Dough Boy

Dear Readers:

Some need speed, Dough Boy needs to knead. I hope you will find this tale worth your time, and please do comment, as I'd love to get a conversation going. Do you relate to any of the characters or situations? Are there similar stories you'd care to mention? Any favorite images, descriptions, or moments in the tale? Your favorite pastry, perhaps? Thanks for reading!

Note: "Dough Boy" has been accepted for the December, 2010 issue of Sugar Mule magazine.


"Dough Boy"

At nine years old, he was Duke for a day.

“Where are you going, Mikey?” A note of alarm wormed into Mom’s voice. Three weeks since moving in, he had not ventured out.

“I’m Duke now. Goin’ a play.” The conk of wooden bats falling hard on the asphalt, the sweet siren song of boys out in the street.

“Out?” Her cookie-dough hands kneaded each other red. She studied her son: his dumpling chin set, his furry brow knit. “Have fun out there. Duke.” The forced note of cheer for herself more than him. She reached for his ballcap to straighten the bill, was shocked when he jerked his head from her hands.

Thus Duke ventured out.

“Duke,” sneered the leader, a crew-cut called Butch. “You’re like, The Duke of Earl, man?”

Duke chewed Dubble-Bubble, stared up through eyes sheltering deep in dark sockets.

“Don’t you like, talk, Duke Man?”

“Sure he does.” A blond scarecrow called Skeeter clapping Duke on the arm. “He said his name’s Duke. Like, put up your dukes,” miming boxing moves.

“Right,” Butch grinned, feinting towards Duke like Sugar Ray in close. “You like using your dukes, Dukey boy?”

Duke rooted to the grass, stared up in wonder at Butch.

“Weird little troll, tell you that much.”

“You bat first, Duke,” smiled Pee Wee.

Middle of the street, pitch the rubber ball to yourself. Up ball, grab bat, swing bat, miss ball. Again and again. Then once again, his tongue sticking out. Boys’ mitts on their heads crowning bursting clown faces.

“It’s like, a magic wand,” Pee Wee grinned without malice. “Like that guy on Ed Sullivan, kept those balls in the air without touching his wand, like the wand repelled `em.”

They grinned. He did too.

“What’re you smiling at, dick head?”

“Hello, Duke.” She tried her best to make it sound real.

“I’m Dick now.” He compressed jagged lips, scrunched his dark brow intently. She laid down the spatula, reached for her boy. He collapsed within himself, and she held back fearing an explosion.

“I’m don’t think you should play with those boys, Michael.”

He broke down and trudged into his room.

She bought him a cowboy hat and a cap gun, a chemistry set, a model T-Bird with a full set of paints, a model World War II battleship. The chemistry set took.

Hour on hour, alone at his desk, wearing safety goggles, filling beakers precisely, measuring out powdered chemicals in tiny spoons, making fizzes, colors, sizzles, stinks. The stink bomb freaked the dog, she ran wildly in circles. The invisible ink was runny but worked. Spy notes to his mother, placed in the dog’s collar, ferried to the kitchen. His mom played along, to her way of thinking: Brownies in ten minutes, hon. He cut her reply into dozens of little squares, dissolved them in a phosphate solution, hunkered back down to work.

His dad, in the doorway, was hip to it all. “How’s it goin’ in there, Professor?”

Professor. A jagged grin turned halfway to Dad; then back to work. A rubber band boat propelled by baking soda and vinegar traversed the bathtub and never capsized. Based on all these successes a new mission was born: the launch of a missile from the front lawn. This was, however, an insecure zone. Mission Control postponed the launch. Captain America, Batman, Mad. Tag with the dog. Itching powder upon the dog’s skin, washing her off with hose-water and tears. TV days turned to weeks, school days to school months; then John Glenn flew, and the mission was on. He marched to the front lawn launching pad on a clear-sky Saturday at cartoon time. The rocket thin and red, the launching pad filled with baking soda and vinegar for massive propulsion. The backyard test launches had all been successful. Goggles up, missile in. Three figures on Schwinns soared up the street. He turtled over the launching pad and heard but did not see Butch, Skeeter, and Pee Wee whizzing past, and didn’t see Pee Wee peeling off like a fighter pilot, wheeling towards him in a wide graceful arc up the slope of his lawn.

“Whatcha doin’, man?” A not unfriendly smile.

Without looking up, too intent for distraction: “Missile launch,” and some technical mumbles. He prepared to shake up the launching pad, then remembered his dad’s admonitions. “You gotta back up,” he told Pee Wee. Pee Wee, not wee now just a bit undersized, smiled amiably and backed up his bike. Pleased with his eminence, “The Professor” mumbled a private incantation, shook the launching pad up, and pointed it at the sky. Fizz-whoosh-whizz and up flew the missile but not very high. Foamy vinegar flowed down his fist, acrid smell pinched his nostrils.

“Ai right,” Pee Wee smiled, respecting the effort and the intent. He rose up on the pedals of his red three-speed, piston-charged into the wild blue yonder.

“Is your name Professor?” they giggled.

All girls were from space, but especially these two: pretty and tall, with inscrutable laughter, and a cryptic conversational code. Did they wish to hug him and call him their mascot, like Jill’s giggly high school friends? Or did they simply think him a jerk.

“I’m ... I dunno,” he shrugged.

They laughed even harder, teeth glinting like knives, and pinned him against the hallway wall next to a poster of Abraham Lincoln.

“You told Miss Conners you were the Professor,” chid the taller one with a smile that put him in mind of Catwoman.

“I ... she said it was a good answer,” he told his sneakers. In an unguarded moment, he’d proclaimed to the teacher, and all of the class: “They call me Professor.”

“You’re a professor,” snickered the less tall one with Barbie-blue eyes, “and you got a C on the cell worksheet?”

He withered beneath their Siamese cat gazes, took hope when he saw that Pee Wee was approaching abreast of two friends. “Hey Pee Wee!” he hailed, desperation amping his voice up to audible. A friendly word would set him free.

Pee Wee was Gordy away from the block. “Pee Wee,” one friend chortled. Pee Wee/Gordy flashed rodent teeth. “Hey there, Dick Head.” Then he punched his friend on the arm and led him on a chase down the hall.

Solace was found in brownies warm, soft, and sweet as his mother, who looked askance when he reached for a second, then softened her look when his eyes pooled with shame. “Have some milk,” she sighed. Milk was good, there was no harm in that. Homework in the kitchen each day after school. Two brownies with milk and no more than two, she drew the line there. He accepted her terms with a sly smile. His belly, face, thighs all rounded like dough. “My Pillsbury Doughboy,” she said with a grin somehow loving and mocking. She jabbed at his belly, he slapped her hand. She recoiled and he swatted the milk glass, flooding the table and soaking his pants. The next day the incident went unspoken. Two brownies with milk, and she too ate brownies as he did his homework. They dipped them in milk, compared milk moustaches, blew bubbles with straws, played follow the leader with fingers fast-walking through trails of crumbs. A little more time and she softened too.

Dad noticed. Was mute. He kept it inside, day on week upon month. “What’s with the damn brownies,” he finally burst.

“Michael’s learning to bake,” she lied upon reflex. “It’s a good thing, to bake. Cooking’s useful for boys. Like on cookouts.”

“Cookouts.” They had never had cookouts. He waved her away with the back of his hand, trudged vexed and defeated back to his den–his principal reason for buying the house.

She gazed at her son in silent communion. He scrunched his brow to mirror her gaze, and she burst out laughing. The baking lessons began the next day.

A plump kid at his high school had not many options. His tenth grade friends, two, were geeks years before geeks were cool, and they murdered each school day with corrosive jibes at themselves and each other, then scurried, relieved, to the safety of home. His home reeked of smoke, for his mom had lost weight and smoked instead, and exercised, hacking, in front of the tube, compliant with Jack LaLanne’s kindly commands.

“I’m gonna make lamb chops tonight,” he said on the landing of the sunken living room. She sat in her leotards, spread-eagled before the TV, gazing up at LaLanne in his snug workout suit, his curly hair mop and his crinkly smile with ineffable longing. “Lamb chops,” he repeated, letting his head droop. She turned to him but did not seem to see. “Lamb chops,” she repeated, as if mouthing a prayer she no longer believed. Her blue eyes sparkled beneath pooling tears, and he thought them the most beautiful eyes in the world, thought her the most beautiful thing in the world. She blinked; tears cascaded. He wished to run to her to kiss her face dry, stood rooted as if at the edge of a pond. She reached out arms like willow branches, but he would not venture into the pool.

He avoided his father whenever he could, not easy to do in a three-bedroom rancher. He craved a TV, Dad exploited the craving: “Tell you what. Bring me A’s in science and math, and it’s yours.” An A in chem but a B in geo; Dad pressed his advantage: “How’s about we finally work a little of that excess poundage off, champ? Lose ten pounds by July, and we’ll get you that tube. Fifteen maybe.”

He ate Weight Watchers with his mom for a month. They watched TV snacking on roasted salt mushrooms and whole wheat toast topped with warm cottage cheese and cinnamon. One night he folded a chocolate-covered cherry from his secret stash into her hand. She was intent on her program, didn’t notice at first, then opened her palm, flung the cherry up into the air as if it were a spider. “Don’t do that, Michael!” Three Kool Menthols finally calmed her down. Two days later the weigh-in came. He rigged the scale and got the TV.

He watched summer TV reruns and news with his proto-geek friends, one gangly, one plump. They hee-hawed at the world while feasting on treats that he prepared nightly from his birthday cookbook: stuffed mushrooms, steak tartare, deviled eggs, and, one night, for a tea party lark, white bread sandwiches with the crusts cut away, putting on British airs, erupting in hysterical cackles and shrieks that pleased his mom in the living room and irritated his dad in the den. He was slicing olives for an encore round of sandwiches when the gangly one, Ted, flounced to his side: “These are just divine, darling” in an emergent baritone, and Michael had to use the back of his hand, still clutching the knife, to wipe the tears that pooled in his eyes. His father appeared, Ted flew like a leaf back into Michael’s room. Michael looked joyfully up at his dad.

“Your friends are weird, Michael.”

No movement save a tightening of stubby fingers on the slicing knife and a rapid dissolution of his gaze into darkness. “You are.”

The plump one, Eugene, was soft in spirit and body. It was he who remained when the summer got long and Ted tired of watching the world on TV, soldiers wading through rice paddies, hippies protesting out on the streets. “Girls Girls! Girls!” Ted had gawked at comely protesters in fringed leather vests revealing flat bellies, had followed them out onto the streets with no plan. Eugene was content to cocoon. The two sat on cushions on Michael’s bedroom floor and leaned back against the bed like a pair of young rajahs. Sometimes they’d drift away and doze. “Keep the door open,” Dad advised, “it’s an oven in there.” Or lean against each other, arms melding like warm dough. “I said open,” Dad snapped before fading away for the rest of the summer.

They sent him to college to broaden himself. Dad set him up to rush his old fraternity, but he wandered the streets of Berkeley instead: incense, flyers, bookstores, bums. With two days left in Pledge Week, Dad cancelled “a big meeting,” flew up, pressed him into the rental car, drove him in silence to the frat house, and sat in the car watching him trudge up the broad stone steps all the way to the door. He became a Tri-Delt. Although forced upon them, although short and soft, he was accepted provisionally: for when they’d venture to Telegraph, conspicuous frat boys, he was quick with terse quips to fend off hippie jibes; and when they were drunk and couldn’t count change, he’d figure tips and settle bills neatly. They first called him Doc, then Beaver, then Scuzz, but none of these stuck. Then Keith, a querulous jock and a leader, dubbed him “Chuck” with a wink over beer. Although it was senseless it sounded okay, for he didn’t know that act followed name: Late at night, after the first big house party of the year, Keith and some others who had been denied drank hard and bitterly on the deck. Keith pointed his cleft chin at Chuck, and his minions pinioned his arms behind him, pulled his head back, pinched his nose and opened his mouth to a river of beer. They held his head up, the countdown began. “One small step for man” joked one when Chuck stood up with the vague idea of walking to the bathroom; Chuck doubled over as if shot and erupted, fell onto the deck barely conscious. The vile muck pooled under his cheek. One guy placed a laurel wreath on his head, and a sympathetic soul lagged behind to drape a blanket over him. Three days later Michael pulled the washer’s discharge tube from the drain pipe before fleeing the house.

He took an apartment off campus with a slender English major who peered at him wryly as if Michael were Raskolnikov–right there in the room for his amusement. Robert, the English major, was beloved of Noreen, a English major who thought him an intellectual giant, though really he was just more assertive than she. They supped on hors d’oeuvres that Michael created, clutching petits fours with long fingers raised as they supposed they would hold cigarettes at cocktail parties one day. They allowed Michael to listen to the erudite chats, and one night even allowed him to chime in beneath Robert’s indulgent Freudian gaze and the soft gaze of Noreen, whose long, slender fingers, pale as the skin of a veal calf, clutched at his heart to the point of pain, sending him to the bathroom to catch his breath. His desire for Noreen showed in his clumsy efforts not to stare at her, she intensifying his longing with gazes tender with comprehension. Robert too comprehended, called him “Robert Cohn” and “Holden” and alluded unsubtly while drinking gin to The Lord of the Flies’ Piggy and Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy; then punishing Noreen, Michael, and himself with contrived noisy sex sounds broadcast through the walls to Michael’s next door room.

He took a studio in the flatlands of Oakland and stared at matches burning down to his fingers. There was only a hot-plate, he lost fifteen pounds. Walking through Sproul Plaza, its antiwar rallies and civil rights rallies and leaflets and petitions for every cause that could be labeled “left wing,” his underdog’s heart drew him to the Young Republicans’ table where a girl with a bouffant Trisha Nixon-do stood flag-carrier straight as a pack of hissing leftists maligned her. He joined The Young Republicans on the spot and fell for the girl, who was well groomed and forthright and knew what she wanted, and looked at him with princess eyes that entreated rescue from some lonely castle. He licked envelopes beneath her direction despite the glue’s bitter taste and his well-hidden distaste for Nixon, his puppyish constancy wearing down her resistence. One day she joked that a well-known Democrat was a “secret fag.” He allowed dismay to flood his eyes, she stared at him apprehending a roach.

He disappeared within his studio bunker with matches he let burn down to his fingers, candles in the dark and matching dark music, and Chef Boyardee eaten cold from the can, two or three at a time. He studied sometimes, sometimes he wandered Telegraph silent as a monk on a vow of silence, with a cryptic grin implying he knew. One midnight he walked the cold streets of Oakland beneath the overpass as if daring muggers. He returned home excited but also disappointed not to have been beaten. His mother called often, a frightened shrinking voice. He’d search but not find the power to speak. She’d call him again and he’d watch the match burn down, resolved not to blow the flame out until she stopped ringing; she rang and rang and he burned his fingers. He wrote heartfelt jagged poetry, struggled through five poor sit-ups, cut the phone cord with a kitchen knife and poured himself into letters to his mother that he cut up and burned.

Jill drove down from Oregon and tugged him north. He begged her to drive the long way through the coast redwoods and spoke no further word, which was okay with Jill. “Never you mind,” she said with a lilt she’d acquired since high school. He stared strangely out the passenger-side window as they wound beneath paternal redwoods that enfolded them in protective shadows. She shared a house with four young women studying theater at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She prepped her roommates, and hey spoke softly when he came out of Jill’s room three days after arriving, calling him “Jill’s famous brother,”“M’lord,” “Master Michael” and such so as not to affright him. He sank into the soft couch and cradled his mug of hot cider, and they allowed him to be himself and to partake of them being themselves: hopeful, worried, nurturing, frank. They poked him sometimes with kind, curious eyes.

“I need a job,” he squeaked in two weeks. Jill found him a job at a preschool for university parents. The kids considered him a kid for his shortness and softness and because he spoke seldom in a voice that was soft except at story time, when he became a whiny toad, and a gruff-but-kind bear, and a know-it-all owl, and a flummoxed giraffe with such conviction that they crawled up close to stare at his lips to see if he really, truly was human. One bold girl padded onto his lap; then the rest of the curious animals clambered up too, each in turn forcing another off the cliff of his knee. The owner stared down at him with some apprehension–she’d checked his background, but what to make of this strange, shy creature who smelled of cookie dough and cried so like a baby elephant that a boy pressed a tissue to his moist eyes.

Miss Miranda Plum, a young would-be elementary school teacher, was drawn to him too, became his kitchen assistant and then his apprentice. Head down over his workspace like a boy preparing to launch a toy rocket, he taught her to make golden wafers encrusted with sugar crystals, Janey Fingers (Janey: the owner) and “Michael’s Famous Brownies” (as Miranda called them), all from scratch and wonderful, though he’d make the brownies only twice a month, for his hips still carried the remnant of his boyhood excesses. To teach her his secrets he had to speak some, but mostly he mimed his instructions, sometimes unfolding in mock comic confusion like Charlie Chaplin mistaken for a baker and pressed into emergency service baking for the king. Surrounded by kids and having no escape, he let them crown him with a white baker’s hat spangled with arts-and-crafts cookies.

On weekends Miranda took him to the woods to a womb-like shadowed glade, a secluded fern dell, a clear river gathering late summer chill. She pointed toes down and plopped into the water, he followed her in with a splayed, foot-first jump that scattered squirrels. His dam burst in hysterics of wild forest howls; her eyes widened to receive him like a vision of nature. She apple-bobbed to him, they came together like a building snowflake and whirled in the water, bobbing, spinning, clinging, squeezing. They enclosed each other, he dove into her essence, fell into her “Baby;” her baby; her own.