At the Storm Door
Kali looked so lovely silhouetted against the window, her auburn hair shining like polished copper in the morning light.
My wife, she’s my wife, Wilson said to himself, not with a sense of possession but wonder.
She turned to him with what he at first took to be a look of rapture but saw it was instead dismay.
“It’s your mother,” she said.
“Amy?”
Wilson’s first word might have been ma or da—who knows?—but he’d never called his parents anything other than Amy and John. When other children used the various endearments for mother and father, it had sounded strange in his ears. His wife, though, who’d grown up in a family straight out of Ozzie and Harriet, still, after eleven years of marriage, could not bring herself to refer to her mother-in-law as Amy. When she did say mother, though, it was in the same spirit she might say “the car won’t start” or “my toothache is back.”
She moved away from the big window beside the front door, and Wilson took her place, glanced out, then stepped quickly back and closed the plantation shutters with a snap like a dry stick breaking.
Had Amy seen him? Of course she had. All his luck was invested in Kali. He had none left over for reprieves from his mother.
He heard her come up the front steps, cross the porch, then walk straight toward, not the door, but the window where he stood holding his breath.
There was silence for a moment. Then, although he knew she was right there, he was so startled when she rapped against the windowpane that he lurched back.
“Wilson!” she called out. “Willy boy!” That was a new one. She’d never called him Willy boy before. “Wilson! Open up! It’s your mother! It’s your mama! It’s your maaaammy!” She strung out mammy like Al Jolson down on one knee. But Wilson didn’t have to look out to know that Amy hadn’t gotten down on her knees.
Suddenly, she began hammering on the window—“Let me in! Let me in! I have my rights!”—until he was afraid the glass would break.
Trying to keep his voice steady, he said, “What do you want, Amy?”
“Let me in.”
“No.”
“Let me in! I have my rights. I want to see my grandson. A grandparent has a legal right to see her grandson. It’s the goddamn law.”
He looked back at Kali, who rolled her eyes. Sighing, he stepped over to the front door and opened it cautiously even though there was an outer storm door they always kept locked.
When she saw him, Amy rushed over and yanked at the handle of the storm door. When it wouldn’t open, she became almost hysterical.
“You bastard! Let me see my grandson! I have rights!”
Wilson let her rant on until she wound down from exhaustion. Then he opened the storm door just enough that she would be certain to hear him and said, “Amy, we don’t have a son. Kali and I have never had children.”
For a moment she looked nonplussed. Then she reared back as if she were going to spit on him and said, “I suppose you blame me for that, too. Why not? You blame me for everything else. John, though, John, oh, he was such a saint, wasn’t he? Well, there are things I could tell you about your precious Saint John, my boy. Trust me, there are things I could tell you about John.”
She kept it up for another couple of minutes—she never seemed to have the strength, or concentration, for longer than that—and then trudged away, head down, as if she’d finished a long shift on the assembly line.
“Maybe she has it out of her system,” Wilson said. Kali didn’t look hopeful.
Amy didn’t come every day, only often enough that they’d begun to dread every step on the porch, every knock on the door. And it’d only been going on for a couple of months. If it’d been much longer than that, they wouldn’t have been able to bear it. As it was, they talked about selling their house and moving, saying it like they were joking, each waiting for the other to grin or laugh.
For years, Wilson had lost track of his mother. Then he ran into a pal from high school, Brent Talley, whom he’d also lost track of for years, and Brent said he’d run into Amy at Pat’s Grocery in the old neighborhood on the east side. A couple of weeks later, Amy started showing up on Wilson’s doorstep demanding to be let in. It must have been Brent who told her where they lived. Some pal.
The first time Amy started on that “the things I could tell you about John” bit, Kali had asked him what she meant by that, and Wilson had almost exploded at her, “How should I know? She killed him off before I got to know him.”
He didn’t mean “killed” literally. He meant killed as a father, drove him away with her lunacy before Wilson reached kindergarten, and all he had left of his father was a vague image of gentleness and guilt, guilt that he was not strong enough to protect his son from her.
“Did she abuse you?” Kali had finally worked up the courage to ask when their dating had reached the serious stage, and they’d begun to talk of marriage.
“Yes,” he said. But then: “I don’t know what to call it.”
He gave a single example, one that could, he thought, illustrate how it had been abusing without really being abuse, could almost be seen as funny, in fact.
It happened after he started school and began developing problems with constipation. They didn’t know what it was the first time he suddenly was hit with stomach pains so severe they caused him to double over and squeal in agony.
Amy drove him to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital, weaving through traffic, running stoplights, the last couple of miles tailed by a cop car, siren blaring.
Inside, a doctor palpated his tummy and then inserted a gloved-and-lubricated finger into his rectum to release the impacted feces.
Not very many days later, there followed another attack and another trip to the emergency room, and then when it happened a third time, Amy shrieked, “I’m not going through this again! Eat these goddamn prunes!”
He tried to eat the prunes, but the pain was too great for him to do anything but grit his teeth and squeal.
She dragged him into the bathroom, yanked off his pants, bent him over her knee, and rammed a Vaseline-coated little finger into him.
When she finished, she held her finger up and said, “Look at this, Wilson. How disgusting, how very disgusting. Don’t expect me to ever do that again. From now on, you’re going to come in here every day and sit here until you dump. You hear me? Answer me!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After that, every morning at 7:00, Amy would march him into the bathroom, watch him sit on the toilet, then close the door on him. Then she’d stand at the door, listening. Every minute or two she’d say through the door, “Did you dump yet, Wilson? I didn’t hear anything. Did you dump?”
There would be days when he’d be an hour late for school as he sat straining desperately on the toilet, which he’d approach as a condemned man would the electric chair.
He saved himself through a ruse. After he’d sat on the toilet for a few minutes, he’d slap the water in the toilet bowl in what he hoped was imitation of a turd dropping, then noisily tear off toilet paper, flush, and wash his hands.
“I dumped, Amy!” he’d call out merrily before emerging.
He concluded his reminiscence to Kali with, “Pretty funny, huh?” But by then she was crying.
Amy had been gone for several minutes. Kali approached the window.
“Do you think it’s safe to open the blinds now?”
“Give ‘r a try,” Wilson said. “But be ready to run if she’s standing right there glaring at you.”
“Wilson! Don’t say that.”
She opened the plantation blinds just enough to peek out, then opened them the rest of the way. She peered left and right.
“OMG, Wilson. Guess who’s coming now?”
He knew from her tone it wasn’t Amy returning.
“Don’t tell me. Ol’ Bob.”
“Yes, ol’ Bob,” she said and opened the door before he had a chance to say, Close those blinds. Don’t make a sound.
Bob Potts was their next-door neighbor. It wasn’t that Wilson didn’t like him. How could you not like a guy who’d keep an eye on your property for you while you were gone, give you fresh produce out of his garden, and insist on keeping the privet hedge on the property line trimmed all by himself. Kali felt sorry for him because, a sixtyish bachelor with only a sister who lived in California, he was almost always alone. Wilson felt a little sorry for him, too, but Bob worked from home and so was always around, and if he didn’t really come to the house six times a day, it sometimes felt like it.
“Hi, Bob,” Kali said, swinging open the storm door in an invitation for him to come in although he rarely did.
“His mom again?” Wilson heard him ask. That meant Kali had told him about Amy’s “visits.”
Wilson gave her a look as he came to the door, but she avoided his eyes.
“Hi, Bob. Yeah, my mother again. She has issues, as you can tell. She’s harmless, though. I think.”
He added that last as a joke, which was a mistake because Bob cocked his head like he wasn’t sure he’d heard right and said, “You think she might be dangerous? You know if you ever need anything from me, want me to make a call or something . . .”
Bob was always threatening “to make a call.” Not just idle threats, either. He had indeed called 911 about the strange car he’d observed driving through their neighborhood every night shortly after midnight. Turned out to be a fellow taking a shortcut home after the swing shift. He’d also called the 311 number numerous times to report potholes that needed filling, lawns waist-high in weeds in violation of city ordinances, streetlights out, on and on. And then there was the dog.
In fact, Wilson had no sooner assured Bob that his mother wasn’t dangerous than Bob dropped that subject and got to his idée fix: Trixie.
“Guess what I caught that damn Trixie doing this morning? Sniffling around my geraniums.”
Despite Bob’s rarely paying them a visit without tales of Trixie’s latest depredations, neither Wilson nor Kali had ever seen the dog. They didn’t even know what breed she was. All Bob would say was that she was a “damn yapping little bitch.” Kali pictured a pug, Wilson a chihuahua.
“Sniffing around your geraniums? Does she eat them?” Wilson asked, scratching his nose to hide a grin. Kali tried to look concerned, but he could tell she was trying not to laugh.
Trixie had endless ways to torment Bob, but above all Bob had to remain vigilant against the little monster’s assaults on his vegetable garden. When Wilson had offered that he wasn’t aware that dogs ate vegetables, Bob gave him a look indicating Wilson was too naive to survive in the real world.
“No, she hasn’t eaten any yet,” Bob admitted grudgingly, “but no doubt that’s coming.”
Wilson had once asked him if he’d ever “made a call” about Trixie, but Bob said no. He wanted to remain on good terms with the Nelsons, Trixie’s owners, being next-door neighbors and all. But it wasn’t easy to do. “They’re cold people, cold. I gave them a bunch of kale once and the next day spotted it in their garbage. Cold people.”
Bob talked a little more about Trixie and his geraniums, then talked a little about the weather, concerning which he was nearly as obsessive as he was about Trixie, and then delivered his customary exit line: “Well, I don’t want to keep you folks. I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do.”
They assured him there wasn’t, and Bob turned to go but then turned back.
“You know she’s probably just lonely. Loneliness can be hard on a person.”
*
“He was talking about himself, you know—when he said that about Amy being lonely,” Kali said as she was pouring herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
Wilson, sitting at the table with the newspaper opened before him, said, “Yeah, I know.” Then he looked at Kali with a sly grin and said, “Hey, maybe we should hook them up.”
“Who, Amy and Bob?” Kali said. Then it hit her and she yelped out a laugh.
The more they thought about it, the funnier it got, and they laughed and laughed until Kali finally managed to say, “Poor Bob. No, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Wilson said. “At least it’d take care of his Trixie problem. That bitch wouldn’t dare come near the place with Amy there.”
They laughed some more.
*
Amy came again the next morning and the morning after that, making three straight days she’d hammered on the door and window demanding to be let in, to see her grandson, threatening revelations about John. This alarming new pattern of daily visits coincided with a week off from work Wilson had granted himself after a grueling year. He’d looked forward to painting the spare bedroom, maybe getting in a round of golf, taking a hike or two in the state park with Kali. But Amy was spoiling it all for him. He’d had enough.
“I’m going over there. I’m going to have it out with her. This has to stop,” he said, hoping, he realized once the words were out, that Kali would talk him out of it. But she just patted him on the back sympathetically and solemnly, as if he were a soldier who’d drawn the short straw and was setting out on a perilous mission.
He hadn’t been back to the old place since that Thanksgiving he’d returned home from college and found Amy gone, where to he never learned. As far as he knew, she’d never returned, either, until a few months ago when Brent Talley ran into her at the grocery.
That Thanksgiving would have been, what, fourteen years ago. The old neighborhood looked like it felt the years even more than Wilson did. He’d always been aware that they didn’t have as much as most other kids in school, but he never realized how close to the poverty level he and Amy must have been. It’d just been home to him, that’s all, not some socio-economic classification. But now, looking around as he drove slowly down the street, it hit him. Trashy, run-down, drab even in the bright morning sun, it was a poor neighborhood. They’d been poor.
He pulled up to the house and turned into the driveway, weeds and wild grasses growing up knee-high through the cracks and potholes in the concrete. More weeds and grass grew up out of the sagging gutter over the front porch. Where was the little carport that had stood at the end of the driveway? Gone.
He stopped the car but did not turn the engine off.
Was Amy inside watching him? She was, he was sure of it. She was right in there. He felt something for her, but what was it? Maybe pity or compassion, which would certainly be appropriate, wouldn’t it, because Amy was clearly insane— “I want to see my grandson!”—or on drugs, or both. A son should feel compassion for his mother, shouldn’t he? And he did, he truly did, but along with compassion he felt fear, not because of what she’d done in the past but for what was to come. Would he never be free of her?
He put the car in reverse.
Back home, Kali greeted him at the door, but before she could ask him anything, he shook his head, and she nodded as if she’d expected nothing less.
He went to the spare bedroom and looked in. When they bought the house, they thought it might serve as a nursery, but as the years passed, the idea somehow came to seem more and more hypothetical. Lately, they’d been talking about a pet. Wilson had nixed a dog or cat—what would its claws do to their beautiful hardwood floors?—but they were still considering a parakeet.
He hadn’t even gotten a start on painting the bedroom, like he’d planned. He hadn’t done anything that he’d planned on that week.
He went to Kali and said, “Hey, what we need is some fresh air. Let’s head out to the park, take that Log Cabin Trail. Maybe take some sandwiches with us. Make it a picnic.”
“Good idea!”
They were in the kitchen making sandwiches when the doorbell rang. Both froze.
Then Kali said, “Your mother wouldn’t bother with the doorbell.”
Wilson nodded. “Right. Must be ol’ Bob.”
He didn’t want to see Amy, Bob, or anyone else, for that matter. He wanted to be in the deep woods walking a long rocky trail at the end of which was a log cabin where he could dream of being alone with Kali, only Kali, forever.
He went to the door, Kali right behind him for moral support.
Yes, it was Bob.
Wilson opened the storm door a couple of inches, trying to look friendly but not welcoming enough to invite a long discussion.
Bob started to say something, but then his face crumpled in misery as he began to blubber almost comically. But Wilson was too startled to laugh.
“Bob?” Wilson said, and Kali, squeezing past him in the doorway, said, “Bob?”
Bob could hardly talk between crying and snuffling and hiccupping, but finally they understood. It was Trixie. Trixie had been run over right in front of Bob’s house. Trixie was dead.
“Those people, those Nelsons—they never deserved to have a precious little dog like Trixie. Trixie, the poor little thing, I loved her so.”
Wilson watched Kali as she walked off with Bob toward his house, her arm around his shoulders, comforting. He was still standing there, watching, as she walked back.
When she was inside again and the door closed, overwhelmed by an emotion he could not give a name to, Wilson fell to his knees and pulled her to him, pressing his face into her belly.
“Don’t ever leave me. Please, Kali, don’t ever leave me,” he pleaded, his voice muffled. But she understood him.
She looked down at him a long moment, then slowly lifted her hand over him as if in benediction. Then she let it fall on his head. And in that hesitant gesture, Wilson felt great compassion, and also just a little fear.
© Dennis Vannatta
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, includingRiver Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.
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