Picking Blueberries by Anna Tambour

Picking
Blueberries
    Father carved the
joint. "Thin for you, Dick?" he giggled.
    "Please, Father." Dick
answered. He still hated the taste, and the batter he was mixing
was double chocolate to disguise as much as possible even the
texture, once mixed in.
    Mother was in the
bedroom. As usual. Dick wondered who was with her this time.
    Today was Dick's
birthday. This morning, Jonathon, the ex-psychiatry student, one of
Mother's currents, had visited for a couple of hours. Dick opened
to door to his knock, and Jonathon held out a gaily wrapped
package. "I stole this for you," he smiled, trying to curry favor
probably, though Dick was surprised that Jonathon had noticed
him.
    "How did you know?"
Dick asked. But Jonathon's face was blank, looking over his head
toward the guts of the house.
    "Coincidence," Dick
muttered, but he unpeeled the giftwrap to find The Complete Poems
of TS Eliot, with a "To Dick 1972, from Jonathon," scrawled on the
title page in thick blue ink. He opened it further to The Hollow
Men. "Thanks Jonathon," but when he looked up, Jonathon had already
disappeared.
    Dick took the book up
to his room and carefully sliced out the title page. Then he smiled
at the book. It was entirely coincidence. Dick remembered other
arrival gifts, as Jonathon always had something when he came over.
Jonathon's gifts to Mother had been a pound of sirloin, a slinky
toy, a package of foam curlers that they both chortled over, then
made a mobile of, hanging now from the lamp over the dining room
table. To Dick, once before, a gift, some plastic toy that Dick
hadn't disguised his disgust over. Jonathon did well on this one,
but as usual, it was a within-grab-range impulse. It could as
easily have been The Gun Digest 1968 or a Barbie doll.
    Dick knew Eliot from
the library, and had enjoyed the camaraderie of hopelessness that
he felt with Eliot, though he preferred Sassoon. But those were
private thoughts not discussed with anyone, least of all Father,
Mother, and their friends.
    A series of loud gasps
and grunts whooshed down the hall and rolled into the kitchen where
Dick and his Father were now, Dick with his mixing bowl, Father
cutting up the hash cube—in family jargon, "the joint."
    Father's brow wrinkled
momentarily, and then he went into the living room. In a moment,
"Ah! Brown sugar, just like a young girl should ..." blasted over
any sound other than a bomb, and Father came prancing back in, neck
extended, head bobbing to the music.
    Father worked a few
more seconds at his task while Dick watched, wondering what took so
long to smash up a glob. But that wasn't the way Father looked at
it, so Dick kept his thoughts to himself. Then Father scraped the
broken up paste into the mixing bowl, and took over the mixing
himself, carefully mixing well, then tipping it into the prepared
pan, and finally using his fingers and tongue on the mixing bowl to
lick the leavings clean.
    Dick put the pan in
the oven, then went to his room. The party would start soon. Father
danced off into the living room.
    ~
    Theirs was only one
house of about a dozen in The Community. The Community had a
constitution, lots of money from somewhere, and a purpose "to
uplift and foster." Dick heard the whole purpose thing read out
once, and it sounded noble. He wished he had written it. The houses
of The Community were scattered in the middle of a quiet
neighborhood, though The Community houses were the only ones not
inhabited by black families. The reason there were so many
Community houses is that the collection was considered a college,
and associated with some famous college in another state, a college
with classes and real campus buildings.
    Most of the people of
Father's and Mother's age had been professors of one kind or
another from another fancy college at the other side of town
(though in the informal atmosphere of The Community, Professor and
Doctor had been dropped, just leaving the plain Mr. Mrs. Miss.)
They were all officially the faculty of The