Fragile Objects
by Katy Carl
When Bub’s father picked him up from school in the new silver commuter car with the sunroof, he said they were going to drive over to the boy's grandmother's house in the next county. They would help her out. Maybe they would make her dinner. It should be fun, Dad said. Bub answered only by puckering his face. He threw his backpack onto the soft grey upholstery of the backseat, flung his body limply after it, and buckled up.
Bub and his mother and father lived in the city, but his grandmother, Dad’s mother, lived in a small house across the bay, one county over. The long drive out of the city, past the tall robot-shaped government buildings and the one office tower, then through the tunnel and across the water, might have left the boy feeling lost if he had not known this route ever since he was tall enough to sit up and see through the back window of a car.
Mardi Gras had long since ended, but strings of purple and gold beads still clung to the branches of the oaks. The spring had drawn on until it was no longer the lime-and-magenta fireworks show of late February and early March but the humid summerlike sunbath of late April. As they drove across the water along the causeway, a low road that threaded under a long bridge that crossed it yet came to the same destination, Bub heard his father explaining the situation to him—these prescriptions make her tired, the loneliness makes her sad; she needs better nutrition, more companionship.
The long words meant no more to the boy than the names of cars or of the parts of the long bridge, which he could see both displayed through the car window and reflected in the glare on the inner surface of it. The words, like the images, rolled past him without making any significant contact.
Bub felt a frustration like an eyelash in the eye. The feeling seemed to be located inside the double images on the curved glass of the car window. He could look at the Bayway rising out of the choppy brown water on its pilings but could never hold in his hands the winches and wrenches needed to tighten the bolts, the levers of the amphibious machinery used to set the long supports in place. He could ride only in the backseat of the lacquered silver car, never the front seat, much less put his hands on the wheel.
Not that he much wanted the responsibility of driving. Bub had seen a car crash on the highway once, where a single lane in each direction wove through what used to be plantation land but was now mostly subdivisions and horse farms. That day he and his mother and father had been returning from some megachurch event, some revivalist meeting that had intrigued his mother’s mind, in a big-roofed rural arena connected to the fairgrounds of the next state over.
The boy could not have told what they had gained by going to the revival. All he remembered of the event was the pink stage lights, the loud singing, and the hot humidity, the overheated fog around him created by flabby adult bodies swaying and crying. But he could have told in detail, if Dad had thought to ask him, about the body on the gurney at the roadside afterward, already draped in a white sheet.
Bub's mother had shrieked and twisted around to the back, stretching her hand wildly toward his eyes—"Don't look, don't look!"—but he had seen: the green green grass, the orange clay, the white sheet, like the Irish flag displayed in school on International Day last year. Then he had been in second grade, still practically a baby. He hadn't even known what death meant before, that it meant you really went away from your body and you never came back into it. That was how much no one wanted to teach him real things.
At the end of the long causeway the car’s engine hummed lower, growling as it pulled up the highway ramp, past the old Civil War fort crowning the hill, through the clear-cut area past the new strip malls and the Zaxby’s and Chick-fil-A chicken restaurants, and then into the woods. Dad drove past the newer subdivisions, stopped at the double-bulbed caution signal blinking yellow, and took a turn away from the main road toward the older parts of the little town. Bub noted each landmark: the post office and the public school, four or five different churches, the gas station, the shrimp restaurant. Next they passed the place with the courtyard fenced in by weathered boards, umbrella tables, banana trees, and year-round Christmas lights, the place that Dad had said was bad. Fishing nets, dirty ones, were strung across the front entry and along the fence. Bub had once asked why these were put here and had been told the nets were for trapping souls. He had not asked any more questions after that. He had not stopped having questions, he had just stopped asking them. Adult talk of souls seemed to be meant to put a stop to children’s questions, either by spreading wishful vagueness or inducing deliberate terror. Bub received this as the way things were and, therefore, the way they ought to be.
The silver coupe wove its way down another two-lane road through woods before it pulled to a stop in the driveway of Bub’s grandmother’s place, a barn-red wooden shotgun house with a screened-in porch and a black iron star in a circle hung on the front outer wall. At the very end of the level asphalt drive, in line with the deck and the little jetty that led out over the deep creek behind the house, there sat parked an ancient light-blue Cadillac, its wheel wells traced with rust.
Bub and his father climbed out of the low coupe and entered the porch. The screen door, with its familiar sleeve-snagging rip in the wire mesh, rattled on its hinges when they passed through it. Bub’s muscles clenched up as if this tension could hold his clothes away from the teeth of the tear.
Inside the house held an atmosphere of sleep and long hours where waking did not mean much. The cool air smelled of musty vinyl, Ivory soap, potpourri, and cooking grease. Right now, above the smells of cleansing and decay, there was overlaid an odor of sour coffee left on the hot plate to burn.
Grandma had stacked and shelved her belongings all over the main room in soft and delicate profusion. The couches, baby-pink velour, suffocated under multiple zigzag and granny-square afghans in wildly discordant colors, mustard, cranberry, rust, aquamarine.
The coffee tables, glass-topped wood, and the cabinets along the walls, held curiosities Bub knew he must never touch: A spun-glass swan, under a willow tree whose branches were also made of thin filaments of glass, rested on a mirror that represented a pool of clear water. The swan’s reflection under the willow looked just like another swan swimming beneath, upside down. Two tiny glass cygnets swam after it, mirrored like the mother; Bub had been spanked as a toddler for pocketing one. An apothecary jar of colored marbles likewise made Bub’s fingers itch. Bronze baby shoes, as if just dropped from little feet, rested beside plaster hands that seemed to pray. Demitasse cups yearned open next to porcelain roses that fooled you into thinking they bloomed. Sprays of dried cotton bolls bristled from crystal bud vases. Against one wall stood a crazed grandfather clock that struck the quarter hour with a jangle every thirteen minutes.
The clock occupied the spot that, in most houses, would be filled by a television. Here there was an old cabinet set, which Dad had said was from the 1950s and which still used wire rabbit-ears on top and glass tubes inside, but the set had not worked for as long as Bub could remember. The walls were lined with old hardback books, some in jackets, others in woven cloth covers, which he had never seen anyone take down to read.
This place Bub both loved and hated. It meant for him an enclosed world, an olden-times world, above all a female world that would never welcome him or belong to him and toward which he felt at the same time drawn and disgusted. Whenever he remembered that he belonged to the blessed brotherhood of those who ran faster and threw harder and could not ever, ever grow up to be helpless mothers with helpless babies or grandmothers stuck in stuffy old houses, the knowledge made him want to jump and dance.
"Mom?" Bub’s father called. With his thick heavy tread he stepped over the threshold into the living room. The floorboards shivered; the threads of the glass willow branches rattled. Bub walked after his father, taking pleasure in the lightness of his own step.
In the daffodil-colored kitchen they found Grandma seated at the round table, in a wooden chair. On the waxy table cover in front of her there rested a cup of warm milky coffee. Beside it a little box with seven doors sat, half the doors open. The veiny hands held the warm cup but didn't lift it to the loose mouth, which, when Grandma looked in Bub’s father’s direction, turned from slack sorrow to a rictus of delight.
"Daniel," said the old woman.
"Mom," Dad said. He looked not at her but, as he kissed her cotton-soft and lightly fuzzy forehead, at the pill box on the table.
"What did you do? It's only Tuesday."
"Well, yesterday was Tuesday. Today cain't be Tuesday too," she said in a tone of voice Bub knew well. It was the same tone his own mother took whenever he wanted to wear beach sandals on a rainy day or a fleece jacket in August.
"You take you a look right here at this calendar," Grandma went on. From the lazy Susan in the middle of the table she produced a much-folded booklet.
"Mom, this calendar is from last year." Bub’s father inspected the plastic doors of the box again. "You say you took these yesterday?" he asked, placing his finger on the first box marked T.
"And these today." She nodded and pointed to the W.
Dad checked the M box and found it still full of little tablets. His relief was visible on his face. "Well, we can straighten it all out by Saturday," he said. He gave the grandmother a little sidewise hug and then, breathing in, reached down to lift her coffee cup to his face.
"Mom, this milk is off. Don't drink any more of it." He stepped to the sink and poured the contents of the cup down the disposal. Then he went to the fridge to check for the rest of the carton.
Bub sat statue-still through all this business. He had a role in this many-times-replayed scene, and he knew it very well. Until he heard his cue, he sat with his feet tucked under him in a kitchen chair. Bub would be scolded if he swung his legs, if he attempted to rise, if he yawned or made a face, if he bit his nails or lips, if he picked his nose or scratched his skin anywhere it itched, if he touched anything that looked interesting. In a minute he would be asked a question to which he was expected to answer Yes Ma'am and Thank You. Until then he sat studying the clementine paisley pattern of the tablecloth and debating within himself whether to trace the teardrops with a fingertip might invite reproof.
"Godwin," warbled the grandmother. The boy suppressed a wince. Not only at school, but in front of other children at all times, he always gave his name as Bub. The self-adopted nickname meant nothing to him; that was why he liked it.
"Godwin," she repeated, while he was still collecting his thoughts.
"Yes ma'am," Bub said.
"Go in the pantry door there, would you, and bring me the blue tin with the snowflake lid. If we have any cookies today would you like one?"
"Yes ma'am. Thank you."
There were always cookies. They were usually stale. Bub would be given one, not seven or four or two, no matter how small they were or how hungry he was. About all of this he had learned by long practice not to argue.
Today the tin brought luck: gingerbread windmills studded with almonds. The cookies were hard but not too much so. His father must have brought groceries over the weekend, although Bub was sure he didn't know when, because his parents hadn’t fought, and a fight between his parents usually preceded or followed any trip to his grandmother’s.
Bub made his windmill last while his father washed dishes, drained the spoiled milk down the disposal, rinsed the carton, scrubbed the sink, peeled carrots, cut open a plastic pouch of meat, and finally shoved meat and carrots off their flat board and into a lidded pot that plugged into the wall. Dad poured water into the pot and shook in salt and pepper before securing the lid on top and then pressing some buttons. Bub’s grandmother also watched this process while mouthing a windmill cookie. Finally Dad microwaved a cup of water and brought it to the table with a weedy-smelling tea bag inside of it. He put the cup on the table where Grandma’s coffee had been before, next to the row of damp almond slivers she had first removed from her cookie with her gums and then removed from her mouth with her fingers, laying each ivory nut down one by one on a paper napkin atop the plastic-coated cloth.
"Careful, it's hot," Dad said . “Let it steep."
The three sat staring at each other across the table for a moment or two. Bub ran scenarios in his mind for what could happen next, based on past visits. The rotary phone on the wall could shrill its firehouse ring, and his mother could be on the other end, demanding audibly to know why the hell her husband wasn't home yet, why he wasn’t picking up his cell either. His grandmother could spill her scalding tea, resulting in another trip to urgent care that would end in another talking-to from another tired-looking nurse in scrubs printed with pink and purple flowers. Bub knew his father did not take such women—women like the nurse, or like Bub’s own mother—seriously. None of them compared to Grandma favorably: "No experience of life," he would say afterward. "No toughness of character. Never had to pull themselves up in the world. Entitled. Then they dress up in white coats and try to tell you what's what. Wonder how they'd hold up if they had had to make biscuits for another family's children at five every morning from the time they were seven years old, and scrub the floors when the others were all learning to write and to figure, and not be allowed to sleep till the laundry was all clean and folded." Early in her life the grandmother's adoptive family had made a Cinderella of her, a Cinderella before the dress and the ball. None of her connections, from the grandfather who had played the role of prince to the boy at the end of the family line, had ever been allowed to forget this.
Anything could happen now, Bub thought. An airplane could land on the house. An alligator could crawl through the plate-glass sliding door of the back porch. But probably it wouldn't. What would probably happen was this. The three of them would move with slow steps to the living room. Dad would help Grandma to a seat on the couch. They would sit and sit. They might talk or not. The grandfather clock would chime, out of tune and time. After the fourth chime they would be allowed to leave. And as they pulled out of the vine-canopied drive Bub would sigh with guilty relief. He would again have spent an hour staring through the never-opened back door at the creek: slow work, no story, but while it went forward, not so bad or so boring. The creek rippled green and brown. Bub could see dragonflies running their switchback plays over it, hear the rhythmic hip-hop songs of frogs. Once he had seen a frog eat a whole dragonfly right near the window on a garden flagstone. That had been worth the hypnosis of the foregoing thirty-eight minutes. The wings had stuck out of the squashy beak so crazily. In the low silver gloom of the cloud-screened sun off the water, each cell had glistened.
Now as Bub had predicted, the three generations moved to the living room, where Bub and Dad—“so good to see my menfolk,” Grandma said—sat on the stiff pink cushions. Dad helped Grandma into her own recliner, a forest green overstuffed chair draped with a worn, nubby cream afghan, before coming to sit on the couch with his elbows on his knees. His torso canted forward like the boom of an excavator.
“Time we got you to the dentist soon, Mom, seems like,” Dad said after a moment.
“Oh Danny, it ain’t worth the trouble. Ain’t got many teeth left worth a damn nor many more months left to put up with ’em.”
This was, as far as Bub could remember, the exact same line his grandmother had been repeating to his father for years and years, and not only about teeth.
“And the eye doctor?”
“Ain’t no point.”
"High time I got the oil changed in your car, though," Dad said in a flat voice.
"Oh no you don't," Grandma warbled. "That's how you get my keys. Then I don't ever drive again. I know all the tricks, you see. How I know is I go to church. All those ladies know every back way to get things done. Make happen what they want, stop what they don't. Oh you bet they do. I ain't giving up no keys, not me. You'll have to find some better trick than that."
"Mom, it's no trick. That car sits in the driveway twenty days outta twenty-one. Least we can do's to keep it maintained for ya."
"Oh I know who 'we' are too. That wife put you up to this. You tell her I know she did and you tell me what she says back to that too."
"Mama, there's no trick, " Dad repeated quietly.
"Oh I know what there is and what there ain't. I know enough. By now I heard enough too."
"I can get the keys from where you keep them if I want to. But I'd rather have you give them to me."
"Huh. Mighta been born at night but it warn't last night." The windmill sweetness and peace had all gone from her face. Her features had drawn tight shut like the petals of an insulted morning glory.
"Well, if it has to be like that—"
"Oh don't mind me, I'm just a stupid old woman."
A terrible silence fell. Into it the clock jangled.
"I saw Betty the other day down to the store," Dad spoke, into more silence. Betty was the wife of the pastor at the grandmother’s church. Grandma did not like Betty but loved to hear of her minor transgressions. Now she refused even this obvious peace offering. Bub pushed the dull edge of his school shoe sole very cautiously down the line of charcoal grout between two dirty white tiles on the floor.
"Winny here got ninety-seven on his last math quiz," Dad tried again. No response.
"Next month we're going up to the fish camp on Wheeler Lake," he then told the silence. "Last time Winny caught a catfish bigger 'n—"
Dad’s upheld hands took the shape of a goalpost, between which the full tea mug flew like a football. The liquid fanned out all along the floor, a slick splatter on the tiles. The cup split in two against the drywall behind the couch: Bub read the inscription #1 Grandma split into syllables with eerie, wrong perfection.
"Shut up talkin to me like that," Grandma snapped. "I got more where that come from."
"Your backwoods comes out when you're angry," Dad muttered under his breath.
"What was that?"
"Nothin. Go get a towel, Win."
Quickly Bub rose and stepped around the spill, toward the front closet where, in an old laundry hamper, large and small cleaning rags were kept.
"And the mop," his father called after him.
While Bub was busy in the front hall, Dad, stumping along in his son’s wake, murmured several rapid sentences in a low rumble the boy strained to hear. Bub couldn't, however, make any words out. Finally, realizing that his quiet and stillness must by now seem to mean mischief, Bub loaded up mop and rags in a red bucket that stood close and turned to hand the bundle to his father. He had never seen such a look on the man's face.
"Well if that's how it is," his father was repeating. "If that's—"
Dad cut his own words short then. He took the mop from his son and began to push the puddle of chamomile around on the tile with the splayed, ropy strings.
Bub stood watching by the front door, very still as if in a deer blind, as if the safest thing to do might be to shrink and calcify, to become one of the knick-knacks on the shelves and credenzas. If he called no attention to himself at all, this might stop happening, or turn out never to have really started.
"Win, go get in the car.”
Dad turned and tossed him the keys to the silver coupe. They hit Bub in the shin and clattered to the tile, where he crouched with infinitesimal slowness to pick them up.
"Win! Now," his father boomed. A flash of lightning sheared a branch off an oak and sent it crashing into a chain link fence: no it didn't, the sun remained stubbornly out, and Bub realized the sound had been the scream of the hinges in his grandmother’s recliner as she pushed in the footrest and rose to point her accusing finger at his father.
"You! Done hurt me all your life," she cried. “Hurt me comin' out. Hurt me failin' school. Hurt me makin' eyes and makin' chirrun with that little piece of sumpin'. Hurt me makin' plans about me I ain't never agreed to. Well I ain't never agreed. I ain’t never agreed to any of it. They cain't tell me it's in the vows. I said love honor and obey. Obey him. Not you."
Son and father stood like statues. They calcified, shrank. Yes, the safest thing to be, in that room at any given moment, would have been a piece of porcelain. You would have been put behind glass and protected. Cherished.
“Win. Go.”
There was a plea in it now. Bub picked up the keys and went.
Out in the car he stared around the yard and driveway. A box garden held sprouts of spinach and lettuce. When he was smaller he had helped to plant seeds here. Later in the summer there would be tomato vines, yellow squash, long green zucchini. When had his grandmother found the strength to dig the soil and weed the beds? It couldn't have been her doing. She could barely walk from her table to her chair without help. It must have been his father. His father who was always telling his mother there was no time, no money, for the deck or the flowers or the vegetables in their own backyard. So why—? Because their house was not at the center. It would never be at the center. For his father, this was the center.
The screen door opened. Dad ran out holding a second set of keys in his hands and, with too much force, grabbed the handle of the driver's door and threw it open. The car's small frame trembled. Dad threw the new set of keys into Bub’s lap.
“Hold those," Dad said. He started the silver car and laid his foot on the brake. Then he took out his phone and began texting. His eyes remained focused on the screen while Bub watched the torn screen door shudder open a second time.
"Dad?" said Bub.
"Not now," Dad answered.
"Just… it’s…"
"I said not now."
Once at a sleepover with classmates Bub had secretly watched a horror movie that had a girl monster in it. The story had been that the girl had died, drowned in a well, but because of some ancient curse she couldn’t stay in the well but instead was forced to come out and attack people who watched the horror movie and now here she came, robed in white, crouched over, hair covering her face, until you saw—
Bub’s grandmother had made her way toward the car at the same incremental speed, in the same hunched and scuttling way, as the girl-monster in the movie. She tapped the glass of the passenger window. Bub's heart raced.
"Dad!'' he shrieked.
"Son."
Bub saw his father's rage on one side, his grandmother's on the other, and didn't know which he feared more.
"Roll down the window," Dad told him.
As soon as the glass came open a half inch the old woman's twisted fingers pushed through the crack. Something fell with a plink to land, again, in Bub’s lap. Bub picked the object up: two brass keys on a strong silver loop with a green plastic numeral 1 hooked onto it.
"Grandma, your house keys..."
"Won’t need them no more.''
"Mom! Mama—"
"Cain't go nowhere, don't need to lock up after. Ain't leavin here again so what does it matter. Next y'all gon come up in here, tag all my things. You want this and he wants that. Who's gon take care of it all like I done? Y'all with them empty houses y'all never set foot in more time’n it takes to eat and piss and sleep? Y’all want my wedding china, my chifferobes, my collectibles? What for, for chamber pots? Who's it all gon matter to? You boy? Godwin! you gon take care a my things for me? You gon dust the swans and the willow with a feather? You gon leave the roses bloom all year? Naw. You gon break 'em is what you gon do. With a baseball bat. Soon's I’m cold if not before."
"Mom. This is enough in front of—"
"You don't tell me what's enough. After all I done. All I hurt.”
His father's face seemed to have melted. “Don't talk like that. When I owe you so m—mm—"
"Shut up that cryin. You don't owe me nothin."
The grandmother began her slow hitch and shuffle back to the house. Bub’s father jolted out of the car and followed her as fast as he could, hoisting his extra weight along. When he touched her elbow to support her, the cane fell from her hand, and she folded to the ground like something made of origami paper.
When Bub’s own mother asked him about it much later, Bub would not be able to remember certain parts of what happened next. Not for years would he recall the sound his grandmother's bones made against the asphalt, the sound that came from his father's throat when he heard it. It would not make sense to him, either, the place where the two of them had come to rest at the head of the drive, near the Cadillac, instead of on the front step where they ought to have been. Bub only knew at the time that his father had left the car running with him inside it. Bub had been told that, in this case, he must not move or unbuckle his seat belt until an adult came to turn the car off. Yet he knew that whatever else had happened, it was bad. His father might really need help. Bub saw he would have to figure this one out alone.
One time, Bub’s mother had taught him how to climb across the console and into the driver's seat to turn off the ignition. This was what Bub now tried to do to the silver coupe, but the key in the ignition wouldn't turn; it only made a skirling locust noise. So Bub looked where his mother had told him to look and, sure enough, the car had been left in Neutral, not Park.
So Bub grabbed the lever, also like he had been shown, and pushed up with all his might, but not far enough. The lever snapped, not from N to P, but from N to R. From the direction of the back axle he felt a lurch. Bub shouted through the closed window for his father’s help as he pushed the lever harder than ever and kicked out with his foot while at the same time he tried with both thumbs to press in the button as he pushed: go up to P, up to P, P for park, P for protect, P for pulverize-me-not. Go go go why won't the thing go? What did I do before?, Bub asked himself, even as his kicking foot came in contact with the wrong pedal, not the brake but the accelerator, and the car roared into motion, shooting backward across both empty lanes of the road before thundering to rest against a young tree in a ditch full of red sumac, Virginia creeper, and immature live oaks and pines. On impact there came another roar like the protest of the chair springs under the heft of a body too heavy for them. Before the loblolly trunk cracked at the base and shattered the sunroof, showering him with glass, the last thing Bub saw was his father sitting absolutely still, cradling his grandmother in his lap with her body strangely twisted so that both adults’ faces turned toward the car under the descending pine tree. Yet the two pairs of glassy eyes seemed not to see the child in danger at all, but only to look inward at their own horror of the future as it hurtled every second toward them.
Katy Carl is the editor-in-chief of Dappled Things magazine and the author of As Earth Without Water, a novel, forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in autumn 2021. Her short fiction has appeared in Belle Ombre, Across the Margin, and Dappled Things. She lives in the Houston area with her husband and family.
