"The Terryberries"
by
Timothy Stillman
The Terryberries were monks in the hood. The Terryberries were punks in the ghetto. The Terryberries were a fright to behold. The Terryberries were an alien duet from the Moon. Mostly, though, the Terryberries were rich brother and brother, age 12 or thereabouts. And mostly they were bored out of their mind in, of course, Terrytown this fine night of winter frost.
Their parents, Abe and Maureen, were entertaining their entertainment challenged cheerless crowd of lout rich friends in the blue period wall to wall elegant parlor where they consumed alcohol and other assorted charms that might be gotten into the system in a myriad of ways. There in the glass house with the glass pink chandelier and the glass full length mirrors all over the place and the silver black grand piano with glass cases folding over protective- like photos of the Terryberry family smiling toothily, and ancestors, not so toothful, from lofty old somewhere or other.
And the Terryberries could not be defeated, Ike and Zan, because they were curious little curlicues around which their most unfortunate names came and collected them and made them a quirk here in Derryville Manor Estates, which was a big name for a little pond of nouveau riche who were never terribly sure how they got to be newly rich in the first place.
The Terryberries lay on the second floor hardwood, natch, and they looked down between the slats of railings of pine wood, natch, at the people below. All doctors down there in some field of hidey ho or thereabouts which impressed each other and the schools, the hospitals, the mental facilities, the universities they were each stuck into as a plum is stuck into a pudding, Christmas or no. And they were filled to the gills with smoked salmon, which Ike and Zan didn't get a bite of at all, at all,, but had to eat dry turkey sandwiches in their room.
And those buffoons down there were stuffed with straw in their party clothes which cost more than the national GNP of some third world countries, all there in their white and black, though their flesh managed to always be around only flesh like the others, somewhat nubby orange. Oh, they flashed their ice cubed liquor sloshing smelly glasses and they flashed their watches and their teeth went tick tick tick as their tonsils offered up little soup tureens of words that everyone there on the couches and chairs and throw pillows, all so carefully and so stiffly and casually arranged, thought was tres gauche.
As the Brothers Terryberry looked at each other in the darkness of the second floor where they were sequestered with their computers and TVs and CD players and DVD players and their DVDs (only Criterion classics would do) and each other for it was each other they liked to play with the most. For they gave each other strength. To set off stink bombs. To pull the tail of the cat at the most inopportune moment, the most opportune for them though. These little hellions that the Derryville Manor Estates didn't like one little bit.
But the Terryberries pater and mater were the most of the nouveau riches in income if little else, so their guests put up with what was to happen, tried to prepare themselves for it, for actually it was nothing new to them, this kind of tomfoolery, and did nothing when the little boy devils ran to the dining room earlier this evening, where all the swells were supping and chatting boringly--oh pish posh, oh deery me, hand me another of those divine rolls would you Rupert darling?, there's a dear-- at the long dining table with its delicious, pleasing to the eye and taste buds, foodstuffs heaped hotly and tantalizingly aromaed on plates, its wine glasses sparkling in the smaller chandelier glow overhead, the table covered with linen, and golden candle lit:
Thus entered the Terryberry boys who turned round, pulled down their pants, bent over and mooned the highly offended morally monocled lot of them, gasps and shivers and good grief, I never--well, boys will be boys: Routine 3 C, thought one guest, hi ho.
And the Terryberries giggled as they began to, brazen boys, pull up their pants in now shell shocked silence of nose turning uppers, just as Taffy the Maid was bringing in the silver coffee urn and the so very delicate cups from some other century of China, all on a silver precious to be sure tray, and saw what these miscreants were doing, and threw the whole kit and caboodle up in the air in horror and screamed like a fire engine--as the little ruffians who should know better finished pulling up their pants up and ran like hell to the second floor, knowing nobody would dare pursue them. Because nobody ever did pursue them.
Well, it caused the air to be ironed like stiff linen. And the guests wanted to say get rid of these far too indulgent in the extreme parents, get rid of these kids who are like monkeys in a zoo. But they could not. Because the Terryberries senior, Dad at least, owned the bank, which owned the estate, the town, and the people who lived in the town. So the villagers could not raise their burning torches and storm the tower in anger.
Because they lived in the tower and there are less pleasant things to give homage to than those two little winsome dollops of frivolity and jazzology who put the memories of fleeting or long flown youth in their cups and made them drink deeply from the ambrosia therein, except it seemed to be more like a taste of seltzer water shooting out of a flower on a clown's coat lapel.
Thus once again pretending to have noticed nothing at all, not the blanched what are we to do? faces of the parents, not their own tiresome outrage, they tried to pick up where they left off before they were so rudely interrupted.
Kill, the guests thought. Kill, the host and hostess thought, as they helped Taffy with the breakage of things as she flittered here and flittered there and became kind of a ghost of some ancient comedy that was of course never seen by right minded people these days. W.C. Fields would have loved her.
Later:
The boys watched, from the second floor, the guests in the parlor. The boy Terryberries were the spiders spinning their web. And the gold coins they tossed down invisibly on the oddly angled and seemingly so short and small people from this height, considered their next "highly original coup," while their victims waited for the next whoopee cushion, for the next shaving cream pie in the face, for the next spaniel to fart in old Miss Lacy's class, entrance made through the windows left strategically open by the Terryberries on the hottest day of the year.
Gag and laugh. Puke and guffaw. Yes, they were quite a caution. They took nothing seriously. When Peggy Gernpoke got married to Davey Dukedoyle, on their wedding night, mind you, when Peggy and Davey were in their new home, doing what they had been doing for three years but this time legally, the Terryberries had somehow commandeered the happy young couple's (though to tell you the truth, they were getting kind of long in the tooth, and bored with each other by now) undergarments and hung them out to dry on their flag pole so the whole world would see them when the sun shown again on the morrow, and a good put out red faced time was had by all.
"They think they are so damned smart," eye glasses free Ike said to thick glasses doomed Zan, who everybody called Zen, because they were all rich and pretended they read those expensively bound leather volume books bought by the yard like wall paper, in their much highly overrated libraries. Probably fake books to boot.
Ike never called Zan Zen, because it was declasse, he thought, and there were some levels to which a highly intellectual child who wore his school clothing, coat and tie included, in pride and dexterity and poshness that he knew his parents and his classmates and their parents hungered for, would never stoop to doing. Mostly he called Zan booger, cause it pissed Zan off and that made Ike laugh real big time.
Though they read a lot, Ike and Zan didn't quite know what the appellation kids gave to them of the word "fruits" quite meant. They were also told by those who were in the lesser grids of wealth herein noted that maybe they should show up on the Jerry Springer show.
Of course, the brothers had no idea who that was, and little idea what television was, save for nature programs and DVDs like "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and the occasional guilty pleasure Nick at Night programming, and they warm and safe in their cocoon of ivory and glass and marble world with all the correct paintings hung on the wall and all the correct sculptures in the foyer and the living room, that Mom Terryberry made none too well, but always of figures of antiquity, even if you couldn't tell just who they were, in her little workshop. Zeus? Aphrodite? Who knew? The guests oohed and ahhed and waited for Mom Terryberry to give them a clue.
The little workshop that had the darling wall of window and half ceiling of same that captured the setting sun on the river blue, all like a painting all in depths of wonder and nostalgia so colorful and haunting you could just about drown in the art of it, the sheer noblise oblige beauty and wonderment of it.
Where Mom Terryberry bedded down on a mattress in the closet, tiny it was, of that workroom, with the principal of Precise Heights School, name of Mal Mandrake. An open secret to everyone but Mr. Terryberry who lived in ledgers and computer printouts all the live long day, ten to three. Then golf for three hours. Then home to his most satisfied wife who he did not have to satisfy, to his immense relief. He thought it was just her time of life. And not Mal Mandrake cutting a rug with the Terrryberry boys' female progenitor.
The Terryberry boys were hot house plants. They held hands everywhere. They were never one without the other. They bathed together. They slept in the same room, though not always in the same bed. They ate together. Went to Parson Persimmon's church together each Sunday. They studied together. They needed the touch of each other. And as pre adolescence drew its strings to a close, they discovered there were things they could do together that made them believe they were far more satisfied than Mom was with Mr. Mandrake who was not what you would call inordinately good looking. Or a big ball of fire either.
The Terryberries were terrors. But they were sissy terrors. Which didn't matter. Because all the kids here were sissies as well. But the others never hung in the hammock with sis or bro either. So the Terryberries' main chagrin, which they didn't notice, became their major mainstay--their daring leap into incest, though the Terryberries had no word for it, would not have known it if it had bent down and biting them in their royal yellow school crests on their plum color school coats.
So being girly meant being masculine. And doing things unspeakable with your bro meant doing things that made everyone respect you while at the same time it made everyone want to stay the hell away from you. Well, not you, it's the Terryberry brothers I'm talking about.
Mr. McGrew (those old enough to remember the cartoon character on TV who sold beer and lightbulbs and played Ebenezer Scrooge in an animated version of " A Christmas Carol") (many of those who remembered that could still feel wistful and could still sing a few bars of young Scrooge's song, "When You're Alone in the World,") called him Mr. Magoo, though not to his basset hound face, for he had a sour sense of humor which meant he had none at all, and could honk that monster nose to a farethewell when he was bored. And he only was not bored when he talked. Always and endlessly about his favorite subject: himself. And talked. And talked.
The boys heard waves of his nasal voice floating up to them, "You know that damned Walt Disney. Ever notice how in every picture, every cartoon, every nature film, he made and all the ones that were made after, there was always some butt joke. I mean the Christers are going after Disney three ways from Sunday on a pogo stick named Bubba, but they never mention this. You'd think they would. I been watchin' Disney movies all my life and I noticed it when I was a young kid. Started making notes. Got a big compendium of them by god." His voice slurry and burpy and tongue control lost.
Then he drank some more wine, lay his head back on the plastic covered pink couch, (the Terryberries had money, taste and furnishing sense was another matter) his body half off it, and promptly went to sleep, dropping his glass and spilling a tiny bit of wine onto the hard wood flooring.
The boys looked at each other. He was: A butt freak. A Disney freak. He was drunk. God. This was great. He never would have said this stuff if he hadn't been totally plastered. They'd blackmail him. But he was the head of a construction company. What could he have they would possibly want? But still, it was too good to pass up. They already had themselves. They had more money than he did. Or at least their parents did.
But if they could blackmail him for a lot of extra money, then, with that money, they could hire a hit man to kill mater and pater. But it would only make it all worse. Remember the Menendez brothers. Hmmm..what were two little hellions to do?
The boys lay side by side. They gave the pinky swear about that. They lay in their underoos. Zan in Spiderman underoos. Ike in Batman underoos. They each hated Superman in any incarnation or incantation at all, from comic books to movies to personal boy wear.
"I shall jump off the railing and into the party." Zan.
Ike, goggle eyed. "What???"
"Just playing with your brain, bro."
"Booger."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
So they tussled. For a time. Though silently. They did everything silently. And more and more, in the dead of night, one or the other would come to his brother's bed, across their little boy room with the Pooh characters wallpaper, which made them retch these days, but mom and dad refused to see their sulky surrogates as anything but her precious little darling babies straight from heaven above, and they would make love, though they didn't know it was called that, very quietly.
They were a curious amalgam of knowledge, smart ass quaking all the while faking it, bravado, and totally silly innocence. But there it was. They were having each other on. A recent development, this love making, but quite full now, quite satisfying, quite wonderful and incandescent. All they knew was it made them feel less alone in a very hollow very Barnum and Bailey world, though they wouldn't have known what that meant either.
A little flame to keep the cold winter winds outside and in those supposed adults down there in toy play grown up land at bay.
They held to each other. Their bare pale warm chests and stomachs of very naughty flesh in this warm toasty house adhered boy to boy. They felt good together. Up here, watching the tall people below them become very short indeed. These oh so self important people who could not bring themselves to believe they could ever be inferior to old money riches, which was Jenning's Landing two miles away which put this place in poverty row by comparison.
The adults muddled and half drunk and some more so talking about books and writers they and the critics went on about without ever reading. To prove they were still cool, some mentioned some of Peter Travers' "Rolling Stone" movie reviews and pronounced he was a man of great learning and with a hand on the real pulse beat of America, the real kind, the kind that counts, and deep, very very deep.
And the boys tickled each other, as some ofay oompahed, shot his shirt cuffs, in high importance, then put his hand on the top of the mantle as the fire made a rosy crackling wood smoke back ground, and he continued to oompah about stocks and bonds and Martha Stewart and what the Tokyo market meant to Standard and Poor's and the farmers in the mid west, if you want some insider trading tips.... Though everyone was in their own little clump and paid him no never mind.
They boys laughed silently, and touched and conjured their own magic, and they weren't mischievous at this point. They were rather endearing and kind and they had of course don't ask doe eyes and they held the sides of their faces together and they put their legs together, they tangled, and were quite for a time in their underoos as they felt somewhat wuzzy and sleep hazed, and didn't want their parents to find them up here asleep. But they fell asleep often during party nights, gazing between the railings at the same old rerun parties down below.
Their parents would carry each one gently as warm bread just out of a summer oven to their room and put them in their individual beds.
Mater Terryberry would gaze down at her sleeping angels. And she would not think of her little love fetes with three different men, though at different appointed times of course, she was of the horsy set which called for a certain propriety in affairs after all; and we couldn't have her biting off more affairs than John O'Hara could chew into those massive books of his after all.
And Pater Terryberry would look down at his own angels too. And he would see something more than money pits who would bleed him dry about half way through their projected stay at Yale one fine day. He would see them as what kept Mater and Pater together, would even think warmly and nostalgically of the Terrible Terryberries stunts pulled on the guests and especially on Taffy in her maid uniform like out of a TV show, like Hazel.
Though he would have to tell her to tone down her reactions a bit. She was getting too obvious. This was not a prolonged screen test, after all.
Because all the adults who knew the Terryberry boys did the same. They played into the Terryberries tired routines. Outraged yes. But still part of the landscape they were trying to get used to.
The boys' jokes always fell flat. They were mostly stupid jokes. And always unfunny. They went on too long or too short. They had no punch line. They were old as the hills. Even the children played into the Terryberry routines.
They hated the Terryberry boys for themselves. They hated them because they were fruits sleeping with each other. They just guessed. They happened to be right. It wasn't a big leap of logic, however. The Terryberries were silly asses who went around handholding, with the occasional thumb sucking now and then, thank god so far it was always their own thumbs they sucked..
And yet, and yet, as Dr. Garber, the one down there in the parlor, eating his pipe as he leant over with his knobby hands together and discussed the finer points of psychopathology or something with a young woman kneeling at his feet, whose bosom he was looking down, for the blouse required it and the bosom was large, she brainlessly attempting to absorb every word, (mostly she liked men, even this mechanical robot, to look down her blouse) as though he were Socrates or something, would put it, they were enablers of kids no one could stand or understand. Course Dr. Garber too was an enabler.
They all had it in their power to destroy the Terryberry boys if they wanted to. Maybe the one fine day of it kept them going. Setting up the boys for their biggest fall. Maybe that would make this worth it.
But not if they could see Zan and Ike sleepy eyed, arms round the other's shoulder, their underoos pulled down a little too much in the back, as they groggily stood and helped each other back, tripping a bit, to their room, and drifted to one bed or the other. Though Mater and Pater knew the boys were too old to sleep together, or bathe together for that matter, still they hadn't the heart to make a production of it, for they were such a comfort to the other.
They had asked Dr. Gerber about the sleeping part (the bathing part might be a sticky wicket for the parents to admit to on behalf of their boys) and he concurred. So what other sage did they need on that topic? They would grow up to be good husbands and good fathers all their days.
The boys fell, in their own beds, asleep almost immediately they pulled the covers up to their necks in their warm room of a womb. They had left the Christopher Robin light on their desk on however. Not to worry.
Their parents would come up the steps, a bit tipsy after the party was over, go to the Terryberry boys' room, tuck them in better, then turn out the light. Then to their room, where they would lie with a wall of Jericho crease between them and think about things that made them sleep and sleep happily.
She, dreaming of Mal Mandrake and those elfin artistic fingers that could do such things to the willing raw clay of herself.
He, of foreclosing on Dr. Gerber whose practice had dropped drastically, what with all these TV psychologists and self help books around. The pompous bastard was trying to fake it, playing the ponies or something, maybe blackmailing some patients; a psychiatrist has the greatest blackmail field to choose from anyone Banker Terryberry could think of.
It made him chuckle. Glad that neither he nor his wife had ever availed themselves of the phony baloney doctor's services, except for that one idle question about the boys that Mr. Terryberry asked him.
Even the greatest of psychologists can't double talk his way out of his banker knowing he is in the hole and will never climb out of it. Closure this, you validated sonofabitch, the banker thought.
And in the bedroom of boys, Ike dreamt of Zan. And Zan dreamt of Ike. And in the morning they would wake up and the windows would be frosty, with the winter sun shining in, or maybe snow might be showcased in their windows when they opened the curtains, and they would be together the whole livelong day and for the rest of their lives to come.
So concludes my story of the Terryberries and the world in which they live. I think this is the only good ending a story like this can be expected to have. We thank you for your time and patience. Now, let's turn out the lights and let Zan and Ike get a good night's rest. They've things to do on the morrow.
Hehehehehehehehe. Timothy Stillman comewinter@earthlink.net