The Buckeye is a Seed by Donna D. Vitucci
Pam wore slippery-heeled, back-less new sandals, so she touched the wall as an aid all the way down the carpeted steps. Inside the basement laundry room the gleaming new Whirpool shuffled the family’s denim. Pam let the sandals clatter from her feet when she dropped to her knees to sit in the corner and scoop up Queenie’s five squirmy pups. The rooting of the small, warm things in her lap, their fur smooth as skin, their clumsy paws and their baby teeth, reminded her of when the children had been infants, and at her mercy. As one sleepy pup nuzzled against her cheek, Pam inhaled the smell of unsullied animal, that mix of clean straw and milk.
The puppies went at her with their teeth; they were just needy. She wanted to ram her finger down a tiny throat, but she held off while the washer completed its spin cycle next to the dryer. The puppies mewled and tumbled over each other, abandoning her, latching onto Queenie wherever they could.
Pam stood, brushed dog from her lap and her legs and the seat of her pants, then slid back into her sandals. From the laundry room doorway, she spied Katie and Tina on their stomachs in the finished rec room. Amid the dumped contents of their book bags, they copied biology lab notes or declined Latin verbs. The stereo’s volume rocked the speakers. Puppies, laundry, the girls and their assignments, the whole house--all every second ticking and tilting forward.
With Nate at the Ford dealership until at least nine o’clock, Pam cooked mac and cheese and baked potatoes for the beautiful bodies gathered around her kitchen table. Twelve and eleven, Katie and Tina were quick-witted and freckled and a little sassy. They used words to beat up on little brother Hal, who shot back at them with parts of dinner launched from his silverware.
The children were at the table, then they weren’t. As Pam began clearing, as the hot water ran down the outside of her too-big Playtex gloves and beaded up on the grease from the plates, she tried to recall a shred of the dinner. She shoved globs of food down the disposal and set the machine grinding.
Her job was to keep the new house ship-shape, keep the house, she thought, as if it was the one threatening escape. Cleaning was in her blood.
So long ago, Pam and her sister Dana had been the Buckeye Motel’s Housekeeping Crew. In their grungiest clothes they cleaned the rentals before high school first bell, lit their cigarettes inside anonymous walls without Mother catching on because the units already reeked so of smoke and who-knows-what-funk they worked at disinfecting.
Summer between Pam’s sophomore and junior year, Nate had been hired on to scythe down the overgrown honeysuckle. By then the girls had developed a routine at the Buckeye: Dana would go through, strip the linens, then Pam followed with clean sheets. They left the doors open until they were done, so they’d know which units still needed tackling. In Unit Seven, Nate outstretched his arms scratched from battling branches and said to Pam, “Why don’t I help you make this bed?”
He appeared like a spirit, in a different unit every day. She cleaned the units out of order yet he always managed to greet her in one. “I have a sixth sense about you,” he said. He swept her up like a rescuer thundering by on his horse. Reclining with Nate in Unit Four, she imagined his black hat a-tilt on the bed post, spurs under the bed. If he was the desperado, then she was his sidekick. They both wore masks.
Marriage and three children later, with new houses requiring furniture and décor and dinner recipes -- none of that eclipsed memories of the nasty mattresses she and Dana beat, before Nate appeared, with the handle end of brooms, behind the S-curve drive of the Buckeye Motel. Mattresses where they, alongside boys from high school as well as drifters, had perspired and shed hairs.
The children were quiet in their rooms, (quiet always meant trouble at the Buckeye), when Pam lifted the telephone and punched her sister’s numbers. She and Dana still shared cleaning tips and shortcuts, called each other Heloise. Pam talked and smoked Newports while she balanced on a high swivel stool, knee crossed over knee, jittery from a day’s worth of coffee and meager supper. Her top ankle waggled her sandal halfway off her foot. The built-in bar was all black and silver so, to blend in, Pam had gotten her ash-blond hair frosted. She saw herself in the long mirror above the bar. From the neck up she glowed, as if she’d been held upside down and dipped in silver. Her face appeared, reflected among the liquor bottles, on a free-floating head. She wiggled her fingers to prove they were hers and that she controlled them.
“A contemporary house has its own special upkeep,” she said.
Dana scoffed from three states away. “You’ve never got but a few things out of place.”
Pam said, “Mess shows more noticeable in angled open rooms.” She charted it for her sister the way she outlined it for Nate. “Their feet tread on the wall-to-wall carpet. The color that used to be beer foam? Now, in places, runs the brown of muddy water.”
Her sister said, “Their feet—the kids’, you mean.”
“Yes, my children, who don’t know the meaning of stillness.”
Dana laughed. “You never sat still. Why should they?”
Pam quit her foot-bobbing. Nothing but the eyes in her head moved.
The kids loved the couch in Nate’s office, a beat-up aqua-colored faux-leather thing he had carted in when he began staying extended hours. It was the main reason the kids wanted to visit the dealership, so Pam herded them into the station wagon and drove. She wore sunglasses and tilted the visor. So long ago, her Driver’s Ed teacher insisted dusk was the most dangerous time of day.
The dealership’s air conditioning slapped Pam with a headache. Or maybe the throb rose from the tang of leather and new-car polish. Tension arced across the sales floor when Nate caught sight of them; it almost knocked her off her feet. She fled into his office, with the children following as if she were Queenie and they her hungry pups.
Safe behind the shut door, and as Nate engaged outside with a prospect, Hal scooted the backs of his bare thighs along the seat, causing fart sounds to erupt. He rolled the legs of his shorts as high as his crotch, slid from the couch back down to the floor, then sprang up to try and make the next time louder, longer. The friction ripped ugly, hilarious sounds. Potential car buyers, the salesmen, the dad, all went about business undisturbed. Tina and Katie were at first aghast, but with no paddling they could foresee, they joined in.
All three kids rode the couch. They bounced, they wore gigantic, amazing grins. Hal’s eyes were squinched in joyful spasm. He was their jokester, their jester, their stand-up comic. He kept them connected like the sticks in a Tinker Toy set.
Then Nate walked in, in the middle of a triple rip. “What the hell’s going on here?”
He pinched the cuff of Pam’s blazer and that thin skin at her wrist and whipped her around so they both faced the corner. “You need to keep these kids in line, especially here. I’ve got an image, I’m manager of this place.”
A vein that ran up Nate’s throat pulsed close to the skin where he’d nicked with the razor that morning, where Pam had held a tissue.
Perspective zoomed to the farthest seam in the ceiling and evaluated. Perfect family, count them: magic number five, five fingers to a hand, five points on a star. All together they shone, constellation at their new street’s dead end, just as they did, as they were expected to, in the Ford sales office.
“We should probably go,” Pam said.
Nate rushed the door before she could begin herding the kids. “A live one,” he said, his eye on the show room. His body stepped beyond the camera’s view.
If she were the director, Pam might say, “Tighten the shot.”
She could play the scene and be behind it, too.
Once the children went to bed, Pam scoured the kitchen sink, then tugged her rings over her widening knuckles and set them in the crystal bowl by the soap dish on the windowsill. Her reflection made it look like she stood both inside and out. She did not recall how this day had been different from the last. Nate might be sprawled on that aqua leather couch, alone or with company. It hardly mattered, but it mattered some. She took part of the kitchen with her when she moved into the rest of the house.
She readied for bed, slipped between the cool sheets, and lay there for maybe five minutes. She loved her children beyond words, beyond memory, beyond every dream she had for their futures. They had talent and beauty and strength; she wanted them to succeed, to leave her even, if that made them happiest. When she rose to check on them, she felt like her flimsy nightgown was a costume for a ghost or a midsummer’s night fairy. No pockets, so she held the silverware concealed within her closed palm.
Hal slept with a night light. She smiled. He’d never want anyone to know of the plastic clown umbrella that capped over a plain bulb so a beacon of color lit the foot of his bed by the sliding closet doors.
Look at him there, just a slip of an eight year-old boy. Pam imagined him a young Houdini. There’d be no keeping Hal like she kept the house. The house had a foundation, a basement to where they could flee during tornado warnings, it had a sturdy base in the earth. Hal would lift away from her in the first tough wind. Girls you could count on, but boys always left their mothers. At least that’s what her own mother said when Pam and Dana were growing up. But they’d split from her and the family’s cheap motel business as soon as they could, set their roots shallow elsewhere, left Mother to greet her fatal heart attack surrounded by over-nighters she didn’t know from Adam.
Pam’s memory was sliced up like a jigsaw—the Buckeye Motel’s damp-rot smell harbored in any of the units’ beds; Nate’s –or someone’s -- hands and mouth steering her, their unavoidable hips; her mother blind to the world eating away at itself; the children popped from her body one-two-three. She had to cut the cord.
Her testimony: “When I went in, Hal was, in his sleep, glowing, shining like that night light. Aside from his fear of the dark, Hal rarely called out. Not much was wrong in Hal’s world. He was a charmer. He was respectful and kind. He was, in all ways, a prince. He had energy and cleverness and enthusiasm for game. I saw him bound for politics, if he’d lived.”
“He’ll be fine,” the police psychiatrist said. “He’s alive. He’ll be good as new.”
“Well then, what’s all this for, I wonder?”
“We’re trying to help you figure out why, Mrs. Roarke.”
“Call me Pam. Can I see Hal?”
“We’ll talk of that later. Now I want you to tell me, if you can, more about what you said on the drive here, something about eating your young.”
She laughed. “A protective measure.” Then another dismissive ha. “Certainly I didn’t mean to eat Hal. I’m no Medea. I-I just wanted Nate to see; he troops through each day without seeing. Even when we’re together we’re apart. The Tinker Toy breaks down.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A joke with the girls and Hal, that the boy’s the glue holding us all together, you know, like the Tinker Toy sticks that peg into each little wheelie? Nate’s oblivious. Hal in the hospital brought back his attention, didn’t it?”
“But what price, Pam?”
“You said Hal would be all right.”
“He is. But you’ve got, on your record now… you know?”
“You said I could see him?”
She figured he was evaluating her, trying to predict the balance of her love for Hal with her desire to flee. Didn’t he know the old adage, “Kill what you love most to break its hold?” Some drifter had told her that and she’d pinned it to the bulletin board in her mind.
The doctor said, “Maybe. Soon.”
He looked at her almost lovingly, she thought.
“We have to talk about Hal, and what you’ve done,” he said.
She did not move a muscle. “Yes.”
“Well, we want to see where you stand, Pam.” He sounded like he was stalling.
“Actually, I’m sitting.”
The psychiatrist had a nice smile. “The eating remark?”
She sighed. “It’s not unusual for some animals to eat their own. Mantises and spiders bite heads off their mates. Tadpoles swallow each other. Gulls eat their eggs. The male lion kills cubs that aren’t his so the female will come into season, because her body won’t breed until her cubs grow independent.”
The doc looked puzzled. “But then it sounds like Nate would have been the one thinning out his pride, so to speak.”
“Nate’s rarely around, to cuddle or to destroy.” She felt like one of those whistles at quitting time in a cartoon, steaming inside, just about ready to blow.
“Were you maybe feeling not so much needed, Pam?”
She wouldn’t let his social worker tactics rock her. “Hal and I once watched while inside the cage in his room the hamster mother gobbled down her own babies. Quite a sight.”
“What did Hal say?”
She laughed. “Cool, did you see that, Mom?”
This holding cell, four walls greener than any puke she’d wiped from her kids’ chins, would make her tell whatever gruesome story this doc could stand.
Give her a hamster wheel and Pam could race circles, or lock her in a cage with that Papa Lion who did in another’s cubs. Just let her get home to her children. She had things to do, some housecleaning, blood on Hal’s sheets to bleach away. Queenie expected feeding, the pups needed to be checked on and petted.
She told the doc about Nate and the Buckeye Motel, as in her mind they were related, one begat the other.
“You could say he wore me down,” she said.
Nate needed her to succumb, it was part of his method. In a way, this doctor wanted her to topple, too. The guy was all innocence, wasn’t he, tugging nervously on his tender, Dumbo-like ears? Maybe her sad story was taking root inside him.
“Dana and I dynamited one section of the Buckeye Motel,” Pam said.
The doc’s whole face transformed when his eyes opened big like that, empty and ready to hear what she said, like a plate needing food set on it. She enjoyed working her drama on this guy.
“The place was squalid,” she said. “Nothing less than TNT could clean out the cooties left behind by the aliases who crossed the thresholds of those rooms. Once they closed their doors, Mother would speculate about their histories and futures, all the while blind to what they were doing at this hole-in-the-wall.
“You might wonder how we got our hands on explosives,” Pam said. “You’d be surprised who crossed our paths, what all they had access to.”
The doc lifted his eyebrow and Pam felt his dopey innocence encouraging her.
“This was no Hilton, it was Bates Motel meets Petticoat Junction, a motor court, each unit with its own entrance. Visitors could go and come without facing down a desk clerk.
“And the guys who came through? Born-again Christian, Harley Hog, drifter, guys right out of the service. All of them full of schemes. A little bit of the actress in us, and men happy to direct. But we couldn’t settle -- go or stay; this guy or that; who was sweet and who was rough; flowers, cheap jewelry, a bruise, crabs. Everybody got something.”
“Which was, in your case?”
Pam shrugged. “What we deserved? Dana married one of the guys who passed through -- Lydon. Lie Down, we called him, because any girl he cast his spell on would. He only had to look at you, had gypsy eyes and the kind of thick dark hair a girl wants to tangle up with her fingers.”
“Were you jealous?”
“No reason. My fingers tangled; I slept with him, too. We both did.” She paused for effect. “Together.”
They’d wandered way off course.
“My dear Hal, can I peek in on him?” she said.
“I’ll have to accompany you.”
Ah, they’d been at the hospital the whole time. Why wasn’t she aware of that?
She pasted on a good, sane smile. “Then I’ll consider it our first date.” She put out her hand and the doc looked at it, turned it over to review her palm, and caught her eyeing him.
“Are you bribing me?” he said.
“Can you be bribed?”
Pam was used to negotiating. Nate could verify. He was the one who’d stopped what amounted to her prostituting at the Buckeye. The new houses of their marriage were castles compared to that motel. No wall-to-wall would ever be the spongy, water-logged carpet of Unit Eight, no shower curtain would spore mold in twenty-four hours like the plastic in Unit Two, no den would have walls so thin as Unit One where they’d timed their moans to the announcer: “This…is…Jeo-pardy!” that her mother watched on the tiny black and white in the Rental Office.
Indefensible, using Hal to bail out, but Mother had always said, “Use what’s at hand.” She’d meant cleaning or half-ass solutions to common breakdowns in the units before Nate came along and applied his know-how. Mother crowned him the Buckeye Motel Handy Man.
As they walked the hall, the doc continued his assessment. “How had Nate’s, well, willingness, his rescue, reduce you to—“
“-- reduce me to someone who’d stab her own son? The man lifted me from the sludge of the Buckeye Motel and that doesn’t seem right, but does logic rule your life? When do good things ever stay good? If you’re happy you better start packing, because after the peak it’s all downhill.”
Pam tugged the doctor’s lapel to bring his ear to her mouth and whispered: “I’ve lived at the bottom of downhill, where numb is the order of the day, numb with cream and two sugars, please.”
He was the kind of up-and-comer who wore a sports jacket, probably hoping to impress, and her buttonholing made them both pause because he stumbled on her shoe and then apologized for mis-stepping.
She started walking away from him, surrounded by the hospital brightness that actually hurt her skin, hoping she moved in the direction of Hal. Aloud she marveled, “My children are growing older than I ever thought they would.” There was no other way to say it: she felt touchy.
The doctor, matching her steps, said, “Capable as lion cubs.”
She nodded. “Soon they’ll be able to catch their own food.”
She could sift evidence in the manner of any TV show detective, and she knew as well as this psychiatrist that Nate had left them, or more accurately, left her.
A police officer stood guard over Hal’s door, but the psychiatrist must have outranked him because they showed each other identification and exchanged nods. Then the doc shouldered the weight of the door for her. Beneath his shelter, she ducked and smelled his deodorant, his sweat, the wintry tweed of his jacket.
“Just for a minute,” he said.
One in a pile of countless cautions she’d heard her whole life.
“Look where that child’s head lies,” she whispered. “Pillowcase whiter than any we laundered at the Buckeye.”
Earlier she’d run a butter knife into his stomach. Some surgeon repaired her screw-up, but her son would have scars. She’d be a moth across his memory every time he dressed or undressed, whenever he bared his belly to a mirror or a lover.
Time was leaking like water through her cupped hands. Some evaporated into thin air, some of it would stay lost, that’s just how it was. To Pam it felt like closing in on ten o’clock at the Buckeye Motel, where Mother insisted ten in the morning was check-out for every last unit, no exceptions.
Her son looked angelic. Pam was hardly needed here.
She turned to the doctor. “Do you think I could have a cup of coffee?” She had him by the lapel again. “I spotted a machine on our way down the hall.”
He jingled change in his pants pocket. “Cream and two sugars?”
“You were listening.”
He shrugged and blushed all the way into his open shirt collar.
How easily the old Buckeye banter fell from her lips.
The doctor’s exit hushed the door closed as Pam knelt next to Hal’s bed. The policeman stepped inside to guard in the doc’s absence. He stood like some silent Indian, barring the door with his big body. She whispered, “Darling?” but they must have sedated Hal because he went on dreaming his young boy dreams.
Between Pam’s fingers the hospital sheet felt starched. Hal’s pillow slip was cool against her cheek. She rested her head beside her boy’s, and her breathing matched his. The whole world slowed. She thought maybe now she could sleep, but here, this doctor was walking in with coffee spit into cardboard from a machine while the guard exited. The doctor’s questions had shaken Pam’s puzzle box so pieces rubbed up against those they were never meant to touch.
She reached for the cup with trembling fingers, and sipped. “I’ve tried to keep it all separate,” she said. And before he could psycho-analyze that she said, “What time is it?”
The doctor smiled, his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels like the hospital was a ship at sea. “It’s tomorrow, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Another day,” she said, her voice full of laissez-faire attitude. Then she straightened to attention. “Who’ll get them off to school?”
“We’ll give the girls a doctor’s note. Let them take a sick day.”
“Will I get a note?”
“Do you feel you need a day off?”
“Who would I give it to?” She laughed. “Nate?”
The doctor’s nod and his wacky smile acknowledged life’s jilting accidents. Then his expression sobered. “We can’t let you back home just yet, Pam.”
“Where will I go?” she said.
Hal stirred under his sheets, not waking, just resettling, but the doc pantomimed sweep, sweep with his hand. They left Hal in his hospital cocoon and stood in the hall. Waking would be scary for him, she thought. He’d maybe dismiss mother-with-knife as nightmare until his hands scrabbled to the bandage on his middle. She wanted to tell him, “When you bleed, I bleed,” but she knew that was no reason to give an eight year-old boy, so she said it to the doctor instead.
“When my children bleed, I bleed.”
“You must be carrying a lot of pain.” His understanding nod irked her.
“Don’t you blame me?” she said.
“I sure as hell do.” Nate, her wild-eyed, fuming husband, blew Pam and the doctor apart from their whispering. “Are you out of your fucking mind, Pam? Our own boy. What – are – you - doing?”
He twisted her by both her elbows, where she was used to him grabbing and shaking her, but the doc leapt in and shouldered Nate away. The three of them splayed against the cold wall, laminated brick, something industrial and clean, material good for a contemporary hearth, Pam thought.
“Everybody, take five here,” the doc said. His dark hair messed his forehead. Nate had evoked from him a breathlessness that Pam found a little sexy.
“Take your own five,” Nate said. His rough knuckles were ready.
Poor doc didn’t know what hit him. The nurses stood, knotted at their station, with charts held to their chests, and watched.
Pam said, “Are you fighting over me?”
“Fuck, no,” Nate shouted. “You think I’m crazy as you?”
The Florence Nightingales swooped forward in their green scrubs. The doctor pinched his nose to stop the bleeding.
“Don’t nurses wear white anymore?” Pam said.
“Mom?” Hal’s voice, weak as water, pulled them all back.
Nate beat her to the door, put out his hand and bloodied her blouse, his fingerprints always on her. “You stay. No fucking way are you near him.”
“But he’s calling me.”
“In a minute he’ll know better, when I tell him what’s what.”
“Like you could roll truth around in your mouth without spitting.”
Nate slipped into Hal’s room and the door sealed closed. The hinges were hushed with some lubricant and the weight of the door managed on slow release.
As smoothly as Nate stole in, that easily he could steal Hal away. The guard hadn’t even moved during the fist fight.
Pam put her ear to the door, heard Nate through the wood. He sounded muted, calm, fatherly.
“Everybody has shitty stuff from their childhood,” he was saying. “You can’t let it rule you, pal.”
He’d said the same to her years ago at the Buckeye Motel. On a recent drive past there, Pam had seen that the placard beneath the neon Buckeye sign still read Color TV, king size beds, phones in every room, as if these things were hallmarks of luxury. Her mother said it wasn’t her fault the place deteriorated once crud took hold. An old television ad for cleaning, the White Tornado, popped into her head.
“What’s past can cast a long shadow,” the doc said. He touched a gauze pad to his mouth and stood next to her.
“And my children should suffer because of that?’
“Should you?”
“Going home with Nate’s not the worst that could happen.”
The doc gave her the most incredulous look, as if to say all his hard work with her this whole long night, and now she was buckling? She knew he was thinking they were back at square one.
“I mean for Hal, not me.”
That eased the startle around his eyes.
“Understand, I’m not giving him up. He’s just better off with his dad. For now.”
The doc nodded. “The police will need you for a while anyway.”
She gave him a jangled look. She felt it on her face and kept it there because it might work in her favor.
“For a statement, at least.”
“I thought that was your job, what this,” she waved her hands, “was all about. You mean you haven’t been recording me?”
The doc gave her a colluding smile and a shrug that helped reset the shoulders of his jacket. “They called me in to assess, so I’ve assessed. You’re not a scary woman with harm up her sleeve. Confused, sure.” He gestured to Hal’s closed door and then used this arm to direct her down the hall. “As Nate says, some shitty stuff from your youth.”
Her youth, when she’d learned plenty of games courtesy of the Buckeye. She thought they were all handling her with kid gloves, so why not play the mental case part to the hilt? She poured on her bland face for bluffing. “I’ll do whatever’s asked,” she said. Now, how many times had that thought wormed through her blond head? Once the doc brought her to the precinct, if they allowed a phone call, she’d ring Dana to remind her that things learned early, you never outgrew their usefulness.
Dana might guess, “Survival?” and Pam would counter, “No, cleaning,” and Dana, always pronouncing the last clever word, would say, “Same thing.” In parroting both sides of the conversation, Pam eliminated her need for Dana at all.
Instead she’d request permission to check on the girls. No, her Katie and Tina were sleepyheads; she wouldn’t wake them yet. But when she did call, she’d remind them to feed and care for Queenie and her pups, to watch when they let them out and to count them once the pups returned to their rusty smelling blankets.
“Make sure each is accounted for,” she’d tell them. She’d sound like her own mother giving directions about linens, ash trays, ice buckets and other items that weren’t bolted down at the Buckeye. “You’d be surprised what people will try and walk off with,” Mother always said. The Buckeye was Pam’s excuse, her schtick, her story. She imagined the whole motel lifted off its Highway Nine foundation, roots ripped and shaggy with clods of earth and weeds she knew intimately. Without it, where was she?
______________________________
Donna D. Vitucci works as a development associate, raising funds for local non-profits. Her fiction and poems have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and journals including: Hawaii Review, Front Porch Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Night Train, Storyglossia, Corium, and Meridian. Her novel manuscript, FEED MATERIALS, was judged a finalist for the Bellwether Prize, 2010.
Pam wore slippery-heeled, back-less new sandals, so she touched the wall as an aid all the way down the carpeted steps. Inside the basement laundry room the gleaming new Whirpool shuffled the family’s denim. Pam let the sandals clatter from her feet when she dropped to her knees to sit in the corner and scoop up Queenie’s five squirmy pups. The rooting of the small, warm things in her lap, their fur smooth as skin, their clumsy paws and their baby teeth, reminded her of when the children had been infants, and at her mercy. As one sleepy pup nuzzled against her cheek, Pam inhaled the smell of unsullied animal, that mix of clean straw and milk.
The puppies went at her with their teeth; they were just needy. She wanted to ram her finger down a tiny throat, but she held off while the washer completed its spin cycle next to the dryer. The puppies mewled and tumbled over each other, abandoning her, latching onto Queenie wherever they could.
Pam stood, brushed dog from her lap and her legs and the seat of her pants, then slid back into her sandals. From the laundry room doorway, she spied Katie and Tina on their stomachs in the finished rec room. Amid the dumped contents of their book bags, they copied biology lab notes or declined Latin verbs. The stereo’s volume rocked the speakers. Puppies, laundry, the girls and their assignments, the whole house--all every second ticking and tilting forward.
With Nate at the Ford dealership until at least nine o’clock, Pam cooked mac and cheese and baked potatoes for the beautiful bodies gathered around her kitchen table. Twelve and eleven, Katie and Tina were quick-witted and freckled and a little sassy. They used words to beat up on little brother Hal, who shot back at them with parts of dinner launched from his silverware.
The children were at the table, then they weren’t. As Pam began clearing, as the hot water ran down the outside of her too-big Playtex gloves and beaded up on the grease from the plates, she tried to recall a shred of the dinner. She shoved globs of food down the disposal and set the machine grinding.
Her job was to keep the new house ship-shape, keep the house, she thought, as if it was the one threatening escape. Cleaning was in her blood.
So long ago, Pam and her sister Dana had been the Buckeye Motel’s Housekeeping Crew. In their grungiest clothes they cleaned the rentals before high school first bell, lit their cigarettes inside anonymous walls without Mother catching on because the units already reeked so of smoke and who-knows-what-funk they worked at disinfecting.
Summer between Pam’s sophomore and junior year, Nate had been hired on to scythe down the overgrown honeysuckle. By then the girls had developed a routine at the Buckeye: Dana would go through, strip the linens, then Pam followed with clean sheets. They left the doors open until they were done, so they’d know which units still needed tackling. In Unit Seven, Nate outstretched his arms scratched from battling branches and said to Pam, “Why don’t I help you make this bed?”
He appeared like a spirit, in a different unit every day. She cleaned the units out of order yet he always managed to greet her in one. “I have a sixth sense about you,” he said. He swept her up like a rescuer thundering by on his horse. Reclining with Nate in Unit Four, she imagined his black hat a-tilt on the bed post, spurs under the bed. If he was the desperado, then she was his sidekick. They both wore masks.
Marriage and three children later, with new houses requiring furniture and décor and dinner recipes -- none of that eclipsed memories of the nasty mattresses she and Dana beat, before Nate appeared, with the handle end of brooms, behind the S-curve drive of the Buckeye Motel. Mattresses where they, alongside boys from high school as well as drifters, had perspired and shed hairs.
The children were quiet in their rooms, (quiet always meant trouble at the Buckeye), when Pam lifted the telephone and punched her sister’s numbers. She and Dana still shared cleaning tips and shortcuts, called each other Heloise. Pam talked and smoked Newports while she balanced on a high swivel stool, knee crossed over knee, jittery from a day’s worth of coffee and meager supper. Her top ankle waggled her sandal halfway off her foot. The built-in bar was all black and silver so, to blend in, Pam had gotten her ash-blond hair frosted. She saw herself in the long mirror above the bar. From the neck up she glowed, as if she’d been held upside down and dipped in silver. Her face appeared, reflected among the liquor bottles, on a free-floating head. She wiggled her fingers to prove they were hers and that she controlled them.
“A contemporary house has its own special upkeep,” she said.
Dana scoffed from three states away. “You’ve never got but a few things out of place.”
Pam said, “Mess shows more noticeable in angled open rooms.” She charted it for her sister the way she outlined it for Nate. “Their feet tread on the wall-to-wall carpet. The color that used to be beer foam? Now, in places, runs the brown of muddy water.”
Her sister said, “Their feet—the kids’, you mean.”
“Yes, my children, who don’t know the meaning of stillness.”
Dana laughed. “You never sat still. Why should they?”
Pam quit her foot-bobbing. Nothing but the eyes in her head moved.
The kids loved the couch in Nate’s office, a beat-up aqua-colored faux-leather thing he had carted in when he began staying extended hours. It was the main reason the kids wanted to visit the dealership, so Pam herded them into the station wagon and drove. She wore sunglasses and tilted the visor. So long ago, her Driver’s Ed teacher insisted dusk was the most dangerous time of day.
The dealership’s air conditioning slapped Pam with a headache. Or maybe the throb rose from the tang of leather and new-car polish. Tension arced across the sales floor when Nate caught sight of them; it almost knocked her off her feet. She fled into his office, with the children following as if she were Queenie and they her hungry pups.
Safe behind the shut door, and as Nate engaged outside with a prospect, Hal scooted the backs of his bare thighs along the seat, causing fart sounds to erupt. He rolled the legs of his shorts as high as his crotch, slid from the couch back down to the floor, then sprang up to try and make the next time louder, longer. The friction ripped ugly, hilarious sounds. Potential car buyers, the salesmen, the dad, all went about business undisturbed. Tina and Katie were at first aghast, but with no paddling they could foresee, they joined in.
All three kids rode the couch. They bounced, they wore gigantic, amazing grins. Hal’s eyes were squinched in joyful spasm. He was their jokester, their jester, their stand-up comic. He kept them connected like the sticks in a Tinker Toy set.
Then Nate walked in, in the middle of a triple rip. “What the hell’s going on here?”
He pinched the cuff of Pam’s blazer and that thin skin at her wrist and whipped her around so they both faced the corner. “You need to keep these kids in line, especially here. I’ve got an image, I’m manager of this place.”
A vein that ran up Nate’s throat pulsed close to the skin where he’d nicked with the razor that morning, where Pam had held a tissue.
Perspective zoomed to the farthest seam in the ceiling and evaluated. Perfect family, count them: magic number five, five fingers to a hand, five points on a star. All together they shone, constellation at their new street’s dead end, just as they did, as they were expected to, in the Ford sales office.
“We should probably go,” Pam said.
Nate rushed the door before she could begin herding the kids. “A live one,” he said, his eye on the show room. His body stepped beyond the camera’s view.
If she were the director, Pam might say, “Tighten the shot.”
She could play the scene and be behind it, too.
Once the children went to bed, Pam scoured the kitchen sink, then tugged her rings over her widening knuckles and set them in the crystal bowl by the soap dish on the windowsill. Her reflection made it look like she stood both inside and out. She did not recall how this day had been different from the last. Nate might be sprawled on that aqua leather couch, alone or with company. It hardly mattered, but it mattered some. She took part of the kitchen with her when she moved into the rest of the house.
She readied for bed, slipped between the cool sheets, and lay there for maybe five minutes. She loved her children beyond words, beyond memory, beyond every dream she had for their futures. They had talent and beauty and strength; she wanted them to succeed, to leave her even, if that made them happiest. When she rose to check on them, she felt like her flimsy nightgown was a costume for a ghost or a midsummer’s night fairy. No pockets, so she held the silverware concealed within her closed palm.
Hal slept with a night light. She smiled. He’d never want anyone to know of the plastic clown umbrella that capped over a plain bulb so a beacon of color lit the foot of his bed by the sliding closet doors.
Look at him there, just a slip of an eight year-old boy. Pam imagined him a young Houdini. There’d be no keeping Hal like she kept the house. The house had a foundation, a basement to where they could flee during tornado warnings, it had a sturdy base in the earth. Hal would lift away from her in the first tough wind. Girls you could count on, but boys always left their mothers. At least that’s what her own mother said when Pam and Dana were growing up. But they’d split from her and the family’s cheap motel business as soon as they could, set their roots shallow elsewhere, left Mother to greet her fatal heart attack surrounded by over-nighters she didn’t know from Adam.
Pam’s memory was sliced up like a jigsaw—the Buckeye Motel’s damp-rot smell harbored in any of the units’ beds; Nate’s –or someone’s -- hands and mouth steering her, their unavoidable hips; her mother blind to the world eating away at itself; the children popped from her body one-two-three. She had to cut the cord.
Her testimony: “When I went in, Hal was, in his sleep, glowing, shining like that night light. Aside from his fear of the dark, Hal rarely called out. Not much was wrong in Hal’s world. He was a charmer. He was respectful and kind. He was, in all ways, a prince. He had energy and cleverness and enthusiasm for game. I saw him bound for politics, if he’d lived.”
“He’ll be fine,” the police psychiatrist said. “He’s alive. He’ll be good as new.”
“Well then, what’s all this for, I wonder?”
“We’re trying to help you figure out why, Mrs. Roarke.”
“Call me Pam. Can I see Hal?”
“We’ll talk of that later. Now I want you to tell me, if you can, more about what you said on the drive here, something about eating your young.”
She laughed. “A protective measure.” Then another dismissive ha. “Certainly I didn’t mean to eat Hal. I’m no Medea. I-I just wanted Nate to see; he troops through each day without seeing. Even when we’re together we’re apart. The Tinker Toy breaks down.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A joke with the girls and Hal, that the boy’s the glue holding us all together, you know, like the Tinker Toy sticks that peg into each little wheelie? Nate’s oblivious. Hal in the hospital brought back his attention, didn’t it?”
“But what price, Pam?”
“You said Hal would be all right.”
“He is. But you’ve got, on your record now… you know?”
“You said I could see him?”
She figured he was evaluating her, trying to predict the balance of her love for Hal with her desire to flee. Didn’t he know the old adage, “Kill what you love most to break its hold?” Some drifter had told her that and she’d pinned it to the bulletin board in her mind.
The doctor said, “Maybe. Soon.”
He looked at her almost lovingly, she thought.
“We have to talk about Hal, and what you’ve done,” he said.
She did not move a muscle. “Yes.”
“Well, we want to see where you stand, Pam.” He sounded like he was stalling.
“Actually, I’m sitting.”
The psychiatrist had a nice smile. “The eating remark?”
She sighed. “It’s not unusual for some animals to eat their own. Mantises and spiders bite heads off their mates. Tadpoles swallow each other. Gulls eat their eggs. The male lion kills cubs that aren’t his so the female will come into season, because her body won’t breed until her cubs grow independent.”
The doc looked puzzled. “But then it sounds like Nate would have been the one thinning out his pride, so to speak.”
“Nate’s rarely around, to cuddle or to destroy.” She felt like one of those whistles at quitting time in a cartoon, steaming inside, just about ready to blow.
“Were you maybe feeling not so much needed, Pam?”
She wouldn’t let his social worker tactics rock her. “Hal and I once watched while inside the cage in his room the hamster mother gobbled down her own babies. Quite a sight.”
“What did Hal say?”
She laughed. “Cool, did you see that, Mom?”
This holding cell, four walls greener than any puke she’d wiped from her kids’ chins, would make her tell whatever gruesome story this doc could stand.
Give her a hamster wheel and Pam could race circles, or lock her in a cage with that Papa Lion who did in another’s cubs. Just let her get home to her children. She had things to do, some housecleaning, blood on Hal’s sheets to bleach away. Queenie expected feeding, the pups needed to be checked on and petted.
She told the doc about Nate and the Buckeye Motel, as in her mind they were related, one begat the other.
“You could say he wore me down,” she said.
Nate needed her to succumb, it was part of his method. In a way, this doctor wanted her to topple, too. The guy was all innocence, wasn’t he, tugging nervously on his tender, Dumbo-like ears? Maybe her sad story was taking root inside him.
“Dana and I dynamited one section of the Buckeye Motel,” Pam said.
The doc’s whole face transformed when his eyes opened big like that, empty and ready to hear what she said, like a plate needing food set on it. She enjoyed working her drama on this guy.
“The place was squalid,” she said. “Nothing less than TNT could clean out the cooties left behind by the aliases who crossed the thresholds of those rooms. Once they closed their doors, Mother would speculate about their histories and futures, all the while blind to what they were doing at this hole-in-the-wall.
“You might wonder how we got our hands on explosives,” Pam said. “You’d be surprised who crossed our paths, what all they had access to.”
The doc lifted his eyebrow and Pam felt his dopey innocence encouraging her.
“This was no Hilton, it was Bates Motel meets Petticoat Junction, a motor court, each unit with its own entrance. Visitors could go and come without facing down a desk clerk.
“And the guys who came through? Born-again Christian, Harley Hog, drifter, guys right out of the service. All of them full of schemes. A little bit of the actress in us, and men happy to direct. But we couldn’t settle -- go or stay; this guy or that; who was sweet and who was rough; flowers, cheap jewelry, a bruise, crabs. Everybody got something.”
“Which was, in your case?”
Pam shrugged. “What we deserved? Dana married one of the guys who passed through -- Lydon. Lie Down, we called him, because any girl he cast his spell on would. He only had to look at you, had gypsy eyes and the kind of thick dark hair a girl wants to tangle up with her fingers.”
“Were you jealous?”
“No reason. My fingers tangled; I slept with him, too. We both did.” She paused for effect. “Together.”
They’d wandered way off course.
“My dear Hal, can I peek in on him?” she said.
“I’ll have to accompany you.”
Ah, they’d been at the hospital the whole time. Why wasn’t she aware of that?
She pasted on a good, sane smile. “Then I’ll consider it our first date.” She put out her hand and the doc looked at it, turned it over to review her palm, and caught her eyeing him.
“Are you bribing me?” he said.
“Can you be bribed?”
Pam was used to negotiating. Nate could verify. He was the one who’d stopped what amounted to her prostituting at the Buckeye. The new houses of their marriage were castles compared to that motel. No wall-to-wall would ever be the spongy, water-logged carpet of Unit Eight, no shower curtain would spore mold in twenty-four hours like the plastic in Unit Two, no den would have walls so thin as Unit One where they’d timed their moans to the announcer: “This…is…Jeo-pardy!” that her mother watched on the tiny black and white in the Rental Office.
Indefensible, using Hal to bail out, but Mother had always said, “Use what’s at hand.” She’d meant cleaning or half-ass solutions to common breakdowns in the units before Nate came along and applied his know-how. Mother crowned him the Buckeye Motel Handy Man.
As they walked the hall, the doc continued his assessment. “How had Nate’s, well, willingness, his rescue, reduce you to—“
“-- reduce me to someone who’d stab her own son? The man lifted me from the sludge of the Buckeye Motel and that doesn’t seem right, but does logic rule your life? When do good things ever stay good? If you’re happy you better start packing, because after the peak it’s all downhill.”
Pam tugged the doctor’s lapel to bring his ear to her mouth and whispered: “I’ve lived at the bottom of downhill, where numb is the order of the day, numb with cream and two sugars, please.”
He was the kind of up-and-comer who wore a sports jacket, probably hoping to impress, and her buttonholing made them both pause because he stumbled on her shoe and then apologized for mis-stepping.
She started walking away from him, surrounded by the hospital brightness that actually hurt her skin, hoping she moved in the direction of Hal. Aloud she marveled, “My children are growing older than I ever thought they would.” There was no other way to say it: she felt touchy.
The doctor, matching her steps, said, “Capable as lion cubs.”
She nodded. “Soon they’ll be able to catch their own food.”
She could sift evidence in the manner of any TV show detective, and she knew as well as this psychiatrist that Nate had left them, or more accurately, left her.
A police officer stood guard over Hal’s door, but the psychiatrist must have outranked him because they showed each other identification and exchanged nods. Then the doc shouldered the weight of the door for her. Beneath his shelter, she ducked and smelled his deodorant, his sweat, the wintry tweed of his jacket.
“Just for a minute,” he said.
One in a pile of countless cautions she’d heard her whole life.
“Look where that child’s head lies,” she whispered. “Pillowcase whiter than any we laundered at the Buckeye.”
Earlier she’d run a butter knife into his stomach. Some surgeon repaired her screw-up, but her son would have scars. She’d be a moth across his memory every time he dressed or undressed, whenever he bared his belly to a mirror or a lover.
Time was leaking like water through her cupped hands. Some evaporated into thin air, some of it would stay lost, that’s just how it was. To Pam it felt like closing in on ten o’clock at the Buckeye Motel, where Mother insisted ten in the morning was check-out for every last unit, no exceptions.
Her son looked angelic. Pam was hardly needed here.
She turned to the doctor. “Do you think I could have a cup of coffee?” She had him by the lapel again. “I spotted a machine on our way down the hall.”
He jingled change in his pants pocket. “Cream and two sugars?”
“You were listening.”
He shrugged and blushed all the way into his open shirt collar.
How easily the old Buckeye banter fell from her lips.
The doctor’s exit hushed the door closed as Pam knelt next to Hal’s bed. The policeman stepped inside to guard in the doc’s absence. He stood like some silent Indian, barring the door with his big body. She whispered, “Darling?” but they must have sedated Hal because he went on dreaming his young boy dreams.
Between Pam’s fingers the hospital sheet felt starched. Hal’s pillow slip was cool against her cheek. She rested her head beside her boy’s, and her breathing matched his. The whole world slowed. She thought maybe now she could sleep, but here, this doctor was walking in with coffee spit into cardboard from a machine while the guard exited. The doctor’s questions had shaken Pam’s puzzle box so pieces rubbed up against those they were never meant to touch.
She reached for the cup with trembling fingers, and sipped. “I’ve tried to keep it all separate,” she said. And before he could psycho-analyze that she said, “What time is it?”
The doctor smiled, his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels like the hospital was a ship at sea. “It’s tomorrow, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Another day,” she said, her voice full of laissez-faire attitude. Then she straightened to attention. “Who’ll get them off to school?”
“We’ll give the girls a doctor’s note. Let them take a sick day.”
“Will I get a note?”
“Do you feel you need a day off?”
“Who would I give it to?” She laughed. “Nate?”
The doctor’s nod and his wacky smile acknowledged life’s jilting accidents. Then his expression sobered. “We can’t let you back home just yet, Pam.”
“Where will I go?” she said.
Hal stirred under his sheets, not waking, just resettling, but the doc pantomimed sweep, sweep with his hand. They left Hal in his hospital cocoon and stood in the hall. Waking would be scary for him, she thought. He’d maybe dismiss mother-with-knife as nightmare until his hands scrabbled to the bandage on his middle. She wanted to tell him, “When you bleed, I bleed,” but she knew that was no reason to give an eight year-old boy, so she said it to the doctor instead.
“When my children bleed, I bleed.”
“You must be carrying a lot of pain.” His understanding nod irked her.
“Don’t you blame me?” she said.
“I sure as hell do.” Nate, her wild-eyed, fuming husband, blew Pam and the doctor apart from their whispering. “Are you out of your fucking mind, Pam? Our own boy. What – are – you - doing?”
He twisted her by both her elbows, where she was used to him grabbing and shaking her, but the doc leapt in and shouldered Nate away. The three of them splayed against the cold wall, laminated brick, something industrial and clean, material good for a contemporary hearth, Pam thought.
“Everybody, take five here,” the doc said. His dark hair messed his forehead. Nate had evoked from him a breathlessness that Pam found a little sexy.
“Take your own five,” Nate said. His rough knuckles were ready.
Poor doc didn’t know what hit him. The nurses stood, knotted at their station, with charts held to their chests, and watched.
Pam said, “Are you fighting over me?”
“Fuck, no,” Nate shouted. “You think I’m crazy as you?”
The Florence Nightingales swooped forward in their green scrubs. The doctor pinched his nose to stop the bleeding.
“Don’t nurses wear white anymore?” Pam said.
“Mom?” Hal’s voice, weak as water, pulled them all back.
Nate beat her to the door, put out his hand and bloodied her blouse, his fingerprints always on her. “You stay. No fucking way are you near him.”
“But he’s calling me.”
“In a minute he’ll know better, when I tell him what’s what.”
“Like you could roll truth around in your mouth without spitting.”
Nate slipped into Hal’s room and the door sealed closed. The hinges were hushed with some lubricant and the weight of the door managed on slow release.
As smoothly as Nate stole in, that easily he could steal Hal away. The guard hadn’t even moved during the fist fight.
Pam put her ear to the door, heard Nate through the wood. He sounded muted, calm, fatherly.
“Everybody has shitty stuff from their childhood,” he was saying. “You can’t let it rule you, pal.”
He’d said the same to her years ago at the Buckeye Motel. On a recent drive past there, Pam had seen that the placard beneath the neon Buckeye sign still read Color TV, king size beds, phones in every room, as if these things were hallmarks of luxury. Her mother said it wasn’t her fault the place deteriorated once crud took hold. An old television ad for cleaning, the White Tornado, popped into her head.
“What’s past can cast a long shadow,” the doc said. He touched a gauze pad to his mouth and stood next to her.
“And my children should suffer because of that?’
“Should you?”
“Going home with Nate’s not the worst that could happen.”
The doc gave her the most incredulous look, as if to say all his hard work with her this whole long night, and now she was buckling? She knew he was thinking they were back at square one.
“I mean for Hal, not me.”
That eased the startle around his eyes.
“Understand, I’m not giving him up. He’s just better off with his dad. For now.”
The doc nodded. “The police will need you for a while anyway.”
She gave him a jangled look. She felt it on her face and kept it there because it might work in her favor.
“For a statement, at least.”
“I thought that was your job, what this,” she waved her hands, “was all about. You mean you haven’t been recording me?”
The doc gave her a colluding smile and a shrug that helped reset the shoulders of his jacket. “They called me in to assess, so I’ve assessed. You’re not a scary woman with harm up her sleeve. Confused, sure.” He gestured to Hal’s closed door and then used this arm to direct her down the hall. “As Nate says, some shitty stuff from your youth.”
Her youth, when she’d learned plenty of games courtesy of the Buckeye. She thought they were all handling her with kid gloves, so why not play the mental case part to the hilt? She poured on her bland face for bluffing. “I’ll do whatever’s asked,” she said. Now, how many times had that thought wormed through her blond head? Once the doc brought her to the precinct, if they allowed a phone call, she’d ring Dana to remind her that things learned early, you never outgrew their usefulness.
Dana might guess, “Survival?” and Pam would counter, “No, cleaning,” and Dana, always pronouncing the last clever word, would say, “Same thing.” In parroting both sides of the conversation, Pam eliminated her need for Dana at all.
Instead she’d request permission to check on the girls. No, her Katie and Tina were sleepyheads; she wouldn’t wake them yet. But when she did call, she’d remind them to feed and care for Queenie and her pups, to watch when they let them out and to count them once the pups returned to their rusty smelling blankets.
“Make sure each is accounted for,” she’d tell them. She’d sound like her own mother giving directions about linens, ash trays, ice buckets and other items that weren’t bolted down at the Buckeye. “You’d be surprised what people will try and walk off with,” Mother always said. The Buckeye was Pam’s excuse, her schtick, her story. She imagined the whole motel lifted off its Highway Nine foundation, roots ripped and shaggy with clods of earth and weeds she knew intimately. Without it, where was she?
______________________________
Donna D. Vitucci works as a development associate, raising funds for local non-profits. Her fiction and poems have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and journals including: Hawaii Review, Front Porch Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Night Train, Storyglossia, Corium, and Meridian. Her novel manuscript, FEED MATERIALS, was judged a finalist for the Bellwether Prize, 2010.
