A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (24 page)

She was going down on him in pure daylight, behind JC Penney's, her bobbing head and the boy's tense features obscured only by a short wall and dumpster. As she moved, his unforgettable thighs clenched, his muscles froze, and she heard delivery guys outside arguing.

“It's a fucking couch, it's heavy. You're a lazy motherfucker,” one guy said.

“Shut the fuck up,” another guy answered.

“Fuck you both,” a third guy added.

Georgia imagined the three of them dropping the couch to the asphalt and moving toward the car. She imagined them peering over that short wall and getting a look.

The noonday boy was a new kind of boy, a boy who was really a man, a man in slacks and navy blue dress shirt, a man in a silk tie. Georgia understood that his silly garments were only his work clothes, a costume, like the blue jumper Mrs. Yates made her wear. She knew that when he left the mall and went home, he was, like her, a different person altogether—a guy in Levis and bare chest mowing the lawn or a guy in shorts and tank top running laps around the neighborhood park.

There was a band of white skin on his ring finger, and when Georgia jutted her chin in the finger's direction and raised her eyebrows, the boy said, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm not talking,” Georgia said.

“Well, you're looking,” the boy said.

But it was Georgia's fault as much as anyone's, so she said, “I don't care if you got someone at home who cooks for you.”

And he said, “She doesn't cook.”

 

When Georgia opened the front door, she found her Aunt Alma on the couch, painting her nails. Her father was on all fours in the middle of the room, playing with Georgia's dog. “Hello, honey,” Alma said. “You have a good day?”

Georgia nodded.

“Sit down with me, Georgie. Tell me what you think of this color. Is it subtle enough? I don't want anything too flashy. What do you think?” she said again, waving her fingers in the air.

“I think it stinks.” Georgia wrinkled her nose.

Her aunt stretched her arms out, elbows locked, and spread her fingers apart. “You don't like it?” she said, pouting.

“The color's fine,” Georgia said. “But they stink—don't wave them around like that.”

“Oh, good, you like the color.” Alma looked relieved.

Georgia walked over to the couch and bent down to whisper in her aunt's ear. “How long has he been like that?” she said, pointing at her dad's back.

“All afternoon. I didn't even know he liked that dog.”

Obviously her dad had forgotten that he hated the dog, the dog Georgia had rescued from the streets months ago and begged him to let her keep. “Because of loyalty, because your mother's a liar and she's gone,” he said finally, giving in.

Now her father was using a voice Georgia barely recognized, a sweet and sticky voice that came from somewhere inside him she hadn't seen since before she was a teenager. “Oh, baby, you're my pooch, my sweet pooch,” he said. “Remember when Clara was a puppy?” her dad asked, turning to Georgia. And though the dog's name was Temper and she'd only been with them three months, Georgia said yes.

She made herself a turkey sandwich and took it to the den. She turned the television on but kept the sound way down low and thought about her father's forgetting, how today it led to love, or a sort-of-love, or maybe that wasn't love at all, because her real father, the man made up of actual memories, hated the dog he now thought he loved. Then Georgia decided that love wasn't a real thing anyway, only something people imagined or pretended to feel, and then she looked at her sandwich, sitting there with little bits of wilted lettuce hanging over the crust, and decided she wasn't hungry anymore.

 

Georgia didn't know what she felt and barely pretended when she met the boy who was really a man in his car at noon. She called him a boy to his face and he didn't protest, although they both knew the truth. Perhaps she called him a boy and wanted to believe it because he was more ordinary that way, more conventional, less original, and therefore would become less of a memory. He would be easier to forget if he was just a boy like the others, if, in her mind, he was ten years younger and not as experienced and didn't know how to smoothly accept the things he accepted: undoing his belt and unzipping his pants with one hand while lifting a lever and letting the seat fall back under his weight with the other.

 

On Sunday her Aunt Alma, who up until now only stopped by once a day with groceries and medicine and food, came to live with them for good. Georgia stood in the doorway and watched Alma in her parents' walk-in closet as she ripped her mother's dresses, blouses, sweaters, and jeans from hangers and dropped them into two huge cardboard boxes. Alma climbed up on a stepstool and swept the top shelf with her forearm, swinging her arm back and forth until the floor beneath her was covered with shoes: heels and clogs and slippers and boots. She stepped off the stool and picked up a black pump. “Look at this,” she said to Georgia, holding the shoe by its skinny heel with two fingers, shaking her head.

“What?” Georgia said.

“This,” she said again, louder this time, making a face and moving the shoe away from her chest like it was a dead animal, a rat or smelly fish.

“It's a shoe,” Georgia told her.

“Yes, well,” she said. “We should have known what your mother was capable of.”

Georgia held the flaps shut while Aunt Alma taped up the boxes. Later, after her father went to sleep, Georgia helped her aunt carry the boxes outside to the curb, where they sat until morning next to three fat green bags of trash.

 

It was noon again, and she should have been anywhere but there. She should have been at the food court sitting with a corn dog or milk shake or bowl of spicy chicken. She should have been doing anything but that.

She pulled her hand away from the boy, quitting at the exact moment he exploded. He dirtied the dashboard and steering wheel, and let out a huge sigh, a sigh that seemed to fill the whole car. “Fuck,” he said. “Sorry.” He pulled Georgia to his chest and hugged her tightly for several seconds before she wriggled from his arms. “Maybe we could go away one weekend,” he said suddenly.

“I don't know,” she said.

“I want to touch you too,” he said. “It's not fair.”

“To who?”

“To both of us,” he said.

“Both of us?”

“Yeah,” he said, “you'll never like me this way.”

“I like you enough,” she said.

The boy looked sad, like he did the day she introduced herself.

“Where would you want to go?” she said, feeling guilty. “If we had a weekend, where would you take me?”

“The mountains. I'd take you to the mountains. I'd rent a cabin. I'd build us a fire. We could roast marshmallows.”

“I don't like marshmallows,” she said.

“We could do whatever you like, then.”

“I'd rather stay here,” she said.

He looked around the car and shook his head. “I want to take you away from this,” he tried again.

“Why?”

“Why?”
he said, surprised, looking at her. The boy leaned back in the seat and let out a small, embarrassed laugh. “It might be cool, you know, to get to know each other.”

“I've got work,” she said.

“You're a funny one.” He was shaking his head, leaning over Georgia and opening the glove box. He pulled out a pack of tissues, but before he cleaned things up or could say anything else, Georgia was out of the car and on her way back to the yogurt shop.

 

After two weeks of sleeping on the living room couch, Aunt Alma said she'd had enough. Her neck hurt and her back, too. She'd had a life before she moved in, you know. She had needs.

She moved Georgia's father's clothes out of the closet and carried them to the den. Georgia sat on what was her parents' bed and watched as her aunt lifted her own clothes from an old brown suitcase. She hung the blouses and sweaters in neat rows, trying to pat out the wrinkles by slapping at the fabric with an open palm.

Finally Alma turned around and looked at Georgia. She put a hand on her hip and said, “Your father doesn't know this is his bedroom anymore, Georgie.”

“But it
is
his bedroom,” Georgia said, her voice flat.

“You said yourself that he's been wandering into the den and sleeping on the sofa. Don't just sit there looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“So judgmental,” her aunt said.

“You could always take Kevin's room.”

“Where's he going to sleep when he comes home for the weekends?”

“He doesn't come home for the weekends,” Georgia said.

“Well, he might, and if he does, where would he sleep if your old Aunt Alma was in his room?”

“In the den.”

“Your father
likes
it in there.” Her aunt was emphatic.

“I just don't think it's right,” Georgia said.

“So judgmental, Georgie,” her aunt said. “You certainly didn't get that quality from
our
side of the family.”

 

When the boy came into the yogurt store, she made his cone smaller than usual, but really it was standard and weighed what it was supposed to weigh, what it should have been weighing all along, the three fat swirls Mrs. Yates had demonstrated for her that first day on the job. He took the cone from her hand and looked at it, obviously disappointed. “I guess you're not coming out to the car anymore,” he said.

She watched as he lifted the yogurt to his mouth, as his tongue went around and around in a circle.

“What did I do?” he asked.

And Georgia didn't say anything, just turned away and began stirring the fudge, which was hot and steaming, and she let the steam hit her face, inhaled, and didn't even turn around when she heard the sensor's little song, when she heard the bells under the mat outside ringing, which told her another customer was gone.

2000

1.

It had been three weeks since my visit to the dingy clinic on Sepulveda Boulevard, and the cramps had mostly subsided, but the bleeding continued. I was standing in the kitchen in a black T-shirt and jeans, wearing two maxipads. I moved from sink to cupboard to stove, aware of the stacked pads between my legs, shuffling around like a very old woman. My hair was on top of my head in a messy ponytail and I wore my mother's apron, which at one time, years ago, said
Elizabeth
in black felt, but which now said simply
abeth.
She was in bed, too tired to cook the dinner she'd promised Gilbert Wolff earlier in the week, and I was attempting her specialty: eggplant with peanut sauce over pasta. If I cooked while she rested, I was hoping she'd be able to join us at the table.

My mother's skin was so slightly yellow that it was still something the two of us debated and questioned, but the fatigue was undeniable. She'd been sleeping twelve hours a night and taking multiple naps during the day. My mother was leaving me, letter by letter, and as I stood in the kitchen looking down at the open cookbook, I touched the remaining letters on the apron with a fingertip and imagined the fabric across my chest blank and white, those final five letters coming loose, falling to the floor or getting lost in the dryer.

In the last week she had stopped shopping, teaching, and going out with Gilbert, which is one reason the dinner invitation came about. If my mother couldn't go to him, she wanted him to come to her. She'd called the school district three mornings in a row for a substitute teacher, but refused to give up her classes completely. She'd promised the kids she'd be back as soon as the medicine kicked in. On Monday she'd be starting a new chemo, a drug that came from the yew tree, and if it worked, the doctor promised her at least a few good months.

I closed the cookbook and decided to rely on her instructions instead, which she was trying to shout to me from her bedroom. Her voice no longer carried down the hall, so I shuffled out of the kitchen and into her room. I stood above her with a notebook and a pen while she listed the ingredients: peanut butter, soy sauce, ginger, red pepper, and orange marmalade.

“You're wearing my apron,” she said. “I love that apron, even if it only has half of my name on it.” She was smiling.

“I don't remember you using jelly.”

“It's not jelly,” she said.

“Can I get you anything?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure about tonight?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Because I can call Gilbert and cancel for you.”

“He's on his way, Rachel.”

“I'll call his cell phone.”

“I'm fine. Let me sleep ten more minutes, and then I'll come help you.”

I shuffled back to the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator and hunted around until I found the jar of marmalade. I measured out a tablespoon. I banged the spoon against the bowl and watched the marmalade fall.

 

I'd met Gilbert several times before, but only in passing—the two of them always rushing off together. Tonight was supposed to be the next step in their relationship, the getting-to-know-the-family step.
I
was the family.

He arrived in a tweed sport coat, black button-down shirt, and jeans. He handed me a bottle of wine and a bouquet of irises. “I'm not supposed to drink—doctor's orders, so the wine is for you,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I couldn't decide about the flowers,” he told me. “I was thinking about roses or lilies, but when I saw these—”

“They're beautiful,” I said.

My mother was right; Gilbert
was
dapper and stylish, especially for a man in his sixties. He certainly didn't look like someone with advanced cancer, but I knew his ruddy cheeks and big smile were misleading, that inside of him terrible things were happening. I told Gilbert that my mom was in her room sleeping but that she wanted him to wake her.

When he headed down the hall, I set the flowers on the table, put the wine away, and searched for a vase. I arranged the flowers, stood back a moment and admired them, then followed to see if he was having any luck rousing her. I stood in the doorway, unnoticed, and watched them. He was sitting on the bed next to her, planting tender kisses on her cheek. He whispered something in her ear. My mother's eyes were open. “So handsome,” she said. “Look at you all dressed up.”

I saw it then: my mother was a dying woman in love with a dying man. I felt dizzy suddenly and held on to the door to keep my balance. I cleared my throat to make my presence known.

“Give me ten more minutes,” she said to both of us. “Just a little more sleep,” she said.

 

We gave her fifteen minutes. We sat across the table from each other, our conversation stilted and unnatural.

“How's school?”

“Fine, fine.” I was nodding like an idiot.

“Good.” A long pause.

“How's the tree business?”

“Things are okay,” he said. Another long pause. “How's the poetry business?”

“There is no poetry business,” I said, and we both laughed.

We gave her thirty minutes, then went to her room together to try again. My mother shook her head, shooed us away, and the two of us returned to the table rejected.

We gave her forty-five minutes, and Gilbert pushed his chair away from the table and got up. He walked to the window and looked out at the black ocean and lone oil tanker. He pointed at the cement patio ten stories down. “Your mother told me there was a suicide here a few years back.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“She said you saw the whole thing.”

“It was awful.”

“Said the girl didn't even live here, that she lived in a house across town.”

“This building is famous.”

He turned from the window and looked at me.

“It's the tallest building in the city,” I said. “The woman next door has lived here for thirty years, and she told me—these are her exact words—it's just something that happens now and then.”

“Like an earthquake,” he said, looking back.

“Yeah, something like that.”

A foghorn sounded in the distance. Gilbert turned from the window and came back to the table. He sat down with a sigh. I looked at the empty chair and wished my mother were sitting in it. I looked at the place I'd set for her: the plate, the knife and fork and spoon. I wondered if I'd be like those crazy, grieving women who continue setting the table for a dead son or a daughter who jumped off the tallest building in the city.

We gave my mother a full hour and then tried her a final time. He sat on her bed and rubbed her back. I stood at the door. “Gilbert brought you irises,” I said over his shoulder.

She opened her eyes, then quickly closed them.

“Want me to bring them in here?” I asked her.

“I'll get up in a minute,” she said groggily.

Gilbert watched the clock on the dining room wall, his stomach growling so loudly that I could hear it. He was obviously hungry, and I was too, but we didn't want to eat without her; it would be giving up, admitting all the dinners to come that she wouldn't enjoy. I used his growling stomach as a cue to get up from the table and go to the bathroom to check the pads. The blood was darker, richer than any menstrual blood. It was thick and surprising. I rolled up the two soiled pads and dropped them in the wastebasket, then covered them with toilet paper. I leaned over, reached under the sink and thought about doubling up again, but decided that one pad would have to do.

I washed my hands.

I washed them again.

I stood for a moment, holding onto the doorknob before moving into the hall. My steps were met with sharp stabs to my lower stomach, which made me want to open the bottle of wine Gilbert had brought with him. I imagined drinking a glass on my own, him watching me and wanting one himself, and decided against it.

I returned to the dining room and sat down at the table. “Well…” I said.

“Let's eat,” Gilbert said. “We'll let your mother sleep and have some dinner together.”

He twirled the noodles on his fork, gave me a sad smile, and I was wishing that she'd met him years ago.

“I love eggplant,” he said. “It's meaty without being meat—not that there's anything wrong with meat. I told your mother how I feel about eggplant and she promised me this dish. And here you've gone and made it for me. What a good girl.” He lifted the fork to his mouth.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It's sort of dry.”

“Nonsense.”

“It tastes much better when she makes it. She'll make it for you another time, I'm sure.”

He was chewing and nodding appreciatively.

“When she makes it—”

But he cut me off. “It's delicious, Rachel,” he said. “You've made a nice dinner.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't watch her enough in the kitchen. I didn't watch her enough anywhere.” I felt my eyes welling up.

He put down his fork. “I want to tell you something.”

“Don't” I said.

“Listen,” he insisted, “you've got to get ready, prepare yourself.” His voice was soft.

“I've been
getting ready
for years. Since she was diagnosed, I've known what was coming.” I picked up my fork again and stabbed at a piece of eggplant. “And still I'm not prepared. How can anyone prepare?”

He shrugged.

“I thought I
was
preparing, imagining the inevitable scenario, seeing myself at her bedside, getting through it—holding her hand, the fucking morphine drip—I'm sorry,” I said, losing my appetite completely and putting down my fork.

“Don't be sorry.”

“I shouldn't say fuck in front of you.”

“Hogwash.
Fuck
is a good word,” he said.

“It's certainly better than
hogwash,”
I said, smiling.

“Monday's chemo will probably work. It's from the yew tree. And your mother will have a few more months. Good months.”

“It's just postponement,” I said.

“What isn't?”

I thought about that a moment and then said, “Taking the elevator to the roof and jumping.”

“Yes, well,” he said. “Everything
except
that.” He paused. “Let's have some wine with this dinner.”

“But your doctor said—”

“Hogwash. I mean, fuck it.”

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely. I want a glass. Or two,” he said brightly.

I shot up from the table and went to the kitchen. “Is red okay?” I called out.

“Merlot, Chianti—whatever you want. Open the Bordeaux I brought, if you like.”

I brought the Bordeaux and corkscrew to the table, then turned to get the wineglasses. “Your mother is the love of my life,” he said to my back.

“Mine too,” I told him.

“She wishes that weren't so.” His voice was serious.

“It is what it is,” I said, placing the wineglasses on the table.

Gilbert shook his head. “You'll have other loves, different loves.” He picked up the corkscrew and began opening the wine. He was quiet while he twisted, a look of concentration on his face. “She told me what you went through—that man who left the country,” he said finally.

“He didn't leave the country,” I said.

“Oh?” He pulled, and the cork popped out.

“He was just here visiting. It's not like he lived here and then went away.”

Gilbert nodded, splashing wine into our glasses.

“He's on a farm,” I said.

“A
fucking
farm,” he corrected me.

“A fucking farm,” I said, lifting the glass to my lips and taking a sip. The wine was delicious—dry and bold and fruity. My appetite returned and I joined Gilbert in eating the dinner I had prepared. It tasted okay, not as good as hers, but better than I had anticipated.

We drank one glass. We ate our dinner and drank another glass. And then another. We opened a second bottle, and poured one more. Gilbert moved to the couch and I moved to the chair across from him. I was telling him about the tree outside my classroom window, how I thought the tree was sick.

“I'd take a look at it,” he said, “but we're too drunk to drive.”

“Angela! Let me call my friend,” I said.

By midnight the three of us were standing on campus. It was dark and mostly quiet, except for the occasional burst of laughter coming from the dorms across the street. Gilbert was several feet away, busy with his black bag on a picnic table, searching for equipment. Angela scratched at the new hives on her chest and I told her to stop. She dropped her hand to her side, then leaned in to scold me. “I can't believe you got fucked up with your mom's boyfriend,” she said.