NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/prose/1539

Text File | 1992-11-18 | 27.2 KB | 527 lines

Newsgroups: alt.prose
Path: sparky!uunet!news.univie.ac.at!iiasa.ac.at!avjohn
From: [e-mail] (Aviott  JOHN)
Subject: short story
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 16:06:19 GMT
Lines: 516

Thanks to those of you who sent comments and advice in response
to last ones.  Your constructive
criticism and praise are both highly appreciated.

address: [e-mail]

BABY
by

Aviott JOHN


The gaggle of toothy adults gathered around my bed and stared.
Seen from below, their faces were extra-ordinarily coarse.  Most
prominent were rows of enamel palisades below twin black holes,
stained teeth beneath gaping nostrils, some none too clean; for
these, from my inferior vantage point, I would condone nose picking.
Enormous expanses of underjaw, my father's already covered with an
uneven stubble of wiry black hairs, my mother's vastly rounded with a
horizontal crease that marked the beginning of a double chin.  A
pity, because when she bends down and looks me in the eye, she is a
very pretty woman.  I've seen the way Uncle Elber looks at her when
he thinks no one else is watching.  I don't count, of course, because
to him, non-adults are non-persons.  Uncle Elber is not my real
uncle, but that's what my older siblings call him because he's our
father's best friend and practically one of the family.

Uncle Elber has what adults quaintly term a roving eye.  A roving
eye!  Can you imagine that?  When I hear the phrase I see an eagle
soaring in majestic circles.  The eagle is a beautiful bird, but
Uncle Elber's roving eye eagle is not beautiful at all.  The picture
that comes to mind is of a large, ugly 'eye-in-the-sky' that flies
about looking for women like my mother.  I can't think what an eagle
would find attractive in my mother.  Seen from above, she can only be
a black dumpling, the rounded top of her head, sharply followed by
feminine extravagances front and back.  It is probably these that the
roving eye sees and covets.

Uncle Elber dislikes me intensely and is visibly ill at ease in my
presence.  Once my mother asked him to look after me while she
hurried away to wrestle with a recalcitrant fowl in the oven.  His
whole body turned rigid and he stared glassy eyed out of the window
until she returned, wiping her hands on a greasy dishcloth.

 'Was she good?' my mother asked.

 'Yes,' he said and tried to grab her shoulders with both hands.

She twisted out of his grasp and bent over me, speaking gibberish.
If I didn't know better, I'd have thought she had gone mad, the way
she leaned over, face flushed, a thin layer of spittle on her lips
and eyes unnaturally bright.  Uncle Elber came up and put his arms
around her from behind.  My mother stiffened and I could see tears
jump to her eyes, as though he were squeezing water out of her with
this ill-judged passion for his best friend's wife.

I looked up coldly and meeting my eye he quailed.  I kept my
unblinking eye on him until he receded from my vision, eyelashes
slanting away from the protuberances of his cheekbones.  Mother
hurried off again, because with a large house to clean, three
children, a husband and the occasional friend to cook for, there was
no shortage of excuses for hurrying away.  Oblivious now to my
disapproving gaze, Uncle Elber drifted to the adjacent living room
where he turned on the radio and listened to Ronald Reagan haranguing
Gorbachev on human rights.  Ha!  Ronald Reagan doesn't know anything
of what goes on here, that's for sure, otherwise he'd have come down
and lectured Uncle Elber proper about my mother's rights, before he
went off to another country to tell them to live like good Americans.

There was a great deal of commotion at the front door a few minutes
later.  My father's voice.  He was in a good mood, which meant that
he had lost a lot of money.  He was like that, boisterous and in a
good mood whenever he'd lost more than he could afford, which was
plenty.  Other days when he'd minted a pile, he would creep late into
the house as soft as a mouse and I would hear moans and thrashing
sounds from the big double bed.  My siblings were in the other
bedroom and they heard none of this.  I shared the large bedroom with
my parents, but I was invisible, of course.

If it was not so dark, I would see the outlines of their bodies
sprawled on the bed.  Sometimes my father snored.  Often my mother
would wake up in the night, perhaps disturbed by his snoring, and sit
up in bed.  She occasionally cried, silent and alone, when she
thought no one was watching.  Tears would flow down her cheeks and
she would simply sit there, wiping them away at regular intervals
with the back of one hand.  Or else she would press the fingertips of
her hands to the point of each cheekbone as though to keep her face
from falling apart.  For my mother this life was as the poet wrote, a
vale of tears.  But why?  Father was successful.  He made a pile of
money.  He lost a lot too, as I said earlier, but that was no cause
for concern because he always managed to earn twice as much as he
lost.  My mother didn't understand what he did anyway.  And she had
us, me and my two older siblings.  There is no fathoming the secret
sorrows of adult females.

Perhaps my father was the cause of her sorrow, but if so, he was
unaware of it; both of the sorrow and of being the cause.  Once, just
once, he ceased his snoring to open his eyes and see her crying.

 'What's the matter?' he asked, catching hold of her hand in alarm.
My father was emotionally unimaginative and associated tears only
with seminal events; deaths, birth pains, natural disasters and so
on.

 'Nothing,' she said, stroking his head.  'Go back to sleep.  It's
nothing.  I feel sad all of a sudden, I don't know why, but it will
pass.  Go back to sleep.'

Father was successful.  He was a gambler of sorts.  Mother had no
idea what he did.  She only knew he worked long hours in a plush
office at the top of a tall building in the city far away and that he
made enough money to cosset us all with creature comforts in
exclusive rural surroundings.  She felt there was a contradiction
somewhere, but could not quite articulate it or put her finger on it.
Sometimes she would gently begin to try, but it was no use.  Her
attempts only met with blank stares.  So she would give up and cry
secretly in the night.

I understood what Father did.  He was a gambler.  He gambled with
other people's money in a perfectly legal way.  He was a consultant
to a firm of stockbrokers and advised them to buy and to sell.  I
don't know all the details of his work, since I've never been to his
office, but roughly it goes something like this.  When he advises,
the company buys stocks and Father gets a commission which is a small
percentage of the total value of the stock.  When he advises the
company sells and again he gets a small percentage as commission.
Father also follows his own advice.  He buys and sells stock with his
private capital, following the advice he gives the firm.  He is very
proud of this and calls it putting his money where his mouth is.

Father was a gambler.  I thought of him as a sort of doctor.  He
kept his finger on the economic pulse beat of the nation and
diagnosed its industrial health according to what he felt at his
fingertips.  "Fingerspitzengefuehl" he called it sometimes and he
vowed it was an inborn gift, an inherited instinct that could not be
acquired.

Father was good at statistics and saw people, even individuals, as
component pieces of aggregates.  He could, for instance, look at the
previous month's economic indicators and predict how the people of
the nation were going to behave.  Based on this knowledge, he made
amazingly accurate forecasts of investor confidence and stock market
trends.  If he said the market was going to be bearish next month, it
would in all likelihood be bearish.  Father's critics said he was
downright dangerous; he had acquired such a reputation that his
prophecies were self-fulfilling.  Father dismissed their charges as
nonsense based on ignorance and envy.

Father was completely flustered and uneasy in the presence of
individuals.  The reason for his unease was simple.  As a
statistician he could predict the behaviour of large numbers of
people.  But in the case of a single individual the statistical
uncertainty was simply too great to allow prediction.  Being a
gambler, he avoided uncertainty like the plague, except where he knew
the odds.  For this reason he had no friends except for Uncle Elber
and he clung to the relationship although UE was such a jerk.  I
think Mother understood this in her inarticulate, tearsome way and
that is why she tolerated UE's boorish behaviour and made no issue of
his unwelcome advances which my father knew nothing about.

Mother did not understand statistics and did not care for them.
She said that seeing more than three numbers in a row made her dizzy
and brought on an attack of migraine.  However, she had no problem
understanding or coping with individuals and made friends wherever
she went.

Sometimes she took us shopping and I sat with my older siblings in
the back seat of the car and waited for her.  There was always a
little surprise for each one of us and the boy who worked in the
supermarket would trail behind her with an armload of shopping bags.
He was nineteen years old and in love.  Mother was too old for him,
of course, but she smiled sweetly to him and perhaps he was simply in
love with the aura of happiness that surrounded her.  Teresa, my
sister, was thirteen and she was angry with my mother.  That boy
should be courting her instead of fluttering around a woman more than
twice his age.  Teresa scowled and sprawled on the back seat, chewing
on a wad of Turkish honey, her favorite sweet, that Mother often
treated her to.

This was a side of my mother that Father never saw; the whole sub-
culture of service people who admired and/or were in love with her.
We had the best postal service in the country because the postman was
nuts about her.  The postman was a jolly graying man who looked like
a retired general.  He was a former army sergeant who said he took
the job because he wanted to keep fit and it was the only one where
he was paid to ride a bicycle.  After delivering the letters, he
would hang about until my mother offered a cup of coffee.  He never
refused coffee from my mother.  If Mother was not at home and Teresa
offered a cup, he would say no.  I really knew he was in love with
Mother when he began coming round even when there were no letters to
deliver.  'There are no letters for you today,' he would say
apologetically, as though personally responsible for this lack of
correspondence.  Other times he would say these words sadly, as
though bringing news of a bereavement.  'I just wanted to tell you.'

Although Mother is no good at statistics, she is not dumb.  She
knows exactly what's going on, and that the fellow in the service
station where we get the car fixed is infatuated with her, just like
the postman and the boy in the supermarket.  Although she does not
show it, I think it makes her feel sad.  She would like to comfort
them all and give them the love they need, but she knows she can't do
that.  She would like to at least invite them home, to cook for them
and pamper them a little, but she can't do that either, because that
would spoil the lifestyle that Father works so hard to keep up.  In
the end the only one she entertains is Uncle Elber who she can't
stand.  Life's funny and tough on you if you're an adult.  So many
things you can't do or say.  On the other hand, so many things you
must do and say even if you don't want to.

I was there the day she made the discovery.  At first I didn't
understand what was going on, didn't understand why she suddenly lost
her calm and began to make scrabbling movements.  Let me begin at the
beginning and try to describe things as they happened.  Yes, I was
lying quietly and watching her put away my father's suit.  It was a
blue suit, the one he'd worn to work the previous day and come home
late in.  She pulled a loose thread from the suit and suddenly
stiffened.  She held the thread up and walked to the window to look
at it in the light.  I couldn't see clearly, but it looked like an
ordinary thread to me, a bit silky and long.  She dropped the thread
and rushed to the bathroom.  She was panting as she dragged the
washbasket and upended it on the middle of the bedroom floor.  She
rummaged through the soiled clothes and held one of my father's
shirts up to the window.  She stared for a long time, then buried her
face in the shirt and began to cry into it.

Mother does not have a head for statistics otherwise she might have
known that sixty-five percent of married males in the country indulge
in extra-marital sex at some time or other.  The percentage of
females engaged in illicit undercover enterprises is about the same,
obviously, because although infidelity is technically achievable
alone, it is much more tempting and easily attained by pairs.  The
odds are simply against fidelity, so she shouldn't have been
surprised and hurt by her discovery.  If Mother were a student of
probability like my father was, and knew the odds, would she have
been less hurt?  I doubt it.  This is one of those situations which
goes beyond mathematics and such kinds of knowledge.  Even a baby can
tell you that.

As I said earlier, Mother says seeing more than three numbers in a
row brings on an attack of migraine.  And Father is a great lover of
numbers.  There are secrets in numbers that only he can divine.
There are symmetries and logical sequences to numbers when they are
stapled together in row upon row and column upon column that only he
can see.  A frequent bone of contention in another otherwise
harmonious marriage were the supermarket bills.  The first thing
Father did when he came home was to pick up the day's shopping bill,
if there was one, from the table in the front hallway and say,
 'You've paid too much.'

Mother loved him and her face brightened perceptibly when he
returned home after a long day at the office, but this predictable
comment was one facet of his homecoming ritual that she dreaded.
Then why did she persist in leaving the bill on the table in the
hallway where Father would find it?  I'm smart for my age and know
the answers to a lot of questions, but not this one.

 'How can you say I've paid too much, dear?' she would ask
hesitantly, going up to him and kissing him.  Father was a handsome
man, but showing signs of age; thickening middle, thinning top.  From
the expression on my mother's face, you would have thought she was
looking at a knight in shining armour.  The only thing that could
remove the dazzle from her eyes was questions about numbers.

 'The trouble with you,' he would lecture severely, 'is that you
totally neglect the left hemisphere of your brain.  See here: the
first item, fifty pounds of sugar.'

 'What's wrong with that?  The bulk packing was going cheap,' she
argued bravely.  'It was marked down this week.'

 'The trouble with you,' he castigated her gloomily, 'is that you
not only ignore numbers, you close your mind to commodities.  There
is no future in sugar.  The world is awash in sugar and prices are
going to go on going down, down, down and down.  So sugar is a fool's
buy really.  Sitting on fifty pounds of sugar that'll have turned
brown and lumpy by the time we get to the bottom of the bag.'

 'Well, I'll make jam and fruit preserves with it in the summer if
it really bothers you.'

 'This simply makes matters worse.  What're we going to do with the
jam that you make simply to finish the sugar you bought that we don't
need in the first place?  Can't you see how this only compounds the
problem?'

 'I didn't see any problem at all until you came in and started
talking about sugar futures.  For heaven's sake!  We have three
children.  Don't tell me fifty pounds of sugar is a problem with
three children in the house.'

 'Three children!  Teresa in her teens and rabidly figure conscious,
is half starving herself to death.  And Joker's teeth are rotten
already, the last thing he needs is sugar.  And that thing,' here he
pointed to my inoffensive figure, 'can hardly be considered a sugar
consumer.  It's... it's barely graduated from tit to bottle.'

My father certainly had logic on his side, although I resented
being referred to as "it."  How would he like it if I called him
Scumbag for upsetting my mother?  Granted she neglected the
left hemisphere of her brain.  Was that a greater failing than
Father's neglect of the right hemisphere of his?  Why did we always
have such terrific cuts of meat on the table, and the choicest
fruits?  Not because the butcher and grocer were overawed by the left
hemisphere of Mother's brain.  Certainly not.  She was nice to them
and really saw them as people.  She maybe couldn't remember that the
world was awash in sugar and there was no future in it, but she did
know that the butcher's wife had had a breast removed and unfailingly
asked after her health, every week.  She never forgot the grocer's son
who was an avid stamp collector and often took a colorful selection of
used stamps as a gift.  Letters are so frequently franked these days
that good stamps are difficult to come by, but Father gets mail from
commodities brokers around the world and stamps from the remotest
countries in the world are the prettiest.  Maroon iguanas and
brilliant yellow citronella butterflies from Ecuador's Galapagos
Islands, unhappy devils from Tasmania or weird candelabra trees,
Euphorbia, from East Africa.

As I said, I don't know why she deliberately provoked Father by
leaving the shopping bill on the hall table for him to see and
comment on.  As soon as I'm able to move about on my own, I'll make
sure I remove it from the table long before he comes home.  I'm sure
that once this small canker is excised from their marriage, it will
be the most wonderful one imaginable.

My father is not a workaholic but he works very hard nevertheless.
Long hours of intensive effort five days a week.  He never misses a
day at work even if he is ill.  There's so much money at stake
(clients' and his own) that he simply can't rest at home on a
weekday.  The result of this is that he and Mother haven't had a
holiday in years, except for a few weekend air dashes to exotic
beaches.  My mother thoroughly enjoys these jaunts but is careful not
to show too much enthusiasm for them.  Father cannot unwind in
unfamiliar surroundings and needs a week of office work to recover
from one of these trips.  After long days in the office he likes
nothing better than to come home, put his feet up and read the
newspaper.  Sometimes he gets into old clothes and plays with us
children or takes us for a walk, and that is fun.

One night he came home from the office and declared that the world
had grown small.

 'In what way, dear?' Mother asked.

Worldwide trade had grown steadily over the past decades.  The
language of money was understood all over the world.  Money was truly
international and knew no barriers.  And he had to go to Tokyo for a
month.  The firm was going to open a new branch in Tokyo so that it
could trade around the clock in all the time zones and money markets
of the world.  'You will come too, won't you? ' he asked.

Mother said no and pointed out the difficulties. Us children.
School.  House.  Garden.  And besides, what would she do alone in
Japan during the day?  She neither spoke the language nor knew
anyone.  Father would be terribly busy the whole time, wouldn't he?
He'd have to waste his time looking after her.

His protests were mild because he saw the sense of her arguments.
She was interested in people, not places, so Japan would be boring
for her without the language or a local acquaintance.  It was quickly
agreed that he would go without her.  I saw a certain sadness in
Mother's eyes and misunderstood.  I thought it was the thought of
being without him for four weeks, but I was wrong.  She was simply
looking at him with the eyes of love.  This love gave her great
wisdom in human relationships.  She had the gift of understanding
truths that could not be expressed in words, knowing that wisdom
cannot prevent emotional pain, it can only help one cope with it.
She saw a shadow in their lives, an emerging pattern that my father
himself was unaware of.  This pattern surfaced two months later and
changed our lives forever.  Mother was the only one who took it
calmly because with the eyes of love she had seen it coming, although
powerless to prevent it.

She missed my father's absence doubly because he had asked Uncle
Elber to look in on us more often when he was away.  UE never
attempted to touch her when Teresa and Joker were around, but once
when Mother was alone at home with me, he put his hands on her
breasts and attempted to kiss her.  She turned her mouth away and
froze to stone with a look of haughty disgust on her face.  I looked
into her eyes at that moment and read so much in them; anger above
all, sad loneliness, and a touch of desire.

Father returned from Japan after a month, looking lean and very
fit.  He literally burst into the house, hugged Mother and then
brought out presents for all of us; a beautiful electronic rattle for
me, something I'd wanted for days.  We children were happy to see
him.  Father's noisy behaviour was what he normally showed when he
had lost money through bad judgement.  But Father did not lose any
money in Japan.  On the contrary, he made a tremendous amount.  So
the three of us, Teresa, Joker and I did not remark on his
boisterousness and did not realize what it was that Father had lost.
If Mother noticed or knew, she gave no sign.

Japan was tremendous, Father said.  He loved the place, had even
learnt a few words of Japanese, thought their food, customs and
culture very civilized, and wanted to return there for a year.  Life
seemed to return to its routine after that.  Father went back to work
after a week's holiday and Mother was busy looking after the house,
Father and us children, and fending UE off.  In short, everything was
back to normal, except that now Father worked longer hours and
sometimes even on the weekends.  Once he phoned on a Tuesday
afternoon to say there was a lot to do and he would work late and
spend the night in the city.

I happened to be awake that night and saw Mother toss and turn in
her bed, unable to sleep.  She sat up after a while and turned on the
light.  There were ghastly dark rings under her eyes, but no tears.
The tears had flown copiously in the preceding months and years and
now it was as if the well of her sorrow was dry and there was nothing
left but a great emptiness.  I noted with surprise the streaks of
grey in her black hair and wrinkles on her face that I had not seen
before.

Mother took me shopping the next day, Wednesday.  After the usual
rounds in the supermarket, she went into a fancy clothing store and
bought an extravagant new dress.  I didn't think it suited her, but
she didn't ask me for an opinion and I said nothing as usual.  I
can't put my finger on the reason, but although the dress was lovely,
it didn't quite suit her or go with her character.  It was very red
and slinky, making her look much younger from a distance.  But
somehow it looked awful on her from up close.  It wasn't the wrinkles
around her eyes.  Lots of younger women have wrinkles around their
eyes too, and manage to look nice in slinky red dresses.  But rather
it was the expression IN them.  The knowing, the experience and the
hurt in her eyes that clashed with the promise of easy sex and
laughter exuded by the dress and the beautiful woman's body inside
it.

Mother was wearing the dress that night when Father arrived home
later than usual.  I was parked in the living room when he entered.
His eyebrows rose faintly when he saw Mother across the room, looking
like a housewifely version of
Carmen, but he made no comment.  He stooped to
kiss me and I smelt the sweet-sour smell of alcohol on his breath,
and something else besides, a faint odour which reminded me both of
musk and the fresh fishy tang of a seabreeze.

 'Do you like my new dress?'

He pretended not to hear the question and tousled Teresa's hair to
ask how she was.  But Teresa was having problems this night with her
maths homework and was too busy to respond.  Joker was listening to
music behind a locked door.  The music sounded like endless cascades
of falling tin cans and drove Mother crazy, so he was allowed to
listen to it only in his own room.

Mother repeated the question.

 'Ah, yes, yes,' he stammered feebly.  'I think it's a nice dress.'

 'You don't have to flatter me.  I want to know the truth.  Do you
like it?'

He looked at her properly this time, slowly and deliberately
running his eyes over her and the dress.  He looked at her and said
nothing.  She turned so red with shame and anger that I could no
longer tell where the dress ended and her neck began.

 'Teresa,' she said in a brittle voice I'd never heard before.
 'Teresa, leave the room.  Go upstairs and do your homework there.'

Teresa took one look at her face and obeyed at once without any of
her habitual objections.  Needless to say my presence was ignored
again, so the following conversation is reported just as I heard it.

 'I'm surprised you don't like this dress.  She has one exactly like
it.'

 'What are you talking about?'  He managed to sound genuinely
surprised.

She laughed.  Shrill, unhappy laughter that echoed unpleasantly
from the hollowness inside her.

 'Never mind her.  Strictly speaking she's your problem, not mine.'

 'Look, I really have a lot of problems at work.  I don't have to
justify my working late,' he persisted.  'Which world do you
live in?  Have you forgotten last October's Black Monday and the
stock market turbulence ever since?'

She completely ignored his protestations.  'You don't owe me a
single explanation.  Cheating's something you have to reconcile with
your own conscience.  I told you, she's your problem, not mine.  My
problem, which you know nothing about, is YOUR best friend.'

He stiffened and grew momentarily pale.  'What d'you mean?  What
are you talking about?'

Her lips twisted with the cruelty born of anger.  'Do you want me
to spell it out for you?  Do you think I bought this dress for you to
see me in?'  I could see her looking for words with which to cut and
wound.  But I'm sure that even in this moment of deep emotion, love
for my father still overode her anger.  Whatever the reason, at that
instant she gave up her resolve and broke into sobs.  The tears fell
like blessed rain after a long drought, flowed into the wrinkles of
her face, smoothing them out like water healing parched, cracked
earth.  And the instant she renounced her intent to wound, I saw my
father tremble heavily, as from a blow.

 'What did Elber do?' he asked.  'I've always known his nature, but
ignored it because he was my best.. my only friend.  I thought you
were safe with him.'

Mother was shaking her head through her tears.  'No, no.  Nothing
happened.  He didn't do anything.'  But of course, Father did not
believe her.  He stormed out of the house and returned three hours
later, looking drawn and exhausted.  I don't know what happened
between them that night, but we never saw UE again.

After this, Father often stayed late at work and Mother often
fought with him.  Things have never been the same since, have never
been as idyllic as before, but I think that basically the marriage is
a sound one, otherwise they'd have separated right then and there.
How long this state of affairs will continue, I do not know.

Only time will tell.