Onion Songs (16 page)

Lunch was a quick soup and sandwich at a diner that serviced clientele from the surrounding office buildings.
There was plenty of seating but people were always stepping on each other’s shoes. When he came back to the office he could see clown after clown in the exterior windows, identical white-gloved hands pressing against the inside of the glass. On the grassy median between parking areas numerous clowns lay face up, staring at the sky, looking as if they had fallen from a great height.

After lunch
he had a meeting on procedures. Twin clowns with giant bow ties stood at one end of the conference table, facing off with water-squirting sunflowers in their lapels. Finally the clown on the right grew tired of the back-and-forth, pulled out a slapstick, and proceeded to beat the other clown with it. No one intervened until chunks of painted skin and bright wig filled the air. Terry remained frozen in his chair, watching, thinking,
it’s like peeling clown fruit
.

He assembled reports all afternoon.
When he couldn’t find the data he copied from the day before. Sometimes he added random graphics in bright primary colors. He had spent years mastering his templates—they were sure-fire, guaranteed-to-please. Sometimes he wanted to cry, they were so beautiful. By the end of the day he had hundreds of pages. They were his big blow off, his major guffaw, his extended joke. He simply could not stop the giggles they caused. He turned to look out the opening to his cubicle space, out the window, out to the sky beyond. He imagined floating there. He could not believe he sat in an office with no door or ceiling. He could not believe he had a boss who paid him for such things.

A dark shape blotted the sky.
The cloud of perfume descended and filled him. Panic rose like gorge. “The boss wants to see you. Now,” she said.

Terry could not believe he was trotting eagerly down to see the CEO, his size twenty-twos making a merry slapping sound.
He could not believe he was knocking on the man’s door, this company fixture who almost never left the building. He could not believe he was going in grinning, grinning so extensively he might have just had his throat cut ear to ear.

He could not believe he was saying
“You wanted me,” and so very pleased by this statement.

The boss
’s huge clown face, some four feet across, sat wedged behind the desk, although “sat” seemed to be a misstatement. It was propped up with crutches on either side of the chin so as not to crush the delicate little body beneath. The eyes were tiny and pressed into the face like a pair of bullet holes. The nose was long, slender, beautiful, and completely unsuited to this face. The mouth was wide and slit-like except for two rounded swellings of lip parted at the center, revealing great, blocky white teeth that gleamed like ice blocks. When the mouth opened further a tongue like a great pink pillow heaved in the yawning cavity. When his boss began to speak that mouth was the only thing in the room as far as Terry was concerned.

“
How long?” the mouth asked.

“
Em—pardon?”

“
You have worked for me, how long?”

Terry felt dumb.
He’d
never
thought of himself as working for this creature. In truth he worked for his family, to keep them fed, clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads, to keep them comfortable, and hopeful.

He thought all these things, but what he said was
“Almost six years.”

The lips pursed, and their undersides adhered to the too-large teeth so securely it appeared they would tear when the head started to speak again.
“You have completed so many reports, haven’t you? Thousands. You have contributed. So many hours.”

Terry didn
’t know what to say. Was this an accomplishment? Was this a compliment? All he could do was grin, but he had no choice,
did he? His clown face grinned for him. And the great clown head of his boss grinned back.

The commute home was always the worst.
If you wanted a leisurely drive of sightseeing, you didn’t go out on the highway at rush hour. Clowns rolled out of every passing street in their bright funny cars, all of them heading, it seemed, in the same direction, but not everyone lived in the same direction, did they? He could never make sense of it. Clowns cursed and clowns collided, raising their fists and shouting “Bozo!” out their windows, all of them already home in their minds, with only this inconvenience of concrete, metal, and asphalt, this maddening delirium of transit, in their way.

“
I believe I got a raise today,” he said with a slight hoarseness, raising his fork as if it signified his turn to speak. “They must be very pleased with my work. Delicious roast beef, by the way.”

His family said nothing, quietly staring.
Little Jane appeared to have been crying. His wife leaned over to him, whispering harshly, “Terry, you should have changed for dinner, don’t you think?”

He turned his head to her, not sure exactly what she was trying to say.
He looked over at Dwight, who looked back at him out of an angry and defiant mask of red and blue, the edges attached to his skin with safety pins. Then he turned to Jane, whose tears started up all over again. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” he asked. “You’re not scared of clowns, are you?”

He could feel the lower half of his face stretching.
He could feel the skin around his mouth cracking. “It’s the smile, isn’t it?” he asked, and thought he might start crying himself. “It’s the smile that will kill you every time.”

STRANGENESS

Strangeness
, n. In particle physics a quantum characteristic used to describe certain short-lived particles and their transformations when interacting with other particles.

Short-lived particles
. Trish looked up from the dictionary at Martin. A half hour ago she’d had to tell him that his best friend from college had dropped dead from a heart attack the previous week. The man’s much younger wife had phoned with the news. She hadn’t provided many details—she’d said she had so many of these calls to make—she just thought Martin would like to know. “Like” seemed cruel in such a circumstance but what word should she use? Want? No, there had been no history. Absolutely none. The woman had skirted around the precise circumstance and Trish, guiltily, had just naturally assumed sex had been involved. A transformation having taken place when two short-lived particles interacted. The result being this alien state, this strangeness, the lights dimmed, no one left at home.

Martin appeared to be taking the news with equanimity.
“He was never in the best of health,” he said softly, but would not look away from the television. It was one of those reality shows; Trish wasn’t sure which one. People yelled at each other quite a bit on those shows—more than she herself had ever experienced, although she knew this was probably normal behavior in some parts of the world. Then someone was voted out of the house, off the island, into the plastic box suspended from a crane, or whatever.

She waited to see if he had more to say, if he needed her comfort in any way.
This man had been Martin’s best friend for many years. But Martin had barely reacted—it might as well have been some stranger on the news who died.

Strangeness had been coming into her life for years
—now at last it had fully arrived, courtesy of Martin, her husband of twenty-six years. Did men undergo a change of life? Angie once said “The difference between men and women is that men go through a menopause every five years.” Angie was on her third marriage, this time to Harry, a small man who hid part-way behind her at all social occasions.

It was that sense of strangeness that had driven Trish to open a dictionary for the first time in probably ten years.
Not even for Scrabble—if she had to look it up it probably wasn’t a word she’d feel comfortable using. The dictionary had been hard to find, pushed to the back of a bottom shelf in a corner of this basement rec room shared by Martin’s big old TV and assorted storage. Not much “rec” had occurred in this house for years, not since Molly had grown up and moved away to a series of eastern towns, none of whose names she could recall.

The top edge of the dictionary had been covered by a thick bed of dust, and curlicues of someone
’s long hair—whose she could not imagine. She and Molly had always worn theirs short.
Maybe it’s angel hair
, she thought, chuckling, scrubbing off the book before daring to open it. But angel hair was a pasta—who would eat this? Of course there were poor people and people a world away whose lives she could not begin to imagine, but that was making her sad, so she derailed that train of thought.

She peeled the pages back carefully, looking for bugs.
If she found any she knew she would just throw the dictionary across the room and then that would be the end of this little project.

Along the way to the
‘S’s she’d stopped now and then to look at a word—cynosure, destructionist, hydromancy, placebo, resistivity. The dictionary was like the estate list her mother had of what had been in her grandmother’s attic at the time of the reading of her will. So these are the things in grandmother’s attic, which we don’t use anymore, although once they had been important in our lives. These are things she had but which she doesn’t have anymore, her being dead, and which we don’t have, our having sold them. This is just a list of what used to be in that huge empty attic up there—this is all we have to remember them, and our grandmother, by.

That list had been no more substantial, really, than a list of the contents of her grandmother
’s pantry might have been. And these are the things that she consumed along the way. This is just a list, mind you, for the pantry is now empty, our grandmother having eaten all these things over the course of her long lifetime, a time that has now ended and will not be, ever again.

On Martin
’s television, young twenty-somethings lounged on inflated furniture in an indoor pool. She could tell by their body language that several different sorts of flirtations were occurring, seemingly at cross purposes. The volume was turned down so low she could make out a general pattern of tone, but no specific words. This had become Martin’s preferred mode of television watching: the volume turned down, brightness and contrast turned up. The lights in the television room were set to the lowest level of dim. The combination lent a yellowish pallor to his face, interrupted by lightning flashes of white. Simply watching his face she might have thought he was watching battlefield footage.

When Trish got into the
‘S’s, a letter that had never been her favorite, which she hated to use even in Scrabble, she remembered that this was a letter that had vaguely unsettled her even as a child, because it so resembled a snake.

Strange
, adj. Foreign, the quality of being alien, not native.

She was somewhat surprised. Was that what the word really meant? She had expected some description of unease. Disquiet. Now that was a good word. Disquiet was the way she felt most of the time, in her house, in her life, in the marriage. Disquietude would be the noun. The place where she lived now.

Not native.
That felt absolutely correct. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had discovered she was not native to this place. The lands at the periphery of her vision, the island out the corner of the eye—that’s where she had come from.

The twenty-somethings were now in a bar somewhere.
The camera work was jarring and aggressive, the colors bright, violent. Something about to happen, although she saw nothing evident on the screen. But she did not look away.

Once she
’d arrived at the correct place, Trish had felt compelled to read the remainder of that dictionary page. It was like a rest stop on a long trip. Since you were already there, why not visit “the world’s largest prairie dog hole?”

Strange woman
, apparently, was an archaic term for a prostitute. There were other meanings, of course. But did they all have some sort of sexual association buried in their etymologies? Weird sisters and harpies and sphinxes. Strangeness back to the beginnings of art and writing. Angie, who believed in astrology and evil spirits and the living Christ, and all manner of things Trish considered strange, said that it was men who made up the words and men who compiled the dictionaries, so it should be no wonder that women were associated with things strange and vaguely sinister.

She became aware of an insistent susurration in the room.
She glanced over at Martin, whose breath whistled, as if he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. He fell asleep often these days: in front of his computer, sitting out on the porch. And this despite the fact that he was always in bed before she was. He used to complain about the resulting neck pain in the morning, although now he did not complain about anything, ever.

She did not think he was asleep.
She could see his eyes flickering, his tongue darting between his lips. But he continued making that noise. As if he were having difficulty breathing. As if he were in pain.

Susurration.
Like snakes gathered together to exchange the secrets of the world. Trish hadn’t realized that she even knew the word.

*

Martin sat motionless at the dinner table, his eyes two wet gray pebbles floating on yellowing jelly. Late afternoon spring sun afforded a relatively clear glimpse. He’d requested these earlier dinners, and eager to please him (did she imagine this would magically fix things?) she’d obliged. It hadn’t resulted in additional time together, however. He just had more time in the evenings to ruminate, to vegetate, to do exactly what, it now seemed, he did best: to stare unblinking at a life she wasn’t sure she understood anymore. They used to walk in the park, garden, sit in the sun, together, but not anymore. Martin was either too tired or too busy, but she honestly couldn’t figure out what he was being busy at.

His skin had a grayish, raw dough patina.
The tiny cracks at the corners of his eyes appeared to have multiplied since the last time she’d noticed. She wasn’t sure, but his hair appeared to be visibly thinner. It was certainly grayer. There was also a puffiness about him, as if air was trapped in hidden pockets beneath the skin.

So people age.
Headline news.
She chided herself. If he wanted he could no doubt catalog a dozen similar changes in her face. But did he notice her enough to do so? He was still a handsome man—she needed to appreciate more what she had and not, as her grandmother used to say, “borrow trouble.”

“
So,” she ventured. “You haven’t said anything about the ham.”

His eyes rolled towards her from somewhere behind his lids.
“This isn’t ham.”

“
Well, no. It’s what we always have. Turkey ham. It’s healthier.”

“
It’s also pinker. Real ham doesn’t come this pink. I don’t believe so, at least. We haven’t had real ham in a very long time, I don’t believe.”

“
If you want real ham, Martin, I’d be happy to fix you some real ham.”

“
No, no. You said this is healthier.”

“
Then what are you trying to say?”

“
I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just saying that you asked me about the ham, but this isn’t ham. It’s turkey ham. But it’s perfectly fine for us to eat. It tastes just fine.”

A few years ago she would have been offended by the conversation.
He was so hard to please. Now it seemed more likely that he was too easy to please, or that “pleased” hadn’t much meaning for him.

The remainder of their dinner conversation consisted of factual statements about the weather, the progress of the neighbor
’s new patio, and a repeated recollection of Molly’s phone call from four days ago. She was pregnant, due in six or seven months. She lived across the country and they rarely saw her. They’d met her husband once, last Christmas. Martin had commented that the young man appeared to be stable, but that he needed a better haircut. She’d agreed. She’d actually said, “I agree,” even though she thought it was a ridiculous thing for him to say. It was the only comment he’d ever made about their son-in-law.

Later that evening Trish peered into the study where Martin was reading.
She watched surreptitiously as he periodically turned the pages, tears tracing his cheeks with almost parallel trails. She left quickly so that he wouldn’t see her watching him.

Downstairs she cleaned the kitchen, although it was already spotless.
She looked around for laundry to do. Towels were stacked neatly on shelves in the laundry room, sheets were in cabinets, and every bit of clothing except what they had on was tucked away cleaned and pressed in a drawer somewhere. Her rising anxiety was assuaged only when she took off all her clothes and slipped into a fresh clean robe, dropping the clothes into the washer and starting it. She would have just enough time to iron the small load before joining Martin in bed.

She went back upstairs.
Martin was no longer in his study. She found him in their bedroom, lying in bed in his bright blue pajamas, sheet tucked tightly across his heart, staring at the ceiling. His lips moved slightly, constantly. She found the indecipherable whisper mildly irritating so she left.

*

“I’m just afraid there’s something really wrong with him that he needs to be treated for.”

Angie patted her arm with one hand and waved a cigarette sympathetically with the other.
“Oh, I know, hon. You couldn’t drag my first husband into the doctor’s until the cancer ate his throat.” Then, when Trish started crying, “Oh... sorry.”