Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [152]
“Well, that’s almost like death. What’d he want?”
“He said he used to live here. As a baby or something.”
“Impossible. I know who I bought this house from thirty-five years ago, and it wasn’t anybody by that name. Besides, that’s not his real name. It’s German. It means …”
“Blink of an eye,” Melinda said. “An instant.”
“Right. But he’s lying to you. I never heard of any German person named Augenblick. It’s a fiction, that name. There’s no such name in German. It’s total bullshit.” He waved his hand dismissively. Since his stroke, her father had started to employ gutterisms in his day-to-day speech. His new degraded vocabulary was disconcerting. His mind had suffered depreciation. She didn’t like obscenity from him; it didn’t match his character, or what remained of it.
Her father’s potted plant in the corner needed watering—its leaves were shriveling. Lately she had become a caretaker: Eric, and her father, and the lawn and garden out in front, and her father’s house, and the plants in it—and if she weren’t careful, that caretaking condition might become permanent, she would move into permanent stewardship, they would be her accumulations, and they would pile up and surround her. The present would dry up and disappear, except for the baby, and there would be nothing else around her except the past.
Downstairs on a side table was a business card.
Edward Augenblick
INVESTMENT COUNSELOR
“Fortune Favors the Few”
e-mail: eyeblink@droopingleaf.com
Anger spat up from somewhere near her stomach. “Fortune favors the few”! Damn him. And this zealotry from an intruder. At once, the languages roused themselves, spewing out their local-color bile. First, the Catalan. ¡Malparit. Fot el camp de casa meva ara mateix! And then the Spanish. ¡Me cago en tu madre, hijo de puta! What a relief it was to have other languages available for your obscenities. They pitched in.
A day later, she and her friend Germaine were walking in Minnehaha Creek, their pants rolled up, shoes in hand, Eric babypacked on Melinda. They were searching the creek for vegetative wonders as they bird-watched and conversed. Melinda liked Germaine’s witty impatience and had befriended her for it. They had bumped into each other in a bookstore a year ago, and Germaine had grumbled at her amiably. Melinda was bowled over by her wit and asked her out for coffee, an invitation that Germaine accepted. Germaine, a teacher and poet, was now back from New York, where she had toured the restaurants.
“There’s a blue jay,” Melinda said, pointing. She splashed her feet in the water, being careful not to slip on the rocks.
“Did I tell you how all the staff at one place spoke with accents? Did I mention that?” Germaine asked. “ ‘Ladies and gentle, let me know eef I can help you in any how.’ They sounded worse during the wine-tasting session. ‘Yooou like theeese vine? Have a zip.’ ” She walked up to Eric and kissed him on the ear. The baby giggled. “ ‘Hold theeese vine to the liiiight to determinate the lascivity.’ ”
“You should be more tolerant of foreigners,” Melinda murmured, turning to face her.
“Why should I? I’m not like you. I put salt in my coffee.” She looked at her friend. “You take that beautiful baby of yours around on your back just to flaunt him in front of nature.”
“No, I don’t. Your leg is cut,” Melinda said, pointing. “Where’d you get that mess of scabs?”
“Roses. I was staring at the clematis vine. Its growth habits were unpleasing. I held the ideal in my head so firmly that I obliterated awareness of the rest of the garden, especially the very large, known-to-be-violent rosebush between the clematis and me. I must have lunged at the vine. The rosebush grabbed at my leg, which continued to move. Seconds later I realized that the whole front of my leg had been savagely torn.”
“Savagely torn? That’s awful.”
“ ‘Laceration’ is what the form said, when I finally got out of the ER. I looked the word up, from lacerate, distress deeply, torn, mangled. Then I had a drug reaction to the prophylactic antibiotic.