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When his parents argued sometimes Jacob needed to go to the bathroom. He could hear them through the walls, though not clearly: it sounded like angry cows mooing. Sometimes they went to bed before it got too bad and he could sneak across the hall to the toilet, and that way they didn’t know he heard them fighting. Sometimes they stayed up late, and though the fight subsided, they would stalk through the living room and kitchen—washing dishes, writing checks, watching television, reading science fiction paperbacks. When this happened and he still needed to go to the bathroom and he just couldn’t help it he used a Coke bottle, pressing the tip of his penis inside the mouth, and that way they didn’t know he heard them fighting.
Tonight they didn’t fight, but they had a couple nights before. He sneaked across the hallway to the bathroom and poured out the bottle. He flushed and washed his hands. Tucked the bottle underneath his bed again where it belonged.
♦◊♦
The next day Jacob went out back with a blue mug full of dog food and another full of water. Dances with Beef knocked the food out of his hand and ate from the dirt. Jacob took the opportunity to pour the water. Dances wagged his tail, which did not, in Jacob’s experience, imply satisfaction. Jacob touched the dog’s back. Dances whipped around and nipped him on the hand. Not enough to bleed, but to sting.
The dog smelled awful; his fur was knotted and matted down with dirt, and half-yellowed blades of grass hung from his side as if they had grown there and wilted. When he’d finished all the food in the dirt he put his nose and tongue inside the mug. There had to be more, and there had to be more, and there had to be more. Jacob gave up on getting it back. He went inside.
He took the dirty pictures from inside his pillow case, folded them up in eighths, tucked them in a ruined shoe box pinhole camera, and put that in the closet under his microscope kit.
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Their mother left to rent a carpet steamer and buy groceries to get them through the week. Marvin put Power Rangers in the VCR and hit rewind. Jacob worked on his room for a while, pushing things underneath his bed and hanging his clothes, even the dirty ones, in the closet. He chipped his dried snot off of the wall. He took the dirty pictures from inside his pillow case, folded them up in eighths, tucked them in a ruined shoe box pinhole camera, and put that in the closet under his microscope kit. Marvin called him from the living room.
He found Marvin with the Power Rangers cassette attached to the VCR’s innards by a long black ribbon of tape. Marvin looked up at Jacob as if he’d been caught with a body. He said, “I didn’t mean to.”
“Great,” said Jacob. “Now the other VCR is going to have a hat.” He pointed to last year’s model, a Sanyo with a cracked face and loose rattling parts inside. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” said Marvin. “I was pulling it out, but the VCR held on, and then it made a growly sound. I’m sorry.”
Jacob tried to rewind the film loose. He tried to fast forward. Something inside the box smelled like burnt rubber.
When their mother came back with the carpet cleaner and the groceries the boys were sitting motionless on the floor, staring at what Marvin had done. She had Aladdin 2; it was, she said, on sale. She saw the tape, the VCR, the spooled black umbilical. She muttered.
It would still get channels. She cut the film where it went in and where it came out. She pushed the ends inside the machine. She threw away the Power Rangers tape and hurled Aladdin 2 against the wall. It didn’t break. Jacob peeled the plastic wrap away and put it with the other tapes so it looked like they had watched it.
♦◊♦
Their mother made them fold the laundry in the kitchen while she did the carpet. They had been working since they got up. It was three in the afternoon. No lunch yet. Jacob said, “I’m hungry. When are we going to eat?” When she didn’t answer he assumed she couldn’t hear. He shouted it again, over the carpet cleaner’s stupid buzz.
She didn’t say anything. Jacob asked her again.
His mother switched off the cleaner. “Is that what you want your uncle and your aunt and cousins to think when they get here?” Her voice began to rise. “That all we think about is food?”
He said, “This is dumb. They’re our family and we’re cleaning up for them because God forbid anyone should see how we really live or who we really are.”
Their mother said, “If you want to be so real and so honest and open, we can start out with your room. Like the girls in your pillow case. Would you like that?”
Jacob shut up. He folded all the laundry.
Marvin changed his shirt five times, each time saying, “This is my favorite!” or “I forgot all about this.”
Their mother stapled a sheet of printer paper down over the hole she’d made in the kitchen wall with her foot the year before. She had been wearing a pink-striped Reebok sneaker, which was how she explained it later: the high quality of her shoes. The family had been teasing her about a boy she dated when she was in school. They’d found a picture marking page 223 of letter J in the 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica. She was helmeted in a perm not her natural color, with neon green hoop earrings and a skirt too short. The boyfriend wore a beard, long hippie hair (though you could see it was already thinning) and had a birthmark like a drip of red wine on his forehead. His nose was upturned, too-small—pig-like. Jacob, Marvin, and their father had made fun of his face (and her hair, and the way they stood together, tilting their heads inward toward each other as if weighed down with invisible ballast). She told them they were being mean. She told them she didn’t like it when they talked about her friend that way. She screwed up her face the way she did when someone tried to take her picture. She kicked a hole in the wall beside the refrigerator.
The hole was still there, but now it was under the paper. “That looks nice,” she said.
Their father came home hungry.
They could still watch the television.
♦◊♦
The family woke to the cheerful tone of their doorbell. It had been months since anyone used it—the last were teenagers going door to door for magazine subscriptions. The bell sounded again after a 15-second interval, and again after another. Jacob thought it must have been doing that a while. He put on a pair of jeans and yesterday’s t-shirt. The bell stopped. Jacob went out into the living room, where Uncle Ellis and his family were unloading their bags and things. The girls (one 15, one 9, both red-headed wisps) came in, dropped off their instrument cases, and walked back out the door. A minute later they returned with several suitcases and a large Ziploc bag full of toiletries (toothbrushes licensed by Disney and Pixar, six-dollar shampoos, scented soaps, antiperspirant spray cans, disinfectant wipes, scented plug-ins). They wore matching pink skorts (skirts with shorts secreted beneath) and white jersey-style t-shirts with pink sleeves. Jacob assumed the older one didn’t like the outfit, hadn’t picked it out, but it reminded him of the worst part about Uncle Ellis’ family, which was that they all seemed to like each other. Not just love, which Jacob thought was easy, but like. The way that lets you agree on a movie without a fight, or the way that lets you share a plate at a restaurant. Getting between any two of them meant feeling a strange energy passing through your body—the thick skin on your elbows tingling all the way up to your pits.
Aunt Paula wore two fanny packs and a lime-green visor. There was a bag of donuts in her left hand and a Styrofoam tray of coffee cups balanced on her right. Her eyes were so wide and bright it made Jacob nervous, as if she was going to catch him at something before he knew he was doing it. A single golden wisp of hair was plastered across her forehead. She was very pretty, with long, shallow crow’s feet and delicate dark eyebrows like the receding edge of a crow’s wing.
“Sorry we woke you up,” said Uncle Ellis, though he did not sound it. “The girls were cold in the car, and I don’t like to leave it running.”
Uncle Ellis was broad and soft, with a strong chin half submerged in the fat of his neck, and sometimes emerging at a desperate angle like a capsizing canoe standing briefly on end before sliding back into the water. He wore small, circular glasses with nearly-invisible silver frames that glinted smartly when they snagged the light. He seemed constantly on the verge of transforming into a large cartoon animal—an ape who loved sugar cereal, a bear who drank chocolate milk. “Jake,” he said, “can you go outside and help the girls unload our junk?”
As Jacob walked out the door, Uncle Ellis was trying to slip their mother a small envelope with nothing written on the outside and a smooth piece of scotch tape sealing it closed.
When he came back, matching luggage knocking up against his knees, their mother was pushing the envelope back into Ellis’ hands. The scotch tape seal was broken, the envelope folded back inside itself.
“Please,” whispered Ellis. “It’s fine. I know you could use it.”
Jacob’s mother clapped her hands. Her face sagged at the corners as if very slowly melting. “That’s right everyone!” she shouted. “I’m making breakfast! How does everyone like their eggs?” She opened the fridge, revealing several dozen bought in bulk, and a green pile of Corn King bacon boxes.
Jacob’s father sipped one of Aunt Paula’s coffees. “Ellis,” he said, and tipped the cup.
The girls sat down on the couch. The older one, Clara, had a book about horses. The younger, Hannah, switched on her GameBoy Color. They liked theirs scrambled with a little milk, said Aunt Paula. Cheese if she had it.
“Does Velveeta count?”
No, it did not.
Continued on the next page …
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