rosy lips agreed. “Right, it figures. Your dad is in a back booth. The old fart who balled his fountain girls.”
“When he had the chance,” I said buoyantly, for we were having a conversation.
I ordered black coffee. The coffee arrived in pea-green mugs that I had once beheld brimming in Ovaltine. “Okay, so my Dad did my Mom dirt.”
Mona patted the yellow cello. The conversation was over. “I want soft-boiled eggs,” said Mona when the waitress showed for the second time. Her iron-gray hair and beaming face loomed like a No Smoking sign. I stared at—who else—Mom. Right here! Bless her! Love her! It was Mom who’d kept my Ovaltine hot. E. A’s Vera C. E. A.’s blood pressure she’d monitored—made him lay off strudel and shortcake. Now she waited to take my order.
“You make his sunny-side up. And lotsa hash browns. Lotsa toast.” And then, “Looky there in the back booth.” Mona smacked her purple T-shirt, cello reeling, wambling, straightening up. “It’s your cousin. Your nutty uncle and aunt.”
A chubby lad munching a grilled cheese, slurping a cherry Coke through a straw. Sweet pickle slice, sweet disposition, sitting next to Uncle Dell. Uncle Dell ran a ladies’ shoe store. Aunt Flo juggled Indian clubs back in vaudeville days at B. F. Keith’s. Uncle Dell chewed on a dead cigar, incessantly working crossword puzzles. Urea again. Ormolu. Cousin Robert made model airplanes. His fingers were gummed with airplane glue. Hunks of balsa wood in the bathtub. It was a race with hungry white corpuscles that Cousin Robert had run and lost. Yet here he was slurping a cherry Coke, munching grilled cheese. Dell and Flo wolfed down pasta. They were good people living careful lives. They ignored my funk, Mona’s mania as they might cripples. Just passing through, I grinned at them. Try not to let on they are sickos, Morse-coded their chinking forks.
Mona blurted with conviction. “Only creeps and weirdos, sickos will be members of Roebuck’s family. Every one of us is an only child.”
Mistake! I wanted to cry out, shake her into sense. There would be Sally, Alex in Richmond. She wasn’t alone. Help was on the way. A fly buzzed in the sun haze, the simmering, down-home apathy. Mona chain-smoked, pecked at her hash browns, cracked a soft-boiled egg, let the yolks ooze out. A Greyhound brayed on the plum-colored brick. The coffee tasted like bitter lye, as if it had pooled in the nickel urn for a month. Nobody was slurping a cherry Coke. Mona eyed the cashier’s bow tie. She ground her cigarette into egg yolk.
“Either you get me some chewing gum or I turn you in to the management.”
Again the carillon, the chimes. I picked up a fork and a butter knife.
“Hello! Put me through to Roebuck.” The fork pricked my earlobe. The blade of the knife nuzzled my lower lip. “No, you’re not going to put me on hold. I’m a taxpayer. I won’t stand for it. You put me through and I mean now.”
A fly was buzzing our eggy plates. I brandished the butter knife, shouting. “You tell Roebuck I don’t have a family. I have Mona. Only Mona.”
Mona was clenching her fists.
Mona was curling her big toes. Her feet were propped on the footboard. She was staring out the window. She had taken a Valium willingly in the coffee shop after I bribed her with Chiclets. A police car jarred the plum-colored brick. Temper tantrum, I’d thought of signaling. The all too familiar carillon chimed A Mighty Fortress Is Our Lord. All this before noon.
We had taken a tour of the town, up Main Street to the surrounding hills, down a side street, left, then left again, down Oak Street toward the funeral home. A cedar tree in the front yard, a hearse in the porte cochere. Viewed from Oak, straight on, the funeral home—with its ivied brick, its rambling porch, its mansard roof—should have resembled a harmless domicile, not a giant hen laying a bloody egg. We sat down on the curb, rested awhile. Big daddy, little Mona smoked cigarettes, courted a vagrancy rap. As I discoursed, Mona rubbernecked.
“Outside of Xenia, Ohio, there is this data bank. In case of sabotage or malfunction its countless records and dossiers can be shunted off to D.C. My divorces, your abortion, all our sins and errors and our slip-ups are on record, mark my words. The day you ran away from home, your first coke hit, on record. My DUI’s, my frantic lust. They have a data bank in Xenia. For the losers who will go first! For the oddballs, the peeping toms, the stewbums over fifty. Baby our days are numbered.”
A steady stream of traffic flowed past us, like a funeral procession, pickups, sedans, SUV’s, a decrepit coupe. The jingle of loose fan belts, the whickering slap of corroded plugs mingled with boom boxes. Finally, only birds and maple leaves delineated a breeze soft and silent like a balm.
“Tell all that shit to Roebuck.” Mona stood up, lit a cigarette. She was skywriting big and little R’s with smoke from her cigarette. The Roebuck I knew, eye patch, oblong noggin, remained hidden from me, like the birds I heard in the foliage.
“Don’t tell me my days are numbered. Yours are. Always have been.”
Along with E. A’s, Uncle Dell’s, Aunt Flo’s, Cousin Robert’s. Mine too. Me, her husband. Washed up, replaced by Roebuck. Mona’s dove-gray eyes were turned on me, quietly scanning me up and down. For a nanosecond she was beautiful.
The Chiclets were on the chiffonier, on one side of an Indian club I had sized up as a delusion. I turned to the open window. A hearse was still in the porte cochere. A cigar butt stuck on the driveway. Mona crooked her big toes. She sat up and turned to the satyr, thumbing Chiclets into its penis. I gripped the neck of an insubstantial Indian club, screwing its head into my left ear.
“Front desk, please. Long distance. I mean long, the Washington Monument.”
I heard a seething inside my left fist. I lowered the Indian club, replaced it on the chiffonier. A useless instrument, this telephone. I rummaged through Mona’s loaf-shaped makeup kit. Found the Valium, went to the bathroom. The stain on the basin of the sink took on the shape of a fetus. Running water wouldn’t eradicate it—and wouldn’t drown out Mona’s jubilation.
“Roebuck. Babe, it’s Mona. Yes, I reversed the charges. Okay, I won’t call you again.” The things she was offering him. Exotic patterns of sex, highs I had never dreamed of. My face in the mirror was a guardian’s face, jowled and haggard, obsolete. The muffled chimes were back, the planing of coffins, the hammering. I gulped a Valium, steadied my hands.
“Him? He’s nothing. He can never be what you are to me. That’s why he’s trying to trick me.”
Slowly, I turned off the water.
I’d had a beer in the hotel bar. I’d put in a long-distance call to Mona’s sister in Richmond, Virginia. I told Sally about my little problem here, brake failure, Mona going bonkers. I told Sally Mona had taken a sleeping pill. Sally put Alex on the phone.
“Eddie you must be on the sauce.”
“Get over here as soon as you can.”
“It’s three hundred miles. Are you out of your mind?”
I hung up on Alex, why not, what good was he to me? I went out to the lobby and sat down in one of the wing chairs and stared out at the street. I thought of Mona asleep up the stairs in room 411. Several sleeping pills had done the job. I remembered how before she had taken the pills, she had craftily eyed her glass of water.
In the rouge light outside a girl carrying a loaf shaped
