Let's Pretend This Never Happened (32 page)

The scene was chaotic but familiar. The ducklings quacked and ran everywhere, hiding under the recliner and attempting to tunnel under the decorative but nonfunctional piano. When cornered by the children, they’d be picked up and would immediately poop, sending the kids screaming with peals of laughter as they dropped the ducklings and started the cycle all over again.

“HENRY.
What did you do?”
my mom yelled, as my dad laughed at the mayhem he’d created, the twinkle in his eyes still bright after all these years.

“What?” he asked teasingly. “I put down paper first.”

It was true. There was a small, empty square of newspaper in the middle of the living room.

“And you thought the ducks would understand to stay on paper?” she asked sarcastically, as she pried a terrified-looking duckling from a toddler’s sticky fist.

“Well, I guess not,” my dad admitted, but he was gleeful to see the kids laughing, and we all knew this would continue to happen. My mom shooed him outside, since he was only making things worse with his cries of “WHOEVER CATCHES THE SPOTTED ONE WINS A SILVER DOLLAR.”

The scene had taken on a dangerous carnival quality, and I was grateful that Victor had stayed home in Houston to work, since he would never let me hear the end of this. Eventually we captured the last flustered duckling and placed them in a bucket in the quiet, dark bedroom, so they could calm
down (and so that Daddy wouldn’t just throw them back in the house again as soon as they were returned outside), and Lisa and I settled back down on our old bed again and picked up the albums as if nothing had happened. It’s a little disconcerting when shit like this becomes old hat, but this is the way things are, and you have to learn to roll with the punches, even if the punches are coming from the clawed feet of angry ducklings who don’t understand that you’re helping.

Whenever we came to visit my parents, Hailey would play with the moonshine still. She’d ride Jasper, the miniature donkey, in the backyard. She and her cousins would play on the old tractors and the ancient stagecoaches littering the acreage behind the house. They laughed and played and explored my father’s taxidermy shop, and wore cow skulls as masks. They looked for buried treasure with antiqued maps my dad “found,” and would dig up wooden boxes filled with coins and costume jewelry and arrowheads that Daddy had buried for them. They’d roam around the property, chasing goats and having fun, and Lisa and I had to admit that their joy made up for the occasional stray duckling that would walk into your bedroom in the middle of the night.

It’d be easier to judge this moonshine still harshly if my daughter hadn’t helped build it.

The next day Victor drove to my parents’ house so that we could celebrate our anniversary, except I don’t celebrate anything with
that certain unlucky number in it
, because I’m still OCD. I made him swear to just tell people that this was simply “our second twelfth anniversary,” which would have worked perfectly if Victor took my phobias seriously and didn’t have a death wish. Instead he kept saying the unlucky number over and over, and I was all, “This is
exactly
why I didn’t want to celebrate at all this year, because if you don’t stop saying that number I will divorce you, and that’s
totally
the kind of thing that would happen on an unlucky year, so fucking
stop tempting fate
.” Then he raised an eyebrow and said innocently, “
What number?
You mean, ___?”
AND THEN HE SAID THE NUMBER AGAIN
. This is when I decided I would just cut one of his testicles off sometime this year, because that will take care of all of our bad luck in one fell swoop, and then we’ll still stay married, because all the unluckiness will have been used up in an intentional ball-removal accident. Victor explained that there was no such thing as an “intentional accident,” and was a little baffled that I’d jumped right from divorcing him to removing one of his testicles, but this is our second twelfth anniversary, so he really should be used to that sort of thing from me by now. Plus, you don’t even
need
two testicles. Lance Armstrong seems to be doing pretty well with just one.
²
And also, I’M SAVING OUR MARRIAGE, ASSHOLE.

For our anniversary my mom babysat Hailey so that Victor and I could go to
Summer Mummers
, a melodrama-vaudevillian play that’s been going on every summer since the forties in Midland, Texas. There’s lots of booze, and you’re encouraged to scream for the hero and boo at the caped villain, and to buy bags of popcorn to throw at the stage whenever the evil mustachioed bad guy comes out. Unfortunately I have a weak arm, and so I ended up just throwing it at the people directly in front of us. They turned around, and Victor surreptitiously pointed at the people sitting next to us as if to blame them for it, but our neighbors noticed, and then a terrible popcorn battle broke out. Then Victor stood up on his chair and yelled, “I WILL END YOU PEOPLE,” and bought three hundred dollars’ worth of popcorn. It was one of those moments when I realized how lucky I was to be celebrating a second twelfth anniversary with someone willing to spend all the money we’d planned to use on a fancy hotel room in order to buy pallets of popcorn just so he could bury perfect strangers in a drunken, Napoleonic endeavor. We fucking
destroyed
those people.

The evening was perfect, except for the one time when Victor went to reload (buying another pallet of popcorn) and I was attacked by a guy who looked exactly like Sam Elliott, and I got so much popcorn down my dress it looked like I’d developed a series of horrible tumors. Also, you know when you get that annoying piece of popcorn stuck in your teeth but you can’t get it out because it would be too embarrassing to dig it out in front of strangers? Imagine that happening, but instead of it being in between your teeth, it’s stuck in your ear canal. And by “ear canal” I mean “vagina.”

Then the cancan girls came out and everyone sang along to “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” with the live orchestra. Then a man onstage quoted Sam Houston, saying, “Texas can make it without the United States, BUT THE UNITED STATES CANNOT MAKE IT WITHOUT TEXAS!” and everyone
in the entire fucking audience
yelled it along with him, and I thought, “
Wow.
It’s really no wonder that the rest of America hates us.”

After the whole play/melodrama/burlesque thing ended, I looked down and saw these small patches of blood on the floor, and I was a little unsettled, because Victor
had
been threatening to put rocks in his popcorn in order to take out the front row. But it turns out that the carpet was red, and that was the only part of it you could see under the piles and piles of popcorn.

As we walked out, I noticed that a woman I’d seen sitting off in a corner was walking in front of us. She’d obviously been expecting something else when told she was going to see “live theater” that night, and she’d seemed both frightened and appalled by everyone’s boorish behavior. As she walked through the drifts of popcorn she muttered to her date, “Ugh . . . What an offensive waste of food. Just think of all the starving children in Africa.” She may have had a point, but I thought it was a little offensive to want to give starving people popcorn touched by vaginas. “Here you
go,” I could imagine her saying condescendingly to the villagers. “Take some more vagina popcorn. This batch was only on the floor for an hour. You need it more than we do.” It seemed insulting, and I felt pretty certain that even starving people would have turned their noses up at it. “No, no. We’re fine.
Really.
Please stop with the vagina popcorn.” Also, the popcorn was kind of stale and gross, and I know this because I ate some, and then I felt very sick later. Victor pointed out that it was no surprise. I was eating from the same bag of popcorn that I’d thrown at people, and that they’d thrown back, and it would land in my bosom and I’d scoop it out and throw it back at them, and then they’d volley it back, and inevitably some of it was landing in the sack I was eating from, and I’m pretty sure that’s how I got swine flu.

The next day we went back to my parents’ to set off fireworks for the Fourth of July, and as we finished up the Roman candles my dad said, “Oh! I promised the grandkids we could set off the cannon tonight,” and Hailey screamed, “Yay!”

“You promised my preschooler
that she could light a cannon?
” I asked in disbelief.

“No.
Of course not
,” he replied. “I told Tex he could do it.” And that seemed much safer, because
Tex was fucking six
. I looked at my sister to see whether she was okay with her kid lighting a Civil War cannon, but she just kind of shrugged, because she’s used to this sort of thing, and had learned to pick her battles.

My parents’ backyard. The gas pump is not functional. The cannon and chickens are.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Lisa asked, and Daddy assured us that he was only going to let Tex pack and prep the cannon—which consisted of Tex standing right in front of a
giant fucking loaded cannon
—but my sister was fairly undisturbed, because she knew Daddy probably couldn’t get the rusty cannon
lit anyway. And she was right. But then Daddy decided he just needed more fire, so he brought out the blowtorch to light the dodgy cannon. This was when I ran for my camera, because I knew no one would ever believe me. The cannon would undoubtedly be loud and unneighborly obnoxious at that time of night, but then I remembered that the neighbors had been setting off fireworks at midnight all week long, and I thought it would kind of be kick-ass payback if the cannon actually did go off. And it did. And it was awesome, and no one died
or
got blood on them, so we considered it one of the most successful nights that week.

As we walked back inside for our final night at my parents’, Victor pointed at a table that had been raised up with chains to the ceiling of the carport. He said there seemed to be a dead bear on it, and I assumed that Victor was drunk, but when we went out to pack the car the next morning I realized Victor was correct. My first thought was that I probably need glasses, because it’s probably odd to not notice a dead bear floating on a table in the backyard all week. But then I realized I hadn’t actually noticed the cannon at first either, and blamed it on the fact that I was too distracted by everything else. Because that’s the kind of backyard they have. One where cannons and floating bears don’t stick out.