“And these difficulties,” says Henry S, “these differences were usually resolved in what way?”“Oh, we’d spend a few days apart, but one of us would usually call or stop by before long, and--like I said--we could pick up where we left off. Pick up where we were before the argument.”
“Admirable,” Henry S says to his notebook.
* “If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one,” said Rose when I opened my back door about two weeks later. She held up two neatly-rolled joints.
I opened the door wider. “Get out of here, you slut. I’m still mad at you.” She stepped through the doorway, and I gave her a hug, making an exaggerated grab for the joints at the same time. She hugged me back, and we struggled, still embracing, into my kitchen.
Rose flopped into a chair and put the joints on the table. They formed a yellow paper arrow, ends touching and pointing at me as if asking a question.
“I’m sorry, Rose. You were right. He’s a jerk, and I knew it all along. But, you know how it is, I wanted to believe it was different.” I sat down in the chair opposite hers and put my hands, palms up, on the table.
“Forget him.” She looked around the room. “I’m assuming he’s gone?”
“Came and got his stuff last week.” I laughed one short ha! “After I got home that night, I stayed up, thinking. First I was mad at you. Then I was mad at him. Then I cried and fell asleep for a couple of hours. When I woke up, he still wasn’t home, so I sat here and worked out this whole speech I was going to give him when he got here. By then it was about five in the morning, and I sat here talking to myself, talking myself right up into being angry and then back down into this really calm, really tight place. This went on for about an hour, when suddenly I realized he wasn’t coming home.”
Rose nodded and touched the joints, aligning them into a more perfect arrow, still pointing my way.
“So, I got out a bunch of those big Orbie bags that I use for the trash, and I started loading them up with all his stuff. All his clothes and football shit and those stupid trophies. I put them out on the curb next to the grass clippings.”
“Perfect! They got hauled away with the garbage!”
“No. It wasn’t trash day. They sat there for a couple of days, and then they disappeared. He must have come by when I was at school. But he did take the grass clippings.” We both laughed.
“I think he moved back into the dorms. I can’t afford to stay here by myself. I don’t even want to. So, I’ve been looking for another place. Found a little apartment over on the west side of town.”
“I’ll help you move,” said Rose. “I’ve got a friend who’ll loan me his truck.”
“Saturday okay?”
Rose nodded.
“Good,” I said. “That was easy. Now, fire up one of those dead rats.”
Rose pulled her little box of matches out of her pocket.
The waiter brings me another beer and another bottled water for Henry S. Maybe it’s the beer, but I’m feeling pretty relaxed.“One time we got high. I don’t know if you ought to put that in, though, about getting high.” Henry S nods, and I go on. “And we modge-podged everything in my house.” Henry S’s pen writes m-o-d and hesitates. He looks up.
“It’s a craft thing. Like glue, only clear. You paint it over pictures and stuff, and they stick to whatever you put them on.” I make painting motions on the side of my water glass, then rotate it as if to show him the design.
“And it’s called ‘mod pod?’ ‘Mod podge?’”
“We always called it ‘modge-podge.’ I don’t know. It’s in craft stores. I still have a lot of the stuff we made. Ashtrays with pictures on the bottom, pencil holders and trays, a cigar box with a Kliban cat cartoon on it. Two cats are sitting on a fence in the moonlight, and one cat says to the other, ‘If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one.’”
Henry S arrests himself halfway into a bob. “I’m not sure I understand.”
I shake my head. “Not important.” I point at his sheet of questions. “How many do we have left?”
“Just a couple.” He moves his pen over the list. “Describe the last time you saw the subject.”
I look at the little red tricycle hanging over Henry S’s head. “Can’t say that I can remember exactly when that was. I’d been living out of state, you know, there at the end.”
*Cartoon from Cat by B. Kliban, 1975
*Cartoon from Cat by B. Kliban, 1975
