Home Land: A Novel Read Free Page A

afterward—is a spider on the new smoke alarm.
    Spooky.
    Enough is enough.
    He finds his mother at the kitchen table. She’s doing crossword puzzles with a fountain pen. There’s a faint dark smear on the tip of her nose. The candy bar wrapper is bunched in a coffee cup. What’s a five-letter word for traitor?
    “Mommy,” he says.
    “I was just …” she says. “I had to test it, L. To see if it was okay. It was bad, baby. It was a bad candy bar. I’ll get you a good one.”
    God, the guilt, hers, his. She gets him cupcakes, candy corn, gooey-sweet tarts. They never speak of freezing things again. Years later, when he kisses her cold calves in a hospital room, he sees what the trick had been. The trick was to give unto others that which you mean to seize. He’d be a sorcerer, too.
    “A SORCERER?” said Gwendolyn, one of the few times I told her this tale. “Just because she ate your candy bar? My mom guzzled rye and beat us. My uncle put his dick in my armpit while I slept. My cousin hid my college acceptance letter until it was too late to reply. Your mother ate your candy bar?”

    “It’s symbolic.”
    “That’s what people say when they know they’ve come with the weak shit.”
    “Fuck you,” I said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “I said fuck you,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to say it for a long time. I just couldn’t find the right words.”
    Yes, this exchange occurred during a particularly frenzied juncture in our unraveling, but I always thought Gwendolyn missed the point of my story. The candy bar incident, aside from its obvious revelations regarding my character, or the deformation thereof, imparts a tremendous lesson about life’s treats in general: munch immediately! Maybe that could be a chapter in the self-help book I’ve been meaning to write, The Seven Habits of Highly Disappointed People, which I could probably bang out in an afternoon if I weren’t so busy updating you fine people on the latest in the life of me.
    Perhaps now you understand why I haven’t waited for confirmation from that titan of secondary education, Principal Fontana, a man last seen bleeding profusely from one or more head wounds whose origins remain a delectable mystery. Doubtless he received my first installment, though it’s no shock he failed to include it in the latest edition of Catamount Notes . I’m sure he’s quite busy with whatever whirlwind he was in the midst of reaping that night we led him out of Brenda Bruno’s. Maybe his stitches got infected. Maybe the lovely Loretta is smearing antibiotic ointment on them even as I write. Oh, Loretta, daub some on your leg wool while you’re at it, hey?
    YESTERDAY, Catamounts, it suddenly struck me that the vestibule of my house no longer reeks of human urine. It was some kind of olfactory epiphany, this absence of stench, and I traced it to the absence of my landlady, Mrs. Hildebrandt. This brittle gal lived below me for years and I’d help her with her groceries and such, though I must confess I wasn’t what would fall under the rubric of
devastated when she sold the building and moved to Green Bay. She liked to run on about her surgeon sons, how dexterous and charitable they were, though apparently neither nimble nor generous enough to visit their only mother.
    “My Tommy would eat you for lunch,” she’d often say, even as I was fixing hers.
    I’d just chuckle, nod. I’ve always been an easy mark for the decrepit, the infirm. Do you by chance remember the secretary at Eastern Valley, Edna O’Grady? Old Lady O’Grady, you called her, and proffered remarks vis-à-vis the probable aridity of her birth canal, as did I, admittedly, but did you ever notice all that caramel on her desk come Valentine’s Day? Who do you figure shelled out the cash for all those heart-shaped goodies? Like I said, I’m a sucker for the crones. Maybe they remind me of my mother, had the chemo worked.
    Mrs. Hildebrandt, though, she kindly cured me of my sentimentalist