Naked, on the Edge

What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book

Mail was in.

Elliott Mitchell stepped out onto the front stoop, pleased and shocked, as he usually was, at the cool roughness of the concrete beneath his bare feet. From the mailbox he pulled assorted flyers and bills, several final notices, and two copies of the new phone book, wrapped in brown paper. Elliott flipped through the collection, taking mental notes of the exciting variety of places from where the mail had come and filing this information away in the hungry places of his mind.

Washington, D.C. Chicago, Illinois. Pueblo, Colorado.

If there had been an atlas in his home like there had been in school, he would have looked them up. But the names themselves were intriguing enough.

He moved back into the house. His feet found the familiar, sticky warmth of the worn living room carpet. The cats peed here, and food from Elliott’s mother’s tray were spilled here. Elliott couldn’t keep up with it all anymore, and so the cats continued to pee and his mother’s trembling hands continued to knock portions of her dinners onto her lap and onto the floor.

Elliott dropped the stack of mail onto the top of the console television. He moved into the small kitchen. The windows were closed and locked in defiance of the cool May air. Orange flowered curtains hung, dead weights against grease-iced window glass.

There was a two-liter Dr. Pepper in the refrigerator.

Elliott took a long swing from the bottle. “Ellie?”

Elliott’s stomach fluttered. He turned toward the call. A drip of cola caught in the corner of his mouth then slid to his chin. “What, Mom?”

“Can’t hear my set. Come turn it up, honey.”

Elliott put the drink back and closed the refrigerator door. On the door, held by an eclectic collection of magnets, were some of Elliott’s best school papers from seventh grade. A spelling test, “A+!” A letter written in social studies to George Washington, “96, Good job Elliott!” Numerous charcoal, pastel, and watercolor artworks, each praised in red ink on a Post-It Note by Mrs. Pugh, the middle school art teacher. He would have had Mrs. Pugh in eighth grade this year for advanced art if he had not been so sick.

But he was homebound now.

He was sick. He knew it, Mom knew it. So very, very sick.

“Just like me, Ellie,” his mother had said. “If you go to school today I might just be dead when you get home.”

And so homebound was the only answer.

“Ellie? The set, I can’t hear it and I can’t get up. My back’s doing it again.”

Elliott went down the short dark hall to his mother’s room. The door was open. Smells of stale cigarettes, medicated vaporizer, and illness hung around the doorway, a heavy, eye-stinging, invisible fog.

“Set, baby, fix it for me.”

He stepped into the bedroom. The floor here was bare linoleum. It was not the pleasant coolness of the front stoop; it was clammy on the skin of his soles. But it was familiar. It was never a shock.

Mom was on her back in her bed, three pillows against the wobbly headboard, one set of white fingers curled around the bedspread at her chest, one set around a cigarette. In the blue light of the television set the skin on her thin face seemed to jump and crawl. When she smiled, Elliott could see her bad teeth. There were three of the cats on the bed with her. Next to the bed was the wheelchair the health department had given her.

“Can’t hear it,” Mom said. She drew on the cigarette. The smoke blew back out in the wind of a violent cough. She found her voice and said, “Just a little volume, honey.”

Elliott stepped to the tiny black and white set on Mom’s dresser, and poked at the volume button until the chattering voices were uncomfortably loud. Mom said, “That’s just fine, Ellie.”

“Anything else?” There was a cat turd on the bottom of Elliott’s foot. He looked at the bottom of it but couldn’t see except that it looked dark and it felt soft and warm. “You need anything else?”

“Teacher come yet?”

“No. Mrs. Anderson won’t be here until two.”

Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the tube on an oxygen mask. She let the smoke out then said, “I just can’t rest good today. I’m hurting. My back, my heart is just hammering like it wants to come out. Lay with me ’til I’m asleep.”

I thought you wanted to watch T.V., Elliott thought, but didn’t say. He went to the bed and lay down beside his mother. The mattress was lumpy. When his mother turned to him, her breath was familiar and strong.

“I feel a little better, honey.” One side of her mouth went up in what might have been a resigned smile. It looked as if even her face hurt her.

Mom always called Elliott honey. Never “Wee-wee Boy", or “Poop-Man” like the kids at J.E.B. Stewart Middle School did. Elliott’s mother loved him, even as she was dying. And she had been dying since Elliott had been in third grade. Her heart was bad, she told him. She couldn’t breathe very well because she was born with bad lungs. Her stomach made juices that were poison. Her muscles were giving up inside her skin and her nerves had so many short-circuits the doctors couldn’t even find them all. Month after month she begged him to stay with her and not go to school. Daddy had insisted, getting Elliott onto the school bus when he could. But most of the time Daddy left for work before the school bus came, and three days out of five, Elliott would stay with his mother because if she died when he was at school, what would he do then?

Elliott awoke to the tune of All My Children. He had slept next to his mother for almost two hours. It was time to find something for them to eat for lunch. At two o’clock, the teacher, Mrs. Anderson, would come.

Mom didn’t eat much of the bean with bacon soup Elliott fixed. She let Elliott wheel her to the bathroom but she would not eat with him in the living room. She insisted on a tray in bed, and then only sipped a couple of spoonfuls and ate the chips Elliott had put in a bowl for her. She didn’t want the Dr. Pepper he’d poured for her. She wanted Sprite. There wasn’t any Sprite, so Elliott told her he would make a list for Daddy when he came home. He could go into town and get Sprite for tomorrow. Mom settled down with another daytime show, and Elliott took the tray to the kitchen, ate his own soup and Dr. Pepper in the living room, and looked through the mail again.

He opened the bills and put them back on top of the console television in a pile for his father. He slid the paper cover off of one of the telephone books, and stopped.

The cover was not the normal photograph of the mountains or a rolling cattle farm, as the phone company was prone to use. It was, instead, a painting. A reproduction of a childish watercolor, splashed in its brilliant colors across the book’s broad cover. The painting was of a bright blue-green ocean, and a sailboat with smiling people all lined up together on the deck. White sparks flashed in the water; the sky was pink and yellow. At the bottom of the painting was the title, “The Adventure on the Sea” by Mosby Paulson.

Elliott cleared his throat, feeling the raw pain of his own illness, his own poor blood and bad lungs and short-circuited nerves.

Inside the front cover was a description of the painting.

“Mosby Paulson is a sixth grade student at J.E.B. Stewart Middle School. She is in Mrs. Connie Pugh’s art class this year, and entered the phone book competition along with over one hundred middle school students throughout the county. All the entries were judged by a panel of artists in the area, and Mosby’s work, ‘The Adventure on the Sea’, was selected as the winner for its lively depiction of movement, brave use of effective colors, and originality of shape.”

Elliott looked back at the cover. Happy people smiling, going somewhere on a silly sailboat in a bright sea. Going places that Elliott would never know, places he would only see as return addresses on the mail that came daily to his dented mailbox.

He could have done better. If he’d been in Mrs. Pugh’s art class this year, he would have entered the contest. And he could have won. He could have had his art somewhere besides on the door of the greasy refrigerator.

“Ellie?”

“What?”

“Can’t find my lighter. It fell down under the bed, I think.”

Elliott went into his mother’s bedroom and dug under the bed while his mother coughed above him. In the shadows beneath the bed, one of the cats blinked at him. He found the lighter on top of a dust-softened sock then crawled back out.

“Thank you, honey.” Mom took the lighter, pulled a cigarette from the pack on the little table by the bed, flicked it three times before it would catch, and then settled back into the pillow with a long, raspy draw.

Elliott watched his mother. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks sharp and skeletal. Her nose was runny and her hair was thin and short. The cigarette smoldered in her mouth, the tip glowing and dimming as she sucked on it and eased the smoke out through her lips without even taking the cigarette out.

“Mom?”

“Huh?” The cigarette did not come out; the word was muffled.

“The new phone books are in.”

“So?”

“Thought you’d want to know.”

The tip of the cigarette grew longer, glowing, smoldering. Then she said, “Our number ain’t in it, is it? They put an unlisted number in there I’ll sue ’em, I tell you that.”

“No, we ain’t in there.”

The ash on the end of the cigarette trembled.

Elliott wondered how long until it fell to the bed covers.

“Good then. You go watch your T.V. until the teacher comes. I’m tired.”

The ash wobbled. If it fell to the bed, it would catch the covers on fire. People who smoked in bed sometimes burned themselves to death, Elliott had heard.

“Go on now,” said Mom.

Elliott went on.

Mrs. Anderson knocked on the door just after two o’clock. She was a young woman, hoping to get a permanent job with the county as a reading specialist. Now she was teaching two students on homebound, Elliott and a boy named Richard who lived on the other side of the county and who had polio real bad because his parents never got him his vaccination.

Elliott opened the door and Mrs. Anderson put on her happy-to-see-you smile. Sometimes, when Elliott heard her car out front, he would watch her get out of her car and come up the walk. She never wore that smile when she thought he wasn’t watching.

“Elliott, how are you today?” Mrs. Anderson’s eyebrows went up. They were funny

eyebrows, drawn thin with a black pencil. Mrs. Anderson always smelled strongly of perfume, as if she didn’t like the smells of Elliott’s house.

“Okay.”

Mrs. Anderson came into the living room, her huge, unbuttoned white spring coat billowing out when she moved.

She removed the coat and hung it on the door knob of the closet. She studied the sofa a moment, and then sat down with her briefcase in her lap. She said she liked cats but Elliott knew better.

Elliott sat on the lawn chair, the only other piece of furniture in the living room except the console television. His teeth found a loose piece of skin on his lower lip and began to chew.

“And your mother,” said Mrs. Anderson. She opened her brief case and took out Elliott’s lesson plan book. “How is she today?”

“Same,” said Elliott.

“Mmm-hmmmm.” Mrs. Anderson looked up at Elliott then. Her happy-to-see-you smile was getting heavy, folding back down into an expression of perfunctory purpose. “How are the exercises going?”

“Exercises?”

“We talked yesterday about your weight gain, Elliott. You’ve put on quite a bit of

weight since you stopped attending school. Without a physical education program daily, you’re doing your body a disservice.”

“I didn’t do any exercises yet. I tried one but my stomach hurt so much I stopped.”

Mrs. Anderson sighed. Elliott had heard that sigh many times, from many of the adults at his old elementary school and at the middle school. On the days when Elliott had been put on the bus by his father, he would have severe stomachaches during homeroom. He would go to the guidance office but the counselors would try to talk him into staying. They would sigh that sigh and say, “Elliott, if you just stick it out through lunchtime you’ll feel better.”

Some of the days he would make it through art class, but then insist on calling his father to pick him up. Most days, however, he would wet his pants or have a bowel movement and the counselors had no choice but to send him home.

He was a sick boy. He was sick like his mother, and he needed to be home with her. If she died when he was at school, he would never forgive himself.

Elliott looked at Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Anderson looked at Elliott. She said, “Are your parents treating you all right, Elliott? How are you getting along with them?”

“Fine.”

“Anything you’d like to talk about?”

“No. We’re getting along okay.”

She rolled this around on her face a little then let it go. “How about your math, did you finish the page of fractions?”

“I finished some of it.”

“Why not all of it, Elliott?”

“I didn’t feel good.”

“And your civics?”

“I didn’t have civics.”

“Yes, you had a chapter to review. We were having a quiz today.”

Elliott said, “Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

“Get out your books,” said Mrs. Anderson.

They spent the next two hours working through civics, pre-algebra, and English. Elliott wondered if a homebound student could have entered the phone book contest. He wished Mrs. Pugh could come at least one hour a week out of his required twenty and let him paint for her.

Mrs. Anderson left at four, and Elliott watched cartoons until six. He made supper of canned chili and chips and talked his mother into coming into the living room and eating on a T.V. tray next to him. She spilled half of her chili then went back to bed. Elliott rubbed most of the chili up with one of his father’s dirty work shirts from the laundry basket.

He lay on the sofa and looked at the phone book. He could have painted one of his horse pictures. Mrs. Pugh had loved his horse pictures. She said they made her feel free just to look at them. He could have made a picture the judges would have loved. He could have had his work on all the phone books in the county.

Elliott fell asleep on the sofa. His father woke him when he got home from work at ten, and sent the boy to bed.

“Ellie, I can’t get up. Bring me the bedpan.” Elliott was in the bathroom on the toilet, looking at the phone book. His teeth clamped together. He hated doing the bedpan. He pretended not to hear.

“Ellie, can you hear me? I need the pan ’fore I make a mess in here!”

Elliott squeezed his eyes shut. Behind his lids, he saw horses running, watercolor horses free and running across a yellow beach and into the water where a happy white sailboat drifted to places far away. When he opened his eyes, he saw his pants down around his ankles, and the penis his mother said the boys would make fun of when he had to dress out in gym class when he went to the middle school.

“The doctor made a mistake when they circumcised you, Elliott. You got a little penis with a nick in it and when the boys see you they’ll laugh.”

When his father had sent him to school anyway, Elliott would wet his pants before gym so he could go home to his mother. For a couple of days the assistant principal walked him to gym and made him dress out. Elliott had hid behind a locker door and cried while he pulled on the royal blue gym shorts. In the gym, he refused to participate, and sat against the wall with the back of his head pressed into the cinder block. After a half-year, Elliott was removed from gym and got to sit in the library and read a book during second period.

“Ellie!”

Elliott went to his mother’s room. She was already wrestling with the hem of her nightgown, tugging it up. “Hurry, honey!”

Elliott took the pan from the floor and slid it under his mother’s rear end, then turned away. He could hear the water run into the aluminum, could hear his mother’s airy whistle of relief around the cigarette in her mouth.

“Done, honey.”

Elliott took the pan into the bathroom and dumped the urine into the toilet. He glanced at the phone book on the -bath mat. Mosby’s painting lay face up, taunting. Elliott rinsed the pan and took it back to his mother.

She was already drifting to sleep.

“You want some breakfast?” he asked.

“My stomach hurts too much to eat. I don’t got long, Ellie, I know that. This morning I’m in more pain then I been in for a long time. What you gonna do when I’m dead?”

Elliott did not know what to say. And so he said, “Do you know where my crayons are?” “Your what?”

“Crayons.”

“Crayons? Those things you had when you was little?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure we throwed them away, Ellie. You ain’t got time for crayons. I need you. You and me, we need each other, we’s so sick.”

“I want to make a picture.”

“Make yourself useful. Vacuum the living room so Mrs. Anderson won’t turn us in for neglect.”

“I want to make a picture. I’m better than Mosby Paulson, so much better you wouldn’t believe it.

“Go.”

Elliott vacuumed the living room. The large cat turds he pushed under the lawn chair because the vacuum nozzle wouldn’t pick them up. He put the vacuum back into the living room closet and went into the kitchen. The windows were still closed, and through the glass he could see the wild and green weeds of his side yard.

Horses eat wild, green weeds.

Beyond the weeds was the neighbor’s house, a blue trailer with a homemade deck on the front. Elliott knew that the Campbells lived there. They were old people, and they used to have two children, but the children were taken away to live in foster homes because the Campbells beat them up a lot. For the first time in the four years since the Campbell children were gone, Elliott wondered where they were.

Maybe Pueblo, Colorado. Maybe Washington, D.C.

Maybe across the ocean on a white sailboat.

In a junk drawer, Elliott found several broken pencils and a knife. He sharpened the pencils with the knife and then drew a horse on a paper bag from under the sink. It wasn’t as good a horse as one would have been had he had his crayons, but it was a fast horse. It ran with its mane and tail in the wind and its nostrils up to the air.

He hid the picture in his bedroom. Then he watched T.V. until Mrs. Anderson came at two with her concrete smile and bright white coat and her chastisements and her nose that couldn’t stop twitching at the smell of cat pee.

Elliott’s father woke him from his sleep on the sofa.

On the console television, David Letterman was well into his monologue.

“You snoring, boy,” his father said.

Elliott wiped his eyes and tried to sit up. “Was not.”

“Was too. You getting so goddamned fat you snoring like an old man. I wish to hell you was back at school where you belong.”

Elliott blinked and rubbed his eyes.

“You can do jumping jacks, boy? Get up and show me a jumping jack.”

“I’m tired.”

“You’s always tired. I work two goddamned jobs and you say you’s tired. Show me a jumping jack!”

Elliott stood up and looked at his father. The man was short and dark and thin. His eyes were angry, dull chips in his skull. He worked at the cigarette factory in the day and the Exxon station at night. Elliott remembered his father saying once that he wished Mom would go ahead and die.

It would be easier on us both, he had said.

Elliott had cried at that, and crapped his pants, and his father had never said anything like that again.

“Do it,” said his father.

Elliott jumped up and down three times, slapping his hands together over his head as he did. When he stopped, his heart was hammering, and his breath was glass in his throat.

“I’m sick,” he sputtered.

“Hell you are.”

“I’m sick!” Elliott ran to his bedroom and cried and wet the bed. He didn’t change the sheets until the next morning.

Elliott got the mail from the mailbox. He stood on the stoop and sifted through the stack. There wasn’t much today, just a folded Little Caesar’s Pizza advertisement and a bill from the oil company. He looked through the untrimmed hedge bordering his yard at the Campbell’s trailer. He wondered how beat up the Campbell children were when they finally got taken away.

He went in and ate some Frosted Flakes from the box.

He then fixed a bowl of red and green colored special edition Cap’n Crunch left over from Christmas, stirred up some instant milk to wet it, and took it to his mother. She was awake, and clawing at the arm of her wheelchair.

Elliott put the cereal on the nightstand. “Where you going, Mom?”

“Got a cramp, got to get up and get it out.”

“Want help?”

“Course I do. I can’t do without you.”

Elliott watched for a moment. In his mind he saw his mother falling onto her face and breaking her nose. He saw the blood bleeding down into the cracks of the old linoleum where her food scraps and her cats’ pee and her own existence seemed to be drawn.

“I know,” he said. He helped his mother into the chair. “I got you breakfast.”

“Mixed it up with that shitty milk I bet.”

Elliott watched as his mother struck a match on the side of the wheelchair and touched it to the tip of the cigarette in her mouth. “Well, yeah.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I’ll give it to the cats.”

Elliott’s mother grunted and drove the heels of her hands against the wheels. The chair shuttered then rumbled out of the bedroom.

Elliott followed her. She went into the living room and, after tugging weakly at the curtains until Elliott pushed them back himself, settled before the window and looked out at the yard and the cracked walkway and the untrimmed brush and the county road.

In the kitchen, Elliott picked up the phone book.

Already, Mosby’s picture was scuffed and bent. Elliott’s father had used the phone book, treating the artwork like he treated everything else around him, as something made for a purpose, a single purpose, and nothing else. Daddy’s purpose was to work and sweat and be the head of the household. Elliott’s job was to go to school like all the other boys his age, like the boys who weren’t sick and didn’t have a ruined penis and boys whose mothers weren’t dying. And Elliott’s mother’s job was to go on and die.

The grimy, strawberry-shaped clock over the stove read ten-thirty seven. Mrs. Anderson wouldn’t be there for another three and a half hours.

Elliott went into his bedroom and sat on his cot. He pulled the paper bag out from under his pillow and looked at it. Even with the dull pencil lines, the horses were good. He was a good artist.

“Mom, you think I draw good?”

From the living room, “Huh?”

“You think I draw good?”

“Whatever.”

Elliott put the horses back. He walked through the living room into the kitchen, where, through the open door, he looked at the bony back of his mother’s neck as she looked out the window.

He turned on the stove. He filled a pan with water and set it down to boil. He wondered how bad scald burns would look. He wondered how they would feel. He felt around in the junk drawer and took out the little knife he’d used to sharpen his pencil. He wondered how hard someone would have to push if neck skin were to part?

He went out to the living room and stood beside his mother. From outside, he could hear one of the cats picking on the door.

“Cat wants in,” said his mother.

Elliott opened the door. The cat trotted in. Cats, Elliott thought, were like his father. Cats believed people had a single purpose—to serve them. Elliott shut the door and the cat ran into the kitchen in search of food.

Elliott said, “You want me to turn on the T.V.?”

“My head hurts too much. You gonna give me a massage on my head, Ellie?”

Ellie rubbed her head with one hand. In his other, he held the little knife.

He stopped then, because he could hear the water boiling in the kitchen. He left his mother and went to the stove.

Before lifting the pan, he went to the window, unlocked it, and pushed it open an inch. May air bled into the stuffy room. The crusty orange curtains trembled as if afraid of the breeze.

Elliott looked over at the Campbell’s yard. He thought about their children, taken away.

He turned Mosby’s wrinkled painting upside down.

The knife was put back into the drawer for next time, if the water wasn’t enough.

Then, sucking air through his clamped teeth, he poured the boiling water over his forearms and hands. The skin erupted, bright and red. Angry, insulted blisters rose.

He caught his breath.

“Goin’ back to bed, honey,” said his mother. She rolled away from the living room window and out of sight.

He caught his breath. Pale cat hairs, floating in the kitchen, landed on the burns and beneath the pain he almost felt a tickle.

He dropped to the kitchen chair and lost his breath; he thought of horses running running running on sand toward the beach. He caught his breath again.

Elliott faced the living room and the front door and he waited for his smiling teacher with the white, billowing sailboat coat.