The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [26]
Two weeks earlier, Buster had outright refused. “I’m not going to wear a dress,” he said. “It’s an evening gown,” Mrs. Fang told him, “a kind of costume.” Buster, nine years old, was not interested in the subtleties of wordplay. “It’s still a dress,” he said. Mr. Fang, who had recently used a good portion of a grant from the Beuys Foundation to purchase a Panasonic VHS/S-VHS camcorder to replace the one broken by an irate zoo employee, zoomed in on his son’s face, tight with repulsion. “Artists are notoriously difficult,” Mr. Fang said and then Mrs. Fang looked into the camera and told him to please leave the room.
“Just get Annie to do it,” Buster offered, feeling the inescapable claustrophobia of his parents’ desires. “Annie winning a beauty pageant is not a commentary on gender and objectification and masculine influences on beauty,” Mrs. Fang replied. “Annie winning a beauty pageant is a foregone conclusion, the status quo.” Buster could not argue; his sister could win the Junior Miss category of the Crimson Clover pageant even if she was sobbing uncontrollably and shouting obscenities. She was the beautiful Fang, the one who could insert herself into a situation and gain the attention of anyone, which allowed for the other Fangs to continue their secret actions. So Buster understood that Annie was the beautiful one and Buster was, well, not the beautiful one. He was, well, something else. Whatever he was, he was not the Fang who wore a dress and competed in beauty pageants. Could he please not be that?
“Buster,” his mother continued, “we have other projects lined up. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do.”
“I don’t want to do it,” he said.
“Okay, fine. I just want to say one thing. We’re a family. We do things that are difficult because we love each other. Remember when I jumped that car with a motorcycle?”
After plastering a town in Georgia with flyers for a daredevil stunt, Mrs. Fang, in special makeup to look like a ninety-year-old woman, drove a rented motorcycle off a ramp and over a parked car. She barely cleared the car and then wobbled for a few feet before crashing into a ditch, but was unhurt. There was an article in the local newspaper and it was subsequently picked up by national news organizations. Mrs. Fang had never, in her entire life, ridden a motorcycle, much less jumped over a car with one. “I could die,” she told her children, who were pretending to be her great-grandchildren, just before she hopped on the motorcycle, “but whatever happens, just go with it.”
Of course Buster remembered. In the car on the way back home, their mother chugging whiskey straight from the bottle, she let the children peel off the latex makeup to reveal her own face, smiling and kind.
“I was terrified. I didn’t want to do it when your father suggested it. I refused. And then I thought, how could I ever ask your father or one of you to do something difficult if I didn’t go through with it? So I did it. And it was incredible. What you’ll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”
“I don’t want to do it,” he said.
“Fair enough, kiddo,” she said, miraculously smiling, cheerful. She stood, brushed off her pants, and walked down the hallway to her study. Annie walked into the living room where Buster was still on the floor and said, “Man, Mom’s pissed.”
“No, she’s not,” Buster said, correcting her.
“Oh, yes,” Annie said.
“No, she’s not,” Buster said again, less confident.
“Oh,” Annie said, softly stroking Buster’s head as if he were a puppy, “yes.”
That night, Buster’s ear against the door of his parents’ bedroom, he could hear snatches of their conversations, whispered transmissions, I did and But maybe and He won’t and Well, Jesus Christ and It’ll be fine. He stood up and walked into Annie’s room. She was watching a silent film where a woman was trapped inside a barrel heading toward the edge of a waterfall and the hero was miles, dozens and dozens of miles,