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Chickasaw
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The Chickasaw Plum appreciates Carolyn See’s permission to
publish this excerpt from her splendid new novel There Will Never Be Another You.
Continuing in the tradition of The
Handyman and Making History, Ms.
See manages once more to combine the quotidian and apocalyptic in a courageous
and masterful manner.
PHIL
Maybe it was their last name: Fuchs, a family blight.
Loyalty to his dead father had kept him through the years from changing it.
Some teacher’s aide back when he was in kindergarten had called him what it
probably really was, Philip Fucks, and that had been the ending—or the
start—of his grade school career, maybe his life’s career. It had condemned him
to life as a buffoon, the last bewildered one to get a
joke.
“Don’t take that crap!” his stepdad
had said to him, or even “Beat the crap out of them!” But Phil couldn’t think of
it. Back in medical school he’d taken the least scary way out, first deciding
to be an obstetrician but nixing that after a week of looking up women’s things
all day, watching them swell up and turn purple and out jumped a baby. It was
too nerve-racking. He settled finally on dermatology, since nobody ever died of
a rash, and he
could refer the melanomas to oncology.
His stepdad -- trying to be kind –
had said that marrying Felicia would put some backbone in him, and now Phil
thought that was a good idea in theory, looking across a gleaming tablecloth
that had belonged to her mother. What really happened was she didn’t have much
backbone either. She took care of things like health and clothes and running
the house. She’d thrown a lot of tantrums lately.
Dinner tonight was steamed boneless chicken breasts, steamed
beets, steamed broccoli: one of Felicia’s fandom health experiments. They all
tried to live well. He played tennis twice a week and ran on weekends, and the
kids played soccer. At least Eloise did, who lounged nher
chair now, ignoring this awful dinner, playing with her upper lip. Philip
couldn’t even say Can’t you cut that out? Because he was afraid
of his daughter’s sneer. Eloise sneered because she was a good athlete and a
first-rate scholar. She’d made it into
Phil eyes the chicken and took a deep drink of his Chateau
St. Jean, which he’d read about—and since then dreamed of-as the perfect
companion to stuffed foie gras.
His wine collection was his luxury and consolation, and Felicia put up with it
because it was an OK thing to do in their circle of friends. A lack of candles made them all look our of sorts tonight. Felicia picked at her chicken, her
mouth turned down at both corners. She was one of those women who’d have to get
a face-lift quick and early, and he knew 0065actly what she’d look like then:
not good humored, because she had a sad, stubborn streak inher,
but determined, with everything on her face going up.
How he’d like some candles or some music! But this was an
early weekend dinner. All business. Just beyond his
wineglass and his water glass and salad, he was treated to the sight of his son
Blam!
Blam!
Felica covered her eyes with her hands.
She seemed deep in her own thoughts.
Blam!
“
“Do something about it, Phil!”
Phil said as mildly as he could, “I’m just asking him what
he was doing. I mean, what is the impetus behind his acts? Is it an experiment
of some kind?”
Blam!
The glasses jolted. Phil snatched up his wine and drank it
off.
“Vern,” he said, “how’s school?”
“Sucks,”
“Sucks rhymes with fucks,” Eloise remarked.
“I don’t like that language at my table, Eloise,” Phil said.
“And Vern, you
better start paying attention in school or you’re going to find yourself
someplace that won’t be the kind of picnic you’re used to.”
“I don’t care.”
“What did you say?”
“Don’t CARE!”
His sister smiled. ”Maybe you’ll get raped. Sucks rhymes with fucks.”
“Eloise,” Felicia said. “Please.”
“Goddamn it,” Philip said. “that’s
it! That was a hundred solar bottle of wine when I bought it five years ago.
There’s at lest twenty dollars worth of wine right there on the table!” Heknew he sounded like a crank, an old crank. But it was
hell to be responsible for thee three—what else could he call them?—leeches!
Why couldn’t Felicia be the kind of woman who needed a career to fulfill herself? The concept of work of any kind was entirely
foreign to her. They’d had help since the minute they were married, a
never-ending stream of Spanish-speaking peasants, who stayed until they learned
some English or couldn’t take I any more and left.
There was no way out for him. Felicia’s brother was a
divorce lawyer. And he himself was bad with math. He couldn’t hid an asset if he tried.
“You could cut
down on your collection,” Felicia said. As if that would
change anything.
He could have said, You drink as much as I do and you know
it, or, Wine’s my only comfort in this hellhole of a house, or You might want
to do more with your life than shop,
or It was a dark day in my life when you spread your legs for me; if I’d only
been thinking more closely about cause and effect.
But it was useless. He had just one project now. Eloise
would be all right. Ads disagreeable as she was, she knew what king of world
she lived in; she pulled the grades and did the sports and had a healthy love
of money. Phil’s pension would take care of Felicia if anything happened to
him, and if she had to live in slightly reduced circumstances, that would be ultrafine with him.
“Vern, I’m going into the den now. You and I have to
talk.” But once he got Vern in there ,he had trouble figuring out what to do next. He took
his own favorite leather chair, close to the fireplace, with the best view of
the televisions, a
nice piece of cherry wood that looked like a cupboard until you
pressed a button and with a terrible groan the television heaved out. (He prudently kept hold of the
remote so that Vern couldn’t blow him off altogether.)
“Soon,” Phil said, “Son.”
Phil’s real dad had been a scholar, a professor, a man of
taste who died too young His stepdad was a man’s man,
respected by all, kind to his family. Always there in an
emergency. He wanted to run his life on both models, to be an honorable
professional family man, to take his kids both to museums and baseball games.
Eloise sometimes went on jaunts with him because she knew which side her bread
was buttered on. Or to get some fresh air. Or for an assignment from school. Since last year, she had
passed on all that.
“Son,” Phil said, and took a breath.
”Leaving the fifth grade is a very important time for any
boy. You could say the time of childhood is past. You have to think about
becoming a man…”
“…whether you like it or not. It’
just a question of grades. Your report cards have not been good lately. Or your behavior.”
“You’re one of only six in your class who haven’t been
recommended by the faculty for a private middle school. You know that.
And two of those six are Special kids. You’ve got to shape up, Vern! Before it’s too late. I’m not kidding about this. Vern?”
“I mean it!” He
could hear his voice rising “It’s not too late. You can still redeem yourself.
Isn’t there anything you’re good at? Something to concentrate on to raise your
grade average, something you like?”
Silence.
“What about French? Y our teacher said you cou8ld probably
do much better if you’d only apply
yourself. He said that you had a real talent there, a natural talent with
languages—“
“Silly-ass faggot!”
“What did you
say?”
“Nothing.”
“Math? Science? Gym?”
His son grunted.
Not for the first time, Phil considered that his son needed
Ritalin or Zoloft, something to take the edge off.
“The thing is, if you don’t get into a good middle school,
you won’t get into a good high school and you’ll never get into a good university.
We’ve been over this a thousand times,
“You work at UCLA. You’ll be able to get me in.”
“Oh, Vern! It doesn’t work
that way. You’ve got to pull up the grades. You’ve got to ace the SATs. You’ve
got to succeed—“
He was going to say on
your own merit. But
he was looking at the possibility that maybe the kid had lost his
merit somehow. Maybe he would go to public schools an
deal drugs if he was lucky, but Eloise might be right too. He’s probably get
mugged or raped or half drowned in a toilet that wasn’t even cleaned regularly.
He’d have no skills. He wouldn’t even go to college and he’d end up working as
a box boy. Or at Blockbuster where he’d get raped and mugged
again. Would Eloise take care of her brother when he got older? Not a
chance. Eloise wouldn’t pull her own mother out of a shallow pond.
Phil looked bleakly at the long years opening up in front of
him. He had dreamed of putting their to children through good schools and then,
at some point, selling the Santa Monica house for a healthy profit, cashing in
his UCLA pension, and moving with Felicia to the south of France. Ryeres.
La Ciotat. He had loved these towns when he was a
student him, bicycling, hitchhiking, beginning to learn the different textures
of wine, starting out at the very bottom—harsh red almost vinegar siphoned
straight from a shop keeper’s barrel into the corked green bottle he’d kept in
the basket of his bake at all times. He
remembered the first Châtonuef-du-Pape he’d bought
with an unexpected check
from home. And his first Lacryma
Christi. “qui
a fait si bonne cuisine?” the
lady at the youth hostel had said that night, when some kids were cooking. And
he’d brought out his bottle.
Now—or soon, when the kids were gone and if the world didn’t
blow up—he knew exactly the
place he wanted himself and Felicia to end their days. A stone
cottage with thick walls and a kitchen garden and some two- or three-star
restaurants close enough to drive to. And to be there when
the Beaujolais Nouveau really was Nouveau.
But he couldn’t do it if
“Look. We’re going out to interviews in the next couple of
months. Your mom and I will do everything we can. We’ll say the teachers had it
in for you. We’ll say you were too smart
for the curriculum-that you were bored. That’s true enough, isn’t it.”
“We’ll say your social skills are below par because
you’re a genius in math….”
Again
“Some science they haven’t thought up et! Pay attention,
Vern! All you have to do is look presentable. You come from a good family; your sisters doing all right. We can get
through this. This is just one of many steps, some of them hard, some of them easy, that lead to—“
He stopped. He couldn’t stand to listen to himself.
“Hey, Eloise!” he yelled. “Felicia! Come on in here and
let’s watch television.
Mercifully, they came in. Felicia stretched out along the
couch where she could touch Eloise if she wanted to, if Eloise would stand for
it.
“Any games on?”
“Nah.”
***************
There Will Never Be Another You is Available at bookstores
everywhere.
The
Chickasaw
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