Story Three. Part Three.
Editor’s Note: Beth Kalet's story Appearances is our featured story. “Appearances” is one of 7 short stories included in Beth’s book Seven Stories, published in 2012. “Appearances” will be published on Hummingbird in parts, one per week over the next weeks.
Beth, a Hummingbird Guest Contributor, is an accomplished writer and editor. Her work, and her own story encouraged us to reach out to her.
In Appearances, Beth explores the notion that people and the lives they lead are not necessarily what you thought, or remembered. In fact sometimes the perception you hold is quite far from the reality.
Book Cover Photo Credit: Diane Pell
Appearances. Part Three.
They sat on my couch, hunched over a bit, clearly uncomfortable, Melissa’s black jeans touching Joe’s blue jeans -- her hands on her lap, like a prim schoolgirl. I was glad they were still together.
“Can I get you a beer? Or water?”
Beers in hand, we all had something to clutch now and that made talking easier.
“How long you’ve been living here Pete?” Joe asked me. He sounded a lot like his grandfather then, his Poppy.
I told him I’d been here, in this apartment, for two years now, almost three. Ever since I’d moved to the city. I wasn’t really sure how much I wanted to tell him about myself and how much he already knew.
It had been more than ten years since I’d last seen Joe. We’d both gone from being kids to men, and I was betting it was something more than nostalgia that drew him back to me but for the life of me couldn’t figure out what. While they sipped at their beers and absently fingered the seams of the couch, I wracked my brain for a clue from our past that would explain why he’d shown up. I didn’t want to be taken by surprise when he finally sprang it on me.
“You know, Melissa, Pete and I used to sit up in my room and talk for hours when we were kids,” Joe said. “I used to think he had the perfect life.”
Then he turned to me. “Pete, did I ever tell you that once I managed to insult my grandmother, my grandfather and both my parents all in one sentence?”
No one said anything.
It turned out that while I remembered our childhood friendship had developed in the classroom, it had a history older than that. As Joe began to talk, bits and pieces of conversations returned to me as memory fragments that I might have pieced together if I’d been a more clever kid.
Joe told me that a year ago his father had been critically hurt while driving back from the airport. He’d taken on a part-time job as a limo driver since the clowning business had slowed. Aging clowns, Joe said, weren’t in demand for kids parties. No one wanted them for corporate gigs and whatever else it was they did as performers. It had all dried up.
His dad was stopped at a red light and was rear-ended by a truck that just barreled into him. He survived for several weeks in the hospital, hooked up to machines that helped him breathe and when the monitors showed little brain function Joe and his mother had made the decision to pull the plug. “With all that rigging coming out of his face, with the bruises and cuts from the accident, he didn’t’ look much odder than he looked on a Saturday morning doing kids’ parties,” Joe said. His voice was flat, as if he was reciting from a card.
After that, Joe said, his mother started spilling her guts to him. That’s when he learned of the connection between his family and mine. And that’s when he learned about the secret my parents had kept all this time for his mother.
Melissa squeezed his hand when he told me this part and I could see Joe hold himself very steady as he sat, still uncomfortably, on my couch. Time hadn’t reversed. We didn’t instantly fall into the easy banter we’d known as children. We were still people who’d once been friends and I waited for him to drop some sort of bomb that might reveal something I didn’t want to know about my family.
But he retreated to storytelling.
“Once, in a moment of anger,” Joe said, “I asked my mother why. ‘Why, when you are deformed, do you show yourself off? Why can’t you pretend you are like everybody else?’
“I wanted to hurt her, make her see how she embarrassed me. She was on my case about something that day, I’m sure. Something I can’t even remember now.”
“You were a kid, just a kid,” Melissa said.
“My mother was an easy mark sometimes. Sometimes I just got tired of…of her not being like other mothers.”
He sighed. There was no more talk of his father. It was all about his mother.
“You know what she said to me?”
“She said, ‘You’ll never know. You’ll never know my darling boy. You are perfect.’ ”
He took his hand away from Melissa and crossed it over his other hand, the one that rested on the coffee table, holding his beer bottle. I saw that moment years ago when my mother reached her hand across the picnic table in our yard to cover Joey’s mother’s clasped hands. I recalled how his mother’s face was bowed and her shoulders bent, hunched, and now I realized she had been crying as my mother gingerly offered some kind of support.
“My mother told me that she felt her deformity every day,” Joe went on. “That not a minute passed by that she wasn’t aware of how different she was. She could not pretend otherwise. It was not possible. ‘Sometimes I feel like I have betrayed my kind – the broken, misshapen, imperfect people,’ she told me. ‘Because I do hide it. But you don’t know this. You can’t see me, Joseph. I am my shame.’
“That’s what she said. That was the first and last time she’d been so open with me. Until now.”
He didn’t speak for a long time and neither Melissa nor I dared to say a word.
“Here’s the thing,” Joe said. “And I just can’t figure out how to say this but -- your parents are holding some information for me. My mother gave it to them when we were little, years ago. Years and years ago.”
I could hardly imagine what it might have been. Like I said, our parents were not friends, and save for the few times I saw his mother and mine chatting at the borders of our back yards, I didn’t think they’d had much contact.
I didn’t think so but what did I know?
The invisible back yard boundary had been planted with hedges some time when we were in grade school, just two feet high at first, and no obstacle to two neighbors who might stand on either side to talk now and then. But time passed and the hedges grew. By the time I moved out, it seemed they had always been there.
“So, do you just want me to get it back for you or do you want to tell me what it was about?”
Joe didn’t answer. Although he’d come on this particular errand, it was apparent that he hadn’t planned his approach.
“OK, then,” I said, after some time passed and no one had spoken. “I’ll call my mother and see if she has what you’re looking for.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Actually I did try to find her, but your parents are not there anymore. Guess they moved?”
My dad died the year after I graduated high school. Had a heart attack right in the car, still in the garage, just as he was turning the key to start it up. My mom found him slumped over the steering wheel and like everybody else, at first she thought it was suicide. It was a heart attack. He was 42 years old. But I didn’t feel like going into it with the two of them.
A few years after my dad died, my mom sold the house, moved to a condo, met a man, remarried and changed her name. Then she moved again with her new husband. To anyone looking for my parents, it would be as if they’d disappeared.
And I hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood. So neither my mother nor I had heard the news that Joe’s father had died. But now I would tell my mother. In fact, I couldn’t wait for the pair of them to leave so I could call her and see if she knew what he was talking about here.
“Okay, then,” Joe said, standing up. “That’s good. When can I check back with you, Pete?”
Maybe that’s the way it is. You can’t repair the past. Our friendship was the boyhood kind and that’s where it would stay. As I walked them to the door, it was Melissa who seemed most friendly. “It was nice to see you again, Pete,” she said in a light tone that came close to lyrical. I supposed she knew what Joe had come looking for.
Part Four, Finale, to follow.
Prior Parts of Appearances.
Appearances. Part One.
Appearances. Part Two
To learn more and to purchase Beth Kalet’s book, Seven Stories, please click here. You may also contact Beth through Hummingbird by clicking here.
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