Sunday, June 26, 2005

The Gleeful Boy (the Sue Miller type read)

Summer isn't just Jackie Collins (we were too tired to try out a Thomas Clancy). It's also some high brown literature. Along the lines of Sue Miller. Here's our version of that genre in short story form.

He Just Seemed So Gleeful

He just seemed so gleeful.

That's what stood out to her. He just seemed so gleeful.

She remembered him at seven-years old with his cat Little Bit, walking in to find him gripping a snarling Little Bit by the nape of her neck as he scraped the hissing cat roughly up and down the bedroom wall.

"What are you doing!"

"She pooped all over my bedspread!"

What had happened, she wondered then. And now.

No amount of talking had helped then.

Nor had anyone else been too concerned.

Not the boy's father who grunted without looking away from the TV screen.

Not the preacher who gave the boy All God's Creatures Great and Small and felt this was addressing the issue.

Nor, most of all, the boy himself.

"You gotta' learn them to behave, Mom," he told her with the most serious, most gave face a seven-year old could muster.

Was it all just her?

Everyone else seemed to think it was.

After awhile she started to think so as well. What she'd seen had been abusive, destructive. But this was a seven-year old boy, a kid who did not know any better.

And she was a worry wart, right? She'd always been one. Her entire life she'd never been able to grow her finger nails long because she would constantly chew them down to the quick.

Her own mother had always joked that she got test anxiety from a knock-knock joke.

So sure, she worried. She stressed. It was who she was.

And thank goodness that who were son was was a good, sweet tyke who'd grown into an upstanding, strong man.

He had sailed through high school with the usual dark moods and silences of adolescence. He had a "short fuse" on the football field. His coach had said that. But it was just the normal competative spirit, right?

Then it was off to college and he had the usual successes and problems. Nothing all that unusual.

He met Amanda. She was so sweet, nice and warm. Anne was what you wanted in a daughter-in-law and she had a smile as warm as sunshine.

There was graduation. There was marriage. There was pregnancy. In that order, not that anyone even paid attention to that much these days.

They were living several states away by then. It was mother's and father's day phone calls, birthday cards, and alternate Christmas and Thanksgivings.

Nothing too unusual from what any other family was living with.

But there was something unusual about Anne. At first she tried to pin it on the time and stress involved in raising a newborn.

Then she noticed that Anne wasn't snapping back to normal and it was a few years after. Not only did the beam of sunshine smile never return, but Anne didn't smile much or even speak much. Month after month, year after year.

And when Anne did speak it was in a whisper. She also didn't make eye contact.

The alternate holidays, it turned out, weren't being spent between the in laws.

He would come up to visit his parents but otherwise they'd spend the holiday at home. His excuse to Anne's parents was that he'd been laid off from two jobs in the last few years and, since he was always starting at the bottom, they couldn't afford to travel much.

She learned of that not from her son, but from Anne's mother who called after Anne's second miscarriage.

"She needs to take better care of herself," her son said grinning as Anne slinked by.

"I fall down a lot," Anne whispered without making eye contact. "I'm just clumsy."

She noticed how Anne's mother watched Anne. She noticed how her son watched Anne's mother. Most of all, she noticed how Anne seemed to dissolve before everyone's eyes.

Later that night, intending to surprise her grandson with a bedtime story, she went down the hall.

Through the open door she heard her grandson saying, "Tell me a bedtime story."

Through the doorway, she could see her son standing by the bed, smiling down at his own son.

"Well sport, a quick one," he said nodding. "Here it is. Once upon a time, there was a baby. It was still born. The end. Good night."

He just sounded so gleeful.

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