The Volkswagen
was idling, her three blonde boys in the backseat, each representing a different strain from
her multicolored mane, Bret the stony bronze, Dennis a frosted wheat and Frank
grassy brown. The music from Bret and Dennis’ Game Boy’s was jousting with the
low murmur of the local National Public Radio station. Frankie was too young to
know how to play his Game Gear, which idled on the title screen as he slobbered
and gnawed at the corner of the machine.
“Did you hear
me? Mommy’s leaving. Doesn’t that make you sad?”
She appealed
to her youngest and favorite, Frankie.
An airplane rose off the ground with the clear, burning thrust of its
jets and Frankie, captured by the noise, followed it’s ascent with his brown
eyes, which were vacant with young life. He looked back at his mom with a calm
lack of any discernible feeling, like his eyes were the two windows of an empty
room bartering a transaction of light with a sky of plain blue. He pushed himself
up in his car seat and looked down to the runway below, where planes taxied
around the runway like the toys on his Micro Machines playset.
A tear broke
from Sheri’s eye as she misunderstood this as an attempt by Frank to climb out
of his harness into her arms, a romantic effort to keep her from going.
“Oh, Frankie doesn’t want mama to go, does
he?” She emphasized the youngest’s name to the two older brothers to make them
want to join the effort to keep her from going. They remained intent on their
games. As they got older and peer pressure took over, Mom, who once barely had
to convince them going to a pumpkin patch or to see the Zoo lights was a great
way to spend a Saturday, had lost the power to convince them or sway them of
anything. Frankie was just beginning to understand the sound of his own name,
that it was some kind of retrieval device the world had to pull him in and
involve him with it. He turned his head to look at his mom with a look just
barely inquisitive, as if to say, “Who? What? It’s you again. Who are you?”
“Momma’s gonna
get on a jet plane and go away to Colorado or Utah and she might never come
back. Wouldn’t that make you sad? You never ever would see her again and you’d
have to live with your mean old dad. Would you like that?”
Dennis, squashed
between the carseat and the generous swath of shoulder room he surrendered to
Bret in the middle on the hump, began to cry, stopping up his tears so Bret
wouldn’t know. Dennis could not fool Bret, whose small childhood dominion lay
mostly in the tyrannical control he had over Dennis’ emotional state. He
noticed the pixellated hero, normally running and jumping and swinging
chain-whip, at rest in the middle of Dennis’ electronic screen.
“She won’t do
it,” Bret whispered, “Play your Gameboy.”
Dennis was on
the verge.
“You want to
live with your father, Dennie?” she said. “I’d
probably be a lot happier by myself out in the desert.”
Dennis began
to whimper. Bret put the sharp angle of his elbow into his ribs.
“Goshdamnit,
Dennis,” Bret said. He shut his Gameboy off and ripped out the cartridge,
offering it to Dennis. “Here, you wanna play Zelda? I’m done with it for now.
Why don’t you trade me.”
The tears cleared
up remarkably fast. Dennis flipped his game off and switched it out for Zelda.
Bret picekd up the old Dragon Warrior III cartridge from the floor where Dennis
had let it fall next to petrified french fry nubs and Happy Meal toys that had
fallen out of favor.
“Daddy’s trying
to get a new mommy for you. Do you think that’s fair?” Sheri was trying to
wrangle the attention of her boys. In a way, she liked not having a daughter,
and although she’d never been a tomboy, she was always outdoorsy, preferring
canoeing or hiking to trips to the mall.
She liked driving a tough car, the grey wagon with 4 wheel drive, and
she liked wearing flannel and Indian headbands more than skirts and heels.
“Gosh, Mom, if
you’re gonna go just get it over with instead of keeping blabbing about it,”
Bret said. Bret was taking on the
quality and shape of Steve in ways that were both disconcerting and
pride-inducing. Steve was strong, and it was good that her boy was too, but
with that strength came a kind of obstinate will and pugnaciousness, which with
Steve she could trump either by drawing him in with her sexual wiles or forcing
him away with her battiness. Bret had grown impervious to her Motherly charms
and had a remarkable stamina when it came to her dramatic stunts.
“If I go how
will you get home?” She shot this sentence out like a taunt. He demanded that
she be more like a little sister to him than a mother.
“I’ll drive
us,” Bret said. “You can do it. It can’t be that freakin’ hard.”
“Oh yeah, your
feet won’t reach the pedals.”
“Dennis’ll
work the pedals.”
“That won’t
work.”
“Every time I
kick him on the left, he’ll brake. On the right, the gas.”
“You’re not
doing that to your brother.”
They sat. A
plane took off with a cool whooshing sound. Dennis thumbed his Gameboy,
placated by Zelda. Frankie sucked a juicebox that had been empty for at least
15 minutes. A tantalizing bead of flavor would rise every once in a while, the
sweet little taste of which kept him going.
“Fine, I’m
leaving,” she popped her door open. “Goodbye.”
Frank’s face
abstained from any thought or feeling whatsoever as he watched his Mom get out
of the car and head towards the door of the terminal. Bret did not look up,
intent on keeping his eyes down on the screen as an example to Dennis, who was
trying to sneak looks sideways without raising his head and so alerting Bret.
“She’s not
going anywhere,” Bret said. “Dad put a limit on her credit card.”
Through the
glass they could hear their Mom saying something at a stagey volume, supposedly
to herself, about how she was leaving and not coming back.
“Stupid idiot
didn’t even crack a window,” Bret leaned forward over the front seat, squeezing
a whelp out of Dennis as he used him for leverage to balance himself on the
fulcrum of the leather chairback. He turned the key in the ignition one notch
and the radio came back on. “I’m sick of this liberal bullshit,” he said,
switching the station over to classic rock. Dennis squealed as Bret planted a
foot in his crotch to provide stability while he lowered the rear windows to
their child safety limit. Frank raised himself out of his seat as if to climb
out after the planes. “No. Come on,” Bret said, patting the restraining bar of
his baby seat. “Sit down, buddy.”
Bret stole a
quick look away from his video game to check on his Mom. She was having a
conversation with an elderly black baggage handler at the Northwest Airlines
check-in desk. She put a hand to the bandanna tied around her forehead as if
she were distressed or exhausted. She was probably telling him some bullshit
about what an asshole her husband was or how she was moving to the desert.
Bret could
sense Dennis falling for her bluff. Something in his posture. He could feel it
wobbling, about to fall. Almost at the instant the tears blurted from Dennis’
eyes, Bret paused his Gameboy.
“Shut the fuck
up, Dennis or I’ll beat the shit out of you,” he said, raising a fist.
Link had been
dead for at least since Bret went to crack the windows and was lying in a
spotlight on the afterlife limbo screen that asked if the player wanted to
“CONTINUE” or “END”. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other what Link’s
fate would be and instead was fighting past his brother’s threatening fist to
watch as Sheri said goodbye to the baggage handler and went through the glass
doors into the terminal. His wail cued up like a siren and Bret pumped his fist
into his shoulder three times to squelch it out. This only served to kick it up
a register, into that invisible high-pitched range that little brother’s are so
familiar with where pain seems to give pause to the sound, the face contorts in
agony, eyes clench hard together, mouth a yawping cavern with mismanaged
gatework of teeth, a brief interim of silence the halted preamble before the
new, more severe howl rushes out like a migration of bats. It becomes a cycle:
quick intake of shallow breath, another howl, rapid ebb and flow of emergency
sounding from his mouth. Bret beat at it to drive it back inside, but soon
Frank had joined in chorus with Dennis, not knowing the purpose for the crying,
simply wanting to be a part of its sour cheer. Bret had lost control of his
constituency and Sheri took notice of this from inside the terminal.
Soon she
was popping open Frank’s door and unstrapping him from the baby-seat. She
bobbed him in her arms and kissed the soft unhealed opening at the top of his
scalp. Dennis, trapped in between the seat and his brother, began to cry
harder, his panicked state rising in intensity. He tried to sidle past the
cumbersome gray carseat, but could not, and reversed course, thrashing at Bret
to climb over him. Bret had not recognized this furor in his brother before. He
was driven out of the backseat and out into the parking lot. He stood by as
Bret ran up and hugged his Mom’s legs. Sheri whispered to the two boys something tender and threatening as they leaned against her, their tears
subsiding, the three making a tableau against the melted
sunset bent bleary and cataracted in the jet-fuel burning up above the runways. A large bronze plane set down with a few rubbery bumps and a long
skid. Bret climbed back into the car, swiped the Zelda cartridge from Dennis’
Gameboy, put it back into his own and switched it on.
