Tales of Sad Earth by Glenn M. Behr

I wonder why they don’t make doors thicker.

After finishing my cigarette I realized that there was something else I needed to do: go to the bathroom. After navigating the hugging arms of sisters I made my way upstairs and was standing before the toilet and nothing was happening. I’m not sure what was wrong, but to be honest I wasn’t surprised. My genes, in all of their wonder and glory had bestowed upon me one of the worst digestive systems in the history of mankind. Usually the problems only extended to those times I found myself sitting with a good book on the porcelain throne for days on end with nothing to show for it but apparently that hadn’t been enough. Now with a bladder full to the point of bursting I was looking around me like an idiot waiting for a miracle when miracles never happen.

And of course dinner was ready and Dad was in no mood to wait.

“Jack?” He called through the door, not hiding his irritation. “Did you fall in or what? Everybody’s waiting.”

“You know, the more you yell the longer I’m going to take.” What did it matter if the lasagna lost a degree or two. I knew if I left the bathroom now the second I sat down at the table the urge would hit in full force and I’d have to run back up here again anyway and that even if dinner was ready and sitting on the table it would be another ten good minutes until everyone else sat down to eat it. It was the way things worked around here. All of Dad’s yelling was completely unnecessary.

“What are you doing in there anyway?”

“Reconstructing the fall of the Byzantine empire.”

I wondered if anyone else had ever had this problem. Did, say, Jesus at some point find himself leaning up against an adobe wall with his teeth clenched shut waiting for John, Paul, and Peter to look the other way so he could get his juices flowing and get back to his water-into-wine business? It was a funny thought, thinking of him standing there with his eyes pinched shut, giving the holy wood a good shake and cursing “For the love of me will you just come on already? Why in my name…!

“I’ll be down in a minute,” knowing that it wouldn’t do me any good. He wouldn’t be satisfied until the door between us wasn’t any more. I never knew a man so crazy about lasagna. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

“Oh yea?” I could hear him smirk. “So’s Christmas.” That one had gotten old a long time ago.

“Christmas is in two days, Dad.”

“Oh…right. Anyway, hurry the hell up, I’m starving.”

I pinched my eyes shut, trying hard not to think of Jesus any more. A burning had started at the tip of things but nothing was coming. I’m not sure I could describe how uncomfortable it all felt except that a direct parallel could be drawn to the dinner I was about to have. It was starting to drive me crazy. What I wouldn’t do to be able to go the bathroom once, just once, and not have any bodily problems, just go in and go and get the hell out like a normal person. It was sad that it had become such a dire wish but I couldn’t help it. I’d put up with this nonsense for years and years and the dance was getting old. I’d had it checked by a handful of specialists, who subjected me to every unpleasant test there was (some streets are one-way for a reason…) and the conclusion was, “Sorry, kid, but it’s all in your head.” Thanks a fucking million…

Finally, after another five agonizing minutes, I was able to go.

I flushed and headed down to dinner.

They were sitting around the dining room table… at least half of them were. Gram and the girls were nowhere to be seen and even though his back was toward me I could tell how pissed Dad was becoming. The stairs creaked under my feet and he turned around in his chair, looking up at me through the crisscross of the banister supports making me feel like some zoo exhibit. He glowered at me as if I was the source of all his short comings and I glowered back like he was the hemorrhoid that wouldn’t quit.

“Well, it’s about time,” he said, trying to make a bigger deal out of this than it had to be. Neither Mom nor Pap seemed to have noticed he was speaking at all.

And then I saw Gram sitting on a tiny wooden chair next to the TV that Pap was still watching over his shoulder, talking on the phone. I have no idea how she managed to hear or be heard with the volume maxed out like it was. Her words were muffled and I could only catch unintelligible snippets, gossip about what’s-her-name or whose-his-face, the usual pointless banter that she was always going on with. The attention on Pap’s face was glazed over because he could barelyifatall hear a word the news anchor was saying. It was angering that he had that perfectly good set of hearing aids gone unused since the day he’d received them. Did he not realize that they were meant to help? There were so many similarities between him and my dad that it was eerie.

“Where are the girls?” I asked.

“Out watching TV.” Mom, leaning back in a chair that was old enough for it not to be such a good idea, the legs bending in ways the carpenter never intended. “Girls!” She yelled through the kitchen into the addition at the end of the house. “Suppertime!”

Words of protest drifted in to us as I pulled out my chair and sat down but it was all routine by this point. They were making their way into the room before the last of the complaints could fall out of their mouths. Gram still yapping and Pap a thousand miles away, pretending to care about a news story concerning a number of houses that had burned to the ground a few counties away.

Looking over at Dad I could feel the tensions starting to rise. He had his fork in hand, hovering over the plate of noodles, cheese, sauce, and whatever else goes into lasagna like he was waiting for a whistle to sound.

“You gave me all of that crap upstairs and no one is ready to eat,” I said, feigning disbelief for whose amusement I wasn’t sure because we ran through this charade every goddamn time. He didn’t bother to answer me, instead arching himself in the chair and starting to wave at his mother.

“Mom!” he yelled and by some mystery of sound waves Gram actually heard him but decided she needed to finish her story before seeing what he wanted. “You want to wind that up and join us here?” He spun his fork still positioned over his plate around in circles as if she was incapable of understanding his point without a visual aid (she probably couldn’t see it anyway).

“Relax, Dad,” Margaret said as she came in through the kitchen. “That’s why God invented the microwave.”

Mom snickered into her wine glass, the pitch and volume telling me she’d been at it a while. The bottle that had been sitting on the table before was nowhere to be found.

And then Gram was finally ready to end her conversation, leaning over with the receiver to save time and punching in the her last few comments as she put it into the cradle: “Okay I’ll call you in a little while don’t forget coffee in about an hour alright uh huh bye.” And then she was shuffling her way over. Lorie chose this point to come blundering in, her face buried in the folds of a teen rock magazine and I thought she was going to bowl Gram right over, the old woman never would have seen it coming, but somehow they managed to steer clear of each other and take their seats, Lorie next to our father and Gram at the head of the table next to me.

“News off, Dad,” Dad said, poking Pap in the arm with his fork-free hand, him sitting in his place at the head of the table but turned to face the TV and evidently too far off to notice. The news anchor had moved on to a story about some teen mother who’d accidentally shaken her young child to death. “Dad!” Yelling, jabbing at him again but making sure that his fork hand didn’t have to leave that starting position because any second now the bell might ring and then God forbid (old habits dying hard?) there were more than six or seven air molecules between the cutting edge and glory.

“What-what?” Pap spun around, his spherical face shocked, eyes wobbling behind the coke-bottle glasses perched with a duct taped arch on the crown of his stubby little nose.

“Ya wanna, like, join us here?” Pitying the poor son of a bitch who keeps this one from his desert.

The anchorman now discussing a project done by a classroom of fourth graders where they had all gotten together to make posters celebrating several young men of the community who had been shipped off to Iraq. I thought it was nice that the news agency took at least a small bit of time to focus on something that wasn’t death related, but then the story shifted gears to explain that three of those young men had already been killed in action and then supplying grisly war photos of fallen soldiers just in case the imaginations of the viewers hadn’t been up for the task.

It was here that Pap decided to turn off the set, leaving an imagine of goresoaked sand and crumpled bodies, the last my mind had to ponder before looking down at my plate of lasagna.

Next to me Mom drained the last of her glass, setting it down next to her plate. Everyone officially in their place and that was enough for Dad. He had shoveled four forkfuls into his mouth before any of us had the chance to fill our plates. Bowls of food began to circle the table. Watching Mom selecting a cob of corn I caught the sadness in her eyes and deciding that she hadn’t had enough to drink to get her through the night I pushed back my chair and headed into the kitchen.

“Where’re you going now?” Dad hollered after me even though it didn’t matter any more, having gotten what he’d been after this whole time but still feeling the need to govern over every step I took.

“Mom needs another glass of wine,” I said, coming back in and setting the uncorked bottle before her. She was here because of me and I was happy for that, but I didn’t want her to have to suffer because of it.

“A fine boy! A wonderful boy!”

I filled my plate up and started passing the bowls along to Gram.

Across the table Dad set down his fork and folded his hands preacherlike in front of his face notquite masking the mischievous grin that’d sprung up there. He caught my eye and motioned his head toward Gram. I had just passed her a steaming bowl of green beans and she was pulling the tongs out, and me knowing what was about to happen and looking down into my lap. It was disgusting that he took enjoyment in things like this. Gram arched her head forward, eyes straining to focus on the job at hand but obvious that she didn’t have any idea what she was looking at. She pinched the tongs together an inch or so above the beans and moved it over her plate and releasing them, under the impression that she had served herself. She went back for another, repeating the same actions. Convinced that she had enough beans she went to pass the bowl to Lorie but I couldn’t stand it. I reached over and gently took the bowl from her extended hand.

“Here you go, Gram,” I said, giving her some beans

With the fun over Dad turned back to his plate.

“So how’s school, Jack?” Gram asked while trying to figure out what it was she was sticking her fork in. She managed to nab a single bean and a dripping noodle. There was a little surprise on her face as she put it in her mouth.

“It’s good.” I shoveled in a mouthful of the lasagna. It was good (the lasagna) but not like it had been before her eyes had deteriorated. It was a shame. She really had been the greatest cook in the family and that was saying something but now I guess it was enough that she was able to cook at all let alone something that wasn’t half bad. I thought of her recipe posters again and almost laughed out loud. I had just remembered something.

A number of years ago while I was still in high school Dad had been slaving over the stove, excited by the number of hours it had taken him to prepare us the meal of our lives. He was almost finished when he realized that he still needed some flour to bread the chicken he was planning to fry. It had then been one of the girls’ task to run down the street to see if their grandmother had any that he could use. They returned with a bag full of white powder (unlabeled because they were all unlabeled) which he took without question.

We all sat down around the table, plates heaping with chicken and vegetables, him at the head, leaning back with his hands placed firmly on either side of his plate, watching with a wide grin as we gathered up our first tastes, waiting to hear from our own lips how magnificent it was. I put mine in my mouth immediately aware that something was terribly wrong. From the look on Mom’s and the girls’ faces I wasn’t the only one but we kept chewing anyway, wondering if food was actually supposed to taste this horrible. None of us were brave enough to point it out to the chef.

But he could tell that something was up. “What?” He asked, his face clouding over with the kind of concern you’d expect from someone who had just discovered their child was in a serious accident. He picked up his fork and shoved a large quantity of the chicken into his mouth and spitting it out again before he had even began to chew.

“GODDAMNIT JESUS CHRIST!”

Gram had accidentally given him baking soda.

We ended up eating sandwiches without him, having locked himself in his room for the night but that was to be expected, seeing as it was his solution for every one of his problems. The best times were when he was watching football out in the kitchen, PennState, and whenever they’d play poorly he’d start cursing and hollering and storming around the room until finally it was too much and shutting the TV off and locking himself in the master bedroom to cool off. Except that he wouldn’t cool off, instead putting the game on in there and start flipping out all over again. The girls and I used to spend some nights sitting at the bottom of the stairs listening to him with a bowl of popcorn. It was better than cable.

“So are you still doing your writing?”

“Trying to,” around a mouthful of corn, warm butter on my fingers.

She reached over and tapped on Mom who looked up around the rim of her glass. “Did you know that he promised us six million dollars after he gets his first book published?”

That number had gone up significantly over the years.

Mom snorted and then to me, “So how much does that mean I get?”

“Well if you’re nice maybe I’ll send you to a decent retirement home.”

“Huh! Did you hear him, Norn?” Gram bobbing her head. “My own son.”

“Didn’t I just bring you wine?”

“A fine boy! A wonderful boy!”

“How’s Marianne doing?” Gram again.

“She’s fine. She would have come down tonight but she had to drive to Harrisburg to pick up her sister. She just came in from Washington D.C.”

“Well, tell her we miss her.”

“I will.”

I looked down at the mess of food on my plate, realizing that it wasn’t lasagna and mashed potatoes I was seeing. It was beef stroganoff. It was ham and peas. It was roast chicken and gravy. It was every meal I had ever eaten in this house.

“Is she coming down for desert?” Lorie asked.

“Who? Marianne?” Lorie had an incredible talent for missing entire conversations. “I just said she had to drive to Harrisburg to pick up her sister.”

“Oh.” She went back to her food and magazine.

“Can someone pass me the beans?” Mom asked, reaching for the wine.

I could taste the stroganoff in the lasagna.

“Are you excited about being home?” Gram, this time managing to get a good bit of food into her mouth and smiling around it triumphantly.

“Of course I am,” I lied.

“Well that’s good.”

“Did you hear that Andrews resigned?” Pap asking Dad in his usual out-of-nowhere way.

Dad dropped his fork and looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

“Uh, you do realize that I’m the one that he handed his resignation to, right?” For the past ten years he’d been Vice President of the school board, a fact apparently lost on the elder.

“Says in the paper he got a better offer over at Mount Carmel.”

“Dad, I know.”

“Guess they’ll be re-opening the position then.”

Dad rolled his eyes and smacked a palm off of the side of his head. Pap didn’t notice and the two of them turned back to their meals.

“Jack.” Gram’s tugging on my sleeve. “Did you hear the one about the guy who went to the doctor?”

“No, Gram, I haven’t.”

There was a twinkle in her eye, her considering what she was about to tell me the best joke in the whole wide of the world.

“Well there’s this gentleman, and he goes in to the doctor…” and then the twinkle fades and she looked down the table at her husband. “Earl,” she called. “Earl. How does that one go? Earl!”

Pap looked up, startled. “Huh? What?”

“How does that one go?”

“What?”

“I said, how does that one go?”

“How does what go?”

“The one about the doctor!” She was getting huffy. Obviously Pap should have known exactly what she was talking about.

“The what about what?”

“Oh, never mind!”

“You can tell me later, Gram.” She nodded and stared off into space.

It felt as if I had been strapped into a chair A Clockwork Orange style and forced to watch the same re-run of a show that I had never liked in the first place over and over and over again. No matter how much I tried to forget I couldn’t be surprised when the same things started happening just like they had the time before that and the time before that and the time before that and the way it was going to happen the next eight million times.

“Paper said they’re gonna give him the head coaching position.”

Mom snickered into her wine glass, some of it shooting straight back up into her nose and clapping a hand over her mouth as the laughter took off, bits of wine seeping between her fingers like a leaky dam. Pap continued talking at Dad but you could have fit the Great Wall of China between them and Mom trying with all of her might not to burst out like a lunatic, both Lorie and Margaret looking at me for support and then Mom beginning to slap her hand on the edge of the table. The power in the third hit was what did it. On top of the china cabinet against the wall was a small wooden sound-activated light house that played an array of Christmas songs and that third smack met the proper volume requirements and it began to pump out a very poor-quality rendition of Oh Holy Night.

Mom laughed so hard that she felt right out of her chair, nearly taking me down with her.

margaret running to help pushing back her chair and reaching for fallen mother and me flabbergasted too flabbergasted to do anything other than stare and holy night o holy night on and on and on too much all of it too much seeing them destroyed warped like wet wood ashes like burnt wood and not the same no longer the same never the same again yet unchanging and worse those images those heroic setinstone images fiction all of it reduced to fiction mom a drunk gram and pap cartoons playing out skits for the enjoyment of all and dad and dad all of them no longer the memory the memory dead yet everything the memory and sad so sad and seeing that wine bottle that wine bottle that had turned mom changed mom hating that bottle and grabbing it to leave but mom grabbing my wrist the joy gone the joy dead until darkness remains

“No,” she whispered. “Please don’t. I need it.”

My heart sank, breaking a little on the way down.

I let the bottle go and stood to leave.

“Done already?” Dad looking peeved.

“Yes.”

“You’ve still got half a plate.”

“I’m not hungry.”

He leaned back in his chair. “You know, your grandmother spent all day cooking this meal for you. The least you could do is eat your fair share.”

“If he’s not hungry he doesn’t have to eat,” Gram said, primly and with a nod of her head. “It’s okay, Jack. You can just warm some up later if you get hungry.”

“Thanks, Gram. It was really good though.”

I grabbed my coat off of the chair and felt for my cigarette tin as I slid into it.

“Can’t even stick around and bless us with your company,” Dad with a transparent shake of his head.

“I’m going to be living here for the next month,” zipping up my coat and heading for the side door. “You have plenty of time to get sick of me.”

The screen door banged shut behind me, setting off the light house again. This time no one laughed.

Tried calling Marianne.

No answer.

The rain came out of nowhere, thick, heavy, hard. Globules of icy pudding making miniature puddles of their own on impact that quickly molded out and together to form great lakes of foaming seascape even two miles inland. Everywhere people ducked for shelter, under billboards, marquees, buss stops crammed like sardine cans bursting from the seams, storefronts effectively closed, clogged arteries leading to cardiac arrest for morning sales, non-English speaking immigrant owners unsure of how to convey this inconvenience fighting their way through hydrophobic mobs with broad broom strokes, heaving and hurling, frustration-induced thrombolytic shoves yet more and more pedestrians coagulating together, thicker and thicker despite all efforts to the contrary. Traffic came to a near halt, wiper blades not designed to handle so much accumulation, visibility reduced to zero in seconds, horns blaring, sound waves muted in the deluge as well as the cracking of fenders, curb walkers torn down like novice surfers in the great white-capped waves of those drivers too impatient to slow.

Inside the lobby it was a different world, dry and cool, the nearly-white-tiled floor shimmering, un-scuffed from lack of sufficient foot traffic, not uncommon for this early hour, great pillars holding up the vaulted ceiling, the world and its Atlas, everything a muted not-quite-white, juxtaposed in rhythmically placed alcoves by fat shoots of fern fronds that playfully tickled at any who walked within their reach, the light brilliantly bright, the artificial “natural light” mixing, on sunnier mornings with the streams of the real thing blooming through the revolving doors. Today this light, the inner mime and the outer model, weren’t harmonizing at all. Everything in here had an antiseptic glow and through the door near-noon had turned to night in the sudden onslaught of the storm, severing any connection they may have once had, becoming two separate plains of existence, the land of the living and that of the dead.

Corrin Malbray wasn’t quite sure which one was which. Cozily nestled behind the plate-glass barricade of her Teller’s booth it was all “out there,” leaving her in some undesignated third realm, Limbo maybe, but closer to one than the other, the effect of which left her dreamy and slightly detached, processing transactions with peripheral motor-responses, each “customer” a shadow-fog cut-out despite the seraphic illumination, her own words spoken backwards through a cone, distant and distorted. If this hadn’t been the case, if she hadn’t been so lost and disconnected, floating up and down the tiers of the Mount, maybe it would have gone differently or never happened at all. Like so many things that November morning it could be blamed on the rain, which ended up ruining so much more than business and had it not come down so hard, so mercilessly, then she might have been paying closer attention to her “customers,” would’ve seen the tell-tale signs as the man, who in a single afternoon affected her life more than any and all of the people she’d known in her thirty-nine years, faded up to her window, the air around him static, molecules in unnatural states of agitation, playing with the brass clasp of a tarnished billfold with surgical fingers, cobalt blue eyes ominous and calculating.

She addressed him from the same “other place” as everyone before, missing the way those eyes carefully took her in, down to the most minute detail, number of pores, pock marks from pubescent acne outbreaks, those stray strands of burnt-blond hair, the soft hollow purple rims below her hazel eyes, the loose-knit mauve-wool sweater built for someone bigger, giving her a balloon appearance, the indentation on the ring finger of her left hand where a wedding band had long held reign but no longer, the chewed cuticles of her unpainted nails, feeling her hopelessness. He listened to her speak from her “other where” intently, picking up the nearly-indistinguishable disturbances in the air around her mouth with each puffy breath of freshly shaped syllable, those tiny nuances of despair, of loss, not only of hope but of all things, someone left a shell, limping through the minutes and hours of each too-long day, thinking only of that loss, consumed and it was there, all of it on the perfect portrait her lips painted, carefully carving each word, sculpting and completely oblivious. There was a scent billowing out through the money-tray hole at the bottom of the protective glass barrier, wafting up and filling him: old cigarettes, vodka, anti-depressants in cute octagonal powder-blue capsules, sugar-coated and easy to swallow, granola. She didn’t wear perfume, her clothes hinting at a lesser known brand of detergent, something cheap in an economy bottle, her shampoo and soap the same, dollar-store surrogate. All of it morphing into her life, the whole story, there on the wind of expelled carbon dioxide for all to smell and ignore, just another Teller at the bank, not even that pretty and therefore forgettable, so tragic.

He understood how deep her tragedy ran (had been in here at this time every day for the past week, taking her in, learning all about her and she hadn’t once noticed him, no recognition, no sign of having caught on to the checks he was cashing, checks from him to him, cyclical) an underground river of unhappy endings manifesting in unparalleled detachment. It was okay. He had a plan. It had all been told. The rain worked in his favor. Of course it would. As she took the small rectangle of paper, which he’d folded after filling it out, as if it mattered if it appeared to’ve been stuffed into the billfold, he reached down, grabbing up the long, black umbrella the ancient woman at the next window had leaned against the wooden partition, passing it from thieving left hand to innocent right. No one saw a thing. He shifted his position, analyzing the patters his shadow tattooed in front of him.

“And here’s your receipt…” Corrin was transmitting.

“Have lunch with me.”

These words, so alien in this mathematical world of clicking digits and decimal places, of set routines and auto-responses, managed to break through the fog, Corrin looking up for the first time, not sure what she expected, not surprised to see the man’s face lost in black-void shadow, back-lit with all that antiseptic Heaven-cloud, reaching fern fronds playing at the edges of his silhouette like groping, skeletal hands, yet nothing malevolent in this vision, any possible threat lost in a great vale of mystery, the medium communicating with the soul of the lost but which one was which? An electrical pulse fired in her cortex, thoughts postmarked/delivered instantaneously into action, lungs contracting, expelling more of that wonderful CO2, the soft vibrations as it grazed over her vocal chords, giving it sound, lips moving, the un-acknowledged hands of the new world Michelangelo.

“Excuse me?”

He let a smile play across his mask because no one could see.

“Have lunch with me.”

There was something, not about his words, but in the way he said them, something she couldn’t put a finger on that set a flutter going in her heart, the valves their flapping faster as blood flow increased. She knew her answer was going to be “yes,” knew it but couldn’t understand why, only that it wasn’t a question at all, that somehow she’d known this moment was coming, these words waiting to be asked, the mono-syllable answer already written in a future history. None of this came to her, only quiet whispers in the back of her mind, half-truths in the half-light of her neo-fog universe, but inarguable as the inevitable rising and setting of the sun.