New Stories from the Midwest

Tenochtitlan

199 tenochtitlan ■ James Magruder After getting an A+ for my “Western United States” salt map, eleven colored states covering three square feet of plywood, I wanted to make a historical building out of sugar cubes. But Miss Vojta said we had to work in pairs for the next project, and I was odd man out in the pack of five I ran with. Brian and Doug and Kurt and Pat didn’t take Social Studies seriously. I moped about this to my mother, who was making pepper steak. She wiggled the meat slugs she took from the lake of flour on the counter and leaned back when they hit the oil in the skillet. The velvet bow nesting in her upswept hair, plus the ball of black panty hose sitting in front of her purse on the telephone desk, meant she had a date. She was rushing dinner, and it was her evening purse, so I guessed it was an older man driving out from downtown Chicago. Somebody Mrs. Shestak knew, probably. My mother reached over the stove for more flour, then, eyeing the dusty canister and her dress, hesitated. “What about Lisa Montalbano? She’s no dummy.” “She’s a girl,” I said, appalled by her stupidity. I moved in for the rescue. I swung a little cupful of flour in a wide arc around her back and slowly tipped it out onto the waxed paper. A trickle of watery blood from the package of meat was snaking into the flour like a bend of the Colorado River on my salt map. My mother tilted her head toward the window over the sink, and her beads slid under the pucker of her satin collar. “Donnie Keller’s in your class, isn’t he?” “I guess.” “What do you mean, ‘you guess?’ He is or he isn’t, silly.” The Kellers lived behind us, and two houses to the left. I looked through the stained-glass mushroom ornament hanging in the kitchen window. There was a stand of old trees separating the back lots, but since it was winter I was able to pick out 200 ■ James Magruder the Kellers’ deck through the branches. Mr. Keller hadn’t brought in their barbecue kettle, and there was a car tire propped against the built-in deck bench. My mother pushed the rotating corner cabinet with her foot and plucked off a bottle of soy sauce as it spun by. The cabinet was one of my favorite things about this house, where we had lasted almost two years. I said I didn’t like pepper steak. “It’s your brother’s favorite.” My brother, Andy, was playing hockey on the subdivision pond. I wanted to hear “It’s one of your father’s favorites,” as if saying it, plus the gingery fragrance spiraling through the vents in the lid of the electric skillet, could draw him home from his bachelor pad in Oakbrook, where he joked that the stewardesses lay thick as thieves around the indoor pool. “Am I going to get to meet him?” I asked. It would be too dark out to spy on her date from my bedroom window as he clicked up the flagstone steps. Andy didn’t seem to care who rang the doorbell for my mother on Friday and Saturday nights. My sisters Amy and Marie were too little to understand the finer details of our parents’ trial separation. “Not until the third date, honey” she said, making dinner hiss as she added the pepper strips. “If there is one,” she added. I opened the silverware drawer to start on the table. My father’s new forks had three tines, not four. His plates and glasses were square, the kind astronauts and Love, American Style characters used. The furniture in his apartment was bright and modern, not Colonial. I pictured him rolling on the shaggy sheepskin rug in the living room with stewardesses flown up from the pool. Stationed behind his leather reading chair was a tall, curving floor lamp whose hot starburst eyes pointed the way to the Age of Aquarius and away from us. ■ The next morning, instead of cutting through the backyards, I walked the long way around to the Kellers. The good cartoons were still on, so the streets were deserted . The mailboxes at the ends of the driveways had dropped their tongues to wait for lunch from the postman. It was January, and the cold pinched my earlobes. I’d swiped...