and left.
You really put her through the wringer, Dad.
The blackboard menu today advertised Hamburger Soup, all U could eat. We started on our second bowls of steaming hot soup: ground meat, commodity macaroni, canned tomatoes, celery, onion, salt, and pepper. It was especially good that day. Dad had also ordered Mighty’s coffee, which he called the stoic’s choice. It was always burnt. He kept drinking it expressionlessly after we’d finished the soup.
I wanted to get a feel for how she was doing, said my father. She’s been through the wringer enough, for real.
I wasn’t sure what coming down to talk with Linda Wishkob was about, but apparently some exchange I didn’t understand took place.
Dad had finally allowed Cappy to come over that day. It was a grueling hot afternoon so we were inside playing Bionic Commando, quietly as we could, with the fan on. As always, my mother was sleeping. There was a soft tap. I answered the door, and there was Linda Wishkob, her bulging eyes, her tight blue uniform, her sweaty, dull, makeup-less face. Those long fingernails on the stubby fingers suddenly struck me as sinister, though they were painted an innocent pink.
I’ll just wait for her to wake up, said Linda.
She surprised me by stepping past me into the living room. She nodded at Cappy and sat down behind us. Cappy shrugged, and as we hadn’t played our game for a while and were not going to quit for any small reason, we continued: For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving. We taste the nearness of defeat. But deep in the bowels of our community our scientists have perfected an unprecedented fighting weapon. Our bionic arm reaches, crushes, flexes, feints, folds. It pierces armor and its heat-seeking sensors can detect the most well-defended foe. The bionic arm combines the power of an entire army in itself and must be operated by one and only one soldier who can meet the test. I am that soldier. Or Cappy is that soldier. The Bionic Commando. Our mission takes us through the land of a thousand eyes, where death awaits us around every corner and through every window. Our destination: enemy headquarters. The heart of our hated foe’s impregnable fortress. The challenge: impossible. Our resolve: unflagging. Our courage: quitless. Our audience: Linda Wishkob.
She watched us in such utter silence that we forgot about her. She hardly breathed or moved a muscle. When my mother left her room and went to the upstairs bathroom I didn’t hear that either, but Linda did. She padded to the foot of the stairs and before I could say or do anything, she called my mother’s name. Then she started walking up the stairs. I quit playing and jumped up, but already Linda’s soft round body was at the top of the stairs and she was greeting my mother as if my mother weren’t skinnily tottering away from her, disoriented, discovered, and invaded. Linda Wishkob did not seem to notice my mother’s agitation. With a kind of oblivious simplicity she just followed her into her room. The door remained open. I heard the bed creak. The scrape of Linda’s chair. And then their voices, as they started to talk.
A few days later there was finally a steady downpour of rain and I stayed inside for the second time that summer, playing my games, drawing cartoons. Angus had been working on his second portrait of Worf, but Star had called up and told him to borrow a plumber’s snake from Cappy’s place. They were over at Angus’s now, probably, drinking Elwin’s Blatz and pulling goop out of a stinking drain. My pictures bored me. I thought of sneaking the Cohen handbook, but reading my father’s cases and notes had set up a despair in me. On a day like this I might have gone upstairs, locked myself in my room, and paged through my hidden HOMEWORK folder. My mother’s presence upstairs had killed that habit off. I was thinking of slogging over to Angus’s or even of taking out the third and fourth Tolkien books my father had got me for Christmas, but I wasn’t sure I was desperate enough to do either thing. The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother’s spirit isn’t dying