Groomed
Kate Grimes
Raphael’s older brother is perched on the edge of the bathtub with one foot on the toilet handrail. He should look awkward, Raphael thinks, but Gabriel has the artfully disheveled beauty of a man in an ad campaign. His suit, his white half-smile, his hair- they’re all things that he paid people to make perfect for him so that he could then mess them up just a little. Come sit on this assisted toilet, Gabe’s crinkly-eyed smile says. You’ll be glad you did. If he were a spokesman, bathrooms all over the country could become accessible, enticing even, as the able-bodied try to capture a little of Gabriel’s careless elegance.
Raphael imagines sharing this thought. His brother would eat it up. But it’s too many words; he doesn’t like to talk in front of a mirror.
It is Raphael’s bathroom, anyway, and he is no spokesmodel. Those are Raphael’s toilet handrails, and that is Raphael’s sturdy little stool in the bathtub. The thready lavender towels are technically his mother’s, but she’s getting married. Surely someone will buy her nice new towels. Probably one of the many women who enjoy doing things for Gabriel. Raphael can feel fine about keeping the towels, but having another person in his bathroom does remind him that he could get rid of some of the paraphernalia of his long recovery. The bathtub stool is actually kind of a hazard and the last thing he needs is another injury.
Gabriel is glowing with happiness because he is walking Raphael through the process of shaving his beard, and he loves playing the gentleman mentor almost as much as he hates that beard. Raphael kind of hates the beard, too, but it’s easier for him to look at than the face beneath it. Since the accident it is, and is not, his face. He still doesn’t expect it. There is much of it he can’t feel.
He has tried binding it into a kind of shape with hair ties, like some sort of ancient warrior, but that just looked grotesque. His jaw is uneven and his beard-ponytail jutted off to the side no matter how he fastened it, creating a hairy tentacle right under his mouth.
No, to appease his mother and brother, the beard must go; in time for their mother’s wedding. Raphael has even agreed to Gabriel’s request that he shave it before the celebration dinner on Friday with the fiancee and his adult progeny; a dinner that Gabriel must suspect Raphael has no intention of actually attending. Raphael has a couple of possible escape plans at the ready. He always does. His dinner Friday night will be peanut butter from a squeeze pouch and perhaps a second course of sports gel, pressed neatly into his mouth as he and cousin Eddie mow down digital zombies from their respective apartments. He’ll do the yoga for his back and peruse his new coffee table book of pinup girls. Everyone will be happier for it. More comfortable.
He’s already getting a little headache from squinting into the mirror at one small section of his face at a time. Sometimes he doesn’t even turn this bathroom light on. If he leaves the door open, he can by the light from the other room well enough. He’s developed a fondness for cool water in a dark place. But now that the bathroom lights are on, he can see that it’s inexcusably dingy. It’s not how he generally operates. His kitchen, for instance, is very clean. His truck is immaculate.
“You’ll be so much more comfortable. And you won’t have to worry about getting food in it, when you start eating real food again.” Gabriel has pulled his punches for a long time, but now in the hated beard’s last moments he’s getting just a little smug. If Gabriel leaves this bathroom feeling triumphant, then Raphael will feel less guilt about skipping Friday’s dinner.
“I’d come over there and do it all for you, but I don’t want your Sasquatch bristles on my suit.” Gabriel came over straight from work. “After you trim it all down you take a shower, or… do you have a hand towel? You can wrap your face up, from the eyes down, in a steamy hand towel; it opens up your pores and you get a smoother shave. And where it’s all irregular…” Gabe flutters his fingers over his own face, a magical gesture that turns Raphael’s knotty scars, reset bones and skin grafts, from absent eyebrow down to reconstructed jaw, into a simple irregular surface, “you’ll be less likely to get irritated skin later. Do you have any aftershave?”
Raphael gives Gabriel the blankest, stupidest look he can muster. He lets his shoulders slacken, his arms dangle, his mouth hang open. Well, his mouth doesn’t actually ever close all the way, but he breaths through it for effect. Blinks slowly. To see if he can push Gabe’s buttons like in the old days, before they were in the accident and before his brother became so damned solicitous.
“Do you even have any fucking shaving cream?” Gabriel annunciates crisply and smiles brilliantly. He is mildly annoyed. Raphael almost smiles himself. He produces a pristine disc of shave soap and an equally pristine lather brush from behind his back, like a magic trick. It’s easy to hide things behind his back because he is a very large man. The jar is part of an ornate shaving kit that was, of course, a gift from Gabe some months ago. A broad hint. Gabe may or may not remember giving it to him, but he makes a growly approval noise and looks pleased and twinkly. Raphael imagines it’s the same look he gave the woman who actually purchased this shaving kit. Raphael decides that he’s happy for the woman. He won’t judge. His brother is a force of nature.
He has plugged the sink to keep the hair from going down the drain. That the drain will clog anyway, sometime very soon, he has no doubt, but still; best practices.
Raphael hacks at the wiry hair on his face with some spindly-looking scissors from the kit. A beard-trimmer would have been more practical, but he has refused to buy one, insisting that the beard will ride his face into the next world. Now he has to use these stage props. Oh well. Pruning branches is a task he kind of enjoys, and he imagines he’s pruning the overgrown bushes along a rickety wrap-around porch at one of their house restoration jobs.
The scissors are creepy, though. They’re brownish for some reason, decorative and curved. They look like nineteenth-century medical equipment. He imagines Dr. Frankenstein using them on his monster in a candle-lit laboratory. At least Raphael’s own reconstruction was completely modern. No cadavers. No lightening. His entire life was brightly lit and thoroughly sanitized for months. He had tactful surgeons and somber but encouraging physical therapists. He had Gabriel crowing and high-fiving him when he crossed the room on crutches for the first time, sweating and shuddering.
It is not their mother’s fault that the first time Raphael saw her cry was when they took his bandages off. Gabriel always has been their mother’s favorite. Raphael has always pitied him for this. Gabriel is shiny and Teresa has never been able to take her eyes off of him for long. Her love is fretful and scrutinizing and Raphael has never longed for a larger helping of it. Gabriel got the deep counseling, the passionate arguments. Raphael got his father and the mantra “measure twice, cut once” and the companionable silence of the workshop,
But when Raphael came to in the hospital with his mother and only his mother standing over him with her eyes wild and teeth bared, he knew that his father was dead. And suddenly he was getting the Gabriel treatment; for days and days he burned under the glare of Teresa’s furious love as she snarled at him to stay awake, to slow his breathing, to swallow or to stay still. He asked about his brother and she snapped that he was fine, which he was. He asked about his father and she refused to answer. Her face was often shiny with tears, but they might as well have been sweat. She never sniffled, never put her hands to her face. He could swear she never closed her eyes, for days, for weeks.
When she admitted that his father had been killed, her voice was perfectly even, just as it was when she told Raphael that he himself had almost died. She didn’t flinch when the doctors explained the many permanent injuries Raphael had sustained. But later, when they removed the bandages from his face, Teresa burst into helpless sobs.
Gabe leopard-stretches and holds forth on the man Teresa is marrying next week, who he calls “the gray squirrel.” He talks about the man’s adult daughters, who Raphael is supposed to meet at this dinner that he is supposed to attend. Apparently the man’s daughter Wendy, is a “drama queen who drinks too much.” Wendy has referred to Teresa as Mexican repeatedly, Gabe says. Raphael wonders aloud if she is hostile or just dizzy. Gabe says that the second time Teresa told Wendy that she was American, of Cuban descent, Wendy said “Oh, like Scarface?” Raphael agrees that that was unmistakably hostile.
Teresa has been understanding, Gabriel tells him, but she is nearing her limit.
Wendy is a good name for a drama queen who drinks too much. Raphael pictures high full breasts and long accusing fingernails. Perhaps some fussy blonde hair. Wendy sounds like someone he would enjoy hearing stories about but not actually being around. He is out of practice with meeting new people, and his appearance has made him wary of the tactless and emotionally fragile. He wonders how easy Teresa will go on this Wendy, and for how long. Teresa is not one to suffer foolishness. He wonders if the gray squirrel is worth it.
He wonders why Gabriel sees situations like this brewing and then takes them on as his problems to solve.
Evidently there is another daughter, and their mother has decided that she is a sweetheart. Her name is Jenny or Jessica or something, Gabe says. They keep forgetting about her. Well played, Jenny-or-Jessica, Raphael thinks.
Raphael has actually met the gray squirrel briefly. Joe. He is a wiry man with a twitchy energy. Raphael dropped by his mother’s during lunch once, at her insistence (though on that day she did not insist he eat with them) and he’d felt Joe regard him with alert curiosity. Joe had fluttered around Teresa, handing her things just as she realized she needed them; another napkin, a pen, her handbag or keys. Joe also managed to chew his soup and make intriguing crunching noises when he did it. Raphael suspects dentures or some past jaw injury.
And so Gabriel, the family’s master of social functions, has planned this dinner with Joe and “the girls” for Friday night so that they can all meet and become acquainted before the wedding. Gabriel extended the invitation to Raphael by leaping into his truck before he could take off after work. He knew that Raphael would be reluctant. Teresa also mentioned it to Raphael when he dropped by her house. She cooed about how nice it would be to dine as a family, and then looked sharply into his good eye and said it would be an opportunity for him to “polish up.”
“… and Eddie’s shaving his beard,” says Gabe, still selling this to him. “He told me he would do it just for the wedding. And you know how proud he is of that red stripe.”
Their cousin can grow a nice beard. He no doubt has a trimmer, a designated comb, and bottles of whatever elixirs conscientious beard-owners use. It ages him, which is advantageous to compact, baby-faced Eddie. But if Eddie must go back to work on Monday with his dimples undermining his authority, Raphael has little sympathy.
Raphael tries to picture himself as an old-time French Canadian logger, stomping around a forest camp axe in hand, scarred and bulky, one of many proud ugly men. He indulges this fantasy when he swims during the early hours at the YMCA where there are many men with scars and scraggly beards, as well as missing limbs, missing teeth and amateur tattoos. Some of them live there. None of them feel sorry for Raphael with his youth, his four limbs and his nice ergonomic cane.
He leaves the cold water some mornings feeling hungry and boisterous and imagines thumping onto a stool in the corner diner, calling for pancakes and sausage in a booming voice and wolfing it all down unapologetically. But beard or no, he hates to eat in public.
Gabriel goes to dinner. Gabriel does lunch. Gabriel uses “brunch” as a verb. He takes people to restaurants and from across the table he transforms acquaintances into clients, lovers, or loyal allies. He understands Raphael’s reservations about eating and drinking in front of people, but he has reached the point where he is willing to make his younger brother uncomfortable.
Raphael closes his eyes and gives his temples a rub. Time to take stock. When he looks at his reflection, his eyes jump to his right side, the untouched side. This side does actually look much better without the beard. He runs his hand across his jaw to the left where it ends abruptly. Without the beard, he can see the gill-like creases up and down his cheek. His left eye is cloudy and doesn’t cooperate with its twin. His reconstructed eyelid can close and protect, but doesn’t move easily. It droops in a way he thinks gives him a sad and stupid expression. Maybe the eyelid is sad for its friend the eyebrow. Most of the eyebrow never grew back, only a small dark tuft, an apostrophe, beside the bridge of his nose.
His long-suffering nose. It could be so much worse. He thinks of Michael Jackson. He thinks of the Phantom of the Opera. But his long, “strong” nose was something he was always a bit self-conscious about and now the left nostril is higher and thicker than the right. Still, he can breathe through his nose and that’s no small thing. It took several surgeries; for months he’d had to breathe through his torn-up mouth.
There is no denying it: Raphael’s mouth is not a pretty sight. The left corner doesn’t shut completely, sometimes showing his teeth. The left side of his upper lip is stiff and pale and looks like a vinyl patch on a suede couch. But the real problem is the lack of feeling and control. Raphael’s mouth’s right side feels fine, which makes it feel like his whole mouth is fine, and so he will chew speak without realizing that the left side is leaking food or saliva.
From the beginning, he’s been working on it, but there have been so many many things he has had to work on. In the early days, he was always tired, always hurting, always healing. He was mourning his father. His eating and drinking failures, while they shamed and disgusted him, didn’t cause him pain or paralyze him. He had to learn to walk again, sit upright again. He had to get used to breathing and sleeping differently. He had to learn to speak all over again.
He still struggles with speaking. Conversation requires strategy and concentration.
He doesn’t in the shower, in the truck; it’s not relaxing any more. The “p” and “b” sounds are flying-spit traps. The ever-present “s” sound now sounds wobbly and hollow to him unless he shush-es it out of the side of his mouth Humphrey Bogart style. As he speaks, he worries about whether his damaged tongue is flicking in and out of sight, whether there’s a stream of drool on his chin. Thinking about how he will say things as much as what he will say is wearying. Who can blame him for embracing a strong-and-silent persona? The idea of eating and drinking and holding a conversation, with new people is enough to give him a headache all the way down his neck.
Raphael’s pores are open now. The soggy lavender towel is dropped to the floor (there is nowhere to hang it. His brother is sprawled across all available surfaces.) He takes the fussy shaving brush and churns up a lather on the soap disk. There was a scuttle, but he didn’t know what it was for, so he’s lathered up the soap in a Santa Clause mug. It’s appropriate, Santa being famously bearded. This part isn’t so bad. Raphael likes tools and procedures. Per Gabe’s instruction, he paints the planes of his face with great care. The fancy double-edged razor soaks in rubbing alcohol.
Now Gabriel slinks closer. He takes the brush and goes back over Raphael’s face in brisk circles, correcting his technique. Raphael decides his brother is responding to a primitive need for a turn with the new toy. It is an appealing brush. Badger hair. It occurs to him that Gabriel is the only person, besides the doctors, who has touched his face since the accident. Perhaps more than necessary, as if to get acquainted with it. The thought tightens his chest and he swallows. He should have told his brother that he looked like a toilet model.
Now Gabriel examines his handiwork, and they are side-by-side in the mirror. Gabriel only comes up to Raphael’s nose. Raphael has taken quiet satisfaction in this. Gabriel can be pushy. They have the same color eyes; light brown, almost gold. They both have thick dark eyebrows (well, one, in Raphael’s case.) He looks at Gabriel’s wicked arches and decides that his brother has gotten something professional done to them. Covered in lather from his cheekbones on down, Raphael could be a lean and battered Santa with Gabriel as his stylish elf.
“So I got the table at Silvio’s, Friday, 6:00. There’ll be plenty of time for everyone to eat and talk, without too much noise. And then the music starts at 8:00, so there won’t be too much talking. Mami likes their bread, and, you know, they have that good beer selection.” Gabriel raises a coaxing eyebrow. Raphael can drink from a bottle with some confidence these days and will have an occasional beer with Gabriel, as an exercise.
Stroke by stroke, the soap and underlying whiskers are cleared from his face in columns. Against the grain, Gabriel chants, nice and slow. Measure twice, cut once, Raphael thinks. His beats faster as he shaves around his mouth. He has the urge to rush it, to just get it over with, but his brother is standing there, towel over his arm like an old-fashioned barber, forcing him to do it right.
“You seem like you’re in good shape. Healthy, you know,” Gabriel says. Clearly he expects a healthy Raphael come Friday.
“I’ll pick you up after work,” Gabriel says. There goes the truck-breakdown plan. And the unexpected work emergency plan. There will not even be a traffic-delay reprieve.
“I’ll get your suit from the cleaner’s. You can change at my place.” Gabriel is a worthy adversary. Their mother must have given him both barrels, Raphael thinks.
And then his brother surprises him.
“I don’t want to go,” Gabriel sighs. Raphael stops mid-stroke.
“I’m not ready for this. Any of it. And I don’t want to go Friday.” Gabriel lowers himself onto the toilet lid and stares ahead. Raphael thinks he looks like a pilot about to start up his fighter plane. Serious, determined, a little queasy.
“She wanted to cook for everybody. And I… I knew it would be easier for you at the house, more comfortable. But I pushed for Silvio’s anyway.” Gabriel looks at him and shrugs. “I’m sorry.”
Raphael moves his head a little, to tell him it’s alright. He waits for Gabriel to keep talking and as he clears the final whiskers from his dented left cheek, Gabriel does.
“I don’t want to see him sitting where Dad’s supposed to be.” He sighs. “All this time, and still…”
“You don’t have to… explain.” He says it softly, slowly, but clearly.
In the mirror Raphael he can just make out the face his mother wants to see. He bears a topographical map of the last decade of their lives. His hand shakes just a little. He takes the towel from Gabriel and pats the soap and water from his face with relief.
He pictures Gabriel sitting miserably between two warring queens at Silvio’s. Gabriel could have any one of a number of girls on his arm for an evening out, but he won’t, because he’s on duty, always on duty. Raphael doesn’t really understand what Gabriel thinks his duty is here, but he can see that it weighs on him.
The strangest family photo they have is a 4x5 in a silver frame on their mother’s desk in the office of all places. It is a photo that their paternal grandfather took of the boys and their mother at their father’s funeral service. Even through a haze of pain pills, Raphael found it dizzyingly bizarre, the way he boisterously arranged them on the walkway outside of the church and told them to smile. He was out of his mind with grief and never stopped moving that day: pushing Raphael’s wheelchair around with no destination, handing Gabriel food that he, in turn, handed to Teresa.
In the photo, Raphael could be any large man in the wheelchair under those bandages. It is a rare unflattering photo of Gabriel, who winces at the camera, looking so young and lollipop skinny. Between them their mother stares into the distance. Her fingers look like talons on their shoulders. A few months ago, after a family meeting, Raphael picked up the picture and murmured, half to himself, “I didn’t smile.”
To his surprise, his mother and brother took offense. Gabriel barked “Raffy!” As if he’d pulled his pants down and his mother had whispered “I could slap you!” And left the room. They’d never brought it up again.
The whole thing filled him with longing for his father, who would have been as mystified as Raphael was by the whole thing, but would have been at peace with it. Raphael never got the chance to learn how he did that. Now he is on his own with these fierce but delicate people. What is it that they expect from him?
Gabriel now looks like an ad for sleep aids or pep pills. He’s the weary man who could shoulder the world and look good doing it if only he could get 8 hours of shuteye. If only he could find a the right multivitamin. If only he could get his brother to meet him halfway.
It is in this moment that Raphael accepts that he will be spending Friday evening at Silvio’s surrounded by food he dares not eat, women he will struggle to talk to, music he can’t dance to. He will lumber in, damaged and uncertain, to break good Cuban bread with his damaged and uncertain family. He feels tired just thinking about it. He feels shaky and sweaty just thinking about it. But he’ll go and he’ll smile, whether people can tell he’s smiling or not. Gabriel will see him; Gabriel will know.
© 2020 Kate Grimes
About the Author
Kate Grimes attended the University of Iowa where she studied poetry in the undergraduate writers' workshop. Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in Big Toe Review, Spillway Review and Full Unit Hookup. This is her first short story publication. Kate lives in Evanston, IL with her husband and daughter.