|
|
The Real and True StoryChad Simpson
The made-up story ends with a girl named Sara driving her drunken father through town during a thunderstorm, looking for her mother. All the town has lost its power because of the storm, and in the story’s last scene, Sara has to stop her car because a tree has fallen and blocked the road; there are no streetlights on because of the power outage, no lights at all, and the tree—its trunk and branches and million leaves—are lit only by the car’s headlights.
Sara puts the car into park in front of the tree, and her father grabs the door handle. She says, Don’t go, but then she watches her father exit the car and crawl through the tree’s branches, disappear into them, and she decides to reach for the radio dial, to turn it on, even though she is convinced the radio, like the streetlights, won’t work; a part of her kind of hopes, even, that the radio won’t work, because it will frighten her that the power outage has somehow reached the inside of the car, and she wants to be scared by that creepy, unreal, otherworldly fear. She maybe even needs to be scared by it.
I don’t remember how that made-up story begins—or why I made my stand-in a sixteen-year-old girl—but the real-and-true story I was trying to write begins like this: I broke my hand when I was ten, playing two-on-two with a miniature orange-and-blue rubber football. Well, the truth is: I didn’t break my hand; I dislocated my pinky at its base, at the exact spot where the carpal bone meets what the doctor called the growth plate. When the doctor—Montgomery, an orthopedic specialist—arrived at the hospital in his tennis whites, a band of mottled skin on his balding forehead where a sweatband had been, I was sitting on the end of the examining table, white paper crackling under my butt, staring at my freak-show of a hand.
What happened was: I had the miniature ball gripped in one fist and was on a sure-as-shit sprint towards the end zone—an invisible line we’d conjured that connected the big-trunked maple in our backyard with this sapling my mom had planted—when the older Demm brother, Trace, dragged me down from behind. I was faster than both Demm brothers, Trace and Ryan, so the first thing that went through my head as I was tackled on that sure-as-shit sprint towards the invisible line drawn on the grass was, “What the?” and the next thing I knew I was on my ass and Ryan was racing off towards the opposite end zone with my fumble.
I didn’t know I’d broken my hand—or dislocated my pinky at the growth plate—right away. I got to my knees and held my hurt hand between my thighs, making what I thought was a fist. I mean, the hand hurt like hell, but I’d never broken—or dislocated—a bone before, so I didn’t know the difference between, say, jammed-pinky pain and truly-broken/dislocated-pinky pain. I held my hand between my legs because I thought I’d only jammed my pinky. I thought the pain would go away.
Trace called me a pussy or something when I still hadn’t gotten up after thirty seconds or so. “What’s the problem, Chad? You break your pussy?” That’s what he said: You break your pussy? What a dick. The pain in my hand was too much, though, and I couldn’t clear my head enough to work out a decent comeback. “It really fuckin hurts, man. My hand. I think I jammed my pinky or something.” Trace repeated almost exactly what I had said: I think I jammed my pussy or something in this annoying, whiny voice and then he asked to see my hand.
I waited a few seconds and then held up my hand so the palm was just below my chin. But instead of actually looking at my hand, I chose to look over it, at Trace’s face.
His eyes widened, he covered a half-smile with his hand. He said, “I think we’re going to have to get Mary Ruth for this one.”
I think now that some part of me could see my messed-up pinky—or some blurry version of it—at the same time I watched Trace react to it. My hand was right there beneath my face. And what I saw looked like this: Take your hand and pull sideways on your pinky as far as it will go. Look at the shape your hand makes. Kind of strange, right? Not quite like those hand-tracings you make into turkeys in grade school. Now imagine your pinky sticking straight out from the side of your hand, about an inch lower than you could comfortably pull it. And blur your eyes, soften them. That’s almost exactly what I saw.
The realization that the damage done to my hand was more than a jammed pinky didn’t send me into fits of tears or screams the way I now imagine it would have. Instead, I quickly agreed with Trace that Mary Ruth, my mother, should be involved.
I’m the older Simpson brother, and I told Dink, my younger brother, to go and get Mom. Dink’s real name is Brian, but he had recently discovered he could make his penis disappear. He performed the minor trick—basically he dropped trou, stuck his knees together, and then leaned his chest forward and slowly drew back his butt until his penis receded in on itself—in front of the Demm brothers and me. Trace laughed disgustedly. He told him to put away his dink. Dink’s dink was, well, unusually small, and so he was henceforth called, in the presence of the Demm brothers anyway, Dink.
I waited for Dink to run toward the house for Mom, but he was still standing behind me. Then I realized he probably had about the same view of my contorted hand as I did and that it had probably freaked him out too to look at it. When I turned to face him—the sun was almost down and the grass had swallowed all its shadows—Dink said, “You want me to go and get Mom?”
He hadn’t moved since I’d gone down; he hadn’t even chased Ryan on his touchdown sprint. “Yeah, Dink,” I said. “Go and get her. Please.”
Half a minute later, Dink’s mouth was still closed from saying “Mom.”
Since I’m the older Simpson brother I should have been a dick like Trace—if you believe in everything shrinks say about birth-order and all that—but Dink had a great-big and real-soft heart, and most of the time, I did what I could not to be a dick.
I stood and said, “All right, Dink. We’ll go in together. Come on.” I even put my good hand on his shoulder, to get him headed toward the sliding glass door that looked in on our TV room, where I suspected mom was reading a book, the television on mute.
Trace said, “Oh, no. Not without me,” and fell in line behind us. “This is going to be good.”
When we reached the door, I took my good hand off Dink’s shoulder, and Trace swooped around us and gave the glass a shove to the side. Then he bowed like a maitre d’, offered me entrance to the house, and walked around Dink and me so he could watch Mary Ruth from the closed side of the glass doors. Ryan fell in beside Trace and both of them cupped their hands at the sides of their faces, like horse blinders, and stuck their perfectly intact pinkies against the glass, waiting to watch my mother react to my damaged hand.
•••
My inclination here, even when I’m sticking to the truth, is to have the four of us—both Demms and my brother Dink and me—find my mother drunk, which would add a dramatic-and-sad, real-life aspect to the story. But Mary Ruth, alas, was not drunk. She was sitting in an easy chair, reading a paperback as I had expected, the television on mute.
She straightened herself in the chair when she saw me walk through the door, and she placed her paperback face-down on the end table. Dink followed me in. Mom yawned hello and then she blinked a few times, as if waking, and smiled.
I walked toward her, leaning forward a little, holding my bad hand in front of my chest, over my heart, and my good hand a few inches in front of my bad one, like a shield. I didn’t want to be all panicky when I approached my mom, presenting my hand like something dead I had found in the yard. So instead, I probably looked like someone who expected, at any moment, his heart to leap from his chest—and who wanted very badly to catch it when it did.
And then my mom must have seen Trace and Ryan in some blurry way, with the unfocused parts of her eyes—the way I’d first looked at my hand—because she stopped smiling at me; her eyes shot to the side.
I, of course, followed where my mom looked, and besides their pinkies, both Demms had their foreheads and noses smushed against the glass. Their faces looked about to explode into smiles.
My mom said, “What’re Trace and Ryan doing—” and faced Dink and me.
“Boys,” she said.
That one word—maybe it was the fear of momful omniscience, or maybe I sensed a vague panic trembling beneath that one syllable rhyming with “toys” and “joys”... whatever it was, I began to whimper, and Dink, from behind me, broke into full-on wail. Mom, right away, wanted to know what was wrong, why were we crying, and then Trace Demm was standing in the TV room.
Trace said, “What’s shakin’, Mary Ruth?”
“Trace,” my mom said, “you know where the magazine rack is. Take one and go.”
My mom received Cosmopolitan once a month in the mail, and Trace, for reasons unknown to his brother Ryan, Dink, or me, had borrowed back issues of the magazine for the past two months, since the day our family moved from Monmouth, Illinois, into the house behind his in Logansport, Indiana. Trace and Mary Ruth shared a cloudy complicity regarding the magazine that the rest of us were too stupid to even mind.
My mom—I remember her hand on my shoulder. Her face, I’m sure, showed concern, probably in the comma-shaped wrinkles that had begun to form at the corners of her eyes....
•••
By the time Trace left with that night’s masturbation fodder, and peeled Ryan from the sliding glass door to take with him, my whimpering had achieved a steady rhythm I felt comfortable I could speak through. Dink’s wails, thankfully, had ceased.
My hands, though, the way I held them when I finally presented my damaged hand to my mom, I imagine now that I looked less like someone waiting to catch his heart when it finally leapt from his chest and more like someone trying to cover up his heart, to smother it completely.
•••
The reason was my father.
In the made-up and poorly-conceived story I wrote about Sara and her parents, Sara’s mother is having an affair. Sara’s father learns of the affair on the night of the thunderstorm, and he asks Sara to help him find her, to drive him, because he is too drunk to drive himself. And it is towards this cliché that Sara’s father walks when he disappears into and through the tree that blocks Sara’s car on the road.
It would be tidy if my father were off having an affair on the night I dislocated my pinky. But the truth, of course, is more complicated than mere adultery.
My father was unhappy—with our move to Indiana, with his new job, his new boss. We’d left Monmouth because the pig plant where my father worked closed down and there was an almost identical pig plant owned by the same company in Logansport where many of the recently unemployed migrated. My father still worked as the plant’s purchasing director, buying corrugated cardboard and rubber gloves and bulk spices for curing hams, a job he’d had for twelve years, but things otherwise weren’t the same.
In Monmouth my father had a boss, the plant manager, named Ray, who basically adored him. In Logansport my father had a boss whose name, improbably, rhymed with “Straightjacket,” and who didn’t quite adore him the way Ray had. I can’t say what exactly it was about Straightjacket that bothered my father, or what it was about my father that bothered Straightjacket, but I think it had something to do with the fact that my father was always a pretty likeable guy. He was charming. It was an effortless charm, one that worked on men and women alike, strangers, small children, pets. I imagine that Straightjacket, like other men I’ve come across, wasn’t enchanted by my father’s brand of charm, and decided that rather than submit to it, he would try to aggravate it out of him.
My father, well, no one had ever reacted to him that way. And soon after we moved to Logansport, he stopped laughing at dinnertime and started spending his nights taking walks—long walks.
My mom didn’t complain about the walks, because, I suppose, there are worse things an unhappy man can do, but I’m sure she missed him most nights, the same way Dink and I did. We missed his easy laugh, his active participation in sit-coms, his simply being there.
And on the night I dislocated my pinky at its growth plate, we missed him for a more practical reason—my mom didn’t know where Logansport’s hospital was.
My mom didn’t panic, but she did walk panic’s edge for a couple of minutes. After deciding to call the hospital for directions, she fumbled with the directory, made frenzied doodles with a black Sharpie while the phone rang, and finally announced to Dink and me, “Well, at least the asshole doesn’t have the car.”
I think I could write a whole story about an abandoned mother trying to figure out how to get to the hospital after her son dislocates his pinky. Only I would give the boy a head wound, something bloody. The family’s kitchen would be full of unpacked boxes the mother had to kick around while she searched for the phone and the directory, and the mother, like I’ve said, would be at least a little drunk.
If I didn’t have the father take the car, and thus force the threesome to walk to the hospital, I would put the mother and her two kids—one of whom is bleeding from his temple—in a car during a thunderstorm, on dark streets, lit only by the car’s headlights. And I would probably end the story before they ever reach the hospital, but I would try to imply in some way that everything was going to be just fine for them—at least for the moment.
But in the real-and-true story we made it to the hospital fine, the three of us. My mother chewed on her lip while she drove, and Dink sobbed a little, though silently, and we made it there, following the directions my mother had written in thick letters and arrows on a page torn from the phone book. My mother filled out the forms, and a nurse took X-rays and called in Dr. Montgomery, the orthopedic specialist who had been playing tennis.
When he walked in the room Montgomery asked to see my hand, and I held it up for him the same way I’d shown Trace Demm. He whistled low; the missing sweatband on his forehead arched.
“You’re going to have to trust me,” he said, “that this isn’t going to be as bad as it looks.”
White paper crackled beneath me.
My mom wasn’t in the room yet. In her absence, Montgomery wanted the particulars of what had happened. I told him about the miniature football, how Trace Demm shouldn’t have been able to catch me from behind, and the quality of my details seemed to relieve Montgomery’s obligatory suspicions; he retrieved my mom from the hallway.
On his way back into the room, Montgomery pulled two ballpoint pens from a pocket in his tennis shorts and said, “There’s really only one way to fix this.” He looked at my mom, and smiled, and seemed for a moment wholly benevolent, one of the blessed, standing there in his tennis whites. Then he pulled a chair up to the examining table and asked to see my hand again.
He stacked the two pens one on top of the other between my dislocated pinky and my ring finger. He had to hold on to the pens, though, to keep them in place, because the space between my fingers was too large.
“You know how it hurt when this happened?” he said.
I nodded, looked at my mom.
“Well, I’ll be honest. This is going to hurt a little more than that.”
Eventually, he began squeezing my pinky and ring finger together. The bone only took a couple of seconds to set, and it did hurt more, if only because I had to sit there and watch him snap me back into place.
While Montgomery squeezed, my mom wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. She said, “It’s okay if you cry.”
I probably could have cried—and I wanted to—but I was thinking about Dink. He was out in the hallway, by himself, waiting for us. He was all alone out there, watching doctors and nurses walk past, maybe glimpsing people who were suffering far worse than a dislocated pinky. Even though Dink was tall enough that his feet would have touched the floor, I kept imagining them dangling over the linoleum, hovering, and then I imagined Dink finally giving up on the strangers walking past him, and burying his face solemnly in his hands.
•••
There is a clever way to end the real-and-true story, almost charming.
After he ordered a new set of X-rays, and while a nurse dressed in scrubs finished wrapping my hand in a plaster cast, Montgomery told my mom and me that there was a chance my pinky might never grow. The point of dislocation—the growth plate—was a fragile thing. We would have to set up future appointments with him, after the cast was removed, to see whether or not the bone reattached to the plate, to see whether or not my pinky was growing.
The ten-year-old me was quite drawn to the possibility of a miniature pinky. I began to imagine the superhuman powers it could hold: He has a man’s hand, but a child’s pinky....
When we made it back home, my father still hadn’t returned from his walk. Mom fed us microwaved hot dogs we ate standing up in the kitchen, and then she put Dink and me to bed. She arranged a pillow under my cast hand, to elevate it, and pulled the covers up to my chin. She kissed my forehead, and then Dink’s, and in a few seconds the door was closed and Dink was crawling into my bed.
I didn’t hear my mom leave the house, but I did hear the car start. And when she turned out of the driveway, I saw the car’s headlights slash through the open window blinds and arc across the wall.
I’m sure Dink heard and saw these things, too, but I acted as if he hadn’t. “Did you know,” I said, “there’s a chance my pinky may never grow again?”
Dink told me to shut up.
“For real,” I said. “It may stay exactly this size forever. But if it does stay this size, that means...”
And thus the true story would end, with my mom searching Logansport’s dark streets for my unhappy father, and me telling my brother Dink tall tales about the man with the diminutive pinky.
But what would be the point?
If it were fiction, I could make the connections clearer. I could pinpoint the night I dislocated my pinky as the time when I first recognized the gulf that had opened up between my parents. I could utilize metaphor, and direct the reader’s attention to the invisible line on the grass we’d conjured as an end zone, to our sexual innocence regarding Trace Demm’s use of my mother’s magazines, to the actual physical space between my pinky and ring finger, which I asked you to replicate and look at for yourself.
In real life, though, with real people, there’s always too much going on for metaphor to clarify, to elucidate, any one situation perfectly. Which is why the clever, charming ending won’t suffice. Not here, anyway.
In real life I never acquired the kind of charm my father had before he began working in Logansport, but I’ve found that sometimes I am able to win people over on the page, with the stories I write. It’s a difficult thing, trying to find the right way to tell a story, a little like wandering dark streets, without any direction, to escape unhappiness.
And it’s an addictive thing to do, to live in the world we’re making up—even when we’re doing our best to tell the truth—and then return from it.
Sometimes I think the secret to writing is finding the right tone, and tone, I think, is our charm, that thing we create to tell the story. But for me to fully achieve this tone I must, in a way, divorce myself from me, to enter the hearts of the people whose story I’m trying to tell.
For the real and true story to end, I need to talk about this, this dislocation, even if, by doing so, I succumb to the charm I’m desperate to avoid here.
I write in our attic, at a desk forged from two sawhorses and a sheet of plywood. And right now, while I am writing this, my wife, Laura, is tucking our daughters, Mary and Vicky, into bed. Their room, it smells like vanilla and fabric softener. I know this because once I finish writing, I stop by their room and kiss them on their foreheads. I tell them I love them.
The real and true story would end better, I think, if, God forbid, one of my daughters happened to become injured tonight, and, while it happened, I was up here writing. It would all come together that way—dramatic and sad, real life.
It would be a minor injury, to my older daughter, Mary. An injury that would heal, of course, hopefully painlessly. She would suffer the injury—a bumped lip maybe, something that would swell and look horrible at first—and present it to Laura, who would come looking for me once she triaged the wound.
“Chad!” Laura would call. “We need you down here.”
She would call these things up the attic stairs, knowing right where to find me. And I would hear these words, hoping everything was okay, and hoping, too, that my heart quickens the way it should, and that I am the one who eventually shows up.
|
|
|
