Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (11 page)

My mother decided that she wanted to know the Marksman socially and invited him to dinner along with the others in the class. We decided on a buffet-style arrangement, the plates and silverware stacked off to the side. This way, if no one came, we wouldn’t feel humiliated. The table had not been set. No one came except the Marksman. Not the fat lady who had her own pistol and a purple holster for it, not the bald man or the two college girls, not the other man with the tattoo of a toucan on his arm. The Marksman was a thin man in tight clothes and he wore a gold chain and had a small mustache. Sometimes he favored bloused shirts but that night he was wearing a jacket. I sat with him in the living room while my mother was in the kitchen. The dogs came in and looked at him. Then they jumped up onto the sofa and curled up and looked at him.

“You allow those dogs every license, I see,” he said.

I wanted to say something but had no idea what it was.

He asked me if I’d been to Disneyland.

“No,” I said.

“How about the other one, the one in Florida?”

I said that I hadn’t.

“Where are you from?” he asked me.

“Here,” I said.

“I’m from San Antonio,” he said. “Have you ever been to San Antonio?”

“No,” I said.

“There’s a big river there, a big attraction, that runs right past all the shops and restaurants and that’s all lit up with fairy lights,” the Marksman said. “Tourists take cruises on it and stroll beside it. They promenade,” he said in a careful voice. “Once a year, they pump the whole thing out, the whole damn river, and clean it and then put the water back in again. They scrub the bottom like it was a bathtub and fill it up again. What do you think about that?”

My hands were damp. I was beginning to worry about this, but my mother always said there was nothing more useless than dreading something you weren’t understanding.

“People have lost their interest in reality,” the Marksman said.

The classes continued at the Institute. The old group left and a new one with the same silent demeanor took their place. I stayed close to the door and listened. The Marksman said never to point the muzzle of a gun at something you weren’t willing to destroy. He said that often with practice you’re just repeating a mistake. He stressed caution and respect. He stressed response, readiness and alertness. When class was over,
everyone filed out to choose a handgun and buy a box of ammunition, then strode to their appointed cubicle.

My mother did not extend any more dinner invitations to the group, although the Marksman came every Friday. It became the custom. I knew my mother did not exactly want him in our life, because she already was making fun of his manner of speaking, but she wanted him somehow. There are many people who have artificial friendships like this that become quite fulfilling, I’m sure. I tried to imagine him living with us. The used targets papering the rooms, his bloused shirts hanging on the clothesline, his enormous black truck in the driveway. I imagined him trying to turn my father’s room into a saferoom, for the Marksman spoke often about the necessity of one of these in every house. The requirements were a solid-core door, a dead bolt, a wireless telephone and a gun, and this was the place you should immediately go to when a threat presented itself, a madman or a fiend or merely someone who, for whatever reason, wanted to kill you and cease your life forever. My father had died in his room, but the way I understood it, with very few modifications it could be made into a saferoom of the Marksman’s specifications.

The psychiatrist had said that my father had been fortunate to have his room, in his own home with his own family, that is my mother and myself and the dogs. I did not disagree with this.

I liked the Marksman’s truck. One Friday night when we were eating dinner I told him so.

“That’s because you’re an American girl,” the Marksman said. “Something in the American spirit likes great size and a failure to be subtle. Nothing satisfies this better than a truck.”

The Marksman usually ignored me, but would address me
if I spoke to him directly. With my mother he was courteous. I think he liked her. She did not like him, and I didn’t know what she was doing. She had not become a very good shot, either.

My mother and father loved each other. He had been big and strong before he got sick. He had favorite things, favorite meals and movies and places. He even had a favorite towel. It was a towel I’d had with big old-fashioned trains on it. He said he liked it because whichever way he dried himself he felt he was getting somewhere, but when he got sick he couldn’t wash himself or dry himself or feed himself either. When he was very sick my mother had to be careful when she washed him or his skin would come off on the cloth. He liked to talk, but then he became too weak to talk. My mother said my father’s mind was strong and healthy, so we read to it and talked to it, even though I grew to hate the thought of it. This hidden mind in my father’s body.

The Marksman had been coming over for several weeks when he appeared one evening with a cake in a box for dessert. I told him that we couldn’t have dessert, that we had the sugar. It had never come up before.

“What do you do on your birthday without cake?” he said.

“I have cake on my birthday,” I said.

He didn’t ask me when my birthday was.

I wanted to show him how I used the sugar machine, but didn’t want to tell him about it. I took the lancet, which was in a plastic cylinder and cocked with a spring, and touched it against my finger to get a drop of blood. I squeezed the single drop onto the very center of the paper tab and put it into the machine. My mother was outside, in the back of the house, putting out fruit for the birds, halves of oranges and apples. I
looked at the screen of the machine, acting more interested than I actually was, as it counted down and then made the readout. A hundred and twenty-four, it said.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“You’re an American girl,” the Marksman said, watching me.

“What are you doing?” my mother said. We used the machine in the morning and the afternoon. We didn’t use it at night.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Nothing.”

I took the pitcher of water off the dining table and busied myself by pouring some into the saucer of the Christmas tree stand. The tree wasn’t taking water anymore. The room was sucking up the water, not the tree. But it looked all right. It was still green.

“Do you want to learn to shoot?” the Marksman asked me.

“Goodness no,” my mother said. “Isn’t there a law against that or something? She’s just a child.”

“No law,” the Marksman said. “The law allows you certain rights—you, me, her, everybody.”

I wondered if he was going to say I could be a natural, but he didn’t.

“No,” my mother said. “Absolutely not.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew I would not always be with my mother.

I went to the psychiatrist longer than my mother and I went to the Institute. We stopped going to the Institute and the Marksman stopped coming over for dinner. The last time I went to the psychiatrist there was a new girl in the waiting room. There had always been a little girl about my age and now
there was this new one, an older one. We were all girls there. It was a coincidence, is my understanding, that there were no boys. The littlest one was cute. She had a pretty heart-shaped mouth and she carried a toy, a pink and purple dinosaur that she was always trying to give away. You could tell she liked it, that she’d had it probably since she was born, it was all worn smooth and gnawed in spots. Once I got there and she had another toy, a rabbit wearing an apron, and I thought that someone had actually been awful enough to take the dinosaur when she offered it. But it showed up with her again and she was back to trying to give it not just to me but to anyone who came into the waiting room. That seemed to be the little girl’s problem, or at least one of them.

The new girl told us that she was there because her hair was thinning and making her ugly. It looked all right to me, but she said that it was thinning and that she had to spend an hour each day lying upside down with her head on the floor to stimulate its growth. She said that she had to keep the hairs in the sink after she washed it and the hairs in the brush and the hairs on her pillows. She said that she’d left some uncollected hairs on a blouse that her mother had put in the laundry, and that when she found out about it she’d become so upset that she did something she couldn’t even talk about. The other girl, the one my age, said that our aim should be to get psycho-pharmacological treatment instead of psychotherapy, because otherwise it was a waste of time, but that’s what she always said.

I was the last of us to see the psychiatrist that afternoon. When my time was almost up he said, “You’re a smart girl, so tell me, what’s your preference, the manifest world or the unmanifest one?”

It was like he was asking me which flavor of ice cream I liked. I thought for a moment, then went to the dictionary he kept on a stand and looked the word up.

“The manifest one,” I said, and there was not much he could do about that.

“T
HE FIRE DEPARTMENT
charged us three hundred and seventy-five dollars to relocate that snake,” Francine said.

“Must have missed that one,” Freddie said. “Fire department was here? Big red truck and everything?”

“There was a rattlesnake on the patio and I called the fire department and they had a long … it was some sort of device on a pole, and they got the snake in a box and released it somewhere and it shouldn’t have cost anything because that’s one of the services they provide to their subscribers, which is why everyone knows to call the fire department when a snake shows up on one’s patio. But we are not one of their subscribers, Freddie. I was informed of this after the fact. We have not paid their bill and their service is not included in our property taxes, which we likewise have not paid.”

“Must’ve been taking a bathe.”

“The charge is excessive, don’t you think? They were here for five minutes.”

“Why didn’t you just smack the thing with a hoe?”

“It’s very civilized of the fire department to effect live removal. Why aren’t we one of their subscribers, Freddie? If the house started to burn down, they’d respond but it would cost us twenty-five thousand dollars an hour. That’s what they told me when I called to complain.”

“House isn’t going to burn down.”

“Freddie, why aren’t you paying our bills?”

“No money,” he said.

It was October in the desert and quite still, so still that Francine could hear their aged sheltie drinking from the bidet in the pool house. He was forbidden to do this. Francine narrowed her eyes and smiled at her husband. “What happened to our money?”

“It goes, Francine. Money goes. I haven’t worked in almost three years. Surely you’ve noticed.”

“I have, yes.”

“No money coming in, and you were sick for a year. That took its toll.”

“They never figured out what that was all about,” Francine admitted.

“No insurance. Seventeen doctors. You slept eighteen hours a day. All you ate was blueberries and wheatgrass.”

“Well, that couldn’t have cost much.”

“Like a goddamn mud hen.”

“Freddie!”

“Seventeen doctors. No insurance. Car costs alone shunting you around to doctors cost more than four thousand that year, not including regular maintenance, filters, shocks and the like. Should’ve rotated the tires but I was trying to keep costs down.”

“There was something wrong with my blood or something,” Francine protested.

“Bought you a goddamned armload of coral bracelets. Supposed to be good for melancholia. Never wore them. Never gave them a chance.”

“They pinched,” Francine said.

“Even stole aspirin for you. Stole aspirin every chance I got.”

“That was very resourceful.”

“Oh, be sarcastic, see where that gets you. There’s no point in discussing it further. We’re broke.”

The sheltie limped out into the sun, sated. He barked hoarsely, then stopped. He was becoming more and more uncertain as to his duties.

Francine went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She searched the refrigerator until she found a lemon, a small shriveled one from which she had some difficulty coaxing a bit of zestful juice. The refrigerator was full of meat. Freddie did the shopping and had overfamiliarized himself with the meat department.

“Broke,” Francine said. He couldn’t be serious. They had a house, two cars. They had a
gardener
. She returned to the living room and sat down opposite her husband. He was wearing a white formal shirt, stained, with the linkless cuffs rolled up, black shorts and large black sunglasses. His gaze was directed toward an empty hummingbird feeder.

“It’s bats that drain that thing at night,” Freddie said. “You don’t have hummingbirds at all, Francine. You’ve got lesser long-nosed bats. They arrive in groups of six. One feeds while the others circle in an orderly fashion awaiting their turn. I
enjoyed watching them of an evening. Can’t even afford sugar water for the poor bastards anymore.”