Winning First Chapter

The Long Gestation of Madame Foo Foo

by

Tracy Maylath

 

Part 1: 1986

 

1

The Dark Butting Up Against the Light

 

Case Against 

God (would smite me)

Dorothy Parker

Mother and Father

Greg (might go away to college)

Tracy (will lose best friend)

Chuck and Dean (could move or die)

Last second regret

What if? (Things get better)

 

Case For 

God (probably has better things to worry about than punishing me for offing myself)

Nuclear bomb (probably kill us all anyway so waste of a sin)

Greg (he’ll love being an only child)

Tracy (Eileen could be a better best friend)

Chuck and Dean (probably won’t move/die)

Thoughts(!)

What if? (Things don’t get better?)

 

The smash-and-grab raid I’d just performed on Father’s tie collection had yielded the Bugs Bunny one that I was fashioning into a noose around my wrist. I was testing it out worried that, when they cut down my stiff and distended body, the rabbit on the tie I’d used might be interpreted like a rune. I pictured them puzzling over what I was trying to say with the ‘What’s up, Doc?’ Whether it was meant as a final, enigmatic message to the world when really it had just been the first tie to come to hand when I snaked my arm into his closet.

Given his novelty neckwear collection stretched to command a foot and a half of space next to his line of beige, button-down, short-sleeve work shirts, my chances had been slim that I would have grasped a tie that wasn’t really just a strip of polyester in the form of some lame dad joke. I tried to consider myself lucky that it hadn’t been The Three Stooges or Mickey Mouse or the one that advised his colleagues to ‘Keep on Truckin’’while the whimsy itself beseeched them to see my father as anything other than a bastard.

Kneeling next to my bed, I was still breathless from sprinting back to my room and ensuring I turned the lock on the door without so much as a click that could alert Mother.  Like a robber examining his booty only after making it back to the safe house I examined the tie, feeling the slip of its fabric, unfolded it onto my bedspread before looping it into the noose to try it out around my wrist.

Mother was in the kitchen fretting over dinner while, in the living room, Phil Donahue on the TV bellowed at his guests. It was soothing as I knew that as long as Phil stirred unrest into his audience, Mother would refrain from investigating what I was up to in the sanctuary of my bedroom.

As I spun the tie around and around my wrist, I giggled as I pictured Mother asking, ‘what do you think he meant by that, Bob?’ both of them standing over my corpse. And Father, baffled and stunned, not just by the suicide of his youngest son but also because he was trying to work out whether the tie would still be wearable.

I figured Mother emotions would teeter on the precipice between grief and smugness, this final confirmation of her youngest’s ‘offbeat’ sense of humour. It was a given that everything I did was, as Mother said, ‘offbeat’ and her tone never sounded like she meant it as a compliment. In fifth grade we had to write a limerick. I giggled as I wrote mine and laughed and laughed at it reciting it to myself on the way home on the bus.

There was a young man called Brian

Who wouldn’t stop having fun

So the men stopped his play

By locking him away

And Brian shot himself with a gun

 

I had showed it to Mother expecting her to find it as funny as I did but her face unfolded into an expression of puzzlement and then horror before she said, ‘I don’t find that funny, Brian. I do not find that funny whatsoever.’ She never could get to grips with how I found pleasure in the darkness butting up against the light. If I had known then that one day I would pay my bills by exploiting this chiaroscuro that life offers, I wouldn’t have needed the tie, I would have just gritted my teeth and waited out the gestation until I was truly born.

Mother’s list of things that were offbeat and therefore distasteful, was so long and labyrinthine it was easier to break it down into categories with an example in each:

Clothing: wearing all black, donning any kind of hat

Television: anything shown on PBS, most foreign shows incl. Astroboy

Food: ‘What’s a meal that doesn’t include meat when it’s at home?’

Interior Decoration: bare spaces, neutral colours, shelves that eschewed both nicks and nacks in favour of books

Books: any book that didn’t have a neon cover and title that was a promise: ‘Be More Confident in 7 Days!’ with a photo of a toothy-bright guru on the back

Ways of Being: Sarcastic, gallows humour, enjoying any weather that wasn’t sunny

 

The tie still dangling on my wrist, I ran my finger up and down the lists of Case For and Case Against. They were written in a kind of code so Mother wouldn’t cotton on if she happened upon them while I was still alive. Also because the thought of her trying to reconcile the ‘Dorothy Parker’ afforded me a tingle of superiority. Because obviously what I was alluding to was Parker’s poem about suicide being harder than you think. Parker fell under Mother’s heading of ‘all of those depressing books you read’.

‘Christ, that was stupid,’ I admonished myself as I realised I’d left the spiral notebook on which I’d written the lists on my bed, while I’d been invading Father’s closet, right out for Mother and God to see. I tore the sheet out but hated the ragged edge it left so one by one I ripped each tiny hanging piece off until the edge of the paper was straight. Plucking the resulting confetti out of the orange shag pile carpet where I’d thrown it, I wadded it into a tight ball, threw it at my Astroboy garbage can and missed.

I shook my head over the lists and tightened the tie on my wrist.  One of the lists was supposed to, in quantity, outweigh the other list and that was going to give me the answer. They weren’t supposed to come out neck and neck and I didn’t know what to add to one or subtract from the other in order to break the stalemate. I guessed I was approaching it all kind of ass backwards, figuring out how to do it before I decided on whether to do it but that kind of weird way of dealing with stuff was maybe another case for even though I didn’t write it down. Also because I’d heard that people just crying wolf had to think of reasons to die and real suicides had to think of reasons to live so the fact that I was a hung jury in the judgement of my own existence, ratcheted up the depression dial from despair to desolation.

I scraped my fingers through my hair like I had the worst case of dandruff as I wondered whether I could turn ‘Thoughts(!)’ into a heading and then add a list of specifics. But like Dorothy Parker it was code. Mainly because if the parental units discovered even one of the ‘Thoughts(!)’, they’d haul me to the high school guidance counsellor without so much as a how d’ya do? And she’d want to fish around in my brain like my thoughts were the toys at the bottom of one of those toy crane machines at the arcade. She’d manipulate the joystick to hover the claw over the Care Bears and stuffed Garfields that lodged in my temporal lobe and, kuh ching, drag them to the surface and examine them for the depraved and derelict ideas they were.

Also, I couldn’t divide ‘Thoughts(!) into subheadings because I didn’t really know myself what they were. Like news headlines, they festered insidious in my brain. The itch of them flared into anxiety in the night. Like the Cold War and Intermediate Nuclear Forces, I knew they were there but barred them behind a safety curtain in my subconscious. Because if I peeked behind that curtain, let alone lifted it up and let all the thoughts drift loose, I would have been rocking back and forth in my bedroom hitting my head against the Superman wallpaper, beyond all capabilities of any guidance counsellor.

The absolute balance of the lists called for a tie breaker. I smirked at the unintended pun as I leaned over to my nightstand and reached into the drawer where the ultimate decider resided next to my always-solved Rubik’s Cube, my mix tapes and my Walkman. I gripped the curve of the Magic 8 Ball with reverence for its ability to always set me straight on the right path. Like when I couldn’t decide whether I had studied enough for a test I’d ask it, ‘am I going to pass this test?’ And if it answered, ‘Very Doubtful’, I’d stick out my tongue at it, push aside the book I really wanted to be reading and crack open the book that I had to be reading. And just a few months ago, when the Space Shuttle Challenger was preparing to go up, I’d asked it ‘will the Space Shuttle accomplish its mission?’ and it had answered, ‘Don’t Count On It’ so when the spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean 73 seconds into flight, I decided to forever place a lot of faith in the 8 Ball’s responses.

Warming it up, like I always did, I cradled the Magic 8 Ball in my palms. Testing it first like a cop conducting a lie detector test to see how we were literally going to play ball, I asked it, ‘am I ugly?’

I spun the ball around and around so that the icosahedronal die could pirouette in the blue liquid and come up trumps.

‘Without a Doubt,’ it answered.

‘Fuck you,’ I strangled it a little before trying again, ‘does my life suck?’

‘Signs Point to Yes.’

My stomach sort of flipped because it seemed like the hung jury might be inclined to become unhung and I would soon be pressing the Bugs Bunny tie into action.

I threatened the ball by shaking it hard, setting the tie on my wrist to waggling back and forth,  and whispered to it, ‘should I off myself?’

‘Better Not Tell You Now.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said to it, slamming it down on my bed next to the torn out sheet and my attention was distracted by the first word on the both lists: ‘God’. It got me thinking about whether God knew my ‘Thoughts(!)’ and there I came jammed again between a thought and a hard place.

God was like Father. You’d be in your bedroom in the night with the door latched, tented under your blankets reading Salinger by flashlight and the next day Father would say, ‘must be pretty tired today huh? Staying up all night.’ And God was presumably a couple of notches more omnipotent than Father so He must have known my ‘Thoughts(!)’. But then if He were a loving God like Ted always said He was, then why would he make me think thoughts that were too terrible to even be thinking? And those thoughts about God and Father and omnipotence and loving versus wrathful tied my brain up in knots. I could almost feel the lobes of my brain jimmying themselves into a tangle like they did whenever Mr Simpson was explaining about how to calculate what X equals.

I yanked on the noose around my wrist that wasn’t working the way it should have. It was supposed to look like one of those ones you see in history books dangling from a gallows but instead it just looked like some beginner cub scout’s first try at a Clove Hitch. The lightness of the tie and the stupid rabbit motif made it particularly unsatisfying object to throw onto the bed landing, as it did, with nothing other a slight sigh on the bedspread. I picked up the Magic 8 Ball again, smacking its smooth black plastic between my palms and hissed the question at it that could turn my fate, ‘should I kill myself, goddammit?’ The ‘goddammit’ timed right on the beat of Mother’s first rap on my bedroom door.

‘Brian,’ she said.

I fast bowled the 8 Ball under my bed.

‘Brian,’ she repeated.

I shoved the list under my mattress.

‘Brian,’ third time unlucky. For the fourth one she raised her voice an octave like she always did ‘Brian.’

I figured her knuckles must be getting sore as I gathered the tie up in my hands.

She rattled the knob on knock number five whacking the volume of her voice up to a decibel I would have been in trouble for, ‘BRIAN’. The she embarked on her usual muttering, taking the Lord’s name in vain, which I’d also get in trouble for. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I swear to God, if you don’t… I don’t know what in God’s good graces is the matter with you lately…I have told your father time and again to take the gosh darn lock off this door…crazy people putting a lock on a child’s bedroom door.’

Refusing to be waylaid by her nagging or the usual critique of the previous house owners, I slid the softness of the tie back around my neck like it was a feather boa. I hummed ‘Do you really want to hurt me’ in my head as I then slid the tie off of me and inched it under my mattress like I was sliding a love letter into an envelope. I jumped at the sixth knock and the ‘Brian’ and shoved the tie quicker, scared that I had torn it on the box spring, ‘Goddammit’.

Mother, like she did with everything always, made it about herself and Jesus. ‘Don’t you dare blaspheme at me, young man. You open this door right now you hear me?’

I rolled my eyes as I trudged to the door and whispered ‘Christ Almighty’ to myself because for once the blaspheming hadn’t been about her. Not totally. As I leaned up against the door like a spy in my own room, I had a vision of how Mother might try to reconcile my body together with the cartoon rabbit if she happened upon them. It caused a giggle to escape my mouth just as I pressed myself up close to the door to confront Mother.

‘What’s so funny? Open this door.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I said.’

‘That’s a circular argument.’

‘Don’t take that tone with me, Brian, what are you doing?’

‘Studying. Dammit.’ The swear word wasn’t for her but because I spied the triangular end of the tie dangling out from under the mattress. I bounded over to poke it all the way under and then back to the door.

‘Language, Brian. You’re not studying. You’ve been in there for hours.’

‘Maybe I’ve been studying for hours.’ I splayed my hand out in front of me scanning my wrist for any sign that the tie had been knotted around it. ‘What do you want anyway?’

‘Well firstly, young man, I want you to stop cursing and secondly I want you to do what your mother says and open this door.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I grabbed my math textbook from the desk next to the door and threw it onto the bed splayed open to a random page. ‘What?’ I said when I wrenched the latch and cracked the door just enough to stick my face through the opening.

‘Gosh darnit, Brian, what has gotten into you lately? You’re nothing but surly and disrespectful and I will not have you speaking to me in that way in my own home.’

‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I’m just, I was trying to work out stupid fractions and I was just getting it and I didn’t want to be interrupted.’

‘I don’t know why you have to lock this door?’ She stood on tiptoe to see over me as I squeezed the door tighter and tighter on my face so that the flesh of my fat cheeks bulged out between the door and the doorframe.

She exhaled loud and low bringing her heels back down to the floor. But her hands hadn’t descended from her hips since I’d opened the door. She was white knuckling a gingham dish towel in one of them and it flounced down the side of her leg with a flourish. ‘You’d better not be messing around with drugs in this room.’

‘Can I mess around with drugs out of this room?’ I set my face to sombre.

She flashed me the stink eye. ‘Don’t you get smart with me now. If you’re messing around with drugs…’

‘I’m not. I swear. I’m not messing around with anything. I was just studying. I didn’t even realise I’d locked the door.’

‘Okay, well I’m just sayin’, if you ever…’ She rolled her eyes Godwards like she was praying for His divine inspiration to bestow on her the end of the sentence.

‘Is Phil talking about teenagers on drugs again? Is that why you came to check up on me?’

‘No,’ she blew a fresh puff of air, ‘I need you to come set the table for dinner.’

‘That’s all? You could have just yelled up to me.’

‘You weren’t answering.’

‘I couldn’t hear you over Phil.’

‘You are turning out to be a smart alec, young man, you’d better make sure your father doesn’t hear you talk like you talk to me.’

‘Can I set the table in five minutes?’

‘Five minutes,’ she punctuated the agreement by holding up five fingers. Then she started the tip-toeing and neck craning thing again to see over my head that I was still squinching between the door and its frame.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked in a baritone butler tone.

‘Well…yes…but…’ The hands finally fell from her hips which left her knotting and twisting the dish towel like it was some Protestant version of rosary beads.

‘I can’t find my good, flesh-coloured pair of pantyhose and I didn’t know whether…’

‘What would your pantyhose be dong in my room?’ It was my turn to breathe out and my heart threatened to rat me out with its hammering on my sternum imagining that she might be ready to turn over my mattress like a prison raid.

‘I know. It’s just that I’ve looked everywhere for them and I thought they might have got in with some of your laundry or something, even though I hand wash them. Trust me to lose the only pair that don’t have any runs in them. I’m sure I took them down off the line yesterday. I must be going crazy.’

‘Maybe Greg took them.’

She gave me that look that she always did when she was being extra stern about how ridiculous I was acting in an attempt to cover up that she was trying not to laugh. ‘You’re not cute you know, now I want that table set please and stop locking this door.’

Relieved that she seemed set to retreat, I let go of the door, stood at full attention, looked straight in her eyes and saluted stiff-armed and said, ‘yes, Sir.’

Surrendering to my silly, she snapped the towel in my direction, flung it over her shoulder and set off back to the kitchen. I crooked my head around the doorframe to make sure she turned the corner. Once I heard her footsteps thumping down the stairs, I breathed. For the second time in just the last hour, I closed the door silent as a thief and held my breath as I turned the lock as slow as I could so it wouldn’t clack.

I made myself a supplicant on the floor at the side of my bed again to offer up thanks to my bedroom ceiling. I reached under my mattress to fish out the tie. The knot in it was tired and drooping like my enthusiasm for putting it to the use I’d intended. I balled it in my fist. I crept back to the door to press my ear against it where I could hear Mother answering Jeopardy questions.

‘Who is Krushchev? … Who is Martin Luther?’

Stealing down the hallway back toward my parent’s bedroom, I realised I hadn’t bargained on the volume at which she was listening to Alex Trebek dish out answers to be questioned. It set my hands to trembling because I wouldn’t be able to hear her footsteps, as thudding as they might be, signalling her arrival upstairs. And she’d come if a commercial came on because, at the first note of an advertising jingle, she always found some reason to escape rather than suffer through them.

‘Goddammit,’ I cursed in a whisper when, halfway down the hallway, crouched over like a burglar, I heard the guy refusing to give up his laundry know-how to the housewife because it was an ‘ancient Chinese secret’. Not willing to risk it, I wheeled around, retreated back to my room, locked the door and sank back down to my knees promising to the ceiling that I would put the tie back when everyone was out of the house.

I shoved it back under the mattress, but while my hand was under there, it brushed the other contraband I had stashed just the other day. I snatched my hand back as though there was a viper under there. Instead, I reached under my bed for the Magic 8 Ball. It was back butting up against the wall so I crawled under, cursing, dragged it out and emerged too soon smacking my head up against the bed’s metal edge.

‘Shit,’ I said rubbing my head with the 8 Ball, before hissing at it one last time, ‘should I kill myself?’

‘Ask Again Later.’

I slumped over it, holding it on my knees. Tentative, like reaching in the cage of a wild animal, I tugged the list out from under the mattress. I smoothed the crumpled page down on my bedspread. The 8 Ball rolled off my lap back to its hiding place under the bed.

Palming the list over and over again, I gave up realising I couldn’t eradicate all the wrinkles in it. I took up the tie again like it was something sacred now. I lifted it up to dab at the one tear I had allowed to roll down. I waited for a sign. Like maybe God would smite a 15-year-old with a heart attack just to drive the lesson home.

Holding my breath for two minutes, I waited and when no sign came after two minutes, I guessed that He was saving up the punishment for when he sent me to Hell. I rocked back and forth, pressing the tie to my forehead as I begged forgiveness.

i’msorryi’msorryi’msorryi’msorryi’msorryi’msorryi’msorryi’msorryi’msorry

‘Gosh darnit, Brian, you said five minutes.’ Mother broke into my penitence. With each word, she grew louder as she thumped back up the stairs.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ I shoved myself up off my knees. This time I lifted up the mattress so I could replace the list and the tie but also so I could confront the other item under there.

‘I mean it, Brian, your father will be home soon.’ With each word, the volume grew fainter as she descended back down the stairs. I blew out a stream of breath as the Jeopardy theme tune welcomed everybody back.

I used my head to hold up the mattress and listened out for the hum of answers being asked like questions. Stilling my breath, I took up the other item that had been hidden. I cupped them loose in my hands, the waistband and the gusset running over the sides of my palms. I raised them to my forehead so that they wouldn’t get wet from the tears and snot that were now freely flowing.  They were so soft. So much softer than the tie.

Snorting a laugh through my sobs that resulted from the vision that careened through my head of Mother and Father butting up against my Superman wallpaper, trying to be as far away as they could in my boxy room, from my body. My skinny frame that was naked except for the perfectly noosed tie and the legs adorned with Mother’s best pair of beige pantyhose. I guffawed at the sight like it was real.

I lay them back where they had been. I backed up so that the mattress could fall back down over them, pressed down on it, smoothed the bedspread, plumped my pillow and made vows to the ceiling. Wiping away my tears and mucus with the bottom of my black t-shirt, I whispered that I would return both the tie and the pantyhose…as soon as I could I promised and I would never take anything from my parent’s room again.

As I trudged down the stairs to set the table, I added to my pledges that I would definitely never again have ‘Thoughts(!)’. Then I mouthed ‘God forgive me’ for telling the second biggest lie I would ever tell.

~~~