Indentations and Other Stories. Joe Schall

the fact that Henry the Eighth, infested not with a burning groin but with bleeding gums, had not really died of syphilis but of scurvy—probably as payment, Lillian thought, for hoarding mountains of meat—and the fact that the four gospels for the New Testament were selected by a timid monk with a facial tic in the south of France, and the fact that Isaac Newton really did get hit on the head with an apple, forcing the thing that fixed Lillian’s feet to the earth to be set into motion. She sought a similar kind of motion through cleaning. She cleaned their apartment with ruthless abandon—adding or removing smells almost daily—resting Bub on her hip while she dumped something pine-scented into a bucket or sprinkled baking soda over the carpet. When the apartment was finally filled with enough of the cleaning smells, she would sit on the rocker with Bub and smell everything and not talk at all for awhile.

      After twenty-three months of perusing, with Bub at her side, most of the weirdness she could find, Lillian agreed with John that it was time she did what she was trained for and she took a job teaching social studies at the Hilton Senior High School. Fridays in her classroom were devoted entirely to facts.

      John’s story was entirely different. Along with Bub’s birth and Lillian’s flair for weirdness came John’s new-found imagination, usually spilling out of his lips in strange half-metaphors, sawed-off similes, and quasi-cliches. He couldn’t quite squeeze his imagination shut; selectivity wasn’t important as long as he had an audience, and his usual audience was either his eighth grade class of inattentive algebraists or a skinny, starchy-smelling Bub. If John thought of something to say he said it. And what he usually thought of were things tactile, wistful, and tawdry. Like a huge brown shopping bag with no writing on it. Like short lengths of rope knotted together into two legs of a monstrous nearly-equilateral triangle. Like spit on a skewer. Like the name “Bub,” which John had chosen himself.

      Such inspirations occurred suddenly to him and just as suddenly he gave them birth through speech, dropping them out on the ground where one of his students or Bub or any passerby could give them a quick once-over. But as Bub grew, John seemed to have less and less time to think of things to say, and before he knew it Bub was six years old, then seven, then almost eight and John hadn’t told him even half of what he meant to yet.

      He made up for some of the lost words while Bub was in the hospital recovering from his first bad asthma attack. He sat at the foot of his son’s bed for hours, explaining to him that Lillian was at a P.T.A. meeting and would be in to see him afterwards, and that he had bought Bub a trumpet for his eighth birthday, which he could learn to play the same way AH boxed if he practiced hard enough, and that they were getting a specialist in to see him who knew every cough in the book; Bub half-listened and smiled and was glad to just lie down for a few days and not have to think about anything but the mysterious illness budding in his chest, which didn’t hurt really as much as it reminded him that he was breathing all the time.

      When the doctors agreed that Bub simply had plain old asthma, which had, in this case, combined with a virus to form a bad bronchial cold, Bub’s doctor—Maynard Masters—had a private talk with Mrs. Lilly.

      After five minutes of restraint, Doctor Masters finally got to the point.

      “When you breastfed him, did you switch back and forth from the bottle to the breast at random, or were you careful to be consistent?”

      Lillian thought about throwing out her arms and raising her whole chest at him defiantly, as if this would be evidence enough that her son had been properly nourished since birth and that Bub’s asthma had evolved in his own chest, not hers. Instead she just shuffled around in her seat.

      “He hardly touched the bottle until he was almost one-and-a-half,” she said. “Until he started making sounds like words.”

      “Good.”

      “We’re lactovegetarians,” Lillian said, trying to sound superior. She wanted to show him up on at least one thing—this man whose name sounded like a half-hearted apology and who, since she’d sat down, had been twisting apart paperclips and dropping the segments in meaningless patterns on his desk. She was half expecting him to accuse her of weaning Bub on spinach and peanuts, or claim that her breast milk ran green, but the doctor just gave a quiet satisfied “Hummph.”