Suss: another literary journal

Bob would like it pointed out here that he got an F on his Dr. Pepper cola can lamp because it didn’t work. “The damn switch wouldn’t turn on” are his exact words. Benita would like to say here that when sliced, the cake she made in home ec had a soapy fill­ing because the short­en­ing can fell short­en­ing first into the sink with too many dish­wash bub­bles and her group used the short­en­ing anyway.

“It was prob­a­bly doomed from the start,” Benita says, refer­ring to Bob’s cola lamp. “Who drinks Dr. Pepper really any­way when there’s Coke and Pepsi?”

Bob, as well, has his opin­ions about the cake. “Okay, so that was just so wrong.”

But beyond this momen­tary dis­trac­tion, Bob and Benita worry what they should do about their mother. The worry comes at the odd­est times — right before the lunch bell rings after fourth period and an announce­ment gets piped into the class­room how some­body else’s mother just brought up to school a for­got­ten lunch or get­ting that rare invi­ta­tion to a friend’s house and being greeted by the other mother at the bus stop who says, “How was your day dear; my day was spent wait­ing for you.”

“What are we going to do, Bobby?” Benita asks.

“Don’t call me that any­more,” Bob says. “It’s Bob.”

Bob and Benita stand over their mother while she is on the couch. She is hard to see, beyond the out­line of sev­eral lumps beneath blan­kets. They both remem­ber when that couch was selected from the store. “You just know all right things,” their mother said in the days that she talked, “for when some­thing is right, it just hits you like a ton of bricks. I knew when I picked out my wed­ding gown. I knew when I mar­ried your father. I knew when you kids were born. A ton of bricks, I say.”

Bob and Benita don’t really know if they believe in their mother’s ton of bricks the­ory. They do, on occa­sion, stare at the sky and at ceil­ings and roofs, on vigil, just in case, but it is really never the case.

“Maybe they’re all out of bricks,” Benita says.

“Maybe too many bricks hit her and that’s why she’s messed up on the couch like this. A ton is an awful lot for one head to bear; remem­ber the fat man on that TV show? They said he weighed a ton, and they did the inter­view with him in bed,” says Bob. “Anyway, I hate this couch.” He doesn’t want to know any­thing about inte­rior dec­o­rat­ing, but he knows that the color is all wrong, and the tex­ture is too nubby and the cush­ions are way flat, and the style, well now, that’s just ridiculous.

“But our mother’s on it,” Benita says, scared to hate any­thing at all. She sticks a fin­ger in the air, mean­ing to touch their mother’s hair which is splayed out in a lovely mess like an abstract paint­ing. When Benita gets her fin­ger too close, she takes it back and closes it back up in her lit­tle hand.

“That’s the part that I hate,” Bob says, just realizing.

The chil­dren stare. Contrary to pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment, they learn that your eyes don’t stick that way like adults are always warn­ing. “Adults lie,” Bob says, hit­ting a fist in the air. Benita agrees. But she doesn’t hit any­thing. Just a lit­tle ner­vous foot tap­ping which could be her way of hit­ting some­thing. Or maybe not.

And now Bob is going to eat a lit­tle round snack­cake. It is choco­late with a gushy creamed cen­ter. He peels it out of its foil wrap­ping like it is a fruit grown inside a skin. He needs to put the cake some­where so he can smooth the foil out. He already has quite a large col­lec­tion going, tak­ing up one adult shoe­box and one smaller shoe­box from when he took his first steps.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Benita says when Bob puts the snack­cake on their mother’s forehead.

They step back­wards, for­wards and side­ways, tak­ing in all the dif­fer­ent views. The choco­late cake looks like a huge beauty mark; a tumor the size of a choco­late cake; and an abnor­mally large dot like the women from India wear when they are married.

“I won­der how long you could leave it there,” Benita says, chang­ing sides from it’s not right to do that, over to Bob’s side of how their mother doesn’t even know.

“Until I get hun­gry,” is Bob’s reply.

“Take it off,” Benita says, switch­ing sides again.

Bob says, “Soon.”

There was a time they got ter­ri­bly excited when their mother got off the couch. It seemed inher­ent of promise ... a winter’s snow before foot­prints ... a spring flower know­ing to poke its hid­den self through the ground, rein­vent­ing itself from the cold. But all their mother man­aged was to stand at the door in a coat, shoes and a purse, before chang­ing her mind about going to see the doc­tor. The chil­dren learned that a per­son can slump over the din­ner table even when propped up, and a per­son can lie still in bath­wa­ter until the skin is some­where between pruned and death. And it still doesn’t make them really alive. It doesn’t really make them anything.

“It’s just some­thing she has to go through,” their father says, over and over again. He used to give a time frame for when she would get bet­ter. Now, he doesn’t do that too much any­more. “Look — do you like how this looks on me?” he asks, about the suit he has on. It is one of three he has recently acquired by walk­ing into the fancy man’s suit sec­tion at expen­sive depart­ment stores in just a tee shirt and shorts, and walk­ing out with the suit [s] on. “I’ve never been caught,” he muses.

“What do you mean?” Benita asks, always attuned; Bob too busy eat­ing the pret­zel sticks he placed and then took out, of their mother’s hair. “She always wanted it super straight,“ Bob says, fin­ger surf­ing in her waves.

Catching him­self in his lit­tle faux pas, though he took Spanish in high school, their father says, “I’ve never been caught in any­thing less stel­lar.” He lies to them about his new suits, and he lies to them about their lives.

Benita is plac­ing dried flower arrange­ments around her mother’s head. Benita gives their mother the old teddy bear that she hugged up with when just a few years ago she was the one being com­forted by their mother.

“She’s dec­o­rat­ing mom again,” Bob calls out. He likes being at home to talk out of turn with­out rais­ing a hand.

“I’m just mak­ing her look pretty,” Benita answers back, adding a stuffed dog with a Marie Antoinette neck, and Benita’s own Barbie pock­et­book, just in case their mother decides she can go some­where, because all moth­ers carry por­tions of their lives in their purses. Today could be the day, Benita thinks, hope­ful, though she won­ders if the day and some day mean the same thing.

The chil­dren feed their mother first, tak­ing turns spoon­ing food into her. Sometimes she won’t open her mouth and they have to force the spoon’s way in. At one time they even turned it into a con­test as to who got the least chin drib­bles and the small­est amount of side of the mouth drools. But when Benita started win­ning a lot, Bob said it wasn’t fair...to their mom and all that, when he was really mean­ing all that about himself.

Now the con­test days are done, and they feed her as if they are robots with their dials set on rou­tine, often allow­ing their minds to wan­der while com­plet­ing the task. Bob imag­ines he is feed­ing a zoo-kept cat, maybe a tiger, but an exotic breed, and Benita goes to a place inside her head where she is much younger, feed­ing her doll, the envy of all the other lit­tle girls on the block.

“She was always like this,” their father says at din­ner. “Except when she wasn’t.” He is wear­ing his stolen suit under­neath a full length vinyl x-ray apron for pro­tec­tion. He lifted the apron from the dentist’s office when the hygien­ist told him the den­tist would be right with him, and then she left the room to take a cig­a­rette break.

Bob and Benita are eat­ing eggs for din­ner. Bob is hun­gry so he eats his like his fork is a shovel. Benita is hav­ing dif­fi­culty accept­ing the fact that eggs come from a chicken’s vagina, so she mainly pokes around at hers. The fact that they are rub­bery and poke right back at the fork doesn’t help her appetite any.

“Some peo­ple are born hap­pier than oth­ers,” their father con­tin­ues to say. “Some peo­ple are born angry. Some peo­ple are born lucky. Pollution has a lot to do with it, maybe I think. Remember I told you that for when the sci­en­tists say it is true.”

Most fathers are quite adept at mak­ing break­fast foods for din­ner. The night before was pan­cakes. When Benita says they are learn­ing nutri­tion in school and how putting greens in your diet is impor­tant, their father sprin­kled the pan­cakes, french toast too, with #22 green food dye. Benita, of course, was think­ing more on the lines of green beans. Their father reminded her that green is green.

“It’s get­ting harder to remem­ber when she wasn’t like this,’ Benita says. “I can’t remem­ber the last time I was able to sit on that couch.”

Bob wipes his hair away to make a spoon stick unaided to his fore­head. “When she goes to pee, you can sneak-sit on the couch real fast. That’s what I do.”

Their father sticks the dishes in the sink with the oth­ers from times before. “She’ll get bet­ter soon. You’ll see. She is a dip­per — dip­ping in and out of vary­ing degrees of sad­ness. She’ll come around again. You just have to be on your toes to catch it is all.” He is in a hurry because he is going out that evening, hav­ing started to date a few other women, while he waits.

“What are you doing?” Bob asks Benita later, who is walk­ing funny.

“Dad said we have to be on our toes. I’m just prac­tic­ing,” is her reply.

They play board games for awhile. Benita always wins, but she cheats the oppo­site way to some­times let Bob win too. She remem­bers what he was like when feed­ing their mother was a contest.

“This is bor­ing,” Bob says, though it’s clearly not, because as soon as he says the words he sees the look on his sister’s face and he thinks he wanted to hurt her feel­ings but he isn’t sure and then he isn’t sure why because he would never want to hurt his sis­ter because he really does like her but it feels good, in this moment, to hurt some­one, her, because she is the one here but he can’t be sure and why he isn’t sure, and he fig­ures this could go on for­ever, and with a mother depressed on the couch all the time, well, Bob knows that for­ever is a really long time unless you stop it right away.

“Then go, “ Benita says, col­lect­ing the game pieces. “Go to sleep and you won’t know if you’re bored or not anymore.”

Bob pounds his fist on the table where they had things set up, and the pieces Benita hadn’t yet col­lected go flying.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done,” she says, and she just knows she won’t be able to pick up all the pieces, because inevitably, there will be at least one piece that gets lost, and then the game will be ruined forever.

Bob watches Benita on hands and knees search­ing for pieces. He knows he should help, and he knows that he should say sorry, but that stronger part of him says a bad word that he’s thought but never said outloud.

“Fuck,” he says, and he is delighted at the way the word so effort­lessly springs from his mouth, when a moment ear­lier, it was just inside his head. And he is thrilled at the stay­ing power of the word and how it expanded from the one syl­la­ble roll off his tongue to this very big thing that fills up an entire room.

“Go to hell,” Benita coun­ters, and it’s just like she thought, that one elu­sive game piece is nowhere to be found. “You ruined every­thing,” and the minute she says that, their brother and sis­ter eyes can’t help but fall onto the fig­ure of their depressed mother and how wait­ing for her to get bet­ter has taken far longer than any­one ever thought it would.

“I’m out of here,” and Bob is out of that place, leav­ing the screen door bang­ing on its hinge. It doesn’t seem like the noise will end, but it does get back to the place it was before, land­ing a false kind of hope for every­thing else in their lives.

Benita sits for a while, with her thoughts on her lap, and they squirm and wrig­gle for her atten­tion, but she hasn’t any­thing to give. Instead, after a while, she takes her ear­rings out of her lobes and places them in her mother’s empty pierced ears. It is dif­fi­cult at first, mainly because some­times after a while of noth­ing, ear holes close up. By the time Benita is won­der­ing what it would look like if peo­ple had three ears or maybe even four, she is remov­ing the ear­rings out of her mother’s lobes and plac­ing them back into her own. She will make sure they are there, nice and secure, through­out the rest of the evening for some­times ear­rings fall, and you don’t know you are miss­ing them until you do.

Benita falls asleep on the floor in front of the sofa that their mother is on. The glow from the TV shines a pecu­liar hum on the oth­er­wise dark­ened room like TV rays prob­a­bly do so cause can­cer only no one is telling. The voices com­ing from the actors on the shows are from peo­ple that no one knows for sure. A blan­ket cov­ers Benita’s lower half; she did not go to sleep with it on. Her legs occa­sion­ally twitch beneath the mate­r­ial, elec­tri­cal impulses refus­ing to obey the sleep­ing signs posted every­where. It is with quite a star­tle then, that she awak­ens to see a boy, not her brother, stand­ing over her. Her eyes and brain, still sleepy, can’t quite coor­di­nate them­selves; she feels like both body parts are danc­ing to dif­fer­ent tunes.

Benita thinks she asks the boy, “Who are you?” but she’s really not sure. She hears her brother’s voice call­ing out dif­fer­ent kinds of food from inside the kitchen.

“Corn chips. Potato chips. Potato chips with ridges. Barbeque. Sour cream. Cheddar. Potato stix ... they look like french fries, but they really are not.”

“Got any tor­tilla?” the boy-visitor asks. When Bob says no, the boy com­plains, “But I want tortilla.”

Benita pulls the blan­ket up to her neck. She looks like just a head. “Corn chips and tor­tilla chips are very sim­i­lar,” she offers.

The boys says, “They’re not the same.”

Benita tries explain­ing how they’re both made from corn, but because they are pack­aged dif­fer­ently, the boy is not hav­ing any of that. Bob dif­fuses the great corn debate with a root beer instead. The boy opens it greed­ily, smack­ing the dark liq­uid down. The after burp is long and loud, and it threat­ens to blow the house down.

“How come you never invited me here before?” the boy asks. He walks around the room, touch­ing things.

Bob shuf­fles back and forth in his shoes. “I wanted to,” he says.

“But you never did,” the boys says back. His eyes blink dif­fer­ently than theirs, invol­un­tar­ily, sev­eral fast times in a row, like a win­dow blind that loses con­trol and rolls itself up when you try to pull it all the way down.

Benita looks at Bob. She knows who this boy is now. It is Donald from school, bet­ter known as the Guerilla, but he is con­stantly hav­ing to say as in guerilla the fighter, not gorilla the ape.

He lives down the block, and up until now, Bob and Benita have done their best to avoid him, a bully known for his tyranny over lunch line money, smaller kids whose clothes are ironed too well or have new hair­cuts or smiles on their faces or whose birth­days it is. Benita looks at Bob, try­ing to burn a hole deep inside his brain so she can crawl in and ask him what does he think he is doing here. Bob knows what Benita is doing so he pulls his base­ball cap lower on his head to pre­vent her from get­ting in, but he does mouth the response, “I can do what I want”.

After he has put his fin­ger­prints on every­thing, often rear­rang­ing their order, Donald the Guerilla, turns back around to the chil­dren who live here.

“I know you,” he says, and he ticks off some of the classes that he thinks he has been in with Benita. He is half wrong. “So you guys are what?”

Bob tells the Guerilla they are brother and sis­ter. Donald looks to Benita to see if she agrees with Bob’s assessment.

Benita gives a quiet yes — she is too angry with Bob to want to admit being his rela­tion out loud.

“You got a boyfriend?” the Guerilla asks. Benita turns away. She is fac­ing her mother on the couch now. Her mother looks hazed, dazed and crazed, and Benita momen­tar­ily drifts off into think­ing about the rhyming irony that belongs to the three words, and if the group­ing of ‘azed’ is resent­ful that this is what they’re stuck with. Normally Donald would get impa­tient at the lack of a response but it gives him time to look at Benita while he waits. He wants her to be look­ing at him too. He doesn’t like that she’s so turned around. Usually he just wants to chase and then hit the girls on the play­ground, but he doesn’t feel that way now. ‘Oh Benita,’ he finds him­self think­ing, ‘you are so beau­ti­ful’. His win­dow shade eyes blink quicker than usual, and it takes real effort for him to refocus.

“Come on, let’s go,” Bob says. He wants to take his new friend to his room where, in his opin­ion, all the good stuff is.

Donald semi-circles around Benita. This, his walk of manhood.

She con­tin­ues to look away.

This action causes Donald to break out a sweat above his upper lip. He feels it pop­ping up like the heads of flow­ers. He wipes it with his shirt sleeve. It comes back. He gets closer to Benita. She has some height on him that he never real­ized before. He backs away a lit­tle so he doesn’t have to think about it. His legs hit the sofa edge; it’s hard to remem­ber the fur­ni­ture of some­one else’s home.

“Jesus Christ,” he calls out, when sur­prise hits the adren­a­lin but­ton, send­ing shud­ders all the way down. “There’s a body on the sofa; get me off, get me off.” He doesn’t really need any help though. Donald shakes and con­vulses him­self away, as if that is how one cures being spooked. He looks accus­ingly, first at Bob, then Benita, with ‘what kind of house is this’ fired in his stare. “Fuck,” he says, try­ing to com­pen­sate cool in exchange for his loss of it.

“That is our mother,” Benita says, for Bob has already died a thou­sand deaths in a very quick way.

“Is she dead or some­thing?” Donald asks, brush­ing him­self off with his hands. He stands on tip­toes, tip­ping for­ward, try­ing to get a bet­ter look at exactly what is on the sofa.

Benita is curi­ous about what the “or what” could mean, for what could pos­si­bly be beyond death for some­thing like the Guerilla’s brain?

Bob tries to get Donald upstairs.

Donald the Guerilla doesn’t want to go upstairs.

“I might have some tor­tilla chips upstairs,” Bob lies, grasp­ing for chips in the air. “A secret stash. My dad’s secret stash. I know where they are. Come on.” He does every­thing short of tug­ging at Donald’s shirt sleeve.

“Don’t want any,” Donald says, intrigued by the mother on the couch. “Does she do any­thing besides lay there?”

Bob hates Benita right now.

Benita was hat­ing Bob first, lead­ing into his right now.

“She’s just rest­ing,” Bob says. “That’s all. Let’s go do some­thing. Come on.”

Donald agrees. He picks up the bag of corn chips the brother and sis­ter tried to talk him into ear­lier. He pops it open, and the air cush­ion­ing the chips escapes into the reg­u­lar air.

“These suck,” the Guerilla says, after tast­ing one. He spits the remains out on the cof­fee table, wip­ing the stuck-on rest from his tongue onto his sleeve. Bob makes a men­tal note not to try tug­ging on that arm. The Guerilla starts to put the bag down, but sud­denly dis­agrees with his deci­sion. He throws a chip onto Bob’s and Benita’s mother on the sofa. It lands near her lap. He throws another. Another. Chips are hit­ting her face. Her head. Donald is delighted with this new game.

“Stop it,” Benita says. “That’s our mother.”

Donald tells her to shut up because she is mess­ing up his concentration.

Bob tells Benita to shut up, too. He grabs a hand­ful of chips; Donald com­plains but Bob says there are many more bags in the kitchen. They decide to see who can throw the far­thest chip on the mother on the couch. Donald wins. But Bob, he wins some too.

“I’m going to come over here more,” Donald the Guerilla says. “This is the funnest house. We don’t get to do stuff like this at my house.”

And Bob tells Donald, “Good. Wait til you see what we can do with a choco­late snack cake.” Bob looks at Benita who looks away. The ton of bricks hit­ting Bob on the head doesn’t feel as good as their mother had promised.