Extreme Elvin Read online

  She was all right, my ma. And I thought I just might tell her. And get it over with. But watch closely now or you might miss it.

  “Hey,” I said. “You know what?”

  “What?” She did not look up.

  “Lester did all right for himself.”

  “Better than all right,” she concurred.

  “I hope eventually I make as good a choice as Lester made.”

  “What choice?” she asked. “We were so drunk, you were four months old before we even realized we were married.”

  Now, she looked up. “Scali bread, or baguette?”

  “Baguette,” I answered, nodding several times more than that question required. The traditional end of a Bishop Family Moment, talking about something else.

  Good thing Ma and I both speak bread.

  Stroganoff

  IT WAS THE DAY. The day. I survived waking up and eating and walking and Ma and school well enough, but survived it was all I did. Barbara just kept growing in my mind, and as she did, everybody else kept shrinking, all my other concerns kept melting. I knew enough to be slightly ashamed of myself, feeling like I was doing something intimate and private in public. Had to keep to myself. But also had to prepare.

  The dogs. Jeez, the puppies. I’d promised Barbara cute puppies, but all I had were these. Right after school I went to the garage, and spent time with them, as if somehow attention was going to improve them.

  I picked up one puppy. The vet said whenever we picked up a puppy, we were to bring it around to the mother’s nose, so she could sniff it, sniff us, see that everything was okay.

  “Here, Grog,” I said, offering the offering.

  Grog opened his eyes without raising his head. Saw the child. Closed the eyes, tight, like he was wincing.

  “Ya,” I said, “you should be embarrassed. And you’re a lousy mother too, boy.”

  So I didn’t bother asking permission anymore. One by grisly one I picked up the entire litter—now there’s an accurate term—sizing them up, holding them by the window light, holding them away from the light, turning them at different angles, fixing their uniformly olive-colored hair this way and that to somehow work with their best features. I had bought a soft-bristle dog brush that afternoon. So there I was, holding this bug-eyed, oily, black-tongued, completely nostrilless Chia Pet in one hand while with the other I was brushing away madly trying to get its bangs to fall rakishly over one eye and maybe score us a point or two for rugged good looks.

  Rugged we got, at least. The hair that grew on the pups’ faces was so hard and wiry, growing straight out in all directions from around the eyes, the sagging cheeks, and the double chins, it was as if we were acupuncturing them. On the bright side, I was able to bend and twist the face hairs into decorative shapes.

  “See,” I said when I finished molding one of them, “this design I made here, this is what a dog is shaped like. Ever seen that shape before?”

  I was talking to them out there in the garage. I was getting like Marlon Brando and his birds in On the Waterfront.

  “You’re not even trying,” I said to the lot of them when I had finished after two hours. I’d arranged them just so on the floor with their mother and they looked exactly like they had when I arrived. “This is important to me, you guys. We’re trying to make a good impression here.” Predictably, the dogs were unmoved. “She’s not even gonna want to eat, after she sees you.”

  “Elvin,” Ma called from the house, “Barbara’s here.”

  Yow. Hey stomach, what’s that for? Settle down. There was no reason she wouldn’t be here now. That was the plan. Barbara would walk the several blocks to my house, and I would walk her home.

  I poked my head out the garage door, and looked to the kitchen window where Ma was.

  “Elvin,” she said calmly, “will I send her out there?”

  “No!” I yelled, both hands stuck way out in front of me.

  I scurried back to the dogs, fluffed them up like pillows, turned, and trotted up to the house.

  When I banged through the door, I was not prepared. My life had not prepared me for this one, or anything like it.

  I saw her like I had somehow not managed to see her before.

  Barbara had on a dress, for godsake. It was red. No, it was green, a deep forest green, or pink. Made of velvet, or was it fishnet.

  Anyway, the point is, it was girl shaped, and merciless. She looked so... pretty. That doesn’t sound like much, I suppose, when a guy like me is just saying it and you’re not seeing it, but it is much. It is a lot of much.

  Pretty. I mean, my mother is pretty. My yard is pretty late in the spring and early in the fall, but we’re not talking about that and you know it. I mean pretty. And it does not come in, all the way in, to a guy’s life all that often, does it?

  At least not into mine.

  “Hi, Elvin,” she said, opening up a heartlessly heart-shaped, red-framed smile on me. She had just a little bit of lipstick on.

  I grabbed onto the nearby radiator for support. Then I waved casually with the other hand to make it look more suave than desperate. “Hi,” I ad-libbed.

  Ma stood there, looking us over. She held out a small bunch of flowers, wildflowers, purple and gold and white, that had obviously been recently and locally picked, wrapped in crinkly white tissue and tied with a fat length of royal-blue yarn. “Look what Barbara brought me,” she said.

  We were already well beyond my experience with stuff like this, so I had no idea what kind of response I was supposed to make. Fortunately, neither did Barbara. We looked at each other. Shrugged, smiled.

  “Excellent home training,” Ma silently mouthed at me. You wouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to lip-read such a thing under this kind of pressure from halfway across a room, except that it is a sort of standard thing when she meets a new person. A positive reference to the individual’s home training is a gold star on the forehead.

  “This was so nice of Barbara,” Ma said, since nobody else was willing to talk. “I think she deserves a puppy for this.”

  Go, Ma. We had been working madly, trying to unload the puppies all around town.

  “Ya,” I said, because that’s what I always said. But then I remembered that I actually liked Barbara. “No, but... we should eat first,” I said, slamming the door behind me for don’t-go-there emphasis. I’d have piled furniture up against the door if it weren’t so conspicuous.

  “Ah, no,” Ma said, turning to the cupboard to find a pitcher for her flowers. “There’s time yet. Go on out to the garage.”

  “Shit,” I blurted.

  They both looked at me with the identical one-brow-raised expression.

  “I mean, shshshsh... shtep right this way, miss.” I threw open the door, just as if I really wanted her to walk through it. And so she did. When Barbara was out and heading down the stairs, I could let my face sink to where it belonged. What was I going to do about this? Ma grinned at me insanely and gave me the thumbs-up as if one of us had just won the Daytona 500. She was no help.

  “Please,” I said as we both turned toward our respective duties, “don’t do that.”

  I caught up to Barbara as we neared the garage, and I started thinking spin control. I flashed on the last view I had of the pups and their mother, all gathered together and oozing like a big 3-D oil splotch on the garage floor.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “You have, like, a tic or something,” Barbara asked, “makes that word come out of you for no reason?”

  We had reached the garage. I scooted ahead of her and stood with my back to the door, barring her entry. “I have to be honest with you before we go in there,” I said.

  “Is this about you and your mother? I’ve heard the stories, but frankly I just found them too unbelievable to be taken seriously.”

  I waved my hands at her. “No, it’s about”—I swallowed, pointed over my shoulder. “It’s about the pups. These are not—” I stopped. I’d been listening in slow motion because I
was thinking in fast motion. “What about me and my mother? Who’s talking about—”

  “Are you going to let me see these puppies or not? Jeez, Elvin, the way you go on, it’s like you have an insane relative hiding in your garage or something.”

  “I wish. Okay. Let me just tell you, these are not... handsome dogs. I don’t want you to go in there and think, like, we’ve been mutilating them, or that they were part of some kind of sick genetic manipulation...”

  Barbara reached out then, and put her hand flat on my chest.

  She put her hand flat on my chest.

  She put, her hand, flat on my chest.

  All seven of my hearts accelerated at once. Inside me it sounded and felt like a helicopter squadron. From that moment on, I didn’t care what was waiting in the garage. In fact, all I knew then about the garage was that it was holding me up. And I was alone with Barbara.

  “You’re so funny.” She left her hand on me as she spoke. “All puppies are adorable. Some are just a little less adorable, and some are more, that’s all. Now, are you going to let me in there?”

  I gave it some thought. As much thought as I was at that moment capable of.

  “Go in where?” I asked, without meaning to be funny or cute or anything.

  “Hah,” Barbara laughed, and pushed me aside.

  When she’d passed, I put my hand into the exact spot where her hand had just been, flat on my chest. I could swear I felt the handprint, still warm. Her hand was exactly the same size as mine.

  “Oh my god,” she yelped from inside.

  Oh ya. The puppies.

  When I reached her, she was pacing back and forth in front the sleeping knot of mutts, trying to get a different angle on them.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “It doesn’t get any better.”

  “What did you mate her with, Elvin, a pineapple?”

  “Hey, I didn’t mate her with anything. I didn’t even know he was a girl.”

  The one-eyebrow-stare again. “Didn’t come with the instruction manual, I guess, huh?”

  Boy, she reminds me of somebody.

  Barbara looked away from me, stood there for a minute with her hands on her hips looking hard at the dogs. They must have felt the heat of her glare, because they got all in an uproar. One of them stretched. One of them opened its eyes. One wild thing actually got to its feet, without opening its eyes, took a couple of steps, then reconsidered and went back to sleep.

  “They are cute,” Barbara said.

  “What?”

  “Cute. I said they are cute.” She didn’t even sound like she needed to convince herself, though that appeared to be just what she had been doing. She’d accomplished it already.

  “You can’t believe that,” I said.

  “I can. And I do,” she responded. And as if to prove it, she went right to the pile and extracted not one but two of the dogs. Without gloves on even.

  To distinguish one pup from another I had come up with a system of identifying them in terms of pasta colors, textures, and thicknesses, according to the design of the hair that shot out from their faces. Barbara was holding the one with the #2 whole wheat linguine face and the one with the squid-ink tagliatelle face.

  “No offense, Barbara,” I said, “but I think you’re a little reckless with the way you use the word cute.”

  She looked up from actually nuzzling the two animals. “No accounting for taste, I guess.”

  Picture me now, whistling down out of the sky, barrel-rolling nose-first toward the earth with smoke coming out of my tail.

  “But I happen to think I have excellent taste,” she added.

  And pulling right up out of that nosedive, once again sky-bound.

  This was an unbelievable person here. She saw the cuteness of those beasts. And the cuteness of this one.

  But just between you and me, I was getting a little nervous about the way I rose and fell on Barbara’s words. She had such a control over my emotions. Way more than I had over my own.

  “You said I could have one, right?” she asked.

  “What? Oh, the pups. Sure. You can have one if you want. You can have them all if you want.”

  She nodded. “One.” She bounced the two she was holding, as if judging them by weight. She looked back down at the rest, considered, then concentrated on the two in hand again.

  “Does this little guy have a name?” she asked, holding Tagliatelle a little higher and nuzzling his nose with hers. He actually came to life, licking her and taking little bites of the tip of her nose. I was jealous.

  “Does the little guy have a name?” I repeated. “I wasn’t even sure the little guy was a little guy. But, well, ya, I was calling him Tag.”

  “Want to come home with Barbara, Tag?”

  I call myself Tag, too, I thought, can I come home with Barbara? But I figured that might be a little forward to say out loud.

  “Elvin!” Barbara said, eyes wide. “That was very fresh.”

  Oh my god, it came out of me. I covered my mouth with my hand, and the rest of my face with blush. Shit!

  “Elvin!” She gasped again. Thank god she was laughing at me.

  I was really no good at this, no good at all.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because of my excellent home training. And then I broke into a fit of honesty, because of my lousy romantic training. “These things are happening... just ’cause I like you a real lot.” I could feel that I was squinting very hard as I said it, as though I was anticipating a hard blow.

  “Jeez, I can’t imagine what you’d scream at me if you didn’t like me a real lot,” Barbara said, looking at her new dog as she spoke, which made it easier on me. “I’m taking Tag, okay?”

  Before I could tell Barbara just how okay that was, how okay everything was, Ma called me again from the window.

  “What?” I yelled, a little irritably.

  “The rest of them are here,” she sang.

  “What?” I ran to the garage door and stared up at my mother in her window. “What are you talking about, the rest of them? This is it. We are the rest of them.”

  “Don’t get huffy with me, Bishop,” Ma said, though she didn’t sound angry at all. “You’re not the one trying to prepare a meal for X number of dinner guests.”

  “What X number?” I asked. “Three? Three is not an X number. We are only having—”

  “Hey guy,” Frankie said, putting his arm around my mother’s shoulders in the window. “What’re you doing down there when the food’s all up here?”

  Ma removed Frankie’s arm. He put it back. She moved it again.

  “I’ll be right up,” I growled, pointing a finger at Frankie.

  When I went back into the garage, steaming, confused, ready to blow a gasket, I came upon Barbara crouched down among the dogs, holding Tag in her lap while the others sort of mingled about around her. She was talking to them, asking them their names, telling them one by one that they were “pretty boys. Yes you are, aren’t you. And pretty girls, yes.” And when she would speak to one, it would turn its unfortunate little mug up toward her and react. They were wagging too, at the sound of her voice. Not that they had actual tails, more like hairy shot glasses attached to their backsides, and when they wagged them it was really that they were wagging the entire rear third of their bodies. I couldn’t believe it. It looked cute. She got them to be cute.

  I had no idea what the correct emotional response was to this situation, but I can tell you what my response was.

  Fear. I could not stop staring at Barbara, as she coolly improved all my surroundings, and I felt afraid, that somehow this was not going to work, to be, to last. That I was not up to this. That I was not meant for this.

  And all I could think to do was to kiss her for it. To run up and kiss her; then to run away while it was still perfect. The urge was so strong...

  “Elvin!” The call from the kitchen again.

  “We gotta go,” I sighed to Barbara.

  “Sure,” she said. “Bu
t why do you say it like that? Is your mom, like, a lousy cook or something?”

  “No, she’s great,” I said. “It’s just that we have party crashers up there now and...” I looked at her, and she was looking back at me intensely, waiting on my next words, taking my concern seriously. “And,” I said firmly, but in reality I was in the process of chickening out. Because what I wanted to say was, I want to stay right here in the garage with you. But what I did say was, “I might have to get tough with them.”

  The thinking being, I guess, if you can’t be smart or honest, be macho.

  “Oh, Elvin,” she said, shoving me hard toward the house, “you’re such a goof.”

  Well then. Guess we’ll scratch macho off the list of approaches.

  When we got to the kitchen, Ma was busy putting out extra place settings.

  “Stop that, Ma,” I said. She continued without responding.

  Frankie walked through the kitchen door. “Hi,” he said.

  “No,” I said, pointing at him.

  Mike walked in. “Hi.”

  “No.”

  “You two,” I barked, one last shot at the macho. “Out in the hall.”

  As I followed the guys out of the kitchen, I stopped and placed a hand lightly on Barbara’s arm. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

  I meant serious business now out in the hall.

  “Please,” I begged. “Please, guys, get outta here. This is hard enough for me. I’m like, ready to lay eggs out there in the kitchen as it is, so I know if you two rats are here I’m gonna totally waste myself with Barbara.”

  I was out of breath already. It was their turn.

  “You got it backward,” Frankie said. “I’m only here to help you. To supervise. To make sure you don’t do anything you might regret later. To protect you from yourself.”

  “But don’t let that worry you. I’m here to provide balance,” Mikie added. “I’m here to supervise him. If you’re lucky, we’ll cancel each other out and you can get on with your business.”

  Something awfully close to a whimper slipped out of me there. As if this wasn’t already ten times more complicated than anything I’d ever attempted before. I was now going to have to operate with these two being like on TV when a person has the little good guy on one shoulder whispering in his ear, and the little bad guy on the other.