Watching the Rain Come Down

Guided by Voices

The British lesbian with a tracheotomy drawling from our GPS was leading us in a circle. She would invent a street, and when we didn’t plow over someone’s yard and scrape in between houses she would recalculate our course. We’d follow her instructions to the tee, but she would recalculate again, directing us to exactly where we started. Over and over I saw the same children tumbling through grass, the same women drinking tea on their porches, the same men shingling a roof, and they all watched us chasing the same mistakes.


Andrea

“I’ll just try and give her a call,” Martha said to nobody as she Pacman-ed her way around her Charleston, West Virginia home in search of the phone. To my mom and me on the living room couch, she said, “Andrea’s mother died and she hasn’t been coping very well, she keeps buying poodles. She’s got so many now she can’t afford to take care of them, so I think she’s looking to try and get rid of some.” Martha emerged from the kitchen with a small silver portable, plucked the paper bag she had been wearing as a hat from her head, and began punching in the code that would eventually summon the poodle woman.

Uncle Sam

Martha greeted us with paper bags, rims rolled up so that they would fit snugly, rectangular comics cut from the newspaper pinched into rolls on their fronts. “I figured these would be cheaper and more fun than party hats!” Martha said as she passed them out to everyone, even Sam. Uncle Sam is my grandmother’s brother, a profoundly old-fashioned, feeble man with small twinkly eyes who has lived slowly for many years with his stomach removed, and has ended up with lung cancer. When we crowded around him to sing happy birthday, I thought of how pissed off at us he must be, surrounded by everyone, tethered to an oxygen tank with a paper bag on his head.


Romantic

My cousin Phil asked me about recommending some classical music, and so I’ve been trying to explain to him the difference between the Romantic and Classical eras amidst the hectic traffic of people delivering covered dishes to Martha’s kitchen. He receives the information with his mouth hanging open, surprised to hear that there was ever a traditional standard of tonality to move away from, because he wants music to have always been special and otherworldly, not something that people could just put together like cars or cakes. He thanks me and tells me he’ll check out some Debussy and Berlioz, but when he turns to go help in the kitchen he doubles back and says, “I tried to study music, like theory and stuff, but at the end of the day it’s about whatever sounds good. You know, at the end of the day it’s whatever gets you off.”


The Poodle Woman Herself

Sammy has four teeth, ironically just the canines, and exuberantly headbutts me in the tummy before wriggling off into the great abyss behind Martha’s couch like the Gollum of miniature poodles. An identical black cotton swab, Norman, lies slack on my mother’s lap, and looming on the love seat caddy-corner to the one on which we are lounging, is the poodle woman. Andrea sits under her ample pile of blonde cake trim curls, her nose emerging from her face like the keel of a cruise ship, her beady marble eyes glassy as she describes her dedication to the poodle calendars she creates for her neighbors each year. She pauses and makes a lilting motion with her head towards the two small dogs, opens her mouth to say something more, and falls apart.


Phil’s Happy Ending

Phil used to date a girl who worked at JC Penneys and was pretty until she smiled, revealing a mouth full of teeth arranged like a pack of chicklets that had been taped to the side of a bottle rocket. At the time he confided in me that he loved her to bits but was lousy at sex, and shortly after this she and her awful teeth gave a blowjob to some redneck and sent poor Phil careening precariously through the next few years, skidding to a stop on Easter Sunday at Martha’s house in a forest green pickup with an obtrusively pregnant woman by his side. She might be ten years older than him, but Phil did his best to explain to his mom that he’d found the love of his life as they watched lizards dart out from under rocks in the backyard. At the dining room table, the hamster-faced mother-to-be gazed into the spaces between strangers and said, “Yeah, I’m definitely keeping it, this could be my last chance.”

When the Poodle Levee Breaks

Andrea sits on the couch, hemorrhaging tears from her watermelon pink face, wailing, “I can’t leave Sammy, I just can’t, the other dogs need him I’m so sorry!” My mother and I turn to each other, exchanging looks that our faces are only capable of forming when we find ourselves stroking the nearly-toothless poodles that belong to a woman we’ve known for less than five minutes while she sobs like she’s on Maury. We want to tell her that we didn’t even ask to see her dogs, let alone entertain a desire to take one, but she soldiers on through her tears, telling us about how she found Doogie Doogster in a dumpster in the McDonald’s parking lot. “Oh, and you have to meet bubbles,” she says, winding down, “we found her under a bridge living with a hobo woman.”

Turkeys of Fate

Joyce is Martha’s thin-haired bird sister, her peckish counterpart who can’t stop hooting stories and political musings at the table, her eyes blinking sharply like a chicken’s behind thick black-rimmed glasses. She has a giantess of a daughter, a thick trunk of girl who wears the same glasses as her mother and clucks with the same goading voice. While Joyce and her daughter rattle off shreds of their lives I watch Uncle Sam bring up a faintly trembling forkful of cake, and as he tenderly mashes it around in his mouth I wonder if he’s been listening to all this. Acceptance, defeat, and attention all blur into a single far-off stare, and somewhere I hear Joyce say, “Remember when our Uncle got those turkeys and they all drowned watching the rain come down?”