Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Annette dropt her voice to a confidential whisper: “I know you’re all aliens, by the way. I’m totally convinced. Nobody else sits on a sofa and drinks coffee like a thirsty man in the desert and scarfs down all my cookies like you’ve never had a cookie in your life. And, well, it scared me at first. (Go ahead, take the last Milano. Mama can always get more at Wegman’s.) It scared me to think that here I was bringing Martians or whatever into my mother’s house, and I wondered for a while if it was really a smart thing to be doing, but look: none of you has ever hurt Mama or me and you’ve never probed us with instruments or anything. In fact, you seem to be quite harmless, you know, just happy to be out of whatever that observational facility is where they’ve been keeping you — just content to sit here on this sofa and drink coffee and eat Pepperidge Farm products with little ol’ me. So I just think, okay, it’s nice to have somebody here who isn’t my mother, since my disability — my psychological disability, not the fact that I wear corrective braces on my legs — keeps me from leaving the house and ever meeting anyone interesting. I mean it’s really, you know, nice. Was that T-M-I?”

“T-M-I?”

“Yeah, ‘too much information.’ Just shut me up if I go on too long. Anyway, after you go — I mean they go — I mean, you’re all from the same planet, right? — well, in she comes— her— my mother — smelling like cow manure — as usual — and standing there in judgement and saying, ‘Well, congratulations, Missy, you made a new friend. Another weird friend who will leave and never come back. And what have you accomplished, my lonely crippled daughter? What have you accomplished?’ Now Mr. Trimmers, let me ask you this: will you come back and see me again and prove my mother wrong this time?”

Gus nodded. “Once I find my boy, I’ll be happy to come for a visit on our trip home.”

Gus took a sip of his coffee. He licked his lips and put another spoonful of sugar into the cup to make the taste of the hot beverage even more to his liking.

“You don’t mean that, though. It’s always the same — really. You come and you drink my coffee and eat up my Mint Milanos and my Orange Milanos and my Genevas and my Tahitis and my Apple Caramel Veronas and my Pirouette French Vanilla Wafers, and after you’ve had your fill, it’s wam-bam thank you, ma’am, and I have to listen to Mama tell me that it had to have been something that I did in the end to drive every single one of you away. But I know in my heart that it wasn’t what I did. I am nothing but the perfect hostess each and every time.”

Gus nodded in a way that indicated commiseration. “Perhaps it’s simply that the people who come to see you are in rather a hurry to be about their business.”

“You’re right. I know. I know it isn’t me.” Annette paused. She said nothing for a moment and then raised herself up from the couch and clomped away with her heavily harnessed legs. “I’ll be right back,” she said, disappearing into the rear of the house. “I have something I want to get. Enjoy your coffee.”

Gus thought about leaving. It would be a good time to do so. But his heart went out to the young woman whose feeble legs were entrapped in metal braces — a woman who resembled so many of the lonely Dinglians who had touched his heart with their empty lives and their inability to achieve comfortable and effective social intercourse. “I’ll stay a bit longer, for when am I to have coffee again?” said Gus to himself. “And I’m most curious to learn a thing or two of how the Beyonders live. For example: what is that box with the glass window that sits across from me? What is done with it? I shall ask as soon as she returns.”

Gus’s hostess did return a minute or so later, with something held mischievously behind her back. Gus didn’t ask the question he’d intended. Instead, he sought to know what the strange young woman was hiding.

“You’ll find out,” she said with a roguish grin. “Now close your eyes.”

“I’d rather not.”

Annette pouted, her bottom lip protruding and producing a look that intensified the homeliness of her features. “You are hurting my feelings, Mr. Gus Trimmers,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” Gus rose from his seat. “But I really must be on my way.” He tried to sound as casual as he could under the suddenly odd and now somewhat discomfiting circumstances.

“But so soon? You haven’t even staid an hour. Most of you aliens stay at least an hour.”

“I must find my boy.”

“Your boy will keep — wherever he is. He’s probably holed up somewhere playing video games. Apparently there aren’t video games where you people come from.” Annette pulled her hand out from behind her back and dropt a pair of manacles down upon one of the two lamp tables, which flanked the couch. Gus stared at them for a moment without speaking. When he raised his eyes to look again upon his hostess he saw something else — something that she drew from one of the pockets of her frowsy frock. It was a small pistol. The pistol was pointing at Gus.

“What are you going to do?” Gus asked, exerting all of his will to keep himself from stammering.

“Shoot you between the eyeballs if you don’t let me handcuff you to this couch.”

Gus’s gaze darted to the couch. It had flat wooden arms, their finish stained and abraded from general scuffing and perhaps the setting down of thousands of cups of coffee thereupon.

“Sit down. I’m going to shew my Mama that I am fully capable of having a long-term friend.”

Gus didn’t move.“Would it not stand to reason that when your mother sees me manacled to this sofa, she will not think me under some form of duress?”

“We will tell her it’s a game we’re playing.”

“I’m certain that she’ll not perceive it as such.”

Annette scratched an itch upon her cheek with the bore of the gun. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Then here is what we’ll do.” Annette opened the drawer contained within the lamp table and deposited the rejected handcuffs therein. Closing the drawer she said, “I will keep this gun in my pocket. And you will return to this couch. And you’ll pretend to be that very friend my mother assumes I’m incapable of having — one who stays for longer than an hour and who laughs at my jokes and compliments my hair — which is frequently washed and permanently fragrant though no one ever notices. And we’ll do this until she goes to bed and then you’ll be free to go.”

“And if I do not wish to go along with this ruse, which does not benefit me in the least—?”

“First of all, I’ll make you all the coffee you can drink. I’m out of Mint Milanos but we have a couple packages of soft-baked Milk Chocolate Macadamia cookies I’ve never even tried before — so that’ll be a treat for the both us — and look: we’ll watch H and H TV.”

“What is ‘H and H TV’?”

“Home and Hearth Television. And we have a brand new TV to watch it on. My mother just bought it to replace the one she threw the vase at last Christmas. She’d gotten into one of her ‘moods,’ and before I knew it, there she was yelling at the TV, ‘I don’t want Beyoncé at Christmas time! I want Perry Como! What have you bastard TV people done with Perry Como?’ Then she picked up the vase and chucked it at the screen. Anyway, this’ll be great. It’ll get your mind off your lost boy for a little while.”

Gus didn’t smile, though Annette’s obvious hope was that he would subscribe just as enthusiastically to the plan as did she. In a calm and measured voice he said, “What if I were to leave this house at this very moment — squarely against your wishes?”