Reversals
“It’s a natural law of some kind”
“Good people do bad things, and bad people do good things.” That was Thunder’s position. “It’s a natural law of some kind,” he’ d said, adding lots of other Homo Sapiens reversals like smart people doing stupid things, and stupid people doing smart things, and …. I’ve never seen an exception to it.”
“I guess you’re saying that any one person is not exactly one person.” Flapjack said, anticipating her own theory of Thunder being four persons in one.
“That’s another way to put it.”
“Or that depending on circumstances, we are all capable of becoming someone we didn’t think we were.”
“That’s not really a reversal,” he’d said.
They went on like that for a while, walking along the Queen East boardwalk, Thunder holding Flapjack’s hand in one hand, and the leash for his large black dog in the other. The dog trotted alongside and Coconut rode her tricycle up in front. They made a striking quartet, Thunder being so tall and handsome, Flapjack being so spunky and sporty, Coconut being so cute and precocious, and the dog being so so so… doglike. They looked like a second marriage, which they were, except Flapjack had not literally married Thunder, and Coconut was from her prior marriage to the short chubby Latino bastard, and Thunder had been married or almost married at least ten times before.
Regardless, they gave the impression of an older couple who were totally in love and living a younger couple’s life style, bound and determined to turn back the hands of time.
Time for a tune?
“Off with her head”
It was Thunder’s law of reversals that haunted Flapjack as she rifled through his sock and underwear drawer. Ever since her TRIP BACK TO NATURE, she’d become living proof of the law’s veracity. A decent person and a good friend, so she had thought, she had left her friend (and her friend’s daughter) stranded and spinning in the middle of isolated Algonquin lake. So what if she was paddling solo (Coconut hardly counted as a bowman [sic]). She’d been 99.9 percent preoccupied with saving her own skin (and Coconut’s). Her friend’s (and her friend’s daughter’s) welfare had been a fleeting inaffordable thought, and she had abandoned them, plain and simple.
Next, she had trammeled on the inviolable right to privacy and private property, breaking into the closet of a dominatrix and running off with some of her pricey clothing — attenuating circumstances notwithstanding. True, her motive had been to unravel a sordid secret not of her own making, but in so doing, she’d become part of it, a bit like Al Pacino in “Sea of Love” who plays a detective who becomes ensared in his own plan to catch a serial killer — BTW one of Thunder’s favourite movies.
Moving on, what kind of mother would leave her only child (un)supervised by a hostile and haughty minor in a hotel room? So what if that mother was trying to sort out a family problem.
And here’s a clincher, it was Flapjack herself who had had cooked up the content of both the BLACKMAIL DOCUMENT and the FRANK PLAN in the smithy of her rotten soul. Like lots of women before her and like lots of women coming after, she’d rode the looping and loopy causal chains of her life to date and blurted it all out to a lover who had turned what she’d told him into indictment of her personal and moral failings. And.
Off with her head!
“My mind goes blank”
Flapjack found the actual document (plus multiple copies) hidden underneath a pair of zebra shorts. It was sealed in a fat manila envelope and it was labeled with her name, Social Insurance Number and her date of birth in Thunder’s spidery and somewhat effeminate hand-writing. Flapjack snuck (or is that sneeked?) the envelope off to the bathroom for a last read, a “last” read, that is, before Frank came.
She chose the passage about what Thunder said she had said about her mother:
There are always alliances in families. In ours, it was all the sisters (eventually four) on Mom’s side and me on Dad’s. Mom got my older sister to begin with because they both liked Romantic poetry and she got all the littler sisters because they were basically powerless. Dad got me because I had cleverly created a role for myself as the family boy.
I saw through my Mom from an early age. She did not believe in building people up. She believed in tearing them down. She did not build up any of the other people in our family either, including my dad and my other sisters – except my brain-damaged sister who was a jewel in the crown of the Lord, a Romantic idea from Christology that my Mom clung to even though she said she was an atheist like my dad who had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family.
Obviously my brain-damaged sister did not need to be cut down to size like the rest of us … because … well, because … she was not in the position to be culpable. She had paid her dues at the moment of birth. She did not need to be whipped into shape.
Speaking of being whipped into shape — that had been part of my Mom’s childhood and it left a mark on her, maybe even resulting in a personality disorder. She was so cold. I can’t even remember her kissing me good night or saying, “I love you.” If I were a sociologist I’d give her a pass, based on her working-class upbringing between two world wars which made her tough and gritty. No point getting too attached to anyone, widgets in the machine run by others. But I’m no sociologist and so I give my Mom a big fail as a mother: D-.
Excerpted from the Diary of ___________________ AKA FLAPJACK
Flapjack couldn’t even imagine how her mom would react to her D-. She would be beyond furious. Plus Flapjack’s father would never forgive her, for as much as he took Flapjack’s side and point of view, and as much as he loved her as his daughter and the family boy, it was Flapjack’s mother who was his Queen of Hearts. And plus, just because Flapjack didn’t like her mom, it didn’t mean she didn’t love her. She did love her. She did. She did.
She read another excerpt:
Mom fabricated stuff to make herself seem extraordinary. Like the time, in Grade 2, when I had to do a project, Mom made me do it on Queen Boadicea whom said she was descended from. I was a kid. I believed her and I took a lot of pride in it, boasting about it in the schoolyard. “My mom descended from a Queen who defeated the Roman Army.” “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” the boys yelled.
My Mom liked to play tricks on my dad which made him seem clownish. Once, before we all drove down to Florida, my dad came up behind my Mom while she was washing the dishes. She had just given herself a NEET treatment and the NEET burned holes in my dad’s pants. My Mom stood at the kitchen sink laughing into the dishes until she cried. Dad had no long pants to wear for two weeks.
Once after an unhappy family dinner, where she probably cited, “Four walls do not a prison make, nor bars do make a cell,” she threw my dad’s hat into the Detroit River where we watched it float up river along with the giant barges and pieces of garbage.
Mom was glad she burned holes in Dad’s pants. She was glad she threw his hat in the Detroit River. She was glad about every insult and assault she lodged against him and us, by extension – “us girls” except for my brain-damaged sister, the jewel in the crown of the Lord.
The best I can say is she was a fighter descended from a Celtic Queen (bullshit) and being a powerless housewife she had no one to fight, so she fought us (true).
Excerpted from the Diary of _________________________ AKA Flapjack
When she read that passage, she cringed. She had told Thunder this, for sure, but seeing it set down, in black and white, it seemed clumsy and clunky and one-sided. For instance, had her dad done something to her Mom to make her be so mean to him? Was she simply so dreadfully mean? Is there such a thing as meanness in and of itself? Are all families full of such pettiness and passive-aggressive drama? She moved on to one more passage:
In the winter we had snowball fights which always ended the same way, with the boys catching us, washing our faces with snow, stuffing the snow down our jackets and us running home with our faces red-raw and stinging. But sometimes, when the moon was high in the winter sky and the roads were white and slippery, the boys didn’t attack us. They let us ride the cars with them. They let us hang onto the fenders with them. They let us go flying down the Windsor streets with them. We were free as birds, wild and soaring and screaming and happy.
Then we came home and my mind goes blank.
Excerpted from the Diary of ________________________AKA Flapjack
Why on earth had Thunder thrown that in? That was a childhood secret of Flapjack and her sister, a bona fide genius and former member of the Archie Fan Club, something for them to savor as the years went by and burdened them with ex-husbands and financial problems. But the way he wrote it implied that terrible things happened at home, which FJ had repressed, almost as if she had PTSD. “My mind goes blank…?” If that got out, there would be no recovery for her parents or for her. Her sisters would probably not forgive her either for painting their upbringing and their childhood and their family in such an unflattering light.
Funnily enough (or is that revealingly enough?), Flapjack threw her remaining moral scruples out the window when she read that line, “My mind goes blank.” She knew then and there that the FRANK PLAN, as callous and calculated as it was, would have to be executed as she had concocted it.
Flapjack put the manila envelope back under the zebra shorts where it would remain until Frank arrived.
“There’s a cheesy-looking guy knocking at the door”
Thunder called upstairs to Flapjack, “Come down.” She and Coconut were watching TV in the bed Flapjack had once upon a time shared with him. They were watching Murphy Brown, and Flapjack remembered that, because Coconut had asked a question about the show that made it clear she had not been following the plot, that she was a little kid after all. She’d asked, “Why does Murphy have a baby now?” missing the subplot of Murphy’s fraught and complicated relationship with her ex-husband. Flapjack wondered what Coconut had been watching all along when they watched the show together — a first big crack in Flapjack’s consciousness of Coconut as a mini-FJ.
Thunder had yelled, “There’s a cheesy-looking guy knocking at the door. You better come down and see what he wants.”
“OK, hang on,” Flapjack said. She peered out the window and saw an old black Cadillac, with shiny hubcaps, parked in front of the house. She recognized the man from Frank’s coffee shop, the tall white-haired man who had stood behind the counter and directed Flapjack to the pong tables at the back. He was leaning on the driver’s side of the caddy and smoking a cigarette.
“You stay up here, Coconut,” Flapjack said. “I need to get the door.”
“Oh no, Mom, I want to see.” She bounded downstairs ahead of Flapjack and threw open the door ahead of Flapjack.
Frank was surprised to see Coconut, though he greeted her enthusiastically asking her if her mother was in, though it was obvious she was since she was standing right behind her. He motioned Flapjack to come outside on the porch. “You shouldn’t have your kid here,” he said. “Maybe Aldon can take her for a ride around the block.” He gestured to the silver-haired man smoking beside the caddie. Flapjack told him she wouldn’t get in a car with a stranger. “Well, maybe she’s got a friend she can visit. We’ll get a coffee and come back in half an hour.”
Through a crack in the door …
Thunder said nothing when Flapjack shut the door but the colour was drained from his already pale face and he had a slight tremor in his right hand.
By the time Frank came back, Thunder had revived himself and it was Thunder, not Flapjack, who stood waiting on the porch. He’d a baseball bat in one hand and the leash of his large black dog in the other. He looked bigger and meaner than he had looked in months. It was like a street fighter had emerged full blown from the deep fog of his depression. (Perhaps a Thunder #5?)
“Stay inside,” he’d ordered Flapjack. “I know what these guys want and how they work.”
Through a crack in the door, Flapjack listened to their conversation.
“Whadda you want,” Thunder asked in a down-low voice.
“I want you to go inside and get some fiction you made up about my good friend Flapjack, all ten or twelve or whatever copies of it,” Frank said in voice that was both soft and threatening.
“You’re kidding,” Thunder said. He sounded relieved.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“No, you don’t. But you know Flapjack? … How do you know her?”
“That’s none of your business,” Frank said. “Just go inside and get me what I asked you for and I’ll go away.”
“Now why would I do that?” Thunder seemed amused.
“Because you don’t want things to get ugly.”
“Ok, so why don’t you just fuck off, then.”
“I’m gonna ask you nicely one more time. Go inside and get that piece of crap you wrote about Flapjack.”
“Again, I’m gonna ask NICELY you why I should do that.”
“Because I said so.” That was Frank’s voice.
“Or you’ll find us waiting for you when you least expect us.” That was not Frank’s voice.
Flapjack heard Thunder drop the baseball bat and the dog leash and mumble, “I’ll be right back with it.”
Flapjack was now clinging to him …
Thunder was close to tears when he said to Flapjack that night, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” She was wearing leather pants and high-heeled shoes, projecting possibly unconsciously the dominance she now had over him.
Thunder was sitting on the bed with his face in his hands. “I thought those guys were coming after me for something else. I never paid out that Eveyln.”
“Evelyn who?”
“You know, Evelyn Remedy.”
“Oh, yeah, her. It’s not just the clothes I took, is it? Because I already worked out an installment plan for that.”
“That’s a drop in the bucket of what I owe. You can leave me if you want to,” he said. “I don’t want to lose my house. But it’s more than that.”
He reached out his arms to Flapjack and she fell into them, propelled by remnants of what she once felt for him and a new feeling, which was a sorrow so deep that it felt like a burning coal sitting in her throat. That night they made love for the first time in a long time and the last time ever
It’s hard to put a finger on it but Flapjack started to feel different a few weeks after the implementation of THE FRANK PLAN. She felt tired and moody and queasy. She felt floaty and puffy. The rubber on the wheels of her Chevy couldn`t quite hit the road. By early afternoon she was so tired she had to have a nap underneath her desk at work. And even stranger, she started to feel and express real affection to Thunder. After all she went through to get rid of Thunder, Flapjack was now clinging to him. Clinging to him … like your skin to a cold, wet bathing suit when you’re trying to peel it off… like your finger to crazy glue … like your tongue to a popsicle just out of the freezer …like a pretty much broke and not quite broken woman to the father of her child.
Flapjack was pregnant and she didn`t really need a drugstore test to tell her that.