Monsters
“When I’m at my most desperate, I remind myself: I am a good person.”
Anonymous, PostSecret.com
Arthur was the new kid.
Just the week before, he and his mother had moved to Charleston. It was late April. With only a few weeks left in the school year, Arthur knew he wouldn’t be making very many friends before summer started, and that he would be spending the next three months of summertime shuttered in his grandmother’s house, alone. His mother had no response for him when he complained about it besides a shrug of her slim shoulders. They couldn’t afford to live in California anymore: it was his father that had disappeared in the car crash, not the mortgage on the house they had lived in for 12 years.
A friend would make this easier, he thought, kicking his legs back and forth underneath his desk as he listened to Mrs. Plinker chatter on about the Crusades. None of the other kids had looked at him twice. They’ve already got their people. History had been his favorite class back home in Chico, but this class was different. This class had Tom O’Hara.
Arthur had never seen anybody like him. Mrs. Plinker had scrawled his own name onto the seating chart directly behind the scrawny blond boy, who reminded Arthur of a wart—unexpected and unpleasant, with an air about him that made the other kids feel eerily repulsed on sight. No one talked to him, either. First of all, he was filthy. From the snot crusted underneath his nose to the stringy, unkempt hair that lay limply over his acne-riddled forehead, every part of him screamed gross. He was also an interrupter. There wasn’t one lecture that didn’t feature him shouting out questions or wrong answers at Mrs. Plinker. It was like Tom wanted to be a funny kid, a class clown, but was always falling short of it.
It embarrassed Arthur awfully.
He tried to turn his attention back to the lecture. Courses like gym and math had always seemed a strange torture of sweat and memorization for a small boy with small shoulders and talents. Immersing himself in stories of world wars and ritual slaughter, on the other hand, made him feel something inside that rarely came out in the real world, the world that seemed populated by hardly anything now but Tom’s outbursts and Arthur’s fat grandmother, Maybelline. He resented Tom for taking it from him.
As Tom’s particularly unsettling odor settled over the classroom’s atmosphere, Arthur started to draw his pencil over the binder paper sitting askew on his desk and tried not to wonder if this was what a rotting toenail would smell like. He was no artist; the folds of Maybelline’s fat looked more like foothills than flab, her greedy pouch of a mouth a triangular blue scribble, but Arthur still felt a kind of obscene pleasure at drawing her ugliness at her expense. She disgusted him.
Maybelline was so fat she couldn’t walk. She had a motorized wheelchair instead. The thrumming motor rattled through her mansion of a house day and night as she whizzed between tables and over hardwood floors talking loudly on her cell phone and dropping food on the floor in her wake. She had a porch for visitors, long and stuffed with chairs and little tables for sitting fried chicken on. Arthur remembered going to visit her as a little boy: the sweltering humidity that coursed over them, the way sweat would trickle through her loud floral muumuu and puddle in the fleshy joints of her arms, the slick, old smell that poured from her mouth onto his face when he dutifully leaned in for a kiss from the bloated crone, that shocking, barking laugh. They hadn’t gone to visit in years, though: not until the accident.
Arthur didn’t like thinking about his father; it seemed like something to be ashamed of, or laughed at, or ignored. He drew a bearded crusader slicing through Maybelline’s drooping stomach, adding squiggles of writhing guts splashing on his notebook paper. She was his father’s mother; she could die too. As he finished adding a final flourish of blood dripping from his grandmother’s abdomen, Tom started coughing, openmouthed, and a fleck of spittle landed on Arthur’s cheek. By the end of the period, Arthur’s mood was black.
Arthur walked home after school, scuffing his feet along the thin sidewalk that snaked its way through downtown Charleston and trying to shake the smell of warm sewage from his nose. The city’s harbor front did little to clean the air with the fresh, salty taste of ocean. Instead, the humidity would pluck out the gassy odors of an ancient sewer system and leave them to lurk between the cobblestones. His grandmother’s house was a hulking antebellum mansion that overlooked the Battery and stared straight at Fort Sumter. As it loomed up over him, he sighed. Another night with Gramonster.
It was his mother who had first given Maybelline the nickname. Arthur must have been 6 or 7, and had been playing with the big coffee table books his parents kept artistically displayed in the living room. Deena had been on the phone in the other room, her disembodied voice echoing her boring, grown-up conversation down the hallway. Arthur was dropping the books on top of each other, giggling with every loud, satisfying smack of gravity, when he heard her say wearily, “—now that Gramonster is involved, the whole thing is fucked.”
It was the curse that caught his ear at first. Fucked! He’d never heard his mother say it before—she had always been careful about what she said around him. He felt a thrill at the secret of knowing he had heard something he shouldn’t have. Then he had thought, she’s talking about Grandma. Her voice had labored viciously over the moniker. He didn’t feel bad for a second; Maybelline smelled weird. She was fat and loud. She was a monster. Arthur never told his mother what he had heard that day, but from that moment onward he had never mentally referred to his grandmother as anything else.
He quietly opened and closed the massive door that guarded the entryway, hoping to sneak up the stairs and down the long hallway to his room before Maybelline caught him. No luck. She was sitting in the parlor beside the foyer, reading one of her magazines. She whizzed over to him.
“Give me a kiss, baby. How was school? New friends today?” Her strong southern accent crawled over him like a cockroach. She had reached out and grabbed his hand as she talked to him, her chubby fingers nestling wetly into his palm. He felt vaguely nauseated.
“Yeah,” Arthur lied. “Totally. I’ve got homework to—“
“Well shut my mouth, sweetheart,” she interrupted, excited. “That’s a good thing to hear. Who are they? Maybe I know their mothers.” She smiled at him encouragingly, and her yellow teeth glared at him. Liar, they said. Arthur panicked.
It was the only classmate’s name he could remember.
“Tom. That’s…Tom O’Hara.”
Her lips pursed in an almost childlike pout. She didn’t know any O’Hara’s. Arthur was relieved, until a smile struck her face like a bad dream.
“You’ll have to invite him over. I’m sure y’all two would just go wild in this old house. C’mon sugar, lets go grab you an afterschool snack.” She clicked her wheelchair forward with her hand still firmly clasped around Arthur’s, but he slid out of her grip.
“Sorry Gramon---Grandma. I’ve gotta go upstairs and get this homework done right away.” He started up the stairs before she could say anything. Once he was on the steps, he was safe; she would have to get out of the chair and buckle into the motorized chair lift installed on the wall. She was too lazy. As he took the steps, two at a time, he heard the whistling of the wheelchair zooming off into the house and away from him. He smiled as he climbed.
That night at dinner, Maybelline brought up Tom. They were all sitting around one end of the colossal wooden dining room table, his mother crunching through her green beans and drinking wine, Arthur picking at his congealing macaroni and cheese, and Maybelline sucking everything down in lusty slurps. Her stomach bulged against the table. Arthur knew he was in for it as soon as she shot a conspiratorial look over at him and opened her mouth.
“Deena, did you know Arthur made a friend today?” Her lips smacked and a little wheeze came out of her in her excitement. She shifted in her chair and leaned forward.
Arthur’s mother looked up at Maybelline. She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“That’s wonderful,” she said, completely pleasant. Deena looked at her son. “Who is it?”
Arthur felt simultaneously guilty for lying and furious at Maybelline for bringing it up. Why didn’t I just make up a name! He knew she was trying to be nice. It was her cloying tone of voice that raised the hairs on his neck. He hated her.
“His name’s Tom. He’s just a kid in my History class. I don’t really know him or anything.” He tried to sound bored but couldn’t help but let a little hardness slip into his voice.
“Don’t be silly!” Maybelline hooted. “That boy should come over for supper sometime. Friday night wouldn’t be too bad! I can get that ice cream with the caramel swirl in it and some whipped cream.”
“I don’t—“
“Deena, can you pick the sundae things up from the store when you go tomorrow to get my heart pills? And maybe some chips and queso too.” She was like a diesel train: loud, unstoppable, and bad for the environment. His mother’s face pinched into another pseudo-smile. She nodded and returned to her green beans. Arthur felt his panic rising. This could not happen. He had to do something.
“Look, Grandma, I really don’t even know if I like the guy, and I’d really rather—“
“Well, you’ll just have to invite him over and find out! I’m sure y’all two will get along like peas in a pod.”
It was hopeless.
Arthur lay in his bed listlessly. He was bored and pissed off, and he couldn’t sleep. He picked up the copy of The Art of War his father had gotten him for his birthday the year before. He hadn’t really read it; it was more of a habit to flick the pages back and forth as he read random lines and let his mind wander. The book made him feel better about the memory of his mother, how she had shrieked and been sick in the kitchen when she got the phone call from the hospital, or the look on the undertaker’s face when Arthur had asked, shyly, if he could see his dad just once before the funeral. I don’t think I can let you do that, son, the man had said with a papery voice. He had looked at Arthur’s mother and given a little twitch of his shoulders. His face was badly disfigured by the crash. I wouldn’t. Arthur’s father had flown through his windshield like a bird through an open window. He had an image of his father with his arms outstretched like a superhero, choking on his own blood. Thinking about it might have made Arthur feel like his guts were being dragged out of him a month ago, but he’d gotten much better at flicking the thought away like he was changing the channel. Masturbating helped.
Sometimes while he was lying there pretending to read, he would idly pull on his penis until it got hard and he had to clean up the sticky mess that dribbled onto his stomach. That had started happening more and more as the months passed and his days grew lonelier. Sometimes he imagined the breasts he saw in the Victoria’s Secret catalogues his mother had had in her room back home, or the little curves he noticed on the girls in class; sometimes he didn’t think about anything at all but the heat of his hand. Today as he jerked himself his mind was blank, but the moment he came Tom’s face popped into his head.
Arthur felt horrified. He scrunched his face up and shook his head fiercely, wiping himself off with frantic swipes of a dirty shirt. It was an accident. He focused hard on the page he had turned to, as if he could block out what had just happened.
“Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” The line jumped out at him. Arthur tried to think about it, to let it fill up his head, and decided that it sounded kind of stupid. Desperate people were the easiest kind to beat. He thought of himself being browbeaten at dinner and Tom’s face crept back into his mind’s eye. He pictured it on his grandmother’s body, and let the funny glow of the image fill him up where shame was trying to take hold.
It was Thursday before Arthur approached Tom. He felt wretched. Despair had grown increasingly in the last 3 days as he tried to find a way out of the mess he’d gotten himself into. It didn’t help that the Gramonster had developed a running track of questions for him:
- Does Tom like board games or movies better?
- Does he have any siblings?
- What church do they belong to?
- What does his father do?
and,
- Fried grits or crab cakes?
Over and over and over again.
Arthur was running out of time. Maybe he’s already made plans. Maybe he can’t come. It didn’t occur to Arthur that he could just lie and pretend he’d invited the boy over and been declined. There was a small voice, after all, that told him he might as well try. A friend would make this easier.
The bell blasted through the classroom, signaling the end of the period and the hurried rustle of backpack zippers. Arthur took a breath. He tapped Tom on the shoulder.
“Wannacomeoveronfriday?” He said it in a rush, trying to pinch his nostrils tight against Tom’s rank odor. Tom raised his eyebrows and looked at him warily.
“Uh...I dunno. What would we do?”
Arthur was irritated at Tom’s hesitation. He doesn’t have friends either. It was snobby, in Arthur’s opinion. It was rude.
He didn’t say anything about it, though. “I dunno, eat dinner and maybe..maybe walk around the neighborhood. My Grandma’s house is over by the Battery.”
Tom’s eyes brightened at that. “In one of those big-ass mansion houses? Whoa! I’ve always wanted to go inside one of those! Yeah, I can come. What time?”
“Six.” Arthur cleared his throat. “And—er—my Grandmother wants to know whether you’d like fried grits or crab cakes.”
Tom looked at Arthur like he was crazy. “Are you kidding me? Both.” Then he sneezed all over his shirt. Arthur jumped back in surprise at the sudden explosion and Tom laughed at him.
School that Friday passed by in a blur. Tom had shot Arthur a bored smile when he walked into class, and Arthur had forced a smile back. He noticed that Tom had something stuck in his teeth and smelled like wet towels.
Once Arthur got home, he spent the hours between school and dinner hiding from his grandmother. No matter where he went, though, he could never escape her voice, or her wheelchair wheels chugging across the hardwood floors. The drawl seemed to seep through the seams in the walls, her creaking “y’all’s” fluttering around his head like moths around a blue-lit bug zapper. He hadn’t seen his mother since breakfast that morning.
She had sat quietly, her eyes almost furtive, a hint of a quiver playing across her hands as she spooned her grapefruit in shiny pink lumps. It was only when she accepted a bowl of steaming, slimy cheesy grits from her slob-jawed mother-in-law that Arthur realized: Deena was excited for dinner that night. He had never once seen her try that mealy, cream-colored gruel before. Gramonster cackled and said something about the pull of Southern cooking. She’s excited for me. The pressure was mounting.
As dinnertime ticked closer and closer, Arthur grew more and more anxious. He kept trying to catch the door at the moment it would be tainted by Tom’s knock. Trying not to stare at it was like trying not to stare at a dead body. The second or third (or fourth) time he caught himself at it, he made himself go up to his mother’s room, simply for the sake of doing anything else.
Deena looked pretty in her clean pressed white linen pants and the pale lavender blouse she hadn’t worn since California. He told her so, and she smiled—her real smile, small and shy and with only the briefest camera-flash of front teeth. Deena shared a long, thin nose and dark brown hair with her son: her mouth was all her own. It didn’t bash you over the head with its dazzle. It nudged you, crookedly, instead.
“It’ll be nice to meet someone else here besides your Gramons—besides Grandma.” She caught herself just in time, but Arthur heard her slip and felt warm as a secret for knowing. In that instant he loved his mother again. He was about to rush his arms around her when the doorbell rang with a jarring ding. Their eyes locked in twin expressions of surprise. Then she let out a tinkling laugh that broke from her like a cat runs through a cracked door. In Arthur’s eyes, she looked light and strangely transformed.
“Well Arthur,” she said, “let’s go see what we get down there.”
The first thing Arthur noticed was that Tom was alone.
The second thing was that he was clean. It was still a shabby kind of clean, but his hair was wet from showering, split ends brushing a graying, too-big button down shirt that was tucked—messily—into a pair of too-small black slacks. Arthur felt simultaneous disappointment and relief. Maybelline rolled over to the boy and almost knocked him down as she slugged her meaty arms around him with a squeal.
“Look at you, tiny thing! Now gimme a kiss, sugar.” To Arthur, it looked like watching a dog tear apart a new toy out of love, deliriously oblivious to the stuffing being flung about the room. When Maybelline pulled away, he half expected Tom to have the shell-shocked face of a bomb victim; but the blond was smiling broadly. Arthur noticed an oblong brown stain near the top button of Tom’s shirt, like spilled gravy or old blood. He decided it was time to get this show on the road.
“I’m starved!” His voice slid up sharply, an accident, and he felt the blush start on his neck and rise up to his cheeks. That was new. He forced himself onward, the sentence sliding awkwardly out of his mouth with a chuga chuga chug. “Let’s go ahead and eat, right? Hey, Tom.” Did his smile look real? It weighed his cheeks by fifty pounds.
Tom gave him a funny look, then said smoothly, “Hey, Arthur,” and moved to shake his hand. The formality surprised Arthur. He forgot to reach his own hand out. Then his mother nudged him forward and he remembered, flapping his digits out like a broken bird’s wing. Tom smiled, and in his eyes Arthur saw a flash of something that disappeared so quickly he couldn’t have said what it was, or why it felt unsettling, so Arthur ignored it.
“Let’s have a tour of the place, huh, Arthur?” Tom said lightly through his southern drawl.
“Oka—“
“Here we go, Tommy,” interrupted Maybelline. Her wheelchair rushed up, motor humming as her bulging thigh brushed against Arthur’s side.
Off they went, the two of them, leaving Arthur and his mother to trail behind. Maybelline was talking at such a speed that the others couldn’t add any more to the conversation than the shuffle of their feet. Instead of trying to get a word in, Arthur watched Tom. Something seemed off—Tom wasn’t this kind of kid. The Tom from History class was loud and wild and dirty and repulsive. This Tom was the picture of politeness, for all the world like a prissy Charleston rich kid. Arthur supposed that when you grow up in it for long enough, you learn to fake that kind of demeanor. Gramonster was eating it up.
“You’re so polite, Tom! Aren’t you just a darling?” She gushed. “Let me show you my Father’s study, you’ll just love it!”
“I’m sure I will, ma’am. I do love books.” They wooshed around a corner in the hallway, and Arthur decided he’d had enough.
“I’ll go check to make sure dinner’s ready,” he said from where he stood, raising his voice as his Grandmother and Tom O’Hara rolled farther away from him. He turned and nearly bumped into his mother, then pushed by her before she could say a word. They both knew the table was already set. Since there wasn’t much else to do but wait, Arthur sat in his chair and started to count.
It was nearly ten minutes before they all returned. Tom was smiling congenially and took the seat across from Arthur only after Maybelline had swung around into her spot at the head of the table. Deena made a big show of giving the boys the biggest chunks of fried grits, golden brown and steaming mightily from a big plate in the middle of the table. There were buttery lima beans and ambrosia, along with a creamy aioli for the oversized crab cakes. Everything on the table was a calorific mess. Arthur felt sick. Tom looked overjoyed.
Dinner was full of conversation between Gramonster and Tom and the passing of plates and tableware from Deena and Arthur. At one point, Tom excused himself for the bathroom. Maybelline took the opportunity to talk about their guest while he was gone. “Ain’t he just the cutest!” she squealed, a white dollop of aioli lingering in the corner of her mouth.
Arthur didn’t want to have this conversation. He wanted to go into his room and read his book or draw a picture or stare out the window: anything but this twilight zone of a dinner. He excused himself too, and went to use the other bathroom. Walking down the hallway, he heard the chink of a glass being put down in a distant room. He picked up the pace.
Light was pouring from the open door of the study. Arthur knew before he arrived at the door that Tom was inside. He peeked around the doorframe and watched as the blond, his back facing the hall, picked up an old decanter of alcohol and poured a little in his mouth. The boy straightened sharply and set the glass bottle back onto the desk, then moved to the other side of the desk and started to open the top drawer. He looked up and caught Arthur staring at him from the door.
“Spying on me, huh freak?” he said maliciously.
Arthur was seething. “Leave that stuff alone.” He walked into the room, suddenly filled with the desire to protect his grandmother’s things, especially from Tom.
“Oh yeah?” Tom snorted, “Why should I? Gonna yell for the fat lady?” He shut the drawer with a smirk. “Fine. I don’t want any of this old crap anyway.” Tom sauntered back to the hallway and moved to clap Arthur on the shoulder, who jerked away from the boy’s touch instead.
“Sensitive little guy, aren’t ya? C’mon brother. Let’s get back to the table.” Tom walked past him and down the hallway, leaving him with no choice but to follow after him in a delayed scamper.
Arthur didn’t know what to do but sit quietly at the table as if nothing had happened. Maybelline was enamored with their guest, and the shine in Deena’s eyes could be nothing but animated approval for this boy posing as Arthur’s friend.
“Mom, I don’t feel good.” It was all he could think of to end dinner as fast as possible. He willed himself to look pale. Deena glanced at him, then at Maybelline, then back to her son.
“Are you sure, honey? We haven’t even gotten to desert yet.”
“Yeah,” he lied. “I just really want to lay down. Sorry, Tom.” He looked over at his classmate blandly. “I hope you understand.”
Tom understood. The women walked him out, cooing, wishing him goodnights and good lucks and hope-to-see-you-agains. When they all got onto the porch, Maybelline demanded, “Arthur! You go give that boy a hug!”
He walked up to Tom and gingerly squeezed the boy’s shoulders in his arms. As their heads drew close, he heard Tom whisper:
“I hope you fucking die, and your fat fucking grandmother too.”
With a final wave, Tom sauntered off down the porch stairs and through the iron gate. As his form grew smaller and was swallowed up by the dark, Maybelline gave out a happy little sigh.
“I swear! That boy reminds me so much of your father at that age.”
Arthur felt his leg kick like a rifle.
The wheelchair gave a groan as it tumbled from the porch. Time seemed to slow. Maybelline’s rolling arms were stretched in front of her, useless, frantic, and comical, her muumuu swelling behind her like a hot air balloon. Her head twisted grossly and her eyes caught his. There was a sickening crunch as the wheelchair hit the gravel below the porch, coupled with the soft smack of desperate flesh and gravity.
Deena gasped and ran forward, down the steps, and knelt beside the massive, shapeless woman hunched across the ground. One of them was screeching. Arthur’s ears tried to close themselves from the sound. Buds of adrenaline and fear and excitement and righteousness began to bloom inside of him, wild and out of control, each trying to overwhelm him. Then the iron smell of blood reached his nose. He saw his grandmother’s face, glistening like a split pomegranate, and fear won.
His legs moved again, inside the house, up the stairs, down the hallway, into his room. He kicked the door shut—don’t think about kicking—leapt upward onto the bed, slithered underneath the sheets, and curled himself around himself, huddling his legs around each other like abandoned children, shaking. He lay very still. He realized he was crying. Somewhere in the night, a mockingbird screamed.
Then Arthur was alone again.
