Delores

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Summary

Delores didn't know why she kept screaming. Well it wasn't really screaming in the sense that it was audible. Rather it was just a long silent razor-sharp screech inside her head.

Delores

by Robert Duncan

Delores didn't know why she kept screaming. Well it wasn't really screaming in the sense that it was audible. Rather it was just a long silent razor-sharp screech inside her head.

God knows she had tried to stop it, but that little voice inside her head just kept setting itself off at regular intervals. And when the voice talked, then the pain was sure to begin, first in whispered tones, to later finish with a crippling outboard whoop.

She had visited the doctor just this morning. She had made herself all up pretty because Momma had always said that dress was a sure sign of a person's class.

What was it the doctor has said? That she was okay. But what exactly is okay? Is everyone okay? I'm okay, you're okay, just like in the book? Or could it be that there was something more sinister behind that two-to-four letter word?

But she shouldn't think like that. Everyone said she shouldn't think like that. So why did she think like that?

But that was this morning. Now she was looking at herself in the hallway's yellowed mirrors and noticing that the baggy overcoat couldn't hide the fact that her body had lost its little girl figure. A sad smile pursed her lips, things would never be the same as when she and Echo had first met.

She was thankful that the children were still at school.

After all, she thought, if she was going to go to pieces it was better that the children weren't there to see her attempt to pick-up all the shattered emotional shards. Delores was proud of the fact that she was at least discreet with, as she liked to put it, "my situation."

She could never quite bring herself to say crazy. She had even tried to eradicate - although that´s not how she would have described it - the word "crazy" from her mental vocabulary after reading a book that said, "you are what you think."

Besides, Momma had always said that only poor people were crazy. To that, Papa had added that rich people had the money to call themselves eccentric. Delores liked the sound of the word eccentric. It sounded so similar to electric. Electric led to electricity, and in turn to exciting, and exciting, naturally rolled itself into glamorous. That, she thought, couldn't be all bad, could it?

Echo had been electric. But that was before her whore, "God forgive me," of a mother had drove him away. He had been so different from all of the other boys that she had dated. Not that she was one of those easy girls, not like her mother, but she did pride herself on the fact that at one time she had been pleasing to the eye.

At least that's what Momma and Papa had said. The only problem being, should you believe your parents? In other words, could Momma and Papa's perception of life be slanted? Biased? And if it were, what did that mean about everything that she had been taught, spoon-fed, to later think or at least mindlessly act out?

But now Momma didn't say anything. In fact, Delores hadn't heard anything from her since she left her and Papa and ran off with that travelling salesman. Or was he a car salesman? Delores couldn't be sure. In fact, she found it difficult to think, what with all of the racket going on inside her head.

What was his name? Was it Charlie? Fred? No, she was sure that his name began with the letter "m". Let's see, Mark? Mildred? No can't be Mildred, after all Mildred's a woman's name. Or was it Milton. She was sure that she had got it right that time. Milton, yeah, that was it.

But, why was it that she couldn't remember Milton´s face? Is it that he didn't have a face?

On the other hand she could easily remember her fifth grade teacher, Mr. Hendrickson. He was the one everyone called "the snake" because he was always sticking his tongue out between his teeth and making clucking noise.

But Delores thought that it wasn't likely Momma had ran off with Mr. Hendrickson. After all his name didn't begin with a "m". Delores knew for a fact that his first name was Tom because they had both attended the Purple Hill 2nd Baptist Church. Papa had insisted they go to the Purple Hill 2nd Baptist Church because he thought that to go to any church that had "1st" in it was too pretentious.

The clock in the hallway bonged four. The children would be home soon. Not to mention Papa. Where was Papa? He would probably come home soon and say outlandish things in front of the children and then the yelling would start, the children fighting, her crying and then who knows what. It was the "who knows what," that scared her.

Echo had said that she was always thinking too much. He said thinking led to criminal maliciousness. Delores for the life of her never could figure out what Echo meant when he said criminal maliciousness, for that matter Delores couldn't even pronounce the word.

Echo was always trying to show off.

Maybe that was why Papa had never liked him.

On the other hand, Momma loved Echo, but then Momma loved all men. That's why Momma ran off with the gardener the whole summer before Delores was born. Momma had told Papa that's what happens, "When the cat is away, mice will play."

Of course Delores heard all of this when she was very young straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But then that was a long time ago, and maybe the story had twisted itself around just a little teansy bit since then.

Delores took off her coat and threw it over the back of a large overstuffed recliner and then went into the kitchen to start dinner. Nothing too fancy. Tonight was Mexican Pizza Lover's Delight.

Delores could never figure out if it was supposed to be read "MEXICAN PIZZA lover's delight," or "Mexican Pizza LOVER'S DELIGHT." She had tried to explain it once to her friend Liz, who Delores thought looked like a cross between Opray Winfry and June Carter Cash even though she was Filipino, and only got the response, "Sister what goes on inside that head of yours is no business of mine."

Liz is the same friend who once told her that in reality all women are nothing more than poorly paid putas. It had almost ended their friendship. But now that Delores was older, and a mother, she found herself agreeing, that is, at least in principle. After all what's more important than a warm bed, food and some money in hand. And if it takes a roll in the bed to land someone who is willing to provide that, well then more power to them.

Unfortunately, that philosophy hadn´t carried over to Echo, a man she´d been unable to keep. "He was a looker, that´s for sure. But he just didn´t have the constitution for work," Delores had tried explaining to Liz. "He was a free-bird...I had no choice but to set him free."

"Well, if it´d been me, that bird would have had more than his wings clipped," Liz had said.

"Lord Jesus knows how hard I tried, but in the end I could just see it weren´t fair. I was killing him, making him a shell of what he could have been. Around me, he was no longer a man," Delores whispered, as an image rose before her eyes of Echo curled on the their bed, yet cold, distant, all the while her body ached to be near him, to feel his touch, to kiss his skin and have the bitter taste of sweat on her lips.

But she shouldn't think like that. Momma wouldn't like it. She would say that it was cheap, course thinking.

Momma was one to talk.

Delores pulled out the frozen TV pizza dinners and plopped them down on the cluttered formica counter that was chipped from years of use, and then began opening the flimsy cardboard boxes to prepare to slip the pizzas, one after the other, into the microwave.

Delores decided that microwaves and TV dinners proved that there really is a God. Less work, no pain.

Papa always said, "No pain, no gain," but then Papa wasn't a theologian.

Delores could hear a heavy motor slowing down outside in the driveway. She didn't have to look to know by the sound that it was the children being dropped off by the schoolbus.

As if answering her thoughts Jimmy the Dog stretched his old legs and edged towards the front door. Jimmy the Dog wasn't really that old, he had just been born old.

In a panic that the children would see her in a bad state, Delores quickly popped one of her ever-present happy pills and gulped down a glass of a water.

Delores looked at her hand, they were her Momma´s hands, fleshly maternal, yet cracked with age. She remembered the last time she´d seen her Momma´s hands - well the right hand to be exact - as she placed her arm outside the rolled-down window of Milton´s faded-blue Impala. The gloved hand waving, almost as if catching the breeze, in a gentle, circular movement, left-right-left. A faded beauty queen on parade, as a teenage Delores waved back from the front porch. Her hands mirroring her mother´s motions, while inside the house, her father sat in front of the white-static of an untuned television.

The front door flew open with the ease of forty years of use.

"Mommy, Randy said he´d kill me if'n I told you that he threw-up on the bus...."

"It's not true ... he's lying," screeched a small reddish freckled face.

Why don't they look like me, thought Delores ... they don't even look like Echo. Is it possible that they switched them on accident at the hospital? These things have happened, and the doctors had said both times that we, that is, that I, was going to have a girl.

But it was obvious, one only had to look at them, to realize that the doctors had been mistaken, they were after all, boys - minitures of Echo. That's what it was a mistake, like all the others before and all the others to come. One endless cycle, an ebbing in and out between nothing to nothing, from one great flub-up, a great gurgle in the universe's toilet, to the next, Delores would have thought if she´d been inclined.

"Yes he did. and not only that he barfed all over Mr. Johnson's lap and then Mr. Johnson got mad and said that he was going to call you...."

"Shut up! You're lying...."

Freckles made a lunge at Mouth's neck with outstretched hands. Mouth ducked and Freckles fell to the floor. Freckles began to cry. Jimmy the Dog began to bark.

Delores wondered how many of her happy pills she had popped. She didn't want to be a junkie, she just wanted a little peace of mind. She remembered the old drug-horror stories her Momma told her, like the one from the sixties about the Barbie-doll babysitter who tripped out on LSD and when the children's parents came home they found their children roasting on a spit in the fireplace and the Barbie-doll babysitter cooly licking her fingers.

Delores thought that perhaps that story had been aimed at Californians.

Then there was the story that Momma used to tell her right before bedtime about the mother who had a drug-flashback while she was crossing a bridge and threw her children over the bridge into a river that ran thousands of feet below and they never found their bodies. Or what was left of them, because Delores was sure that the fish probably would eat at least a little part of them, maybe just a pinky or the tip of a nose.

Delores used to imagine the children floating through the air, looking back at their mother, perhaps holding hands as they fell, while their mother, with a hilarious wicked-Oz-type-witch laugh, head thrown back, pulled discreatly from out of a hidden pocket a small compact and looked casually in the mirror to paint her pursed, gleaming stellar-like lips.

Delores thought mothers shouldn't tell their children stories like that. That is, at least, not right before bedtime.

But, right now, in this precise drop of the proverbial plop of the sand in time's never-ending hourglass, Delores' children continued to scream, squeal, or in general make a muck-up of her already precarious situation. Nonetheless, their voices seemed to lose force, wafting higher to float on a plane about twelve-feet above Delores.

She felt weak. Too tired to move. She felt heavy, and began to sway slowly back and forth on her toes. Delores realized that she wasn't up to settling the children's fight and decided to go into the living room and lie down on the sofa.

She tried to take a short step with a rubber leg that stretched from here to Kansas. The foot got caught at the Wichita border as Delores tripped over one of the children's toys.

For a second she wobbled on stilts before something gave her a sharp push from behind. She watched the carpeted floor coming closer and closer, as if in slow motion she sank lower, her knees buckling, her hands frozen at the side unable to protect her naked face from the inevitable contact.

"Five dollars a square yard," she thought. "Was that a bargain?"

Delores saw a dark form in front of her. Hot breath. Jimmy the Dog licked her face.

Delores smiled.