Chapter 6
THUMP, thump, thump. 1:48AM…
“What was that?”
“The cat,” The Bear mumbled.
He had forgotten to shut our door that night, apparently. Good training tool to keep her on Puck’s bed instead of ours. Later I found out she had bit The Bear’s arm, which resulted in her scuttling form ricocheting off the bed. One night we’ll get this down. Still, there was a purring mass right beside me at 6:40 that morning. I think she likes the bed, too. Saturday night when all the bedding had been put back on, The Bear found her sleeping in a fat lump underneath it all. But enough of beds and bedding and things like that. It was Sunday morning, and there were more things to do. Puck – who for some reason only has to be reminded to wake up on Sundays – voluntarily switched on Bing Crosby while I worked the make-up mirror. It only takes a few minutes, but the damage is done quickly. Sometimes it’s the weather, sometimes it’s the water, other times the histamines, whatever. But when I look back up and my face is rosy red from the reaction of whatever I’ve slapped on my face, I know something’s up. This time trying to remember the 19th century museum-buildings world’s fair glass-walled garden grounds, fiery explosions, and the kind of air blimps you see in children’s picture books from two hundred years ago spinning in the back of my mind from early morning dreams.
Somehow the topic of pythons surfaced on the drive in this morning. I know it’s not so intelligent sounding of me, but I can’t help it anyway…
“I hate it how pythons have the audacity to think that they can just swallow a human whenever they want to.”
“No…” The Bear disagreed. “I think snakes are just thinking… ‘Ummmm… I’m hungry…”
Then I laughed at his French court cowboy boots when we got to church. I do that sometimes. Church occasionally provides these strange waves of… emotional experience… inside the gymnasium we ladled with flannel banners and called a sanctuary. Applause isn’t exactly Presbyterian. But today the congregation seemed a little rebellious again. Clap happy. You could just see the glucose popping out of the cracked white plaster corners in gooey bubbles. No perfect church. Especially in the sound booth balcony where the heat of a thousand summers pins your breath back.
Puck got his hands on a new toothbrush earlier this morning which he used to brush Donkey and Buck during the service. A sermon addressing the “little black bugs that jump around your heart”, at least how Puck and I talk about it, got him whispering a few questions here and there.
Tacos for lunch. And burritos for those who were interested in a perfectly good pouch of tortilla-bundled refried beans soiled by chopped onion. The last member of the family to join the Mexican spread was Joe, right out of the Silverspoon’s morning service. And not long before Mom drove Linnea-Irish over for volleyball, score keeping, ref practice… I had been catching up with Joe for awhile in the basement cave. He was packing up for a week in Colorado Springs, driving out Wally’s car. Upstairs, Dad had finished his nap and was scraping off the carbon build-up from the glass door of the wood stove and piled on another frost-covered log before side-lining Joe into a do-si-do…
“Oh, no, Dad! I’m sore! I’m sore,” Joe laughed off the pain of ice hockey.
Carrie had similar wounds from taking a spill on an unsightly patch of ice, the same one that forms outside the door every year. Puck dug up the scraggly Elvis wig from the hat box as Carrie-Bri and Rose walked back in the door with two gallons of milk and boxes of dark brown hair dye from Walgreen’s. Rose poured herself a bowl of Cheerios and Puck marched up the stairs with one of Linnea’s treasures – a Tic-Tac box stuffed with dirt from a holy shrine in New Mexico. Mom replaced it with the lap harps she dug up in the basement, somewhere near the box of cardboard shields we sketched and painted as kids for our own Medieval dinner. Carrie’s, of course, had cowboys and the moon. Joe had cars. Rose’s just read – “Happy Rose” – which sort of baffles all of us a little… Dad slipped on the crazy Elvis wig and sang a few bars of “I’ve wanna hold your ha-aa-aa-aa-nd.” I guess Francis had been talking about how he had tried to replicate Carrie’s talent at pulling Auntie Anne’s pretzels with the same skill. The resulting product had included bits of paper napkin stuck to the backs and somehow even – amazingly – the plastic clip from a clothing tag, or something ridiculous like that. Maybe it had a little to do with the fact that Francis had been tired after a wedding and rodeo in the same day. Proof came in the form of him nodding off during Sunday School, while he answered questions…
“Did I, really?”
Rose was a bad, mad studying fiend, in Linnea’s hot pink volleyball t-shirt [a color I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Rose wear in her entire life], marveling at the lightweights from Annamaria’s wine tasting engagement girls’ party the previous day, which had included not one, but three, full-feature films. Meanwhile Joe had skipped down with Annamaria’s fiance, a complete man-date driving through German hill country, burgers, and racing games until midnight. Mom, on the other hand, had gotten busy with the redesign of the old piano wall in the living room. The piano was still there, but would soon be replaced with the marble-topped buffet from Grandma, an antique gold-rose-carved mirror, and a red velvet cushioned chair that might have been pulled from a Victorian movie set. Add in the equally turn-of-the-century air grates on the walls, and Mom’s plan continued to come together. Carrie also expressed her sympathies regarding Lance Berkman’s contract with Arlington. Probably the only guy in the MLB who would be quoted as waiting on the Lord’s will to make the right decision.
Francis nodded off again on the drive to Grandma Snicketts’. Joe filmed it, of course. We flipped through Grandma’s old poetry book, many of them originals. She teased Joe about never wanting to fly with him…
“What?” Joe grinned. “Permission to ascend from 14,000 feet to 13,000. Alpha Bravo X-Ray One-Ray.”
She packed us off with leftover sugar cookies and brownies. I grabbed the blue plastic bag of these goodies before Francis could engorge himself on them, but he wrangled them off, Puck chasing him down pavement to the van in steady pursuit of sugar he didn’t really care about anyway. Mom and Dad debated the trumpet solos on the radio during the drive home…
“That’s just casual trumpeting, Luther.”
“It’s sloppy, Adel. Trust me.”
“You’re going to be practicing the solo in the basement tonight, aren’t you?”
Carrie’s hiatal hernia/rib situation had been acting up again lately, the results of which could be witnessed in the machine-mixed gluten free bread, canned soups, [a side of hand-tossed salad], and a boxed cheesecake, which Dad was instructed to microwave for 30 seconds…
“That sounds kind of dangerous, actually…”
Mom was busy introducing the concept of…
“Would you rather get across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon or sea-worthy sail boat?”
The response was universally by balloon, considering the Atlantic as opposed to the Pacific, monster waves, giant snakes…
“Ok,” Mom tried another one. “Would you rather microwave a cheesecake for 30 seconds or… if you had a third eye, where would you put it?”
“Those don’t really go together…”
“No, Mom, that doesn’t…”
“You should have stopped at the last one…”
Of course everyone started discussing the best place for a third eye anyway. Rose’s answer, behind a head of freshly washed dark chocolate brown hair, was the quickest…
“I’d throw it away.”
I trimmed The Bear’s own burgeoning bush of brown hair when he returned from groceries later that evening, [while watching “The Hunger Games” for the first time]. Less like a Viking, more like a seminary student. Sort of boring, I guess. But you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.