is so hard. Oh, I have so much trouble. Oh, I need to buy more things with my daddy’s money.” He knew that she’d been Miss Chili Cook-off a few years past, that she was seventeen, and that she was from Guadalajara, Mexico, but that she now lived with a man she called Pop Pop, and his wife, who she called Nana, because he’d been at Sullivan’s when Pop Pop had brought her there, introduced her to Billy, their boss – something unsavory about the interaction: Pop Pop a family friend of Nancy’s father’s, helping her in America, both Billy and Pop Pop standing back, admiring her. Why was she named Nancy, he wondered, and not Maria or Teresa or something that sounded Mexican? And Pop Pop disgusted him, fat and pasty, bulging eyes, a disturbing proprietary air, as if he owned Nancy and was lending her to Billy (“She’s like a daughter to me,” he said, moving forward, putting his large hands on Nancy’s shoulders).
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Nancy asked, and he looked down at his plate, saw that the spaghetti wasn’t steaming anymore. He’d lost his appetite, a blankness growing inside him – that feeling of disappearing. “Wait here,” she said, a questioning look on her face. “I’ll be right back.” And then she was pressing her chair back, rising. She pushed through the back door, saying, “Stay,” and the door shut behind her.
There was a folded piece of paper sticking out from her textbook, and he knew that he had time to take a quick look. He felt his mother urging him to hurry, hurry, and he opened the book, saw that she had listed her goals in neat careful block letters, reading the first two – send money home, get good grades – before shutting the book with a flush of shame. That was his mother infringing on Nancy’s privacy, something he would not ordinarily do, and he concentrated on the palm trees bending with the wind, dark against dark. Sprinkles began to wet his hands and arms, bigger drops landing on his head, and suddenly, grief was twisting inside him, as if his mother sat in Tara, reminding him about Peanut. His plate of spaghetti was getting cold. And then Nancy returned, holding a glass filled with an unidentifiable food – it looked like there were streamers coiled inside.
“Calamari,” she said, with a full smile. He’d never seen her smile like that before, and it made her seem unprotected, like a child; he was slapped back to the present, as if she’d reached over and pinched him – very hard – on the thigh. He saw that the cluster pearl earrings she wore were clip-ons – her ears were not pierced – and something about this made him sad for her, but a clear kind of sadness, tender and sure of itself. She handed him the glass and he took his fork, curled a mesh of slippery calamari in the prongs, and lifted it to his mouth, taking a large bite. She was watching, chewing with him, the taste of limes and lettuce and rain – and after he swallowed, he said, “That’s really, really good.”
She took her own fork, and this time he chewed with her, watching. The rain was hitting them, her hair sticking to her face. He didn’t want their encounter to end, but he knew that they would get soaked, and then she put her fork down and said, “We must go back inside now.” A familiar stinging sensation rose inside his throat, but he knew he wouldn’t cry. “Wow,” she said, looking up at the swirling raindrops, and then there was a loud swooshing of wind and rain and palm fronds, flapping hair into her face. She came across to his side and he rose from the table. She brushed the hair from her cheek, looked at him with an expression that was both practical and serious, and then she turned, taking their plates, and he followed her inside.
When he came home, Rita was sitting at the kitchen table with her nurse shoes crossed underneath the chair. She was smoking a cigarette, a small plastic ashtray beside a glass of milk. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in the house but he let it slide, considering she’d kept a window open. She ran her cigarette under the tap, washed out her glass and ashtray, set them beside the sink, picked up her paperback novel, and then left by the back door, shutting it gently behind her.
He checked on his mother, her body slumped on the foldout sofa bed, Peanut growling beside her, so that he couldn’t come closer; and then he went to his bedroom and checked his e‑mails. Nelson had sent him an e‑mail, the subject heading: From Hee Chee Chong Ching. From what he could gather, the e‑mail consisted of a long list of Spam subject headings about penis enhancement, Nelson’s way of apologizing. Stan read:
Boost your size with Mega Dick
StrongCock
Three Extra Inches of Manhood
Become a Solid Eight Inches
Are You Small in the Pants?
A Larger Dick is only a Click Away
No More Semi-Hardons
Powerful Dick
Don’t Get Off before She does
Have the Biggest Dick at the Bar
Women Can Tell How Big It Is
How’s the Wife?
Fatten up your Love Muscle
Feed Your Dick
Your Dick Needs Help
Full, Thick Hardons
Make your Dick Loooong
Are you Well Endowed?
Does it just hang there?
What Will the Wife Say?
Extra Large Manhood
PowerCock
Let the Big Dick Fairy Bless You
Big Man with a Big Dick
It’s the Only Dick You Have
Make Her Scream Your Name
She’ll Hurt So Good
SuperDick
Bless Yourself with a Huge Dick
A Dose of Manhood
Women Are Unhappy with Small Dicks
Penetrate Deeper
Your Trouser Snake
By the time he’d finished reading, he knew that he wanted Nelson to help with Peanut, and he e‑mailed him back: Let’s take care of it.
Within a half hour, Nelson arrived with a cat carrier, and they lured Peanut from the den with a slice of turkey. Stan was relieved when Nelson didn’t say anything about his mother, didn’t even look at her sleeping on the sofa bed, dead to the world via her medications. And Peanut fought, growling and wild, smacking against the sides of the carrier, froth at his mouth. As Nelson loaded Peanut into the back seat of his Volkswagen van, he said, “Don’t worry: I know what I’m doing,” but his eyes looked startled, as if he were trying to convince himself, and he didn’t argue when Stan got into the passenger seat.
At Newport Animal Hospital, Nelson waited quietly while Stan handed the sympathetic woman behind the counter the Visa his father had given him for emergencies, and as she ran it through the machine, Peanut growled and shivered in the carrier at his feet. Stan realized that Nelson had already spoken with the woman, and that she was aware of his situation, but he insisted on paying, even when Nelson showed him the wad of bills in his pocket. “Dr. Smith will assess Peanut,” the woman said, setting the Visa and the slip for him to sign on the counter, “but most likely, with the dog’s history, he’ll be euthanized by the end of the week, and the three-hundred twenty-five will take care of everything.” He was about to sign the credit card slip, but the next thing he knew, he was out the door, gasping for air.
He leaned against the wall of the Animal Hospital, closed his eyes. His body shivered, and he felt only misery and despair.
Within minutes, Nelson joined him. Before Stan could say anything, Nelson, with a look of unwavering tenderness, said, “Let’s go, man,” and Stan understood that the clerk had let Nelson forge his signature. He followed Nelson’s figure in the dark to the van, and when Nelson unlocked and opened the passenger door for Stan, he felt their friendship sinking into a deeper silent realm.
The next morning, Stan woke with a start. He ran downstairs, and when he entered the den, Sharon, the Monday Wednesday Friday caretaker, was already helping his mother into Tara, lifting her by her underarms and sliding her into place. Sharon was leaned over with her back to him, arranging his mother’s legs, when she said, “Looks like Peanut got out. I can’t find him,” and his mother was staring at him over Sharon, her eyes blazing.
The high school had contacted Stan’s father about his absences, but his father had chosen not to punish him – at least not yet. “Son, what can I do?” he asked over the telephone, the murmur of a television in the background. It occurred to Stan how lonely his father was, and that his mother had probably asked Howard to leave when she got sick, his love blooming helplessly with her illness and rejection. And that she’d probably never loved him.
His father would talk about Stan’s future, and college. A career. He’d encourage Stan to see a therapist. He was seeing one, he’d tell Stan, for the first time, and it really did help to have a professional to talk to. Something stirred inside Stan, banged at his chest. He thought of Nelson’s stick figure Dad, snatching the heart from the baby Nelson. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Okay,” his father said. “I may be losing your mom but I’m not going to lose you.”
His mother had only looked at him, letting him know that it was fine with her if he ditched, as long as he passed his classes. But she had far more to concern her than Stan ditching a class every now and then, although something had changed since Peanut had gone. Lately, she disconnected from him, averting her fierce eyes, letting him out of her stare, and he wondered if she was protecting him, passing him over to his father, to Nelson, to whoever else might care for him – folding herself away from him. But he knew that was impossible, no matter how she tried.
Nancy’s bedroom was how he’d imagined it: big, soft bed with a dust ruffle, and so many fat pillows that she had to remove some, put them on the floor, just so that they had space to sit; beige walls with framed paintings of sunflowers and daisies; a skirted and mirrored vanity table with perfumes and makeup and two hairbrushes; everything clean and organized. In other words, a room that would never quite be hers, but would always be Nana and Pop Pop’s guest room, with Nancy living in it. She’d opened a window, set the curtain back so that they could see the side of another house, a hedge and a water heater.
She’d explained that she was older, more serious about life and goals, and that she wasn’t interested in him as a boyfriend. Instead of arguing (she was only a year older), he’d agreed, and it had taken a burden off, allowed them to talk candidly, without the backdrop of persuasion. They timed their breaks, and sometimes he quizzed her on her vocabulary words, enjoying how she made the words seem like something else, like something completely her own, with her mispronunciations. She knew that his mother was dying, but she didn’t ask about his family; and he surprised himself by telling her things, even about Nelson and Peanut. (“I think Peanut is in dog heaven,” she’d said. “A big field, a place for dogs.”) She was defensive and quiet when he asked about Pop Pop, turning her head from him. And she didn’t talk about her family because it “makes me too sad,” except to tell him that she was the eldest, and that she loved her parents and her five siblings “more than my life.” They’d gone to the beach twice and swam in the surf. She’d worn a conservative black one-piece, cut low at her thighs and high at her chest, and he’d looked away from her when she’d toweled off: she was too much to take in. She would marry someone wealthy, he decided. She was on a course, and good for her.
But now that they were inside her bedroom, an energy hummed between them, as if they were haloed in light. She was supposed to interview him for a class project, and she’d assembled a tiny microphone and a tape recorder on the bed; and when she settled herself beside him – kicked off her shoes and sat next to him – he watched her thighs, heard them brush against each other. She folded her legs beneath her, and he was surprised, having never really seen a younger woman wearing pantyhose, a darker seam at her toes.
Pop Pop had been reclined in a La-Z-Boy watching a football game as she’d led Stan through the hallway, saying, “He’s part of my class project,” and he’d felt the heat of Pop Pop’s stare, a surge of mutual disgust. And then he’d wondered if he’d sensed Pop Pop’s interest in Nancy because it matched his, but that idea repulsed him.
“Testing, testing,” Nancy said into the tiny microphone. But then she clicked the recorder off, set it on the bedside table. She looked down at her lap. “I don’t have a project,” she said. “I don’t know what questions to ask.” She looked up then, grave and earnest. “I lied,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I do things all the time that I don’t understand.”
“I miss my family,” she said, looking down again, tears wobbly at her eyelids.
“I miss my mom,” he said, “and she lives with me. Sometimes I can’t feel anyone. I miss people and they’re right there. But it’s really me that’s not there.”
She looked up, sober and concerned.
“Will you go back?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he said, “Can’t you go back to them? Just go back to them. Go home.” But as he watched her, he saw that it was far more complicated.
She smiled then, reached for his hand. And then she guided it over her blouse, onto her breast, onto her heart, which rose and fell with her breathing, warm, silky, the shape of his palm. Her heartbeat pulsed. He felt himself slide into sensation, moving closer, leaning over so that his mouth touched her hair. Everything seemed unreal, and he was both sheltered and floating in anticipation, reminding him of his mother’s intimacy: limitless, close, constant, unknown, and then she removed his hand from her chest, continuing to hold it firmly in hers, pressed against the bed. He closed his eyes, leaned into her neck. And he wanted to tell her how scared he was, how lost, but then she moved her head, whispered, “No, no. I can’t go home.”
Victoria Patterson is the author of Drift, a collection of interlinked short stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Her novel, This Vacant Paradise, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in 2011.