in the middle of the lake, Jayson, Willie, and the twins watched her march down the driveway, pick up the amputated mirror from her Maverick, and hurl it into the lake while letting loose with a primal scream. The chartreuse glinting mirror arced overhead and landed in the water with a phloomp only ten feet away from Jayson and his cast.
Only when it landed did Toni notice Jayson, Willie, and the twins watching from their floating island. Her mood changed instantly, as was her style. ‘Fleeting’ was the only constant trait of Toni’s personality.
‘You kids ready for hot dogs?’ Toni called out to them cheerily. ‘I got the kind with the cheese inside.’ She planted her hands on her hips and cocked her head with incredulity. ‘The cheese is on the inside! Can you motherfuckinbelieveit?!?’
Willie was still filming. He’d learned the hard way not to stop until Jayson yelled ‘cut.’ Jayson wasn’t sure how he was going to work Toni’s domestic explosion into the plot of this episode. But he’d find a way. It was good material. Very natural.
His most immediate directorial concern was finding an ending for the unexpectedly prolonged scene.
Jayson turned back toward Trey, rose on his tiptoes, pulled Trey’s head toward his own, and kissed him as the original script had called for.
The water breezes kicked up as the sun set behind the houses on the far shore of the lake and Jayson lost himself in his first ever kiss.
Never confuse yourself with your character, Jayson reprimanded himself silently, repeating acting advice he’d heard Bette Davis offer on Johnny Carson.
‘Annnnnd, CUT!!!’ he shouted at Willie, reluctantly separating from Trey. The twilight sky was streaked with purple, and clouds of mosquitos began swarming around them.
Tara coughed and sputtered as she pulled herself out of the water and onto the dock.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she hissed at Jayson, ‘if you’d made out with Trey any longer, I would’ve fucking drowned for real.’
Trey didn’t say anything. He pretended to be concentrating on gathering his belongings for the pedal boat ride back to shore. Jayson ignored Trey’s discomfort. The only thing that mattered now was finishing the Dallasty! episodes and mailing them off to CBS.
Soon enough Jayson would be on his way to Hollywood. He would escape all of this small town nothingness. The petty domestic dramas. His insufferable unpopularity. The strangers who would stare at his strange clothes and strange brother and strange mother in the A&P.
Don’t touch that dial, he thought to himself. The newest, greatest season of Jayson Blocher will premier right after these messages.
‘Jaaaaayson, I’m outtta here! Come kiss me goodbye.’
‘Jesus Jm J Bullock Christ,’ Jayson muttered to himself, putting down his pencil in the rust shag carpet of his bedroom. After one of the hottest and most humid summers on record, the carpet smelled as fetid as the slime that grew between the rocks on the shore of the lake. And it had been vacuumed about as often.
Jayson was only halfway through writing the final scene of Dallasty’s cliffhanger. He was farther behind schedule than he’d anticipated. The week’s shooting had been frantic and stressful, with the twins’ schedule being interrupted repeatedly by back-to-school shopping excursions. Jayson himself had had no such diversions. Toni had pinned a $20 bill to his bedroom door on Tuesday and told him to bicycle into town to buy what he needed. Which Jayson promptly did: four cartons of Starbursts, a box of Whatchamacallit candy bars, and thirty-six pouches of BlueBerry Blast Capri Suns.
If he could get the final scene finished today and shot sometime over the weekend, he would have the entire season of episodes ready to be dropped into the post office box by the corner of Oconomowoc High School on the first morning of classes.
‘JAYSON! I’M LEAVING!’
Jayson slid down the front foyer steps on his ass and walked into the kitchen. In the week since Garth had left, the house had become even dirtier, which, had you asked Jayson last week, he would have sworn was impossible.
Toni was leaning against the burnt orange counter that was, poetically, pockmarked with cigarette burns.
‘I didn’t even know you were going somewhere,’ Jayson said.
‘I told you on Monday that I was going to spend the weekend at an artists’ collective in Chicago,’ she replied, holding her arms out for a hug.
‘No you didn’t. Monday you spent the entire day in the sarcophagus.’
Toni dropped her arms.
‘I did?’
‘You did. And I have the police citation to prove it.’
Toni had recently declared herself a ‘modern artist’ working out of her garage ‘studio.’ She announced her new vocation last spring in a press release sent to the Oconomowoc Enterprise that, much to her indignant disappointment, was never published. She kept a copy of it hanging on the refrigerator. By a nail. Toni had several mementos nailed to the refrigerator, since she was wary of the health effects of magnets.
5/21/81. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Toni Blocher, née VanSchlessor, is proud to announce a showing of her avant-garde sculptures detailing the rise and descent of woman’s struggle with the modern institution of matrimony. Neither an advocate for the patriarchy, nor a traditional feminist, Blocher will exhibit her latest works in the driveway of her home at N6855 W. Lakota Dr. from April 7 to April 14. (Parking on street is strictly prohibited by the fascist Lac Labelle Homeowners Association. The artist recommends slowing to a crawl while driving by. Ms. Blocher will walk next to your vehicle and answer any questions regarding pricing of specific works. Photography is prohibited.)
To create the work for her first showing, she’d spent four days and nights in the garage attacking bolts of bridal toile with a blowtorch and cans of spray shellac. The molten plastic toile was molded into giant blobs faintly resembling historical torture devices.
The ‘Pee-yes de la Raisin-stance,’ as she called it, was a working spiked sarcophagus coffin propped up against the basketball pole in the driveway in which, during certain afternoons throughout the summer she could be found writhing in imaginary pain. Completely nude. This finally did result in a write-up in the Enterprise this past Thursday—in the police blotter column.
‘I could’ve sworn I’d told you about the weekend,’ Toni said. ‘Maybe with that motherfucking back-hair-matted limp dick pig deserting us, I got distracted.’
‘Garth didn’t leave, Ma. You kicked him out. Because he didn’t support your vision.’
Toni had a way of attracting all sorts of men before ultimately eviscerating them. In Wisconsin, being ‘big boned’ didn’t have the same pejorative meaning it had elsewhere in the country. Here, men had been trained since childhood to lust after voluptuous State Fair Dairy Queens, with their curves and–as
