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Icing

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From the story Angelfish

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Marjorie’s breakfast this morning is the chalky icing on a store-bought powdered donut. She’s put two fingers through the hole and is scrolling slowly forward with her tongue. She does this leaning out over a paper plate, so that the little avalanches of unloosed powdered sugar do not tumble down the front of her blouse.

Because I am her brother, and because the quality of brotherhood I aspire to involves a certain duty to  inject brotherly advice, I wonder aloud about the nutritional merit of powdered donut icing. I then try to warn about the three large mugs of coffee she’d guzzled and whether some preemptive relief might be in order.

“I’m ready,” she insists.

On the road, approaching a rest stop I ask, “do we need to pull off?”

Negative.

Seven miles later we are parked on the shoulder somewhere beyond Waitsburg, and she is over the bank, finding a way.

I would like to yell “snake” but we are older now. At least I am older. Marjorie is Marjorie without regard for chronology. Our Grandma Beth was among the few who professed to understand Marjorie and I do not recall her ever demanding that Marjorie act her age. It just wasn’t a meaningful point of reference. Still isn’t.

I am thinking about my blood pressure when she comes back into view, her flannel overshirt pulled down and tied at the waist. She stumbles a bit at the top of the sandy bank and so I start over to break her fall. She ignores me and, like a surfer slicing into the face of a wave, she slides on the soles of her sneakers back down to the shoulder of the highway.

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Permeated

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From the story, Angelfish

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Marjorie and I are heading toward Grandma Beth’s funeral. Our father’s mother was a pillar of humanity in a family which, before her, was not discernibly endowed with either wisdom or grace. It was a sad tragedy, but no departure from the coil of the brand, that her husband died at the hands of his brother, an insane event instigated by a petty argument over a $100 gambling debt, leading to the reckless display of a handgun.

For the last forty of her years she was a widow, a woman who permeated the world around her with the weight of books and the aroma of fresh-baked breads; a woman whose versatile wit could amuse children and deflect the rage of pompous men.

In the seat beside me, Marjorie is laughing, softly. At what I don’t know. We figure penetrating cosmic radiation affects her this way.

“Where is that place you got us lost that night coming back from Canada?” she asks.

“Washtucna,” I reply.

“No, no, no, no, it had a pretty name to it, like a flower.”

“Kahlotus,” I say.

“Kahlotus,” she repeats. “That was it.”

“You think that’s pretty?” I ask.

Marjorie laughs and slides her back lower in the seat. Over the rim of her sunglasses I see her eyes close.

The first dust devil of the afternoon spins weakly in the crotch between two hills. Jet contrails subdivide the southern part of the sky in a way that reminds me of a four-square court.

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Salacious

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Salacious

From the story Angelfish

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As we take a curve past a boarded up farmhouse and a stand of Russian Olive trees, Marjorie stretches her arms out. In my experience with her, this movement and the exclamatory yawn can be like the sound of a bolt-action carbine being loaded.

“How long have you been seeing Gina?” she asks.

“About four months,” I say.

“Is she good in bed?” she asks.

Here, I reflect on my options, to decide whether to be discrete, or salacious, or whether it even matters. I give it a few seconds.

“Remember that thunderstorm last Thursday?” I ask.

“Right,” she affirms.

“She slept through it,” I say. “Didn’t even roll over.”

I look over at her as she offers me a lame smile.

“So, yeah,” I continue, “she’s terrific in bed.”

“Whatever happened to Melanie?” she asks, as we now speed past Angus cattle who look plump and relaxed, as though they’ve never been audited.

I wait for the odometer to register another tenth of a mile.

“Syphilis,” I say.

The tires hum across the grated deck of a small bridge.

“Liar,” she says.

——

Previous posts in this story: Permeated, Icing.

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Tenuous

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From the story Angelfish

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Beth actually came to enjoy recounting how Marjorie’s first marriage was so tenuous that it broke up over popcorn. His name was Robert and the two of them departed Whitman College, just three days into their sophomore year, to go make lots of money at a fish factory in Alaska.

Beth told the story to illustrate Marjorie’s misguided impulses and as a broader example of the unresolved mysteries of youth.

“Spontaneous combustion of the brain,” was actually her favored description.

Beth recalled how Marjorie had sprung from the cab of Robert’s weathered, orange pickup truck, accosted her in the lushness of her garden, explained the situation in less than a minute, then bent the brim of Beth’s sunhat back in order to kiss her hard on both cheeks.

“This was goodbye,” Beth said dryly.

Marjorie was in for gutting fish for about six months. Robert had two years “max” in mind. Marjorie was in the kitchen reading a book on the Dutch Masters when Robert, smelling heavily of tobacco and halibut, began hollering about her inattentiveness to the popcorn she was supposed to be tending on the range. His advice to “turn it down and shake it” was not all that important in the larger scheme of things.

“In an acrid smog of Jiffy-Pop,” Beth explained, “a marriage built upon fish money hit the rocks and sank into the icy waters of Norton Sound.”

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