Confessions of a Recovering Slut (12 page)

“That’s right,” he said, pounding his dashboard, “this here is American made. Nothin’ better.”

My father would have agreed with him, as when he died he’d had that job selling used cars. Every single one of them was American made. At his office a week after the funeral, when my father’s supervisor handed the checks to my sister and me, I noticed a poster taped over his desk that read, “Believe = Achieve.”

Outside it was raining those big, fat, heavy raindrops that actually hurt when they hit your head. After getting into our second accident that day, we drove two hours home in that, not saying much to each other, but thinking a lot nonetheless.

I was thinking of the time my father caught me in bed with Scott, that handsome heroin addict who would mark the first in a total toilet spin of awful men in my life. It was during the period when my younger sister and I were left to live on our own for a while, not that our parents didn’t check in on us occasionally.

That’s how I was busted in bed with Scott. My father had broken the law by opening the unlocked sliding-glass door of his former home and letting himself inside. Scott and I were asleep in his former bed, but I’ve always been a light sleeper, and I bounded up just as my father walked into the room. Thank God I had on pajamas.

“Dad,” I exclaimed, taking him by the arm and leading him back out to the living room, “what are you doing here?”

“I came to check on you,” he said.

I had it in my head that maybe my father didn’t get a good look at Scott, who still slept obliviously in the bedroom. Maybe, since Scott had long blond hair, I could get out of this by telling my Dad it was my friend Kathy who came to spend the night, and we both just fell asleep innocently while watching TV in his bedroom. Yeah, that’s it. He’ll believe that.

“Of course I believe you,” he said softly, and I could hardly fathom this was the same man who beat the crap out of me four years earlier just because I accidentally accepted a
Roe v. Wade
pamphlet from an activist.

I was relieved to have evaded a scene, but I still remember my father’s face; it was the face of a man witnessing the erosion of things all around him—his marriage, his health, his daughters purity—all of life’s natural erosions that you can’t do a damn thing about, but you tend to fight them anyway. Then the day comes when you catch your kid in bed with a boy, and that is the day you give up.

“Don’t leave the sliding-glass door open anymore,” my father said before leaving. “It’s dangerous. You can get into all lands of trouble.” At that he closed the door quietly, and left his life behind.

I
’D BE THE BIGGEST KLEPTO
of all time if not for the fact that I’m afraid of getting crapped on by the karma gods. This is especially painful to admit since I hate the whole concept of karma. Seriously. I believe you should do good things simply because you’re a good person, not because, ultimately, you have your own damn agenda in mind.

Not that I’m all that good of a person, but still I can’t comfortably fit thievery into my life, otherwise I’d have a
pile
, I tell you. My own mother was a master thief. Consider the famous incident in which she stole a six-deck card shoe off the top of a blackjack table in Las Vegas. But truly what fun is a card shoe? Even if it comes with the chain still attached, at best it’s just something you can swing across the room and hit your sister in the head with. Other than that it has no use.

It still irks me that my mother never stole useful things. No. She only stole stuff she thought people wouldn’t miss, like pool cues, ashtrays, hospital gowns, patio furniture, fireplace mantles, and so on. We had piles of this stuff, and I constantly lamented that my mother was not the land of klepto who came home with watches and earrings and other practical items.

I found this out when I tried to place an order. I wasn’t even being all that demanding, I thought. It seemed simple enough to me, to walk into a toy store and steal a trampoline, especially since my mother had recently come home with a one hundred-pound potted tree she took from a local hotel lobby, but that day I learned there’s some kind of inner code among kleptos; they actually don’t consider themselves thieves.

“I don’t
steal
” my mother gasped, angrily grinding her spent menthol into an ashtray printed with the tiger and little Negro logo of a Sambo’s coffee shop. “If you want a brand-new trampoline you have to pay for it your own goddam self.”

Paying for it myself meant hours of door-to-door cupcake sales, during which I usually ate half my inventory. I also tried to sell caramel apples and blond brownies, but they weren’t as easy to push. There is just something about a cupcake being sold by a grade-schooler that sends housewives running for their wallets. If you tell them there’s a purpose to the sales, that’s even better.

I had some great stories for why I was selling cupcakes, too, all culled from conversations I’d overheard coming from my parents’ bedroom, like the one about how I had to help pay for my brother’s education so he could get a college degree and do all the things my father never got to do. Or the one about how my sister lost her shoes at the park and our family was gonna have to live in the gutter if we had to keep buying her new pairs. But the one about needing money to put food on the table didn’t fare too well, not surprisingly, since cupcakes are actual food and there I was holding a whole tray. In this particular case, though, I found the truth worked wonders.

“I’m selling cupcakes on account of my mom won’t steal me a trampoline,” I’d say, and I sold panloads. At ten cents apiece, though, I never did make enough to buy myself a major piece of playground equipment, so I didn’t get the trampoline. Instead I just amassed big pile of dimes, which I decided was better than a trampoline. I liked how a mess of dimes felt against my palms, all small, slippery, and flat. I took them out of their metal bank every day and played with them, letting them slip through my fingers, laughing like a mad little miser. “Mine, mine, all mine!” I’d cackle.

Then the pile mysteriously started diminishing. At first it was just one or two dimes at a time—an amount someone wrongly thought I wouldn’t miss. Then one morning my pile was downright paltry! My father was home that morning because he just lost his job selling trailers again, and I’d overheard my mother being really upset because she personally decorated some of the trailers at the big trade show, and she was lamenting the loss of two carved mallard ducks and other accessories she’d paid for and wanted back. But when my father left a job, he didn’t go back, and those ducks were gone for good.

That morning, when my father gave my sisters and me our lunch money, he doled it out in dimes. I didn’t say anything. Instead I just waited patiently, and eventually my pile of dimes began to grow again, as I knew it would. After that I took my pile to the swap meet every weekend until I found a carved duck. The lady wanted five dollars for it, and I thought about telling her one of my stories, but in the end opted on the truth and she let me have it for half my pile. The part she liked best, she said, was that I wanted to give it to my
father
to give to my mother. That and how I’d earned all those dimes my own goddam self.

I
T’S SERIOUSLY DIFFICULT
not to cry all the time lately, and not just because I’m the cesspool of hormones everyone said I would become during the final stretch—and I mean
stretch
—of this whole experiment in spawning I’ve been these past few months. For one thing, I cry because I wonder, Jesus God!, am I
always
going to be this waddling, puffy-faced planet with swollen feet who can’t even pick things up? Don’t get me wrong, I was never a good housekeeper. I take after my own mother, who was so oblivious to the roaches in our house that she didn’t notice we had a problem until they started attacking our heads while we were in bed.

So I consider it a huge accomplishment over my upbringing that I specialize in picking things up. I’m not good at
cleaning
, per se, because I understand that cleaning entails the use of, like, sponges and special gloves and stuff. I seriously don’t get that. I can stare at my bathtub for an entire morning wondering why the hell it doesn’t clean itself since I splash water on it every day when I shower, but when I see a bath towel on the floor, I’m really good at picking it up and hanging it on the doorknob. See, that’s what I do, I
pick things up
. Now—huge, bloaty bag of bacon fat that I am—I can’t even do that. If I drop something I have to lack it all the way to Lary’s place so he can pick it up. Sometimes he is not even home, and when he gets home he has to yell, “Why the hell is there a
spatula
on my floor?” Then I have to cry.

I cry all the time. And if I ever stop to wonder what the hell it is I’m crying about, I cry even harder because, oh, my God!, I’m gonna have a baby. You would be amazed at how pregnant a woman can get before that fact really sinks in. Here I am, knocked up now for eight and a half months, and the whole inevitability that all this will culminate in a squiggly little ball of bone and flesh with
eyeballs
and everything didn’t really hit me until I attended the perinatal classes at Crawford Long Hospital last weekend.

It was there that they showed us those
movies
. Those grainy, gory, homegrown
snuff films
, with the difference being that, instead of someone ending up dead at the conclusion, someone ends up the opposite of that (“It’s alive! Alive!”), a twist that is almost as horrifying if you ask me. Inevitably there is a point in these films in which the mother becomes a growling, eye-rolling, foaming-at-the-mouth demon who can do little but thrash her head from side to side. At this point she puts her legs up and all of a sudden out pops this
other head
! It stays that way for awhile—I swear I think the obstetrician slows things down on purpose at this point so everyone can take in the “wonder” of it all—and the mother is lying there swinging her head around in silent agony while
the other head
is blinking its eyeballs. It was the Attack of the Two-Headed Creature!

All of a sudden it occurred to me that, Jesus God!, this is what I have to go through to get to the other side, the side with the little knit booties and the baby jumper with “Born to Suck Tittie” embroidered across the front that a lesbian couple contributed to my baby shower.
I have to become the two-headed creature!
So, needless to say, I was still crying in my seat when the lights went up and the other future mother’s had left the room for a snack break.

“Hey, you’re gonna do fine. Everything will be fine,” Daniel tried to console me.

“That’s just not
natural
!” I sobbed into the cell phone.

“C’mon,” he said, “you need to be stronger. You need to pick yourself up.” At that I stopped gibbering. I can do that, I thought. Picking things up is my specialty.

I
DON’T FIND IT FUNNY
that the delivery-room nurses decided to nickname my baby “Tomato Face.” I mean, aren’t most babies born with big red heads? And another thing, nobody told me there was so much seepage involved in new motherhood. I feel like a faulty Tupperware container. Actually Lary did try to warn me, but who can take him seriously? Especially when it comes to motherhood. He reminded me I shouldn’t bring my big-headed baby to his place because she would die—not that he would kill her himself, but that his place, a former abandoned candy factory, is about as safe for children as a bag of broken glass thrown at a spinning lawnmower blade, what with all the industrial tools Lary leaves strewn about. I don’t know what he uses that equipment for, but I think he might have sawed a car in half once. That’s probably what those pieces are under a tarp in the alleyway behind his warehouse. Anyway, with all those tools I don’t see why he can’t build my baby a protective iron bubble so I can hang out at his place like I used to. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

Because otherwise I’m pretty much a prisoner here in my own home, a walking lactating lunch bucket for my newborn. What’s worse is that it looks like I’ll have to give up my God hobby as well. Back when Grant decided to become a fugitive from mediocrity and gave away everything he owned, I was happy to get his collection of crudely painted roadside religious signs. They’re propped up against the outside of my house right now, blaring “Get Right with God,” “Hell Hurts,” and “Repent Immediately!” The problem is people in my neighborhood think I mean it, and they’re mistaking me for some kind of missionary, and lately all the roadside flotsam who beg for money at intersections have been knocking at my door. “I am not a nun!” I have to shriek. “I am a recovering slut!”

Sadder still is that the panhandlers are pretty much my only daytime company, captive in my home like I am, which is ironic because I didn’t buy this place to hang out in it. It’s only six minutes away from Poncey Highlands where I used to live, so I figured I’d always be over in my old neighborhood drinking lattes and tequila shooters and whatnot, and maybe I’d sleep in my house on those rare nights I didn’t stay out having wild sex with traveling Irish rugby players. In the meantime this place would quietly increase in value until I sold it for an assload of money and retired to a small island off the coast of Cancun like Grant did, only for real. There I would bake under the sun until my skin turned to beef jerky. It was a good plan.

But things never go according to plan. In fact, I think if you’re really attached to controlling your future, you should plan for the opposite of what you want just to confuse the cosmic comedians whose sole job is to figure out what you think your future should hold so they can preclude it from ever happening. Because never, after a decade of making do with the faded memories of most of the members of my original family, did I think that I’d eventually grow a new one of my own. Never did I plan for this little sprogette, whose name is Milly, and whose head is still big but not red anymore.