I settled in for another lecture. Since my father died, my mother had become a droner, as if to fill the hole in her life with verbiage. She’d also frosted her hair a yellowish gray to make herself look older, more like a widow, but she was still only forty-four and I hoped she would remarry, this time choosing somebody rich and politically right of center, after the expiration of whatever she deemed a proper interval of bereavement. Not that she’d done much actual grieving. She’d used the interval instead to be angry at my father and the pointless way he’d died. It had fallen to me and my sisters to be devastated by the plane crash. I’d already begun to take a kinder view of my father when it happened, and when I arrived at the high-school auditorium for his memorial service and saw the overflow crowd of colleagues and former students, I felt proud to be the son of a man who never met a person he didn’t want to like. My sisters both gave eulogies whose effusion seemed pointed at his widow, who sat next to me and chewed her lip and stared straight ahead. She was still dry-eyed when the service ended. “He was a very good man,” she said.
I’d since spent three increasingly unbearable summers with her. The highest-paying job I could find was at the Atkinson’s Drugs branch where she herself worked. I stayed out late every evening with my friends and returned home after midnight to foul smells in our bathroom. My mother’s colon was unhappy not only with me but with my sisters. Cynthia had dropped out of grad school to become a labor organizer in California’s Central Valley; Ellen was living in Kentucky with a gray-bearded banjo player and teaching remedial English. Both of them seemed happy, but all my mother could see, and drone about, was the waste of their abilities.
I owed my drugstore job to Dick Atkinson, the owner of the chain. During my second summer with my mother, her bowel’s irritation was aggravated by Dick’s courtship of her. Dick was a nice guy and a staunch Republican, and I felt that my mother, who’d always admired his entrepreneurship, could do a lot worse. But Dick was twice divorced, and she, who had stuck it out with my father, disapproved of discarding spouses and wanted no part in it. Dick considered this ridiculous and believed that he could wear her down. By the end of the summer, she’d worked herself into such a state that her gastroenterologist had to put her on prednisone. A few months later, she’d quit her job at the pharmacy. She was now working, at what I suspected were slave wages, for the congressional campaign of Arne Holcombe, a developer of downtown Denver office space. When I’d gone home for a third summer with her, I’d found her health improved but her idealization of Arne Holcombe so over the top, so incessantly and droningly expressed, that I worried for her sanity.
“What are the polls showing?” I asked her when she’d exhausted the subject of McCaskill’s contributions to the moral fiber of the nation. “Does Arne have a chance?”
“Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen,” she said. “We’re still suffering from the aftereffects of a lowlife president who put his lowlife cronies’ interests before the public good. What a gift that was to the special-interest-pandering Democrats and their sickening, grinning peanut farmer. Why any rational person would think that Arne has anything to do with Watergate, it mystifies me, Tom, it really does. But the other side slanders and slanders and panders and panders. Arne refuses to pander. Why would he pander? Is it really so hard to understand that a person with twenty million dollars and a thriving business only descends into the gutter of Colorado politics if he’s animated by civic responsibility?”
“So, that’s a no?” I said. “The polls aren’t looking good?”
I could never get a straight answer from her anymore. She droned on about Arne’s honesty and integrity, Arne’s fiercely independent mind, Arne’s sensible business-based solution to the problem of stagflation, and I hung up the phone still not knowing what the polls showed.
The following Saturday night, Lucy and Bob threw a Halloween party at their house. Oswald and I put on suits and dark glasses and earphones and went as Secret Service agents. Bob’s many friends, people who’d been living within a mile of their alma mater for nearly a decade, people for whom it was a political statement to invest their energies in absurdities and trivialities, had come in ungainly conceptual costumes (“I am the Excluded Middle,” a guy sandwiched between slabs of Styrofoam informed us gravely at the door) and were filling the place with reefer smoke. Bob himself was wearing moose antlers, signifying Bullwinkle, with Lucy as his sidekick, Rocky. She’d blackened her nose, covered the rest of her face with brown greasepaint, and dressed in brown stretch pajamas with a tail of real animal fur attached above her butt. She scampered over to Oswald and me and offered to let us touch her tail.
“Must we?” Oswald said.
“I’m Rocky the Flying Squirrel!”
She seemed possibly stoned. I was already embarrassed to be there with Oswald, who had no patience with counterculture zaniness. I scanned the living room for younger, edgier faces and was surprised to see Anabel, standing alone in a corner, her arms crossed firmly. Her costume was no costume — jeans and a jean jacket.
Lucy could see where I was looking. “You know what her costume is? ‘Ordinary person.’ Get it? She can only pretend to be ordinary.”
“That’s Anabel Laird,” I explained to Oswald.
“Hard to recognize without the butcher paper.”
Anabel caught sight of me and widened her eyes in her hanged-person way. It was interesting to see her in denim — it really did look like a costume on her.
“I should go talk to her,” I said.
“No, she needs to try to mingle,” Lucy said. “This happened at our Bastille Day party, too. People can tell she’s worth talking to, they’re coming up to me and asking who she is, but they’re afraid to go near her. I don’t know why she bothers coming to parties where she doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her.”
“She’s shy,” I said.
“That’s one word for it.”
Anabel, seeing that we were talking about her, turned her back on us.
“Take us to your beer,” Oswald said.
I was following him to the kitchen when Lucy grabbed my hand and said she had something to show me. We went upstairs to her bedroom. In the harsh light of its ceiling fixture, she looked like Lucy but also like a small animal. I asked what she wanted me to see.
“My tail.” She turned around and wagged the fur at me. “Don’t you want to touch my tail?”
Who doesn’t enjoy touching fur? I stroked her tail, and she backed into me, grinding her butt against my thighs, dislodging the tail. This was sort of hot and sort of not. She brought my hands up to her breasts, which were lolling free under the pajamas, and declared, “I’m the little squirrel that loves to fuck!”
“Wow, OK,” I said. “But aren’t you also, like, hosting a party?”
She turned herself around in my arms, took off my shades, and pressed her face to mine. Her greasepaint had a strong crayon smell. “Has anybody ever lost their virginity to a squirrel?”
“Hard to know,” I said.
“Would it even count?”
She put her tongue in my mouth and then led me to the bed. Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal, and I was feeling strangely unconcerned about Anabel; I intuited that being pounced on by someone else might even advance my cause with her. But when Lucy got around to drawing my hand under the waistband of her pajamas, saying, “Feel what a furry little animal I am,” I couldn’t help seeing her silliness through the appalled eyes of Oswald, whose personality made me think of Anabel’s, her judgments, her hanged-person eyes, which made me pull my hand away. I stood up and put my shades back on. “I’m sorry,” I said.