Pin (2 page)

I
WAS SITTING BY THE WINDOW LOOKING OUT AT THE
heavy snowfall and trying to follow the descent of just one flake at a time, just to see if I could do it. I couldn't because the flakes kept whirling away in the wind. Pin sat back in his corner of the room and watched me. Although I didn't turn around, I knew he was smirking the same way my father used to smirk whenever he thought I was doing something silly. Every once in a while, Pin would say, “Well, well?” in that same high nasal pitch my father used when he spoke to us or to other children through Pin. It was very annoying, but I ignored him for as long as I could. Finally, frustrated, I turned around.

“I can't do it,” I said. There was no longer a smirk
on Pin's face. His eyes glared with my father's arrogance.

“Did you really expect you could?” I could see he was satisfied. He loved being right. I remembered one time when I was with my father in the hospital corridor and he was telling this tiny, elderly woman that her husband was in the throes of a heart attack. She asked, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Maybe it's just a chest cold.” She looked from him to me as though I could support her hope. I looked up at my father. He hated to be contradicted, especially by a patient or relatives of a patient. He would go into a rage if nurses ever did it. His eyes became small and intense, just the way Pin's were now, and his jawbone tightened so hard the little nerves in the sides of his cheeks quivered and twitched. Because anyone could see right through Pin's face, it was easy to know when he was upset.

“Your husband, madam, is having a coronary. I would estimate that seventy percent of his heart muscle has been destroyed. Pretending it's something else will not make it go away. I suggest you remain in the waiting room and call some of your closest relatives.” With that he walked away. I practically had to run to keep up with him. When I looked back at the little woman, I saw she was still standing there, holding her hands against her chest.

“The idea of someone trying to follow one snowflake,” Pin said. He gave the equivalent of what had always been my father's laugh: a short, guttural sound centered in the throat. I was really very disgusted with him and almost left him sitting there in the room alone. I've done that before. He's always pretended that it doesn't bother him. “Your
father never minded solitude, why should I?” he said. But I know it bothers him because he told Ursula that it did and she told me. That was a long time ago when she was just a little girl.

When we were young, each of us made out that he'd keep the strictest confidence about anything Pin said, but we didn't. I used to tell her everything and she used to tell me everything. Now she rarely says anything about her conversations with Pin. Actually, I don't think she talks to him much. At least, that's the impression I get. I know she has developed this thing about dressing him and absolutely refuses to help keep him clean. It's so important that he be kept clean. My father always made a point of that. Through Pin he would say, “Cleanliness is the foundation for good health.” And then when little kids would come into the office, he would have Pin say, “Do you wash your face and hands regularly and especially before eating? I do.” The kids would laugh and then look at my father, but his lips were tightly closed and he would always act as though he was interested in something else and had nothing to do with Pin's voice.

“Your father oughta be in show business,” people often told me and Ursula, but I didn't think so. He wasn't interested in performing for anyone but himself.

“Did you really think you had the visual discrimination to follow one snowflake in this blizzard?” Pin said, pronouncing each word deliberately, just to ridicule my idea.

“No,” I said. “Damnit.”

“No reason to get emotional, Leon. You're getting more and more high strung lately, jumping at everything I say; and you snap at Ursula before she
completes a sentence, just like your father used to do to people. It's not at all like you. Maybe you should pop a pill, hmm?”

“Maybe you should shut up for a minute.”

“See what I mean?”

He was exasperating sometimes, sitting there in that wheelchair, bulldozing and manipulating me. I felt like going over to him, twisting off the top of his skull, and reaching in to pinch his rippled, rubbery brain. I've looked at it up close a number of times. He's really amazing, every part of him. The brain even has the tiny veins running through it. You can see how all the nerve endings are attached and how the eyes are connected. He doesn't like me doing that anymore—looking into him like that—and I haven't really done it since my parents died.

I turned my back on him and looked out the window again. Mr. Machinsky was trying to make a broken U-turn on the snowy street, and traffic was blocked up as far as I could see down the hill. They were all skiers, impatient to get up to Davos, the ski resort built at the top of the mountain. They started leaning on their horns. This made old Machinsky nervous and he pounded on his horn, rather than continuing his turn. It seemed to work. They all shut up and waited. Some leaned out of their windows and yelled at him as he drove down the road, but the old man ignored them. He was tough and stubborn and the only neighbor we had at this point on the hill. I always kept away from his property because I knew he hated kids and my mother had said, “Machinsky is so dirty he's a host for all sorts of germs. I wouldn't want to ever rub up against him.” She had actually shivered and embraced herself, squeezing her small but shapely breasts against each
other. She wore her dark brown hair tied back in a bun because “it was the neatest and cleanest way to keep it.” Although she had a fine wardrobe, she mainly wore housecoats starched as clean as surgical gowns. I used to think that those tiny veins in her temples and on the tops of her hands were so visible because she scrubbed herself so vigorously. I remember asking my father about it.

“Ridiculous,” he said without looking at me. He was reading one of his medical journals. “Her hygienic habits have nothing to do with her skin density.”

“Are Pin's veins as close to the surface as anyone else's?”

He put his magazine aside and looked at me as though he had just realized I was actually there.

“Everything about Pin—his dimensions, his organs, even the irises in his eyes, everything—is representative. For his body size, that is.” He snapped his magazine before him again and I was quiet.

My father wasn't a large man, although his demeanor and his appearance always made him seem bigger than he was. People were genuinely surprised when they learned that he was barely five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. He wore his thin black hair cut short, like a marine drill instructor, and he shaved twice a day because his beard was so dark and heavy. I was always in awe of his hands, with their long, powerful fingers. Anyone who ever had it done said he could put stitches in so quickly it was practically a painless experience.

Mr. Machinsky's self-made traffic jam had been
amusing, so I laughed. Pin was dying to ask me why I was laughing, but he didn't. I knew he was keeping silent just for spite, so I didn't say anything. I wasn't really that talkative a person anyway. I suppose I inherited that from my father, who was always disdainful of small talk. He didn't have the tolerance for it. My mother was forever too busy for idle chatter. She worked at the house with a nervous energy that consumed her every waking moment. It is a big house and although we could easily afford live-in servants, my mother insisted she had to do it all herself. If a maid cleaned up anything, she'd only go in after her, dissatisfied with the job. My father was by no means frugal, but he made no effort to get her any domestic help. If I asked him any questions about my mother, as I did about her veins, he would sluff it off when at home. If I asked him questions about my mother or about Ursula or even myself when he was at the office, he would answer through Pin. In fact, when I give it some deep thought, I realize he would very rarely speak directly to me. I know we never had what other guys would call a down-to-earth father-son discussion. He often gave me the feeling he resented me. I think he thought of me as his “offspring” rather than his son.

When my father was in a halfway decent mood at the office, and there were no patients, he would let Pin give me a lecture on something medical. I would pull my little chair up in front of Pin and my father would stand off behind me, cleaning instruments or something, and suddenly Pin would speak with my father's high-pitched nasal voice. In the beginning, I would turn around to ask a question, but after a while, I would just ask Pin the questions. Sometimes
Ursula was there and would do the same, but she didn't have the same patience or interest and often grew bored.

As long as I can remember, both Ursula and I called him “doctor.” I think that stemmed from my mother always referring to him that way. “You'd better get your things together before the doctor comes home.” “Tell the doctor his supper's ready.” So we called him “doctor” instead of dad or pop. Of course, Pin never referred to him directly as anything but “the doctor.”

Bored with the falling snow and the continuous traffic of skiers, I turned away from the window again just as Ursula walked across the room, dressed only in her bra. Her ass bounced ripples down the backs of her legs. It was her way of seizing Pin's complete attention. She was so jealous of our relationship lately, always trying to get me to cut down my discussions with Pin. I knew she was doing the same thing now, pretending to have come down to get a book. I watched her deliberately skim through a few, seemingly oblivious to our presence.

Actually, my presence wouldn't have mattered. Ursula and I have never thought anything about standing naked before each other. We did it as kids and we did it as we grew up. In a sense we participated in each other's development. I remember staying awake one night with her, both of us staring at her naked chest to see if we could detect her breasts growing. She fell asleep before I did. I thought I saw something happen, but it was so quick and I was a little bleary-eyed by then, so I wouldn't swear to it. I told her about it, though, just so she'd feel bad about falling asleep like that.

I use to stare at her a lot, fascinated by our genetic
and blood relationship. I wanted to see what of myself I could find in her.

Ursula has worked in the local library ever since she graduated high school. It's just a little hick-town library, nothing spectacular; but Ursula found a second home there. I used to make a great deal of fun of that, but I've learned to temper my jokes some. For the most part, she ignored them anyway or told me I was jealous. What a laugh. Jealous of that! Even when she said it, she said it with half a heart. She knew I could have had my choice of almost any profession I wanted. I was always a straight-A student in school. It was just that when father and mother died in the car accident and left us all that money, the house and father's lucrative investments, well, I just didn't see the sense in doing anything but what I always wanted to do. I've always wanted to write poetry, mainly a great modern epic poem, a kind of American “Beowulf.”

I spent most of my time working on it. At night, Pin, Ursula and I sat in the living room and I read them the day's work. I have a high regard for Pin's opinion of poetry, and Ursula does have a good deal of sensitivity for literature, probably because of her job in the library. Both of them always said I read well. I would get a fire going in the fireplace and we'd all sit around sipping coffee after dinner, and then I'd read what I had written. Ursula's eyes always exploded whenever I hit something she thought was “marvelous.” She had that word, “marvelous.” Pin simply nodded silently at good things. It wasn't a very emphatic nod, just a slight movement of his head. I always looked up quickly from the paper when I read a part I thought he'd appreciate, and sure enough, there would be that
slight nod. I guess being so close to one another over the years had made us very sensitive to each other's reactions. At times I felt we were almost a part of one another.

Ursula had a “wisp of a body.” At least that's the way Mrs. Martin referred to it, but Mrs. Martin was so stout that anyone would have a “wisp of a body” standing next to her. She came once a week to clean the house. It took her a long time, almost all day, to do the place. For the most part, I would stay upstairs and Pin would stay in his room behind the garage. She never went into his room. He wouldn't have tolerated any strangers coming into it. He was so emphatic on that point that I had to actually lock his room from the outside. She asked me about it only once. I told her in very strong, definite terms not to worry herself ever about that room. She shrugged and forgot about it. When she left, I opened his room and brought him out. I guess we really didn't need Mrs. Martin to come in and clean. It was just something I felt my mother would have wanted us to do.

Anyhow, Mrs. Martin thought Ursula had a “wisp of a body.” That was because she was long legged and small waisted. She had thin arms and nearly no shoulders, but she was not small breasted. She was very deceptive that way. She insisted on giving that impression to people by wearing these awfully tight bras that squeezed her bosom against her.

“Your sister oughta eat something substantial,” Mrs. Martin told me once. “It ain't healthy for someone to be so close to their own bones like that.”

I could understand why she felt that way. Ursula's face was lean too. Her skin was wrapped tightly around the sharp chin bone. She had thin lips and
her cheeks were as taut as the skin on a drum. The cheekbones protruded a little. The wideness of her forehead made her eyes appear small and deep, but when you stood next to her, you saw that they weren't small eyes. Ursula thought she was ugly and she was always very critical of her appearance. I did a lot to build up her ego. Too much, if you ask me. However, if she asked me what Pin thought of her, I would say, “Ask him yourself. I don't speak for Pin.”