Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives Read online

  The middle brother started to cry as if his heart were broken, as indeed it was, and he burbled out, We were supposed to get a sackful of hot tamales. And then the youngest brother began to wail, and the oldest brother broke into choking sobs he was trying to hold back.

  The father looked around at all of them strangely.

  Dr. Hornegay said, Your son attempted, apparently, to leap from the roof onto this contraption. However, after what I concede was merely a superficial examination, I do believe the boy will be fine, aside from bruises, a busted lip, and possibly some slight injury to his tailbone. And now I’m sure you’ll have no more need of my attentions, so I should get back to the house and check on my beloved Eustice, who as I’m sure you know has not been well for some time.

  Holding himself fairly erect, Dr. Hornegay made a little bow with his head, adjusted his eyeglasses. He turned and walked into and through the deepening twilight of the neighbors’ yard, a listing specter, emerged on the other side, and followed his grainy shadow from the streetlamp flickering out front of their house, up the hill toward his own.

  The father carried the middle brother into the house and laid him down on the sofa where the boys had been sitting all afternoon, and he said a proper hello to the other two brothers, and then he kind of hugged their mother, who was sniffling but getting ahold of herself, and the two of them spoke quietly together for a few minutes. But soon they began to speak in normal-volume voices, and then, when the father noticed the bottle of Old Crow on the table with two glasses half filled with melting ice, their words got louder, and the father was saying things about What was she doing down here drinking whiskey with that old pervert while his boys were outside with No Parental Supervision and They Could Have Been Killed, and she was saying things how He Had Some Nerve Lecturing Her About Responsibility, and then he was making himself a tall drink from Dr. Hornegay’s bottle of Old Crow and they continued to argue, and at one point finally the father slammed his empty glass down on the kitchen counter and said, Well, I’ll be damned if that pathetic son of a bitch is going to come sniffing after my wife, separated or not, and he stormed out the carport door, and the mother stormed through the den into the back of the house saying not quite under her breath, Oh, my fucking God.

  The oldest brother and the youngest brother immediately ran out of the house to see what their father was going to do to Dr. Hornegay, and though he didn’t feel very good and was very sore in his back and butt, the middle brother got up off the couch and limped after them up the hill, calling, Wait for me.

  Up at Dr. Hornegay’s house, from the light of the streetlight at the edge of the yard, they saw their father in the Hornegays’ carport pounding on the door to Dr. Hornegay’s den and shouting, Open this goddamn door, Hornegay! And then he came out of the carport and stepped into the shrubbery in the bed beneath the picture window that looked out from Dr. Hornegay’s living room and pounded on the glass with the same fist and shouted some more for Dr. Hornegay to Get His Ass Out There Right Now. When Dr. Hornegay still did not come out, their father walked to the street and dislodged a piece of asphalt from its edge and stepped back into the yard and was about to heave it toward the picture window when the front door from the living room opened and Dr. Hornegay stepped out into the shadow of the little stoop there with a rifle of some kind in his hands.

  You step back, sir, he called to their father. Their father, the piece of asphalt in his hand, did indeed step back a step, and stared at Dr. Hornegay with the gun in his hands.

  Run home, boys, their father said to them, but they only scurried out into the street and then across the street into the Harbours’ yard and stopped there.

  Then their father said, Shit, that’s only a BB gun, you damn fool, and he started toward Dr. Hornegay, and Dr. Hornegay lifted the BB gun to his shoulder and began to fire and slide the pump and fire again, demonstrating what seemed to the boys a remarkable facility with the BB gun, an example they would remember the next time they had a BB gun war with the other boys on the street. The Harbour twins had a Daisy pump just like the one that Dr. Hornegay was shooting their father with right now.

  Their father had begun to shout out in pain as the BBs from Dr. Hornegay’s Daisy pump pinged off his body, until finally he retreated into the street, where Dr. Hornegay got him a few more times until the father and the boys all retreated all the way down the hill back into their own carport and into the house.

  The boys sat on the sofa again in a neat row while their mother fixed their father another drink of Dr. Hornegay’s Old Crow, on ice, and used more ice to press against the several very red bumps on their father’s face and neck. One of the BBs had pinged him in or near the eye and that eye was swollen badly and the skin around it had turned purple and yellow and black.

  Their mother said, As long as you’re here you might as well stay and eat, I’ve got a chicken I was going to bake with some barbeque sauce and some rice and broccoli.

  I sure would love some fried chicken, if you wouldn’t mind doing that, their father said.

  Well, I guess I could fry it, their mother said, it might be quicker, and I know the boys are starving, they were supposed to get some hot tamales.

  She got the chicken from the refrigerator and cut it up and shook the pieces in a sack with flour and salt and pepper while she heated Crisco in the pan and soon the boys could smell the chicken frying. They watched from the sofa as their mother bustled about the kitchen tending the chicken and starting the rice and broccoli, and as their father sat at the dining table nursing his drink and pressing an ice pack against his swollen eye. It was all wonderful and very strange. Their mother moved about in the kitchen’s bright light. Their father sat in the dim umbrella of yellow light from the hanging lamp above the little dining table. In the brothers’ minds, it was like this maybe wasn’t something real. It was like the quiet, weird, clear part near the end of a crazy dream. They could see their father, sitting there, but the light was funny and it was almost like he could flicker out, and not be there, and it would be only their mother in there, frying chicken. The middle brother felt himself tuning up. Their father then removed the ice pack from his eye and looked over at the boys, and smiled, and was about to say something when blood began to spout from the swollen eye and he fell back against the table and cried out.

  Jesus God! their mother shouted, and ran to grab her car keys and hustle their father out the door, calling back to them, I have to take him to the emergency room, and then they were gone.

  The boys went out into the carport and watched them drive away up the street, then they went back into the den.

  The oldest brother looked dejected and said to the middle brother, You better go turn off that chicken before it burns up again.

  I can cook chicken, the middle brother said.

  The other two brothers looked at him standing there with his swollen, blood-crusted lip and his eyes swollen from crying, not believing him, and then the middle brother limped into the kitchen and looked into the pan where the chicken was frying, took a fork and turned the pieces of chicken over in the hot oil, and let them cook like that for a while.

  Get me a plate and put a piece of newspaper on it, and put a paper towel on top of that, he said to the youngest brother. The youngest brother looked at the oldest brother, who motioned for him to do what the middle brother said, so he got the plate and a piece of newspaper and a paper towel that the oldest brother handed to him from the roll on the counter and he set it down beside the range. In a few minutes the middle brother took the chicken pieces out of the hot oil and drained them on the plate with the newspaper and paper towel on it. Then he checked the pots with the rice and broccoli.

  Get some butter out for the rice and the broccoli, he said to the youngest brother, and the oldest brother nodded for the youngest brother to do what he said. When everything was on the table and they had plates to eat on and forks to eat with, they sat down and helped their plates.

  The youngest brother said,
Aren’t you going to say the blessing?

  The middle brother looked at the oldest brother and thought about it for a moment and then said, No, I don’t want to.

  All right then, the oldest brother said, and they began to eat.

  The Misses Moses

  THE MOSES SISTERS LIVED TOGETHER, ALONE, IN THE fine old brick house near downtown where they had grown up. Who knows why neither had ever married. The older, larger one, sure, you could imagine reasons. The younger, frail one, maybe she’d been too timid. It wasn’t hard to think she’d been pretty. She had bones as delicate as a mouse’s. A mouse is beautiful, if you really look at it.

  She, the smaller Miss Moses, pushed open the screen door from their front porch with a hand that was itself mousishly thin and delicate.

  “Please do come in,” she said.

  The larger Miss Moses stood behind her, big arms folded, as if blocking further entrance. She smiled, too, but there was some kind of obvious skepticism, as if she were thinking, I could take you, buster. Don’t try anything with me.

  All I wanted was a cheap, clean apartment for a few months, till things got better. I already wished my mother had not put me in touch with these two.

  The house had that little old lady smell, like a spotless, dust-free, uninhabited attic. Old, expensive rugs and drapes in some late stage of decrepitude, their worn, exhausted fibers a molecular stage above disintegration. Dark, heavy wooden tables and sideboard and china cabinet. Hard stuffed chairs and sofa covered with sheen-blotched silk and heavy fabric that looked like a softened, premium burlap. Cloudy mirrors in baroque frames.

  We went into the kitchen, which was large, and sat at an oval kitchen table with chrome legs and skirt and a kind of faux-marble Formica surface. It looked like the Misses Moses’s single concession to modernity, a moment in maybe 1959, since which there had been no more of that.

  The smaller Miss Moses sat in one of the chairs—they matched the table, with chrome frames and faux-marble vinyl cushioned seats—and said, “We were just about to make some pimento cheese. Would you like some?”

  “You’re going to make it?” I said. I guess I’d never thought about someone taking cheddar cheese and mayonnaise and pimentos and making pimento cheese in their own home.

  A knowing smile crept into the small, soft face of the smaller Miss Moses. You could tell she creamed her face every night—that’s what my grandmother had called it, “I have to go cream my face,” she’d say—you could smell the sweet, milky residue still in her pores. She looked over at the larger Miss Moses, and the larger Miss Moses pursed her lips in a satisfied way, nodded, and went over to the Frigidaire to get out the ingredients for the pimento cheese.

  A large ceramic bowl the color of skim milk, with a pattern of thin blue curling lines, sat in the center of the table between cut-glass salt and pepper shakers and an empty wooden napkin holder. Next to the bowl stood one of those old tin box graters. A long-handled wooden spoon lay in the empty bowl. While the smaller Miss Moses sat and watched, occasionally turning to smile at me and make conversation, the larger Miss Moses took the spoon from the bowl, set the box grater in there, and began grating the cheese. She did it slowly and without effort. Her arms looked strong. They had seemed fat, but it was that hard fat you see on fat guys who work with their hands, mechanics, or butchers, or middle-age moving van guys. It was impressive.

  The smaller Miss Moses kept turning her sweet little face to smile at me and ask if I wanted a Co-Cola.

  They seemed in no hurry to show me the apartment.

  “You don’t smoke, do you,” said the larger Miss Moses. It wasn’t a question, ending on a down note. Not exactly not a question, but one for which the proper answer was assumed.

  “We could smell it, if you did,” said the smaller Miss Moses with a guileless little grin. “And we know you don’t drink,” she added. I saw the larger Miss Moses raise her heavy eyebrows and drop her gaze to the cheese she was grating. Her poor little sister would get a reprimand for that, later on.

  “I used to smoke, too, of course,” I said, wanting to help the smaller Miss Moses out of her gaffe. “But I quit when I got the chance.” I smiled at them and shrugged. “Why not?”

  The smaller Miss Moses leaned forward and nodded, her expression one of earnest concern and sober agreement, but before she could say something else the larger Miss Moses moved us on.

  “Yes, it’s a filthy habit,” she said. “It’s a sign of good character that you could stop.”

  I had handed my pack of Camels to the counselors and said, You might as well take these, while we’re at it, and they had laughed, waved them off, said, No we don’t even try to deal with those things here. I handed them over, anyway. I remember that I recalled the scene in The Stranger where Mersault, in jail, can’t smoke and says at first he was jittery, nauseous, resentful. Then he says, “Later on I realized that that too was part of the punishment. But by then I had gotten used to not smoking and it wasn’t a punishment anymore.” Remembering this again, sitting there with the Misses Moses, I almost laughed a little bit, and they must have taken my expression to be one of cheerful agreement. Their faces relaxed again, the smaller Miss Moses’s into her sweet front-porch smile, the larger’s into her own, which I decided was indeed just a little bit smug.

  By this time the larger Miss Moses had finished making the pimento cheese.

  “Would you like a sandwich?” she said.

  “Or we can put you a little bit on a saucer, with some crackers,” the smaller Miss Moses said.

  I said I would very much like some of the pimento cheese, but as politely as I could I added that I might enjoy it more if we waited until after I had seen the apartment.

  “Oh, of course,” the smaller Miss Moses exclaimed in a voice that was nearly hushed, as if she were mortified they hadn’t offered to do this before offering me the sandwich.

  “Oh, no, it was very kind of you to offer it,” I said. Still, she was embarrassed.

  The larger Miss Moses covered the bowl of pimento cheese with a kitchen towel and said, “Come this way, we’ll go in through the carport.”

  I followed her through the kitchen doorway into the carport, the smaller Miss Moses toddling behind me. The apartment was in a low, square addition on the carport’s far side, entered through a plain wooden door. Inside, it was mostly one large room, a double bed in one corner, a sitting area in another, with an old television set and an easy chair and a coffee table. The opposite wall of the room opened into a tiny kitchen and, off of that, a tiny dark bathroom. All in all, it wasn’t so different from other apartments I’d rented in the past, when I was younger and single.

  Maybe because I stood there just inside the apartment doorway, taking the place in, blinking a bit, and saying nothing, the Moses sisters took my expression to be one of critical concern.

  “Our previous tenants have all found it to be quite comfortable,” the larger Miss Moses said.

  “And we don’t charge much for it,” the smaller Miss Moses said. “We don’t do it for the money, not at all.”

  I looked at her and smiled.

  “It looks fine,” I said. She seemed relieved.

  “We want people to be happy,” she said, as if she felt this almost desperately. “Would you like to sit on the bed? It’s old but very comfortable.”

  The larger Miss Moses chuckled and gave her sister a mildly critical look.

  “Now, Karen, when was the last time you laid on that old bed? Go on, now,” she said to me. “Try it out.” The smaller Miss Moses seemed a little crushed.

  I went over to the bed and carefully laid myself onto it, keeping my shoes off to the side, off the coverlet. They both watched me. It was strange, looking at them from that angle.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Feels good.”

  The smaller Miss Moses grinned, and the larger Miss Moses smiled also, in a confident way, as if vindicated.

  “Come into the kitchen, then,” she said.

 
In the kitchen she ran cold, then hot water from the faucet into the sink.

  “Pressure’s good,” she said. “And the hot water tank is only ten years old. We never have a problem with the drains.”

  “Oh, no,” the smaller Miss Moses affirmed.

  The larger Miss Moses stepped over to the stove, a small gas model, and turned all the burner dials, causing each of the four to gently harrumph into blue flame. We said nothing, watching them burn small and beautifully for a moment, and then one by one she shut them off.

  Then we went to the door to the bathroom, just off the kitchen. The larger Miss Moses flicked on the light switch with a thick finger and two fluorescent tubes on either side of the medicine cabinet mirror flickered on with the sound of someone tapping a tiny fork against a china cup. Once illuminated, the tubes buzzed quietly. The larger Miss Moses ran water into the sink, then ran water into the tub. She flushed the toilet, and we all three stood there crowded into the little bathroom and watched the water swirl and kerplunk down the drainpipe and gurgle as the bowl and tank refilled themselves.

  Out in the main room again, I said that I would be pleased to rent the apartment from them, if they saw fit to rent it to me.

  “Oh, marvelous,” the smaller Miss Moses said, her smile beatific. The larger Miss Moses smiled grimly and nodded.

  “Well, then, how about that sandwich?” she said.

  I said yes, I would love to have the sandwich, and so we went back into their kitchen and the smaller Miss Moses and I sat down again at the table. The larger Miss Moses set a loaf of white bread beside the bowl of pimento cheese and the jar of mayonnaise. She set out small plates and found a new package of paper napkins and set those out for us, too. Then she sat down and the smaller Miss Moses began to make our sandwiches, spooning the pimento cheese onto slices of bread, and spreading mayonnaise onto the second slices. She put them together, and cut them into halves, and handed the little plates with our sandwiches on them back to us. When she set mine in front of me, she paused and looked into my eyes with such feeling, I was taken aback and embarrassed.