The Trouble in Me (5 page)

“If you do easy stuff for too long it becomes hard,” I said without emotion. “Even monkeys get tired of monkeying around.”

“What's gotten into you?” she asked. “You're talking like an idiot. And is that blood on your shirt?”

I didn't have to answer because Gary suddenly shouted out, “I'm ready for the body, Mom!”

“It's about time,” Mrs. Pagoda fired back as my mother looked over at their house in shock.

Then as our curiosity quietly froze us both in place, Mrs. Pagoda called for Gary's dad, who was in some inner part of the house.

“Mr. P!” she said sharply as if jabbing him awake from a nap. “Mr. Pickles. Get up offa your divan, it's time for the funeral!”

My mother gave me a nudge. “What funeral?” she whispered. “And who is Mr. Pickles?”

“I think it's a pet name for the dad,” I replied, and then I pointed my nose toward the open hole. “And that would be for the dog funeral.”

“Well, we don't have time for this perverse spectacle,” she said impatiently. “And don't throw the meat in the canal—those awful fish will just get all overexcited and want more.”

Then, from inside our house, we heard the smooth voice of Nat King Cole singing, “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa.” My sister, Karen, had turned up the stereo. It was my father's favorite song and he always sang along with it as his fancy footwork glided around our house in dance-floor circles.

Hastily my mother turned toward our back porch and frowned. “I'm sweating,” she said with exasperation, and dabbed a paper napkin at the half moon of perspiration under her sleeveless blouse. “And you've ruined the meal. Let's hope your sister holds the fort.”

My sister must have seen my father pull into the driveway and put the record on with the volume turned up. And now she was saving the day or, should I say, saving the trophy moment, because on the back porch, in her outstretched arms, she was holding forth a cookie sheet ready for the Commodore's inspection. On it was brilliantly modeled a birthday cake shaped after the USS
Newport News
, which was our Sea Cadet chapter's sponsor ship.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said warmly just as he danced around the corner from the front of the house.

Then she presented him with the cake as if she were the real Mona Lisa while Nat King Cole crooned about men bringing dreams to her doorstep.

He grinned widely as he raised his arms to greet her. “Now, this is a trophy moment,” he declared gleefully above the music, and grasped one end of the tray and then the two of them slid it carefully onto the patio table.

He knelt down on one knee to examine the red-tipped cannons, which were made of candy cigarettes. Then his eyes glazed over when he saw, up on the bridge of the cake ship, the standing Commodore modeled out of marzipan with a row of marzipan sailors saluting him. The smokestacks were made of curled thin sheets of licorice. Even the line of signal flags flying from the jack staff on the bow and up to the bridge flagstaff and over to the stacks and back to the stern ensign staff read HAPPY BIRTHDAY COMMODORE, exactly like the ones I had already burned. The ship sat on a dappled sea of blue icing with churning white foam rolling outward from the prop wash. My sister had thought of everything.

My mother turned the music down.

Dad beamed. He danced around the cake while murmuring, “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa,” as his eyes searched out every nautical detail. “Wonderful. Marvelous. Genius,” he declared in a singsongy voice while sneaking swipes of battleship-gray icing off the ship's hull.

He had been giddy like this all my life. I never questioned it, but suddenly his cheerfulness seemed artificial, as if his life was the repetition of a recorded song going around and around, repeating itself day after day until the day came when the record got old and thin and silent and the needle peeled the vinyl into a circular curl of the Mona Lisa's silent hair. Could having a family like us really make him happy, or was this an accidental life he was trying to make the best of, which was why all his joy seemed so vastly overinflated?

He seemed like a hot-air balloon on the verge of exploding and showering us with the confetti of all the shredded dreams that had kept him going. I couldn't tell if I was being too rough on him. Yesterday he seemed the same as I had always known him. But today I couldn't be sure, and if I judged him differently, wouldn't I judge myself differently, too? How could I know he was so full of hot air unless I was, too?

“Who made this dreamboat?” he finally asked, and his eyes flashed mischievously as he snapped off the portside candy anchor and crunched down on it. “Which da Vinci of the ship's galley created this masterpiece?”

My sister had done every meticulous bit of the work. I was no help, though she had asked me to assist with painting on the ocean of icing, which was the easiest task, but I had told her I was busy.

I had been watching television. It was a show on how to repair cars. The narrator-mechanic talked like he had a mouthful of ball bearings. He had a nasty scar running up under his neck that then hooked upward over his chin and connected with the tip of a V-shaped gap in his floppy lower lip. I guessed he had stuck his head too far under the hood and got hacked a good one by the fan blade. His lower lip warbled when he spoke, but still he knew what he was talking about, and he was efficient with his hands, which did most of the teaching anyway. I liked knowing how to repair flat tires and change water pumps and spark plugs. I wanted a car and figured I'd only get a junker, so I'd need to know how to fix it up, which was why I didn't pitch in and help my sister.

Mom had promised to assist with the cake, but then she got busy with a nursery project putting up wallpaper cows jumping over grinning moons in the baby's room.

“The moon looks a little depraved,” I had remarked that morning when I stuck my head around the corner. “It's smiling like Hermann Göring.” I was on a kick where I tried to ruin each innocent moment by perversely listing the deeds of every evil Nazi I could recall. I was good at history.

“Don't be morbid,” she replied. “The wallpaper will guard the baby against germs.”

“Or Germans,” I remarked as I slouched back to my car repair show. Mom continued to hang the wallpaper. My sister continued to sing to her records and create her masterpiece.

Now, as my father looked eagerly into all of our faces to learn who had constructed the ship cake, I stared down at my roughed-up shoes. I expected my sister to take the full credit she deserved.

“We all contributed,” she said graciously. “It was family teamwork.”

She knew that saying the word
teamwork
was like magnifying his extra-tall, extra-gilded trophy moment because the instant she said it he livened up even more and launched into one of his instructional naval discourses.

“A ship, like a family, is only as good as the teamwork of her sailors,” he announced as if reading out the title of a treasured lecture he was about to deliver. Then he rattled on for a while as my mind begged to drift off toward the Pagoda animal burial.

At our cadet meetings, where we practiced tying elaborate boat knots and attempted to carve tiny sailing ships that fit into impossibly tinier bottles, my father often took the time to address us as a unit.

He would stand up on the seat of a chair and begin a talk with, “Crew, nobody likes to be a weak link on a ship. Now, boys, everyone line up side by side.”

There were only about twenty of us. We groaned as we put down our half-made elaborate boat knots, which would snailishly fall open again, or sheathed our wood-carving knives, and then we all lined up about a foot apart from each other.

“Now, get close enough so that you can lock arms,” Dad ordered, eyeing us impatiently.

We did. We had done it many times before, so we knew the drill by heart.

“I want the two end boys to circle around,” he instructed, “and link up to form a perfect, impenetrable circular chain.”

He rhythmically clapped his hands together to motivate us. Once the end boys linked arms he began to tap a beat with his foot and sing an old sea chantey that he knew we loved.

“What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” he bellowed. “What shall we do with a drunken sailor? What shall we do with a drunken sailor? Early in the morning.”

Then we all sang back, “Put him in the long boat 'til he's sober. Pull out the bung and wet him all over. Heave him by the leg…”

By then we were singing so wildly and dancing like cows kicking our legs this way and that until one of us got lifted off his feet and tilted over and then the whole chain of us would wobble a bit and slowly collapse inward with a final slaphappy groan. Then we'd have to pull our arms free and get up and do it again.

Dad was dead set on everyone working together as a unit and conforming to the theory of the “unbreakable chain of collective strength.”

“When you're under enemy fire,” he instructed sagely, “every moment lost to confusion results in a casualty. It is worthy of a court-martial to waste a man's life because of poor training.”

Now as Dad stood in front of the birthday cake he rubbed his half-fingered fist into the palm of his good hand. I saw that stubby finger jiggle like a tongue wagging and thought of his Jack Ruby comment from breakfast. It was a stupid joke, but then I had laughed anyway. It was a teamwork laugh, I supposed, or maybe I was just being spineless.

But suddenly the references seemed as
contemptible
as Mom had said and I no longer felt part of his team. If I had shown any guts I would have backed her up by blurting out, “I think it's a stupid joke, too.” But sometimes agreeing with Mom left me the target of Dad's annoyance, and he could fume and hold a grudge for a week, so I had kept my mouth shut.

Then, from behind Dad's back, and lurking on the other side of the fence, Gary and his father appeared and were breathing heavily as they leaned forward like fishermen pulling a net full of fish. They strained to drag a large canvas tarp toward the grave. I guessed the greyhound was wrapped in the tarp.

Mom cast a puzzled glance over at the panting, struggling Pagodas and I wished she hadn't. At first I thought Mr. Pickles was wearing a large red-velvet cake on his head. As he tugged the tarp forward I realized it was a Shriners fez, and the elaborately knotted tassel swung back and forth in front of the ceremonial silver scimitar and Moorish moon like a scolding finger saying “No, no, no.” For a second I thought Mom was going to invite them over for cake, but then she must have summed them up as hazardous social germs because she turned her back toward them and announced cheerfully, “Family-trophy-moment photo!”

“Indeed!” Dad agreed, and drew himself up to attention.

Mom quickly retrieved the camera with the flash cube from the kitchen and Dad stood with the cake tray tilted forward, but not too forward, and my sister and I knelt like bookends on either side of him. It was a classic trophy-moment photograph.

Then I took a photo of Mom and Karen and Dad. Then Karen took one of me and Mom and Dad. By then the mosquitoes had begun to rise up off the canal into winged formations of humming hypodermics and we carried the cake into the kitchen, where Dad did the honors of slicing it up according to Mr. Bowditch's famous nautical rules on latitude and longitude. I received a shallow piece of the ocean but didn't dare complain. I ate it while peering out the window, trying to get a better sense of what Gary and his dad were doing. But I only saw a final glimpse of Mr. Pickles pushing up on the lower edge of his fez, which had slipped down over his eyes that were as wrinkled as raw oysters. Then he adjusted the fez as if he were carefully straightening a lampshade while he trotted toward his wine-colored Cadillac. He obviously had a Shriners meeting to attend and left the rest of the work to Gary.

Since the hamburgers were ruined Dad suggested that he and Mom go to the Sea Cadet Commodores' cocktail party at the Kon-Tiki Club after all. He had been going to skip the party because of his birthday celebration, but now without dinner I had inadvertently given him and Mom an excuse to get away from us.

It didn't take them long to spruce up, and once they left the house my sister put on my mother's lipstick and came up to me and playfully punched me in the shoulder.

“I know you burned the banner,” she said slyly. “You are such a clown. Now you owe me one for keeping my mouth shut. And after what you did to the burgers you owe it to yourself to start paying attention to what you are doing.”

She was right, but I wasn't in a mood to be wrong. My mistakes always made me respond like a jerk.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. I'll pay you back when you least expect it.”

“Moron,” she replied in a tired voice. “You are too stupid to know when people are being nice to you.”

She was always more fair to me than I was to her, and somehow this kept me from being totally honest with her. I wasn't smarter than her, so being a liar was my only way of trying to get the upper hand, but she saw right through me.

“And what were you and that kid in the skanky underwear talking about down by the canal?” she asked suspiciously. “That was pretty weird.”

I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “Just saying hi.”

The less I said about him the better. As a kid I learned that when you announced you had an invisible friend it was no longer invisible. It was best to keep Gary in the shadows.

Karen continued. “And could you figure out what he and his dad were doing out back?” she asked. “They were creeping around like they were burying something illegal.”

“They are burying a greyhound,” I explained. “Gary was digging the hole.”

“I hope it doesn't smell,” she remarked.

“It's a deep hole,” I added, cutting off the subject.

“Well, I'm going to visit Suzy,” she said, and headed for the door. Then from over her shoulder she added, “Watch it. Suzy said that guy's a two-faced user. And she should know.”