Page 234 - Some Dance to Remember

204 Jack Fritscher

phone call from someone, not the doctor, who, Kick inferred, owed him a
chunk of change. He seemed slightly upset. Ryan was not one to pry; but
not without some eagerness Kick told Ryan El Lay called him back for the
next weekend as well. “Urgent business,” Kick said.
Ryan was disconsolate. “Not two weekends in a row!”
As usual, when Kick was away, Ryan invited me along to watch the
family circus. “Not,” I said, “two weekends in a row!”
“You can’t leave me defenseless,” he said.
“You? Defenseless?” I said. “Don’t be moronically oxymoronic.”
The triplets were on the warpath. Sandy was beside herself. “It’s all
from your side of the family, Thom. All of it.”
Abe had discovered masturbation. He emerged from his room only
to fry cheese sandwiches and fight with his sisters. Sie was working on
her porn vocabulary and Bea had taken to wetting the bed. Thom had
forced Beatrice to sleep in Pampers. He had wrestled her to the floor of
her bedroom and fastened the diapers on her himself. She howled at the
indignity. She told anyone who came in the front door what they were
doing to her, and what she planned to do to them. “I’m going to be a
lesbian,” she shouted. “I’ll show them.”
Sandy was impassive to the commotion. She sat on the edge of the
bench-like brick hearth, chain-smoking, feeding a week’s accumulation
of wet plastic diapers into the fireplace. She threw them one by one into
the fire. They landed white and wet on the burning logs, sat for a moment,
turned brown around the edges, and curled up like huge marshmallows,
going up finally in a roar over the high hissing sound of her teenage
daughter’s urine evaporating to steam. One after the other she rationed
the diapers into the fire, watching the burning, with the sudden plastic
blaze lighting her thin boned face, accenting her hawk-nose and chopped
black hair. She was the witch of Endor reading the runes of burning dia-
pers. She was the wreck of a woman whom marriage had made. When
Ryan ushered me around the corner and into the room, Sandy did not
really look up. She sat on the hearth, smoking and drinking coffee, while
hypnotically she burned the wet diapers. Finally, she looked up and said,
“What’s so funny?”
“Welcome to the Big Top,” Ryan said.
“What?” Sandy Gully said. Finally, she laughed, almost seeing what
a ridiculous figure she cut. “So, somebody has to do it.”
Thom, for his part, cornered Sie at the end of the long green hallway.
They were at each other’s throats.
“Can we discreetly withdraw?” I asked.

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