Stephen Dixon - Frog

Writes: “There once was a man. Was once. He was a big man. Thick neck, puffed-up pecks, six-feet-sex, puissant-plus.” Weak. Pulls it out. Turns it over to stick back in to type on. Something’s on the other side from another work he stopped. “‘Mrs. Simchik stinks,’ a boy said, and got whacked. ‘Don’t ever say the word—’” That was it. Doesn’t know what he planned to follow it. Couldn’t come up with anything, probably, besides the prose. Doesn’t know when he wrote it: last month, year; just ended up in the scrap pile. Weak. Weak. Throws it into the pail. New scrap paper in. “There was a woman. She was my mother. She’s, is. My old mother, mother of young. He went upstairs. Phoned her. I did. Went, up, phone, reached, dialed. ‘Mom, how are you?’ ‘Not feeling that great today, thank you for calling.’ ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ he said, What’s the matter? What’s up?’ for he heard it almost every time before, similar words, same tone, minor complaining, nothing good. ‘Well actually, now that you asked me, I’m dying. That’s what the report came back from with my doctor.’ How was he reacting when she said this? Shock, that’s all: ‘What! What!’ ‘I’m saying, that’s what Dr. Gladman said the report confirmed that came back from the lab. I’m not saying it well because it so upsets me. I took extensive tests. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to bother you. Your children, job, home, you’ve your own troubles. I had to work it out of him. Worm it out. I had to ask and ask and finally I said “What is it, it isn’t good, we both know that, I can feel it and you can see it and the tests and reports all prove it, isn’t that right? So tell me, I’m a good listener.”’ ‘You said this?’ I said. ‘Surely he said “No, you’re all wrong, Mrs. T.”’ ‘Surely he said yes, I was right. “Listen, Mrs. T.,” he said — he called me Rachel, actually, just as I sometimes call him Bill. Though he always calls me Rachel now. He’s very nice, very friendly. He said “If you want the truth, it doesn’t look good.”’ “This is terrible,’ I said; ‘what does one say? For one thing, that you go to someone else for another opinion, of course,’ and she said ‘I have,’ and we talked some more, I said I was coming right up to see her, called my older brother, he also hadn’t known, we’d meet at my mother’s, I took the train, three hours, cabbed to it, subway to her place from it, total of four hours, when I got there my brother answered the door and said he’d found her dead.”

Weak, weak, but suggests what’s on his mind. Mother then. When? Long time ago, try; when he was a boy, start. “He throws something — a hammer — was aiming for the closet with the tool chest on the floor next to it, the closet next to the breakfront with the opened tool chest on the floor, the tool chest on the floor of the closet next to the breakfront, I threw a hammer at the tool chest on the floor of the opened foyer closet but it went through the breakfront next to it. My folks were away for the weekend in Old Saybrook. Gil Dobb’s the resort was called. Gil, they said, served two-pound lobsters for lunch, inch-and-a-half thick veal chops for dinner, grew and cut flowers which he put in vases on the dining room tables every meal, ironed the tablecloth himself sometimes so it was done right, sold antiques in his antique barn, was a fagele whose longtime companion was rarely seen on the grounds and never ate at Gil’s table in the dining room. They went there every fall for their anniversary and my mother always came back with some of Gil’s antiques (hand-painted plates to hang, converted kerosene lamps, chamber pots, soup tureens, creamers, something else she liked to collect whose name he forgets — Toby mugs), his father with a big basket each of apples and pears and a few dozen freshly laid eggs. I was scared they’d punish me, my mother especially (my father would probably just call me a stupid kid and say what I’d done was only to be expected), since the breakfront was originally her mother’s and had some prized objects in it, none broken and many bought from Gil. But when they got home around dinnertime Sunday night—” No, weak, but just see what comes out by finishing it. Shouldn’t take long. “They came home the next night. He was worried the whole day. He was told by his brothers to go straight up to her and say he broke it. He did. She still had her coat on, his father had just set down a basket of fruit and asked the boys to help him with the rest of the things in the car. But he quickly told her. ‘Mom, the breakfront, look at it, I broke it.’ She looked, got on one knee, put her hand through the place where the glass had been — a quarter-section of the breakfront, he doesn’t know who took the broken glass out before his parents got home — and waved and said ‘Yo-hoo, here I am, how’s my baby boy?’”

Weak, uninteresting, ends up well for her though, but what else from then? She once took him and his sister Vera to see Santa Claus. This one’s stayed around; see where it leads. “Carla and George walked through a dimly lit corridor with their mother to get to the elevator to see Santa. Elves greeted them from behind reindeer and trees, some littler than he but with high grownup voices, one handed them each a wrapped present. An elf ran the elevator. It went straight up to Santaland, he thinks it was called. Christmasland. Toyland, it had to be.” The present was handed them right after they saw Santa. “They were the only ones in the elevator. It was decorated like a snowed-in log cabin. The elf hummed a tune to himself as the car rose. Was he instructed to or maybe even not to? This wasn’t in George’s mind then. A carol was being sung from somewhere in the car, but a different tune than the elf’s. He remembers his mother said this wasn’t just any old Santa they were going to but one they had to pay for. Hence the present. The corridor upstairs was also dimly lit and ended with a long line of waiting kids and their parents. They’d passed two other Santas in their rooms but were directed by an elf to this one. He doesn’t remember sitting on Santa’s lap. Santa wasn’t old, seemed if he stood up he’d be as tall as a circus giant, had no belly. An elf wanted to take a photo of him with Santa and then Clara and him with Santa but both times his mother said too expensive. The exit door from Santa’s room opened onto the toy department. He remembers being surprised by that. A guard stood on the toy department side to keep people from sneaking in.” So what? Has little to do with anything. One time in the same store though…

“One time in the Thirty-fourth street Macy’s his mother told him to wait over here. What she did was buy a box of sanitary napkins. How’s he know? Because she had a shopping bag with something shaped like a box in it when she came back and he thought it was a surprise for him, just by the way she said ‘Wait for me here and don’t move from this spot no matter how long I’m away,’ as if she didn’t want him to see what she was buying for him, even if it wasn’t around Christmastime or his birthday and she said she was going to another counter on the first floor and there was nothing for children on that floor that he knew of or could see in that store. She was away a long time. He had nothing to do. He wanted to move to another spot, at least a few feet away — the perfume smells from the counter she put him next to were bothering him — but didn’t. A couple of times he thought maybe she forgot where she left him. It was the world’s biggest store he’d been told a few times, so she could have made a mistake in directions herself or come back to where she thought she’d left him and decided he was lost. Should he try to find her? Or maybe just yell out ‘Mommy’ till she came. She wouldn’t like that if she heard it and one of the guards they seemed to have all around on this floor might just grab him and throw him out of the store. Or just try to get home by himself? How would he do it? He didn’t have the fare for the subway or bus. He wouldn’t know how to get to his subway station or bus stop even if he did have the fare. But he knew the name of his station and it was in this borough, so maybe if he told someone it and was able to borrow the fare, he’d get there. Once out of the station he thinks he could find his way home, since it was only three blocks away along the avenue you come up into and then just a short walk down the street. Better to stay put though. If his mother thought he was lost she’d get the whole store to find him or call up his dad to have it done. But how he found out what was inside the box was that night he looked in the bag. It was still in the foyer coat closet. He couldn’t see any pictures or words on it that would make it seem like a present for him, so he asked his brother Alex what the box said. Alex looked at it, said ‘Kotex’ and that he thinks it’s something women use for their behinds or someplace but he doesn’t know what for. ‘Cleaning, probably.’” Nothing there either.