Amor and Psycho: Stories (10 page)

“You have to choose,” she said. “Eat—or die.”

I picked up my fork and knife and began to eat. Although the chicken was poisonous, it was also delicious, and made me stronger. In this way, my sister saved my life.

THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED
on my birthday, a stormy night in January. My friend Georgie gave a small dinner party. We had champagne in flutes, raw ahi on thin slices of cucumber, then chicken pie and mustard greens. We told bawdy stories and listened to Portuguese fado. I wore a black silk camisole under an old wool sweater. Georgie and I both dressed in this absurd but comfortable way after our marriages broke up, and I think it had to do with feeling, as we did, hot and cold at the same time.

When the power went out, someone opened another bottle of wine. Just then, Georgie’s ex-husband, who is a first responder, came in, peeling off his yellow reflective coat. We cried out gaily, “Did anything terrible happen?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said, and we grew sober for a moment, imagining what.

Georgie calls her ex—Carl—a superhero. Carl
is
a superhero: humble, strong, brave, not too emotional. These qualities,
which initially drew her to him, eventually turned into the reasons she left him—though they stayed friends.

Carl washed his hands, drank his wine, and tucked into his chicken pie.

“Two rez kids, probably doing a hundred miles an hour. The driver was just thirteen years old—he’s survived, so far. The other kid was thrown across the river. They can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl.”

MY KIDS WERE WORKING
on a new project now—flags for the main street of the town. At first when I heard them talking, I thought Scarface was the one killed in the crash. But the kid who died was his cousin, Maria. Scarface had the wheel.

How could I have forgotten? It had been nine months since I’d seen him. It was toward the end of school; I’d come back from Africa and finished the mural. Somebody had painted over the bonobo and replaced it with some generic ravens circling a roundhouse. The grandma on dialysis was still there, smoking her pipe; so was Uncle Gene, on his back, facing the sky. I went to the district office to pick up my check, and when I came out, the kids were walking to their buses, and there was Scarface, taller and fatter than I remembered. I walked him to his bus, a distance of thirty feet. We didn’t talk. He climbed on the bus and walked to the back row, where the Indian kids sat, stone-faced and
silent. I called after him, “Hey, Scarface, have a good summer.” Nothing. I climbed the three steps into the bus and yelled down the aisle, “Hey, Scarface, have a good summer!”

“You were going to get me some weed!” he shouted, his voice full of rage and hope.

I backed up and almost fell out of the bus. The driver unfolded the yellow doors and took him away. My sister would say I have a hardened, ruined heart, and maybe it’s true. I’d blocked him from my mind.

Sura asked a red-faced woman. She asked a high school track star. She asked a woman who stole three lollipops from the front desk and held them unrepentantly, like cigarettes. She asked a Buddhist monk. She asked a man. Everybody said the same: The Isle of Wigs—go there.

It was on Wilshire, not far from DuPar’s, and she stopped first and had a pancake to steel herself. She bought one wig the first day and then went back a couple of weeks later and bought another. Two wigs turned out to be a minimum. Should she buy more? Sura couldn’t believe insurance wouldn’t cover a head of hair. If she lost a finger, wouldn’t insurance cover it? If she lost a ring? The faith healer her son Daniel found through the gym wasn’t covered, either. Plus, he was a Catholic, which made Sura wonder what her own mother, dead of the same disease for thirty years, would
think. Would she be happy or even more furious to see her daughter saved by that kind of faith?

When her son bought her a German alarm clock so she wouldn’t be late for all her appointments, Sura took it right back to Longs to exchange it for an American item. But the bright aisles distracted her (she needed a new bath mat, measuring cups, spot remover, a replacement head for her electric toothbrush—they wanted
ten
dollars, but you could buy two for seventeen). Toys reminded her of the grandchildren she didn’t have yet; perfumes reminded her of old, sick women, and cameras and film reminded her of the boxes of unsorted pictures in her garage in the desert that showed the arc of her life so far. Nothing reminded her of her mission until, back in the parking lot, she reached into her purse for her car keys and found the black clock ticking.

TIME
! Sura’s children said she wasted her time, looking through the paper every day at the sales in stores when, for her own peace of mind, she should be putting her affairs in order. But what was she supposed to do about the bonds and certificates? Should she pay down the mortgage, pay the taxes? It was a terrible mess and nobody could help her, nobody. Her neighborhood association had called, sorry about her personal setbacks, but it had to cite her for unwatered landscaping. The Rosens had put green rocks in their yard; somebody else had paved theirs all over with Astroturf. It didn’t look bad—and compared to the expense of plants!
Sura was supposed to find an hour a day to relax and visualize health, then fertilize the orange trees, but who could do so much?

“Every day you’re not in chemotherapy is a day wasted,” the nurse in Dr. Frank’s office told her, adding to the pressure. But you couldn’t have chemotherapy every day.

At the infusion center (twenty minutes late), she arranged herself in one of the titan-size pink Barcaloungers, which reminded Sura of pedicures at the Waxing Manicure—improving forces. All you had to do was lie back. The good nurse, Julie, sunk a needle into the port in her chest, which Dr. Frank said wouldn’t hurt after the first time, but it did. Why wouldn’t it? It throbbed like a heart, demanded attention like a child. Sura dozed—
they put drugs in the chemo to keep you quiet
—and found herself beyond the padded chair, in the jungle with a dirt floor and a green smell among wild animals too busy with their own animal lives to hurt her. A black chimpanzee lay on his back while his mate pulled fleas or lice from his ear with her thick human fingers. Sura opened her eyes and closed them again—not dreaming, just thinking. Last summer, she’d studied Ape Language & Culture with her best friend, Sophie, at the Elderhostel in Seattle. The food was to die for. The famous Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg’s mother had been there—nice lady, Naomi Ginsberg. (“Allen Ginsberg’s mother died in 1956,” her son told Sura, always eager to
specifically
contradict her, although where was he in 1956? Unborn!) Sura had sat next to Naomi the night they watched a film in which monkeys swung
from manzanita branches, babies clinging for their lives to the hairy breasts. But an awful thing happened in Seattle: Sophie died—a heart attack in the dining room.

Sura woke horribly chilled in her chemo chair, cisplatin dripping into the port in her chest, to find that the technician with one eye had given her snack to an older, sicker woman who seemed confused—by America, Sura guessed.

“Why did you give her my snack?” Sura asked.

“You were sleeping so nicely,” the technician said meanly.

“I had a nightmare!” Sura told her.

A little stick figure—the good nurse, Julie—brought Sura orange juice and a cookie, chatted about her vacation coming up. Her husband wanted to take her to the Panama Canal, even though she’d been there already during a different marriage. Sura frowned and said, “Why don’t you go to Israel?”

“Barry doesn’t want to go to Israel. He’s had two heart attacks already, and he says, ‘I want to see the Panama Canal before I die.’ What am I going to do? Besides, they’re fighting in Israel. It isn’t a good time.”

“They’re always fighting,” Sura told her. “It’s never a good time. But when you go, you’ll see—it’s a good time.” She hadn’t been since 1972. Now who knew when she’d go back?

SURA COULDN
’
T SHOP
after chemo—she went home and went to bed—but the next afternoon she drove to Home Depot and picked out forty dollars’ worth of hot-weather
blooms, showy things that looked good right now, but tomorrow, who knew? She’d rushed out in a hurry, put a pink bandanna on her head; she was bald as an egg. The woman who rang her up, gorgeous girl, thirty years old, winked at Sura and picked up her hair for a second as if it were a hat.

“Oh my God,” Sura said.

Forty dollars was the least of it. She didn’t even have the energy to call the handyman to ask him to come and put in the plants. The chemo brought her platelets down. She tried to eat half a bagel and a little spinach salad and read the newspaper—but it made her sick, looking at the pictures from Israel of the blown-up bus. People talking as if they were used to it, as if they could accept such a dangerous life. No! She would not accept it. The twelve-year-old boy carried off in Gaza by his schoolmates, his eyes rolled up into his head. His friends with their book bags still on their backs! One boy hung behind, maybe scared the same thing could happen to him. When Sophie died, Sura hung behind also, even though she was Sophie’s oldest and best friend, the only person who knew her well. One minute Sophie was standing beside Sura in the buffet line, saying, “Look, corn bread!” and the next she was lying unconscious on the floor. Sura would never forget what she saw—a pulmonary embolism. An ambulance took Sophie away and an hour later she was dead. Sura hung behind, not out of meanness, just an instinct.

Dr. Frank’s office called, trying to change her next
appointment for sooner. “What, he’s going out of town?” Sura asked the receptionist.

“No, no.”

“So he thinks I’m not going to make it to Thursday?” She shifted her weight on her puffy slippers, but wrote the new date down on her calendar, inked thickly already with appointments with Dr. Frank and the clinic and the periodontist—teeth were important, the only part of her skeleton that showed—and her childrens’ birthdays, just a year and a week apart. Both Daniel and Fay were over forty and neither had children yet. Late, late!

In planning mode, still by the phone, Sura called the handyman, Ramiro. When he came a few hours later, Sura explained that she wanted him to dig up all the dirt in front of the house and lay black plastic under the white rock to keep the weeds down.
Not too much dirt
, she told him in her Spanish. (Actually, she said
not too much thing
, pointing to the dirt. It was hard to get through.)
Sí, sí, señora
, Ramiro told her, and then went away without doing any work at all.

“I don’t have much time!” she called after him.

She walked down the hall to her bedroom in her slippers, her hemorrhoids burning and jarring on the concrete slab with the Mexican pavers on top, which had seemed like an attractive idea at the time. She lay down on her bed with her hands at her sides, put earphones in her ears and switched on her relaxation tape. “You are walking on a beautiful beach along the ocean,” the reader said. “A fresh breeze is blowing. The breeze smells of fresh air and flowers. Feel the fresh air
enter your nose and bring relaxation to your whole head. Feel your eyes relax. Feel your nose relax. Feel your mouth relax.…” The port hummed in her chest. Sura hated the beach; the salt made her hair frizz. But now—she had no hair. Sura closed her eyes, folded her hands over her heart and slept.

She woke up with blue-green, mustard-colored nausea floating in front of her eyes. Her daughter, Fay, had told her she should smoke some marijuana.

“Oh my God,” Sura had said, astonished. “You want me to get lung cancer, too?” But did Fay listen? She brought two marijuana brownies in a Baggie, which Sura stowed in the back of the freezer. She’d never eat them, but she didn’t want Fay to be tempted, either.

She studied a yellow-blue hematoma on her arm. The technician with one eye who took her blood had made it; Sura had never trusted that one. Who ever heard of a technician with one eye? The other eye was glass, always looking away from you. (You expect people with some terrible affliction to be kinder, Sura thought. But why should they be?)

And speaking of trust and her children, when they came to visit, they brought gifts she didn’t need or want, and her son stole things, as if she were already dead. From the big box in the garage he stole the best picture of her ever, posing with her husband Nat’s big pumpkins that year. He also stole the biggest letter she’d ever gotten. It was from Nat when he served in the army, typed on a special big typewriter on special extra-big paper, two feet wide and three feet long. The
letter began “Dearest Heart of Mine, I am about to start the largest letter of my career,” and went on about how it was too late for her to turn back, plans had been made (his plans!), the tickets bought. It was a young man’s letter, filled with so much language of love she had to make
XXXXXXX
’s over long portions of it even before Daniel and Fay were born (because she always felt she would have children, and she might be too busy then to remember). Nat’s letter was a secret for her eyes only, although now even she had forgotten exactly what the secret entailed, what words of love he had used, exactly, and Daniel, who was ambitious and secretive, had rolled up the letter and stolen it, and taken it home, where his children might see.

“Did you take that picture of the pumpkins and my big letter?” she asked him directly when he came to see her.

“They’re safe at my place,” he said. “You had everything loose in a box in the garage.”

“I knew where it all was!” she objected.

“And now you still know where it all is,” he told her.

At the store where he picked up his mail, he’d met the secretary of a famous actress who cured her dog of liver cancer with shark cartilage she got from a woman in New Zealand. Daniel had sent away for the stuff—at his own expense, and why not, if it was legal, since he was a lawyer—and twenty brown bottles arrived by UPS with black eyedroppers in them, but no instructions. The bottles looked to Sura like poison. She kept them in a wicker basket in the den, where
she kept the unfinished, unfinishable business of taxes and estate plans, things she thought she might do sometime while she watched the stream of death and terror on TV.