T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Though she isn’t really conscious of it, in a way she’s laying claim to her turf, because why should she feel like a stranger in her own daughter’s kitchen? She’s rearranged the cups on the hooks beneath the cupboard, facing in rather than out, run the dishwasher, mopped the tile floor and then mopped it again to get rid of the streaks and adjusted the radio to a station she can hum along to. Cat Stevens — the Muslim apologist — is singing “Peace Train” at the moment, and he was preceded by the Carpenters and before them whoever did “Up Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.” The bacon pops and sizzles in a gratifying way. She pokes it with a fork, then removes it piece by piece to drain on a paper towel. Turning down the heat under the pan, she mixes in tomatoes, peppers and onions for huevos rancheros , to which she’ll add a generous shake of Tabasco once the eggs firm up. And then, when Alma has gone off to work and Ed is propped up in front of the TV with his eggs and bacon and his morning Bloody Mary, she’ll preheat the oven and separate the eggs for the cake batter.

Upstairs, in the bathroom, Alma shucks her robe and steps into the shower. For a moment steam rises around her, but the shower’s never hot enough, some glitch with the water heater, and now, suddenly, it goes cold. Lurching back and away from the icy spray, the shock electric, instant gooseflesh, she raps her elbow sharply on the aluminum handle of the shower door and lets out a clipped reverberant curse. Her mother must be running hot water, filling the teapot, or God forbid, switching on the dishwasher, in which case the rest of the shower will be an exercise in masochism, her feet cold against the tiles, cold spray splashing her ankles. . she’s about to pound the wall and shout out to her when the hot water suddenly comes back and she’s ducking her head under the stream and spinning a quick pirouette to distribute the warmth. Though she does her best thinking in the shower — something to do with the calming effect of trickling water and the opening of the pores — she nonetheless strictly limits herself to five minutes, regulating the time on the diver’s watch Tim gave her for her birthday last year. It’s hardly enough to get her hair shampooed, rinsed, conditioned, rinsed again and combed out with the spray-on detangler — especially when the flow goes stone cold for fifteen seconds — but she won’t waste water, not during the ongoing and eternal drought brought on by deforestation, global warming and user demand that grows exponentially by the day because the developers have to turn a profit and the condos keep on coming. Guilt — that’s what defines her usage. Guilt over being alive, needing things, consuming things, turning the tap or lighting the flame under the gas burner.

The minute hand shifts, the seconds beat on, and she rinses for the second time and shuts down both handles with nine seconds to spare. Shivering, she towels off briskly before running Tim’s electric shaver over her legs and digging out a dry towel to wrap her hair in. All the while, even through the steam and the cloying scent of the various perfumes the manufacturers have somehow managed to work into their allegedly unscented hair-care products, she smells incinerated flesh, and what do they cure bacon with anyway? Salt and carcinogens, what else? Faintly, through the misted-over slab of the bathroom door, she can hear her mother, in the kitchen, singing along with the easy-listening station.

The night before, just as she’d been sitting down to dinner with a film she’d picked up at the video store on her way home from work (keep it simple, stir-fry and brown rice, Madame Bovary , in the Jean Renoir original), the doorbell had rung. She’d hit the stop button just as Emma, busty, square-shouldered, with the little puckered mouth and razor eyebrows of the thirties, was coming on to the country doctor in a bucolic farmyard with its lowing cattle and a cadre of piglets straining at the teat, thinking it was somebody selling something, only to pull back the door on her mother and gaunt alcoholic stepfather, both of them cradling sacks of groceries. Her mother had insisted on cooking—“We’re both of us starved and you know how I hate road food”—and ten minutes later the three of them were standing in the tiny kitchen, she with sake on the rocks and her mother and Ed with tall glasses of vodka adulterated only by a splash of diet tonic and a paper-thin twist of lemon peel while her mother whipped up a quick spaghetti sauce, “Vegetarian for you, hon, eggplant, peppers and mushrooms, with some turkey sausage on the side for your father. Or Ed, I mean.”

It wasn’t until they were seated at the dining cum kitchen table and the third round of drinks had been poured, the stir-fry and rice folded into a Tupperware container and isolated in the back of the refrigerator for future reference and the pasta steaming on their plates, that her mother wondered aloud where Tim was. “Is he working late or what?” She cocked her head over the plate of spaghetti and gestured with her glass, the ice cubes softly clicking. “Everything okay between you?”

“Yes,” Alma said, feeling as if she were somehow evading the truth or the essence of it, though she wasn’t and she and Tim were, in fact, as close as they’d ever been, closer even. “Fine. He’s out on the island this week.”

Her stepfather — white-haired, bad-hipped, six years older than her mother but looking twice that — wound a skein of red-stained pasta around his fork, then set it down and asked, “How’s all that going? Good?”

She answered automatically, conscious of her mother’s eyes on her. “Yes, sure, of course. Never better.”

“Did you get the article I sent you? From the Sun ?” Her mother leaned in confidentially, her food untouched still, and this was her pattern, talk, drink, talk some more, and let the food go cold. The sausage she’d arranged to conform to the inner rim of the plate had been cut neatly in six or seven slices, but none of the slices had made the journey from plate to fork to mouth.

All at once, her mind went blank. Article? What article?

“The one about the protests? The picture showed your building — and you could see the window of your office there on the second floor — with, I don’t know, picketers out there with their signs?” Her mother shot a look at Ed, then came back to her. “You were mentioned I think three times, or four — was it four, Ed?”

Ed gave a vague nod. He was somewhere else altogether, his question— How’s all that going? — nothing more than an attempt to be sociable. He’d been the P.E. teacher at her mother’s school and they hadn’t married till Alma was a grad student. He barely knew her and knew Tim even more peripherally — he’d met him once, on one of his rare trips to the coast in the company of her mother, or maybe twice. He liked sports. Liked to talk about this team or the other, so-and-so’s batting average, the Diamondbacks’ need of pitching. Of birds, ecology, the ruination of the islands, the islands themselves, he knew next to nothing and what he knew was as vague and untroubling to him as what was going on in the former Yugoslavia or among the Dayaks of Borneo. She didn’t blame him. He was like anybody else, living in the world of society, commerce, TV, oblivion.

Her mother’s tone was defensive. “I circled your name. In blue. The blue pencil I use for my crosswords, I remember it distinctly. And don’t tell me I didn’t mail it — I’m not that far gone yet.”

“You did, Mom, thanks. I’m sure it’s around somewhere, probably at the office — I try to keep a file on each project, public response and whatnot, just for future reference. Not that anybody’d be interested.”