The single syllable words used in junior high were forbidden: cunt, fuck, shit. I wasn’t sure if cunt was the same thing as vagina and was too embarrassed to ask. The multi-syllabic words used at the dinner table by my father weren’t forbidden but they sounded deadly, leukemia, with its harsh ‘k’ sound, and chemotherapy. Because of those words we had to pray in church and light candles for my mother.
I asked the smart kid in class if he knew about leukemia. It’s a fatal disease, he said. Is fatal bad, I asked. You die from it, he said. I didn’t want to believe him but he got the highest grades on tests. Then I asked him if vagina and cunt were the same thing. He said they weren’t but he didn’t tell me what the difference was.
After my mother’s funeral the smart kid invited me over his house and sat me at the piano and then turned his back and told me to tap any key, black or white, and he’d be able to point to the exact key I had chosen and I wondered how he was able to do it over and over again, and then he led me through his house, like a museum guide, and when we entered his parents’ bedroom I felt like I was trespassing, and he showed me his father’s silk shirts in the closet, feel this, he said, and the shirts were soft and delicate and he named all these fancy department stores, and I thought about how my father shopped at Sears, the same place you could buy a lawnmower, and then we got to another room where all his parents’ trophies were kept, for tennis, golf, bowling, and even a trophy he’d won for a chess tournament in summer camp, it was like show and tell in grade school.
In the living room he pulled out a photo album of vacation pictures, the fields of Gettysburg, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. He asked if we went on vacations. We’ve been to Disney World, I said. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was my favorite. At the end of the ride you go through hell and the devil is standing there with a pitchfork. It’s really cool.
Any real places, he wanted to know. My parents like us to learn about history.
No, just Disney World. We were going to go back again but my mother got sick.
I told you leukemia was a fatal disease, he said.
He kept looking at the photo album. My mother wants to go to Paris, he said. She said she took French in college and wants to try it out.
Have you ever seen a dead body, I asked.
A lot of soldiers died at Gettysburg, he said. I saw where Lincoln gave his speech.
But there are no bodies there, I said. Like there are at a funeral.
My parents have been to funerals.
A dead body is cold and hard, I said.
That’s gross, he said.
That’s what my mother felt like.
Other bodies, I mean.
Can you spell leukemia, I asked.
Of course, he said. He spelled it wrong. Then I spelled it. I was good at spelling multi-syllabic words. How about chemotherapy, I said. He spelled that word wrong too. I asked him if he knew what it was. He seemed disappointed in himself. It’s radiation, I said. To fight the cancer.
I’d know about that word if my mother had leukemia, he said, but she won’t get it, she’s pretty healthy.
When I got home I was greeted with an eerie quiet, no sound of machines, vacuum, blender, radio, no sauce or meatloaf aroma.
No hum of life.
My father was still working at his hardware store. He called to say he was bringing home Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I set the table for two. I thought of the smart kid’s house, always full of life, opera music playing, his mother cooking an elaborate dinner and setting the table, his father having a drink in front of the TV news, ice cubes rattling around in the glass. His sister giggling on the phone and playing with the cord.
I took a perverse pleasure in my parents suffering, something the smart kid knew nothing about, the aura of death, bedpans and tubes and needles, the smell of waste in the air because my mother’s kidneys had failed, my father telling me to pray for a miracle.
At my desk I did homework. History. I was bored with dates and facts and stuff that happened hundreds of years ago.
And I also took pleasure at the thought that most kids on vacation would’ve preferred the devil over Lincoln.
***
Peter DeMarco is a retired New York City high school English and film teacher. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the stand-up comedy amateur circuit. His writing has appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), New World Writing, trampset, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, River Teeth (“Beautiful Things”), BULL, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly. Follow him at @PDMwriter and read more at: peterdemarcowriter.com.
Rejection Letters 