Dead End Gene Pool (22 page)

In an attempt to discover any traces of my father, I combed our sterile house, but all I could find was an old check register containing his carefully recorded expenditures, like a check to Best & Co. for thirty dollars and fifty-eight cents (
clothes for Willy and Wendy
), or one to Johnson’s Garden, fifteen dollars even. I spent hours analyzing my father’s handwriting for clues, trying to identify my DNA in the dot of his
i
or the curve of his
c
. I hated having only half of myself accounted for.

That was about all I had to go on in the memory department, so I settled for missing the
idea
of him.

One is either born with the capacity to believe in God, or not. Apparently, I was not. About the same time I ran out of BiSoDol, I came to the conclusion that whereas God had neither resurrected my father nor drowned my stepfather in the boiling sea of shit and piss and vomit he deserved, He, She, or It clearly did not exist. This led to a disturbing chain of thoughts that culminated in the epiphany that everyone and everything was going to die. More importantly,
I
was going to die, and there was going to be nothing after that. As in forever and ever and ever. This got me screaming into my pillow, and making lists, and imagining ordered rows of shoes, or trolls, or jellyfish on the tide line of a beach. If you were born just to die, and then be dead for infinity, you might as well have never existed, so what was the point of anything? No wonder my father had killed himself.

My mother, on the other hand, believed in lots of gods. She exhibited the primitivism of early man, and made few distinctions between animals and humanity. She was surrounded by her daemons and totems, and she glorified the animal spirit deities by treating her pets—her dogs and horses and chinchillas and tortoises and prairie dogs and coatimundi and old spider monkey—as equals, even though the latter would spray a fountain of go-away urine on anyone who walked in the door, and then bite them for good measure.

It should come as no surprise that after my brother’s evil pony bucked me off in the field, and I staggered to the kitchen door, my arm like a twisted car wreck, the radius sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle, my mother took one look and said, “Jesus fucking Christ! Is the horse okay?” Luckily, shock had already set in. As red-faced as an India rubber ball, my mother called an ambulance, taped my former arm to a two-by-four, and then walked me back across the field to catch the pony. Hoisting me into the saddle, she grimly reasoned, “Listen, Toots, if you don’t get straight back on, you’ll be scared to do it again.”

She had dealt with my compound fracture in the same pragmatic way she’d administered to Piddle when her throat had been ripped out by a neighbor’s werewolf. Upon discovering the three-quarters-dead dachshund in the garage, my mother had calmly fetched a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a needle and thread. While I held the dog, trying to ignore the gushing blood and exposed windpipe, my mother stitched her throat closed. The vet said he’d never seen such practicality. My mother told him she worshiped the damn dog, so she did what she had to.

A few days after I came home from the hospital, the doctor made a house call. My mother was on her way into town to meet the Lord and Master for dinner, and she fussed about my room in an attempt to hurry the doctor. She was wearing her new Yves Saint Laurent “Mondrian” shift and her favorite black Roger Vivier patent leather shoes with the Myles Standish buckles on them. It may have been late winter, but her legs were bare, and of that peculiar pumpkin color only QT can deliver.

Examining me, the doctor remarked on the size of my stomach.

My mother came to stand by the side of the bed and tapped her foot. “I
told
her to lay off the Fritos,” she said, shaking her head. “But honestly, Doctor, what can I do?”

“I’d say this is more than just a case of snack food,” said the doctor, palpating my distended, rock-hard abdomen. “Your daughter looks like she’s in her second trimester.”

“
What!
” my mother shrieked. She sank backwards into a beanbag chair, her pocketbook spewing lipstick, change, keys, and switchblade across the carpet. “Are you telling me—I mean, there’s no
way
she could possibly be—”

“Yes,” said the doctor, sternly. “I’m afraid this poor child is
severely
constipated.”

My mother made a sound like gas escaping a balloon.

The doctor regarded his Timex, and snapped his black bag shut. “Do you know how to administer an enema, Mrs. Beer?” he said, giving her a dubious look over his glasses.

Mother and daughter looked at each other in profound horror.

Shit. If only I’d read the label on the bottle of BiSoDol.
Not for children under 12. Adverse side effects include constipation.

Never has a procedure been invented that so tests the mettle of the participants. My mother and I hadn’t been that intimate since I’d come through the birth canal.

Spring arrived, my arm healed, Piddle was taken off the respirator, and the snowshoes were put away for the year. While the Lord and Master and his bride went scuba diving in the Bahamas, Will and Edward and I went to visit our grandparents in Hobe Sound, Florida.

The Jupiter Island Club was once the most stultifyingly WASP enclave that closed society had ever produced. The town of Hobe Sound itself was nothing, a hole-in-the-wall with a Winn-Dixie and a Bible college. The club was on the adjacent barrier island, in between two game preserves. To be a part of it, you had to own a house on the grounds, but to own a house on the grounds you had to be a member. The Atlantic sparkled along a white beach on one side, and the Indian River, swarming with fat, amiable manatees, separated the island from the mainland on the other. Sun-kissed, fair-haired men, women, and children tooled along on bikes and in golf carts, and behind the Bakelite steering wheels of old Mercedes-Benzs. They went back and forth from the courts or the fairway, to the beach club or the snack bar or the clubhouse, to one another’s houses for cocktail parties. My mother only dreamed of such a Nirvana—sun, the beach, hot and cold running servants, flora and fauna, and an open bar at all hours.

My grandparents honestly tried to make things fun for Will and me, but it was their idea of fun, not ours. Edward was happy to sit all day long in a sandbox with a pail and a shovel and a starfish mold and several doting caretakers, but for us they scheduled tennis lessons and swimming lessons and golf lessons and deep-sea fishing excursions, and even signed us up for tea dances. They rented us ugly bikes and brought Captain Closson down from Maine to drive us around—to no avail. Hobe Sound was my idea of Hell. I hated tennis, I hated golf, I hated swimming lessons, I hated lying in the sun—and I had no friends because I was inept at doing all those things. Lollygagging about the house with the grown-ups was supremely boring, but I endured it because I was too embarrassed to be out with Will, riding around on crappy rental bikes.

Suffering, in addition to being redemptive, can sometimes be portentous. On a day that would herald the close of the Addams era, I was introduced to two wondrous things: Gothic literature and the obituary page.

One of my father’s brothers, Uncle Bob, was staying with us in Hobe Sound. We had all just returned from the beach club snack bar, where the four of us had lunched respectively on stone crab and noon balloons (the club’s signature rum punch with an added floater of 150-proof Myers’s); salad and a glass of milk with two raw eggs in it; and bacon cheeseburgers with fries, multiple Cokes, and a couple of brownies. My grandparents had teetered off to their beds for the usual post-lunch sleep-off. Edward was being forced to do the same, and was wailing his head off in a far corner of the house. Will had (unbelievably) found a friend to hang out with and was gone. It was too hot to do anything other than drape oneself across a Bruno Mathsson chaise and get lost in the newest issue of
CREEPY
.

Uncle Bob was reading
Scientific American
. He was blinking heavily behind his thick horn-rims, and making his trademark groany-grunty sound—something he did so habitually that we referred to him as Uncle
urr-hhhhh-uuuuhhh
Bob. I could see why he’d never been married. With his blue chin and gross hairy back, Uncle Bob often reminded me of Fred Flintstone.

Finishing his article, he came over to see what I was up to. Over my shoulder he studied the black-and-white drawings of a body-snatching that was taking place in a dark, rainy cemetery. Rotting flesh and bone-bared limbs were sticking out of coffins and body bags, and worms were playing pinochle on decomposing snouts everywhere. The omnipresent narrator, Uncle Creepy, leered and cackled his trademark
heh, heh, heh
all over the pages.

Uncle Bob straightened up and grunted. He asked me if I’d read the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. I shot him a look that said,
Are you nuts?
Like I would read school stuff on my own? But then he told me the name of the story was “The Body Snatchers.”

“Really,” I said.

Was it a red-letter day or what. That very morning I’d been in my grandparents’ bedroom, rearranging my grandmother’s jewelry and makeup on the dressing table while she had her breakfast in bed with the octogenarian poodles and Edward lay ripping up Babar books by her side.

My grandfather was in the bathroom with
The New York Times,
doing big business with the door open, as usual. We heard the toilet flush and he shuffled back into the bedroom, the ties on his Savile Row pj’s undone, the bottoms half off and trailing over his long pale feet.

“I say, Peggy, look at this.” My grandfather rustled the paper in the direction of his wife and cleared his throat to read.

“Babar!” shrieked Edward, and stuffed a page in his mouth.

“What is it, Popsie?” my grandmother said, her eyes locked onto the
Today
show.

“In the obituaries there’s a woman who’s died. Some Bolshevik. Name seems familiar.”

“Mmmm hmmmm,” my grandmother replied, sucking on the pit of a prune, eyes riveted to Barbara Walters.

“See here, Peggy.” He squinted at the paper with his glasses down his nose. “This ‘aide of Lenin,’ they call her. Well wasn’t she that female your mother used to have those nonsense séances with?”

Brffffftttttt.
“I’m sorry, darling?” My grandmother was following the directions the guest chef was giving with small movements of her cereal spoon, building the Pineapple Surprise right along with him.

“What’s an obituary?” I interrupted.

“Ca-ca! Doggie ca-ca!” laughed Edward, lunging for a poodle turd on the floor.

“Yes, I’m certain that was the woman. A hawkish type. Dour. No wonder,” my grandfather said, padding around with one hand scratching his stomach. His pajama bottoms suddenly dropped to the floor and he stepped out of them.

“What’s an obituary, Granddaddy?” I asked louder.

“What?” He looked at me, surprised as usual by my existence, and said, “Look here, that’s an obituary.” He handed me the paper, pointing to a few columns with a fuzzy photo of a woman. Then he wandered off to the closet to get dressed for his tennis game. A commercial had come on, so my grandmother offered an explanation.

“An obituary is a story they write in the newspapers where they tell about a famous person when they’ve passed away.” She reached for her lipstick on the bedside table and began to haphazardly apply it.

“Gaga! Gaga, ca-ca!” said Edward, holding the turd out to her.

“Do they talk about how the person died?” I asked, suddenly remembering that early sighting of my father’s.

“Thank you, dearie,” she said to Edward. “Sometimes they do, but only if it’s because they were killed in an avalanche or sank with the
Titanic,
like that poor Astor cousin. You are too young to remember. Think of it as a sort of book report on a distinguished person’s life.”

“Huh,” I said, scanning the rest of the page, but there were no interesting details. Then I had a completely brilliant thought.

“Gaga, do all papers have them?”

“Right-o, dearie,” my grandmother mumbled through tissue, blotting her lips. The poodles exchanged positions, and
The Today Show
returned from station identification.

“Right-o, Gaga,” I said, and trotted off to the kitchen to see if there was anything more explicit in the
Palm Beach Post
. There wasn’t, but in due time I would discover British journalism.

The next day, Uncle Bob returned from town with a couple of books, both of collected short stories. The first was by Edgar Allan Poe and the second by Stevenson. By lunchtime I had read “The Body Snatchers,” and by dinner “The Raven,” with Uncle Bob’s help in translating that bugaboo “Night’s Plutonian Shore.” By bedtime I had penned my first obit—a heartfelt, if sophomoric, send-off for the Lord and Master: