Visit

“Visit” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

We went to visit Mom on Mother’s Day. I brought a card from school that I’d made with glitter and bits of uncooked macaroni. Peggy said it looked retarded. I said she was just jealous. She said ha, she didn’t need a card. And anyways, if she’d had one that ugly she’d have flushed it down the toilet. I said to knock it off or I’d tell Mom. No, you won’t, she said, you’re too much of a sissycat. After that she made a big sigh, turned away from me, pulled out a crossword puzzle and worked on it the rest of the way until she got so bored she held her head out the window like dog.
The bus let us off at an enormous white gate. A smiling man stood beneath it. His coat had the word Doodles printed on it in red above the pocket. He asked our names, then shook our hands. His was sweaty. Once we were inside the gate he again held out his hand. A couple dozen sticks of gum lay in it. He said to take as many as we wanted. Did we want ten? We could have ten. Or fifteen. How many did we want?
We said no thank you.
We had instructions from Dad: on this visit we could accept no gifts. None. Not even if the person looked nice—and Doodles didn’t. He had stains on his pants and his shoes didn’t match, but I liked the way he whistled as he walked us through the guards, past the sign-in desk and down the several echoing halls to where they kept Mom.
The door he stopped in front of had only one window. It was tiny. Peggy and I weren’t tall enough to look into it but I told Peggy it must be how the doctors made sure Mom was okay. She said I should just shut up because she already knew that, so there!
Doodles pulled the door open and then left without saying anything. This room wasn’t like the others in the hall. I had no curtains, plants, posters, magazines, or anything. Not even any furniture. Just a bed. Mom was on it. She was sitting across from us, staring at us. Her head never moved. Neither did her eyes. All that moved were her lips and her tongue. She kept licking at them. And it made a quiet little noise, almost like rain.
I didn’t remember about the card until we were back on the bus. Give to me, Peggy said. She slipped it out the window. We lost sight of it in the twilight long before it stopped getting jostled about by the wind.

"Punishment"

“Punishment” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

Dad didn’t like us calling Mom a vegetable. But everybody else does, Peggy said. Who? When Peggy wouldn’t answer he told her to go outside. This was his way. He made us sit on the porch when we didn’t obey. We couldn’t read or eat or sing or do a puzzle or draw or talk or balance on the rail or do headstands, jumping-jacks, or sit-ups or anything. We could sit. That was it. Sit and stare at whatever was out there, which was usually nothing. The house next door was what I watched. They always sat there looking back, only they were colored blue so I knew they weren’t really looking at me. They were somewhere else in their heads, wherever it was their TV had taken them.

Vegetables

“Vegetables” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

The yard sale next door sold our wagon. The kid who bought it was too big for it – almost as big as us. But he got it anyway. He had red hair that looked like a weed you’d see growing where nothing else would. We watched him drag away the wagon. Peggy said he’d break it before he got it home. She knew he would. Peggy said he looked like the breaker type. We’d never broken it. We only broke things when we were upset. Peggy did this more than me. She threw a scissors at me once when I called her ugly. It stuck in the dinner table. She was also able to hold her breath under water longer than me or anyone I knew. Sometimes when she was under I was afraid she’d burst. Her face was gray as ash when she came back up. I’m back from the dead, she’d say. Now I’m special. Now you have to do what I say and eat all your vegetables.

Bad Influences

“Bad Influences” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

The streetlight was broken, but we still hid our bicycles in the alley next to the movie theater. We had to stash them between the alley's wall and a big green dumpster because Dad passed this way on his way home from work and he didn’t like us going to see movies—especially foreign ones. They were bad influences.
The woman who took our tickets was bent over like a hunchback. There was mustard on the rim of her lip and Peggy whispered that her perfume smelled like dish soap. The woman said the movie started ten minutes ago. We went in anyway, trying to be quiet as we tiptoed across the squeaky linoleum floor with our jumbo-sized popcorns in our hands.
There was nowhere to sit except the front row. Peggy couldn’t believe how uncomfortable these seats in the front row were. She said she thought they were so stiff because they had probably been made out of the old blackboards from her school. Then she giggled a little, but stopped when there was a creepy noise behind us. Neither of us moved. We just listened to that sound. It was muffled rumbling sound, a little like the ocean but not as nice. Finally I peered around a little. It was an old man back there right behind us. And he kept wheezing. Peggy said I should tell him to stop. I wouldn’t. He wore a raincoat. Peggy said she didn’t like him or his raincoat. He made her feel funny. And, worse, he kept breathing on her. She said we should leave. We did.
But we didn’t go home. We climbed up some soda crates behind the movie house and waited on its roof until the old man came out, whereupon I reached my hand out far as I could and dropped a slug on him. It landed on his hat, but he didn’t notice so it wasn’t any fun. Then, as we rode home, it started to rain. After it kept raining for a week Peggy said maybe we shouldn’t have thrown the slug at him.

Dog House

“Dog House” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

The nails of our porch were exposed in places. They would trip you if you weren’t careful. It happened often at night. It did every time my father’s friend Barney came to visit. His green canvas duffle bag would fly out of his hand and fall behind him in a heap, but this didn’t stop Barney. He continued forward, propelled by his own girth; his hand shooting out ahead to try and save him, his lips curling back, his cheeks hollowing out, fingers stiffening, until --- clang! --- he’d clunk face first into the huge rusted steel door we’d gotten from the light house at an auction.
He slept on our couch whenever he visited. I was always first up so I made him breakfast. He said his eggs had to be as tough as the skin of a lizard or he wouldn’t eat them. He’d been in prison. I always wanted to ask him about it, but Peggy said I shouldn’t. She said if I did, she’d tell Dad and then I’d be in the dog house real bad. She thought Barney had killed someone. It made sense to her that someone big like Barney would be a killer. And, she said, hadn’t I noticed that killers always had too many nosehairs?
I looked at Barney while he and I sat eating our rubbery eggs and the wind pounded the trees outside. Dad had met him at the bar. He was one of the few men that Dad liked. They often sat on a pile of rocks up the hill behind our house and smoked cigarettes until it got so dark you couldn’t see anything of them except two orange glowing dots. Because I couldn’t ask him about being in prison, I didn’t ever know what to say while we ate our eggs. All I could do was sit and watch him out of the corner of my eye, ready to jump and run away if he started to hold his butter knife in any unusual way.

Walnuts

“Walnuts” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

There was a park only a block from our house. We never went to it. We liked the one downtown more. That one had these busted people lying around without socks. They would ask other people for money or cigarettes or food. But not us. They never asked us for anything. It bothered Peggy how they smelled. She said it would be better if they took a bath, but she sat with them anyway because they always told good stories and Peggy liked stories.
Her favorite was told by the guy with one leg who sometimes sold roses or walnuts. She knew his story by heart. Yet whenever we went to the park and found him there, she insisted he tell it again. She would go over and stand in front of him and look down at him with her eyes unblinking, her arms crossed and no smile at all until he asked what she wanted. You know, she said. Tell it. Tell me the story.
He laughed to himself a little, waved his hand in the air as if to brush her off, and then looked at her fiercely as a dog deciding whether or not it should bite her. You really want me to tell it… again?
She didn’t answer.
Instead she sat herself down in front of him and got ready to listen. For her the listening required a great deal of energy and she needed time to prepare. Me, I couldn’t do it. Not again. I’d heard the story enough times. So I walked over to a tree. From the top I could see the park spread out beneath me like a map. While I sat up there I thought this must be how the dead feel: a little dizzy, a little sick, but safe from anything ever changing on them.

Gin Rummy

“Gin Rummy” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

It was a small house we lived in. It had been a fisherman’s before it was ours. From its top window the entire bay could be seen, even the bar where my father worked as a bouncer. At night when it got late, my little sister Peggy and I would climb up there and wait for the light’s of Dad’s bar to go out. Most nights he brought us pickles from a bulbous oak vat beside the bar’s icebox. The wax covered bags he brought the pickles home in smelled funny. They had the same smell as the perfume of a woman who lived next door. We always at them quickly because we knew if you held one too long your hand got warts.

Dad never said much when he came home. He would slide his shoes off, bang them against the wood stove and drop them beside it. They were dark with mist from the tall beach grass that surrounded our house on all sides.

Only one night did Dad say much more than “Hi, here’s your pickles.” It was was the night his brother had brain surgery. He took me with him to the post office—which he’d called up special to make sure was open that late. On the way he talked fast. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself. I don’t remember any of what he said, but his brother died that night and we didn’t go to the funeral; it was in Vermont.

Peggy and I got out of school the next day. We stayed home, had Chef-Boy-R-Dee spaghetti and playd gin rummy until she said she was so sick of it she could throw up. After that she read a book. I tried to, but couldn’t. Instead I watched TV for as long as the sun lasted. After it went down, the set’s reception went completely berserk and made everything look like a desert. In the darkness of the bed I listened for the dim whir of passing squid boats and a song in my head that Mom had taught me back before Peggy was born, when Mom still lived with us, before she put all those things in the fire and had to go away.

DOLLS

“Dolls” -- (A Peggy Scribble)
By Michael Kroetch

In between our house and the house next door ran a wire fence barbed along the top. Plastic dolls hung off it. Lots of them. More than we could count. There was something about each one that disfigured it. We never knew who put them there or how they stayed on the fence in the wind. It was always pretty windy in winter and not uncommon for us to wake with tree limbs all over the yard scattered about like the horns of elk. Despite this, the dolls never seemed disturbed.

My sister Peggy said it must be because the fence was electric. I was older so I told her this was stupid. How could it be electric and not ignite the dolls? Ignite was a word I knew she didn’t know and I smiled in triumph. She said I was stupid. Of course it was electric--and if it wasn’t, why didn’t I touch it? I told her I didn’t need to just to prove she wrong. I knew it and that was plenty for me. She said that was fine. I said okay.

We didn’t talk for an hour. We sat playing our jigsaw puzzles in private until my father came in and gave us our pickles for the night. At that point Peggy said she wasn’t hungry and would give me her pickle if I would go play with her on the swingset. I agreed. While I pushed her, we talked about the dolls. Neither of us like them. We never had. I asked my father about them later and he said it was probably nothing. I didn’t know what he meant by this, but his TV western had come on and he already had his cigarette lit so there could be no more discussion. I had to forget the dolls.