Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

I checked out two hours after checking in. The desk clerk gave me a look, but I didn’t care. I had resolve.

A yellow Ford EXP with District of Columbia plates was parked next to the garage. It was probably Eugene the balding boy’s and I hadn’t noticed it when I left that morning. Sometimes I notice everything and other times I notice nothing at all. Lately the notice-nothing periods had been throwing off my balance.

Shannon, Eugene, and Gilia were sprawled in various postures around the parlor, hacking at the pumpkin mountain. Everyone seemed so cheerful and comfortable that at first I didn’t realize what was wrong with the picture.

I said, “Gilia.”

She looked up from carving molars in a jack-o’-lantern. “Hi, Sam.” She’d done the nose sidesaddle to look like Richard Nixon, or maybe it was the orange jowls. Something made the pumpkin a spitting image.

“Grab a knife and dig in,” Shannon said.

I dropped next to Gilia on a couch cushion they’d pulled onto the floor. Gilia smiled and handed me a pencil-thin X-Acto knife. “I like your family.”

“Have you been introduced?”

“We’re all buddies on this bus,” Eugene said. It rankled me some to think a stranger would consider Eugene part of my family. He sat in Caspar’s Lincoln rocker, which I’d never had the gall to sit in, slicing the tops off a pile of pumpkins on the coffee table. The kids had quite the efficient operation. Eugene circumcised and eviscerated, so to speak, and the girls created pumpkin personalities. The vegetable art was easy to separate. Gilia was into cubism—triangle eyes, rectangle mouths with squared-off teeth—while Shannon was sloppier. Her guys had noses all over heck and the eyes of a Picasso. Everybody was fast. Maybe a hundred heads crowded around the legs of Me Maw’s baby grand, with another fifty topped and scooped, waiting for surgery. A gross four-foot mound of slime and seeds rose from newspapers spread across my oak floor.

“The detective says you’re an immoral scumbag,” Shannon said.

I stabbed my pumpkin in its future eye hole. Slicing down, I tried to remember if Gilia mentioned the detective yesterday, or that information came from Katrina only.

“What detective?”

Gilia was watching me. “The one who showed up at Skip’s house last night and again this morning. They made me read his report because I rode around with you and everyone is afraid I’ll pick the wrong side. Ryan says he’ll box my ears if I ever speak to you again.”

Shannon was outraged. “Box your ears? Where did this guy find his word choice?”

“Nineteen fifty-two. When they showed me how terrible you are, I had to come and see myself.”

I stabbed a nose. “I don’t think I’m terrible.”

“Repeat that affirmation several times daily and soon your superego will recover from its recent humiliation,” Eugene said. He flipped a wad of orange snot on the goop pile.

“Did you really eat LSD in college?” Gilia asked.

“Who told Skip?”

“And you were arrested for having sex on a Ferris wheel.”

“Alicia couldn’t get off in bed. I had to get her off.”

Shannon pointed her knife at me with much better form than Clark had shown the night before. “Daddy, why was it okay for you to have sex and do drugs but not okay for me?”

“Double standard,” Eugene said.

“It is not a double standard. In those days we believed in peace and love. Kids now do sex and drugs for all the wrong reasons.”

“He knocked up a thirteen-year-old girl,” Gilia said.

Shannon frowned. “She was my mother.”

“Did Skip tell you I was thirteen too? And Maurey seduced me. I wasn’t given a choice.”

“It doesn’t say anything about your age in the ad,” Gilia said. “Just that you impregnated a thirteen-year-old.”

A bad feeling crept into my stomach. “Ad?”

“Skip’s buying a full-page ad in the Greensboro Record so he can expose your sleazy past.”

“The newspaper won’t print it.”

“I told him that, but Skip says they will or he’ll pull the Dixieland Sporting Goods account.”

“They still won’t. Except for politicians, ads like that are illegal.”

“Then he’ll have flyers printed.”

Advertising seemed like overkill. I’d never done anything that even vaguely compared to the nastiness of rape, and you didn’t see me printing up handbills on Skip and the gang.

“What traitorous hell bitch gave him this dirt?”

“Your wife.”

Gus brought in a tray with a bowl of toasted pumpkin seeds and brandy snifters all around. Seemed a bit early in the day to be drinking with my underage daughter, but I didn’t want Gilia thinking I was structured, so I kept my mouth shut and flew with the flow, or whatever they call good sports these days. We held our snifters aloft while Shannon recited the poem about teeth and gums, look out stomach here she comes. Gus and I downed moderate sips, but the three young people chugged the load. When Gus saw this, she glanced at me and tossed the rest of her brandy down her throat. I followed suit. Tasted like NyQuil.

Hands on hips, Gus studied my artwork. “What you making there? Looks like a sicko paper doll.”

I turned the pumpkin face out. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Van Gogh’s self-portrait,” Gilia said. “The later one.”

“Right.”

Shannon hummed a riff from the “Twilight Zone” theme, then said, “Warped minds think alike.”

Eugene grinned as if he knew all the answers. “Sympatico.” This from a man with drippy arms the color of a hepatitis victim.

I was secretly pleased and alarmed at the same time. While I’d always wanted to meet a woman who thinks like me, this parallel brains jive might be more genetic overlap than compatibility. I’d reached the point where I really hoped Gilia wasn’t my sister. Or cousin.

“Anyone with class can recognize van Gogh,” I said. I decided a giant ear hole would be the magic clue.

Gus snorted. “I got class and I thought it was an electrocuted cat.”

Gilia touched my sculpture, the other side away from where I was cutting. “I like it. No one who sees van Gogh in a squash could be an immoral scumbag.” She and I made meaningful eye contact across the pumpkin.

Shannon jumped in to wreck the mood. “My daddy can. Don’t let his sensitivity line fool you, I’ll bet cash he’s been woofing it up on a married woman all morning.”

The X-Acto knife slipped through pumpkin meat and stabbed me in the palm. I dropped the knife and sucked my hand a moment to compose myself. They were all looking at me.

“I was only kidding,” Shannon said.

I put on my innocent face. “Some people’s kids are too precocious for their own good.”

She blushed a Cabernet color. Maybe she was chastised, but, more likely, she realized she’d accidentally nailed me. Shannon sees through my innocent face the way I see through Lydia’s pretending to lie whenever she tells the truth. Contrary to what we’ve been told, children can detect deceit in parents much easier than parents can detect deceit in children.

To cover the awkwardness of the moment, or possibly out of disgust at me, Shannon dipped her right hand into the pumpkin pulp mound, came out with a hefty wad of slime, leaned across Gilia’s latest jack-o’-lantern, and pasted me right between the eyes. Splat! Juice and stringy, mucus-like stuff trickled down my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. I sealed my left nostril by covering it with a finger and sneezed, rocketing a seed out of my right nostril through van Gogh’s ear hole.

Shannon went back to work on a pumpkin. Gilia stared at me, and Eugene stared at Shannon. Gus helped herself to toasted seeds. Dignity seemed important. Maintaining a rigid decorum, I got to my feet and walked behind the girls toward the bathroom. As I passed Shannon, I leaned over and scooped up a handful of orange slime and dumped it down the back of her shirt—my shirt, actually, as she’d recently taken to stealing my dress Van Heusens.