2 Written by Melanny Cowley

    Glen is early. He wants to take me to Righteous Urban Barbeque on 23rd. It’s run by a so-called celebrity chef, Paul Kirk. Fine, I say. I know that names are important to Glen, and barbeque is not, but I say nothing.
    At the restaurant, Glen doesn’t order wine. Instead he wants to know if I think Rudy Giuliani will make a good president. While he asks me this he reaches up and fingers his black hair ever so slightly forward over his receding hairline. He does this a lot, but I don’t think he’s aware of it.
    “I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t.
    “You mean you have no opinion about Rudy Giuliani or any presidential candidate in particular?” he asks.
    “I mean I have no opinion at all. Is that so terrible?” Glen raises his head to scrutinize me, and his glasses reflect in the light, so that I can’t see his eyes, like I am being calculated by an alien.
    “No, that isn’t terrible,” he says, and his head ducks down and his eyes reappear with a flash.
    “It’s just that without opinions, there isn’t much to talk about, is there? I know you don’t like talking about your past.” He says this with a great deal of tenderness, as though he is approaching a strange dog.
    “It isn’t that I don’t like to talk about it,” I say quickly, “It’s just that my past was…. violent.”
    “Oh,” he says, and my cheeks flare. Our food comes: ribs and brisket with bright red stickiness oozing onto the plates. Glen picks up his rack of ribs.
    “I just want to go for a drive,” I say.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”  Feel speed under us, you know. Better than sex. Much better. Your foot hard against the pedal. The road vibrating. I can feel it. Then, I’ll reach over, and with the jerk of my forearm, I can send us off.
    “You know I would like to talk about it with you. Maybe you could tell me about your response to spaghetti.”
    I see spaghetti in my mind, and feel my stomach drop and churn like a loose wheel. I still see Jesse’s face at dinner in Boise four years ago. The way he eyed it with suspicion, and I reached across the table and patted his hand and said, “Don’t worry, it bothers me too.” And the sick way Jesse looked at me, as though he hated me for seeing that part of him, as though I had become the spaghetti. I wanted to yell, “Quit pretending it didn’t happen! She made you wear it! She made you eat it! You tried to vomit and she just kept shoving! I remember, and I carry it, too!”
    But I can say none of this to Glen, who eyes me as an interesting specimen and refers to my phobia as a “response.” I want to talk to Glen the boyfriend, but only Glen the aspiring psychologist can be found.
I tell him that my parents died on the slick back roads of Idaho driving home from a weekend away, celebrating their anniversary. I tell him our grandmother “Nana” took us all in, and that she was mentally disturbed, and that all three of us became emancipated when we turned sixteen. I don’t tell him about all the wooden spoons that were broken over our heads, or about the time she burned Maggie’s hand with the cigarette lighter for talking back, or how Jesse got the worst of it because he was the oldest or maybe because he was a boy or maybe because he talked back the most, or maybe because of all those reasons.
    “Do you see Nana anymore?” Glen asks.
    “She died six months ago.”
    Nana died of a heart attack when Glen and I had first started dating. Three days went by before anyone missed her. They found her face down in the bathtub. Jesse bought my airfare back to Idaho. The mountains, much grander than I ever remembered, startled me as Maggie drove the three of us to the yellow house. I sat in the back seat, my hands under me, growing sweatier as I concentrated on the landscape, the yellow wild grass, the brown sage. I recognized the mountain that sloped a great length, as though it took up one side of the world. The fat and jagged peak pointed its perpetually stubby finger to the sky. The mountains I had grown up looking at, taken for granted, provided a comfort and also a scare. Foreign and familiar, the landscape reached out to me; my gut pushed it away.
    The pine tree in the front used to be small, but it had grown to a great height, at least thirty feet. At least, I thought, something has flourished here.
“I think the house shrunk,” Jesse said when we walked in.
It was like being at the seven dwarves’ house. The cabinet Nana threw Maggie into looked ridiculously small, innocent and charming. The ceiling hovered over us as though it had fallen. Even the floor, one tiny square, mocked what we had been through, what we had feared by returning here.
We tried to sort through the junk. It was knick-knacks, mostly.  A collection of cheap porcelain dolls, dozens of wicker baskets, two wooden cowboys that couldn’t be worth more than a dime at a second hand store. It took forty-five minutes for us to realize that we didn’t want anything, that we didn’t want, or need to be here at all.
    “Well, what about the photo album?” I asked.
    “I don’t want it,” Maggie said quickly. Jesse shook his head, his pale buzzed hair glinting a bit with sweat.
    “I’ll take it, then,” I said, feeling morbid for wanting it, “We were kids, you know. This is what we were.”
    That seemed to encompass everything I couldn’t say. There was one realtor in town: Bart Simms. He was a rolly guy, kind of bald. He always gave me wet willeys in junior high. Jesse called him on his cell phone and he showed up at the house, offered to take us out for ice cream at Arctic Circle while we signed papers. We piled into his car, and I ended up in the front seat. Bart drove an ’84 silver Mazda with such an awful crack in the windshield. I was certain he had slammed his head into it.
    “How’d you crack it?” I asked him. Guilt and excitement fluttered my chest.
    “Oh that,” he said, “Well, I got drunk one night and slammed the brakes, you know. That was stupid.” His voice dropped and he looked away.
    “Don’t be embarrassed,” I said. But of course, he was.

Posted on November 7th, 2008 in Fiction