Bended Twigs

By Vincent R. Vurchio

A forty year old missing person case becomes a homicide, and three generations of the Cleary family are forced back together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483509013

Book preview

Dianna

Chapter One

1974

It was only sex!

Marianne Cleary couldn’t understand why her husband was so upset, just because she’d spent the night in a neighbor’s house, in a neighbor’s bed. That neighbor’s wife had spent the night in another neighbor’s bed, and that one somewhere else, and the pattern had gone on right around the neighborhood. Bill had had a neighbor’s wife to take to his bed, and if he hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity it wasn’t her fault.

It’s a beautiful morning, she said, pointing out the kitchen window to the bright blue summer sky. We’ve got two healthy children. They were Stan, who was seven, and Kim, who was five. The kids were in the front room watching cartoons on the TV and hopefully the volume was up high enough they couldn’t hear their parents arguing about something they were too young to understand. Marianne just hoped they weren’t watching those horrible Warner Brother’s cartoons, the ones so saturated in violence, negative energy, and stereotypes. She couldn’t understand why TV was still allowed to show such things to children. We’ve got a nice house, a nice car, a nice yard. We’re healthy, still young enough to enjoy life. Not rich, but Bill made enough to support them comfortably, and in a few years Marianne hoped to go back to work and make them even more financially secure. We’ve been to a great party, had a really nice time. Well, she had, anyway, and she supposed everyone else who’d been there did. Bill looked like he’d been through a battle. I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal out of nothing.

Nothing? Bill fit the textbook description of being beside himself, if such a thing actually exists. Nothing?! Nothing is never just nothing. Nothing is always something!

Marianne wasn’t going to even try and decipher that. Her brow wrinkled as she forced his words back out her ear. If she allowed them to stay inside her head she’d get a migraine. Bill recognized the look in her eyes. It came right before she stopped listening to him altogether, so he switched to something more metaphorical, something she could possibly relate to more easily. You make it sound like all I caught you doing was using margarine instead of butter on my breakfast toast.

That didn’t work, either. "Honey, we’ve been using margarine for years. What the heck does that have to do with anything? And besides which, you didn’t catch me doing anything. It was a key party. That’s the whole idea of a key party. You go off and have sex with other people. Christ! You had the chance to fuck Abigail Waters, and, damn, honey, I’d fuck Abigail Waters given half a chance and I’ve never even fucked another woman before in my whole life."

Or had she? Not that she recalled, but there was that weekend her sophomore year at college when she woke up on a Sunday morning naked on the floor of her best friend’s dorm room and couldn’t remember anything past Friday night. She was tangled up with two other similarly unclad girls, only one of which she knew, she was sore as hell and coated in something icky she refused to consider identifying, and so maybe she had fucked one or both of them and just didn’t remember. What difference did it make, anyway?

Believe me, he said. I wanted to. You think I haven’t thought about it? Abigail Waters was hot stuff. Every man in Macintosh Acres wanted to fuck her.

So, why didn’t you?

His finger whipped back and forth between the two of them. Because we’re married.

As if he had to remind her. You know, she said, the way you say that, you make marriage sound like everything I wanted to avoid. She turned away from him and pretended to be doing something near the stove. I don’t know why I let you talk me into getting married in the first place. That wedding put my father in hock for the next ten years. The food was lousy, two of your cousins got in a fist-fight on the dance floor, and we certainly didn’t need a minister’s permission to have sex. She laughed sardonically. That ship had sailed already, if you care to recall.

Bill was unimpressed by any of this. She turned back to face him and her heart melted (just a little) when she saw that hurt puppy expression he got when tragedy struck, that helpless lost waif look that had nudged her into falling in love with him despite the little voice in her head that said Not a chance!. How many times since did she wish she had listened to that voice! But there that look was again, and it was so hard to resist. She came to him and cupped that puppy face in her hands.

We were so happy when we first met, she said. You were so funny and romantic. He’d still had all his hair. Apparently premature baldness ran in his family. Both genders. Her first impression of his grandmother when they met was that she looked like Daddy Warbucks with sagging tits. I couldn’t help falling in love with you. It just felt so natural to be with you. So long as the conversation never wandered into politics. His conservative outlook made her crazy. She hadn’t thought it would eventually become a game-breaker. She might not have been wrong. We could have been just as happy living together as we’ve been being married. Maybe more so.

My parents would have disowned me.

By her estimation, that would have been a plus. His father’s idea of a good time was when the local TV station ran a Twilight Zone marathon on New Years Day. His mother’s angelic face hid the world from her satanic self. They were Ma and Pa Kettle played by Gomer Pyle and Elsa fucking Lancaster.

She let go of his face. But then we had the big wedding and now we have careers and mortgages and kids and I love our kids and I love our home, but we’ve become a business that has to be maintained. We’re not fun anymore. And we’re not alone. Everybody in this whole neighborhood feels the same way.

That confused him. About us?

About themselves! Really, he could be thick as cement sometimes. About all of us. About this whole middle-class bourgeois boring life! He turned his back to her. She followed him, lecturing as she came. We all bought into the same bullshit our parents did, the whole American Dream, even though we knew better. We knew better! And now we’re all miserable. So, we found another way to put a little spark back into our lives.

Sex, he said, making it sound like the word should be accompanied by lightning bolts and the thunder of retribution. Free love. All that leftover hippie crap.

She turned him around, held him by his upper arms, and forced him to look at her. Honey, listen. I didn’t mind giving up my career to raise our kids. Really. But, Jesus, what am I supposed to do around here all day? Stand outside and watch the laundry dry? I tried getting involved in politics but you didn’t like that. But, really, Nixon? Twice? So I tried hobbies. You have any idea how boring that can get after a while?

Not soon enough, by the looks of things. The house had two dozen grotesquely overgrown plants all dangling from macramé slings she had made. He had a closet full of hand-painted tee shirts he’d have to be really drunk to wear in public. They had a collection of clay pots that would have shamed the Hopi. The attic was full of half-finished acrylic landscapes and abstract sculptures made from old lamp parts.

So, sex is just another hobby now?

She said inside her head, It is the way you do it! Out loud, she said, But, it works! It takes away the boredom.

Which would be fine except for the fact that we are married!

Yes, we are, she said flatly. We are married. In the eyes of God and by the power vested in Reverend… She couldn’t for the life of her remember the minister’s name. …Whatsisname, by the state and in front of all those witnesses. We have the documentation to back it up, just like the title for the car and the deed for the house. But, that doesn’t mean we own each other.

His back straightened. Yeah, he said. It does.

The seventies were transitional years for American middle-class suburban society. Counterculture mores born on big-city college campuses had spilled out with the graduates into mainstream America. Instead of people relaxing after a hard day’s work with a few beers or the ubiquitous dry martinis, with Mantovani dripping from the hi-fi and the lights properly dimmed, they lit up joints and played rock and roll too loudly on tape decks that would soon be shrunk down to pocket-size. Marriage wasn’t as unquestionably necessary as it had been to their post-war parents, and it hadn’t yet become the total anachronism it would turn into for their own children’s generation. Marriage was still a comfortable tradition that people treated uncomfortably untraditionally. Weddings were being held on beaches and in cow pastures, they had self-proclaimed clergy with no traditional congregations performing hip and updated rituals. And even after the fact, people refused to let the bonds of matrimony become actual bonds. The free love generation had taken its toll. Mate-swapping, swinging, open marriages; all that and more as people tried to salvage tradition with a little untraditional innovation. Sometimes it worked, and most of the time it didn’t. Marriage was cute, but more and more it was just a set-up for the inevitable divorce.

Marianne and Bill had been married for ten years. They’d met in college. She had been a svelte, perky, vivacious strawberry blonde and he had been tall, handsome, with dark wavy hair and a somewhat overgrown mustache and beard. Facial hair was the closest he came to protesting anything, and he shaved the day he graduated and every day since, even on weekends and vacations. He was an accountant, now, and she was a former grade school art teacher, former because the necessities of middle-class family life made holding a job while raising children impossible. When the kids were grown she intended to go back to teaching, and maybe get into administration where the real money was because teaching artistic concepts like abstraction and design to kids who hadn’t yet mastered coloring inside the lines was at best frustrating. She’d only turned to teaching in the first place because her creative talents weren’t enough to make her any money. And money, in the 1970’s, was everything.

Almost everything.

With their combined salaries they’d made a nice life for themselves. They had a reasonably new ranch house in a development that had once upon a time been an apple orchard and was appropriately called Macintosh Acres. It was the kind of rubber-stamp neighborhood that had inspired the song Little Boxes. It was everything she and her contemporaries had derided in their youth. Their house was on Pippin Lane, between Fritter Street and Cobbler Avenue. They drove an almost-new Dodge sedan. They had the two kids but no pets. Pet ownership was, to Marianne, akin to slavery. In another few decades PETA would have applauded her attitude. Bill thought she was nuts. But, altogether, they had created a comfortable world for themselves, and it was more than enough to satisfy Bill’s needs.

But not hers.

The Barkers two blocks over on Granny Smith Boulevard had held a party the previous night at their house, and eight couples from the neighborhood had been there, Bill and Marianne included. Wine flowed freely, and the air was filled with the pungent odor of some really fine grass that came all the way from Vietnam. Seemed they knew how to grow more than rice over there. No wonder we had fought so hard for them. Talented people!

A stereo had blared music, an odd amalgam of hard rock, classic rock, and something new on the horizon referred to as disco. People had danced (not always with their own partners) and they talked, they laughed as if insane at jokes that weren’t in the least bit funny, and they feasted on cocktail wieners wrapped in pie-crust triangles and miniature egg rolls that came frozen in a box. When the food and the pot was gone and the booze almost so, then had come the big finale.

Meg Barker, a prematurely matron-like nurse in her mid thirties, had used a large wooden salad bowl to collect all the men’s house keys. When that was done she paraded around the house, shaking the bowl to mix the keys well, and then stood with the bowl on top of her head (so nobody could peak in) while the women one by one reached in blind and pulled out their tokens. Whoever’s key they got, that was who they went home with. It was a delightful game that somebody had either seen in a movie or had read about in a book that was then made into a movie, but whatever the origin it seemed a great way to keep the revolution alive long after the need for revolution had shriveled and died. Everybody paired up and walked out. The party was over, but the fun was just beginning.

For most of them.

Marianne had chosen Tod Wentworth’s key. Tod was a very athletic car salesman. He always mowed his lawn on Red Delicious Avenue while shirtless, displaying the muscles he maintained with the free-weight set in his garage. She walked off hugging his upper arm, giggling at the size of his biceps not because she was all that impressed by them but because she knew her acting impressed would inflate his ego, which would then inflate something else and that was what she’d come to the party hoping for; a nicely inflated male ego.

Bill had, as stated before, won Abigail Waters, inarguably the best-looking woman in all of Macintosh Acres. Tall, blonde, large-breasted, long-legged, and prone to wearing far too much eye shadow, she was the hottest chick around and everybody had whistled knowingly as she and Bill had left the party together. Even Marianne had hooted for them.

So, you’re telling me you really didn’t fuck Abigail Waters last night?

I already said I didn’t.

You didn’t make out with her at least? Nothing? He shook his head, almost apologetically. Didn’t feel her up?

With his head down he couldn’t see the look of total disgust in her eyes, but he felt it nevertheless.

I slept on the couch, he said.

Marianne could not contain her laughter. That is the most pathetic thing I have ever heard! The whole neighborhood was banging away like rabbits, and there you were, sleeping on our couch, probably with every stitch of clothes still on, including your shoes, while the closest thing this town has to a Playboy Bunny was waiting for you naked in bed not twenty feet away!

Bill inhaled deeply. For Christ’s sake! The kids were home!

So were Tod’s. So were everybody’s. Sleeping like babies. Which is what they are, and what we are not!

Bill sighed. So I guess that means you…slept with Tod.

How dismal could he get? No, I didn’t sleep with Tod. I fucked Tod. He fucked me. We fucked our brains out, is what we did. It was a key party! That’s the whole idea of a key party!

And if I’d known it was a key party we wouldn’t have gone!

She snorted. "You wouldn’t have gone, maybe."

He stared at her a long time. Her looks hadn’t changed a bit since they’d first met in college. She shaved her legs and under her arms now, which was a definite plus, but she still had golden blonde hair that she kept boyishly short, still wore paisley and stripes together, still had that devilish sparkle in her eyes while she watched him undress for bed at night. But, so much else had changed that he barely recognized her. So that’s it? he asked her, afraid he already knew the answer. You want to sleep with other men, now?

Her eyes squinted. This was make-it or break-it time. Her mother had always said you could never go wrong with the truth. Marianne had never fully believed that. The time had now come to test her mother’s theory. Now? she said. You think this was the first time?

He looked dazed.

You think I haven’t already slept with other men? She laughed again. Honey, what else is there to do around here? Listen to the grass grow? And, you think I’m the only one? Open your beady little eyes, Baby! Macintosh Acres is Peyton Fucking Place! Where the hell have you been?

He sounded angry and yet crushed. With you, he said. Where I belong.

Another laugh, this one tinged with pity. Well, honey, you have some catching up to do. Go ahead! Fuck anybody you want. It’s okay. It’s just sex! What about that new secretary at the office? The young one. Becky Whatshername?

Beth Armbruster. She was twenty-two, fresh out of college, single, pretty. Bill had already done what Marianne suggested, in his mind only, while masturbating in the shower.

She’s cute, Marianne went on. Kind of small upstairs, but what the hell! You’ve never been all that much of a breast man anyway. Eh? Oh, for Christ’s sake! What are you blushing about? It’s only sex!

Bill wasn’t blushing, he was enraged. He fought back the tears, refusing to give her that satisfaction. She already thought so little of him, as a man, as a husband, for all he knew as a father (good God; what if the kids weren’t his?) the last thing he wanted was her thinking of him as a wimp. I can’t believe this is happening.

She tried to get near him. He wrenched away from her.

Jesus, Bill! I had fun. Is that such a crime? We all had fun. All except you. And Abigail, I imagine. She laughed, thinking about the irony; Macintosh Acres’ resident sex-symbol sleeping alone while a fuck-fest raged all around her. You do remember what fun felt like, right? We used to have fun, once. When we met, in college? You couldn’t wait to get in my pants back then.

Yours! Your pants! Not everybody’s! Not just anybody’s who came down the pike. And certainly not a neighbor’s who we have to see every goddamned day now! What am I supposed to do the next time I run into Tod? Compare notes?

She tried to touch him. He wouldn’t have it. Honey, you have nothing to worry about in that respect. Tod may have wall to wall muscles but he isn’t half the lover you are. It was an incredible lie. Tod had sent her to places Bill didn’t even know existed. So had a few of their other neighbors, and the man who came to clean the furnace last winter. She thought she’d never get the smell of fuel oil off her before Bill came home from work.

But she’d had enough of her husband’s attitude. Christ, she said, "it’s