acoustic set

stories

by melissa unger

drippings

 

We tortured him like only older sisters can. Dressed him in girl’s clothes, put make-up on him. Called him Alice in front of his friends. We made him do weird things like wash the gravel from our driveway in Palmolive. He had a system. He’d get a bucket full of gravel, fill it with water from the garden hose, squirt in some Palmolive, wash, rinse, put the gravel back and get another bucket full and start over. We thought it was hilarious.

We had lots of animals. Even a chicken coop. My sister and I hated getting the eggs out because we were always barefoot in summer and didn’t like the feel of the wet mud and chicken shit between our toes. So we made him get the eggs.

He was beautiful. He had thick blonde curly hair the color of a beach, and delicate, little ears. We always got sunburns, but his skin just turned a taupey brown, like a deer.

He was small for his age, but one year he pushed me into the pool. It caught me off guard. I was wearing my favorite sneakers and scraped my chin on the tiled bottom. I had a scab for a week.

His hamster, August, got pregnant. When the litter came, my mother put a towel over the cage and told us not look or stick our fingers in. But we did.

A week later, when he took the towel off, he found the tiny, half eaten corpses. We had contaminated them with our scent and August had turned on them.

He crouched there for a long time. Looking into the cage.

His shorts were too short and his socks too high, but girls liked him anyway because he wasn’t threatening.

One day, we were all on the boardwalk getting ice cream. It was really hot, my father had his shirt off and I was embarrassed. My mother was avidly petting a Sharpei, she had never seen one before.

My sister and I were leaning against the back of a bench licking the ice cream drips off our wrists.

My brother said he was going across to the arcade. He stepped into the street and an old Volvo station wagon hit him head on. Flipped him up into the air like a seal flipping a rubber ball.

We realized afterwards that he hadn’t hung out in his room much. There was hardly anything to put away a few years later when my parents converted it into a den.  But my Mom found a shoebox under his bed and she sent it to me at college. It was filled with snapshots of me and my sister.

pop

 

In the toy store, the stuffed animals were lined up on the shelves in neat rows. The more expensive, bigger ones, perched high.  The cheaper tinies, within my reach.

Once a month he would bring me there.  Reflecting on my behavior, scratching his chin in deep concentration, he would finally point dramatically to the chosen shelf, from which I would pick.

The month I learned to jump into the pool without holding my nose, it was a high shelf. In response to my refusal to eat green beans, a low. But still. I always got something.

He wore a straw hat with a wide ribbon band. A shiny black and red button, like a bulls eye, perched on its left side. Evenings after dinner, he’d put the hat on the table and rub the button. From underneath the hat would appear gum, candy, coins.

He delighted me.

When I got a bit older and boys would come to pick me up, sitting on the couch with a scotch in his right hand, he’d casually put out his cigarette on his tongue. Then he’d laugh. To take the fright out of them.

He showed me how to do it once. I was sitting on the toilet, my knees tucked under my chin watching him shave. He leaned down and presented his curled tongue, pooled with a little spit, for my inspection.

He’d put ketchup on everything my mother cooked and it made her crazy.

We’d play Blindman’s Bluff in the yard. He’d spin me and spin me.

I ran straight into the pool once. He dove in after me.  I cried about my new dark denim overalls.  He peeled them off me gently and went inside to get a towel.

I stood there shivering on the grass, streaks of dark blue running down my legs. Cold, but knowing he would be back soon.

 

bark

 

We drove around the neighborhood looking for the dog.

Dan in one car with Sarah still half asleep. Me still in my pajamas, with Jesse, in the other.

 

Sometime during the night, he’d dug his way through hedge. The thickest one that we wrongly thought would keep him in.

 

Jesse broke the news theatrically, and ran back out to start looking, leaving his tiny wet footprints, ghostly on the kitchen floor.

 

Morning dew.

 

My head throbbed. We had stayed up too late the night before, arguing about the election and plastic surgery. I had fallen asleep against Dan’s chest and my hair had tangled in his watchband.  I touched the big messy knot and pulled at it vainly with my left hand.  I wondered whether he would notice the blonde strands, when he checked the time.

 

Dan was heading towards the beach. I was heading into town.

 

We passed a woman I didn’t know. She was walking slowly but looking over her shoulder at something that wasn’t there.

 

On Main Street, Jesse asked if we could get pancakes. I told him I didn’t have my wallet and sharply asked how he could he think about food with the dog missing.

 

I regretted it later.

 

At the police station, I explained.

 

Sarah cried for about a week. Jesse would just sit quietly before bedtime, listening carefully for the scratchy metal sound the tags had made on his collar when he ran toward us.

 

Dan and I would stare, our feet propped on the old air mattress, at the hedge through which he had left, hoping it would part.

ash

 

The noodles stayed in the colander the whole weekend. They took up half the kitchen sink, got in everyone’s way, but still, there they stayed.

My mother was making a point.

Grace had said she would pitch in. Pasta salad. She had cooked an entire box, left it to drain and gone into town to buy a pack of Parliaments and Diet Pepsi, which only she drank.

They were still there at breakfast the next morning when I tried to wash the pan I had cooked the eggs in. My mother sponged the counter and looked at the back of Grace’s head.

Grace’s friends were camping in our yard. They were driving cross-country.

A small girl with freckles on her arms and enormous breasts.  The boys were tall.  One had a front tooth that crossed almost entirely over the one to next it.  The other had a tattoo of a bird in flight on his inner right forearm.

The toothy one mowed the lawn for my father. His thanks.

Grace talked loudly about her plans to move to Spain.

Pulling the roast out of the oven, I could tell my mother was thinking: leave, now.

Grace didn’t have a passport. But she wanted to see bullfights.

“Blood. Beasts.” She’d say.

The tattooed boy, I think his name was Ryan, said his father had been to the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

Plastering himself sideways, tight against the rough Spanish walls as the bulls tore through, he had lost an eyebrow.

“Could have been much worse”, Ryan said.

The next morning they left, leaving little molehills in the yard where their tent spokes had been. My father pushed them back in with his foot, like divots on a Polo field.

Grace stood at the sink looking out at the paperboy making his way up the driveway. Her long cigarette ash dangling over the noodles.

 

cross

 

I didn’t feel like going. But I was ready. I sat on my couch, hot in my coat, hoping they would have forgotten. But the buzzer buzzed and I went down.

I smoked a cigarette in the street on the way. My stomach was empty so it made me queasy.  When we got to the party, I went straight to the bathroom to splash water on my wrists like my mother had taught me.

I think my shoulder briefly touched his back as I pressed through the crowd.

When I came back out he was eating cheese.

He danced as if the floor was hot. His eyes closed, almost wincing. Lifting one foot, then the next, off the ground.

Later, in bed, he wrapped his long cold feet around mine. Like hands, holding.

He smelled like garlic, and because he had ridden his bike, sweat.

In Amsterdam, he got sunburn on his forehead because he wouldn’t use my lotion. “Smells like coconuts”, he said.

He taught me how to make risotto.

He got punched once.

He came home, his eye a purplish red. The color I imagine his heart to be.

He always made the bed and had a bald spot on his upper right thigh where the coins in his pocket had rubbed off the hair.

The only present he ever gave me was a small amber cross somebody else had given him.

Last Saturday in the supermarket, I heard crepe-soled shoes squeak slightly behind me the way his used to.

My lips pulsed, blood rushing to them.

I turned; a can of tuna in my hand, weighing like a stone needing to be thrown.

sauce

 

A mosquito had just bitten me and the veal piccatta was rubbery, but still, I was happy to be eating outside.

I slipped my feet out of my loafers and took off my sweater. I noticed my t-shirt was stained with blueberry yogurt. I was looking down trying to spear a caper with my fork, when the car plowed right through the restaurant terrace. Determined, like a bird through a pane of glass.

All I felt was a strong draft, like someone pushing windows closed against a storm.

Covered in dark soil from the shattered terracotta planter, I snapped up, like a punching bag. Righting itself.

A man was walking around, blood and geranium petals stuck to his face. A mosaic of red dots that I found beautiful.

There was shattered glass everywhere. It crunched under my bare feet. Like walking too far out onto the lake before it was completely frozen over.

Despite it being late spring the sounds were softened, as if by snow.

The Italian waiter’s face was suddenly very near to mine.  His dark, thick lips were moving rapidly.  He reminded me of the cod I had seen last week tossed on the sun-bleached docks.  Wanting air.

The florist from next door was tying a tourniquet around the leg of the man I had made eye contact with earlier when choosing my table. Flirting.

I walked over and saw the bone sticking out, near his ankle. Yellow, like nicotine stained teeth. His hair was matted on one side now, as if he had been sleeping.

Sitting low, propped against an overturned table, he was the height my brother had been the spring he had learned to walk. I felt him reach up and grab my thumb.

I crouched down to face him, my blueberry stain now level with his right eye.

 

 

 

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