T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

The smell of fresh coffee and home fries made me realize how hungry I was and I ordered the kind of breakfast I used to have in college after a night of excess — salt, sugar and grease, in quantity — just to open my pores. While I ate, I made my way through both newspapers, item by item, because this was luxurious, kingly, the tables clean, the place brightly lit and warm to the point of steaming with the bustle of the waitresses and the rain at the windows like a plague. Nobody said a word to me. Nobody even looked at me, but for my waitress. She was middle-aged, wedded to her uniform, her hair dyed shoe-polish black. “More coffee?” she asked for the third or fourth time, no hurry, no rush, just an invitation. I glanced at my watch and couldn’t believe it was only nine-thirty.

That was the thing about taking a day off, the way the time reconfigured itself and how you couldn’t help comparing any given moment with what you’d be doing at work. At work, I wouldn’t have eaten yet, wouldn’t even have reached the coffee break — Jim, stop!

No, no! — and my eyelids would have weighed a hundred tons each. I thought about driving down to the ocean to see what the surf looked like under the pressure of the storm — not that I was thinking about surfing; I hadn’t been surfing more than a handful of times since the baby was born. It was just that the day was mine and I wanted to fill it. I made my way down through Topanga Canyon, the commuter traffic dissipated by now, and I saw how the creek was tearing at the banks and there were two or three places where there was water on the road and the soft red dough of the mud was like something that had come out of a mold. There was nobody on the beach but me. I walked along the shore till the brim of my baseball cap was sodden and the legs of my jeans as heavy as if they’d just come out of the washing machine.

I drove back up the canyon, the rain a little worse, the flooding more obvious and intense, but it wasn’t anything really, not like when the road washes out and you could be driving one minute and the next flailing for your life in a chute full of piss-yellow water.

There was a movie at two I was interested in, but since it was only just past twelve and I couldn’t even think about lunch after the Lumberjack’s Special I’d had for breakfast, I went back to the condo, parked the car and walked down the street, getting wetter and wetter and enjoying every minute of it, to a bar I knew. The door swung in on a denseness of purpose, eight or nine losers lined up on their barstools, the smell of cut lime and the sunshine of the rum, a straight shot of Lysol from the toilet in back. It was warm. Dark. A college basketball game hovered on the screen over the cash register.

“A beer,” I said, and then clarified by specifying the brand.

I didn’t get drunk. That would have been usual, and I didn’t want to be usual. But I did have three beers before I went to the movie and after the movie I felt a vacancy in my lower reaches where lunch should have been and so I stopped at a fast-food place on my way to pick up the baby. They got my order wrong. The employees were glassy-eyed. The manager was nowhere to be seen. And I was thirty-five minutes late for the baby. Still, I’d had my day, and when I got home I fed the baby her Cream of Wheat, opened a beer, put on some music and began chopping garlic and dicing onions with the notion of concocting a marinara sauce for my wife when she got home. Thoughts of the following morning, of Radko and what he might think or expect, never entered my mind. Not yet.

All was well, the baby in her crib batting at the little figurines in the mobile over her head (the figurines personally welded to the wires by Clover’s hippie mother so that there wasn’t even the faintest possibility the baby could get them lodged in her throat), the sauce bubbling on the stove, the rain tapping at the windows. I heard Clover’s key in the door. And then she was there with her hair kinked from the rain and smelling like everything I’d ever wanted and she was asking me how my day had gone and I said, “Fine, just fine.”

Then it was morning again and the same scene played itself out — Clover stutter-stepping to the bathroom, the baby mewling, rain whispering under the soundtrack — and I began to calculate all over again. It was Thursday. Two more days to the weekend. If I could make it to the weekend, I was sure that by Monday, Monday at the latest, whatever was wrong with me, this feeling of anger, hopelessness, turmoil, whatever it was, would be gone. Just a break. I just needed a break, that was all. And Radko. The thought of facing him, of the way he would mold the drooping dog-like folds of his Slavic flesh around the suspicion in his eyes while he told me he was docking me a day’s pay and expected me to work overtime to make up for yesterday, was too much to hold on to. Not in bed. Not now.

But then the toilet flushed, the baby squalled and the overhead light went on. “It’s six-fifteen,” my wife informed me.

The evening before, after we’d dined on my marinara sauce with porcini mushrooms and Italian-style turkey sausage over penne pasta, in the interval before she put the baby down for the night, while the dishwasher murmured from the kitchen and we lingered over a second glass of Chianti, she told me she was thinking of changing her name. “What do you mean?” I was more surprised than angry, but I felt the anger come up in me all the same. “My name’s not good enough for you? Like it was my idea to get married in the first place?”

She had the baby in her lap. The baby was in high spirits, grinning her toothless baby grin and snatching for the wineglass my wife held just out of reach. “You don’t have to get nasty about it. It’s not your name that’s the problem — it’s mine. My first name.”

“What’s wrong with Clover?” I said, and even as I said it, I knew how stupid I sounded. She was Clover. I could close my eyes and she was Clover, go to Africa and bury myself in mud and she’d still be Clover. Fine. But the name was a hippie affectation of her hippie parents — they were glassblowers, with their own gallery — and it was insipid, I knew that, down deep. They might as well have named her Dandelion or Fescue.

“I was thinking of changing it to Cloris.” She was watching me, her eyes defiant and insecure at the same time. “Legally.”

I saw her point — she was a legal secretary, studying to be a lawyer, and Clover just wouldn’t fly on a masthead — but I hated the name, hated the idea. “Sounds like something you clean the toilet with,” I said.

She shot me a look of hate.

“With bleach in it,” I said. “With real scrubbing power.”

But now, though I felt as if I’d been crucified and wanted only to sleep for a week, or till Monday, just till Monday, I sat up before she could lift the baby from the crib and drop her on the bed, and in the next moment I was in the bathroom myself, staring into the mirror.

As soon as she left I was going to call Radko. I would tell him the baby was worse, that we’d been in the hospital all night. And if he asked what was wrong with her I wasn’t going to equivocate because equivocation — any kind of uncertainty, a tremor in the voice, a tonal shift, playacting — is the surest lie detector. Leukemia, that was what I was going to tell him. “The baby has leukemia.”

This time I waited till I was settled into the booth at the diner and the waitress with the shoe-polish hair had got done fussing over me, the light of recognition in her eyes and a maternal smile creasing her lips — I was a regular, two days in a row — before I called in. And when Radko answered, the deepest consonant-battering pall of suspicion lodged somewhere between his glottis and adenoids, I couldn’t help myself. “The baby,” I said, holding it a beat, “the baby…