Free City of Boys by Beth Nugent Page B

—You’re a disgusting fool, she says, —and don’t you think everyone can’t see it.
    Francine sleeps, or pretends to, though I can hear my aunt’s voice clearly, and does not stir when I get up to go to the bathroom. I walk without sound, counting my breaths with each step.
    —Listen to me, she says. —You goddamn fool.
    I imagine my uncle, next to her in the bed, his jaw working. —Listen, she says again, and then there is the slap of her palm against his skin, a hideous hurting sound in the night. —You listen to me.
    He must be awake, his skin stinging, staring into the night, surrounded by nothing but her voice. Someday he will kill her. He will come upon her in the laundry room when she thinks he is watching television, and he will creep up on her in his foam soles and bury her face in the soft sweet-smelling sheets she piles up against tomorrow. He will bury her face in the sheets and he will bury her body in the garden and then he will come upon me like rain. Candy, Susie, candy, he’ll say, and I’ll come running.
    I put my hands over my ears, but Aunt Louise’s voice filters through my fingers like smoke, like light through the leaves. —Disgusting, she says, —disgusting.
    My mother is thirty-six years old today. I was born when she was twenty; she has had me all those years. Since she was twenty, there has been me. In four years I will be twenty. For her birthday today, there will be a small dinner with the family and a few of my parents’ friends. Uncle Woody has got several bottles of champagne and a big net to play volleyball, or badminton. Carol comes first, early in the day, to help with the dinner. She brings a small present, wrapped in bright blue paper, and a bouquet of flowers, blazing orange and white, like an armful of fire. As Aunt Louise runs for a vase, Carol gives a small flower to me, and the largestand most beautiful flower she puts behind my mother’s ear, a flame in her hair.
    —There, she says, —now you look like a birthday girl.
    My mother almost smiles as she touches the flower, and Carol looks away to where my father and Francine are struggling to put up the net in the back yard. Aunt Louise returns with the flowers in a vase and looks at the flower in my mother’s hair.
    —Don’t you think you’d better put that one in the water, too? she says, and my mother removes the flower and gives it to her. I tuck mine into my top buttonhole.
    —Susan, Carol calls from the window. —Come here. Look. She points to the leaves of a bush that rests against the glass and shows me a large locust, stuck to the leaf with a gummy liquid that comes from its body. It struggles to free itself, but each time one leg comes loose, the locust must put it back down to work loose the other, and so imprisons itself again.
    —That means they’re going to die soon, Carol says. She smiles. —I’ll sort of miss them. I’ve gotten used to the racket. Imagine how quiet it will be with them gone. We’ll be able to hear ourselves think again.
    —Well, Aunt Louise says, —that will be a nice change for all of you. She smiles pleasantly as she carries the vase of flowers into the dining room.
    I am standing in front of the kitchen window, chopping for the birthday dinner, cutting up carrots and onions and peppers, which will go into the sauce for the lamb, my mother’s favorite. Late-afternoon sun glitters from the knife, and I concentrate on the play of my fingers and the blade, my hand moving steadily back along the spine of a carrot, the knife relentlessly pursuing. Everyone has left the house.Francine and Aunt Louise are picking up the birthday cake; Uncle Woody and my father have gone to buy the portable trash masher that will be the family’s gift to my mother; my mother and Carol are in the back yard picking grapes, perhaps the last of the season that the locusts will not eat.
    I am wondering if, right now, picking up the cake at the bakery, Francine is making new friends, meeting boys