He could forgive the sins of everybody, especially President Nixon.
“Ready?” she said, and picked up her oversized purse and flung it over the shoulder, one fluid, easy motion, with nothing getting in the way of her cigarette, her lit Tareyton 100. She turned off President Nixon on the TV. Walter covered the canary’s cage and waved goodbye to Pumpkin.
THIS IS THURSDAY BY MARK ZIPOLI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 51
“She’s crazy,” Dolly Vann said. “She’s always been crazy.”
Dolly was unaware that her 10-year-old nephew Walter was in the next room. He’d been listening to her and her sister Tootie in the kitchen talking about his mother. He’d heard her plain as day refer to his poor mother as “crazy”. Still, not moving a muscle, Walter waited patiently for Aunt Dolly and Aunt Tootie—hunched over the table like killers in the dark—to finish their verdicts.
Dolly and Tootie each for years had routinely bad-mouthed every in-law in the family. No one escaped their judgments. No one ever heard them, except lately Walter. And he wasn’t going to tell, because hearing the nasty jabs and derisive critiques about people he was supposed to respect and obey gave him an inexplicable thrill. It gave him a gentle pleasure knowing some of the worst things about people in his family, or people in the neighborhood. Naturally, being so young, Walter did not understand psychology, but he knew something sophisticated and beyond his head was allowing him to enjoy the iniquity of ruined reputations. Hearing them criticize his own mother was the price he had to pay. He understood that it went with the territory.
He sat unseen in the dining room at the large, seldom-used table covered with a clear plastic top that protected the polished mahogany. A ring of keys and a pack of Hoyle playing cards lay near his elbow. The brass clock on the credenza before him reflected a pale narrow face, green eyes, and worried mouth. His blond hair was short and parted on the side. He was skinny, neat, and never comfortable.
It was Thursday night and that meant Bert’s Diner for the steamed hamburgers of life. While he waited, he watched his aunt’s yellow canary flit about in its cage that hung from the ceiling above the airconditioner. Pumpkin, Aunt Dolly’s rotund little brown Chihuahua, was in the kitchen on Dolly’s lap, quiet. That was good, because the dog was usually a pain in the neck on Thursdays, as he sensed Dolly and Walter would be leaving together.
While waiting for his aunt to get ready, Walter concentrated on his thumb. He wanted to peel it, but he wouldn’t. Since he’d been staying with Aunt Dolly these past two months, his nerves had been better, he was calmer, the need to peel wasn’t there.
He always thought about the thumb, both thumbs. His compulsion was to peel them when he “broke out with nerves”, as the doctor explained it. He peeled off the skin from both sides of the nail, then down from the cuticle, all the way to the first joint. When the torture of nerves in his blood began, when his stomach performed backflips, he would make his thumb raw for days on end.
His mother had been enraged. She applied mercurochrome so it would burn. A Band-Aid to keep it clean.
The raw evidence of sad, shivering fear—he wanted to peel the thumb, but he wouldn’t.
“You ready to go?”
Dolly startled him, shuffling into the dining room wearing her perennial flapping sandals, having dismissed Tootie to go home to make her own dinner. Dolly gave a quick, half-hearted brush-through to her short, curly brown hair. Then she dabbed on an unnatural clot of red lipstick with a hook-motion, as if brandishing a crochet needle. She smiled like a Renaissance cherub, albeit a forty-something cherub. Her plump cheeks rested with reassurance, tucked inside the collar of a beige, lightweight trench coat.
“Ready?” she said, and picked up her oversized purse and flung it over the shoulder, one fluid, easy motion, with nothing getting in the way of her cigarette, her lit Tareyton 100. She turned off President Nixon on the TV. Walter covered the canary’s cage and waved goodbye to Pumpkin.
On Thursdays, little mattered except supper. For the past two months it was always the same; it was always a pleasure. Every Thursday night, Aunt Dolly took her nephew to Bert’s, a hamburger joint up on Broad Street, on the east side of town.
Bert’s Diner was home to the most unusual square hamburgers. Racks inside layers of chrome drawers cooked the meat in a steam chamber the size of a 1960s Zenith TV. Aunt Dolly had always loved these square burgers. She loved the consistent precision of each moist, delicious shape. She loved the place, loved the distance it afforded her from the workday she’d just killed.
Entering through the glass door, sporting a pastor’s genial authority, Aunt Dolly took a booth by the windows. Once inside Bert’s, she acknowledged the presence of an old school friend, or a former neighbor who’d moved to this side of town. She waved to the owner of the corner gas station, then to a policeman, a mailman, even Dr Flynn, who had delivered Walter’s brothers and sisters into the world.
Everyone needed good hamburgers, it was true. There was Alfred Guyda, a peculiar, tilting man, with severely cut black hair and thick black-framed eyeglasses. His prominent nose fought for attention with his errant rolling green eyes. Alfred spoke out of the side of his mouth, as if everything he said was a euphemism, as if his speech benefited an invisible agent to his right.
There was Mrs Gregory, no first name, delightfully forlorn in spite of still mourning her son’s death in Vietnam and fretting over her husband’s recent cardiac arrest. And Alice Tooth, whose expensive, rampaging perfume beat hell out of the greasy consanguinity of hot fat, old coffee, cigarette smoke, and burned toast.
Dolly lit a cigarette. Her order was smooth and effortless, a measured counterpoint to the prep sounds and dropped silverware behind the counter.
Walter, right behind her in everything she did except for the cigarette, loved the instant enchantment and odorous consistency that stroked him like a soft dream. The grease smell from the fries and onions, the steam rising out of the machine sending forward the smells of beef and cheese as if swung from a censor at Mass, it was so thick and warm.
“Man oh man, Thursdays,” he would breathe to himself, and then blush.