Cures for Heartbreak (11 page)

Kelsey laughed delightedly. She'd clearly done this before; she'd said we'd have no problem sneaking in, they never carded, and she was right. The two men were swallowing her stories as eagerly as their drinks: she was a Spanish teacher at a high school, she'd told them, and, staring into her Black Bunny beer, explained that I was studying to be a vet.

I'd sipped half my gin and tonic, but already I could feel it. “Ready for another?” Corky asked.

I shook my head. “Work tomorrow,” I said gravely.

“Veterinary medicine—I imagine that must be a rewarding profession.”

“Oh, it is. You get that sick bunny on the examining table and—oh, it's rewarding.”

What the hell were we doing? It was thrilling and exciting
(were these men really taking us seriously? Could they really be interested in
us
?), but it also made me feel a little ill and frightened, as if we were crossing over into territory I wanted to enter, but wasn't sure how. Earlier, in Central Park, Kelsey and I'd mutually confessed our virginities, and agreed we'd wait until we fell in love. This wasn't love with these men, that much was clear, but it was intimidating just the same. It was one thing to read romance novels and another to have the physical fact of a man right there, itching to get into your furry domain.

“Have you been in class all day?” Gil asked.

“No,” Kelsey said. “We've been celebrating Mia's twenty-second birthday.
Feliz cumpleaños!
”

She and Gil raised their glasses, and Corky bought me another drink. The clock ticked away, midnight, one. Kelsey told them about relaxing in Sheep Meadow, and the movie, and shopping, as if she and I'd been friends for years.

“Do you do this on your birthday every year? Make it a full holiday?” Corky asked me.

“Kind of,” I said, and for the first time I thought of my previous birthday, before my mother got sick. She'd bought me half a cake from a gourmet shop in Manhattan, because she didn't have time to make one, and she figured we never ate the whole thing anyway. She'd placed it on the table and I'd peered around it, looking for the other half. “What happened? Did you get hungry?” I'd asked her, and she shook her head and blushed, saying it was expensive and she'd thought
half seemed like a better idea. I'd sulked, feeling sorry for my measly half-cake, and I could kill myself now for not appreciating it then. Why had it seemed so imperfect?

And why, in the morning when I'd awoken, had my memories of past birthdays been so sugarcoated? Why had I not thought of the less-than-perfect ones too? I hated the way these types of memories still haunted me, dredging themselves up, unwarranted, constantly poking through—
remember me, remember me
—when I didn't want to remember any of them.

I stared at the floor. Tears brimmed in my eyes, and I blinked them back, but they poured out anyway; I cried into my drink. This
always
happened—it was pathetic. I was a professional weeper; if they had a course in it at school, I'd excel in something besides hygiene for once. I cried on every holiday, on Mother's Day, her birthday, and the seventeenth of every month, the anniversary of her death.

Corky looked horrified; he stood back. “What's wrong?”

I shook my head.

“What's up with her?” Gil asked Kelsey, as if I was some kind of freak. Kelsey didn't answer; she put her hand on my shoulder and waited for me to stop crying, which I didn't. We went to the bathroom for a tissue, and when we came out the two men had left.

We sat on the wooden bench in the subway station, waiting for the train to take us home. “Why did you do that?” Kelsey asked. “Why did you start crying?”

I shrugged. We hadn't spoken since we'd left the bar. I looked around the station. It was surprisingly packed, but only with men. A big toothless guy paced by us back and forth, leering like he was hungry and we were lunch.
Perhaps we're just going to die,
I thought, and at two in the morning this began to sound good: then the humiliation would end.

I stared at the tracks. “I don't know.”

After a few moments she said, “Where's your mom? You've never talked about her.”

My heart jumped, as it did whenever anybody asked; each time it was still a surprise. I shrugged. I looked down at the floor. Scuff on my black shoes. Snickers wrapper. Discarded gum.
She's in the cemetery, decomposing,
I once thought to say. But I said the usual: “She died in January,” as if giving the month made it real. It didn't. Eight months had passed and here I was, the words still crumbled into me, hollow breaking lumps, screws in the chest, never-ending.

“I'm sorry.”

She didn't say anything else, just looked at me, but not in an odd, surprised way—she looked at me plainly, like she was taking me in. Like she was waiting for me to say something more. And that plainness surprised me. I stared back at my shoes, the dirty ground. What was the purpose of it, all the crying, the heartbreak? I'd ruined our chances with those guys, I'd ruined our perfect day, I'd ruined
love.

“I'm sorry I made those guys run off.” I sniffed.

“They were creeps—I'm glad you did.”

I wiped my nose on my sleeve; a few latent sobs were still working their way out.

“I've cried in the worst places, too,” she said quietly as the train finally pulled into the station. “When my parents first opened the store, I cried nearly every day, I couldn't understand why they were working such long hours. I thought each morning when they left that they were never coming back.”

“But you were like six or seven.”

She shrugged. “It doesn't matter.”

At Queensborough Plaza, three stops before my house and six before hers, Kelsey checked her watch. “It's almost three. My parents'll kill me if I come home now and wake them up. Do you mind—can I stay at your house?”

“Oh, sure,” I croaked, horror rising in my throat at the idea. How could I bring her to Spooky House? But I didn't have a choice; I couldn't say no. I braced myself during the rest of the ride and cringed as we walked the three long blocks from the subway to my house, past the weeds, the litter, the slanting trees, the overgrown roots cracking the sidewalk, the peeling paint on our red stoop. That stoop I'd played on, hiked up jauntily so many years, and now winced to even look at.

I drew in my breath as we entered our dark living room. Pillows and newspapers were strewn on the floor; dirty mugs, plates, and the partly eaten Sara Lee cake cluttered the coffee
table. My father was asleep on the couch in his sweatpants and undershirt; he woke up when I shut the door, and blinked at us. For a moment he seemed alarmed, and then confused, and then he just looked awkward, and I wondered if he was thinking,
Oh,
now
she brings a friend over, at last, at three in the morning.

He pulled his button-down shirt off the chair and buttoned it off-kilter, so it hung about him loosely, like a smock. He hadn't shaved in days. There was dried ketchup on the pocket of his shirt. The hair he usually brushed over his bald spot hung down one side of his face, like a new-wave haircut. I told him we were at a party that ended late, and introduced them to each other.

“You'd like some coffee, Leslie?” my father said.

“Kelsey,”
I said.

“Kell-see. Kell-see. A slice of cake? Skim milk?”

I shook my head. “Maybe in the morning. I'm sorry. We're really tired.”

But Kelsey was eyeing the chocolate cake. “I'd love a slice,” she said.

So the three of us sat there, on our living room couch, drinking skim milk and eating birthday cake (it was still partly frozen in the middle) off yellow napkins imprinted with
WENDY
'
S
. My father pulled my birthday presents out of a grocery bag beneath the table; they were wrapped in newspaper and tied with a bow of string.

“Oh wow,” I said, tearing off the paper, “Teen Lady. I love them.” My father seemed pleased; we said good night, and I led Kelsey upstairs to my room, all the time waiting for her to revolt, to refuse to be with me any longer in my crazy, decrepit house.

I opened the door to my room—the old single bed, the satiny star mobile, the Rob Lowe poster, the Barbies. I hated it, our frozen house, my stupid childhood room, which I'd never changed or redecorated; I was never able to part with a damn thing. I thought we'd go to bed quickly: I gave her a toothbrush, nightgown, and towel and set up the chair bed, but she didn't seem ready to sleep.

The scrapbook, the one of my mother, lay on the shelf beside my bed; she picked it up. My heart flinched to watch her open the quilted cover: there were my insides, spilling out on the page. I was embarrassed for her to see this raw, doting, unharnessed outpouring. My mother, in every period of her life, and every year of mine. Ridiculous things, I'd pasted in there: not just the birthday cards and postcards, which might be all right, but I'd included a doodle on a Post-it, a price tag from a skirt we'd bought together, a grocery list in her handwriting, a wrapper from her favorite Fannie Farmer chocolate bar. Even December's phone bill was in there. My father had given it to me so I could check my calling-card charges, to ensure that AT&T hadn't ripped us off. Three minutes, a call to her office had been. Two minutes. One. I couldn't
remember where I'd called from or what we'd talked about, only that I should've talked longer.

Kelsey fingered the plastic sheets, touching it all.

“You're lucky,” she said. “You're lucky to have had her.”

I sat beside her. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to me.

She lay back in bed, and we stared up at the shapes in the peeled-off paint of the ceiling. We lay in the quiet, and I thought that this was what she meant by lucky: simply this.

Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.

—Gypsy Rose Lee
        

I
nearly had a heart attack when I found the box of condoms in my father's toilet kit.

I looked away, then back again. I hoped I'd imagined it, but there they were, staring up at me: Trojans, lubricated, ribbed, extra thin for extra pleasure. Oh, God, I didn't want to think about it.

It was November, and I was on my way to visit him in the hospital again. It had become our home away from home. “My vacation spot,” my father called it. “Better than Green Springs.” His latest complication was an arrhythmia; the doctors had implanted a pacemaker-defibrillator, which stuck out from his waist like a deck of cards. He'd been in and out of the hospital over the last month as they made adjustments; this time he'd forgotten his toilet kit at home. Before I left the house I called Kelsey and told her about the discovery.

“Maybe he needs them to, you know, do it on his own,” she said. “It's probably more sanitary that way.”

“You think my father's
masturbating
?”

“Shh. Your whole neighborhood doesn't have to know.
And every guy does it.” She spoke with the authority of having caught her two brothers at it many a time. “Or maybe he's not, though,” she considered. “Maybe he's got somebody.”

“Like who? A girlfriend? Who would go out with my father?”

“What do you think he does when we go to parties on Saturday nights, or when you sleep at my house?”

“He stays at home and watches
Murder, She Wrote.
I think.” My voice wavered; maybe she was right, maybe he did have some woman on the sly. I never really thought of what he did when I wasn't there; I just assumed it was the same thing he did when I was there, which was to mope around the house and read the newspaper. For the past two days, while he was in the hospital, I'd slept at Kelsey's house at night and savored my solitude in the afternoons: sprawled on our living room couch, I ate chocolate chip cookies for lunch, watched steamy soap operas, applied Deep Sea mud masque, and painted my toenails as I talked endlessly on the phone.

I said good-bye to Kelsey and left for New York University Medical Center.

The first thing I saw in his room was an empty pizza box from Earthly Delites lying on his bed tray. I'd brought sliced melon and turkey sandwiches from the corner deli; I set the grocery bag down. “You got pizza delivered?” I asked, not knowing you could do that in a hospital.

“It's cheeseless. Sylvia brought it,” he said. He nodded at a
woman with thick, elbow-length dyed blond hair sitting on a plastic green chair in the corner.

She glanced up from her
Astrological Times.
She was wearing sunglasses; she took them off to glimpse me, then put them back on. “It's so sunny,” she said. “Not easy on the glaucoma.” My father introduced us.

“How do you two know each other?” I asked.

His face lit up with pure wonder. “We met three weeks ago, after they put the pacemaker in. They'd just released me, and I got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor by mistake—I didn't realize it was going up instead of down. I stepped out, and there she was.” He grinned.

“Sylvia has lung cancer,” he continued matter-of-factly. “She never smoked. It's in remission now—she's very healthy.” Despite that statement he went on to catalog her additional ailments: allergies to wool, rice, strawberries, peanuts, and eggs, and white sugar didn't settle well with her either. “Sylvia and I have a lot in common,” he concluded. “Anyway, she knew her surgery would go well because she asked her garoo first.”

“Her what?” I asked. Her kangaroo?

“It wasn't the guru,” Sylvia said. “It was the tarot cards.” She turned to me. “He gets it all mixed up. I only called the Psychic Network once. I read tarot cards myself.”

My father's eyes widened with excitement. “But the garoo was right—he said to go in for the surgery three weeks ago,
and she did. The day after, she met me.” He beamed.

“You met three weeks ago?” I couldn't believe my father had met another woman, and all this time I hadn't known.

“We did!” Sylvia said. “The Magician card came up—it means a great love or marriage is impending. I didn't understand it then,” she went on, her eyes sparkling, “but I do now.”

My stomach turned over. I excused myself and went into the hallway to call Kelsey.

“My father's sleeping with a clairvoyant,” I said on the pay phone.

“You still can't be sure if he's sleeping with anybody. Maybe he just got the condoms as wishful thinking. Like most guys.”

I felt something queer rise in my throat. “Let's just not talk about it anymore.”

Our conversation moved on to Cover Girl Nail Slicks and new shoes, but I couldn't stop thinking of Sylvia. I'd known that my father would start dating sometime. It was even natural. Perhaps I'd even hoped for it, wanted someone to rescue us from Spooky House and from our weekly dinners at Wendy's, when we sat alongside the hordes of elderly couples squeezing out each other's ketchup. I didn't want to be the only person he depended on. But my father was old, with glasses and high-water corduroys, and I'd thought,
Who would go out with him?

Sylvia. She was in the bathroom when I returned to my father's room; finally I was alone with him. “Psychic
Network?” I asked. “Tarot cards?”

He shrugged. “Personally, at first I thought it was a crock of shit. But she's good at it, you know. She has ESP. She knows who's gonna call before she picks up the phone, and once at her apartment we couldn't find a missing casserole dish, and she sat down and thought about it, then opened the top cabinet and there it was.” He sounded sincerely impressed. “I really like Sylvia. We can talk to each other.”

I grunted.

“She's picking me up tomorrow, when they release me.”

“What time? She doesn't have to—I can leave school early and get you.”

“No, she'll do it. But we were thinking that afterward we could all go out to eat,” he said.

Sylvia returned from the bathroom then, carrying a cup of water. She was tiny, and my father and I towered over her; I stared at the long white part running through her hair. She removed a vial from her pocketbook and squeezed two droplets into her glass. “I brew my own herbal tinctures in the closet at home,” she explained.

How would I survive this dinner? “Can I invite Kelsey?”

My father looked toward Sylvia. “Well, there'll already be four of us . . .”

“Four?”

“Felix is coming too,” he said. “Sylvia's son.”

“Felix,” I told Kelsey. “Felix Feinstein. He's probably three feet tall. He probably has warts. I bet she didn't give birth to him; she brewed him up from a tincture.”

“Oh, come on. Stop being so harsh. You never know—he could be cute. The whole thing is kind of touching—like the Brady Bunch.”

“Yeah. The Brady Bunch on crack.”

“Hey, could you get her to tell me my fortune sometime?” she asked.

“What do you want me to do, rent her out at parties?”

She sighed. “You're so pessimistic. It could work out. Then you wouldn't be complaining about your father all the time.”

“Don't even say that. What if it does and Sylvia moves in with us or something, God forbid? Where would all her tinctures go?” I pictured her sitting in our kitchen, miraculously recovering all our missing flatware and cutlery.

“Hey, if nothing else, at least your father's getting some. That's more than we can say for ourselves.”

“Thank you for that lovely image,” I groaned, and we said good night.

Women who care for their husbands their whole lives always die first.

I'd copied that into my journal right after my mother had said it, her fourth night in the hospital. Underneath that I'd scribbled a guideline to my future self:
Never marry.

What had she meant, exactly? My mother had given up Rolf and all those other boyfriends, waiting to marry my father until she was thirty-two. And the year after they'd married, he'd had his first heart attack. After all the time I'd spent in the hospital with him, I could see how draining it was to care for him—she'd spent her life doing that.

The upsetting fact was that her death had changed him for the better. She'd complained he wasn't open or affectionate enough before, and now he was. He'd placed framed, enlarged photos of my mom all over the house, made faithful weekly trips to her gravesite, and spoke openly of how he loved her. And now he wanted to go out, he wanted to talk, but with Sylvia. My mother had never gotten to all the possible futures she'd imagined, yet now here was my father, embarking on a new one. Maybe he'd learned from his mistakes, but Sylvia would get the benefit of that.

It couldn't work out with him and Sylvia; it wouldn't be fair. The past shouldn't allow it.

Dinner was at Dreamfood in the East Village, at five o'clock. When I arrived ten minutes late Sylvia and my father had already started in on an appetizer of braised tofu.

“Sorry we began without you. It's my hypoglycemia,” Sylvia said. “If I get too hungry, I feel like I'm gonna croak.”

I stared at her outfit, a turquoise velour pantsuit lined with purple.

“It's reversible,” she said proudly, her eyebrows raised at this ingenuity.

She was extolling the virtues of the Home Shopping Network when Felix walked in. Sylvia had said he was eighteen, but he looked older; he was over six feet tall and tan, with brown hair and blue eyes, and wore a dark gray suit. Normally such an appearance would have an effect on me, but I hardly glanced up from my tofu as we were introduced. I wanted little to do with the Feinstein family.

“Felix had an interview with a
Vogue
photographer today,” Sylvia said as he placed a large portfolio against the wall. “For an internship. He's studying to be a fashion photographer. And he's not even gay!”

Felix laughed and planted a kiss on her cheek.

A fashion photographer. I wondered what he thought of reversible pantsuits. “You two don't even look alike,” I mumbled, and thought,
Lucky for him.

Sylvia held her son's hand. “Felix is my only son.”

“From her third marriage,” my father explained.

Oh, God.

“Henry passed away from a tumor two years ago,” Sylvia said.

“I'm sorry,” I said. The saga of my family was falling even more unnervingly into depths of TV-movieness. Felix could certainly be the star actor: he swigged his wheatgrass juice as if it was chardonnay, and seemed enthralled by my father's
detailed descriptions of defibrillation, and by my father's theory that the hospital cafeteria's chicken was really reconstituted breast implants.

And Felix kept asking about me. I didn't have much to tell. “I'm a sophomore in high school,” I said, thinking that was a depressing enough statement in itself to quiet everybody.

“Your father says you do particularly well in English,” Felix said.

“Yeah, whatever.” What did he care? I wasn't going to be sucked in by this pseudo-interest.

The conversation continued around me: allergies, ailments, medications, shark cartilage, cooking methods for tempeh, the fat content of texturized vegetable protein, a
Health Now
article called “Cheese: The Silent Killer.” After a shared slice of carob pie, my father hinted at whether I'd be staying at Kelsey's tonight.

“Not on a school night,” I said with horror.

“I forgot it was,” he said sheepishly. I knew he wanted to stay at Sylvia's, but I wasn't going to let it happen.

“You could get me a taxi,” I said, knowing he wouldn't pay for one in a million years. “I'll get
killed
if I take the subway at this hour. Especially wearing this short skirt.”

My father slouched in his chair, considering the dilemma.

“I'll get her a taxi,” Felix interrupted. “I have to go over to Third anyway—there are tons of taxis that way.”

It was odd being spoken of as a commodity, a package of
loose goods being bargained over. And what did Felix want from me? Why was he being so nice? I wondered if Sylvia had paid him.

She quickly downed her decaf with herbal tincture, and before I could think of any other excuse for why my father had to take me home, he and Sylvia had their coats on and were ready to leave.

“Have a good time!” Sylvia said, and my father didn't even look back as they walked away.

“Do you know, I'm still hungry,” Felix said when they were out of sight.

My stomach grumbled slightly too. “Soy isn't very sustaining.”

He smiled. “It wasn't bad. But you know what I really want? A sundae. With chocolate fudge and
real
chocolate ice cream. Would you want to share one?”

I wondered if Sylvia and my father had given him a handbook to all my weaknesses. But why not share one with him? I deserved some reward for enduring the evening.

We went to the Village Ice Cream Shoppe and ordered the biggest sundae they had. Gobs of ice cream, fudge, a Belgian waffle, and a thick rich brownie, with sliced bananas and caramel all over it. Ecstasy. Heaven. Orgasmic, Kelsey would say, though eating was as close to orgasming as either of us had ever come.

A half hour later we'd barely made a dent in the mountain
of it, but Felix put his spoon down. “Actually, I had another motive for bringing you here. It's rare—it's nice—to talk to someone else who's had a parent who's died.”

“Yeah, the Dead Parents Club,” I said. “We should get T-shirts.”

“Are you always so sarcastic?”

“No.”

“I know it's not easy watching your father with another woman. But don't you want him to be happy?”

“Yes,” I said indignantly, and we ate the rest of the sundae in silence. I did want my father to be happy. Sometimes I felt wronged by him—exactly for what, I wasn't sure. For not loving my mother enough, or for her death? I couldn't escape that deep inside me I felt, in some essential way, that he should've prevented her death. Or perhaps it was her death that had wronged me, and he was the only one available to blame. But I loved him too—the last two days when he was in the hospital, I'd walked by Wendy's on my way to the subway with a pit in my stomach, missing him. I missed the quiet hum of his television programs, his daily summations of the
New York Times,
even his treatises on the perils of wearing miniskirts on the subway. I was dependent on his company, on his conversation, on
him,
as much—or perhaps even more—than he was on me.