Elizabeth Massie - Naked, on the Edge

“Can’t hear it,” Mom said. She drew on the cigarette. The smoke blew back out in the wind of a violent cough. She found her voice and said, “Just a little volume, honey.”

Elliott stepped to the tiny black and white set on Mom’s dresser, and poked at the volume button until the chattering voices were uncomfortably loud. Mom said, “That’s just fine, Ellie.”

“Anything else?” There was a cat turd on the bottom of Elliott’s foot. He looked at the bottom of it but couldn’t see except that it looked dark and it felt soft and warm. “You need anything else?”

“Teacher come yet?”

“No. Mrs. Anderson won’t be here until two.”

Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the tube on an oxygen mask. She let the smoke out then said, “I just can’t rest good today. I’m hurting. My back, my heart is just hammering like it wants to come out. Lay with me ’til I’m asleep.”

I thought you wanted to watch T.V., Elliott thought, but didn’t say. He went to the bed and lay down beside his mother. The mattress was lumpy. When his mother turned to him, her breath was familiar and strong.

“I feel a little better, honey.” One side of her mouth went up in what might have been a resigned smile. It looked as if even her face hurt her.

Mom always called Elliott honey. Never “Wee-wee Boy", or “Poop-Man” like the kids at J.E.B. Stewart Middle School did. Elliott’s mother loved him, even as she was dying. And she had been dying since Elliott had been in third grade. Her heart was bad, she told him. She couldn’t breathe very well because she was born with bad lungs. Her stomach made juices that were poison. Her muscles were giving up inside her skin and her nerves had so many short-circuits the doctors couldn’t even find them all. Month after month she begged him to stay with her and not go to school. Daddy had insisted, getting Elliott onto the school bus when he could. But most of the time Daddy left for work before the school bus came, and three days out of five, Elliott would stay with his mother because if she died when he was at school, what would he do then?

Elliott awoke to the tune of All My Children . He had slept next to his mother for almost two hours. It was time to find something for them to eat for lunch. At two o’clock, the teacher, Mrs. Anderson, would come.

Mom didn’t eat much of the bean with bacon soup Elliott fixed. She let Elliott wheel her to the bathroom but she would not eat with him in the living room. She insisted on a tray in bed, and then only sipped a couple of spoonfuls and ate the chips Elliott had put in a bowl for her. She didn’t want the Dr. Pepper he’d poured for her. She wanted Sprite. There wasn’t any Sprite, so Elliott told her he would make a list for Daddy when he came home. He could go into town and get Sprite for tomorrow. Mom settled down with another daytime show, and Elliott took the tray to the kitchen, ate his own soup and Dr. Pepper in the living room, and looked through the mail again.

He opened the bills and put them back on top of the console television in a pile for his father. He slid the paper cover off of one of the telephone books, and stopped.

The cover was not the normal photograph of the mountains or a rolling cattle farm, as the phone company was prone to use. It was, instead, a painting. A reproduction of a childish watercolor, splashed in its brilliant colors across the book’s broad cover. The painting was of a bright blue-green ocean, and a sailboat with smiling people all lined up together on the deck. White sparks flashed in the water; the sky was pink and yellow. At the bottom of the painting was the title, “The Adventure on the Sea” by Mosby Paulson.

Elliott cleared his throat, feeling the raw pain of his own illness, his own poor blood and bad lungs and short-circuited nerves.

Inside the front cover was a description of the painting.

“Mosby Paulson is a sixth grade student at J.E.B. Stewart Middle School. She is in Mrs. Connie Pugh’s art class this year, and entered the phone book competition along with over one hundred middle school students throughout the county. All the entries were judged by a panel of artists in the area, and Mosby’s work, ‘The Adventure on the Sea’, was selected as the winner for its lively depiction of movement, brave use of effective colors, and originality of shape.”

Elliott looked back at the cover. Happy people smiling, going somewhere on a silly sailboat in a bright sea. Going places that Elliott would never know, places he would only see as return addresses on the mail that came daily to his dented mailbox.

He could have done better. If he’d been in Mrs. Pugh’s art class this year, he would have entered the contest. And he could have won. He could have had his art somewhere besides on the door of the greasy refrigerator.

“Ellie?”

“What?”

“Can’t find my lighter. It fell down under the bed, I think.”

Elliott went into his mother’s bedroom and dug under the bed while his mother coughed above him. In the shadows beneath the bed, one of the cats blinked at him. He found the lighter on top of a dust-softened sock then crawled back out.

“Thank you, honey.” Mom took the lighter, pulled a cigarette from the pack on the little table by the bed, flicked it three times before it would catch, and then settled back into the pillow with a long, raspy draw.

Elliott watched his mother. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks sharp and skeletal. Her nose was runny and her hair was thin and short. The cigarette smoldered in her mouth, the tip glowing and dimming as she sucked on it and eased the smoke out through her lips without even taking the cigarette out.

“Mom?”

“Huh?” The cigarette did not come out; the word was muffled.

“The new phone books are in.”

“So?”

“Thought you’d want to know.”

The tip of the cigarette grew longer, glowing, smoldering. Then she said, “Our number ain’t in it, is it? They put an unlisted number in there I’ll sue ’em, I tell you that.”

“No, we ain’t in there.”

The ash on the end of the cigarette trembled.

Elliott wondered how long until it fell to the bed covers.

“Good then. You go watch your T.V. until the teacher comes. I’m tired.”

The ash wobbled. If it fell to the bed, it would catch the covers on fire. People who smoked in bed sometimes burned themselves to death, Elliott had heard.

“Go on now,” said Mom.

Elliott went on.

Mrs. Anderson knocked on the door just after two o’clock. She was a young woman, hoping to get a permanent job with the county as a reading specialist. Now she was teaching two students on homebound, Elliott and a boy named Richard who lived on the other side of the county and who had polio real bad because his parents never got him his vaccination.

Elliott opened the door and Mrs. Anderson put on her happy-to-see-you smile. Sometimes, when Elliott heard her car out front, he would watch her get out of her car and come up the walk. She never wore that smile when she thought he wasn’t watching.

“Elliott, how are you today?” Mrs. Anderson’s eyebrows went up. They were funny

eyebrows, drawn thin with a black pencil. Mrs. Anderson always smelled strongly of perfume, as if she didn’t like the smells of Elliott’s house.

“Okay.”

Mrs. Anderson came into the living room, her huge, unbuttoned white spring coat billowing out when she moved.

She removed the coat and hung it on the door knob of the closet. She studied the sofa a moment, and then sat down with her briefcase in her lap. She said she liked cats but Elliott knew better.

Elliott sat on the lawn chair, the only other piece of furniture in the living room except the console television. His teeth found a loose piece of skin on his lower lip and began to chew.