The Business of Naming Things (8 page)

What'll you have?

Carla hesitated. She didn't want anything but a pair of binoculars and, maybe, a Percoset.

How about a Bloody Mary? A bullshot?

There was no use telling Billy no—to him, it meant yes.

She ordered a Bloody Mary, even though it wasn't noon yet and it wasn't legal, and took a menu and went back to the sunny area in the back room. And there it was. One, two, three condos up the lake. His jeans were actually hanging on a clothesline.

She still hadn't really seen Dale up close—his face, that is. Not of recent vintage anyway. She and Delia had looked through a bunch of old yearbooks from his school, where, as it happens, Delia's cousin was once the nurse and so had all the books from a certain era. And there he was, Dale X. Sweeney, class of '84. Blondish hair upswept at the temples, a scattering of freckles, high, sharp cheekbones to die for, eyes a little beady, to be honest, like maybe he was a car thief. He
really looked more 1950s than 1980s, more duck's ass than disco. Can't see no teeth, said Big Delia, which was true. I assume he's got 'em, said Carla.

Carla had barely touched her Bloody Mary when Billy came over. It's a bye week, actually, he said. There ain't no Bills game today.

Wow, thought Carla. How interesting.

She teased him. Billy, you're so . . . honest with me. It's like we was brother 'n' sister.
Were
, she corrected herself, silently.

No, he said. I mean, I meant, you know, there's not likely, um, to, you know, like the crowd, it'll be a slow one today. Not much for me is what I'm saying.

Really, said Carla in a deadpan.

It's nice to see you is all, said Billy, moving away from her table back to the bar.

She drew the straw of her drink to her lips and sucked a good jolt of vodka from the bottom. She let the warmth of the sun off the lake through the porch glass glint off her cheeks and toast her lightly. She gazed at Dale Sweeney's jeans doing a slow cowboy's dance in the wind.

Nothing came of that but a headache from the second cocktail she had, plus the Marlboro she smoked in the parking lot before heading home to make lunch for JayPee and Callie. Carla went back the following Saturday, and there was a bit of a crowd for a college game of some sort—she couldn't care less; college football was all southern wasn't it, like NASCAR?—but no sign of Dale, not even his pants. She went again the next Sunday, pretending a little interest in someone she knew would never be there—an old flame from a distant town, who, she knew, had moved to Colorado. But she told Billy he might be in—this guy—on Sunday, explaining her presence once again. But no Dale.

She decided, This sweetie pie doesn't come home or doesn't get up till afternoon, now does he? I'm too early in this brunch deal. So she made a quick change of plans. The Bills are the Monday-night game, yeah, Billy?

Why
yass
, he said with a leer.

Out the door she went.

Right then, of course—like clockwork!—Carla's mom's colostomy bag broke—really, right about then, because when she got home, JayPee said Grandma had called and to call her right away.

She couldn't believe it. The bag had blown in the living room, where Carla's mom had leaned over to adjust the TV set, and the bladder got squashed between her thigh and her midriff and—you know—all over the TV screen and that perforated speaker plate and, of course, the pile carpet she and Jeff had given her for Christmas a year ago. There was even shit high up on the brass clockworks on top of the TV, right on the underside of the hat brim of the bronze cowboy on the bronze horse. Shit bronze: amazing to behold, amazing that Carla noticed. But she was superwoman, anything for her mom today. Carla got there in ten minutes and brought her own bucket and mop and ammonia.

Things got worse, of course, the next day. Carla stopped off at Dragoon's to get a resupply of bags and a fresh
TV Guide
. They watched
Meet the Press
together, but her mom got sicker as Sunday afternoon began to fade. Carla finally left at eight to get back to the kids and give them dinner and baths, but she knew she would be back. Sure enough, her mother called at eleven, saying she needed EMS. She had a fever, her stoma was infected, and she had cramps. Nice progress.

As Carla drove to her mother's, she was proud that she knew what a stoma was, thanks to Mr. Crevecoeur. Somehow
it had come up months ago, in the employee lounge—someone else's mother maybe—and Mr. C. said it meant mouth in Greek. Stomach, he said, was really a big mouth. The doctor just gives you another mouth. Everyone thought, What? Colostomy means colon mouth, said Mr. C. carefully.

I
T WAS TRICKY GETTING
B
IG
D
ELIA
to sit with the kids on Monday night, but Carla finessed it. She ran a guilt trip on Big D. You're the one who got me all interested in this guy, she said. Just let me do my thing.

What's your thing, Car?

You never mind.

Carla's mom was all set up in a semiprivate room. John's coverage from the prison was still top-notch, even though he'd died six years ago. As a surviving spouse, Marie qualified. She assured Carla she was just fine; she liked the woman in the bed next to her—an Indian from the reservation with failing kidneys; they both liked the soaps.

Carla had to put in half a day at Ye Old Price Chop, as Mr. Crevecoeur called it at the company party after a couple of Buds, before beginning her prep for Monday night. She expected an easy half shift; Mr. C.'d be doing his inventory. But instead, there he was in customer service with a bandage on his head. He was jabbering when Carla signed in; again she thought he was maybe talking to her and maybe not. Sir? she said.

Darla, er, Carla, he began.
I thought you were Dale!
He said it with a theatrical flourish and a southern twang.

Carla was confused. I'm just signing in; half day today, sir. Bakery.

You just don't know. You're so young. A TV commercial.
We were all saying it:
I thought, I thought you were Dale!
He laughed and then winced. His head hurt, you could tell.

I said bakery, said Carla, clarifying.

It was a Grape-Nuts commercial, actually. A teenage boy. Underwater. Now listen: A teenage boy underwater, he pushes a woman in a bathing suit to the surface. Splashing everywhere. She lets out a yelp! Turns out it wasn't that young buck's girlfriend—Dale—but her mother. And he says,
But, but, I thought, I thought you were Dale!

Mr. Crevecoeur laughed. Carla started tapping her foot like she did when she got impatient. You know why? You know why he thought she was Dale? I'll tell you.

Because she ate Grape-Nuts and had a nice figure, offered Carla as a guess.

Mr. C. closed both eyes, as if waiting to pass something painful. Carla headed off to the bakery.

S
HE GOT A LIGHT FROST FROM
D
EBBIE'S
H
AIR
We Are and then took a step class at the Comfort Inn for a little tone and to give a slight humid jostle to her locks. She took a long shower at home (with shower cap) and imagined Dale looking at her through the frosted glass. I don't need to eat Grape-Nuts, she thought, if that's what it was. Then she sat on the edge of the toilet seat, wrapped in a towel, her skin pink and tingling in the way that happy skin slowly cooling tingles, and she waited. Carla felt she could wait forever in just this phase—this transitional stage. She wasn't wet and she wasn't dry; the mirror was fogged, though she could see the shadow of the shape of her head through the clouded surface; she was not single and she was not married; her parents were alive, and dead; she was and was not a lot of things, and in
there, in between things, she felt free. She wondered why she wanted to change a thing about her life. These were interesting thoughts to her. Suddenly, she was afraid her cell phone would ring—she turned it off. She locked the door—she could hear the scramble of cartoon noises with kids' laughter mixed in; they'd be content for hours; they could pee upstairs when they needed to. Carla turned the tub faucet back on, hot. She wanted more steam to rise. For a few moments, she hung over the tub itself, letting her towel loosen, and tickling with her fingers her own neck beneath her ringlets. Chills rose from within her, only to be satisfyingly warmed and melted at her skin's surface. She could hardly get enough of this.

Carla sat back on the flipped-down toilet seat and decided that Mr. Crevecoeur was scary—maybe gay without knowing it, which was the scary part, and no way was she going to a bar for
Monday Night Football
, Dale or no Dale. No way was she going. No way she was going anywhere, and she let the water run.

Then she remembered: Delia was coming over to baby-sit. Carla turned off the water and began pawing through a drawer, looking for her eyelash curler. By the time she found it, the mirror had cleared. She sat there, batting her eyes, flirting with herself, trying to imagine the moment of her arrival and how her life would look if she were Dale.

I
NN OF THE
N
ATIONS

E
VERY MORNING WAS A REVELATION
, a new idea, for Father Paul Connolly, S.J., pastor at Church of the Assumption in Oreville. And this morning was no different. It was true—and a possible sermon topic?—waking up each day, today such a day, with an insight into how it all worked, God's great machine, those big gears and spheres of time and space and decency, all bathed in grace like an oil, though . . . Was that the idea? Never mind, thought Father Paul. The creep of the secular, the monsignor is right. Next.

Nonetheless, the revelation. . . . No, he
had
already forgotten it. That was fast. Few things live as short a life as that did! Marvelous. There's something, though, left: Perhaps every morning the revelation needs to be refreshed. Yes, part of something to live for, the search renewing every day. Father Paul, now warming: For to wake up two days or three days in a row or a lifetime of days, as the monsignor himself has often boasted (as if it were true, as if it were good),
with the same idea
is to be . . . coerced. Deluded. One loses the necessary doubt. That'll do it. Thomas. Can work that in at Easter.

Where is the moon? Father Paul wants to know. Writers make note of the moon, don't they? They know not why. He rolls over, or tries to; twisted sheets
cross him like a sash
, he thinks. Not bad. Or a straitjacket. In room 11 of the Inn of the
Nations motel, he struggles to undo the leather belt around his ankle. Small welt. Father Paul wants to get to his book, BOMC's latest insistence.

But the birds are singing, beginning to repeat themselves. Now there's a group waking up to the same revelation every morning and telling it! And worth a listen. Yes, listen: same short stanzas of tweets and warbles . . . sealed with a screech . . . over and over. Undetectable variations—perhaps a musician (he thinks of one:
oh so fondly
) would know them, not Paul. In any event, the same slight changes, day after day, from break of day till midmorning, when, apparently, the appropriate number of iterations have been met. Like saying the rosary. Or reading office. Done when done. If done.

Where's it gotten the birds? Show me the boid who signs his own soong, in his own voice.

Not even our Lord had his own voice. Where is the Book of Jesus? Where's the book of the enlightened Nazarene? Imagine that . . . if it were so. We get close in John—but John, you'd think, was counsel to one very slippery client, not to an honest carpenter.

And now the president is dead.

Father Paul undoes the balky buckle and tosses the cinch to the floor. It rattles across the pine planks and shatters the cheap silence ($12.50 a night). Pine floor, pine wainscoting, gingham curtains, a plain bed, birch-bark lampshades on the night tables, Margaret's green 7 Up bottle atop the TV. He will not turn it on.

When Father Paul's two bare feet hit the floor, he has the sensation he's stepped onto the spinning world. Madness to think this way all the time. No wonder we gave it to Galileo Galilei. Stoning? He can't remember.

Father Paul—his feet and ankles and heart now cold—gets back in bed.

He thinks of Margaret and her harp,
fondly
. Canted between her legs, her slender fingers rippling the air. With . . . heavenly music. Where has Margaret gone?