All Too Surreal Page 12

  Sylvia was dishing out a second helping of peas for herself, while Tammy swung more or less happily in her baby swing. The kitchen light hit Sylvia’s face just right, revealing the tiny fissure that creased her otherwise smooth skin.

  Tammy said ma-ma-ma, not really a word, not at five months. Just a happy baby sound.

  Sylvia looked across the table at him and smiled. “More peas, hon?”

  As Michael watched, the crack widened and lengthened. He told himself that it wasn’t there, told himself that real hard, and sure enough, it wasn’t.

  “Yeah.” He held his plate out to Sylvia. It was mostly empty, save for some juice left over from the chicken and a few small clumps of mashed potato. There was a chip in the plate, but as soon as Michael registered it, it was gone.

  Sylvia spooned out a healthy portion of peas for him, despite the fact that he’d already had seconds. He was about to tell her to stop when a good-sized chunk of plaster fell onto his plate, knocking it out of Sylvia’s hands and sending peas flying. The plate crashed to the table and crumbled like sandstone.

  Sylvia jumped back, startled, and Tammy began crying. Michael looked up at the divot in his ceiling. Damn place is falling apart, he thought. And then, as the realization of what that meant hit him, he thrust the thought away, buried it deep in his mind, made it never-was, or as close to never-was as made no nevermind.

  Everything was fine. Everything was normal.

  He smiled at his wife. “Why don’t you go ahead and take the baby, while I clean up?”

  “Didja get it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Michael said irritably as he lowered himself to the cool stone of the basement floor next to Barry Madden. He, like Michael, was twelve years old, and his best friend in the whole world. He dropped his dad’s new Playboy onto the floor in front of them. “Mom nearly caught me, though.” He wanted Barry to appreciate the risk he had run, but as usual Barry’s mind was completely focused on the women sandwiched between the covers of the magazine.

  Barry lost no time in flipping past the advertisements and articles to get to the good stuff. Michael paid no attention to the magazine, always found it and the women inside boring. Instead, he watched Barry’s face, wide eyes, skin flushed with excitement, lips stretched into an eager, dirty grin. Then he looked down at Barry’s crotch, and saw the bulge of his boner pushing against the fabric of his jeans. He knew it wasn’t right for one guy to check out another guy’s hard-on, wasn’t normal.

  But he couldn’t help himself. Michael felt his own penis begin to stiffen.

  Barry looked up from the magazine and scowled at Michael. “What the hell are you lookin’ at?”

  Michael turned away, his cheeks burning. “Nothin’.” His burgeoning erection died and fell limp.

  He could feel Barry’s eyes boring into him, gauging, assessing. Then Barry punched him on the arm, just a little too hard. “Fag.” He said it good-naturedly, as a joke, but Michael could detect a warning in the word. Don’t do that again.

  And then everything returned to normal. Barry opened the centerfold of a leggy, tanned, well-endowed blonde and let out a whistle. “Man, oh, man! Look at the tits on her!”

  Michael looked, trying to force himself to see whatever it was that excited Barry so, trying to make his body react like it should.

  But nothing happened.

  “God, I’d really love to do it to her,” Barry said.

  Michael tried to force enthusiasm into his voice. “Yeah, me too.”

  After dinner, Michael went outside to do a little yard work. Sylvia accompanied him and stood on the porch, Tammy in her left arm, perched on her hip. The late August air was humid and clung to the skin like plastic wrap. Michael was tempted to put the work off until another, cooler day, but decided against it. He’d already let the weeds go too long as it was; if he waited any longer, they’d take over the yard completely.

  As he went into the tiny two-car garage to retrieve his hoe, Michael noticed the rot eating away at the ceiling beams and concentrated, willing it to be not. Seconds ticked by, but still the rot remained. Michael closed his eyes and redoubled his efforts, picturing the wood smooth and unblemished, sturdy and strong. When he opened his eyes, that’s just how the wood was. He nodded, satisfied, although a little disturbed that it had taken so long. Still, it was fixed now. No, better than fixed. Never was.

  He took the hoe down from where it hung on the wall, and marched back into the yard, ready to engage once more in the eternal struggle of man vs. plant. He stopped at the first weed he came to, a dandelion, positioned the hoe’s rusty blade, and sliced into the earth.

  Upon contact with the soil, the blade fell apart in reddish-brown bits and the handle snapped in Michael’s hands, light and fragile like a kite frame. He let the pieces fall to the ground and stared at the flakes of rust that surrounded the unharmed dandelion.

  From the porch, Sylvia called, “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, willing it to be so. But no matter how clearly he pictured it, the rusted metal fragments didn’t coalesce, the handle segments didn’t rejoin.

  Lousy piece of crap. That’d teach him to shop at Builder’s Paradise. He supposed he’d just have to do this the old-fashioned way. He knelt down and gripped the dandelion at the base of the stem and pulled. The plant should’ve come away in his hand easily, but it remained fixed in the earth, solid.

  He tried again, with the same result. The dandelion would not come up.

  He stood and regarded the weed, puzzled, and somewhere deep inside, more than a little afraid. He felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead, even though it wasn’t that hot out, even though he hadn’t been working that hard. He wiped the sweat away, brushed his hands on his jeans, and bent down once more. This was a dandelion; he had pulled up hundreds of them before without difficulty. This should be no different. He would make it no different. He gripped the weed with both hands this time, concentrated, and pulled.

  But if anything, the dandelion was even more firmly rooted in the ground than before.

  Michael stood again. Screw it; he’d go get some weed killer tomorrow and zap the sonofabitch. Zap all the damn weeds in the yard. Funny, it almost seemed there were more weeds now than when he’d first come outside. He probably just hadn’t noticed them before. Yeah.

  He picked up the remains of the hoe and started to head for the garage to throw them away, when a slim, middle-aged man came jogging down the sidewalk. Michael didn’t know the man’s name, but he was regular as clockwork, passing by the house the same time every evening, regardless of the weather — which is why you’re out here now, a distant corner of Michael’s mind whispered, but he paid it no attention. The jogger was dressed in a white T-shirt and blue shorts. He was tan and lean, and his muscles moved smooth and easy, as if oiled. He had to be nearly ten years older than Michael, but his graying hair still held a lot of black, and he had a youthful, almost boyish face.

  The jogger noticed Michael watching him and waved. Michael gave him a howdy-good-neighbor smile and returned the wave. Then the man was past and, conscious of Sylvia still on the porch, Michael looked away.

  “I guess that’s enough yard work for one evening,” he said a bit too loudly. He threw away the hoe, closed and locked the door to the garage, and stepped onto the porch to stand next to his wife and daughter.

  Tammy was dozing, so Michael was careful to move quietly as he put his arm around Sylvia’s waist and gave her a peck on the cheek. An inch from where his lips pressed against her skin, a tiny fissured opened. He willed it to go away, but it didn’t. Fine, he’d just have to ignore it, then.

  He gazed lovingly at his daughter’s sleeping face, and if her hair was a trifle thinner than at supper, her ears now a bit lopsided, she was still beautiful in his eyes. A beautiful, normal baby.

  Life was good.

  They went inside as new weeds sprouted throughout the yard.

  Michael struggled with Tara Jensen’s bra clasp,
trying to make his clumsy, alcohol-numbed fingers work. Tara’s breath — redolent, like his, of Miller Hi Life — came hot and fast in his ear. She whispered his name, although it sounded a lot more like Jimmy, as in Jimmy Bedford, the boy who Tara had really wanted to take her to prom, but who had instead taken Cheryl Iserson, the girl with the biggest tits in school. Tara was intensely jealous of Cheryl, and had gone to prom with Michael to get back at Jimmy, who, Michael was certain, wouldn’t care in the slightest.

  Michael didn’t blame Tara for being jealous. Jimmy was a star center on the basketball team, and quite handsome. He pushed the thought from his mind and renewed his efforts to free Tara’s breasts, which were of a respectable size, if not in Cheryl Iserson’s league.

  Michael and Tara were parked alongside a deserted country road beneath an old oak. The windows of Michael’s Nova were down and the air of a cool spring night filled the car, although Michael was so hot and dizzy from the beer that he barely felt it.

  Tara had been a friend of his since last year, when they shared a desk in art class. He knew her well, and when he discovered her disappointment and anger at Jimmy, he realized he could use it.

  No, not use, never use. He wouldn’t do that to a friend. Realized Tara and he could … help each other out. He could take her to prom, so at least she’d get to go, even if it wasn’t with Jimmy. And she could do what she was doing right now: help make him a man. For while he had dated a handful of girls throughout high school, even made out with some of them, he had never gone all the way. Hadn’t been sure he could. But tonight he was going to prove it to himself, to Tara, who had joked on more than one occasion that he might not be … normal. Prove it to the world.

  If he could just get her goddamned bra off!

  Tara pulled away and smiled, her eyes barely able to focus. “I’ll do it.” She reached behind her and with a single smooth motion, the clasp was undone. Michael felt like he had failed a small but important test. After all, weren’t real men supposed to know how to get a girl’s bra off?

  Tara slipped the straps over her shoulders, baring her breasts. Michael could only see them dimly in the night-gray of the car’s interior, their indistinct round curves, the dark splotches of her aureoles, the smudged dots of her nipples.

  There they were; all he had to do was reach out and touch them, feel them, squeeze them. Do whatever he wanted with them. But the fact was that he didn’t want to do anything with them. He felt no lust for the flesh offered before him, just embarrassment and shame.

  He couldn’t help himself, was too drunk to hold in the tears. As he sobbed, he hoped that Tara, his friend, would put her arms around him, hold him, whisper It’s okay.

  “Jesus, Michael.” Her voice held no concern, no sympathy. Just disgust.

  He knew exactly how she felt.

  Later that evening, Tammy started fussing, as she usually did before bedtime.

  Michael scooped her off the threadbare blanket on the floor, where she had been playing with a tarnished pewter rattle before becoming instantly grouchy.

  He left Sylvia to watch a sitcom rerun in the family room while he took Tammy into the sleep-conducive quiet of the living room. The blue paint was faded, the floorboards warped and cracked. He made a half-hearted effort to imagine it not and wasn’t surprised when it didn’t work. He walked Tammy around in circles while softly singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She cried and thrashed at first, but within several minutes she had calmed and was curled up against his chest, eyes closed, head nodding. Michael enjoyed putting her down for the evening, did it almost every night. He liked being alone with her, just the two of them, in the stillness. And if she didn’t feel quite as warm against his body as she normally did, he didn’t worry about it.

  He walked slowly down the hallway to her bedroom, not wishing to move too fast and jostle her awake. The globe of the hallway light was broken, the carpet worn and frayed. He walked into Tammy’s bedroom. Normally the nightlight bathed the room in a soft, warm orange, but tonight it was emitting a sour green. Michael didn’t allow it to concern him. At least it was enough to see by.

  He laid Tammy gently on her side in the crib that this morning had been a cheery white but which was now black and worm eaten, and as her tiny body came in contact with the now soiled, mildewed mattress there was a soft, brittle snap. Suddenly fearful, Michael lifted Tammy back up, and in doing so saw what had happened, for while his baby girl was nestled against him, her right arm remained in the crib.

  He focused his gaze on the arm and wished with all his might that it was back where it belonged. But it just sat there on the mattress, looking more like a plastic doll’s arm than a human limb. For an instant he considered attempting to physically reattach the arm, but the thought that it might actually feel like plastic, might in fact be plastic, or worse, something less real than plastic, filled him with horror. And then, just like that, the feeling went away. Because everything was all right, everything was normal. It had to be.

  He put Tammy down — extra-carefully this time — next to the doll arm (for that was the only way he could bring himself to think of it) and then covered her with a receiving blanket. She stirred, reached out with her remaining arm and drew the detached limb toward her mouth and started sucking on the fingers.

  Michael felt his stomach lurch, and he turned away quickly and walked out of the room, telling himself that everything was all right, all right, all right.

  He sat on the edge of his lumpy single bed, listening to the sound of violent retching coming from the other side of the cramped dorm room, watching his roommate’s body shudder and convulse as he knelt bare-assed, emptying his guts into the waste basket.

  Michael was twenty-two, a junior in college, although he still had at least a year and a half until he graduated. And for the last two years, he had roomed with Jerome Hudson. Jerome, who had been dating the same girl for the better part of those two years; Jerome, who had been talking about asking her to marry him; Jerome, who, tonight, had told Michael that he knew what he was. Who told Michael he was curious.

  The taste of Jerome’s penis was still strong in Michael’s mouth. But Jerome hadn’t come. Oh, no. After less than a minute, Mr. Curious had pushed Michael away and rushed over to the waste basket, vomit spewing forth before he was halfway there.

  Dry heaves now, and, between sobs, “Faggot … fuckin’ … faggot!”

  Michael felt like throwing up too.

  After putting Tammy to bed, Michael sat on the couch in the family room and read for a bit, periodically brushing fallen flakes of ceiling paint off his book. Sylvia sat beside him and worked on a sampler as a present for a friend who’d just had a new baby. The fissure in her cheek was wider now, nearly a gash. And her left eyebrow sagged, as if the skin was coming loose.

  Around ten thirty, Sylvia laid the sampler aside on the coffee table and said, “I think I’m going to get ready for bed.” She gave him a meaningful look marred by her drooping eyebrow, and the bits of white paint floating down around her like ash. “Care to join me?”

  Michael was weary from trying to ignore the changes around him, changes he was powerless to stop. But if he was to truly convince himself that everything was normal, that he was a normal man living a normal life with his normal family, then he had no choice, did he? He at least had to try.

  He manufactured a smile. “Sure.”

  Michael nearly broke his foot on the way to the bedroom when a section of the hall floor gave way. But he extricated himself and continued as if nothing had happened. What else could he do? He couldn’t make it not was, not anymore.

  Sylvia was waiting for him, naked on the edge of the bed. The mattress, which they had bought new only a year ago, was now ancient and sagging, the blanket and sheets torn and full of holes as if a battalion of moths had been at them. Her thin, small-breasted body was crisscrossed with rents and tears, some only a fraction of an inch, some much larger. She smiled with the teeth that remained to her.

 
; “Make love to me,” she said.

  He had never felt any real physical attraction for her, had always gotten through times like these with fantasies. Such as, for example, doing the jogger in the park when the man was only halfway through his run, sweaty, but still full of energy. But such imaginings were not going to help him get by tonight.

  Still, he had his duty as a husband to perform.

  “Lie back.”

  Sylvia grinned and a flap of skin peeled away from her neck. “What have you got in mind?”

  Michael forced himself not to shudder. “You’ll see.”

  She did as he asked, legs hanging over the edge of the bed. He knelt before her, steeled himself, and slowly, gently inserted his index finger into her vagina.

  As he did, he felt something inside her break.

  Sickened, he wanted to stop, but he knew he couldn’t. His wife wanted him, and he wouldn’t be any kind of a man if he at least didn’t take care of her this way.

  He started moving his finger in and out, slowly at first, then faster, faster.

  He concentrated on the sounds of the house as it creaked and groaned around them, hoping they would distract him from the terrible damage he was doing to her, but they didn’t. By the time Sylvia’s moans had risen to a squeal and her body shuddered with orgasm, her pelvis was a shattered wreck.

  “Nnnnnnn, that wasss ‘onderful.” Her lower lip hung bloodlessly, attached by only a tiny shred of flesh, distorting her speech.

  “I’m glad,” Michael said, his voice quavering. “I, uh, need to use the bathroom.” He turned and virtually fled the room.

  “Huwwy ‘ack, deaw!” Sylvia called after him. “It’s youw tuwn next!”

  He stood before the cracked mirror and gripped the sink to steady himself as tremors rocked the house, the porcelain crumbling beneath his fingers like chalk.

  The house spasmed and suddenly lurched to the right. Tammy started crying, her voice wheezy. Michael wondered if her lungs were still working properly. Sylvia shrieked his name, “‘ichael! ‘ichael!” over and over, but her cries were soon lost amid the sounds of falling plaster and splintering wood.