Free Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler Page B

on Byron Circle, squatting on its foundation, its windows stickered with warnings of an
    elaborate alarm system. And every morning Mimi drove him from the house—I mean, gave him a ride to work to the pres- tigious lab before heading to the Benedrum Center for the Per- forming Arts. I wondered if he and Mimi talked, if the car gave the same erotic bedspring rattle as it lumbered over Pittsburgh’s bridges and streets, carrying Steven from his solid house to a hermetically sealed room. “He seems pretty safe to me,” I said. “Well, now, ” she said, shrugging the dagger like now was a movie she didn’t care for. “Now he’s all grown up. He was such a serious boy. I remember one day he got worried because he stepped on a crack in the asphalt at his school—that was one of the reasons we ended up putting the kids in private school, because the public school grounds weren’t kept up that well— anyway, he stepped on a crack and he was terrified all day long because he thought he’d broken my back. You know: ‘Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.’ But all those days are gone.”
    “He doesn’t step on cracks any more?”
    Mimi smiled, stabbed, started another. How many daggers did they need, anyway? “It’s just that—do you mind if I tell you something? It might be a little embarrassing.”
    I wondered if Mimi could see in my head the mortifying sex circus she’d already shown to me—an image of my girlfriend’s mother, hairy legs spread, expelling Ping-Pong-ball children like some machine designed for batting practice. Or if she, one floor below me, felt chilly shame pressing upon her like a steam- roller as she heard the noises I kept hearing, the whispers, the creaks of the carved wooden bedframe Mimi had undoubtedly found in an out-of-town antique store and brought into the city slowly in the far right lane with hazard lights clicking in re- lentless rhythm, the moans covered by sweaty palms. I’d been
    in perpetual embarrassment for weeks now and I haven’t de- cided yet how an orchestra can best convey this. “Go ahead.”
    “Well,” Mimi said eagerly, “a few days ago I was airing out the house. You know it’s not good just to have the air condi- tioning going all the time. So I opened the window at the end of the hall, you know, the one above that little wrought-iron table I showed you?”
    So far this was as far removed from mortification as the Glasses got. Anti-embarrassment. Non-mortification. “Yes. Lit- tle claw feet.”
    “Right. Well, whenever I open the window in that hallway it always opens one of the doors. Some air pressure, or wind rush- ing thing. This time it made the bathroom door open. Steven’s bathroom. And he was just stepping out of the shower.”
    I examined the little outlines of masking tape. A hammer? A chisel? What fit? “Oh.”
    “I mean literally stepping out. He didn’t see me. He was step- ping over the side of the bathtub, you know? And I could see everything. He was reaching for a towel.” Mimi stepped into the middle of the room and pantomimed it for me and all the blank wig heads. First one leg and then the other stepped out of the invisible tub, arcing like fired missiles. I could see what it looked like to watch him, and when she reached for a towel the crotch of her paste-stained jeans was spread flat in front of my eyes like a stretched canvas and I knew what she was talking about. If I could just reach over and turn the radio way up, I could hear the biggest hit of the summer instead of—
    “I could see everything. My little hairless boy. Well, not any more. He had this small triangle of downy hair on his chest that went down to—like, I don’t know, like a landing strip.” The
    timpani comes in first, thrumming out the rhythm of the now- familiar theme: T.U.D. The Unknown Dread is here in the Props Studio, the cellos, the violas, the bassoons sneaking into the air over the radio and into my ears and the ears of all the Styrofoam