Cut and Dry

Cut and Dry

There were not many weeks when they knew what the following week would be for them. They never got entirely comfortable with this condition of things, but it did teach Nick and Amanda that anything could get better or worse.
Their mother held a job, a good job, a job with some real distinction attached to it and more importantly a steady flow of housekeeping money and what they needed. It never brought exactly what they wanted, some kind of real quality, because Imogen believed the more things you could buy the better life would seem. Instead of one or two fine things, she brought home loads of crap, cheap record players, cheap clothes, cheap everything: more cheapness than anyone could ever wish for.
Nick once speculated to his sister that this avalanche of discount goods and bulk bought groceries made up for what Imogen and Frank didn’t have in the Depression.
Amanda said part of it was a rejection of Frank’s parents and their fine furniture and the objects in their house, things that carried echoes of a slower more genteel past, nothing at all ostentatious but everything felt like something in Frank’s parent’s house and everything in Imogen and Frank’s house felt like nothing much.
Decades later Amanda and Nick figured all of it wasn’t so awful but they both knew that something had gone missing, somewhere after the A-bomb and bomb shelters and Kennedy’s head blown off.
Imogen was the bread winner and she ruled everything, every cupboard every shelf every closet but the one Frank never finished spoke of Imogen’s mania for things like garlic salt instead of real garlic, dried herbs instead of fresh, canned this, canned that.
Did they love Frank more than Imogen. Or another way to say it was, did they hate her more than they feared his losing streaks and his ability to stake their college money in a crap game. But that wild thing in Frank that double or nothing or whatever it was, it made them both wonder if Frank and Imogen ever shared anything in life.
They loved each other, Nick said, but what is that. Love like gangrene. So used to saying the same pointless things to each other this composite voice came out of them sometimes, a kind of tinny braying noise like someone trying to drill through granite with the stump of an electric toothbrush.
Or something. Why do we talk about them like this, Nick asked his sister.
Amanda shrugged a little. I guess to remember, she finally, unconvincingly whispered.