“Going to toke up?” Beatrice’s mother asks him. He pops his head back inside the kitchen. He is stocky and solid like a bolted zucchini that has grown too long. He holds a finger and thumb up to his lips and inhales, pinching together a vacancy in between them.
Their mother has put a feather in her hair for the holiday, her “Indian headdress.” She can’t stand it that her youngest child is a pothead and sometimes she’ll get a look, as if she’s trying not to cry just thinking about it. She’s a very good actress. She stares at Clem. He looks just like her, dark hair, red skin, and papery lips. Beatrice’s mother can make her bottom jaw tremble so slightly that the movement is barely perceptible. She stares at him with her mouth wide open, waiting for him to feel guilty. Beatrice looks away. It is difficult for Beatrice to think of her mother as someone with thoughts and desires, as someone who keeps a vibrator in her bedside drawer the way Beatrice does, as someone who might dream about a tremendous ice cube, the size of a sofa, melting in the middle of a hot desert, and wake up having absolutely no idea what the dream means.
“Dude, I’m so stoned.” Clem laughs once, faking a stumble before disappearing. As he opens the front door the flat sound of road traffic sneaks inside. Beatrice clears the table. She holds the turkey over the garbage by its breastbone, dangling it there while her mother splits what is left in the last wine bottle between their two glasses.
“When Atlantis was sinking there was an awful period of…” and Beatrice’s mother stops to think of the proper word but can’t. “Of sinking,” she says and places her open hands on either side of her face, like the sunshine. Beatrice cringes at the gesture. Her mother is going to try to tell her something she doesn’t want to hear. Her mother still works for Mythologic and believes all concepts are better communicated through specious retellings of ancient myths. Most of the time, Beatrice can’t see the connections.
“Imagine,” her mother says, her hands still in place. “People went to sleep inland and woke up with the ocean at their doors. When they stepped outside in the morning to pee or to feed their goats the neighbors were gone and the only sound was waves lapping.”
Her mother slowly drags one finger across their kitchen table and then does it again. Beatrice remains entirely still, frozen like a field rabbit, hoping her mother will decide not to tell her whatever it is she wants to say. She can already imagine its perimeters: “Honey, I wish you would think about a job that offers insurance,” or “I know a real nice young man you might like to meet, Bea.” But he wouldn’t be a nice young man. He would be another forty-five-year-old divorced actor her mother had met through community theater projects, a man who also holds his hands up around either side of his face like the sunshine when he wants to make a point.
Or maybe she wants to tell Beatrice that she is finally going to sell the farm.
But Beatrice is wrong.
“When your dad was in the hospital the doctor gave me a choice, Bea.” She rubs her palms across her skinny thighs, exhaling. “The doctor asked, ‘Do you want to stop his pain?’ And at first I said, yeah, of course, but then the doctor asked again, ‘No. Do you really, really want to stop his pain?’ And, Bea, I knew what he meant and I said yes. I killed your dad.”
She is drunk.
“Oh. So you killed him?”
“Well, not me, but the doctor. I told the doctor to go ahead and get it over with.”
“What does that have to do with Atlantis?” Beatrice asks.
Her mother has to think for a moment. She looks up at the ceiling. “We all have to die sometime?”
Beatrice stares straight ahead like a TV stuck on static, the remote control gone dead. She blinks a series of gray and black squiggled lines. No reception. Nothing. Her mother’s words are not getting through; they are stones dropped into a bottomless hole, the hollow known as Beatrice. They fall and fall until they are too far away to be heard.
There’s an unwound egg timer beside the stove. “You want to watch a movie, hon?” Static clears, program resumes. It’s a story about a mother and her kids on a farm in Pennsylvania, a dull after-school special broadcast for the Thanksgiving holiday.
If Beatrice sits in the living room with her mother watching a movie, she’ll explode—a dark green syrup of boredom her mother will have to sponge off the floor with Fantastik and a towel. “I’m going to go see what Clem’s up to.” Beatrice is still holding the turkey by its breastbone. It has started to sway. Beatrice drops the bird. It makes a swoosh, a rush of flight as it falls into the garbage bag.
*
When Beatrice was a girl, Clement still a baby, and the farm was in okay shape, Bea and her father walked the fields once a day. The furrows were dry and bulging and Beatrice liked how it felt when the dirt broke underneath her muck boots. Corn plants made a canopy over her head. She’d lose sight of everything except her father’s legs marching ahead of her. She’d put her hand inside his and he’d hold it roughly as if her hand was a mouse he’d captured. She’d pretend he was not her father at all but a boyfriend, someone from TV.
He said: “Don’t tell your mom, but I’m the king of the farmers.” They walked on a bit farther and came across an irrigation hose that had cracked its rubber tubing. Her father fingered the leak and stared out at the land with every intention of coming back and patching up the cracked hose. He’d never come back. He just liked to look that way from time to time.
“Farming,” he’d say, “takes ten percent perspiration and ninety percent inspiration.” Beatrice had heard this the other way around, but didn’t let on. Maybe he was the king. He wasn’t a bad farmer. He just didn’t do things the way they had always been done. For instance, pruning trees—he had no time for it, or thinning plants. He hated to yank up seedlings that had been eager enough to sprout. He’d let the vegetables grow on top of one another. He’d let the carrots and beets twist around each other, deformed by proximity. “They still taste as sweet,” he’d say, but no one wanted to buy the bent oddities that came from such close growing quarters.
Beatrice’s father rarely wore proper farmer clothing. Instead he dressed in chinos, button-down oxford shirts, and canvas sneakers. “They’re cheap” is all he ever had to say. He looked like James Dean in the movie East of Eden. James Dean on a John Deere. He’d hay the fields, and Beatrice would follow behind in the trail of the tractor’s exhaust, so it would be hard for her to know what was an act and what was real.
*