Snapping Points by Maurice Broaddus

“Damn, it smells like ass in here.” Pops was barely in the door before he started in on Keith. His capacious form, though lacking the nimble grace of his former running back days, wedged the door open to allow Momma room to make her entrance. She handled her business with a silencing glance, though not much else about her ever remained silent for long.

“What’s the matter with you? No one ever taught you any manners?” Momma pressed her face to Keith’s, her thick foundation rubbing off on him. He reciprocated with a smooching gesture. “How’s my baby?”

“Doing good, Mom. Here, let me grab those.” Keith scuttled to his dining room table with the two pans of food; turning to me almost as an afterthought, he nodded. “Hey, sis.”

“Mm-hmm,” I answered.

“You guys remember Aldrin.”

The family eyed Aldrin with distrust and he waved with some discomfort, from the couch. It was hard to forget Aldrin. A day and a half worth of stubble accented his dirty sallow complexion. The corners of his mouth upturned in a full lipped smile which revealed no teeth. He was sensitive about the state of his teeth.

In a rush to prove his independence, Keith moved out with the first roommate offer that came along. The family made one stipulation: Aldrin was to be brought into the family way and partake in a meal with us. Family could only go with those who joined in our secrets since living with folks was like cleaning house: eventually you would stumble across the closet full of skeletons.

“Let me get a good look at you,” Momma pushed by Pops and gestured for Keith to turn around.

I kept waiting for her to toss him a treat when he finished. “Look at you, thinking you’re all grown. You too good to spend time with us?”

“Yeah, you act like you don’t need to spend time with us anymore,” Pops echoed.

Keith hesitated. Not long enough for any except me to notice, but I knew what to look for. The family way ground on him and he wanted to find a new path without offending our parents or tradition. “Come on, Dad. I just needed some time to get set up on my own til I had you over. I wanted to be able to host Sunday dinner. Anyway, we family and I’ll always need family.”

“Cause family shows up with food,” Momma said.

“You gonna show us around?” I asked.

“Rude much?” Keith shoved me gently in that familial way we play. Folks often referred to us as Irish twins because we were only a year apart and shared similar lanky frames, but we traded and kept secrets the way friends do. I marveled at how quickly all of us fell into the routine and rhythm of family despite Keith’s recent absence.

The condo opened into the large maw of a family room/dining room combo area which led into the walk-in closet that passed for the kitchen. A trail of shoes—a left foot here, a right foot there—ran up the stairs to the bedrooms, marking a trail as if someone might get lost. No one bothered going upstairs. Whatever the source of the pungent aroma was only grew worse when they approached the stairwell. Instead, we opted to seat ourselves around Keith’s dining room table – a familiar ensemble since it once sat in Momma’s dining room.

“Shall I tell you a Jamaican joke that a lady used to do out there?” Momma’s eyes, tinged with bitterness, shone over the morose curl of her lips.

“Here we go.” Pops filled his glass with water.

Born in Jamaica, Momma constantly reminded us of her heritage, though she hadn’t been back since she was a child. She often went so far as to refer to the rest of us as “you people.” Of course, she also fancied herself as Eartha Kitt’s twin, so one could imagine how seriously we often took her. However, she was the matriarch and the position automatically demanded respect, or our brand of it.

“She used to starve her kids. And then she didn’t want to give them any food.”

“This is funny already,” Keith added.

“Why’d she want to starve her kids?” Aldrin asked. “Cause she’s Jamaican.” Pops cut his eyes toward him. “He didn’t get the memo.”

“My bad,” Keith said.

“What memo?” Aldrin squirmed. He grew up always being the outsider, even within his family, which gave us a bit of a soft spot for him. He always struck me as a guy searching for a family to fit in with. His blue collar family had a…quieter…family dynamic than ours; that alone would have been reason enough for his unease. However, Keith had also impressed upon him the need to pass our family’s little test. We needed to know if we could trust him if this living arrangement was going to work. Aldrin explained that he understood because “everyone had their secrets.” However, Keith was already re-thinking his decision to move in with him.

“Don’t ask her any questions. It only makes the story go on longer. You stay quiet, keep your head down, and it will be over. Eventually.” Keith smiled a tepid grin at Aldrin, his eyes in a near sleepy droop of boredom and impatience with the man.

“Then she would give her kids some nice hot soup,” Momma ignored all of them. “And the kid would be so hungry that it would burp. So she would say ‘You’re full’ cause anytime someone burp that mean they’re through eating. Then she would take their food from them and they would just continue starving.”

There was no chance of anyone starving today, though. Sunday dinners after church were a family tradition of down home cooking. Not that any of us had been to church in a long time; not since we had Reverend Shields for dinner. The man loved to show up on the doorstep with an empty belly, though empty bellies were easy to stuff. Regardless, the tradition remained with a food spread that could feed an Army: Jamaican patties, stuffed green peppers, meatloaf, green beans, macaroni and cheese, sweet cornbread, with bread and butter pudding cooling on the counter. Come Easter or Thanksgiving, the number of dishes easily doubled.

“Something’s missing. I know…music.” Momma strained about for her now missing stereo system.

“I’m on it.” Keith jumped toward the deck, which consisted of three stacked milk cartons, and hit the power button. The strains of the latest 50 Cent joint boomed without mercy.

“Is that how I raised you?” “Sorry. I forget how…what’s the word?”

“Posh,” I finished.

“How posh you like us to be for dinners.” Keith tuned the radio to a classical music station. Once he sat down, he tossed a cornbread roll across the length of the table to Pops, who grunted his approval.

“Mrs. Broakas, would you be terribly offended if I didn’t eat this?” Aldrin asked.

I could almost hear the hitch in Keith’s breathing, his brow furrowed in mild annoyance every time Aldrin opened his mouth. We exchanged glances and Pops paused in mid-bite before our attention landed on Momma. We waited for her reaction.

“What is it?” she asked calmly, maintaining her near regal bearing.

“The pears and cottage cheese.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s pears and cottage cheese mixed together.”

“Yes, I would be,” she said. “We don’t waste anything put in front of us.”

“There’s pineapple too,” I noted.

“It’s healthy for you,” Pops said.

“And I know how much you love it, Dad, so here you go, here you go.” Keith heaped a few more spoonfuls onto Pops’ plate. Pops flipped him off outside of Momma’s line of vision.

It rarely crossed our minds to go out to eat. The last time we ventured out, it was Pops’ 50th birthday. Since he never expected to live so long, we made a time of it; even rented a limo. Some brain trust in management arranged us around one long table, which had my father on one end and Keith on the other. In the booming voice of his, Pops let everyone know he had a new erectile dysfunction device which was working out well for him. It involved a pump and we were asked to leave about the time he announced “Just three pumps and I’m ready to go!”

“Could you pass me some more meat?” Aldrin studied the meatloaf as if deciding how hungry he truly was. He glanced about with a nervous dart of his eyes as Momma piled another slice onto his plate.

“You know they call me Sweet Meat,” Keith said.

“They who?” I asked.

“The ladies.”

“Do you just make that shit up on the spot?” Pops asked.

“You’re not supposed to use profanities around the table,” Momma reminded.

“Take them back to them hole-in-the-wall places you go dancing in,” Keith said.

“You started that shit,” Pops turned to Momma who reveled in bringing up the night clubs he enjoyed dragging her to. He had an old school grace and charm about him, as if at any moment he could break out into an impression of the Temptations’ step.

“You said a word again Pops,” I added.

“And you,” Momma turned on Keith, “don’t you still owe me for the ‘gas money’ I loaned you?”

“Why you got to let everyone know I owe you money?”

“Cause you do.” Cough. “Control freak,” cough, Keith muttered between faux coughs.

“You ought to quit running down your family.” Aldrin’s dull, compassionless eyes turned from Keith to Momma, oblivious to the murderous glare he received from my brother.

I suspected Aldrin thought he was scoring points with Momma, but he didn’t catch how irritated Keith was becoming at him. Keith cast a see-what-I-mean arch of his eyebrows toward me, but I shrugged. Everyone had their quirks folks had to learn to live with. It was a part of getting along with people. He sighed and continued. “No, when I made fun of her for trying to cover up her stroke, that was running her down.”

“That little routine got you kicked out the will,” I said.

“Yeah, but it was funny. Seriously, how you gonna front your speech slurring, a droop in the left side of your face, and your left arm being in a sling talking about how you ‘sprained it.’ Please, we didn’t have to be doctors to figure out what’s what.”

“You do what you have to do to stay strong.” Momma didn’t take her eyes from the meat she sliced nor bothered to acknowledge Keith’s foolishness.

“I know. But it was silly for you to try and hide it from us.”

“You didn’t have to talk about the inevitability of her going senile and keeping her in your attic to scare you future kids with,” Pops said with instigating glee.

“’Kids, go give grandma her dinner.’ ‘No, daddy, please! We don’t want to go up there.’” Keith alternated between a grown man and child’s voice. “‘Next time I tell you to clean up your room, I bet you’ll listen.”

“Wow, that’s rough. I’d never talk about my momma like that.” Aldrin took his life into his own hands. The sharp clink of a knife on a plate drew everyone’s attention to Keith, who then made an exaggerated gesture of sniffing the room.

On the whole, Broakases were pretty easy going people. So it would take a lot for us to commit to doing something. Aldrin had a gift for wearing on people, which Keith never let me forget. (“You went out with him once.” To which I protested, “Look, I told you not to bring that up. I blame that on PMS. You know I’m not myself that week.”) For weeks Keith had confided in me about his growing resentment toward Aldrin, dropping little hints like, “Dude, the house is getting kinda ripe” or “What are we gonna do about that?” Unfortunately, among Aldrin’s other quirks was an inability to pick up subtle cues. With the condo starting to stink, Keith realized he couldn’t bring girls over, sweet meat or no sweet meat. Eventually, Keith spent less time at his own place. Everyday he’d stop by his parent’s house with a desperate longing in his eyes, like he was just one step closer to death. He just kept mumbling “He’s got to go,” but Keith wouldn’t say anything because that wasn’t the kind of person he was. No, he’d let stuff build and build and build until he reached his snapping point. I knew it was bad when he returned home to talk to Momma about it. “When I get home, I go right to my bedroom and call it a day. Stink can’t get in my room if I close the door. I’ll stuff a towel in the crack if I have to.”

“Aldrin, I feel like we hardly know you. Tell us about yourself.” Momma finally got down to business, beginning her own style of inquisition, as if calling a meeting to order.

“There’s not much to tell. What would you like to know?” He bridged his stubby fingers as best he could, gearing up for the challenge. Still, there was something fundamentally off-putting about him. If you truly wanted to get to know someone, you could ask them questions and parse their lies, or you could just rummage through their stuff.

“You got a job?” Pops interjected.

“May I be excused?” I asked.

“Hide your shame, girl, or at least keep your funk away from where we’re eating.” Keith smiled and nodded, my Irish twin on the same wavelength as me. “Top of the stairs, to the left.”

“Thanks.”

I climbed the stairs surprised that my brother’s obsessive compulsive streak hadn’t at least arranged the shoes into matching pairs along the side of the hand rail. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that not only didn’t all of the shoes have a corresponding partner, but they weren’t even all the same size.

The bathroom was a sty. I imagined that the downstairs bathroom was better as guests were less likely to wander upstairs. The malefic odor had increased, but the source wasn’t in there. I began counting to keep track of how long I took, figuring that five minutes felt about right for my usual time on the toilet. The medicine cabinet beckoned. Shaving cream, razors, mouthwash, cologne (though English Leather barely qualified as such)—the unused trappings of civilized cleanliness. Risperdal. Zyprexa. Abilify. Trazadone. Looks like someone’s trying to find a way to stop the voices in their head, I thought, although I tried to not think about why I knew that.

I eased the door shut and made my way to the bedrooms. The first was obviously Keith’s. Aldrin didn’t seem like the Malcolm X peering out the window/Olympic athletes with raised fists sort of decorator. The second door was locked, but I’d been picking locks more difficult to open ever since Keith needed to get into Pops’ special briefcase, which held the porno magazines and DVDs we referred to as the Disney collection.

One hundred eighty. One hundred eighty one. One hundred eighty two.

The smell tumbled out of the room with such force I nearly fell down the stairs. I’d always gotten a weird feeling around Aldrin, but had assumed it was my retained water. The room was a squalid hole of mouse-eaten socks strewn about and piled underwear (the state of which gave me the dry heaves). Pizza remained in boxes; from the wriggling among the pepperoni, I’d guess at least a week old. Wadded up pieces of paper littered the room. A few pieces had drafts of a riddle in cut out letters; others had the preamble of a would-be manifesto. Then I noticed the pillows: a crazy quilt of leathered flesh, patches of upper torso stitched together.

Two hundred fifty seven. Two hundred fifty eight. Two hundred fifty nine.

I decided to spare myself by not opening the closet door. Creeping back to the bathroom, I left the door open to make a show of flushing then washing my hands. The conversation had personalized.

“You got a girl?” Pops asked.

“Why’re you going to ask the man that?” Momma asked.

“What? I didn’t ask if he could pick a vagina out of a line up.”

“I bet he’s got one,” I interrupted. “He probably keeps one in his closet.” You’d think after being so careful about my sneaking about I wouldn’t just come out and say things. However, there was something about being around the family that emboldened us.

“A blow up doll?” Keith asked.”

“They’ve come a long way with those,” Pops offered.

I slowly recounted what I discovered when I went upstairs, everyone’s attention shifting from me to Aldrin. He gripped his butter knife.

“Dude,” Keith said in a low, flat tone. “You aren’t really making booby pillows?”

“Ah shit,” Pops said. “I thought it was something serious.”

Aldrin sat in a state of bewilderment, not knowing what to make of me passing Keith more gravy.

“I got another story I haven’t had the chance to tell,” Momma started. “Remember our neighbors?”

“The crack dealers?” Keith asked.

“Well, I don’t know he did that.”

“How could you not know? His customers waited in our yard.”

“Keith, she doesn’t ‘know’ about Pops’ Disney collection either,” I pointed out. Pops grumbled.

“All I know is that he was rude. I walked by him while I was tending to my garden and he called me several of those words we don’t use.”

“So, I guess that means you no longer like him,” Keith said.

“Of course I like him. I’m on my second plate of him.”

It took Aldrin a full standing ten count to process what had transpired. He studied his plate, glanced at me—I nodded—shrugged, then took another bite. With that, Momma finally smiled.

To tell the truth, we didn’t think much about where the meat came from anymore. Pops worked as a butcher and Momma was a genius in the kitchen. Her seasoning and sauces created gourmet delicacies. Have a run in with the neighbors and it was the Jones’ vichyssoise. If there was a bully in the neighborhood, it was Butch bolognaise. A particularly nasty bit of road rage led to Williams’ pate.

“I’m glad that’s over with. Now I can relax. I’m missing something. Corn.” Pops surveyed the last vestiges of his plate. He built mounds of food on his plate before enjoying his meal. He ate with the memories of growing up poor and often without meals. So he relished every plate then ate with the frenzy of a convict who might have his food snatched at any moment.

“You’re missing corn. You’re missing scalloped potatoes. You’re missing macaroni ‘n’ cheese.”

“You’re missing dessert,” I added.

“Dessert we can eat in the living room,” Keith ushered them into the other room. “Let me straighten up a few things.”

Keith’s obsessive compulsive streak kicked in again: dishes needed to be cleared and put away. He told me once that he and Aldrin had tried to divide household chores equitably and tried taking turns doing dishes. Keith would do them the night of his turn; Aldrin preferred to wait until every dish in the house was dirty. When Keith found himself eating a bowl of cereal from a saucepan using a ladle, he cracked and washed the dishes. Aldrin kept repeating “What? I was going to do them.” The other part of Keith’s OCD streak involved him needing to have all of the noisy appliances going at once. So if the dishwasher (purchased soon after the saucepan and ladle incident) was going, he’d do a load of laundry. I was thankful he no longer felt the need to wash the clothes he was wearing when he did laundry;: the picture of naked Keith so soon after eating risked turning the condo into a vomitorium.

“You doing laundry, too?” Momma asked.

“Just a load of towels while I’m back there. Got any towels or wash cloths, Aldrin?”

“I’d never wash another man’s drawers,” Pops blurted out.

“Who asked you to?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I got a couple towels, but I don’t use wash cloths,” Aldrin said.

“What do you use?” Pops perked to morbid attention.

“Dad, I don’t think …”

“When I take a shower, I wash with my hand. You know, I just soap up my hand and I wash myself.”

“How… how are you washing the crack of your ass with your hand?” Pops pressed the topic over Keith’s queasy-faced objections.

“Leave the boy alone and let his business be,” Momma said.

“I’m just asking a simple question.”

“Enquiring minds want to know,” I said.

“Enquiring minds ought to think about the mental images they risk conjuring if they keep us this line of questioning.” Keith wandered into the laundry room.

Not that Aldrin cared much; as was his habit, he had fallen asleep. Tufts of hair jutted from his collar and sleeves and suddenly I was glad Keith ended the conjuring of mental images. Aldrin’s double shifts often caught up to him so that once he stopped moving, he’d fall out on the couch or in a chair, sometimes in mid-sentence. The only clue of his abrupt departure to lala land would be this horrific sound that would emanate from the back of his throat. Keith used to worry about his breathing stopping, however, these days, he half hoped Aldrin would simply stop breathing. It was in his eyes., Keith would daydream: “I could just go over there with a cushion and no one would ever suspect a thing.”

Keith returned to the dining room with the gait of a surgeon in a bloody gown preparing to deliver bad news. Dangling from his right hand was a bottle of Tide. He stood in the entryway of the dining room with a glare of dull rage in his eyes. Whenever he had that look, I knew the situation was not going to end well. Keith held that bottle of Tide as if it had just died in his arms. He stared at that bottle of Tide and glanced over at Aldrin then back at the Tide bottle. He began to whisper, “Who used…who used the last…of my muthafuckin’ Tide?”

The room grew grave still. I wasn’t sure whether it was because of Keith’s quiet cadence or because he dropped the big profanity in front of Momma. Some instinct of self-preservation must have stirred Aldrin, because he snapped awake in mid-snore. All eyes went from weighing on him back to Keith.

“I said … who … used the last … of my muthafuckin’ Tide?”

Suddenly, I’m starting to feel as if we were at church again. I was ready to Amen and Momma and Pops reminded me of the choir swaying back and forth in the loft before they were ready to belt out another song. Aldrin had the paralyzing realization that he was a sinner facing the judgment of an angry God. Keith continued.

“It’s not like I ask for too much out of my roommate. I come in and want a little food, a little peace and quiet, and every now and then … I need to do some laundry. And for me to do my laundry, I need my Tide. Now, I’ve come into this cabinet, I’m here to do my laundry … and I find … this empty bottle of Tide. So I ask you again … who used the last … of my muthafuckin’ Tide?”

At this point, Pops has his hands in the air, waving them back and forth. “The man’s preachin’ now! Go ‘head, preach it!”

“Who used this man’s Tide?” Momma jumped up as if struck by the Holy Ghost. “Someone tell me! Who used his Tide?”

Again, all eyes fell on the dumbstruck Aldrin. Keith strode toward him with great deliberation until he towered over Aldrin’s seated form. On his best day, Keith came in at about a buck twenty, with Aldrin weighing twice that with ease. However, Keith possessed a manic urgency, a predator’s mien, that even those incapable of reading subtle cues could sense. After an interminable pause came the final whisper.

“I said, ‘Who used the last of my muthafuckin’ Tide?!’”

“I …” Aldrin watched Keith unscrew the top of the Tide bottle. “I guess that was me.”

Keith examined the pour spout of his Tide bottle and whatever mental calculation he performed ended when he drove the spout into Aldrin’s eye. The sickening moist splatter sounded like liver slapped by a broom handle. Keith leaned on the bottle, putting his full weight into it and then he wedged the bottle cap into Aldrin’s mouth, cutting short the shriek. The cap was too large for Aldrin’s mouth, but Keith pounded his fist into it snapping several of Aldrin’s green filmed teeth in the process. The cap hammered into place, Keith pinched closed Aldrin’s nose holding both hands over it until the thrashing ceased. Keith relaxed then stepped around to the front of the body and surveyed his handiwork. The family huddled around him. The thing about family was that everyone had their assigned roles to play. Momma was the keeper of tradition, Pops the instigator, Keith the jokester who brought everyone together. Me? I was the observer who occasionally broke tense moments.

“Just think if he’d used your Downy balls.”

Pops leaned into Aldrin. “Yeah, you shouldn’t have used the last of the man’s Tide. Apparently he takes that shit a little personal.”

“You ever think Broakases weren’t wired to live with others?” Keith wiped his hands on his gore-splattered shirt.

“I’d definitely say your people skills need work.”

“And you have an anger issue or two you may want to resolve. You may want to go without a roommate,” I said. “Or wait a year so we could room together.”

“What are we gonna do with the body?” Keith turned to Momma.

“Maybe we could make sausages out of him.”

“I like sausages,” I said.

“You guys …” Keith started. He glanced at Aldrin then studied each of our faces. There was something painful about watching your big brother tread around emotional moments, so I put my hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

“We’re family. You can always count on family.”