The accusation that hurled us into the next morning, the morning after the dull orange drink incident: “It’s not just the drinking, Pal—it is the lying, it is the hiding, it is the deceit …” Babs pointed it all out. The smuggled sweets he kept hidden—things like ordering two McFlurries on the last day of school, saying one was for her, when I knew he was only going to eat it later, the box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day—saying he hadn’t been “much of a drinker” since that dark period after Nell died.
“And he has inherited it from you! It’s in his genes! He will always be trying to get out from under this, Pal!”
(“—always!”)
So we were trapped—at least I was. I hung my head inside the toilet bowl. I could still hear Babs talking. It felt like she was having this great epiphany—“It all started with you!”—and the only logical solution—in retrospect, I realize—would be for her to leave.
The full weight of our family had hit her. It had sunken in. I know she was panicked. I know she was worried about me. But maybe now it all seemed bigger—too big. I would always be trying to get out from under it, maybe. But she wouldn’t be—she didn’t have to be. Is this when she decided to leave us? I can’t really say. I will not talk about Babs, I will not talk about Babs, I will not talk about Babs. It is not my place to talk about Babs—to try to tell her story.
But I do have to tell the next scene. That guy who liked Mom, who gave her that card, and would stand in his underwear—he started to think I was “off” because I wasn’t showing an interest in girls. I only wanted to hang out with Luca. He gave Mom these books, fanatical books on guiding cis, hetero, Christian boys through puberty. One was called Does God Love Gays? On the title page was the question; on the page right behind it was the answer: YES—God did love gays! “And, as a Christian, you should too!” it said. “But remember, Christians are called by God to speak out vehemently against sin! So how do we navigate this? This book will tell you.”
I found it in a stack of his things, after he was gone. I wasn’t sure Mom had seen it. I will not talk about this man, I will not talk about this man, I will not talk about this man who plugged his need to drink with religion, and encouraged my mom to do the same, who made my mom feel happy for a while, but who gave her this book that made her think she did not love me. I will not talk about church, I will not talk about church, I will not talk about church, because I know it is complicated. I know church does a lot of good for a lot of people. I know not every believer is like that man.
So I’ve cut up the next scene, which is set in a church. I have kept in the good parts, the good advice I was given, which has helped me, and the rest I have weeded out. In those spaces I’ve included substitutions.
I am still working. On this part especially.
Babs and I waited on sofas in the waiting room. Pal was at home. All morning, after the fight, they hadn’t been able to look at each other. He hadn’t been able to look at me.
“Avery, you can go on in!” It was the sweet lady at the front desk. She had white hair with bangs and round glasses.
“The pastor is ready for you!”
I crutched in—I’d been feeling like I was over the crutches, almost completely. But I must have banged the patellar in the night because it was sore. Pastor Daisy remarked, “Ah! I could hear you coming—from a mile away—on those Mechanical Wings!”
She had bright red hair, which was tied in a bun, and amplified by the halo through which I was seeing everything: effect of a hangover. That, and a rotten-feeling gut, apparently. She wore the reverend collar and a white coat. “I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a state,” she said. “I was gone for two weeks on vacation and left only one instruction, for someone to water my abiah root”—she nodded at the doorway—“and no one did, so …”
She pushed her desk chair back and stood. “Do you think you might be willing to lend a hand?”
I followed her out of the office and down the hallway—through the corner of my eye, glimpsed Babs in the waiting room.
Babs was reading a magazine. I didn’t think she had brought the magazine on her own, but I also wasn’t sure where she had found one. I hadn’t noticed any magazines in the waiting room when we were sitting. Maybe she had brought her own but had kept it hidden from me, as though it might offend me. That she might, for a moment in the waiting room, try to escape this. The sunlight coming through the windows, reflecting off the pages—through the halo of the hangover, effect was like vapor. Like light and shadow at the same time. She raised a tissue to her nose, like she had been crying.
I’d never felt so responsible for someone’s hurt before. I felt so guilty.
“Psst, Avery—” Pastor Daisy was at the back door, the abiah root pot lodged against her hip. “Come on. I don’t want to let all the cool air out.”
I followed Pastor Daisy outside into a courtyard with a brick path. A fountain, some benches, some trellises with vines. The sunlight blurred every edge. Every object had a soul looming out from its margins. I had to squint my eyes.
“We have these really—really—lovely plants back here! Just right beyond the daphne!—called ‘ecstatic puff-ball’—have you heard of them?”
“I haven’t,” I said. “I don’t really know plants that well.”
“Well, then you’ll be—pleased—you see. The puff-ball is quite animal, really.” We paused next to a bed of dark soil, from which the puff-balls sprouted like soft white pinecones from their bed.
“See, they look sentient, don’t they?” Pastor Daisy lowered the pot. “They’re like cannibals—ah!” She nudged the clay pot with her heel, and the abiah root whistled out. After two weeks of no watering, it was practically powder. We stood there watching.
“What happens next?”
“The puff-ball overtakes it—it begins to ingest it. See, the ‘ecstatic puff-ball’ feeds on decay.”
“And that happens … now?”
“It is happening now, yes.”
“And we’ll see it?”
“See—what?”
“It ingest?”
“Oh—no, that takes a while. Really, the process is its own sort of decay. But it’s fascinating. Shh!—be very quiet, and you’ll hear it.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Do you hear—it—can you hear—it—the chewing?” She made a delighted and repulsed noise.
“I can’t hear it.”
I was jealous.
“Well, after all,” she said, “you’re only sixteen.”
“See—if it really was, as you say it was—a ‘one-time deal,’ Avery, I’m not too concerned.
“It’s just that—you absolutely know what a slippery slope drinking as a means of coping is.”
There were two books on her desk: one called Called Back and the other called Are We Almost There? They were a bit conservative for her taste, she said.
Then she pulled out some old Guideposts for Kids that told “true” stories of children in peril.
“And in this story”—she showed me—“an angel saves a little girl from getting hacked to death by an axe murderer!”
“First it’s a drink here, a drink there. Because you’re sad, or you’re stressed, maybe, occasionally—but then something big happens:
“You know, you lose a parent, God forbid, or a friend.
“You find you have then, well—not to sugarcoat it—a whole slew of bad days, right in a row, one after the other.
“And so, we have the choice, you know—we make a decision. Do I disappear? It sounds tempting. Or do I make it a practice to stay present, you know?
“Talk to people, talk to God, listen for God—
“Your grandmother—”
“She’s not my grandmother.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Not technically.”
“Well, she tells me you’re a writer.”
“That makes it hard.
“Hearing voices all the time.”
“Voices?”
“Well, in the sense that when you read something, you take in a voice. When you write something, you produce a voice. Voices in, voices out—I deliver a sermon every week. I write constantly. It’s exhausting. Even when I’m writing a sermon!—sometimes it’s hard to remember that God is like—within me.
“Just like God is within you.
“It’s like, from the moment we are born, our first thought is—‘Okay, everything is out there, so I have to go get it,’ you know?
“My mom is out there, and she has food, and I need food to survive, et cetera, et cetera—
“But when it comes to God, Avery—and listening—you have to plant both of your feet on the floor—”
She stomped her black shoes out from behind her desk.
“You have to be present. You have to be alive!”
But what about remembering? Was there God in memory too? I didn’t ask—I didn’t even really know to wonder yet.
The placard on her desk said Pastor Daisy, but it was sort of a fake placard, made from construction paper, Magic Marker, and glitter. I think a child must have made it.
She had a poster of Mount Vesuvius on her wall.
I asked her if she or anyone she loved had ever struggled with addiction issues. “Oh, sweetheart,” she replied. “That’s all of us.”
On her desk beside her computer, there was a stack of envelopes, many of them halved, and other scraps of paper. I asked if I could borrow a scrap to leave her a note.
She seemed begrudging, like she needed all of them. I said I didn’t have to, it was fine. “Oh, just go for it,” she said. And that’s when I left her a small poem:
“I’m living inside today’s bright edges / God, supposedly, lives there too / Sometimes God manspreads, and I complain / I say, ‘I only want to learn to love you.’ ”
After the church visit, Babs and I went to a crowded bookstore. Nobody was in the poetry section. A good selection, though: Anne and Sylvia and John, Eileen, and Allen. I saw Rita Dove, who I was starting next, her book called Mother Love.
When a bookseller walked over with a stack of new books, and I asked if she had any recommendations for books by contemporary queer poets, she nearly dropped her stack.
“Literally, it’s like I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to ask me that.”
A stack of seven became a stack of eight. Became a stack of nine, easily.
Babs came over. “Find anything?”
“Um—” The answer was yes. She saw the stack. Crush by Richard Siken, The New Testament by Jericho Brown, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, The Devastation by Melissa Buzzeo, [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay, and Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway by Ed Pavlic—I thought Pal might like that one, since he liked Donny Hathaway.
“Oh, just get them all,” Babs said, and she bought them for me.
($159.32)
In the car, she started crying. “Let’s just take them back to the store, Babs. I’m sure they’ll let us return them.” She said she wanted me to have them; it was important to her, “because I love you, Avery.”
“I love you too, Babs,” I said.
When we got home, Pal asked, “What happened? Everything okay?” I went outside and sat underneath my tree and wrote what was mostly plot summary for the end of the egg poems.
After the appointment at the church, the egg returns to the tree behind its grandparents’ house. The tree has been struck by lightning, and now the poems are all spelled backward.
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
The egg cries at the death, a little, of its poetry.
The tree groans. The egg knows. The trunk sags forward from the root. “The roots aren’t good,” the egg observes.
The egg is not on a slope, and so can’t roll away quite accurately.
The trunk groans. Really whines this time, an apology the egg does not accept. The egg did not ask for this. Barely born, and over with, and without and without, a mother.
Proofless of so much as its favorite poem.
Thanks to nature. “Thanks be to God.”
The trunk ruptures. It’s a mournful, shrill apology. It echoes in homes up and down the street, and even in the cabin on the cruise ship, where the egg’s grandparents lie, making love.
(Now that I’ve written myself out of characters and out of the poem completely, I think it’s time for Mom to come home, officially.)
(at the house)
(everyone brought vegetarian food)
(even Pal’s cousin James)
I will never forget when we were kids, and Pal had that dog with him and how that dog got us into so much trouble one day. Pal’s mama, and it was my aunt, you know, she got after us, man. Because we hadn’t been supposed to go down to that creek. Just that creek right back off there, hind Yonah, in those woods.
We hadn’t been supposed to go back there, and sure we went, and that dog got all wet and muddy—Nicky was his name. We all got back, and Nicky was dripping mud all over the place, and we got sure enough popping. Well, not the dog.
(eating potato salad with a fork)
(notice how I hold the fork differently, like Mom does)
I had this dream the other night, and, um, you know I got that pump house in the yard. I think you’ve seen it.
Well, he was out there. Pal was. In my dream. Believe it or not, he was out there, and it was like he was looking for something. For something to fix something else; and I just said, “What are you doing out here, huh? You big galoot,” and he just looked up, and he called me by my real name, which he would sometimes do. He said, “Joe Abel,” and then I stepped over, and I … I hugged him.
In the kitchen one morning, Pal’s silver vat was out. He used it in the shop to melt things, normally. Now he had washed it. He whisked eggs in it. It was a superstition. To eat from it the day of a fishing trip.
“Want to ride out to Ditty Boy’s later with me?” he asked as he dunked a piece of white bread.
“Sure,” I said. “But what will we be doing there?”
“Catobble-wm-rn,” he said. “Catalpa worm run.” He turned around. “Oh, you’ll see when we get there.”
Catobble-wm-rn, or “Catalpa Worm Run”: Some dead brush and snapped limbs would
pin upward and scrape the base of the truck as we crunched over them, too
sparse to be woulds [sic], more like a junkyard of timbs [sic]. Pal would wheez the accelerator, and we’d lurch over one. CRUNCH! He was cackling.
There were chickens in the side yard, all happy and proud. They had a big dead tree trunk to hop onto and off of in the middle of their pen if they wanted. They were eyeing me nd [sic] Pal.
Pal undid the padlock and the chain on the gate [sick]. He draped the chain over his arm as he stomped around to swing it open [sick]. “Punch it,” he said, and I punched the accelerator. We were in [sick]. He shut the gate behind us.
[Sick!] [He was sick, Avery!] [Already!] [You could’ve said something!]
The back field wasn’t huge, but there were about a dozen cattle, black-and-white except for one red-colored bull, who Pal said was a new addition. (He said the previous bull had been rotated out, but I didn’t want to think about that because I didn’t want to think about where the bull had been rotated out to.)
And there were a few calves, one sticking its head between a fence board and a strand of wire to watch us. “Here we go,” Pal said, and he marched along the fence to the corner post, where two trees emerged. White grass grew at the roots.
“Catalpa tree,” Pal introduced. He bent a limb down. “Take a look.”
It was bright-leaved with these toothy-looking seedpods. Pal plucked one.
A catalpa worm is actually a caterpillar that blooms into what’s called a hawk moth once it matures.
Pal snatched one up. It would never mature.
He inverted it right before my eyes. I saw the inside of its skin, foam green turned the bright yellow of highlighter liquid.
It stained Pal’s hands as he went, setting the worms on a paper towel inside a plastic Tupperware container, side by side.
“It was either me or the birds,” Pal said. “Trust me.” And when I had a dream, later, about staining a bunch of my sheets bright yellow, I knew what it was about.
I’m sorry it’s untitled.
(Luca hands me a mix)
I didn’t want to give you something that had a title like “I’m Sorry” or something dumb like that.
It’s not all death songs, is it?
(I smile)
(he shakes his head)
No, but it contains my first original. I play guitar on it and everything. A song for you. In the future, though, I might need you to write lyrics because that shit is hard.