“What’s the occasion, Sissy?” asked Mama.
“You mean besides having Thanksgiving dinner with our Mama?” I replied. Avie and I were helping Mama take the turkey out of oven in her tiny new apartment near Eight Mile Road. “I can be traditional when I want to.”
“You didn’t have to get dressed up for me,” said Mama. “But you do look nice in a dress for a change. I don’t think I’ve seen you in one since high school.”
“Clarissa went by the house to pick up her old clarinet,” said Avie. “Daddy told her she was dressing too much like a boy lately and that she should grab some of her old dresses out of the attic, too, while she was at it. Only, they don’t fit her anymore. So he gave her money to buy new reeds and a new frock.”
“Avie can’t keep anything secret,” I said. I stuck my tongue out at my half-sister.
“You do want to look your best,” said Mama.
“Oh, Mama,” I said. “Next thing you’ll be asking me is if I’ve found a man yet.”
“Modern women don’t need a man,” said Mama, suddenly somber. “Men are no damn good. The only two men I loved in my life ended up breaking my heart. Best thing they ever did was give me you two girls.”
“This turkey’s big enough to feed ten people,” said Avie, changing the subject. She was at the stove adding flour to the juice to make gravy.
“You can take some home to your hippie friends at the church,” said Mama, referring to the Youthful Permutations who lived in the residence of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City and watched over the century-old neo-Gothic building.
“They have enough turkey already,” said Avie. “Eats on Feets had their Thanksgiving dinner for the indigents of the North Cass District earlier this afternoon in the church Community Hall. There are enough leftovers in the congregation freezer to last till the next Ditty in the City. Besides, the Y+Thems’ll be going out with me and Sissy to Ann Arbor Sunday to have even more leftovers with Trent and Stella.”
“All except Dana,” I said. “And she’s the one who most wanted to meet Stella. But I guess she’s on the outs with everybody, especially me.”
“Is that the one who looks like a vampire?” asked Mama. She had met the Y+Thems once or twice while visiting Avie in the church residence during the semester. “The one with the Statue-of-Liberty hair?”
“She could be turning into a vampire,” said Avie. “No one sees much of her lately; she spends a lot of time in the church belfry. She’s taken to wearing a silk cape that’s kind of spikey, like her hair, and somewhat bat-like.”
“There’s an idea,” I said. “Drive a stake through her heart.” At least that would put an end to all the anti-Ms. Megaton Man graffiti around town, I thought.
“Do you girls have any plans tomorrow?”
Avie gave me a quizzical look. “Not particularly,” she said.
“Just Black Friday shopping,” I said. “Maybe dinner in Chinatown…”
“Say hello to your father,” said Mama. “I know Cray’s going to take you out; we still talk. We’ve decided to keep things civil, so as not to make this more hard on you girls than it needs to be.”
“We’re grown adults, Mama,” said Avie. “But you can’t sell the house. It’s where we grew up. All our memories are there.”
“There will be other houses, other memories,” said Mama, setting out the dish of stuffing. “Starting now. Let’s eat.”
Dinner with Daddy was just as amiable as with Mama, and there were almost as many leftovers. We braved the terrors of the Cass Corridor to eat at one of Detroit’s classic Chinese restaurants, with all the clichéd oriental decorations you could ask for. Daddy even ordered Turkey chop suey, which isn’t even a real Chinese dish. Avie had the egg foo young and I had General Tso’s chicken. We were so stuffed, I vowed not to eat at all on Saturday.
It was just as well. Saturday was a cold, dark day, one of those days that threatens to storm but never does. It looked like it could have gone either way—snow or rain—but it remained dry and cold and gloomy—a pregnant day—hovering around right around freezing.
I had a key to the church. Thanks to my close relationship with Avie, Jasper, and the Youthful Permutations, and since I volunteered for the Eats on Feets and so many other activities, I was granted the privilege. Reverend Enoch said I could use the facilities whenever I wanted, and since he’d drafted me for the music ensemble I had taken to practicing my clarinet in the church sanctuary on weeknights when I wasn’t working at the restaurant. Nobody used it then, and it was sufficiently insulated from the residence building so that nobody even knew I was there. I was still rusty and squeaky in the higher register, but at least I wasn’t disturbing anybody, which I would have if I tried practicing in my apartment with its paper-thin walls.
Whenever I did practice in the church sanctuary at night, I turned on the fake candlelight fixtures; their warm glow on the neo-Gothic interior gave the space a quiet, meditative feeling. The Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving was the first time I had practiced in the church during the daytime; I kept the lights off so I could see the colors of the stained glass windows from the inside—I had seen them from the outside when at night when the interior was all lit up plenty of times. On that gloomy afternoon, daylight filtered in weakly, the only illumination. It was a gloomy, creepy day, and the minor and diminished scales I tried to recall from memory, from when I had studied privately in junior and senior high, only added to the melancholy atmosphere.
I must have played for three hours, until my embouchure was shot.
As the afternoon darkened to evening outside, I was almost in complete darkness.
Suddenly, I heard a voice:
“Sounds good. You playing with the ensemble Sunday mornings?”
I looked up to the choir loft in front of the church. I could barely make out a silhouette in front of the round rose window.
“Dana? Is that you?” I felt my way in the dark for the light switch. “Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me.” Finally, my fingers found it against the side wall. Soft, warm lighting illuminated the neogothic stonework.
Sure enough, up behind the pipes of the organ was Domina, nearly naked in her leather thong and brassiere; she had on a translucent silk cape around her shoulders. Its lower hem was spiky, just as Avie had described. “That’s not going to keep you very warm,” I said.
“I don’t really feel the cold,” said Dana. She leapt from behind the pipes and landed at the edge of the balcony, her cape billowing.
“God, you do look like a vampire bat,” I said. “I should warn you, I’m armed.” I held my clarinet by the bell and pointed it up at her. “The mouthpiece is hard rubber, but the barrel is ebony—that’s wood. So’s the reed.”
“Thanks for the warning, Van Helsing,” said Dana. “Wish you would have given me one before you tore my heart out.”
“Stop being so melodramatic,” I said. “You don’t have a heart, either.” I looked around for my case on one of the pews. I started taking my clarinet apart to put it away.
“You didn’t answer my question,” said Dana. “You playing tomorrow morning?”
“I haven’t rehearsed with the ensemble yet,” I said. “I just got this out of the mothballs the other day. Reverend Enoch said they’d be working up some Christmas carols.”
“That will be nice,” said Dana. “I used to like Christmas, when I was alive.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, looking down as I closed my case. “Why do keep writing that graffiti all over the city? Don’t you think you’re being rather childish? At least I know now how you’re getting around the city. Only I didn’t think bats could use spray paint.”
I looked up at the loft again; Dana was gone.
A sinister laugh echoed around the empty sanctuary, trailing off into silence.
Sunday morning, Avie fetched Mama in her Pacer and we took her to church at the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. I wore my dress, and it was actually the first Sunday morning religious service I’d attended there. Reverend Enoch preached on how we might dream of a better life or daydream of better worlds, but that we only had this one reality to live in, so we’d better all work together to make the most of it. I couldn’t help but think he was responding to the Nerene message in a not-so-subtle way. Afterward, in the parking lot, Mama said, “That wasn’t so bad. At least you girls haven’t joined a cult. Although I think your pastor needs to preach the Gospel of Jesus more, not just this New-Age progressive politics jazz.”
From the trunk of Avie’s Pacer, Mama pulled out three foil-wrapped pumpkin pies in tins. “These are for your friends in Ann Arbor this afternoon,” she said.
“Three?” I said. “Oh, Mama, you didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”
“I know how everybody loves my baking,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek. “You say hello to that little Simon for me.”
While Avie went to drop Mama off back home, I took the pies and ran upstairs to my apartment to change from my dress into my jeans and hoody. Although the weather wasn’t biting cold for late November, I wore my Ms. Megaton Man uniform underneath. I wanted to be ready for anything, since we were going to Ann Arbor, and although we planned to steer clear of Megatonic University, you never know when you’ll run into the random Killer Bot.
When I came back downstairs—I almost forgot the pies and had to go back to get them—and walked back to the church parking lot, Avie was just pulling in. The Youthful Permutations—Tempy, Soren, Kiddo, and Ben Franklin Phloog—emerged from the residence, along with Rubber Brother and Kozmik Kat, all bearing bottles of wine and coffee cakes and so on. We all piled into the Y+Thems’ white van along with our goodies. Everybody was going except Dana, whom nobody had seen for days except me the evening before, when she disappeared like a vampire bat from the choir loft—the only thing lacking being a puff of smoke. This was ironic, because she was the one who most wanted to meet Stella. For the sake of the occasion, I would have been willing to forgive Dana all the nasty graffiti she seemed to have put up all over the city, but nobody knew what had become of her.
I hadn’t been able to reach Donna Blank, either; one could only imagine what kind of Thanksgiving weekend she was having in Royal Oak as the Phantom Jungle Girl with the Brilliant Brain and Cowboy Gorilla.
When we got to Ann Street, the old house was warm and cozy. Trent and Stella seemed more like a couple than ever before, and Simon was delighted to visit with Kozmik Kat again. You’d have thought the Y+Thems would be in awe, meeting the former Megaton Man and See-Thru Girl, but there was none of that living legend business—Stella and Trent both deflected any conversation that went toward megahero shop talk. Stella had said that dinner would be no big thing—just leftovers—but of course she had essentially cooked a second bird, and all the stuff we brought made it a second Thanksgiving feast.
As we sat around the dining room table too stuffed to move, Tempy delighted everybody by demonstrating his megapowers. “Watch this!” he said. He disappeared into the kitchen, then reemerged, saying, “Happy Thanksgiving!” Then he walked through the living room, back up the hallway, through the kitchen again, and into the dining room, making a big circle, and said, “Happy Thanksgiving!” again. “See? I can manipulate temporalities—that’s why they call me Tempy,” He did this corny routine over and over, but every time Simon screamed for him to do it again.
Simon was delighted—he was even more delighted with Ben Franklin Phloog, whom Koz calculated was Simon’s first cousin once removed. Simon seemed especially fascinated when Kiddo nursed Ben Franklin right at the dining room table before the plates were even cleared and coffee and dessert served.
But Stella didn’t seem amused—by any of it. She’d seemed even more cold and distant than usual from the time we’d arrived and all through dinner. As the Y+Thems cleared off the table—Jasper made quick work of it with his rubbery limbs—and Kiddo stuck her boob back in her top, Stella took me aside in the living room. “I have some sweaters and things upstairs I want to get rid of, if you’re interested,” she said.
“Sure, I love hand-me-downs,” I said, and followed her up to her bedroom.
Alone now, I asked, “Is everything all right? You don’t seem exactly thrilled to see us.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Stella. “When Trent said you were going to be bringing your friends, I suppose I thought that meant your friends who are students, civilians—not megaheroes.”
“Audrey, Hadleigh, Nancy, and Chas you mean,” I said. “But they all went home to see their folks this weekend. It’s the Y+Thems who don’t have any family—they just have each other, and for the most part they’re always cooped up in that church residence. I thought they would appreciate a nice, home-cooked meal—instead of the soup-kitchen version they dished out on Thanksgiving.”
“That’s fine,” said Stella. “It’s just me. But when I said in the courtroom that I chose to live in the Midwest for a reason, I meant it. I plan to raise Simon as a normal child. I insist on it.”
“Nobody’s wearing their costumes tonight,” I said. “At least as you could see. And Tempy wasn’t really using his powers of manipulating temporalities. And nursing a baby—you see worse than that all the time in a hippie town like Ann Arbor.”
“I realize that,” said Stella. “But Soren is a saber-toothed tiger, and Koz is a talking cat. And Rubber Brother…. You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
“The point is, Simon is getting old enough that he’ll remember these things later on, and I don’t want that. I don’t want his childhood memories filled with Yarn Men and talking felines and Malleables stretching all over the place at mealtimes. I don’t want him growing up thinking that kind of thing is normal.”
“What about Ms. Megaton Man? Is she banished from Ann Street, too?”
“Of course not, Clarissa,” said Stella. “You’re welcome here any time, as long as you don’t fly in the window in your primary-colored outfit.”
“I’m wearing it right now,” I said, tugging at my hoody. “You designed the first one for me, remember?”
“That was different,” said Stella. “I wanted to encourage you. I was excited for you, happy for you. I didn’t expect you to immediately fly off for a two-week orgy, but…megaheroics are fine for you, Clarissa. All that adventure nonsense suits you. You’re young. But it’s not the life I want for my child. You understand, don’t you?”
“I understand you’re ashamed of your past,” I said. “You always have been, from the time I first met you. You’re ashamed of who you are, but you’re still the See-Thru Girl. You’re still a Meltdown.” I had seen Stella—in the very kitchen below, on Thanksgiving morning two years earlier—turn herself naked with but a thought and inadvertently reveal a hint of the Meltdown megapowers she so strenuously repressed. “And you want to pass that shame onto your little boy.”
“He’s my little boy,” said Stella. “And he’s going to grow up normal. He’s not going become some government-controlled, sideshow freak—a pawn in some Multimensional chess game in which he has no agency.”
“Is that what you think I am?” I said. “Is that what you think the Y+Thems are?”
“I know that’s what I was, and I’m not going to let that happen to Simon. I won’t permit it. It’s nothing personal, Clarissa. I love you and your sister; I think you know that. I don’t mean to be insulting. But I hope you’ll respect my wishes. I expect it.”
Stella and I brought down armfuls and shopping bags full of sweaters and stuff she wanted to getting rid of. Avie, Kiddo, and I divvied them up on the living room sofa; Tempy snatched a lovely pink cashmere that looked hardly worn. There were also some baby clothes Simon had already outgrown that could still be worn by Ben Franklin Phloog.
“Stella must not be doing too badly,” I remarked to Trent, who was watching from the hallway, “to afford to be giving away such fine clothes as hand-me-downs.”
“Rex keeps coming through with alimony, or child support, or whatever you want to call it every month,” said Trent. “Plus, Stella’s parents,” he intimated, who were retired academics, “are loaded, too. And, despite whatever Stella would like to believe, ICHHL is still charging us next to nothing for this house. So the former See-Thru Girl and Megaton Man are still wards of the state.”
“I hope everyone’s taking leftovers home,” Stella announced from the dining room.
“Leftovers—Gad,” I said, feeling my stuffed stomach. “She’s such an Earth Mother.”
“Did she give you the ‘Ann Street is now a Megahero-Free Zone’ speech upstairs?” asked Trent.
“She sure did,” I said.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” said Trent. “She’s just going through a phase.”
“Neurotic, lifelong denial, more like,” I said.
Stella and Jasper were setting out carefully foil-wrapped packages of leftovers on the cleared dining room table for us to take back to Detroit.
“That reminds me,” I said.
I had brought three of my Mama’s homemade pumpkin pies especially for the occasion; two we consumed with plenty of ice cream, but one remained warming on the stove, still wrapped in foil. I threw on my coat, grabbed the pie, and slipped out to the back yard when nobody was looking.
I remembered how the Partyers from Mars especially enjoyed Mama’s pumpkin pie when they had shown up for desert two years before. Given Stella’s prohibition on freaks, I didn’t think inviting them in would fly. But I still wanted to share the blessings of the season, even though they were extraterrestrials, so I marched through the back yard and around to the back of the garage.
“Hey Anton, Apollonia, Officer Pup,” I called. “Skull Guy, Squid Girl, Tortoise Person. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
The empty patch of grass between the back of the garage and the chain-link fence was empty, except for a telephone pole in the corner. It was silent and dark.
I reached inside my coat pocket, pulled out my visor, and slipped it on. I tapped the temple.
“Yoo-hoo, Partyers,” I called. There was still no sign of the George Has a Gun, the green-domed, blue saucer I knew the visitors from outer space had parked there.
“Who are you talking to?” asked Kozmik Kat.”
“Koz!” I cried. “Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Are you bringing the gift of pumpkin pie to invisible pilgrims and Indians?”
“In a way, I am—pilgrims from another part of the galaxy,” I said. “You remember the Partyers from Mars? Their saucer is parked here under a cloaking device—at least it was, last time I checked.”
“How do you know, if it’s cloaked?” asked Koz.
“I can see them with my visor,” I said. I tapped the temple again and scanned the corner of the yard. There was still no sign of them. “Only they don’t appear to be here at the moment.”
Koz tapped his cyclopic goggles. “I don’t see anything,” he said.
“You said you took the battery out,” I reminded him.
“That would explain it. Maybe they flew the coop, or upgraded their cloaking software.”
“Here, hold this,” I said, handing him the pumpkin pie. I grabbed a couple pieces of fire wood from along the side of the garage, brought them back, and laid them down in the grass near where I’d last seen the saucer. I laid Mama’s pie carefully on top of them. “Maybe they’ll come out when they’re hungry.”
“There you are,” said Trent. He’d thrown on his coat and come out to the backyard after us. “You’re friends are packing up the van; they’re fixing to leave soon.”
Trent and I stood there for a moment, looking at each other.
“Koz, do you think you could give us a moment?” I said.
“If there aren’t going to be any Martians, I’m not hanging around,” said Koz. He turned tail and went slinking off along the side of the garage to the driveway.
“I’m saving up for a car,” said Trent. “Soon, I’ll be able to visit you in Detroit.”
“That’ll be nice,” I said. Our fingers entwined.
“I’ve never wanted to be Megaton Man more in my life, these past few months, just so I could fly to Detroit to see you.”
“Big, bulky guys don’t do it for me,” I said. I knew this for a fact, having tried Sampson “Body by Nuke” McSampson. “I like you the way you are, Trent.”
We kissed. Plenty of tongue.
From the driveway, the van honked.
“Don’t be a stranger,” said Trent.
“I won’t. Happy Thanksgiving,” I said.
I turned around. The firewood was still laying in the grass, but Mama’s pumpkin pie was gone.
Next: Mona Lisa Outer Drive [Link available 04/03/2020 10:00 am EST]
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