Blind hearts - 7. Chapter 7

Alex’s room was irradiated with the morning light. He woke up with a crick in his neck, and a familiar sinking feeling yawned in him as he pushed to his feet. He had lived twenty-two years within the four walls blue and mauve. The same rug beady underneath his bare feet. The Napoleonic soldiers pieces set in an eternal march over folding table, a few glimmering the same tinned patina, others peeling with paint of primary colors. Over in the oblong nook by the closet, the baseball bat in the same slanted position. And now time for that daily shower.

As he slugged out of his clothes, his body resurrected those still smoldering moments with Dimov. He just as soon killed the ungainly jaguar of the morning with a quick act and the mental note to forget him already.

Red hair sheened in mist and blanketed in the scents of musky soap and minty paste, he shuffled into the kitchen and was greeted with the one surprise of the day—occupying the space between the stove and the kitchen island, a whale in a baggy gown, well, Susan, one hand unsteady on a cane, the other shaking a cast iron pan, being hard-lipped over the business of breakfast.

Smiles fluttered over his face. “Finally, you’re making me breakfast the way it’s supposed to be.”

She bunched up her lips over the steam rising from onions browning. Alex warned himself to watch out for the crevasses of ill feeling that her countenance augured. Susan ignored the frying pan to open the fridge, but the pallid wing of her arm trembled uneasily over the fridge door handle, dashing Alex to her aid. With the cane hand, she swept Alex back to the perimeter of the kitchen, muttering, “Sit down, I’ll handle it.” Eh voila, the cold air wafted from the dun cocoon of the fridge.

Alex eyed the onions shading to black then the hand hard-knuckled on the grey hook of the cane, and still his nerves were quivering. “Mom, let me handle breakfast.”

“Please let me make you breakfast.” Her tone vibrated grittily over stove.

Alex pouted, but since she was nice, he could the good little boy for a little while. “Oh I forgot. I picked up your prescriptions yesterday.”

“Thanks—when did you come back last night?”

“Don’t remember. Can you believe it? I’m getting old. I forget where I parked last night. I spent damn near an hour wandering in the dark.”

Susan took too long to open the fridge again, curdling Alex.

“Dad called me while I was looking for the car.” He waited for the grimace to wash off her face. “He wants me to walk for graduation. Imagine he’s still mad I didn’t walk for high school graduation.”

The crack of the eggs coincided with a slimy feeling that he may have been too enthusiastic about David’s phone call. Then the whisking of the eggs, languid and roiling, he wanted to snatch the steel bowl from her.

“Well,” he prepared his reserve, “are you up for me doing this whole graduation she-bang?”

“That’s between you and your father, dear.” The last word came as afterword.

“Come on, Mom. This is last great ritual of childhood, a coda to my twenty-two years of school, a celebration to your loving and patient care…”Her eyes scaled up to meet his, quizzically. “Mom…”

“Will see if I’m up to it.” She turned, almost yawing too far too one side as she tried to open a drawer. “You and Frank painted the town red last night?”

It was sounded like an attack more than a nosy inquiry. Alex learned early on never to lie about these things. Secrecy manufactured her twittering machines of questions.

“You know we’re not joined at the hip. In fact I haven’t see Frank all week.” Alex flicked his eyes over the multiplying dripping dishes then wondered if running into Frank at the cafeteria counted as seeing.

“So where were you last night?”

“Mom,” he said exasperatedly, “I played some poker, hooked up a little later and then got lost looking for my car.”

“Hooked up with whom?”

“Never ask a young guy about his sex life. You won’t like what you’ll hear.”

Susan shook her head and retrieved another bar of butter from the fridge. “You remember Lisa? I remember you, my ten-year-old, gentlemen in a tuxedo giving Lisa flowers.”

Alex blinked for memory. “I think that was the result of joke played on me by Uncle Todd.”

“You were still cute and grand, and now here am I making a big breakfast to a grown man debauched.”

That was dramatic, thought Alex. Debauchery could be the perfect word of his lifestyle, but not quite. He imagined opium dens, jilted lovers, tempestuous letters, not midnight study sessions and being hen-pecked. Suddenly he alarmed that he may have forgotten some important date of hers… a birthday? An anniversary?

“You want me to get you flowers, is that it?”

“That isn’t the point.”

“What is the point?” The question evaporated into the whirr of air hood.

She turned to reach over him for the overhead cabinets, but upon running into his narrow waist, cried, “Go on and sit down at the table, please.”

Alex slapped himself to the nearest seat at the dining table. Ignoring its dark stained lake, he could see her legs, unsteady cylinders, from under her gown’s lace hem. The making of breakfast plodded according to its own painful quavering time. The scrambled eggs, the hash browns, the bacon, her frequent rests leaning on the counter, her spotted hand sliding ever so slightly off the cane, the chopping that no matter how loud could not overshadow her whistling wheezes, and then she set the table. Dragging one foot over another foot back and forth, plates, jam, butter, and just as she readied her to sit down, COFFEE—he narrowed in his seat and was the damned with one verdict only: he was the worst son ever south of Hell.

Alex’s appetite was trampled upon by guilt. He stirred circles over circles in his eggs and kept watching the minute hand of the clock.

“Come on, eat.”

Her tone was unexpectedly bright, moving Alex to look up and smile at her. It reminded of the time when Susan was fifty pounds lighter, sported a bob, would tell him to eat or his teeth would disappear. Smiling wider, he took a spoonful. The eggs were perfect. The nucleus of a good day had beaded from all this. Perhaps this breakfast was the beginning of new health, and soon she would join him surfing again. Maybe.

“You should be making me breakfasts more often,” he said.

“Yeah … what is the news on the jobs front?”

Alex reached for his coffee. “Still have one more interview on Wednesday in Santa Monica. Finance I’m afraid.”

“God, is Frank going be joining you too in that job?”

Alex chuckled, remembering his teenage stint at burger joint. Susan had insisted he pay off Frank’s three hundred dollar birthday of Napoleonic solder figures. Frank joined him later at the job just to piss off his mother for her organic ways. The duo had lasted two weeks before the manager yelled at them, “YOU TWO ARE FIRED.”

His chuckle simmered into a laugh. “Frank’s lazy. His dad got a consulting job in New York. I guess that’s a good thing, after the summer’s over, I will be here in Irvine with you, far from his evil ways.”

She swayed her head reluctantly in concession of his point. “Consulting’s more productive than trading stocks.”

“You know, Mom, you could be happy for me a little. A lot of my classmates are having trouble getting interviews as it is.”

“Of course, I’m proud of you.”

Alex took some comfort in her brittle air, and it did not help that she had taken to rapping her fork against her plate rim.”

“Honey,” she drawled, “It’s just a little disconcerting that you don’t listen to what I say.”

“Mom, I listen,” he said hotly.

She gobbled a couple bites. “But you’ll do this finance job even though I don’t care for it. You’ll come home at odd hours. You’ll keep up that gambling habit with that aimless Frank of yours. You’ll sleep with all of socal already—”

“Ok, ok. I’ll nail myself down for a proper date.”

Alex waited for her pursed lips to relax. The clock struck ten, the three-day-old ochids at the centerpiece of the table looked embarrassingly thirsty for water, and a napiform heat was developing in his pants. And there was still no hint of a smile on her face.

She surrendered her fork onto the plate; her eyes considered the cane to her left. “I’ve had enough of the eggs. They’re salty.”

“I think they’re perfect.” Alex rushed down a few spoonfuls.

“They’re salty… I’m going to lie down—Do you mind cleaning up?”

“No, not at all.” He rather preferred it.

She propped her off the table then with a slight waddle, limped her way in the island between couches, and hardly stopped, like she was wont to do, to smile before a shrine of portraits with pictures of cute and grand Alex, cursed with freckles but blessed with eyes of green stones, beaming an agile mind not yet rigid with lust. Then the sound of her plodding gait tapered round the corner grainy in the shaded light.

Alex was left with a sense of pressure building up his groin and expanding up within the confines of his ribcage. He dashed to his room and picked up his phone from the desk and texted a friend of his, Tony.

Guess what I was thinking about when I woke up this morning.

As soon as he sent it, he realized with a sigh, that he had offered to cut out his hanky-panky and date someone properly. He exited the room, shuffled along the tiled corridors and stopped to note the strip of light underneath Susan’s door. A vague promise spun in his mind, these adolescent moorings he would forget and assume the cilice mantle of adulthood.

Tony replied. You fucking slut, come over now and get it.

The electronic white of the screen glinted off his widening eyes, and he rubbed his moist lips in fevered anticipation. He had some time before meeting Frank at one pm, but first he needed to do the dishes.