The Dwelling: A Novel (24 page)

She dug around in kitchen boxes, finally coming up with a little blossom vase and put the flowers into water and placed them in the center of the dining-room table where she could see them and be reminded every time she did that they weren’t
really
alone, that there were people everywhere. Kind people.

Barbara stepped away and admired them for only a moment, and then Petey got home, his nose bloodied, his lip fat, and all the delight went out of the day.

Fat kid! Fat kid!
Andy Devries and Marshall Hemp had taken off as soon as someone in the crowd had said,
He’s hurt.
Pushing himself up off the hardened earth, spitting mud out of his mouth, Petey Parkins remembered what exactly had been said, it had been
shaddup the fat kid’s hurt
and then Andy and Marshall had taken off.

Petey spat again and mud sputtered out with saliva, but instead of a good hard hork onto the mud, something that might have salvaged some of his dignity, even just to him, the muddied spittle stayed mostly on his bottom lip. He swiped at it with the back of his hand, his mouth tender where his teeth had mashed into the tissue.

Fat kid.

He sniffled snot to the back of his throat. His nose was running. He’d cried.
Cried.
His face would be ridiculously red against his pale freckles and there would be more dirt, mixed with sweat, under his hairline. He could feel it running down his temples. There was nothing for him to wipe his nose with. He wore a white T-shirt, pulled out and over his pants to hide the large bulk of his belly. If he wiped it there, everyone would know. The snot tickled under his nose. Petey swiped at his eyes with the hand that wiped off the spit.

“Paul?”

He would have to use his fingers and then what? He couldn’t bear to let it run into his mouth. The kids who had gotten off the bus to see the fight had mostly disappeared, bored now that it was over or scared they were going to get caught. They were all but gone.

“Paul?” Petey realized someone was talking to him. He flinched instinctively, cringing against whatever new horror was in the works. When none came, he answered. “It’s Pe
ter,”
he said, emphasizing out of habit the last syllable of his name. He said it that way nearly every minute to his mother, who still called him Petey. He told her and told her and told her that he was going to be Pe
ter
at the new school. At the old school he’d been Petey the Weenie.

“Oh,” said the last kid. There was no taunt in the voice, but Petey stayed poised for it anyway. Alert. He spat again. He thought he might taste blood. Nothing came out that he could see. His lip hurt inside. He’d scraped his knee and palms landing from the first push—Andy Devries—while Marshall laughed but looked angry, and prepared for the next part, which was to kick
the fat kid’s ass.
“You okay? You’re that new kid, right? You okay?”

Petey’s nose was about to drip. He had no choice. He squeezed his nose with his fingers and pulled it away. He held his hand out in front of him, horrified. He walked a couple of steps to the edge of the sidewalk and wiped it on the grass there.

“Make it grow, eh?” Petey looked up at the kid talking. He was skinny and tall, older than Petey. He stared at him with rounded eyes and easy smile, and it took a second but Petey felt more than saw the blankness behind the eyes. The retard smiled at him, and when Petey didn’t bite or snarl or try to punch him, he closed up the distance between them and patted Petey gently on the back.

The unexpected tenderness, or the fact that it was coming from a retard, stung his face and he felt the horrible taste of tears coming back. “It’s okay now, they took off,” the kid said smiling, nodding with deep understanding. “Andy’s bad,” he added. “He’s a super-
shit.”

Petey nodded back, sort of, then bent over at the waist, leaning the full weight of his substantial upper body on his knees. His right knee throbbed, but he didn’t favor it. Instead he let his head fall and the snot run out of his nose.

The kids at the old school had been used to his fatness. It had come on him gradually over his eight years. It had been a side issue. Instead he’d been a crybaby. Petey the Weenie. If the kids from the new school saw him crying like a baby now, they’d figure it out. He hoped no one could see, hoped the moron couldn’t or wouldn’t tell, hoped the ground would start to shake and an earthquake would wipe out the whole snot-running city. And, of course, at the old school he’d had Jeremy. His best friend—his only friend, really—in the whole world.

An ache began like a black hole in his stomach at the thought of Jeremy and his friendly face, any friendly face, and the tears threatened then never to stop, to stay as long as the earth stood, long enough for another Ice Age, or another comet to hit the earth and destroy everything like it had when the dinosaurs lived there. He sobbed harder, feeling sorry for himself, sorry for familiar faces, even for the familiar assholes of the old school. The old taunts.

Fartin’ Parkins.
He hoped they didn’t figure that one out.

Sideways glances on either side showed deserted, quiet streets. Far away he could hear the girls’ field hockey team practicing. Just him and the retard. Tears of sublime misery poured from him then and by only hairs he resisted just dropping to the ground and letting it rip, letting the tears swallow or kill him or just anything that would let him be dead.

“He’s a shit, that Andy Devries,” the kid said. “A shitty shit,” he added, and giggled. He repeated “shit” another four times and seemed to get wrapped up in it. “I have to go. You want me to come home with you?”

Just what he needed, to be walked home by the local retard—he stopped himself.

“Nah,” he said, standing up. He wiped his hand across his nose, wiped the mucus on his shirt, suddenly not caring who saw. “Nah, I’m okay.”

“I better go. My mom yells.” The kid took off, running up the street, leaving Petey alone.

His house, their new house, was on Belisle Street. It was almost four blocks from the corner and he realized with fresh horror that he didn’t know what kids, if any, lived on Belisle, or if they were watching, waiting for him to walk by so they could toss a new taunt out at him, maybe more
hey fat kid,
or
whale boy
or something new like
fatass
or maybe they would just moo or oink when he walked by, hiding behind curtains, doors, fences, their parents still at work and no one home to stop them.

He sighed deeply and let it turn into a snuffle. He wiped again at his nose and it hurt too. His jeans were dirty. His mother would notice that, but first she’d see the snot on his shirt and be disgusted right up until she realized by looking at his
(fat)
face that he’d been crying. Then she would cry too. Or maybe she would just get that blank look and tell him quietly to go change. Then she’d disappear someplace in the house and he wouldn’t even be able to hear her.

Periodically he looked up at the houses, uncertain still which one was his. They were mostly the same on the block, old-fashioned but fixed up. Renovated. That’s what theirs was, renovated. The ad had said, “newly renovated.” His dad—before he left, of course, and stopped being his dad or (not so bad),
Your Father
had become
That Asshole, Your Father
—had renovated their basement for a year, adding walls and a bar and eighteen tiny little lights that recessed into the ceiling, running all along one side of the basement (he’d said they were “a bitch to put in, just a
bitch.”
Whenever someone came over, Petey’s dad shuffled them down into the basement and gave them a drink from the bar and told them what a
bitch
the little lights had been to put in). Then he left it as though it had been the last order of business. It was as though once he finished the basement he had nothing else to do and so he left. Then his mom started crying and didn’t stop for months. She didn’t cry as much as she used to, but she still wasn’t easy to pin down to one mood. Sometimes when Petey was still at his other school (not so bad) he would come home to find her sobbing in the living room looking through old photo albums like someone had died, the house quiet, breakfast dishes in the sink or even on the table still, the place smelling like cigarettes and coffee, her eyes puffed out and so red he could barely see them. Other days Time Marched On—that’s what she said sometimes, like an announcement, “Well,
time marches on,”
and she’d ruffle his hair, but it was okay, because even though he wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, those were usually the best days.

On Time Marches On days, he might come home from school and she would be in her bedroom trying on every piece of clothing she owned, coming out to show him different outfits and asking him bizarre questions about colors and styles until he wanted to tell her,
Mom, Regis says to phone a friend,
but he never did. Those times her voice was on the edge of something scary that he didn’t recognize but knew instinctively that he had to humor her
or else
—never knowing what the
or else
was.

He crossed the street onto his block, the last one, and saw with mortification, that his mother had tied a huge,
HUGE
red bow to the front door, so that he would be able to find it among the other newly renovated old-fashioned houses. (On the other hand, it went quickly through his mind that if the bow was there, it meant at least she was
thinking
and that meant it might be a
Time Marches On
day, instead of a
That Asshole, Your Father
day, but it was quick and rote and meaningless in the face of new torments such as Andy Devries and Marshall Hemp.) Without thinking about it, he swept his eyes stealthily around the block, searching for kids, any kids, even little ones, who might have seen. The streets were bare, the houses staring back. Of course, you couldn’t see
in them.

Petey ran past the four houses between him and home, the first plan of action to rip that bow off the door before someone saw (
Hey, fat kid! You get your house as a
present?).

Actually he didn’t run, he scurried. Petey only ran when he was going to get beaten up. The rest of the time he scurried, like a bug, hoping not to be noticed.

He yanked the bow off, hearing a
riip!
with a certain amount of satisfaction, and then he pulled the door open. His mom looked up, a smile forming on her mouth, lips moving in a standard greeting, maybe
hi honey how was your day
or maybe
how was school sweetie,
but her whole face seemed to crash once she really looked at him and she leaped to her feet. “Oh, Pe-
tee,
ohmigod, oh, my poor baby, your
face—”
his mother cried when she saw him and crossed the floor in three long strides, dropping to her knees and pulling him into her body like a tiger, lunging.

He let himself be pulled in. “Pe
ter,”
he managed, before he burst into tears and succumbed completely to the rest of her mother-talk, soothing and hurtful at the same time, because she was crying too, and it was all his fault.

They went into the kitchen where his mom ran cold water over a dish-cloth and held it softly to his lip asking him, without expecting his answer, if it felt better, if that helped and
there there.
Then they went to the little kitchen table where they’d eaten breakfast in the morning. He’d had Count Chocula cereal. So far they’d eaten breakfast and lunch in the little kitchen and dinner at the big table in the dining room. On their way to the table, his mom holding the cloth on his mouth, Petey noticed that a package of chicken was thawing on a plate on the counter.

He told her what had happened, but avoiding the things they said through pride and something like self-protection. She soothed and
aaahed
and poor-babied him until Petey began to calm down. There was a crossover moment when his mother’s voice began to fade, the words becoming sounds and when Petey’s mind began to shift to other things soothing.

“I’m going to phone their mothers,” she said.

“Can I have some pudding?” he asked, just seconds before she finished closing her mouth on the last syllable. It had come out too sharply, too fast.

“What did you say their names were? You have to tell me their names again,” she said. “I’m going to call them. This is a terrible thing to happen. You’re a new boy in school. The
school,”
she all but spat out the word
school,
“should have been watching out for you. Especially if they have such terrible boys there. I’ll call the school, too.” She finished by picking up the cloth that Petey had let fall to the table. His lip had swollen to the point of feeling foreign against his teeth. His tongue couldn’t stay away from it. The tenderest part was right in front of his chewing teeth.

“Mom?” he asked again. He couldn’t repeat the whole question. Couldn’t break the spell.

Barbara stared at him. She heard him. She chewed her own lip, the same place as Petey’s sore spot. Her thinking look. Her eyes dragged away from him, to the counter where the microwave and its little green LCD clock were.

“It’s almost supper time,” she said, her tone changing, carefully losing its animation.

There were no words, but no silence, between them. Petey’s lip throbbed. He needed something in his mouth. He needed it to feel good in there, something creamy, sweet. Something that would take away the taste of the blood and snot. That was all.

“I’m hungry,” he said simply. His mouth hung open in his round face, bottom lip protruding, giving him a slightly moronic expression.

Barbara shut her eyes against him. Her arms crossed over her ample chest—more ample with the extra weight gained since the break-up. From inside, her chest tightened. The beginnings of panic rose not in her mind, but in her body. Her right leg began to shake and she raised her shoulders, tightening her neck muscles. She got up from the table. Tried to sound offhand.