Hands on hips, Gus studied my artwork. “What you making there? Looks like a sicko paper doll.”
I turned the pumpkin face out. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Van Gogh’s self-portrait,” Gilia said. “The later one.”
“Right.”
Shannon hummed a riff from the “Twilight Zone” theme, then said, “Warped minds think alike.”
Eugene grinned as if he knew all the answers. “Sympatico.” This from a man with drippy arms the color of a hepatitis victim.
I was secretly pleased and alarmed at the same time. While I’d always wanted to meet a woman who thinks like me, this parallel brains jive might be more genetic overlap than compatibility. I’d reached the point where I really hoped Gilia wasn’t my sister. Or cousin.
“Anyone with class can recognize van Gogh,” I said. I decided a giant ear hole would be the magic clue.
Gus snorted. “I got class and I thought it was an electrocuted cat.”
Gilia touched my sculpture, the other side away from where I was cutting. “I like it. No one who sees van Gogh in a squash could be an immoral scumbag.” She and I made meaningful eye contact across the pumpkin.
Shannon jumped in to wreck the mood. “My daddy can. Don’t let his sensitivity line fool you, I’ll bet cash he’s been woofing it up on a married woman all morning.”
The X-Acto knife slipped through pumpkin meat and stabbed me in the palm. I dropped the knife and sucked my hand a moment to compose myself. They were all looking at me.
“I was only kidding,” Shannon said.
I put on my innocent face. “Some people’s kids are too precocious for their own good.”
She blushed a Cabernet color. Maybe she was chastised, but, more likely, she realized she’d accidentally nailed me. Shannon sees through my innocent face the way I see through Lydia’s pretending to lie whenever she tells the truth. Contrary to what we’ve been told, children can detect deceit in parents much easier than parents can detect deceit in children.
To cover the awkwardness of the moment, or possibly out of disgust at me, Shannon dipped her right hand into the pumpkin pulp mound, came out with a hefty wad of slime, leaned across Gilia’s latest jack-o’-lantern, and pasted me right between the eyes. Splat! Juice and stringy, mucus-like stuff trickled down my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. I sealed my left nostril by covering it with a finger and sneezed, rocketing a seed out of my right nostril through van Gogh’s ear hole.
Shannon went back to work on a pumpkin. Gilia stared at me, and Eugene stared at Shannon. Gus helped herself to toasted seeds. Dignity seemed important. Maintaining a rigid decorum, I got to my feet and walked behind the girls toward the bathroom. As I passed Shannon, I leaned over and scooped up a handful of orange slime and dumped it down the back of her shirt—my shirt, actually, as she’d recently taken to stealing my dress Van Heusens.
Shannon’s spine snapped upright, but she made no noise. Her hand flipped up as if she were throwing salt over her shoulder, only instead of salt, my face caught pulp. The pumpkin slime in my mouth gave me another metaphor for the taste and consistency of a turned-on woman, which I needed. There’s a limit to how often you can compare something to raw oysters.
I cupped my hands together for a double load of what felt like alfalfa-fed cow poop. Lifting my hands high, I brought the whole load down on her head. Take that, trollop.
Shannon turned to face me. The only sound was the gentle crunch of Gus chewing seeds. I glanced over at Gilia. She hadn’t decided if this was family horseplay or an all-out fight. I hadn’t either. Shannon was just like her mother in that I couldn’t tell squat about what she was thinking until she decided to tell me. At the moment, for instance, as she pulled my belt toward her and dumped a pint of goo down my boxers, was she angry as hell or amused to no end? My next move should have been dictated by attitude, but not knowing attitude, I answered her shorts shot with cleavage filler.
Shannon’s mouth and eyes went rigid. She looked so much like Maurey I wanted to apologize. I wanted to hand her a handkerchief and say, “Whoops, let’s forget the ugly incident. We’ll pretend it was a recurring dream.”
Fat chance.
She started to circle, which made me nervous. I’d expected more goop and was prepared to take my medicine, but this empty-handed circling threw me off. We rotated like the Earth keeping track of a pissed-off moon. What was the moon up to? She had a glop of pumpkin on her forehead and a seed stuck in her right eyebrow.
Then Shannon stopped. “It’s not nice to slime your daughter,” she said.
“You slimed me first.”
She shook her head. “You’ll never learn, will you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her eyes were bulletproof glass—space age plastic. Ten thousand howling Zulus firing spears at helpless Redcoats. Unable to meet such fierceness head on, I looked away, first at Eugene, whose face revealed an intellectual interest in father-daughter dynamics, then at Gus, who was chewing and watching something behind and below me.
Maybe I heard her, or maybe I simply felt Gilia’s presence. Whatever the cause, I glanced between my legs just as Shannon charged.
Splat! The classic Three Stooges kneel-behind-the-knees-and-push maneuver. What the Bowery Boys called a number seven. I landed neck deep in slop.
I read in one of Wanda’s Cosmo magazines that men often express a desire to crawl into women they copulate with. Cosmo took this as a return-to-the-womb neediness. I, personally, have never had any desire to return to Lydia’s womb. The fact I was once that close to my mother is appalling, and I have no wish to be inside a woman again. However, for those men who fantasize about crawling up the crotch of an excited woman, I suggest they first try bathing in pumpkin pulp. A lesson might be learned.
Shannon and Gilia thought my predicament was a hoot. Cause for belly laughs all around. Eugene had fallen on the floor, struck down by hilarity. Even Gus chuckled.
I sat up, grabbed Gilia by the arm, and yanked her into the pile—where her intense laughter turned into a shriek. Shannon put out a Blackfeet war cry—taught to her by Maurey, who learned it from Hank Elkrunner—and dived on both of us.
15
Shannon apologized to me the next morning, an event worthy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
“I’m sorry I said you were woofing it up on a married woman yesterday,” Shannon said. “You’re such an easy target, sometimes I forget you have feelings.”
I hung my head and stirred my red beans. “You cut me to the quick.”
“I realized that afterwards. You got so pale.”
Was she being ironic? Lydia and Maurey taught me long ago never to take a woman’s word at face value. I decided the proper course was silent yet wounded. Lies of omission are easier to cover than the out-loud kind.
Shannon brought her coffee and sat down opposite me. “Gilia is amazingly nice—I can’t remember the last time a nice woman liked you—but you know how it is when a daughter’s father gets a new girlfriend. There’s a moment of jealousy.”
“Gilia isn’t my girlfriend.”