Hard Mouth Read online

  An alcoholic vapor did seem to be issuing from my poor pores. I couldn’t tell if he was listening to me. The house had been overtaken by the food’s garlicky savor. The cartons crowded on a lazy Susan. I sat down at the dining table, between Pop and Ken. Ken sat next to Ma. Then there was a chair, then there at the end of the table, again, was Pop. I imagined us as clock hatches. We began spooning food onto plates.

  Pop reached his hand over to mine. “Hey honey,” he said. In his other hand was a balled-up napkin.

  “Hey Pop,” I said, and opened the box of crab Rangoon to give him one. “Veggies?” I asked. They were in a white sauce, all cornstarch and salt and sugar, lascivious pea pods and suspect shoots. Pop demurred.

  I turned up from the food and hung the vegetable carton in the air. “Anyone?”

  Ken took it and I took my own crab Rangoon and began to snap its pastry corners. It tasted like a fryer with a tang of factory-by-the-sea.

  “Will you move Pop’s tea closer to him?” Ma asked.

  “I hate it when you call him Pop,” I said. “Just call him Dan like everyone else. And he should call you Marilyn, never Ma.”

  “Okay, fine, will you move Dan’s tea?”

  “Don’t give your parents such a hard time,” Ken said. I made a loopy comedienne face and went back to my Rangoon.

  “Is that all you’re eating?” Ma asked. I clipped my chin at her own empty plate. “What? I’m old. My stomach is small.” I told her that was dumb.

  There was too much food on the table. It disgusted me: the vegetables and the Rangoon, scallops and string beans and General Tso’s chicken, sweet-and-sour and egg drop, four luck pork and shrimp lo mein, craggy platters of rice. I pushed the lazy Susan around and around until Ken told me to stop because I was making him seasick.

  I got up for a glass of water. When I looked through the kitchen window into the front yard, I saw the brush grass and, beyond, one-stories with carports, both sides of the street all parked up with dinged SUVs and shitty sedans. Like a scene from a movie or dream I recalled then the view from Omar’s condo: the highway, its distant motoring mutter. I was back on the ground floor now.

  When I tuned back in I saw that Ma had at last taken some vegetable fried rice. Everyone was chewing, even Pop. With a pained face he was chewing, and swallowing, too.

  “How’s work?” Ma asked Ken.

  “Usual. I got some new supervisor, the manager’s kid. He’s nice but he doesn’t know how to work with people.”

  “Maybe he should just work with flies, like Denise,” Ma said.

  I stuck out my tongue, even though it had chewed wonton wrapper on it.

  “Denise, close your mouth!” Ma said. Then she laughed.

  “It’s the see-food diet,” I said. I was doing a reenactment of a movie I’d seen once.

  From the end of the table, Pop began to guffaw. It was an industrial noise. His body, in those days, never seemed to have enough moisture.

  “Easy, Dan,” Ma said.

  “Let him laugh at my funny joke,” I said.

  “If it was funny, maybe,” Ken said. He got up and got Pop a glass of water. Pop patted his arm, and then we were all sitting again, chewing again, except Pop. We all noticed.

  “Pop has something to tell you guys,” Ma said, nearly formally.

  “You mean Dan,” I said.

  “Pop has something to tell you guys,” she said.

  We all looked at the gray man at the end of the table, propped up on his pillows. He was only at the end of his fifties, but brittle looking, everywhere except his eyes: that firm soft stare wouldn’t yet quit.

  “Denny,” Pop spoke. “Ken. I’m not getting any treatment this time. We’re just going to let everything take its course.”

  I imagined then a large boulder, lobbed off a quarry cliff, into a bottomless depth of water. Someone had muted the scene. I searched and saw Ma, still, with her mouth open slightly, caught between rest and action. Ken was already up, hugging Pop at his seat. I got up too. I hugged too. One or fifty minutes later Ma was there. Soon we were all hugging each other, in the still-bright light of an August evening, in some room among other rooms, in some house among other houses, in some suburb among other suburbs, in some metropolitan area in some state, along other states, along the rest of the country, along its countless peopled features.

  Some think this is what love feels like: this quick stomach drop, this timeless, hazy drowse. They’re wrong. This is the beginning of loss. How does a moment like this end? I found my face wet. Someone else was crying also. Or maybe it was only the other person crying. I opened my eyes but saw only shadowed limbs and torsos abstracted. I shut my eyes again and imagined the boulder at the bottom of the quarry water, having hit rocky sand, settling in.

  Ken, our fine unrelated familiar, was the first to speak. “We all support you, Dan,” he said. “If it seems like the right thing to do, then we support you.” His words were muffled in our hug.

  At last we all straightened up. Ken sat back down and Ma sat back down and I kneeled beside Pop. Though already I was returning to my scalding self, apart from this intimacy. Soon those who had been eating were eating again. The grit on the floor bit into my knees. I sunk into a cross-legged position, and fished for the rest of my crab Rangoon like I was getting something off a high shelf. I chewed it slowly beside Pop’s leg. He petted me. I chewed the Rangoon into a salty paste, then found a napkin to spit it out. The paste was faintly pink. Later in bed I would discover with my tongue the shreds of my cheek’s interior, which I had been chewing unthoughtfully along with the dumpling.

  Soon enough the meal was over and Pop was escorted by Ken to bed. Ma started with the dishes.

  “You’re going to have to take the leftovers if Marilyn doesn’t want them,” Ken announced when he returned to the kitchen. The table was wrecked with grease.

  “I won’t even eat them though,” I protested. “Take them.”

  “I sure as hell don’t want them,” said Ma, clattering over the dishwasher.

  I asked Ken why couldn’t he take them. With my fingers I calipered his side. “You should eat!”

  “So what have you been doing with yourself, Denise?” Ma asked. She held out a saucer of fortune cookies in their merry cellophane. She changed the subject anytime she liked.

  “The usual,” I said. I didn’t want to take a fortune cookie so I didn’t. It was difficult to understand what I was doing there, anymore. No one had touched the ice cream. The carton gave off a thin pool of water.

  Ken said he had to go. Ma walked him to the door and as they embraced I fooled with the ice cream defrost pool, drawing spokes or spikes outward from the carton, remembered the dragged arc of liquor on the bar. Ken called goodbye from the front room. I hollered back in kind.

  Ma came back with lips so pursed they seemed to disturb the air. “Denise! You’re making a mess.”

  “It’s just water.”

  She found a rag and sopped my spokes. “We don’t have to talk about it tonight.”

  “Okay.” I introduced my hands to one another, twiddled my thumbs.

  “But if you want to.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just another decision,” she said. “How long is this supposed to go on?” She put the ice cream in the freezer.

  I made a sound with a closed mouth. Through the kitchen window I could see Ken’s car drawing itself out of the scene. The sun was back behind the neighbors’ houses, lighting them up at the edges. Our house was growing dimmer and dimmer. I don’t mean to make this so plain. Perhaps the drama was undercut by Ma washing dishes. I wished I was washing dishes. Just then I ached for so minor a duty.

  Down the street and into moderate traffic, I drove home the long way—through the old horse fields built over with single-family homes and their two-car garages; next past a church, and another church. Gene was nice enough to sit shotgun; I was glad for the company. Just anything might’ve done: a crash test dummy or mall mannequin. I imag
ined him stroking my jaw with his thumb but actually he was just looking out at the streets, counting mailboxes and humming to himself. “What do you think about all of this?” I asked. He didn’t say a thing.

  At a stop sign I turned to look at him, my quivering behemoth. His hair was steely and parted and pomaded neatly, his lips thick, his ventriloquist dummy chin giving way to a thoracic spread. His eyes a sparkly bit of rodentia. The setup made me swoon, with companionship or thanks.

  I know: Gene was there and not. Like faith, or air. I only believe in one of those things, but—he was a modern convenience, a thing that you could use unthinking, on most days.

  “Well?” I asked again, moving through night neighborhoods.

  “Oh I don’t know. Don’t rush me,” he croaked, rubbing his knees back and forth in an agitated way. He wore shirtsleeves and braces. The pits of the shirt were wetted dark; the sleeves stretched around his hairy arms. “These kinds of things take a lil’ time to turn over.” His wattle wavered with him. “Oh well. Well, I don’t know. Well! I guess every man’s gotta go sometime.” He blew his nose into an apparitional handkerchief and tried again: “It’s like this: once, when I was at a card game with Cary, he asked me did I want to talk real talk.”

  “Who, Cary Grant?”

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “You don’t, didn’t.”

  “I did,” he brooked. “At least when I was alive!”

  It was a going routine that he had once been a real person. I couldn’t decide if he was a liar, or believed himself to be telling the truth. Either way I was a secret sucker for my own tall tales. Sometimes he was a hero fighter pilot and sometimes he was a movie star and sometimes he was a great explorer. Sometimes just a person, unnotable as I. In conjuring Gene I was undependable: unreliable or forgetful, or both. I went on driving, humoring my man. “You didn’t,” I said, smiling awfully. I yielded for two teens shrugging across the way.

  “Does it matter? Will you listen?”

  “Maybe I’ll listen.” I turned off the AC and let in the cool night air. We were rolling through quiet streets hazy with the coronas of sodium lamps. A house, a house, a long stretch of dirt. In my part of the county cow pastures were in the midst of obliteration, construction, development—a remaking by the busy, unminding hands of capitalism.

  “Look, one night I was at a card game with a mess of performers, and Cary, all of us, we were saying: what if we all had somewhere to go up, somewhere out of the city, somewhere up in the mountains, somewhere to rest outta the lights?”

  “Don’t rich people have places like that already?”

  “Sure, but it’s never organized. You gotta do it all on your lonesome.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that, she asks!” He tapped his fists on the dashboard gamely. “You get to be famous and you get used to the idea you don’t have to think of the details. So I asked Marjorie to make us sandwiches and we sat up all night, devising a kind of, what, spread, not a home for retired actors, but, see, a kind of lodge.” We drove past the prehistoric silhouettes of backhoes and trenchers, the mud fields shadowed and tread combed.

  “You thought of the details.”

  “Yes, but you see, it was a game.”

  I made a minor sound so he’d continue. I wanted to consume only. Perhaps it was like a dream, having him beside me: a man full of symbols I did not want to decode. A man I wanted to witness in a solemn or laughing fashion.

  “The sun came up and everyone begged off but I had the month away from set, so I got to thinking. Somewhere for resting and hunting and cooking like I liked to do. Not that you’d know about any of that.”

  “I’m not a very good hobbyist.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. A lady has much to occupy her time.”

  “So what did you do? Did you buy a place?”

  “Buy a place? Sister, I built it.”

  “Did you go up there away from the lights?”

  “I did.”

  “And did anyone else?”

  “They visited me a time or two, to make use of my fine hunting dogs who I liked to spoil. They were mutts mostly, for anyone knew they were better creatures than the purebreds: black and tans crossed with blue ticks, redbone-black labs, a bit o’ terrier in that handsome retriever.”

  I sighed loudly to stop him but he kept on.

  “Only Lucie was purebred, but even so she was a whippety lil’ gal, the runtiest of runts, forty pounds soaking, a hard mouth wouldn’t let go of anything till I asked her the umpteenth time. Don’t tell Marjorie lest she get jealous: once I had my haven, I let all the pups up on the bed with me. Course that was my comfort much as theirs: three dog night ain’t come from nothing. Boy, with them in the bed I’d wake up sweating in the dead of winter!”

  We were moving closer to my place. Here the buildings were fully built, dense and orderly, a series of shapes repeated. No one was about. The car’s hum burgeoned against the edges of my neighbors’ cars and siding and mailboxes. I tried to remember what movie or book had taught me about hunting dogs. I wondered about all the things I had learned and forgotten, in the encroaching, milky mist of trying to be okay.

  “But mostly you were up there by yourself? Didn’t you have movies to shoot?”

  “Oh, that was after my career.”

  I thought of the genial retirement Pop would never have: a sunny golf green where he played half-heartedly, boating with Ma on the Bay, looking up childhood friends on the internet—no, this was merely a brochure of retirement. I thought instead—

  “I got sick and had to leave the place.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to change the channel.

  “Yes, a man has got to find a place or patch of land for himself,” Gene said.

  “What about the ladies?” I asked, turning and scanning the empty road. This felt in some way exhilarating. I was unemployed, moving swiftly from harmless kook to edge-dweller. I was ready to end this day. I was ready to discover how next I would degrade.

  “Ladies we love live on in our hearts,” he said. “And that’s all there is to it.”

  “You’ve never much gone in for ladies, have you?” I said.

  “Yes, well, now, I mean, what I’d have all those wives for? But no, you’re right. Never got the hang of them.”

  “I got the hang of you,” I said.

  “And ain’t it just grand!”

  Nothing was grand. I parked in front of my quiet vinyl-sided eight-flat and nodded at him. “Home we go?” As we walked down the little path to the apartment door, we linked our arms.

  At the door Geney kissed me on the forehead. He smelled of nothing, but also of bitter bay cologne and an herbal aftershave. “Good night, little one,” he said. “A bit of sleep is all you need.” This wasn’t true.

  I bowed adieu and went inside. The air inside was cold and shocking, as it had been at my parents’ home. In this family we controlled our interior climates with severity. I sat on the loveseat, between the kitchenette and bed, and breathed out loud enough for the neighbors to hear. I wondered if they were disturbed by the noise: I used to worry that I thought about all of the wrong things while the right things went slipping by.

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke accordioned in the loveseat. On my phone there were two voicemails: one morning call from Ma, and one from Ken. Ken had texted also, to say that he loved me, was thinking of me, would call later. I thought I should lose his number. Instead I responded aloud to myself that I, too, felt love; then got a glass of water and folded myself into the loveseat again and began to braid my hair into tiny trellises. It was something Ma had done for me when I was a kid, out of the bath and just before bed. Over breakfast I’d undo the braids, my hair falling into loose crimps. Throughout the day the texture would relax until my hair was straight again. Now I had no hair ties. The braids undid themselves as quickly as I finished them. Yet I continued the ritual. I thought of Gene’s retirement home
for actors, at its full capacity: one man, several dogs, and a whole lotta bluster.

  In my eyes and chest I felt, still, the logy, sentimental press of a lingering hangover. I didn’t know how Ma felt, nor Pop. Ken, by habit and goodwill, had adhered to our family despite his evident normalcy; he knew how to feel and express like a real person. So I knew that the night prior—as I’d sighed and prattled to no one—he’d been home lying on his tidy bed watching the ceiling for some extraordinary permission to cry. Probably it was one of his life’s central pits that he ended up in our strange herd. He was always so healthy and tall. A kind, soft stomach. Dark hair, a broken eyetooth.

  Sometime after college, I’d asked him why he didn’t get it fixed.

  “I don’t know,” he’d said.

  “It’s probably expensive,” I’d said. “Who has the money?”

  “Does it give me character?” He’d presented his choppers.

  “No,” I’d said. “But it makes me wanna buy you dinner.”

  Briefly I wondered if I should call Ken; I didn’t want to. It didn’t occur to me he might like or need some comfort or company.

  When my hands grew tired of braiding I realized that I needed something heftier to occupy myself. The notion of anything readily available—TV, text, tunes—made me dizzy. I decided I’d go into the city and look at something or somethings, pretend to be in and of the world. Through the glass of the back door I could see a squirrel picking its way through the brush of the shared lawn.

  My phone was vibrating on the floor beside me, this time a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I rose to stretch and dress. I checked the listings for current exhibits. I made provisional choices regarding my day. When ready I listened to the voicemail the caller had left.

  Monica. Had I given her my number? It seemed so. “Look,” she said. “It’s no good you haven’t been anywhere I have.” It had only been two days since I’d met her. I put the phone on speaker and let her voice fill the room. It had been a long time since I’d had a new friend. She said, “Call.” She said, “Soon.” I wanted to know why she’d really called, but on the other hand I thought I might not care.