Brad Watson: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

The boys sat on the sofa again in a neat row while their mother fixed their father another drink of Dr. Hornegay’s Old Crow, on ice, and used more ice to press against the several very red bumps on their father’s face and neck. One of the BBs had pinged him in or near the eye and that eye was swollen badly and the skin around it had turned purple and yellow and black.

Their mother said, As long as you’re here you might as well stay and eat, I’ve got a chicken I was going to bake with some barbeque sauce and some rice and broccoli.

I sure would love some fried chicken, if you wouldn’t mind doing that, their father said.

Well, I guess I could fry it, their mother said, it might be quicker, and I know the boys are starving, they were supposed to get some hot tamales.

She got the chicken from the refrigerator and cut it up and shook the pieces in a sack with flour and salt and pepper while she heated Crisco in the pan and soon the boys could smell the chicken frying. They watched from the sofa as their mother bustled about the kitchen tending the chicken and starting the rice and broccoli, and as their father sat at the dining table nursing his drink and pressing an ice pack against his swollen eye. It was all wonderful and very strange. Their mother moved about in the kitchen’s bright light. Their father sat in the dim umbrella of yellow light from the hanging lamp above the little dining table. In the brothers’ minds, it was like this maybe wasn’t something real. It was like the quiet, weird, clear part near the end of a crazy dream. They could see their father, sitting there, but the light was funny and it was almost like he could flicker out, and not be there, and it would be only their mother in there, frying chicken. The middle brother felt himself tuning up. Their father then removed the ice pack from his eye and looked over at the boys, and smiled, and was about to say something when blood began to spout from the swollen eye and he fell back against the table and cried out.

Jesus God! their mother shouted, and ran to grab her car keys and hustle their father out the door, calling back to them, I have to take him to the emergency room, and then they were gone.

The boys went out into the carport and watched them drive away up the street, then they went back into the den.

The oldest brother looked dejected and said to the middle brother, You better go turn off that chicken before it burns up again.

I can cook chicken, the middle brother said.

The other two brothers looked at him standing there with his swollen, blood-crusted lip and his eyes swollen from crying, not believing him, and then the middle brother limped into the kitchen and looked into the pan where the chicken was frying, took a fork and turned the pieces of chicken over in the hot oil, and let them cook like that for a while.

Get me a plate and put a piece of newspaper on it, and put a paper towel on top of that, he said to the youngest brother. The youngest brother looked at the oldest brother, who motioned for him to do what the middle brother said, so he got the plate and a piece of newspaper and a paper towel that the oldest brother handed to him from the roll on the counter and he set it down beside the range. In a few minutes the middle brother took the chicken pieces out of the hot oil and drained them on the plate with the newspaper and paper towel on it. Then he checked the pots with the rice and broccoli.

Get some butter out for the rice and the broccoli, he said to the youngest brother, and the oldest brother nodded for the youngest brother to do what he said. When everything was on the table and they had plates to eat on and forks to eat with, they sat down and helped their plates.

The youngest brother said, Aren’t you going to say the blessing?

The middle brother looked at the oldest brother and thought about it for a moment and then said, No, I don’t want to.

All right then, the oldest brother said, and they began to eat.

THE MOSES SISTERS LIVED TOGETHER, ALONE, IN THE fine old brick house near downtown where they had grown up. Who knows why neither had ever married. The older, larger one, sure, you could imagine reasons. The younger, frail one, maybe she’d been too timid. It wasn’t hard to think she’d been pretty. She had bones as delicate as a mouse’s. A mouse is beautiful, if you really look at it.

She, the smaller Miss Moses, pushed open the screen door from their front porch with a hand that was itself mousishly thin and delicate.

“Please do come in,” she said.

The larger Miss Moses stood behind her, big arms folded, as if blocking further entrance. She smiled, too, but there was some kind of obvious skepticism, as if she were thinking, I could take you, buster. Don’t try anything with me .

All I wanted was a cheap, clean apartment for a few months, till things got better. I already wished my mother had not put me in touch with these two.

The house had that little old lady smell, like a spotless, dust-free, uninhabited attic. Old, expensive rugs and drapes in some late stage of decrepitude, their worn, exhausted fibers a molecular stage above disintegration. Dark, heavy wooden tables and sideboard and china cabinet. Hard stuffed chairs and sofa covered with sheen-blotched silk and heavy fabric that looked like a softened, premium burlap. Cloudy mirrors in baroque frames.

We went into the kitchen, which was large, and sat at an oval kitchen table with chrome legs and skirt and a kind of faux-marble Formica surface. It looked like the Misses Moses’s single concession to modernity, a moment in maybe 1959, since which there had been no more of that.

The smaller Miss Moses sat in one of the chairs — they matched the table, with chrome frames and faux-marble vinyl cushioned seats — and said, “We were just about to make some pimento cheese. Would you like some?”

“You’re going to make it?” I said. I guess I’d never thought about someone taking cheddar cheese and mayonnaise and pimentos and making pimento cheese in their own home.

A knowing smile crept into the small, soft face of the smaller Miss Moses. You could tell she creamed her face every night — that’s what my grandmother had called it, “I have to go cream my face,” she’d say — you could smell the sweet, milky residue still in her pores. She looked over at the larger Miss Moses, and the larger Miss Moses pursed her lips in a satisfied way, nodded, and went over to the Frigidaire to get out the ingredients for the pimento cheese.

A large ceramic bowl the color of skim milk, with a pattern of thin blue curling lines, sat in the center of the table between cut-glass salt and pepper shakers and an empty wooden napkin holder. Next to the bowl stood one of those old tin box graters. A long-handled wooden spoon lay in the empty bowl. While the smaller Miss Moses sat and watched, occasionally turning to smile at me and make conversation, the larger Miss Moses took the spoon from the bowl, set the box grater in there, and began grating the cheese. She did it slowly and without effort. Her arms looked strong. They had seemed fat, but it was that hard fat you see on fat guys who work with their hands, mechanics, or butchers, or middle-age moving van guys. It was impressive.

The smaller Miss Moses kept turning her sweet little face to smile at me and ask if I wanted a Co-Cola.

They seemed in no hurry to show me the apartment.

“You don’t smoke, do you,” said the larger Miss Moses. It wasn’t a question, ending on a down note. Not exactly not a question, but one for which the proper answer was assumed.

“We could smell it, if you did,” said the smaller Miss Moses with a guileless little grin. “And we know you don’t drink,” she added. I saw the larger Miss Moses raise her heavy eyebrows and drop her gaze to the cheese she was grating. Her poor little sister would get a reprimand for that, later on.