As James moved through the store, checking his list against each aisle’s index of ingredients, he peeked around every corner. If he saw someone he knew, he ducked back and moved on to another item on the list. Avoiding acquaintances saved him the head nods, the smiles, the passing of inane conversation. It also kept James’ heart from accelerating from already-in-overdrive to panic. Sometimes, when an item was halfway down an aisle, someone would come around the far corner as he dashed for the middle. Then it was a race; could he get the item, toss it into his little rolling cart, and escape before he and the person met? Sometimes, they called his name and then he was stuck. If he tried not to hear them, they only yelled louder.
On this day, James thought he was safe. He had his toilet paper, bread, day-old doughnuts, and chicken breasts for dinner, along with some fresh corn on the cob and a half-gallon of low-fat milk. There was only the country-meadow air freshener to grab and then he could be out the door. He spun on his heels and headed to the top of Aisle Seven, intending to move quickly past the endcaps to Aisle Twelve and then head for the express lane. But as he shot past Aisle Nine, he heard the mayor’s voice. There was no mistaking or ignoring the mayor’s voice; he had a politician’s command and he demanded an audience.
“James!” he called. “James, how are you?”
The question James always found impossible to answer. What did people really want to know? Did they want to know the state of his health or his mind? Did they just want him to say, “Oh, fine, fine,” and then shut up while they loaded their litanies on him, their problems and preachings, the latest town gossip? Did they even hear themselves ask the question, let alone listen for an answer? James faced the mayor and decided just to duck his head and smile.
“Good, good,” the mayor said, patting James’ shoulder. James stepped quickly backwards, just far enough to be out of reach, so the mayor’s fingers stroked the air. “Listen, I have a favor to ask you.”
James locked his knees and waited.
“The wife, she went to this antique mall in Davenport the other day. And she had to come home with this cuckoo clock. Loves it, she says, says it caught on her skirt as she walked by and she looked down and saw how it had a hold of her and so she bought it.” He shook his head and laughed.
James wondered why the cuckoo clock chose the mayor’s wife. She was a wisp of a thing with breasts. She shook his hand at the ceremony where he received the key to the city and he found himself briefly wanting to squeeze more than her fingers. An urge James didn’t have often, but those breasts were irrepressible. James tucked away a smile as he wondered if the cuckoo bird was in heat.
“Anyway, it doesn’t run quite right and she’s heartbroken. It cuckoos the hour on the half and the half on the hour. Makes it hellishly hard to tell time.”
Misplaced hands, James thought. Someone at some time moved the hands backwards instead of forwards and messed up the clock’s mind. “Simple fix,” he said out loud.
The mayor beamed. “Oh, I’m glad to hear it. I’ll have someone bring it around, if that’s all right with you.”
James nodded.
“Thank you, James. Good talking to you!” He stepped closer before James could adjust and clapped him on the back. James gasped and didn’t breathe again until the mayor disappeared down Aisle Ten. Why, James wondered, didn’t the mayor just send someone around for groceries, why did food deserve a personal touch, but the clock would be delivered by a stranger? Quickly, James collected his air freshener and moved through the checkout.
Outside again, he stopped for a moment in the shade of the building and wiped his face with a handkerchief. His heart slowed and he waited for the sweat to cool and evaporate from his skin, and then he headed down the sidewalk. The town’s clock tower chimed one-thirty, so he knew it was only eighteen minutes past the hour. For a moment, he pictured the clock tower as a huge cuckoo clock. Big enough to require an ostrich as the cuckoo. Without thinking, James laughed out loud. Slapping his hand over his mouth, he glanced around, but no one else was out, no one to demand an explanation for his sudden bray, no one to seek any explanation at all. That allowed him to smile during the trip home.
All cuckoo clocks made James smile. Cuckoos were spread throughout the Home, at least one on every wall in every room, to lighten the mood, lift the spirit. When a cuckoo bird flew out of its door, its window, its chimney, or in one case, a cat’s mouth, James had to smile and he felt the rest of the clocks brighten. No matter how rich or formal the tone, a cuckoo bird’s chirp always sounded ridiculous. They were like a bride wearing sneakers. Whenever James heard laughter coming from the visitors, he knew what he’d see even before he looked in the room or checked the security monitor; a crowd gathered around a performing cuckoo.
James had them all, from miniature to gigantic, with faces as big as a grandfather clock’s or as small as a quarter. Some played tinny music, others just cuckooed, all had moving parts, from the traditional bird to waterwheels to dancers twirling in lederhosen around an overweight oom-pah band, tiny red faces blowing into a tuba, a horn and a clarinet.
Franz Anton Ketterer invented the cuckoo. It was always very hard for James to imagine that someone had to invent each individual kind of clock, but especially the cuckoo clock. What kind of mind thought up a little bird barreling out of a small door and coo-cooing the hour?
James often wished that he could invent a clock. A special clock, one that would be named after him. But while he could see the clock in his mind, he could never build it into existence. He sketched his idea once, trying to see through his dreams into what was left of his soul, into whatever it was that made that pendulum swing in his own body, but he didn’t get very far. He wanted to create a statue clock of a mother, leaning down to a boy. She was looking at her wrist watch, silver and slim and bright, which James pictured as a working clock. Her boy gazed upwards, his arm outstretched, bearing his own tiny golden watch, also a working clock. She was teaching him to tell time, to divide up his life into hours and minutes and seconds and set him on a path of days and nights that fell as evenly as a heartbeat. James wanted both of those clocks to have an internal pendulum, but those pendulums would swing in perfect synchrony, in rhythm and motion with each other. Two hearts beating as individual, but also completely dependent upon each other. If one ran fast, so would the other. If one stopped, then both were silenced. But James never figured out how to make it work.
For a moment, James stopped on the street, clenched his hands around the handle of his little cart, and stared at the sidewalk. Thinking of that clock, the one that only existed in his mind, in his imagination, always set him into disarray, and he had to focus hard to bring his body back into balance. He shoved that woman and her little boy as far back in his mind as he could reach. James knew that clock would never tick, never chime. There was no living model. He just couldn’t imagine.
T
y hated it when his mother plucked her beard. She always did it at the kitchen table, sitting at his father’s place under the old cuckoo clock. She set up a makeup mirror and turned the little round lights on bright. At ten years old, Ty knew makeup mirrors were supposed to be for makeup; he never knew women had beards to pluck until his mother announced what she did from time to time, at the table. The worst part was when she waited until he had his head buried in the fridge and then she yelled, “Oh, wow, Ty! Look at this one! I musta missed it before!” When he looked over, she straightened out a long curly hair, holding it between her two hands the way a fisherman holds a prize catch. The really long ones usually came from her neck.
He always stuck his head back in the fridge and held it there, hoping the cold air would freeze the image of his mother, tweezers to her chin, and he could smash her with a hammer into little tiny ice shards. The beard-plucking was gross and it made his stomach feel funny. He hated her when she did that and hated her worse when she made him a part of it.
He hated his name too. Ty. Short for Tyler, which wasn’t so bad, except no one ever called him that. At school, he was dubbed Tynee, NeckTy, Tyed-Up-In-Knots. He hated those, but at least he could figure them out, but then a new name showed up when a bigger boy grinned and said to a girl bent over the water fountain, “Hey, Amber, wanna tie one on?” The girl blushed almost as red as Ty himself. He didn’t know what the boy meant, but everyone else howled and started calling him Ty-One-On. Amber smiled at him before he ran away.
Girls seemed to like his name, like the way they could drawl, “Hiiii, Tyyyy,” as he went by. He never answered, but when he tried to scowl, he felt his face automatically lift in a grin. So the girls wouldn’t stop. They “Hi, Tyed” him wherever he went and he couldn’t stop them and he blushed and grinned. Like a dork, he told himself. Like a fucking dork, using the new word that was too dangerous to say aloud. He used it silently and often, trying to take the gloss off it, make it an ordinary word that slid naturally into his vocabulary. Fucking cereal, fucking toothpaste. Fucking hot dog. Fucking cuckoo clock, fucking makeup mirror. He admired how it sounded, low and sharp, within the walls of his brain. He thought it would sound better shouted out loud, echoing down the halls at school, ricocheting against the gun metal lockers.
Ty looked at the girls and wondered if they plucked beards as soft and downy as the hair on his arm. He wondered why men shaved and women plucked. He knew his own father shaved, though he never watched. His father spent a lot of time in the bathroom with the door closed. There was always a disposable razor stuck in the toothbrush holder. The razor had a plastic handle and varied in color from blue to black to a blue/black combination. His mother kept a pink razor in the shower and Ty knew she used it on her arms and legs. Why tweezers on her face and a razor on her limbs? Ty imagined how dangerous shaving was, how easy it could be to cut your own throat. He touched his father’s razor once or twice, ran his fingers over the blade and was stunned by so much blood at so little hurt. He could die without knowing it.
The day he became Ty-One-On, Ty pulled his best friend Barry over to their favorite rock by the side of the street. The big rock looked like a baked potato and Ty’s mother said that whoever owned that house deliberately stuck the rock there as an oddity. Ty just thought it was cool and he and Barry liked to sit on it and watch the cars go by. “Did you hear what that guy called me today?” Ty asked. “Ty-One-On.”
Barry nodded.
“So what does Ty-One-On mean?” Ty scuffed his shoe against the potato’s skin.
“Damned if I know,” Barry said. He looked at Ty and grinned, then licked his lips over the swear word. “Damned if I know.”
Ty laughed and smacked his hands against his thighs. “Well, damned if I know either!”
They smiled and sat next to each other, bumping their shoulders together.
“Fuck,” Ty said softly, bravely, trying it out.
Barry’s eyes widened, then he frowned and brought his big front teeth to his lower lip. “Fuck,” he said too, drawing out every letter.
Ty jumped down and walked away, dragging his backpack on the ground. Barry followed. “Does your mom have a makeup mirror?” Ty asked.
“A mirror where she puts on makeup?” Barry asked. “Yeah, she’s got one. Doesn’t call it that though. It’s in her room and it’s like a table, and there’s lots of lights in a big circle. She calls it a vanity. You know, you’ve seen it.”
Ty had. It was pretty, in a way, when the lights glowed bright and reflected off the oval mirror. It looked like a movie star. “My mom sits at the kitchen table with hers. It’s little…she keeps it under the sink in the bathroom.” They were getting close to home, so Ty put his backpack over his shoulders again. His mom yelled if she caught him dragging it. “Does your mom have…” He motioned in the air, bringing his thumb and forefinger together and apart. “Tweezers?”
Barry nodded. “Yeah, she pulls out her eyebrows with them.”
Ty stopped, fingering the dark short hairs that he knew arched above his eyes. “Her eyebrows?”
“Yeah. She makes them real thin.” Barry grinned. “It’s weird.”
“Yeah.” They got to the intersection where Barry had to go right and Ty left. “Barry, does your mom pull out a beard?”
Barry laughed. “Women don’t have beards!”
Ty touched his own chin. No hair yet. “My mom does. She plucks out her beard, she says. I saw her and everything.”
Now Barry stopped and his mouth dropped open. “Oh. My. God,” he said, each word a sentence all its own.
That’s what Ty was afraid of, that reaction. That was exactly it. “Not your mom?” he asked one more time, hoping maybe Barry was lying, maybe he’d break down and tell the truth.
“No.” Barry shook his head. “No, Ty, not ever.”
Ty sighed and slouched. His backpack fell to the ground. “Great,” he said. “My mom’s a freak.”
Barry nodded.
“Fuck,” Ty said. “A fucking freak.”
T
he next time Ty found his mother in front of her makeup mirror, he didn’t dive into the fridge. He stood by the table and watched. His mother pulled her face this way and that, putting the tweezers to her skin and yanking out hairs that Ty could barely see. The underside of her chin became blotchy with red. Finally, she put the tweezers down and looked at him. “Is there something you need?” she asked.
“Why do you do that?” He pointed to the mirror, the tweezers, her face.
“Pluck my beard, you mean?” She shrugged. “To get rid of the hair. See?” She picked up his hand, put his palm under her chin. It felt smooth and the red spots weren’t even warm. “Like a baby’s behind,” she said and smiled.
“But why do you have a beard? You’re a girl.” Ty took his hand back.
She laughed. “Well, yeah, I am, but when girls get older, sometimes they get hair where they don’t want it. And then it has to be pulled out if they still want to look like a lady.”