Hard Mouth

  Hard Mouth

  HARD MOUTH

  Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Goldblatt

  First paperback edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Goldblatt, Amanda, author.

  Title: Hard mouth : a novel / Amanda Goldblatt.

  Description: First paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018060435 | ISBN 9781640092426

  Classification: LCC PS3607.O448 H37 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060435

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-64009-327-0

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for my family

  CONTENTS

  Hard Mouth

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Hard Mouth

  ABBOTT:

  To feed a horse you take a bag and put his fodder in it.

  COSTELLO:

  Does he stand for it?

  ABBOTT:

  Certainly.

  COSTELLO:

  You mean you put his father in a bag?

  ABBOTT:

  That’s right, and you hang his fodder on his nose.

  COSTELLO:

  Now ain’t that a pretty picture—a horse walking around with his father hanging on his nose!

  The Abbott and Costello Show, November 9, 1944

  In this story I do not mean to hide myself. Rather I want to be obvious. I want you to see, at least, me.

  Let me offer this: when I was eight I bent my mother’s gold heirloom bracelet. Then I lied about it. It was an oval cuff with stamped initials: an heirloom. I pressed it against the curb in front of the house. It crushed homely. I ruined the thing. I was horrified, powerful. I hid myself beneath the kitchen window, to wait.

  Ma had been watching. She came out the front door in her T-shirt with a wet spot at the stomach, had been scrubbing and standing too close to the kitchen sink. Would she ever learn to wear an apron, or to reduce the water pressure, or to stand further back? Her approximation of housewifery was then disinterested at best. Later it improved, or got worse, depending on your metrics.

  Crossing the yard to get to me, Ma nearly stepped on the daffodils she’d put in the week prior. She asked me what I was doing. I was an only kid; I couldn’t lay blame. I tried “on accident,” “an accident,” “accidentally.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” she said. “When you break something like this it stays broken.” A hank of hair fell from her ponytail as she spoke, and affixed itself on her sweaty cheek. “Maybe your dad will have something to say. I don’t.”

  I gave her back the ruined bracelet and she held it so that I couldn’t see but a sliver of old gold between her fingers. It winked meanly. I did not wonder whose it had been. Ma left me to sit on the stoop alone, and went off to corral the moldering dinner-and-breakfast mess. Through the open windows I could hear the splashes and mutters. I didn’t cry.

  Rather I sat where I was, shredding a blade of grass. I watched the street. It was empty of neighbors, until a bigger kid came lumbering. “Oh hey,” he said, casual in the heat. I didn’t answer. I can’t remember if this was Clint or Darren. At the time they were both big male kids I only heard about when Ma gossiped. The kid’s basketball shorts wooshed. Years later he’d be dead from a war, or a drunk driving accident. Clint one way, Darren the other—Ma wouldn’t be able to match their names with their deaths. “Does it matter?” she’d ask. In response I’d leave the room. A neighbor’s death was only an abstract breakage. Ma was not interested in goodbyes, or good at them. I think of those boys not as people but as shorthand, which is probably why I remember them at all.

  I watched Clint or Darren disappear beyond the hill’s peak. All around me there were stripped fringes of grass. I had made a bald clearing of dirt on the lawn. I was already in trouble and so went on making my harvest. It pleased me. There is, I’d learn, some freedom in the compounding of bad behavior.

  Soon Pop rolled up in the Corolla. He parked on the street as he always did—so Ma could get out later if she needed. He shuffled some heavy-sounding things in the trunk, then wrested up his briefcase, which was brown and hard sided. Pop, Dan, was tall and pleasant looking. Not celebrity handsome or catalogue handsome. Not a series regular. He had, perhaps, a kind television doctor’s face. One able to communicate sincerity and compassion with his tidy professional mien. He was warm to the touch. Ma loved him and I did too. He was beloved, which is important to this story: what we’d do for him came from this attachment, and not from any drive to duty.

  When Pop got to the stoop he squatted in his khakis and cheek-kissed me good, then looked at the grass. “Something going on?” he asked. I shrugged. “You coming in for lunch?” he asked. I shrugged again. I was not worried he would stop loving me but I was worried that I would be in his eyes reduced. This worry had set me silent. At the time I did not feel guilty about the bracelet, that emblem of my uncaring. He kissed me on the top of the head, said “Suit yourself, Miss Lady,” went inside.

  Directly I crouched under the kitchen window, to see what my parents would say to one another. But waiting, I heard only dish clinks and faucet splats. I went back to my perch, resigned, to continue my harvest. The crop was dry, green with beige papery ends that made it easy to pull one fiber from another. Soon Pop came back out and sat next to me on the step. I had missed the conspiracy. He was here to report. “Your mom’s not so happy you broke her bracelet,” he said. I wanted to tell him I had bent it. Though even I knew this was irrelevant.

  “So,” he said, “I want you to start thinking about others—about empathy.” I knew the meaning of the word. I lived twenty minutes outside Washington, in an unfancy mixed-income Maryland burb of single-family homes and townhouses and apartment buildings, where culture sloughed itself unthinkingly from the downtown museums and public radio and politics. Ma and Pop had not yet given up chipping at my starchy mulishness. They could’ve turned to some kind of Sunday school for this, but neither had any inclination toward religion.

  Pop said he had an idea. “Hop to, little one.” I trotted behind him and launched into the Corolla with its living-hot leatherette seats. Once we were in motion I asked him where we were going. “To one of my properties,” he said. I didn’t answer. The neighbors’ vinyl siding streaked into stripes as he drove.

  In these early nineties there’d been a dim valley in my father’s success as a real estate agent. When things got thin Ma would get a temporary job to goose us till Pop’s next deal: She answered phones or filled out forms, filed or fetched, delivered or doled out. Meanwhile, when Pop’s contracts ran out, properties unsold, clients would be sorry to fire him but do it anyway. Still, they liked him, and were often startled into hospitality by his charm, unfaltering in the face of his own failure. On more than one occasion, they asked us to dinner.

  At these meals I
don’t know what adult things they discussed—the economy probably, local politics, the public schools, public art, football, golf, gossip, hunting, a new-construction strip mall up on the main road; I listened unto bleariness, then excused myself to watch TVs in dens all over the neighborhood. Once there wasn’t a TV anywhere in the house and I whiled a quiet hour with nothing more than a pack of cards and a frayed finger trap. These houses were unremarkable to me as any public restroom, places to enter and use and leave.

  Now we parked in a drive. He told me I could get out so I did. We were at a biggish split-level a few streets over from ours. The owners, he told me, were away tending to their daughter, who was about to have a baby. They hoped the house would be sold when they returned in a few months; it wouldn’t be. Pop would’ve tried. For now he popped the lockbox and got the key.

  It smelled clean and stale, like the library. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and a large sliding glass door by the kitchen. It went out to a cracked patio and a small, dry water feature with a fish-shaped fountain. Inside, between floors were snub flights of stairs. Our own home was a single floor rambler. These stairs were a novelty. I tested them—moving upward and downward repeatedly—as Pop, who already had plenty of empathy, let me.

  After a while, longer than I’m sure I knew, my father tapped on the wall till I stopped. Then he took me up to the third floor, to the end of the hall, where the daughter’s childhood bedroom sat like a commemorative diorama. Seeing it, I imagined the couple had two versions of the same daughter: the first, grown up in the world, was about to give birth, toddling about with electric bills and fiddling with the coffee maker, and the second, who still inhabited this room, wore pigtails and fed the dog what she did not like from her dinner.

  The idea was convincing enough; the room was chock-full. It was not the neat anonymity of a parents’ room, nor the pleasant gold chaos of a den with its knickknacks and junk mail. It had posters and drawings, crates of toys and stacks of paper, everything organized but not neatly, all for nobody’s use. The closet door was impeded from full closure by a jumble of bags.

  On the nightstand beside me, was there a framed photograph of a heavyset, beagle-eyed man in a tuxedo jacket, staring out? I can no longer remember where he was or wasn’t. His presence would stitch itself across my young memory, both before and after he’d made his actual debut. More on this, later, possibly. I stood and looked at the frame, which was silverleaf, thick as a sausage or intestine.

  My father told me to lay down on the bed. It had its comforter but no sheets beneath, which I discovered when I wrested the fern print quilt from its tucking. The plastic of the mattress sheath sucked lewdly against the back of my thighs where my shorts did not cover.

  “Imagine you’re someone else,” he said, once I had settled.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Imagine you aren’t you.”

  I was confused but closed my eyes and tried, because I could tell he wanted me to. Behind my eyelids I saw only black in the unlit room, blinds drawn.

  “It’s important that you try this now,” he said. “Because this will be something good to know for the rest of your life—to know what it feels like for others, in any dealings you’ll ever have with anybody.”

  Of course I didn’t hold on to this. My guilt was a closed circuit. Long after this lesson—when I was hardly the same person, hardly the same cells—I would confirm that guilt and empathy were not comorbid. You could be guilty and careless. You could care without comprehension or heed of blame. It was an extra step to care enough to lock empathy and guilt together such that they could drag one another forward.

  I lay in the bed, eyes closed—doing my young best—while Pop said, “Now: imagine you are the little girl who lives here. This is your room. Your clothes are in that closet over there. Those are your charm bracelets on the dresser, and those are your field hockey trophies. That is your poster mapping all of the magical places in fairy tales. On it you’ve got a favorite toadstool. Sometimes you dream about sitting on it.

  “When I count backward from ten, you will feel yourself raising out of your own body and into this little girl’s.” He counted. “As I hit five, you’ll feel the differences. You can count them. Her eyes feel bluer. Her hair is more coarse, short like a boy’s.”

  Now I wonder where he got this hypnosis prattle: from a professional development seminar, or a late-night infomercial, or a self-help book. It didn’t matter. I was young but not gullible. I was young but aware. This was penance: I played on. My eyes and mouth were closed.

  “By the time I hit two, now, you will not even remember to notice the differences. You have always had blue eyes. You have always had curly hair. You have always had that scar on your knee.

  “When you open your eyes, you’ll simply be in your room.”

  At one I opened my eyes, looked around. I was still myself, in my still body. I imagined this revelation would deflate Pop. He’d be sad and quiet, in the way I hated. So I pretended the conversion had worked.

  I did not look over at him for a long time. Instead politely I chewed my cheeks. I looked at the ceiling and then, if it was there, into the photo-face of the beagle-eyed tuxedoed man in the silver, intestine-thick frame. He had an inchworm of a wrinkle between his brows and I felt very endeared to him. I considered that there might be people who I didn’t know currently, who would one day be very dear to me. I worried the roof of my mouth, that interior lunar landscape. I sighed and continued this.

  Soon I felt a new presence in the room. I looked up at the strange man in the doorway. He seemed pal-rich, flourishing with fondness. Instinctually, I liked him. “Do you see?” he said. I shrugged, unsure what he meant. He asked me did I want to go get ice cream.

  The stillness of the house felt incorrect, unadjusted, and I found I wanted to leave it. After following him down the stairs and out of the house, I felt a bit better.

  The man opened the passenger side door for me and once we were moving I lifted the seat’s side lever to recline. From my new low vantage I got treetops galore, green poufs whizzing by, punctuated by dipping power lines. I yawned a bit and the man giggled under his breath and I didn’t ask him why.

  At Baskin-Robbins I ordered a scoop of rainbow sherbet in a cake cone. Though I knew the man across the table was my father, I couldn’t stop looking at him like he was someone from history, who had lived a very long time ago. As if he were the man in the silver frame. But he was not. He was here, breathing. He did then twiddle his thumbs like someone I might’ve known.

  Outside the ice cream parlor I asked the man if I could ask a woman with a large white poodle if I could pet it. He said yes but the woman said no, and so I merely watched it licking its ice cream cup across the sidewalk as we got into the car and rolled out of the strip mall parking lot and down the street.

  When the man brought me home for dinner with his wife, she looked at me cheerily, as she set the table in a haphazard fashion. Her long hair was pulled up but not neatly. “I made your egg noodles,” she said. “I’m not mad at you anymore.” I didn’t know what she meant by this. The woman told me to wash my hands. After first encountering a linen closet, I found a bathroom where I used extra soap. Do I see this now as some theatre I was trying? No. I was sincere and then sincere again—and courted some strangeness in doing so.

  From the bathroom I retraced my steps to sit and eat the other girl’s egg noodles, beside the woman and the man, at a big-leafed dining table with much more room than needed. The woman told me a story from when she was little but I couldn’t concentrate on the story because the egg noodles seemed to be slightly off-color and also because it didn’t seem very important. I was not then a reliable calculator of significance; I was acting on instinct and cue.

  After dinner the woman led me back to the bathroom and said I should take a bath before I went to sleep. I washed myself in the strangers’ soap. It smelled like flowers, and baby powder, a heavy hug. I put my face under the strange water.
I peed as I let the water out, and then put a towel over my shoulders. It was pink and thin. The woman stuck her arm into the bathroom and handed me a blue flannel robe. “Here’s your robe,” she said, as if telling the truth.

  In the cool dark of the room where I was staying, the new shadows prickled. Here there was no closet door, only the one for entering or exiting. In silhouette a freestanding wardrobe hunkered. I closed my eyes and thought of the story I had once heard about the bad girl who had ruined a family heirloom. She was very young, and silly, and didn’t know what she did. It was easy to be like that at her age. Now I know it is easy to be like that at any age—easier than anything else, to be heedless. There were crickets there harping outside the window, and the sauntering light of cruising cars on the road outside. I fell asleep, and do not remember dreaming.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, when I woke up, that I saw my room and felt it to be mine. That I heard the fuzzy morning noises coming from down the hall and knew them to be signs of Ma and Pop. I didn’t feel good or safe, and I didn’t feel bad.

  HERE’S AN ADDENDUM: I wrote about all this in sophomore English class, a time otherwise without catharsis, a time when I was merely battling to blot out my own angsty ruminations. It was my first explanation of being, of meaning-making. It was uneven, but heartfelt. At the time it was profitable for me to believe I’d learned my lesson. I volunteered to share it with the class.

  As I read my hands shook badly in the air. Already I regretted sharing something that meant anything to me. My teacher at the time was a mom-aged woman with skin so gray it looked glue coated. After I was finished she said only: “Thank you, Denise.”

  We didn’t like each other, or, that was what I thought then, and though I had nothing in particular against English, it was the only class I didn’t share with my only friend Ken. He’d show up after, leaning against some lockers and tucking his hair behind his ears—a habit I recognized from teenagers on television. I’d shuffle out, and he’d lean and tuck and say, “How was it?” And I’d shrug and grumble and say what a bitch Ms. Landon was. I wasn’t wrong, but what does that matter.