The Best People in the World (35 page)

He'd gone nuts. A pile of scrambled eggs, something like blueberry Danishes, steaming sausages, and a pitcher of orange juice. He wore a red union suit with a white plastic belt and a red wool sock tugged over his head. He'd covered his sideburns, with something (flour?) so they appeared white.

“Ho, ho, ho,” he said.

He grabbed Alice by the waist and pulled her onto his lap. “Have you been naughty or nice, little girl?”

She kicked and struggled, but while she was full of hostility, he had given himself over to the Christmas spirit and this made him invincible. He couldn't hear her threaten to box his ears. I sternly warned her not to.

She beat at Shiloh's arms, but he wouldn't release her.

“And what do you want for Christmas?” Shiloh asked.

“Let go of me, you idiot. You boob. You deaf catastrophe.”

I pulled Shiloh's hands from around her.

“And what about you, little boy?” He let Alice go and pulled me onto his lap, “What do you want for Christmas?”

I petted his head. He flinched at first, but I was gentle, rubbing circles over his scalp. I touched his sideburns.

“Taste,” he said.

It was powdered sugar.

Santa said, “All the good children get breakfast. After the food is gone, we can exchange presents.”

We were always hungry, but we never really ate anymore—it was too much of a bother. I wrote a thank-you on his notepad. Merry Christmas. I didn't know what to do about Alice's outburst. I felt as though my most human parts were hibernating, just like the green earth, like
Alice's softness, those parts of Shiloh that had become insensate. All day we breathed that scalded air. That empty brightness outside couldn't reach us. We lived in a vacuum. Heat and sound didn't communicate the way they used to. We were left with degrees of friction. We rattled off one another like billiard balls. We rang like crystal. Nothing could change until those frozen rivulets on the windowpanes ran as meltwater.

Alice left the room—as a protest, I thought. When she came back she had a message for me. “Enjoy it while you can, because he really got us presents and when he sees we didn't do anything for him, he's going to hate us.”

I pushed my food in front of her. After her announcement the piles of eggs, those glutinous Danishes, the fat that sweat through the sausages, all of it seemed a monument to our failures. Whatever could he have gotten for us? What did I want? What did I need? This secret would be revealed to me. I could offer nothing in return.

Shiloh made contented noises, clapping his lips and snorting.

“I ought to christen him with the rolling pin,” said Alice.

Something about her tone made me feel that her complaints were as much with me as with him. Could these times be the ones I would pine for? And was her fury nothing more than a reflection of the strength of her character? And why couldn't I summon up a force capable of neutralizing it? Why couldn't I have rescued us from that house? And later I would drive into a hurricane to see a woman who refused to take my phone calls. And later I would lie about my age, my earning potential, the countries I'd visited, but never about my first love, never about Alice.

Shiloh reached out and patted my hand.

“Ignore her,” I told him. “She's a flower that produces meanness instead of color.”

“Don't talk to him,” said Alice. “It's like people who talk to their dogs; it robs them of dignity.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” said Santa. He pushed himself up and headed toward the living room.

“How can you eat so much?” I asked Alice.

“Because I'm hungry, Thomas.” With a sausage staked to her fork,
she brought her thumb back to hook her hair over her ear. She chewed with her lips pouted to try and gross me out.

I lay my head in my arms and listened to her fork scrape across the plates. In the other room Shiloh threw wood on the fire.

Alice walked over to the pantry.

“You can't still be hungry?”

“And yet I am. What do you suppose might cause that?”

She stood facing me, defying me.

“Just the idea of this conversation exhausts me, Thomas.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes I felt completely brittle inside. I said, “What do I care if you're tired?”

She put a cold hand under my jaw and tilted back my head. “I'm pregnant.”

We had an impromptu staring contest. The longer I looked at her, the easier it became to convince myself that she was a stranger.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I have to leave,” said Alice. She leaned over and planted a kiss on my forehead.

“I couldn't wait any longer,” Shiloh announced as he came into the room. He carried two packages wrapped in paper grocery bags. He handed one to each of us.

We received the packages without joy.

“Open them,” said Shiloh.

Out of the rabbit fur he'd stitched a hat for Alice and a pair of mittens for me.

Alice held the hat to her nose.

“What does it smell like?” I asked her.

She pushed it in my face. It smelled like blood.

“I can't wear this,” she said. She handed it back to Shiloh.

He didn't understand. He pushed it back to her. “Try it on.”

Alice started crying. She tugged the hat over her head.

Shiloh looked to me for an explanation.

I took his notebook. Shiloh watched me write
She's pregnant
.

He leaned over Alice, shielding her body with his. “Thomas,” he said, “come here.”

I joined my arms with his and we crowded her, as if we feared she would float away.

Alice and Shiloh lost themselves in a storm of tears. When that passed Alice sat on my lap while Shiloh poured pancake batter directly on the stovetop.

“I bet I'm crushing you,” said Alice.

“Crush me, please.”

She bounced on my lap. She laughed.

I stood up, holding her in my arms. She was too light. Shiloh said, “Be careful with her.” He pushed the chairs out of the way so I wouldn't trip over anything.

“Put me down,” Alice said.

I carried her into the pantry.

“I won't,” I said.

“I'll get dizzy.”

“Merry Christmas!” shouted Shiloh.

I carried her into the living room and around the tree. Then I wanted to see Shiloh again and I carried her back to the kitchen. She wanted me to put her down, but I refused. I was trying to prove something to her about what I was capable of.

“I give up,” said Alice.

I made her kiss me before I returned her to the ground.

Shiloh said, “I think I have enough rabbit left to make booties.”

I tried to pick Alice up again. She pushed me away.

Shiloh insisted Alice eat half a stack of buckwheat flapjacks.

She didn't feel well. She cursed me for getting her agitated. Her upper lip got dewy. I escorted her outside and watched her be sick off the porch. I kissed her wet forehead. I looked at the mess on the snow. A tremendous waste of food.

8

Anything for Alice

After finishing the eggs she moved to the flank steak.

With all the meat she took in, her body produced a new oily
sheen and a particular rankness that startled me beneath the close sheets. Her moods improved. She wasn't nauseous again. Her breasts returned and then her butt and belly, too. Heat poured from her body. I liked the feeling of one of her legs over my abdomen. I looked forward to her being huge. I wanted her conspicuous.

 

If the baby was a boy? Solomon, said Alice; Earlie, suggested Shiloh (after his first friend); Lake, I said, Lake Lowe. Lake Mahey, said Alice. What about the middle name? Lowe, regardless. Lake Lowe Mahey. And a girl? June, suggested Shiloh, for the month we'd arrived. Rain, said Alice. What about Brook? I asked. Alice thought it should be Shiloh's choice. He'd need to think about it. Would it be June? Would it be Rain? Brook had been my suggestion; it wouldn't be Brook, he concluded, since then I would have named both the boy and the girl.

Our baby would never wear shoes in the summer, never wear clothes, swim like an otter, grow as brown as a bean. I would take a job down in the valley. Any job. It wouldn't matter. Even though all the green life had receded around us, it hadn't disappeared, but only traveled inward. If, in a snow-choked valley, a hothouse could produce rows of perfect poinsettias, couldn't Alice's body contain a slow uncurling?

And did it anticipate us as much as we anticipated it? Here we were coming into January and thinking about a date in August. This was good for Alice. She'd never been more vibrant. She could crush me in her arms.

And who would we be? Alice and Tom. Shiloh would be Uncle Shy—what a gift for an orphan, a nephew, a niece, family. “She'll be Rain,” declared Shiloh. “In August you always need rain.” Rain Lowe Mahey.

 

On New Year's we stood in the snowy pasture and measured ourselves against the stars. When the hour came we heard the distant report of shotguns celebrating. Something about the spaces between people made you want to be heard. Those faint popping sounds were
our connection to the world. Shiloh asked if we heard them. Did
he?
No, but he'd expected them. From his pocket he produced a firecracker he'd fashioned for the occasion out of two tin cans and Alice's sisal rope. Would Alice mind? Just this once. He buried it in the soft hummock of the haystack. From the top of the meadow, we watched the spitting fuse burrow into the mound and then a yellow-orange blast. A ring of snow jumped. The shock registered in our chests as the hay drifted across the pristine field.

We stamped our feet. Down in the valley, in some silent town, sparkling arcs launched into the sky, blue, green, white. Ropes of colored light sent up to lasso what? To us they described feathers or ferns. Shiloh explained the chemistry of colors: sulfur, copper, magnesium. What must have been the grand finale presented pinwheels like bouquets of flowers, silent reports that expanded and contracted in the same instant, a flurry of mortared shells that lit the valley. 1974.

 

As the two of us cuddled on the living-room sofa, Alice asked if I'd considered our never-ending supply of firewood. Had I compared the rate of consumption to the progress of time? Her point: in a little more than a month, we'd burned more than a third of our stores. We'd put in three rows of wood. We had two left. That and a scattering of bark, spiders' eggs, and dust. If the weather didn't get any worse, the next row might take us to the end of January, the final row to March. Wasn't that something? I asked. She named that thing: insufficient.

When the fire died I swept the floor and poured the dustpan over the coals—sparks as small as stars shot up the chimney. Our Christmas tree left the house the same way.

 

Shiloh got my attention. He signaled me to follow him into the basement. What I'd been doing was rubbing Alice as she sprawled on the sofa. I tugged socks over her feet and tucked them beneath the covers. Kissing her sticky chin I tasted canned peaches.

The opening to Shiloh's crawl space glowed like a furnace door. I
poked my head in. He had half his hand crammed in his mouth. His toolbox was open on the table.

I scrambled in. Luckily his lamps put some heat in the air. A sort of hazy smoke spun off them where dust smoldered. I held my hands up near the bulbs to let the heat infuse my blood, but my twining shadows only served to annoy him.

I reached up and grabbed the back of the aluminum reflectors. As soon as I touched it, I knew I had burned myself. Shiloh took his hand out of his mouth. “See?” he said. “Now you burned yourself.”

I found instant relief placing my hand on the cool metal of the toolbox.

“You have to touch everything?”

We stared at each other for a moment. He pointed at a spot on the table.

It was a tooth, a bicuspid, I believe. A bit of flesh clung to it the way fruit will stick to a pit. I pointed from it to his mouth.

He yawned to show me its old home.

What's this about?
I asked him.

“It just came out,” he said.

No
, my chin argued.

He picked the tooth up and pushed it back in place. Maybe it would take root? He couldn't let it rest. He balanced it on his tongue.

Bite something hard?

This was why he'd invited me down, he had some theories and some countertheories. What had started the whole thing was this overwhelming sensation of looseness. His body was feeling sort of arbitrary, kind of accidental. He thought it might be related to his accident. I wanted him to stay with the tangible, with this tooth he'd lost. He asked me, Did my teeth feel pliant? Did they have some give? It was with a real sense of apprehension that I checked. Everything seemed basically rooted. That was the way he understood it, that the roots sort of anchored them to the jaw.

But, see, we, the two of us, we're eating all these soft foods now. There wasn't any sort of pressure keeping the teeth
in line
. (Every so often he picked the tooth up and reinserted it.) Was he suggesting
that our diet had caused this? This was the heart of his problem; he couldn't be sure. He'd sort of gone around conducting an inspection, but it was hard for him to know how much of the wiggle he had felt was just a product of that more general looseness. And how loose, I wanted to know, was the tooth that had fallen out? That was the thing, it was the first tooth he'd noticed and he'd just kept working on it until it came out, but some of the other teeth, he couldn't be sure—he was missing what you call clinical data—they seemed looser. Which one bothered him? For instance? Sure. His main teeth. The front ones? For instance. And which other ones? All of the other ones.

I wiped my hands on my pants legs and he scuffed his teeth dry with his shirt sleeve. They seemed solid to me. I tried putting opposing forces on the pair, but they didn't want to move.