Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

goes.”
    “Maybe so, but Mama seems to think that Lenore—”
    “Fuck Lenore!”
    Under other circumstances, I might have teased him about the language, but there was real anguish in his eyes. He ran his palm along the tabletop, smoothing out his thoughts. “Lenore moved out last week. She’s living with Mel Brook.”
    He said Brook, of course, not Brooks—I heard that clearly—but I got the visual, anyway: Lenore humping away on the beloved entertainer. There had to be a joke in there somewhere—maybe about Christians needing Jews for the rapture, or Lenore confusing Mel Brooks with Mel Gibson—but I managed to restrain myself.
    “Is Mel Brook…someone I should know?”
    He shook his head. His right eye flinched convulsively a couple of times—a tic I hadn’t seen before. “Just this gal she knows from Sunday school.”
    Now I had a new image of Mel: a Bible-toting dyke in a gray mullet and a polyester pantsuit. I couldn’t help myself: “She left you for a woman?”
    “No!…Hell, no!” He looked like I’d smacked him in the face with a dead flounder. “She didn’t leave me for anybody. I…banished her.”
    “ Banished her?…Jesus, Irwin.”
    “Could we leave His name out of this?”
    “Then don’t talk like a biblical patriarch. Who the hell says ‘banished’?”
    “I asked her to leave. I told her to leave. Stop messing with me, Mikey. This is tough enough as it is.”
    I offered him penitent silence, then spoke in a more reasonable tone. “What happened? Y’all always seemed pretty content to me.”
    That was not the right word, of course. Complacent would have been closer to the truth. Irwin and Lenore weren’t as lovey-dovey as they once were, but they seemed resigned to each other for the rest of their days. They had their McMansion and their grandkid and their Personal Savior, and that had seemed a gracious plenty.
    Lenore, you should know, wasn’t always such a tight-ass. When Irwin was courting her back in the seventies, she was still the social director at a convention hotel in Tallahassee and something of a firecracker. She was Christian, but she didn’t make a fuss about it. She was pretty and perky and sometimes very funny, and my folks were openly amazed that their crazy-ass delinquent son had landed someone so presentable.
    This was roughly the time they learned of my “lifestyle,” so they were thrilled to have a shot at breeding grandchildren. Irwin bought a split-level house just down Abbott Springs Road, and the four of them—Mama and Papa and Irwin and Lenore—became a functioning unit. Mama would write me effusively about their long road trips in Irwin’s Buick: one to Colorado, as I recall, and another to New York to see Cats on Broadway. For almost a decade they were Lucy & Ricky & Fred & Ethel, and it got to me more than I would ever have imagined. I would not have traveled with them for anything in the world, but I felt a little jealous sometimes. More of an outsider than ever.
    Then Papa died and I announced my antibody status and Mama dug deeper into Jesus, taking Lenore with her. The reason seemed clear at the time: they had already lost one Tolliver man and were almost certain to lose another. Whatever their petty rivalries over the years, grief had made them sisters in salvation. Or so I believed. Irwin did, too, poor bastard, so he began strangling his cuss words and praising the Lord to placate the women he loved. Like me, a fellow male, he was oblivious to the real bond between Mama and Lenore, the secret they had planned on taking to their graves.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself.

    Irwin’s eye was flinching again.
    “Do you remember,” he said slowly, “what you told me out in the boat?”
    It took me a moment. “About Mama wanting to leave Papa?”
    He nodded darkly.
    I still wasn’t getting it.
    “It’s the same reason, Mikey.”
    “The same reason as what ?”
    Right about then our drinks arrived, though I have no memory whatsoever of interacting with the waitress. The glasses just materialized and remained there undisturbed, while my eyes stayed glued on my brother’s flinching eye.
    “The same reason as what?” I repeated.
    “The same reason I threw Lenore out. Her and Papa…they were having a…I mean, you know, they’d been…” He lifted his palms from the table and tilted them to parenthesize the unspeakable. The gesture wasn’t graphic but it screamed its meaning.
    I gaped at him. “How do you know