ALL ABOUT IT

It looks like an eye. It’s crazy to think of it that way, but he can’t help it. It’s a bare spot in his lawn where the grass is dying and it looks like an eye. It stares up at him from down there, accusing, demanding an answer. How did this happen? What the hell did you do? What did you not do?

It’s visible from the street. He checks, and there it is. From the sidewalk it looks more like a vagina than an eye, only not in a good way. It looks diseased. It makes him think about that commercial on TV with the herpes lady and her goofy boyfriend and that makes him think about those lubricant commercials and how the herpes lady should’ve thought about the herpes before she bought the lubricant. Assholes. Why do they want to show that on TV? From the driveway, the spot in the lawn looks like one of those outlines of a fish with the Greek letters that people put on their cars. Jesus fish. He’s going to have to get in the car and go find a place that sells some stuff to fix his grass. It’s going to be a problem, he can tell.

He sees his kid through the front window when he goes to get the car. The kid’s sprawled all over the couch watching TV with a straw in his mouth and bowl of some kind of crap balanced on his stomach , and every once in a while he lets go of the straw with his lips and turns his head and puts some of the crap in his mouth and then sucks on the straw again and swallows. It doesn’t even look like he’s chewing. Does the herpes commercial make him shudder? It’d better.

He thinks he should get the kid off the couch and bring him to get the stuff to fix the lawn, but then he thinks better of it. The kid’ll only ask how the bare spot got there and then he’d have to either lie or tell the truth and he doesn’t feel like lying to the kid today. How is anybody supposed to know all this stuff about lawns that you’re supposed to know? Use a spreader, the directions said. Fuck the spreader, he said back. And now there’s a bare spot, like a bald spot on his head. It’s grass, for fuck’s sake. It should grow. You can walk on it. Kids play on it when they’re not watching lubrication commercials on TV. It’s supposed to be tough.

He leaves the kid where he is. One day the kid’ll wake up with a bare spot on his lawn and then he’ll have to figure it out for himself. He looks around at the neighborhood. It’s not really a neighborhood. It’s a subdivision, but he calls it a neighborhood because it sounds better to him. He looks at the other lawns. You can tell that most of them have guys taking care of them who got lessons in that kind of thing from their fathers. In America, you’re supposed to learn about lawns from your father. Lawns, how to cook meat on a grill without burning it, how to join clubs and go fishing with your kids, how to find a wife who looks like Laura Petry and doesn’t eat at buffet restaurants. At least he got that last part right. He’s got the wife. He needs to work on the kid a little, but he got the wife part right the first time.

It’s Saturday. It’s a nice day, too. All up and down the street there are guys outside doing things to their lawns. They look like Sims, those little computer people that his daughter, the other kid, is always messing with. Only Sims don’t care if anybody’s watching and he suspects that these guys do. You’re supposed to watch them mowing with mowers that have had their oil changed recently and will be rinsed with a hose before they get put away, like their fathers taught them to do. You’re supposed to notice the guy vacuuming his lawn with a mower attachment that looks like one of the floor cleaning machines your father hauled around in the back of a truck to his job every night.

Vacuuming the lawn. What is that about? What can be down there that needs vacuuming? He would ask the guy, but the guy might offer to lend him the machine and then he’d have to take the offer or get stuck looking like some son of an immigrant who’s too lazy and too ignorant to figure out that his grass needs vacuuming. He gets the car out of the garage.

On the road he’s surrounded by bumper stickers. He hadn’t really focused on them before but now he can’t not notice. He’s the guy with the crappy lawn and everybody’s got advice for him. LIFE, says a bumper sticker on a minivan. No shit, he says out loud. He knows it’s about abortion, but it’s a complicated issue. And it’s not. Herpes and lube on the TV. He doesn’t know what to do about the troops, either. How the hell is he supposed to support them? He knows the frat boy lied to send them over there. Everybody knows. Unlike the abortion thing, it’s not even a little complicated. It’s big, it’s unbelievably huge, but big doesn’t mean complicated, it just means big. He wants to talk about it, to say something. But people don’t want to hear it. He understands. He keeps his mouth shut and takes care of his lawn and tries not to do stupid things that kill the grass in the shape of a vagina.

All the bumper stickers are screaming at each other. It used to be a conversation. It used to be funny sometimes. Now they shout. They threaten. They mock. He sees a decal of a little boy pissing on a flag that says French. It says French, he thinks, because if they put the actual French flag in there the people they’re trying to impress wouldn’t get it. Vote Life, Vote God. God Bless America. Who are these people?

Normally at the hardware store he can’t find anybody to tell him anything about anything. But today is different, and this geek kid in a little red vest and pants the size of a tree trunk follows him around at a distance, stalking him. When he gets to the aisle where they keep the grass-growing stuff, the kid hangs back a little. Good.

Staring at the shelves, his eyes glaze over and he almost forgets about the kid and he picks up a plastic bottle with a nozzle that hooks up to a hose. He holds the bottle out in front of him and pretends to read some of the ingredients and he sees the kid lurking at the end of the aisle by some bags of fertilizer that are stacked like interlocking bricks, like a fortress. On top of the pile, one of the bags is standing upright—King of the Hill, so everyone can see how happy the guy on the label is with his perfect, lush, radiant green lawn.

The kid in the red vest sees him looking and pounces.

“Can I help you?” The kid looks friendly enough, but how much could anybody his age know about lawns?

“No. I’m just looking.” He picks up another plastic bottle. The label on this one is crawling with bugs and grubs. Grubs. He doesn’t want to think about grubs. He turns it over. Billbugs, spittlebugs, army worms, crane flies, cutworms, earwigs, chittabugs, mites, leaf hoppers, ticks, waterbugs and grubs. Grubs from Japan and dung beetle grubs. Hyperodes weevils, hole crickets, chinch bugs.

He thinks about buying the bottle and getting away from the kid, but what if he screws it up and instead of killing bugs he kills more of the grass? He shoves the bottle back on the shelf. Just looking. What a line. Just looking at grub-killing stuff like that’s all he has to do on a Saturday afternoon. The kid probably knows that he’s lying, that he does need help but is too embarrassed to ask for it.

“Okay,” the kid says.

They stand there. The kid doesn’t move. They’re going to stand there, two guys looking at a shelf for a few minutes. Great.

He tries to get some relief by looking at the fertilizer display, but the guy on the fertilizer bag looks like a guy on one of those commercials for erectile dysfunction. That’s what they’re really selling there, soft boners. They just happen to have a pill that’ll cure it when your member goes limp from thinking about the poor jerk on the commercial that can’t get it up with his wife, who’s sitting there in the background in her silk nightie, all ready to go.

The kid finally shrugs and waddles off in those pants. He stares at the pants. He thinks about yelling Fire so he can see if the kid can run in those things. But he doesn’t. He’s left with the man on the fertilizer bag. White hair and white shoes. White teeth and red polo shirt. The fertilizer man looks like a guy who could vote for a playtime cowboy from Texas and not feel bad about it later like everybody else. Boner pills and bare spots and guys chanting crazy chants in the cockpits of airplanes full of people with lawns to get back to, grass to grow so they don’t get bare spots that look like vaginas and embarrass everybody. Everything is coming apart and nobody knows what to do except to try and look like it’s all going to be okay, like we’re still number one. But if we were number one how the hell did this happen to us? People running, crawling under parked cars while whole buildings, pounded into dust, pour through the streets like water. How the hell did we get here? We’re a nation of men with soft dicks and pills to make them hard and lubricated vaginas with herpes and we advertise this on the television so our children can watch it and grow up thinking it’s all normal; pills for your dick and having to look the other way when the lady in front of you in the security line at the airport has the ugliest feet you’ve ever seen, like frog feet, wide and triangular. Freak feet. And everybody’s looking at them and you don’t want to be one of the assholes who can’t help but look and you just want to tell her to get some shoes on, lady, nobody wants to look at that.

It makes us all look weak. All of us. Bare feet and dead vagina grass. It makes us look like we can’t take care of our shit.

They have some grass seed and fertilizer already all mixed up together with some shredded paper that’s painted green. A dummy could grow this stuff. Toss it on the ground and get it wet. But he leaves empty-handed. He can’t buy anything now, not when he just told the kid in the vest that he was just looking. The kid would know he’d been lying just to get rid of him, which the kid probably already knew, but why make it worse?

Outside, the road is a river of bumper stickers and fake ribbons and he’s got to wade through it again. The car in front of him has one of those Jesus fishes. The fish has a cross where its eye is supposed to be. He wonders if it’s a flounder; the one with both of its eyes on one side of its head?

He knows a guy who was drinking in a bar someplace in China when the planes hit. They sent the hostess around to tell all the Americans to go away. The guy was in China looking at a factory where a bunch of women work all day sticking suction cups on glow-in-the-dark plastic saints that people then stick on their dashboards. The guy didn’t know what saints they were. The guy just made sure the saints got made and put on ships and sent around to the people who put them in stores and churches and wherever the hell it is that they sell things like plastic sucker-saints. The guy went back to his hotel and watched the buildings come down on TV; alone in the middle of the night, half way around the world, across the International Date Line. It was yesterday in America from where this guy was. It was happening yesterday. The guy told him all about it.

He crosses the freeway to the other big box store and goes in. The place is enormous and full of stuff. He already knows where all the stuff comes from. The guy with the plastic saints told him about it. But where the hell does it all go? This is something he thinks about for the first time. Not who buys it, this he knows. And not where ultimately it will end up. Everybody knows where it ends up. But what are the specifics of the trip?

He’s looking for the gardening aisle when he sees the woman. She has a kid with her, a girl, maybe three or four, and they’re standing in the aisle looking at picture frames. She’s a young mother but not herself a child. She’s wearing capris, black, with the little slit up the calf, and an olive, short-sleeved blouse, tapered at the waist, showing some figure but leaving much unsaid. She stands with her shoulders back and her chin forward and her hand out with the fingers cupped just a certain way, touching one of the frames, getting the feel of it, stroking it, thinking. She has a memory someplace in her head, he can tell. It’s a memory caught in an image; a photograph or maybe the kid painted something for her. She needs a frame for the image that carries the memory. To preserve it, so that people who see it will know that it means something more than some other memories that didn’t get themselves framed. If you frame a thing, it stands a better chance in the world. The frame tells people to not mess around with this image. It’s not just some picture you took. It’s a memory.

But what’s going to happen is a foregone conclusion. In the long run the frame won’t do anybody any good. Even the woman knows. She knows all about it. In another forty or fifty years, the kid is going to send her to a home or a condo at least one plane ride away. Then the kid will hold a garage sale. Some stranger will find the frame in the bottom of a grubby cardboard box and spend two minutes deciding whether or not to spend a quarter on it and throw away the image and use the frame for some idiot baby picture of another kid that nobody alive now even knows or cares about. The image will go. It’ll end up in a landfill next to a plastic saint whose sucker gave out. It’s a given. Still, he thinks it’s a good thing that people try to save their memories. You have to try. The guy who was in China couldn’t reach his family on the phone even though they don’t live anywhere near New York. When they finally let him get on a plane after a few days, it was empty except for him. One guy on a seven-four-seven. All the way across the ocean.

He realizes then that the picture frame lady looks like one of his neighbors. He isn’t sure, but he ducks around the corner and down another aisle just in case. He finds himself facing a display of chocolate fountain machines. Fountains of chocolate. On sale. How did this come to be? Did he have a part in it? It’s a long road from knowing a guy who makes plastic sucker-saints to fountains of chocolate. The picture frame lady says something to the kid. She coos. He can’t hear what she says, but it sounds nice. Her husband probably tends to their lawn with the same care she takes tending to the image, whatever it is, that stores the memory she’s trying to preserve. Maybe the husband even vacuums the grass. They probably have sex a lot. There’s the kid there as a reminder. Walking proof of sex in the past tense. He has kids too. He knows all about sex. The bare spot in his grass doesn’t make him into some dick-cripple who needs a pill. And besides, it looks like an eye. If you think otherwise, you’re standing in the wrong place.

He finds the gardening aisle and they have the same stuff with the grass seed and the green paper mulch. There’s another kid in a vest and quick, he stares at the label, pretending like he’s reading the ingredients. Amoniacal nitrogen, urea nitrogen, methylenediurea and dimethylenetriurea nitrogen. Do other men actually know about these things or do they just trust the people who make it and put it in the bags? Where do they get this trust? He notices then that all the ingredients only add up to 52 percent. Where’s the rest of it? The kid in the vest is hovering. He thrusts the bag over his shoulder like it weighs something but it doesn’t weigh more than a couple of pounds and he feels like an idiot. He nods to the vest kid and cuts around the end cap.

The store has self-service checkout and he chooses this option. He doesn’t want to have to make small talk with a checkout person about a hole in his lawn. This way a man has some privacy. He stands in line behind another man who was thinking the same thing but it’s all gone bad. He can see that now. The scanner is malfunctioning and he can’t help but look and see that the man is trying to scan a package of hemorrhoid suppositories. He sweeps it past the scanning device and stuffs it in a sack. A computer voice announces in a big voice full of electrons and bits and bytes and no empathy whatsoever that there’s an unauthorized item in the bagging area. The guy’s neck is filling with blood and turning red. He glances around to see who’s looking and his face is draining, going white. He looks like a candy cane. He’s old. There are silver hairs all over the back of his neck and they look like they shouldn’t be there, like crab grass, only white. There’s a lady at a little kiosk between the scanners. She’s supervising the self-checkout lanes and it becomes apparent that she’s got a screen there that shows her everything that’s going on.

“Suppositories?” the woman calls out. She doesn’t care. She sees hemorrhoid suppositories all the time. “Let me try.”

But it’s clear that the man does not want her touching his suppositories. The back of his neck pulses, his shoulders roll and quake. “It’s all right,” he manages to say.

But it’s not all right and the woman advances. Ownership of the suppositories has not yet transferred. She’s still in charge and the machine has gone down and she’s supposed to know what to do. People count on her to know. She shakes her head and passes the package over the scanner again. It beeps. It works fine. The old guy must’ve screwed it up. It sucks, having to watch this. The man puts some money in the receptacle and bolts out of the store without his change. Forty-three cents.

In the parking lot, the hemorrhoid guy gets into a Buick. People drive Buicks around here. It’s a fact.

He follows the hemorrhoid Buick guy. It feels necessary. In the street, a bumper sticker reads, Jesus. Just the one word—Jesus. What’s he supposed to do with that? The hemorrhoid guy’s got no bumper stickers. Not one.

They drive to a subdivision that doesn’t even pretend to be a neighborhood. People are working on their yards everywhere. Some of them have their garage doors open and he can see all the junk they have. He still doesn’t know why he’s following this man. It’s stupid. People go to jail for this kind of thing. The guy pulls into a driveway and a garage door yawns open. It’s a mess in there. A big, hairy mess. No wonder the man’s got problems. Everybody can see his mess every time that door opens.

The door closes. End of show. Now what?

He parks and gets out of his car and digs in his pocket for forty-three cents and he puts it in the guy’s mailbox out by the street. It’s a weird thing to do. He sees that some asshole’s dog took a shit on the guy’s lawn. He goes back to the car and takes out the bag of grass seed and leaves it in the guy’s driveway and drives away. Nobody seems to notice.

On the way home he stops at a flower place and buys a bouquet for his wife. Roses. Twelve. He doesn’t need any pills. He’s got roses. While he’s at it, he buys a knee-high, ceramic statue of a saint in a little grotto. He doesn’t know which saint it is. Nobody knows what those guys looked like anyway. When he gets back to the house, he sticks the statue on the bare spot. It fits. Problem solved. In the house, the kid’s still watching TV with the bowl of crap and the straw. The roses go in a vase on the table. She’ll see them later. He grabs the remote control and turns the television off.

“Get up,” he says. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go make a memory. You sit around like that all the time, you’re gonna need a pill some day.”

To his surprise, the kid says, “Sure,” and off they go. If he had a camera right then he’d take a picture and maybe even have it framed. But he doesn’t have a camera and he doesn’t want to screw it all up by going to get one. He’ll have to remember. And when it’s gone it’ll be gone, and that’ll be the end of it.

By David Dumitru