Alone in the Company of Others: A Novel

Alone in the Company of Others

Kelly Huddleston

Open Books

Copyright 1998 - 2011 ©Kelly Huddleston

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 1

AT FIRST THERE WERE SIX, all of whom were related, but none of whom knew one another intimately: a man of plurality; his wife Wanda; his two sons Russell and Wilsie; his sister Connie; and me, his niece Camille. But then, as my cousin Russell put it, there was the accident—a single shot to his abdomen, the blood in the snow beside the flagless flagpole, the siren, and finally the ambulance. Most assumed it was an act of desperation. Others thought it was retaliatory. Whenever we asked her about it, Wanda immediately retreated to her bedroom. Always self-absorbed, Mother said he did it to advance the lives of those around him. Only one person—Russell—thought it was unintended. Whatever the reason, my uncle’s suicide brought us, the remaining five, together.

"What happened after he brought us together is another matter," said my mother Connie to her group of hitchhikers and Wanda’s three Certified Veterinary Technicians.

Drama, said my aunt Wanda, who was also in the room. A slugfest. She walked into the kitchen.

You know, Wanda, your husband—

"Your brother!" called Wanda.

He didn’t always like to instigate drama, Mother said to the hitchhikers and Wanda’s Certified Veterinary Technicians. She paused to make sure everyone paid attention to her. "One time, when we were children, he knocked the wind out of me. It was at the schoolyard, during summer break, and it was hot. I was on the monkey bars. He was swinging me. He didn’t want to, but I made him do it. Then I lost my grip, right after he’d given a good solid push, and wallop! I was flying in mid-air. I didn’t mind that so much. That felt wonderful, actually, but it lasted only seconds, and then I was falling like a stoned bird, and hit the gravel. God, I couldn’t breathe. Anyway, he felt terrible."

Wanda was back in the room. She stood tall as a giraffe, frowning, with an orange in her hand. Everyone felt intimidated by her, except Mother. Did I know him as a child? No, Wanda said, and sniffed.

He had horse teeth back then, and a cowlick, my mother said. He looked like Alfred E. Neuman with all those freckles.

Wanda peeled the orange. It looked like she wanted to change the subject. I bet you skinned your knee when you hit the gravel, she said. I bet you started to bleed.

"I started to bleed from both knees, Mother said. Gravel got wedged underneath the skin. It was awful, like I’d been invaded by pebbles."

Invaded? I know how that feels, Wanda said flatly.

You’re not going to start that again, are you? said Mother.

You know I love you both, Wanda told my mother, "but when you first came it did feel like an invasion. It was probably your no-nonsense attitude that did it, or the fact that you said you came out of concern for me. You’ve always been obtuse like that, Connie. Like your brother, now that I think about it. She placed the orange peel inside a paper napkin and wadded it tightly in her fist. And then all this," Wanda said, and eyed Mother’s group of hitchhikers.

Click.

That was the end of Wilsie’s tape, or at least one of Wilsie’s tapes, and one of the more lengthy ones at that, one on which there was no trace of Russell’s voice.

By the time I met my cousin Wilsie he’d stopped speaking to other human beings and was using a scratched blackboard to write messages and his little Fisher Price tape recorder to record our conversations. But that was before, as Aunt Wanda liked to call it, the fall. There are no new tapes now.

About Wilsie’s tapes (of which there are over four hundred): These days I only listen to them at night when I can’t sleep, and I never listen to them on his old Fisher Price tape recorder (which by a sheer act of God, I must report, still works), but instead on a black Teac recorder that I bought a few years ago at the same discount store where we used to buy Wilsie’s cassettes (he always insisted on the ninety-minute variety, in five packs). When listening to Wilsie’s tapes I try to avoid pressing any of the buttons. With my fumbling fingers, I don’t want to permanently damage any part of our recorded history.

On my Teac, the record button is located next to the rewind button, so I very rarely press that key. I’m a flipper, anyway. One time I timed myself and found I could flip a cassette from side A to side B, or side B to side A, in four seconds flat, but that doesn’t include hitting the play key. The play key neighbors the fast-forward key, and if the fast-forward key is pressed when the play head is already engaged then all our voices sound scrambled together, which drives me crazy.

I’ve taken the liberty of organizing Wilsie’s cassettes. I had to, really, the way they were left so haphazard. Now they’re all dated (I used stickers for that), and on each case there’s a color-coded list of which voices can be heard on the accompanying tape. This proves helpful when I do my statistics. Here’s something I worked out one night when I couldn’t sleep—an average of the number of statements made per day in our house recorded on Wilsie’s Fisher Price recorder:

Mother: 886; 56 per hour; .9 per minute

Aunt Wanda: 578; 36 per hour; .6 per minute

Russell: 223; 14 per hour; .2 per minute

Me: 212; 13 per hour; .2 per minute

Certified Veterinarian Technicians: 104; 7 per hour; .1 per minute

Hitchhikers: 98; 6 per hour; .1 per minute

Others: 46; 3 per hour; .05 per minute

Wilsie: .00001; 0 per hour; 0 per minute

(Note: These numbers are not absolute. In this life it appears absolutely nothing is absolute.)

Point nine per minute. That’s nearly one statement per minute made by one woman—my mother! I can see her now, simple-minded and sanctimonious, talking incessantly, nothing but a gear-grinding machine spitting out vowels and cranking out consonants. In truth, I’m as cynical as she, only more economy-minded, less dramatic.

You’re a major wimp and a closet pervert, my cousin Russell once told me. (Thankfully Wilsie and his tape recorder were not in the room to record the statement.)

But I’m getting off the track now. To get back to Wilsie: Of course Wilsie didn’t record all of our ramblings, especially when we were on the telephone, but Wilsie was crafty, not to mention determined, and he somehow managed to record, and therefore document, the delicate time just before we all came together in the small mountain town of Bucksnort, Colorado. Incidentally, it’s exactly four tapes worth—a nice, clean, even number.

Tape one begins with the voice of Carl Worthington, a Denver lawyer who acted as executor of the will, and who returned my aunt Wanda’s call a week after her husband’s (Russell and Wilsie’s father, Connie’s brother, my uncle’s) funeral while she was performing a castration on a black Labrador puppy named Sprinkles at her veterinarian clinic in Applewood, Colorado. As the lawyer fumbled for words (on Wilsie’s tape he greets Wanda as Mrs. Turner, then thinks again and addresses her as Doctor), my aunt is heard calling out instructions to Stacey, one of her Certified Veterinary Technicians, who was probably still standing over Sprinkles, who in all likelihood was still under anesthesia and lay prone on his back on the steel table, his four big, black puppy paws sticking straight up in the air, his limp pink tongue temporarily jammed to one side of his snout to accommodate the green tube that went down into his windpipe.

Doctor Turner, are you still on the line?

What? said Wanda on Wilsie’s tape dated October 4, 1982. A dog howled. A cat, no doubt half-drugged and confined to a cage after a controversial de-claw surgery, screamed its head off. If you listen closely you can hear the distinctive popping sound of a microphone being tested to record conversations.

Are you recording this conversation? said Carl Worthington.

That’s Wilsie. He’s on the line in my office. He doesn’t talk. He just listens.

I’d prefer if we spoke privately.

He’s only five years old.

I’d prefer if we—

Wanda’s voice: Fine. Wilsie, will you get off the line now?

Click. The tape recorder clicked off.

Click. The tape recorder clicked on again.

Is he off now?

I think so. Wilsie, are you still there?

I thought you said he doesn’t talk.

"He doesn’t."

Now, regarding the will, Doctor Turner. I don’t quite know how to put this―

Wait a minute. I don’t think he’s off yet. Wilsie, I can hear you breathing.

Click.

Click.

Good thing your husband never—

Wilsie!

Click.

Click.

―incorporated, which means it’s all yours now, of course. But I’m not sure he informed you of everything. We need to discuss the property.

Property? said Wanda. You mean the house?

"No, the other property."

What property?

The Bucksnort property.

"What-snort?"

The ski resort.

Hold on a minute, will you? Wanda cleared her throat. In a calm, motherly voice, she said: Wilson Turner III, I can hear you in my office. You’re sitting on my chair, the squeaky one, and sucking on a piece of—

Click.

Click.

I tried to warn him against buying it, but he was adamant. He couldn’t stop talking about the chairlift. So against my better judgment he bought it—an abandoned ski resort in Bucksnort.

Click.

It’s really a lovely property, Gladys York of York Realtors in Bucksnort told Wanda (and unwittingly to Wilsie’s tape recorder) over the telephone.

This particular conversation, I’m guessing, took place a few hours after Wanda’s phone conversation with Carl Worthington, the lawyer. Knowing Wanda, she probably finished sewing up Sprinkles and then went outside the clinic to the alleyway for a cigarette before getting back to business, which on that day probably meant a few more surgeries: another de-claw, a lump removal, or perhaps a time-consuming canine dental cleaning (all that scraping). Then another break: more smoking; hearing the cheery ring of the cash register; watching Stacey in the back room stuff her mouth with cookies and marshmallows and animal crackers.

Next would come the obligatory phone calls: Hello, Mrs. Grabowski. This is Doctor Turner from the vet clinic. I’m calling to let you know that Sprinkles is out of surgery. The anesthesia is just beginning to wear off, which accounts for all the howling. And, No, Bob, the courier did not come at noon. This is the third time this month he’s been late. If you ask me, I think it’s because the kid is always doped out of his head. Listen, Bob, you’re going to have to speak up. It’s been a busy day and I can’t hear myself think. What did you say? And, Is this York Realtors? I need to speak with Gladys York. No, I cannot hold. I’m a doctor; I have patients. Yes, I realize it’s hard to hear me. I’m in the recovery room.

If Wanda sounds fed up on Wilsie’s tape, then Gladys York of York Realtors in Bucksnort sounds equally harassed—as well as strangely enthusiastic. Her voice sounds slippery, her message embellished by a surplus of italicized adjectives. Listen:

"Yes, Doctor Turner, I certainly can hear you better since you went into your office. Now, to get back to where I left off: There’s a massive fireplace made out of gorgeous red bricks, not to mention a colossal kitchen. Though early this morning, I must tell you, three men from Pepsi came to collect the vending machines, and now the deep fryer is gone. Despicable, if you ask me, how you can’t trust anyone anymore. At least they didn’t touch the big copper pans. Now that would have been a real travesty.

There are fourteen bedrooms in total, Gladys continued, "all still furnished. There are two big bedrooms upstairs (what they used to call the master suites) and twelve smaller ones located on the ground floor, behind the fireplace.

"Now, let me run all this by you so there’s no confusion: the cook, the wait staff, and the maids are all long gone, finito. But there’s still the promo guy to consider. His name is Finn Green. Anyway, this fellow is claiming that your husband—oh, dear, I’m so sorry—agreed to keep him employed, not as a promotion consultant, but as a security guard. Now listen, hon: I’ve got a hunch about this Green fellow, and why he’s so adamant about this security business. He likes the digs, you know, where he lives on the property—the Lair Lodge, that’s what it’s called. It’s located at the top of the mountain, next to the chairlift. Hon, you still with me?"

Wanda didn’t answer.

So we’re talking about two buildings here, Gladys York continued. There’s the ski resort itself and the Lair Lodge, where this Green fellow is currently camped out.

Excuse me, said Wanda, finally, "but where did you say the property is located?"

Bucksnort, Gladys York told her. It’s charming, really. And Carl Worthington says you’ve never been here? Oh dear! Let me tell you, it’s nice and quiet up here. But take some advice from me, hon: buy yourself a good snow blower.

Click.

Tape two, side B, Wilsie’s final recording before we all came together at the abandoned ski resort in Bucksnort, Colorado, features a conversation between my mother Connie and Aunt Wanda. It is calmer than the flipside. By then a week had passed since Mrs. Grabowski had picked up her castrated Labrador puppy. Even in the absence of howling dogs, it’s still difficult to hear the voices on Wilsie’s tape. I’m guessing this was due to a bad phone connection from Applewood, Colorado, where Wanda’s house was located, and Old Town Chicago, where Mother and I were living at the time in a studio apartment that I can no longer remember except in pieces: stark bare rooms; a tattered couch; two windows with a view of a red brick wall; a brown dog puppet (mine) with jawbreaker-sized eyeballs and an open blood-red mouth on top of an Amana refrigerator. That’s it. Everything else is forgotten. But back then I didn’t have Wilsie, or his tapes, or my black Teac.

It doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t even like to ski, so what made him buy a ski resort? Wanda said to my mother over the speakerphone. Next to her, I’m fairly certain, sat Wilsie with his tape recorder. Television noises—the sound of a gunshot, shattered glass and theme music followed by a brief pause and then a woman singing about detergent—can be heard in the background.

For the last time, Russell, turn it down! Wanda shouted.

"I think it makes perfect sense—the ski resort." That was my mother, Connie. Note her emphasis on herself—one of the few things about her that remained constant.

Wanda didn’t say anything. She must have been flabbergasted. "I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys’R’Us kid," blared wobbly and muffled on the television.

He didn’t always have big ideas, my mother said. One time, when we were children—

Just a second, said Wanda. She probably couldn’t stand talking to my mother. It was the first time they had spoken in five years. They were not what one might consider close. Wanda shouted at Russell again, no doubt stalling. (He did not, for the record, shout back at her. If he had then his voice would have been recorded for decades to come. I could be sitting here right now, listening to his words over and over again.)

Do skiers still come to the resort? my mother asked. She sounded hopeful.

No, said Wanda. It’s closed.

But there’s a lot of space?

"It’s ridiculous, the amount of space. I don’t know what to do with it all. I can’t imagine what he thought he was going to do with it."

But you’re going to move in?

Yes, said Wanda, sighing. We move tomorrow. Russell says he likes the chairlift.

How much space is there, exactly?

"The concept of the utopian society is elementally flawed," a televised voice stated.

Click went Wilsie’s tape recorder.

Five days later Mother and I stood forlornly on a highway overpass, roughly six miles from the abandoned ski resort that was now Wanda’s house, our bags and a gold-plated bowling ball at our feet, watching the taxi driver that Mother had offended speed away. It was a big moment for us, I could tell Mother thought, as we looked at the snowy meadows on either side of the highway, and then above to the boulders the color of chalk, and at the hemorrhage of blue-black trees that spotted the smooth slopes of the stenciled peaks. Perched on top of one of the denuded, craggy crests, a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus stood with arms outstretched, and my mother stood there staring at it with a look of pure exasperation on her face. Earlier that night, two and a half hours before we boarded the plane to Denver at a bookstore in O’Hare Airport, Mother had run her thumb along the spines of books, stating yet again to me the importance of coming in contact with ideas, only this time when she said it there was a deadness in her voice, unlike her usual upbeat, categorical way of speaking (Mother was big on emphasis), and it was only then, after we had left the bookstore and were walking past the international gates that I began to understand the depth of her disappointment—a feeling forever sealed inside her when, right before we boarded the plane to Denver, she’d emptied out the contents of her purse before a woman sitting between two big purple wastebaskets. Out came a thick wad of bills, then the thin blue booklets I knew were our passports, and finally two one-way tickets to Athens, Greece. Almost comically, it now seems, Mother gave our money, our identity, and our once envisioned future to an astonished, open-mouthed, homeless woman. In a soft yet definitive voice, Mother said to her, Here. Try this.

CHAPTER 2

USUALLY A HOUSE REMAINS A HOUSE, a ski resort remains a ski resort, and a veterinarian clinic remains a veterinarian clinic. A clubhouse, or an opera house, or a sex club, or a home for unwed mothers, or a recovery room in a hospital, remains what it is. It does not spontaneously morph into something else. Smells become familiar. A distinct imprint is left. When you walk into a hospital you know it is a hospital by the squeaky-clean floors and rows of identical chairs and slightly hushed voices and smell of disinfectant. Patients come and go—they get fixed or they die. It’s people who constantly change, not the structure.

Sometimes, just to make sense of things, I pretend I live in a recording studio. Different people from all over the country come to record their unique version of life. They sing about love and loss and hope and despair. A lot of times they sing about nothing. By now I’ve heard all the versions: the desperate love ballads, the practically undecipherable heavy metal tirades, the reflective folk tunes, the booming arias. There is no cohesion from one song to the next. In my opinion it’s just a lot of noise—loud, out-of-tune and screeching.

Presently our house acts as an unaccredited university. Whiny voices sing day in and day out about peripheral existence. Meanwhile, Wanda sits at the control panel monitoring the cacophony. Like a producer of a multi-disc teen album, she listens to the voices endlessly. She doesn’t hear what I hear. She doesn’t see what I see—the boys with their political magazines and stupid, funny glasses, or, even worse, the girls in the bathroom with their lip-glosses and chewed-down fingernails and big blinking eyes staring into the void at so many other similar reflections.

Wanda calls her students desert plants—wildflowers, cacti and succulents, trees and shrubs and grasses with all their whorls and spindles, wax-tapered fruits and glossy, water-heavy wedges, entire micro-environments growing out of a barren womb. Phreatophytes push their roots deep into the dry earth, Wanda says, until their tips reach pools of underground water. Xerophytes, even more cunning, store liquid drops in their round and green giant limbs. They conserve water and its nutrients, anticipating the time when the rain stops. Of course her students love her for that. Each time Wanda verbally plies them with compliments it reinforces their belief that they’re actually as quick-witted and special as they like to think they are, as though they’re a rare species fighting against extinction.

Wanda’s students hate me. This is, of course, a problem. Half the time I can’t even go into our living room, which, when class is in session, resembles a university lecture room; a true place of learning, as is stated in the admissions guide at one of the accredited universities in Denver, which, so long ago, I refused to attend for personal reasons.

Personal reasons my ass, Wanda now tells her current batch of pupils when she thinks I’m out of earshot. "If you talk to her about it, she’ll say she dropped out at the last minute because the course counselor told her she couldn’t take Introduction to Greek Mythology until she was a junior. But that isn’t the real reason. The real reason that Cam (Wanda calls me that now; I’ve been abbreviated) never went to the University Downtown is because the quality of the education and the philosophy enforced at that establishment amounts to bird shit—and she knows it!"

The University Downtown, as Wanda calls it, was founded in 1915 by a man named Dale Goody, whose wife’s grandfather, Eugene Whipsley, had acquired his fortune after the Civil War in the timber business by milling railroad ties for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. During his lifetime, many people said that Eugene Whipsley was a man of fortune. During his lifetime, many people said that Dale Goody was a man of double fortune. Not only had he married into the Whipsley family wealth, but out of the deal he’d also acquired his wife, Birdie Whipsley, a small-boned, delicate creature, who, though physically fragile with a weak voice and jaundice colored skin, required little to no attention and allowed her him to do whatever he wished with her family’s money.

When Dale Goody married, Wanda now enjoys saying, he not only won the prized yellow canary, but the gold-plated birdcage that came with it. At the wedding reception, Wanda jokes, Dale Goody fed birdseed to his little Birdie as everyone else toasted his good fortune with shotguns and Canadian whiskey.

Over the years, the University Downtown has undergone a series of changes. More classrooms have been built, along with a stadium, an indoor swimming pool complex and a collection of clay tennis courts; there’s a labyrinth of dorm rooms, common rooms, break rooms, sororities and fraternities now, as well as a range of activities and clubs offered that have nothing to do with the school’s curriculum. One of these clubs (offered only to boys) is called the Bird-Snaring Club. Its activities consist solely of videotaping girls performing acts of personal hygiene in the girls’ bathrooms. Once the footage is shot, edited and duplicated, a member of the club first distributes copies of the tape to all the other club members, then to a select group of paying customers, and finally to the victim herself, along with a note that reads: Greetings, are you aware that you’ve just been snared?

It is common knowledge that in the late 1970s Dennis Goody, the grandson of Dale Goody, originated the Bird-Snaring Club at the University Downtown. Like his grandfather, Dennis enjoyed the sport of hunting. Also like his grandfather, Dennis did not hunt animals, but humans. After graduating from his grandfather’s university, Dennis Goody became an accountant by day and an avowed voyeur in the Washington Park neighborhood of Denver by night before falling to his own demise in yet another of his hunting adventures. This time around, the hunter became the hunted when an unsuspecting woman, whom he had taped on a number of previous occasions through her second story bathroom window, became a little less unsuspecting.

This is the way Wanda tells it to her students: The bathroom window where Dennis Goody stood (he was on a ladder) to make his tapes was just behind and to the right of the bathtub and was at the same height that the woman’s pale, submerged shoulders rested as she reclined in the tub. One night the woman dropped the sponge she’d been washing herself with into the deepest part of the bathtub, and as her left hand drew down into the water, Dennis Goody zoomed his lens in, focusing on the narrow panorama of her right ear lobe, her right shoulder, and her right nipple. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Dennis, the woman’s left forearm, then her left hand, slowly reemerged, and at that moment—the same moment her left hand completely emerged from the water—Dennis Goody zoomed his lens back out again, only to see the woman’s upper body suddenly and violently twist in the direction of the window as her left hand hurled a baseball-size paperweight dove directly at him.

The blow of the dove, or, as Wanda likes to call it, the inevitable collision between peace and mankind, which shattered the glass and struck him somewhere between the collarbone and shoulder, did not kill Dennis Goody. The fall didn’t kill him either. After all, as Wanda often points out to her students, it was only two stories. What killed Dennis Goody was his own camcorder, which landed squarely on his forehead seconds after he hit the ground.

Acknowledging all the open mouths, furrowed brows, and pricked ears, Wanda continues: When the ambulance and police cars arrived, Dennis Goody’s victim would remember peering down from her second story window to see the lifeless body of Dennis Goody lying on her front lawn. Both his eyes and his fists were clenched tightly—like a fetus, she thought—but his mouth, a gaping black hole, stared back up at her, and she shuddered. Five years earlier, the woman had moved from Kansas City to Denver to sing with the Central City Opera, which only operated during summer. During the other three seasons, she worked as a dental hygienist at Denver General Hospital. Before that night, she thought the most beautiful and indispensable feature on the human body was the mouth, but after seeing the open mouth of Dennis Goody—the yellow teeth, the cherry-colored gums, the large, fleshy hole that went down into his insides—she had to give up both singing at the Central City Opera House and her job as a dental hygienist. Because of that one mouth, she later said, she had to give up contact with mouths completely—or at least as much as possible.

The woman’s name was Teresa Arbor, and after Dennis Goody’s camcorder killed him in her front yard she came to live with us for more than ten years. Though Dennis Goody was the last in the long line of Goodys, he had plenty of voyeur followers, mainly members of the Bird-Snaring Club at the University Downtown, and once they heard of his death, along with the tidbit about the dove paperweight, which they took as a personal insult, they went after Teresa with a vengeance.

And so Dennis Goody, the hunter who became the hunted, lives on. Besides the Bird-Snaring Club and its devoted members, a bronze statue of him stands directly in front of the entrance to the boys’ dorm rooms at the University Downtown. The only good thing about it, Wanda often says, is that in early spring and late fall, when the birds migrate to warmer climates, the statue is plagued with bird shit.

And then there is Dale Goody himself, who founded the school in 1915. Since that time only two things remain the same: the school is still for profit, and the mascot, a vicious-looking yellow-eyed bird crouched menacingly inside a gold-plated cage, still appears at every pep rally, football game, and annual freshman introduction breakfast. In a way, then, Birdie Goody, the timid, jaundice-colored wife who allowed her husband to do whatever he wished with her family’s money, lives on as well. Of course, Wanda roars over that one. After all this time, Birdie’s still in her cage. She always will be, Wanda often reminds me.

At this university, in this lecture room, which also happens to be our house, which also happens to be our living room, all appropriate, studious bric-a-brac is included: the pens and notebooks, the motivational posters, the piles and piles of books and papers, the drawers full erasers, and, of course, the students, all sitting in rather chaotic fashion, facing Wanda the pseudo-professor with awe and expectation, as if she herself were the one true voice that needed to be heard. What a joke!

Now, to quote my mother: Repeat after me: I’m against collective speech!

Currently this quote, in the form of an obnoxious bright yellow poster, sells in shops all across the country. We have it hanging over the fireplace, just above the gold-plated bowling ball that rests upon the mantle. While listening to Wanda’s lectures, the students often gaze at it. On occasion I’ve heard them say to one another: Repeat after me: I’m against collective speech!

Even though I leave the poster up for sentimental reasons, Wanda has told them, "you are to ignore it. For God’s sake, don’t repeat it."

They still repeat it, but only when they think I can’t hear them. What they don’t know is that I have a number of tape recorders hidden all over the house. At night, when I can’t sleep, I collect the tapes and listen to their conversations on my big black Teac, the mama of all recorders. Listen:

"Out in the woods, as we are, away from civilization, Mother Nature is in control now. And Wanda, too, you know. Mother Nature and Wanda."

But what’s with the chairlift? How did it get there? asks a boy with a lisp. And what about the girl who lives here? What’s her name again?

Camille, another boy answers. I’ve heard she’s Wanda’s lover.

A girl studying Modern Greek in our house replies: Wrong, idiot. She’s Wanda’s niece. She took over Wanda’s veterinarian practice.

I heard that her husband left her. Now he’s living in Greece trying to write a book.

Well, that doesn’t surprise me. I mean that he left her. She seems totally unoriginal.

Repeat after me: I’m against collective speech!

This voice I know well. It belongs to Becky Kingston, one of Wanda’s more sorry students: a girl with skinny wrists, chapped lips, and watered-down facial features. According to Wanda, Becky’s not only afraid of me (that apparently is not uncommon), but everyone else in the house, including Wanda. Becky Kingston goes to great pains not to insult anyone, then, to always, so to speak, play by the rulebook. Seated together at the enormous table in our dining room for a meal, someone might casually ask Becky to pass the salad, and Becky invariably replies, Repeat after me: I’m against collective speech! Halfway through the meal, when someone else inquires if anyone wants to take a walk through the woods the next day, and asks Becky if she would like to come along, Becky always answers, Repeat after me: I’m against collective speech! After dinner, while still at the table, when someone else might take out a package of cigarettes and asks Becky if she would like one, she squawks, Repeat after me: I’m against collective speech!

As far as I know, that’s all Becky ever says, and all the while she looks absolutely terrified, a stray mutt with old whip marks, on the verge of tears, both an endearing and an infuriating creature, so entirely pathetic that Wanda, I suspect, doesn’t know whether to toss her a bone or beat her senseless.

Becky is confused, Wanda will only say to me about her.

One recurring nightmare I have involves Becky Kingston. I’m alone with her in the common room. She’s crouched in the corner. I stand tall before her, explaining to her in detail, as she whimpers, what Mother had said to me as I stood next to her by the railing on the overpass in Bucksnort.

A community, Mother had said to me on the overpass in Bucksnort, is any group of people living in the same area and/or having interests, work, or the like in common.

In my nightmare I tell Becky that even back then I was worried about Mother. She was thirty-seven years old, a proud single woman, unemployed, and by all accounts probably unemployable; in short she was a socio-economic dropout, capable by all means, yet resistant to the chain, to order.

As an example, I tell Becky about Mother’s last (and only) job in Chicago. She had worked in a Greek restaurant called Harry’s Taverna, which was owned by a man named Spiros, who everyone in his immediate family called Rouli, who had a son named Harry, who had a newborn son named Spiros, who was not allowed to be called Spiros until his baptism and Name Day (still five months away) and was therefore simply called The Baby. All this was confusing to the customers, I tell Becky. Most assumed that the owner’s name was Harry, considering he owned a restaurant called Harry’s Taverna, but when they called him Harry, as in Can you please bring the bill, Harry? his son, whose name was Harry, would bring the bill instead. Further confusion arose when some of the customers heard Spiros’ wife call him Rouli. When the customers began calling him Rouli, as in Can you bring us another bottle of wine, Rouli? Rouli, whose real name was Spiros, would promptly spit out a rapid succession of Greek words to no one in particular as his son Harry brought another bottle of wine to the mystified customers. Rouli was his family nickname. Not just anyone was allowed to call him by it, I tell Becky. Furthermore, Rouli did not actually work in the restaurant: all night long he and his father—another, although slightly older Harry—sat on matching green barstools watching that other, much younger Harry do all the work.

Along with his serving and bartending duties, I inform Becky Kingston, Harry had another job as well: Each night at nine o’clock, after changing out of his waiter’s uniform into a brightly-colored, ill-fitting costume (shoulder pads), Harry got up on the small stage to perform traditional Syrtaki dances with my mother Connie. That was my mother’s job: to dance with Harry, who by that time was so exhausted that she had to practically hold him up in her arms while dragging him from one end of the stage to the other.

Harry had a costume, and so did my mother, I remember explaining to Wilsie once, before the fall, when he asked me about Chicago. Originally, we were all from Chicago, though both my cousins Russell and Wilsie claimed they didn’t remember anything about the Windy City. She wore a black skirt and a white blouse, but there was this thing she put over the skirt and blouse, like an apron, and it was very colorful, with a lot of red in it, I told Wilsie. And there was a hat too, which was stiff and colorful and worn high on her head.

That sounds like a stupid job, Russell had said. There’s no way she ever made any money doing that.

There was a tip jar, I said in my mother’s defense, though