Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“How was it today?” Estelle asked, too brightly.

Freddie sat silently as if the question were much too complicated to be answered. Finally, he said, “We’re going to put on a play.”

“Yes, I think you told me that,” Estelle said. “What is it? What’s the play?”

“We’re all writing it. Or they are. The kids and the counselors.” He gave her his best sour look. “It’s called Wonderful World. ”

“And who do you play?” Estelle asked.

“Me? I play Mr. Scary.”

“Mr. Scary? Who’s that? And what do you do?”

“I stand up at the beginning of the play and I recite my fear monologue and scare everybody.”

“Well, that’s nice,” Estelle said, trying to put the best face on things. “Do you have it? The monologue? Could you read it to me?”

“Yeah,” Freddie said. “I got it right here with me.” He heaved himself upward, trying to get his hand into his trouser pocket. After much poking, he pulled out a grimy sheet of paper. Her grandson unfolded the paper and began to read. His delivery sounded like a voice-over in a horror movie. “ Fear, ” Freddie intoned. “What is fear? You and I live with, interact with, fear. We know fear, but we shun it. But what if one were to embrace fear? Not to live with it, but to be it, to become fear. In our everyday lives we divorce ourselves from fear . We tell ourselves it is distant , it is unreal , it is abstract . But this is not so. Fear is tangible , more tangible than you or I. What if a man became fear? Where would fear live ? He would dwell among us, hidden but not unseen. Who would fear be? For what would fear strive? What would be the face of fear ? Ha ha ha ha.”

“Very good, Freddie. But, well, that’s a strange monologue to give to a twelve-year-old,” Estelle said, after recovering herself. “The words are awfully big. What does it have to do with a wonderful world?”

“It’s like what you have to get out of the way? Before the world is wonderful? And yeah, well, that’s what they gave me,” Freddie said, slumping down in the car. “The counselors wrote it. That’s what Mr. Scary says. I’ve got to memorize it. Also we made T-shirts today. I mean, we wrote words on T-shirts. So they became ours.”

“What did you write?”

Freddie held his shirt up. With laundry marker, he had written GOT HERPES? on his. “Well,” Estelle said, “that’s not very nice.”

“It’s supposed to be a public health warning,” Freddie said. “A wake-up call.”

“And the other kids, did they throw food at you?” Estelle asked.

“Not today,” Freddie said. “Today was a good day. They liked how I did the Mr. Scary monologue.”

“Freddie,” Estelle asked, “do you really have to laugh at the end of that? It’s a little corny.”

“The ha ha ha ha part? I added that,” her grandson told her. “That’s my contribution.” He took out his phone gadget and began tapping letters.

“Are you texting someone?”

“No,” Freddie said. “I’m writing a story.”

“Oh, good,” Estelle said. “What’s it about?”

“The underworld,” he told her.

Sometimes, on certain days when Estelle had found herself sitting on the front stoop of the house, her coffee cup cooling between her palms, and the morning breeze riffling her hair, Freddie still eating his breakfast cereal inside, she would imagine that the way her grandson had turned out, with his sorrow and obesity and malice, had its own logic. But then at other times, particularly when the breeze stopped, time halted as well. And when that happened, Estelle was no longer sitting on the front stoop with her coffee but was back there , in time, in Part One, taking her daughter, Isabel, to a guidance counselor, and then to that killingly expensive, pill-dispensing psychiatrist in the circular building with curved interior walls that made Estelle think of a gigantic brain, and they, all of them, the brilliant professionals and Estelle herself, were trying to talk Izzy out of the sullen and then manic rages — shoplifting, a stolen car, drug-taking, car wrecks, God knows what kinds of sex, and with whom — that had overtaken her and turned her into this oblivious bingeing adolescent force-of-nature who’d actually driven once into a parked fire truck. Well, at those moments nothing had its own logic, or it had the wrong kind of logic, because you couldn’t talk anybody out of anything, could you? No. How many young women had managed to do what her daughter had accomplished? Had smashed a stolen car into a fire truck? An achievement. Her teenage accomplices had fled, but Isabel had stayed there, dazed behind the wheel but boldly confident that such an excellent accident gave her special monster status. Who else, among Estelle’s acquaintances, had also hit, though not very hard, a pedestrian in a parking lot? Her daughter, Isabel, had, and had been unrepentant. He shouldn’t have been there , she had said of her victim, a retired dentist. In her taste for mayhem, Isabel had truly been Squirrel’s child. So there was a logic to her actions, of a sort.

Estelle thought that her own life had veered between long patches of drudgery, weeks and months filing claims in an insurance office during the day and then racing home to cook dinner for her children and to put them to bed, typical single-mom scheduling, and then, the next job, working in the front office at the veterinarian hospital where she’d met Randall, accompanied by a choral background of barking. Yes, all that domesticity. And classes taken at the community college, including art history, her new passion. Then other stretches of time superimposed themselves on the dull ones, the moments of high drama, first the ones staged by Squirrel and then the ones staged by her daughter. Her two sons, Carl and Robert, seemed frightened by their little sister and had landed jobs after school at grocery and hardware stores; poor souls, solid citizens before their time, they almost didn’t count, those boys.

But Isabel! Even on medications, she drank anything, she took anything, she went anywhere at night; she seemed to have no home place except the deep nothingness that she sought out. In Squirrel, those traits had been charming, for a while — they looked good on a boy — but with Isabel they were as charmless as her scowling face. There was really something demonic about her, almost bestial. Estelle imagined her as she saw her back then: twisted up with injuries, avoiding eye contact, the blond hair matted and unwashed, her jeans caked with dirt, her fierce young woman’s sexuality attracting the worst of the boys who gleefully hovered around her waiting for her next bold move.

One night, one of many late nights, Isabel had come home at three in the morning. Estelle had awakened out of a shallow and dream-infected sleep and gone into Isabel’s room, where Isabel had thrown herself on the bed in the dark. She was muttering, and after Estelle switched on the lamp, she noticed that the pillow where her daughter rested her head had turned gray at the indentation. Isabel never showered anymore, and she smelled like a feral child.

“Where have you been?” Estelle asked her, trying not to yell.

“I’ve been inside and outside,” Isabel said. “I’ve covered the world.” She giggled. “Like that paint? That covers the world? I’ve done that.”

“Jesus. What am I going to do with you?” Estelle said to herself, to the walls. “At least get undressed. At least get some sleep. And you’re grounded,” she said, automatically.