by D. Chance Garner
The second time I met Mrs. Otis, I was giving slimers at my parents’ funeral. My palms are always moist and my step-father would never let me forget it. “Nobody ever trusts a man with sweaty hands,” he’d say. “It gives you that ick-feeling. Like raw meat. You know it’s just meat, but it’s still gross.” So, at the funeral I kept my fists cupped between handshakes to guaranty maximum ick. Then I watched with a secret smile as their faces soured and they gently tugged away from my grip. I almost lost my composure when I took Tom Quary’s face in both my hands and thanked him for coming. I had to muffle a giggle as he walked away trying to nonchalantly wipe his cheeks on his shoulders. A woman mistook my giggle and took my hand.
“Oh, you poor baby,” she said. She was tiny and reminded me of baked goods. Squeezing my hand, she told me how sorry she was, she was sure my parents loved me, and would no doubt be proud to know I’d returned home to look after my brother. “Where are the two of you going to stay,” she asked.
My parents had been life long renters, minus the mobile home they’d burned down for insurance money. Burning down the only home he’d ever owned had been my father’s foot in the door to owning his own CPA business. He’d never repaid that debt by buying my mother a new house, so now my brother and I had a week and a half before the rent was up.
“Do you have a line on a job, sweetheart,” she asked.
“No, I just got back. I don’t even know where to start.”
“I saw the Wal-Mart had a sign in the window just yesterday,” she said.
“Loop 51 or Elkview? It don’t matter, Loop 51 I flipped off the boss, Elkview I hid in a stuffed animal display and scared the shit out of a little girl as she passed by. They both asked me not to come back. I’m not worried though.”
“Well, I’m lookin to rent my guesthouse. It’s not much but you can pay me what you can afford. You’d be helping me out really. It’s not charity. I could use someone who wouldn’t mind lighting the furnace every now and then, storing things in the attic for me, that type of stuff. Oh, and the floors are just break your heart beautiful,” she said. I told her I’d call her, and thanks Mrs-
“Otis,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Otis. We’ve met before, once.” She gave me a weak smile as I looked around and saw she was alone. “My husband died a few years back, honey. Good luck,” she said. She squeezed my hand once more, turned and made her way slowly home. She never wiped her hand.
Three years later, the love seat had burn marks and the sofa cushions were mismatched. The giant spool coffee table didn’t have the rustic look I was shooting for, and rather than brightening the dual living room/kitchen, the mismatched sarongs I’d hung for curtains seemed chaotic.
The hard wood floors, the floors Mrs. Otis had called ‘break you heart beautiful’, could only be seen in small patches through piles of Grant’s clothes. Grant stood at the mirror in the bathroom, one finger pushing his nose up piggy-style, inspecting. I walked in and lifted the seat. “I want this place cleaned up before I get home,” I said.
Grant was tugging on an ear lobe, still trapped in the mirror. “My ears produce more shit, I swear to God. D’you use Q-tips?” he asked.
“What kind of question is that? Do I clean myself? You think I run around nasty all the time?”
“I don’t use Q-tips,” he said.
“You’re a disgusting little boy,” I said, pushing him out of the way to reach the sink.
“What about your eye brows? You pluck ‘em?” he asked, staring closely at me now.
“What’s up, dude?” I asked. He followed me to the kitchen and sat at the bar. I pulled the cereal and bowls from the cupboard.
“I’m trying out for a play at school, and I want to look professional,” he said. The fridge was the shade of green that tells you it was built before 1975, and I didn’t trust it. I smelled the milk and poured it on Grant’s Froot Loops first.
“How come you’re just tellin me about this now?” I asked him.
“I figured you’d just say it was gay or something.”
“Not everything that involves men in tights is gay. Even I used to do drama,” I said.
“Really? Were you any good?”
“My career opened and closed after just one show, ‘You’re a Good Man, Charley Brown.’ But you’ve never seen a more convincing Linus.”
“Why’d you stop?” he asked.
“I quit acting for the same reason I quit drugs, I hated the people around me.”
“Then why’d you start?”
The real answer was that at 15, Stephanie Henderson had three things: a passion for acting, a knack for cheerleading, and a hypnotizing little wiggle when she walked. But that’s not what I told Grant. “I was attracted to the idea of really constructing a character from the ground up,” I said. I heard someone say that to James Lipton once. “Really figure out what makes him tick, his hopes, his fears, his motives, his secrets,” I said.
“And did you discover any dark truths about Linus’s nature?” he asked.
“Oh, it changed my life,” I said.
“You know what changed my life,” Grant asked through Fruit Loops.
“What?”
“Honey I Shrunk the Kids.”
“Honey I Shrunk the Kids changed your life?”
“Yeah,” he said, picking cereal from his lap and popping it into his mouth. “Well, the scene where they fall in the cereal. ‘Don’t eat me! Dad, don’t eat me.’ You know. And he uses the Cheerio as an inner tube, to float.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s when it hit me like, ‘Whoa, tiny people can use cereal for floaties.’ But it’s more than that. Like it was the first time I realized people didn’t see stuff the same way I see it.”
“What about the ant,” I asked him. Grant shot me a questioning eye brow over the rim of his bowl, as he guzzled the last of the pink milk and few bloated Fruit Loops. “What about the ant they train and ride and shit; he was huge. That didn’t make you say, ‘Oh, shit! That ant’s huge. It changed my life.’ So why the Cheerios?”
“Because I’ve seen Cheerios.” He said it like I asked him why he wore pants.
“You’ve seen ants, too.”
“But I’ve also seen an inner tube, ya know? I’ve never seen a giant ant and knew what that was like. I never thought, ‘So. This is a giant ant. I like it.’ Ya know?”
“So,” I said, handing him my bowl as he went to the sink.
“So, but I’ve seen Cheerios. I’ve held them in my hand, squished them in my fingers. And I’ve seen an inner tube, too. There’s always ladies floatin’ the river in inner tubes, and some of them are big ladies. So when I saw that scene it was like I understood both sides. The dad had to eat the cereal, cause it was just cereal, and the kid had to cling to the cereal cause to him it was a life preserver. Couldn’t blame either one for the tragic circumstance. I was like, ‘Wow. You really gotta try to see stuff from other people’s perspective,’ you know?” He stopped and gave me the look.
“You can’t change your life based on a movie,” I told him. “It’s all smoke and bullshit. In real life the dad woulda ate the kid cause he, like the rest of us, is generally ignorant of what’s around him. The sister would resent the father for the whole ordeal. Start datin guys like the ones that used to beat her dad up in high school. When they crushed beer cans on there heads she’d smile and think of her father. The strain would take its toll on the marriage and the wife would get the house in the divorce. She’d use the money from its sale to finance her new hobby, booze cruises. It’s during her cruise to Borneo that she’d miss the news report identifying Ted Zalinsky as the cause of an explosion at a singles apartment building in what police were calling a misguided experiment that left seven men dead. All of them survived by estranged wives and kids that lived in Michigan or Arizona, and it seems like the reporter thinks that it’s a good thing they’re far away, seems less sad.”
“Now you’re just rambling,” Grant said.
“Here’s my point. It’s on that same cruise that the mother meets Hector. Hector’s Latin and he dances and wears gator loafers. He has a little place in the Virgin Islands, he’d tell her. It would be under renovation, or being sprayed for pest, but he’d have plenty of stories and the stories would make her feel like she was there, almost. That’s the only real ending you can call happy. Cause all any of us can hope for is a little bit of money, a little bit of sex. Most of us will only get a little bit of one and that for too short a time.”
“It was a hell of a sermon this morning, Reverend,” Grant said. He stood, with the shorts, and headed for his room. “But next time ease up on the fire and brimstone. You been using that one a lot.”
“Yeah, well, I know this, auditions or no auditions, there better not be any clothes on the floor when I get home,” I yelled as he closed his door. Later that evening, I would come home to piles of clothes: on the coffee table and on the couch, in the sink and on the bar, on the toilet and in the tub; but none on the floor.
Kathrin, Mr. Shelby’s receptionist, had thick thighs and a little wiggle when she walked. She chatted away as she led me down the hallway. “Don’t let him intimidate you. He’s a Teddy bear, but he can be a little larger than life sometimes,” she said, pausing in front of a door that read:
Mr. Jonah Shelby
Human Resource Manager
Golden Bluffs Community Club
Running a hand through her hair, the girl who looked too young to go by Kathrin inhaled deeply, affixed the smile that must’ve won her the job and asked, “O.K. Are we ready?”
I reached down and adjusted it from the right to the left, expending the only piece of advice I could remember my father giving me.
“Listen, son,” he had said. “If you’re afraid to touch it, hell, she’s gonna be afraid to touch it. You don’t see ballplayers hidin’ when they adjust do you? Who gets more tail than ballplayers?”
Her eyes rolled with the door as it opened and Shelby’s voice boomed. “Katie, sweetheart, be a doll would ya...”
Mrs. Otis was tending her tiny garden as I came home. “Looks like a lot of work for just that little garden, Mrs. O,” I said.
“Hard work ain’t never hurt nobody, sweetheart. How was your interview?”
“They said they were lookin for a head groundskeeper. Management position. I told ‘em I was management material, but...” I shrugged my shoulders.
“They didn’t have any labor positions?’’ she asked. She stood up, dusted her knees and took off her sun hat.
“I don’t want to be nobodies grunt, Mrs. Otis.”
“None of us want to, honey, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Work labor a couple months; let ‘em see for themselves you’re management material.”
“That ain’t the world I live in, Mrs. O. This world of mine watches me bust my ass day in and day out. Anybody who notices my hard work ain’t about to give me a better job. They figure, ‘might as well leave that hard workin nigger where he’s at. Be hard to replace him.’ I ain’t takin no more of those jobs.”
“This world of yours? You’re the only one had it hard? The rest of us ain’t had to fight for what we have? You want to skip steps, make it easier on yourself. Whine and moan about a hard life. I’m tired, of you. I don’t mind you’re two months late on the rent. If I could afford it, I’d let you live there for free. If this old body could stand it, I’d drag myself out there and labor for anyone who’d have me, just so you and that brother of yours had a place to stay. How’s it make me feel that you’re too good to go do the same?”
“I don’t got the time to sit and wonder how other folks feel, Mrs. Otis. And I ain’t askin you for help. I’ve been raising that boy for five years, nobody offered to help with that. ‘Geof, don’t mind you’re not grown yet yourself, come raise this boy. Sheryl’s too busy. It’s none of our business what you might be busy with. We figure you ain’t gonna do anything with your life anyway.’ That’s bullshit Mrs. Otis. I gotta raise another man’s son. A man who ain’t no relation to me.”
“You have to raise your brother. Your mother’s son. Don’t be so selfish. Stand up and be a man. Why’re you runnin from the man you should be? You’re a good man. Why are you always tryin to be somethin else.”
“See, no. I never understood why everyone was always surprised to find out I’m not a good man.”
“They’re not surprised, son. They’re disappointed.”
I came home and Grant was adjusting the antenna on the TV. “Anything on?” I asked.
“Earlier I got Discovery for a few minutes. You know they don’t bake Twinkies? How’d your interview go, by the way,” he asked.
“They ain’t gonna hire me. They wanted someone with management experience. So, what do they do, fry ‘em?”
Grant gave up on the TV and flopped down on the couch. “Nuh uh. It’s a chemical reaction. They aren’t cooked at all. How do you get management experience if you need management experience to get a management position.”
“What do you mean chemical reaction? It’s cake on the outside. What kind of chemical makes cake?” I asked.
“I dunno. A little scary, right? Glad I’m a ho ho man, myself. D’you ask him about other openings?”
“The only opening he cared about was between his secretaries legs. He had his hand on her ass the whole time she was in the room.”
“In front of you?”
“It was supposed to look to me like her extreme lower back, but I know a handful of top ass when I see it.”
“Top ass?”
“Yeah. It’s like the gropers equivalent to the mullet. The top ass grab entails the thumb and index fingers remain on the lower back (all business), while the middle, ring and pinky fingers slide south of the beltline resting on the top few inches of the ass. While this seems a small accomplishment to some, the true connoisseurs know, what top soil is to dirt, Top Ass is to ass. An expert groper has the surgeon-like precision to even slip the pinky in the ass crack during this maneuver; that’s known as a ‘Sunday Mornin’. Novices stick to the classic or, ‘Schoolboy’ style.
“Eww Geof. You do that shit?”
“Hell yeah. A smooth Sunday morning’s gotten me plenty of fun Friday nights.”
“What the hell’s a Friday night?”
“Date night, man.”
“You’re a perv,” Grant said. He shook his head.
“You know what I was thinkin while that fat man had his hands all over his fine little secretary? I wish I was him. I do, too. I wish I was short and fat and bald and entitled. He made a racist joke about Mexicans during the interview, paused in the middle to ask if I was Mexican, then continued on when I said no. I wasn’t even mad though. I’d have been mad if I was Mexican, but instead, I envied him. That man lives life without fear of consequence or reproach. I’d love to live like that.”
“That’s not you though, Geof,” Grant said. I poured a glass of water and drank it down.
“You don’t think so. I used to work for the Arby’s in the mall. Everyday this fucker from the footlocker would come in and order a Beef ‘n’ Cheddar and a 7up. Everyday he worked, beef n cheddar and 7up. And he was such a dick about it; he’d call me burger boy and shit. Well, about that same time, my buddy fell from the over pass on Azalea road. He was spray paintin “TITS RULE” all in Caps, I shit you not, “TITS RU-” and boom he falls and ruptures his liver. So five days later, they’re lettin him outta the hospital and he still hasn’t took a shit, and the doctors are worried. They tell him to take magnesium citrate to loosen him up. He said it was the most terrifying experience he ever had on a toilet. Thought he’d shit a lung. But, the upside, he says, it tastes just like 7up. So naturally, I go into work armed with this info. ‘Gimme a beef n cheddar and a 7up, burger boy’ he says. ‘No problem, sir.’ The front page of the newspaper the next day said, “Emergency Crews Respond to Call of Nature.”
“Bull shit.”
“I shit you not. I got fired from Mazzio’s Pizza for stealing two five pound logs of pepperoni. Mother Francis General fired me when they found me in a service elevator with a cancer patient smokin a joint. What’s fucked up is I was volunteering. How d’you fire a candy striper? Then I got fired from the motel ‘cause they had this pretty little house keeper. All I’ll say there is I slipped her a ‘Sunday mornin,’ next thing I know I’m in a room buck naked with one hand in the air and a guest walks in, and I’m like, “Wrong room. Wrong room.” Hell I aint even embarrassed about that one.”
“That don’t sound like you, Geof.”
“Yeah. That’s what my supervisors said when they fired me. But that’s what I’m gettin at. The guy raising you ain’t the guy I’ve been most of my life. I’ve got no business teaching someone to be a person. Look, man. I talked to Aunt Sheryl and told her I can’t do this anymore. I borrowed a little money from Trav and Celia. Tomorrow we’re gonna go down and get you a bus ticket. Aunt Sheryl said with Kelvin joinin the service when he graduates, she’s got plenty room for you. You’ll go finish school up there in Indiana. After that, smart as you are, you’ll be able to go to whatever college you want.”
“What? Why? What did I do Geof?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you mad at me? You’re always mad at me. What did I do?”
“I said you didn’t do anything. I’ve got no business raising some fifteen year old boy.”
“Some boy? I’m your brother.”
“That’s right. My brother. You ain’t my Goddamn son. It ain’t my job, just cause your daddy’s dead. I wished that man was dead for years, but if I’d known I’d have to raise his son, I wouldn’t have prayed for it so hard.”
I thought, for a second, that he’d sit down and cry. Instead, he charged me, slamming me through the bathroom door. I ended up in the tub. Grant ran.
The first time I met Mrs. Otis was at the fourth grade Christmas pageant. The show was over and all the kids were let loose in the auditorium. I was the New Years Baby. My one line should have been “See y’all next year,” and then the curtain. Instead, I tripped over my sash, bit my tongue and cried. Then the curtain. While children ran through the aisles, I stumbled through tears holding a fat lip. I found my mother struggling to stand between my father and a short olive skinned guy. Each of them yelled and pointed at the other. A woman much older than my mother bent down with a licked thumb and smeared tears from my face.
“Oh, now it wasn’t that bad,” Mrs. Otis said. “Ain’t no need to cry. Don’t you know it’s bad luck for the New Year Baby to cry? Will it help if I kiss it?” she asked.
“My mama will kiss it,” I told her. She looked surprised.
“See, if you big enough to talk to me like that you might not need nobody kissin on you. You just about grown, ain’t you?”
“I gotta go see mama,” I said, pushing past her.
“Hold on,” she said. “Your mama’s talkin to grown folks. Tell me, how come you’re the New Year’s Baby anyway. What do babies have to do with Christmas,” she asked.
“It’s not for Christmas,” I said, offended by her ignorance. She pretended to be embarrassed and I explained to her the importance of my part, just as it had been explained to me.
We talked until my father appeared and pulled me up by my shirt. Mrs. Otis kissed her fingers and reached to touch my cheek but my father batted her hand away.
“Don’t you touch my wife,” the olive skin man yelled.
My father smiled. “Don’t touch your wife? You gotta be kidding,” he said.
The olive skinned man was cut of by Mrs. Otis. “Geoffrey Otis,” she yelled. And then continued much softer, “Don’t you discuss it in front of this child.” My mother lifted me into her arms. The two women stared at each other in silence.
I flinched first. “Momma,” I whispered. “This is Mrs. Otis. She’s real nice. Says she’s got a cat big as me. And I think that’s her husband, he got the same name as me, mama.”
“I know Geof,” my mother said. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Otis.”
Mrs. Otis drew a breathe that made her ten feet tall. “You have a beautiful son, Mrs. Sanders.”
I knocked on Mrs. Otis’s door, knowing Grant only had one place to go. I walked through the empty kitchen and found the two of them on the couch. Grant’s head rested on Mrs. Otis’s shoulder. She rocked and patted him, paying no attention to her dress speckled with tears and snot.
“Come on, boy. Let’s go get your stuff ready,” I said. I didn’t look the old woman in the face. Grant kept crying, louder. “Come on, let’s go,” I said, pulling him up by his shirt.
Grant screamed. Mrs. Otis sat him down with a hard tug on his jeans. “Don’t you touch this child. You so determined to be like your father? Fine. But I told this child he was gonna stay with me, and I’m beggin you to say different. Go ahead. Otherwise, you’re gonna take yourself out of my house. You’re gonna go back there, pack up your things, and get off my property. Grant’s gonna stay with me. If this is the man you’re gonna be, don’t darken my doorstep again Geoffry. Now, go on.”
The two of them stared at me as the walls fell down around me. My arm swung out, animating a sentence that wouldn’t come.
The old woman’s voice stopped me as I turned to go. “Grant, did you ever meet my Geoffrey? He wasn’t a great husband. Made a lot of mistakes. But everyday he woke up tryin to be a better man. He’s been dead ten years this May. Today’s the first time I was ever happy he wasn’t alive.”
The next time I saw Grant he was twenty five and had a wispy goatee. He had a job writing jokes for a taffy company. Why’s Noah so good at poker? ‘Cause he always has two pair. That one paid for him and his wife to visit me in Lima. His wife had the beginnings of a baby-bump and one ear that was closed up and she always smiled. So did Grant.
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