Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

With Ogata’s voice still echoing in his head, Peter called Judith. Lucy was right — he was a mama’s boy to his core.

“Do you have a moment?” It was almost a joke — she was a self-employed jeweler.

“Actually,” she said, “I am a little busy. I may have had a breakthrough.”

He could hear a disquieting excitement in her voice. “A breakthrough?”

“I’d been thinking about scarabs. They’re hot again. . well, really, insects in general. I wanted to do my own take on them, but I don’t like bugs. Then I noticed the wheat heads in the yard. When I cast them, they looked like a cross between an ear of corn and a caterpillar. I brought a dozen pendants to the farmers’ market and they sold out in an hour.”

“Do you think you’ll make more?” He wanted to keep her talking. Her voice calmed him.

“That’s just it — one of the buyers owns a yoga catalog. He asked if I had a distributor. I guess he thinks he can sell them. It could be real money. There’s a guy in Oregon who’s sold eight thousand scented river stones.”

Peter knew his mother had an artist’s soul, which meant, well, it meant she couldn’t make fifty identical necklaces, let alone five thousand.

Judith said, “I promised Rolf I’d pour another batch today and see if I enjoy making them.”

“Could you license the idea and have someone else cast them?”

She let out a sighing syllable. The topic was closed for discussion. “How are you? Are you happy?”

“I’m not unhappy.” Then he said, “You and Rolf should come out.”

He listened to her silence as his suggestion echoed on the line.

“That’s a nice offer,” Judith said. “I think we’ll pass.”

“I’d pay.” He was playing chicken with her, though he wasn’t sure why.

“It’s not a good idea right now.”

“Because of the pendants?”

“What has he told you?”

A tan dog with a smushed face stopped to sniff Peter’s ankles before scampering away.

“What sort of friends were you?”

“I never said we were friends.” Her voice had gone flat.

“I guess it’s none of my business.”

“That’s not what I was getting at. What did he tell you about meeting me?”

Cross had said something about her eyebrows and he’d remembered her height. He called her fearless.

“Did he tell you that when we met I’d just run away from home?”

Of course she’d run away. But for their eyebrows, they were nothing alike.

“Did he tell you that I related everything back to The Tempest ? It was the only thing I’d read in junior English.”

Now Peter felt bad that he’d tricked her into telling this squalid story.

“I’m sorry.”

“We’re not done,” Judith said. “What did he tell you?”

“You were skinny.”

“And?”

“You didn’t want coffee. He brought you milk.”

Judith didn’t say anything to encourage him.

“I didn’t know you’d run away.”

“I was pregnant.”

“He told me.”

“How many mornings do you think he’s found a girl waiting on his steps?” Judith clucked her tongue. “I should get to work. The morning’s half gone and I promised Rolf I’d have fifty pendants done before he got home for lunch.”

Peter glanced at his watch; it was still a few minutes before noon. He wondered if all of Ohio smelled like smoked meat.

If I open my book about Cross with him staring at produce, the next chapter mustn’t follow him outside to the car waiting across the street. You can’t tell a story the way it happened; you’ve got to manipulate things so the reader finds entertainment in the untangling. For whatever reason, a story needs to be folded and flipped, like how an atlas will reorder the world so that adjoining states appear unrelated, or so a river concludes at the side of a page.

The reader needs to feel involved in the sense making of a story, or they’re not involved in the book. A book is a negotiation between what a reader wants to see and what the writer wants to show. Songs must satisfy and resist in a similar way. Cross’s voice isn’t seductive, but there’s a pleasure to be had in submitting to it. If a singer can get away with reading the phone book, 39what’s to stop them?

So the second chapter in the book about Jimmy’s life on the road will focus on me. Should my story not prove as interesting as the parts about Jimmy, that’s not such a big problem. That’s sort of the point.

So I will step away from a bodega and the threat of crime, away from an international recording star hiding in plain sight. I will open, instead, on July 27, 1988. I will open with a perfect kelly green square of lawn, a lush island bordered by two blue-black, almost iridescent driveways, bordered on another side by a freshly paved road, bordered on the last side by a 1,600-square-foot colonial. And attached to that house: a two-car garage. Inside of that garage: two cars (a nearly new Honda and a ruby-red Mercury), plus a push mower with a 5-hp Briggs & Stratton engine. Peering behind the house, the reader will see a shaded rectangle of lawn with an aluminum swing set painted like a maypole and, in the shade of an oak tree, a square sandbox ringed with sand, which if viewed from above might recall da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

And who lives in this house? Why, this nice couple named Arthur and Patricia, and their beautiful daughter, Gabrielle. And with them a dog, a tubby beast that likes to curl up beneath the kitchen table and nips at their feet if they accidentally step on him. A big farter, this dog; they are constantly saying “Oh, Cherokee” and “Not again, Cherokee.” The girl, especially, loves the dog. They’re not embarrassed by the dog’s name, won’t be for years and years, and by then there will be so much more they’re embarrassed by it will hardly matter.

On every side of this 1,600-square-foot colonial lurk other 1,600-square-foot colonials. In all, fifty-six houses on a cross-hatching of roads branching off a much, much older road, a road that, because it’s in Virginia, once hosted a battle that claimed 3,100 American lives. When boredom settles on the minds of the boys and girls living in the colonial houses, they dig in their yards and recover things that might have been horse tack or belt buckles or brass buttons. A junior-high boy from across the street, playing in the tangled roots of a white cedar — one of Hurricane Gloria’s many casualties — discovered the curving blade of a cutlass, which time and moisture had eaten until it was as brown and fragile as a dog turd.

The twenty-seventh is a Wednesday, so, if both cars are in the garage, it must be quite early. Think of morning light; think dew on the grass and stillness. In fact, Arthur is up. He is drinking instant coffee from an aluminum mug. Before him he holds a copy of one of the various mimeographed newsletters that he’s been contracted to print — catching typos reminds his clients that he cares. Gabrielle is at the kitchen table slotting checkers in a Connect Four game while her cornflakes disintegrate in their milk bath — she has taught her parents to appreciate this quiet interlude while she waits for the cereal to turn into a yellow slurry; the girl hates scratchy foods. Cherokee nuzzles his owners’ ankles.

Arthur’s thoughts drift from the document before him to the things he needs to do when he gets to the store. He’ll have to make room for their paper delivery. The shuffling wouldn’t be so problematic, but they’d given over half the back room to a large-format printer — they didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if, as seems inevitable, one of the national office-supply chains enters the market.

Using the checkers, Gabby constructs a red house with a yellow door on the Connect Four grid. She shrieks when she finishes, then tilts the grid so the pieces splash in the tray. “House,” she yells, but by then, of course, the house is gone.