Dead End Gene Pool (27 page)

My mother always changed for dinner before her husband came home from work. Tonight she was wearing one of their all-time favorites, the crocheted brown micromini dress. As usual, she skipped the underwear. The dress must have been made with the largest hook on the market, because there were more spaces than yarn, and my mother’s nipples poked through them like pencil erasers.

On cue, the rumble of a 3.0-liter V-12 engine could be heard turning onto our street. It revved to a wail as it streaked past the four Victorian row houses before our hideous detached modern brick. The Ferrari 250 GT spun through the gate and squealed to a halt in front of the only noncommercial six-car garage within forty miles. Out sprang Herr Peter Beer, as immaculately groomed as when he had left the house ten hours earlier. His gray flannels were still sharply creased, his shirt tautly tucked in, his custom John Lobb side-buckled shoes as glossy as when they’d come out of the box, and the black Hermès briefcase he gripped had barely sustained a scratch in ten years of service. The Ferrari gleamed as well, but he had me to thank for that: punishment in our house was dispensed in the form of a tin of simonize wax and an afternoon of flunky labor.

It was lucky I still didn’t have much of a social life. Given my propensity for screwing up, waxing my stepfather’s sports cars took up a fair amount of my time. There were six of them: a Porsche, three Ferraris, a Mercedes-Benz Gullwing, and its 300 SL roadster counterpart. Each perfectly maintained specimen was painted with about a million coats of silver lacquer that my stepfather insisted be buffed, burnished, stroked, and rubbed in a particularly exhaustive (and punitive) fashion.

My mother waved to her husband out the kitchen window, then returned to the stove to dump a cylinder of frozen orange juice over the pale carcass of a duck. She shoved the pan into the oven, licked her hair into place, and took a suck from her 7UP can that could have drained a wading pool.

“
To—ré—a—dor, en gar—dé! To—ré—a—dor!
” the Antichrist belted as he fussed about the Ferrari, flicking the road dust off with a feather duster, unrolling the fabric car cover, and enfolding his baby in it for the evening. He fancied himself a misunderstood tenor and sang opera far more than was necessary. He sang it all with theatrical gusto, in the seven languages he was fluent in.

The garage door ground shut. Smooth leather heels sounded on the front path. And then, “
WAA HOO!
” hailed the Tenor. The front door sprang open with a rush of 4711 cologne.

“
HOO WAA!
” returned my mother, whipping off her apron.

“Where are you, little one?”

“Coming, my Lord and Master!”

That was always my cue to exit stage right so I wouldn’t have to watch him suck out her tonsils and make bread out of her butt.

Beneath the stairs in the core of our house was a triad of tiny gun rooms. These were referred to as the outer, the middle, and the (high-caliber) inner sanctums. Within were samples of what was represented in the tens of thousands at my stepfather’s arms factory: Soviet AK-47s and Dragunovs, Israeli submachine Uzis, German Walther PPK pistols, Belgian Brownings, Italian Berettas, French Chatelleraults, Chinese and Dutch hand grenades, American M-79 grenade launchers; you get the picture.

My stepfather was all for sharing his enthusiasm for the weapons industry.

“Look at this beauty,” he said one evening after dinner, placing a rifle in my seven-year-old brother’s lap. Edward sat on the floor, still in his gray flannel uniform shorts, his shirt untucked and spotted with spaghetti sauce, his tie askew. He’d been playing with his Matchbox cars and was justifiably uneasy at having been singled out for enlightenment. My mother glanced over from where she was slunk in a black butterfly chair (in a leather mini and fishnets) working on her thesis. She was in her second year of graduate school at Oxford.

“Some jokers think this is an AK-47,” said my stepfather. “Ha! It is not!”

Edward stared dolefully at the weapon. Inspired, the Lord and Master leapt up and exited the living room to return a moment later with another hulking assault rifle.

“
This
is an AK-47.” He leveled the gun and peered with his non-roving eye down the sight at Inky, our recently acquired pound dog, who exhibited her hallmark stupidity by yawning back at him.

Taking up the original rifle from my brother, he stroked it lovingly from its slotted forearm to its cutout skeleton stock. “And
this,
” he crooned
, “this
is an SVD: a Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova—the first rifle specifically designed for sniping!”

“Blimey,” said Edward, dutifully, and looked toward his mother. But she had given up trying to shield him from these stepfather-stepson moments. Her hands tightened on her notebook, but she said nothing.

“That old Dragunov, now he knew how to design a rifle! The magazine alone took eleven months and twenty-three days to design!” My stepfather said this in an awestruck, Russian-accented whisper, as if he could hardly fathom such a feat of creation.

“They may look the same, but the likeness is strictly cosmetic.” He was trying to transfer some of his zeal to this pathetic child. “The critical difference is the
gas
system. The Dragunov has a short-stroke gas piston, do you understand?” Edward’s lip trembled and a tear rolled down his cheek. He knew he was failing in the role of stepson, but he was powerless to act any differently. Like all of us, he was terrified of the man.

“Ach!” said the Lord and Master, sitting back on his heels in disgust. “Leslie, your son is a coward.”

“Waaahhh!” cried Edward.

My mother remained in her chair, conjugating Greek verbs, and sucking hard on her 7UP can. She’d make up for Edward later, in bed.

Puberty had not been going too well for me.

After school one day my mother had marched me into the underwear department of the local Marks & Spencer.

“Listen,” I’d hissed to her as, one after another, she snapped through the racks of gargantuan brassieres, “I don’t even want a bra! Everyone at school will laugh at me—even
more
than they do already.”

“Oh, poppycock.” She had signaled to the saleslady, a steel-haired matron with a proud, two-acre chest, as I slumped in my mortification.

“I can’t believe you don’t carry a 32AA.” I clutched the glass counter at my mother’s pronunciation of “can’t” as
cawn’t
. Her fake accent was a constant source of public humiliation.

“I am most dreadfully sorry, madam,” the woman clipped back, her metal spectacles disdainfully down her nose, her hands in prayer over her
balcon
.

“Just what do you expect girls this age to do?”

“Why, we expect them to grow, madam. I shouldn’t worry, time will take care of her.” She turned with dismissal to the next customer, a spotty girl with double Ds who stood arm in arm with her quadruple-E mum.

My suddenly American mother had grabbed the saleslady’s pink arm. “Well we don’t
have
time. My daughter needs some boobs
now
.” With her free hand she continued to rifle through the bras. “Just find me four of the smallest goddamn bras you’ve got, already.”

In the end, her Yankee ingenuity overpowered my modesty. In front of
The Avengers
that evening, my mother stitched me a set of breasts. She cut the padded cup of a generic brassiere along the seam, brought the bottom half up over the top, and sewed it back into place.

“The sooner we get you into one of these, the better,” my mother had said through the pins in her mouth.

The result was a spongy but credible B-cup bustline.

I wore my new chest out shopping the following weekend, and imagined the admiration of every boy along the high street. I came home and actually hugged my mother. This was a mistake—it convinced her she was making headway.

On the morning of my fourteenth birthday, while I was inhaling a celebratory stack of toast drenched in butter, my mother presented me with a small, carefully wrapped present. Wiping my hands on my school uniform, I took it from her.

She beamed. “Go on, open it up.”

I did, and sat frowning at a round plastic container. “What is it?”

“It’s the Pill, nitwit. Do you love it?”

“The Pill? I don’t need birth control.”

“Bullshit,” she laughed, unwrapping the cellophane from her own breakfast, a caramel-flavored Ayds candy, and popping it in her mouth. “Maybe you don’t now, but you will soon. Trust me.”

“Did you send Will a six-pack of rubbers when
he
turned fourteen?”

“Are you kidding? He’s just like his father. He’s so sexless he wouldn’t know what to do with ’em.”

I stashed the thing in my bathroom with all the unopened boxes of Tampax she continued to buy me every month.

Within hours of becoming friends with Josephine Doran, I had adopted her family. All that was lacking was the paperwork. In their compassion, the Dorans allowed me to live at their house pretty much full-time without actually residing there, which greatly improved my view of humanity. It amused me no end to think of my grandparents coming to visit me there, my grandfather having to use the Doran household bathroom, or my grandmother being offered Nescafé in the mug with the fornicating dwarves as she perched on the edge of the sprung mohair sofa in a pink shantung Mainbocher with Dino the stegosaurus salivating freely against her side.

Despite her imperfect features and pockmarked skin, Josephine was pure jailbait. There was something minxish about the way she hiked her pleated brown kilt high up on her thighs and slunk her kneesocks down around her ankles before trotting past boys, men, and grandfathers even.

In her wake I began to make progress. After I left the house on school mornings, I would emulate the master by stuffing my brown felt boater in my book bag and rolling my kilt up at the waist so that the hem barely reached the bottom of my regulation brown wool knickers. We timed it so that Josephine and I caught the same bus to school. I’d get on five stops earlier and wait for her in the front seat at the top of the double-decker bus. When we reached our stop near school, we’d flounce down the twisty stairs and hop off in front of the butcher shop. With our noses in the air, we’d traipse past the lab-coated apprentices as they staggered from truck to shop under enormous, stiff carcasses. Swiveling around to gawk, they’d bang into one another like stooges, tripping over the sides of beef and mutton hind ends. It was a revelation that all I had to do for attention was wear falsies and show my underpants.

Naturally my mother endorsed this new trend.

“Hey, Toots,” she said to me one afternoon. “I passed you on the high street today when you and that Doran girl were walking to school. I like the new look. You know, the skirt-up-to-your-ass look. Just don’t let your teachers catch you.”

I folded my arms and sunk my chin into my fiber-assisted chest, and stared mutinously at the floor.

“But you know,” she went on, “your legs would look a lot better if you’d lay off dairy products for a while.”

“But do YOU know,” I spat, “if you were normal, you’d be mad—like Josephine’s mother would be, if
she
caught
her
.”

My mother whirled around from the stove.

“Maybe you’d prefer I was one of those sagging old bats that hang around the house, porking out on the stuff they cook for their fat families.” She shook a wooden spoon at me, making her huge Diver Dan self-winding Rolex go
whirrrrrrrr
.

Sulkily, I shook my head.

Emma Peel (M-an-A-p-PEAL) was the fashion icon my mother lionized. Accordingly, today she was all in black in an
Avengers
-style stretchy faux leather catsuit and stack-heeled patent leather knee-high boots. She had on her favorite lipstick, Fabergé Nude Pink, which made her look like she’d been eating pink marshmallows. My mother probably had a couple more good years to carry on this Bond girl stuff, but she was thirty-nine and looked like a J-O-K-E in my opinion. I, on the other hand, was ever so slightly pudgy, and wore glasses, and was understandably resentful as hell. When not in my shit brown school uniform, I tended to cover my body up in floor-length hippie skirts or patch-adorned, bell-bottomed jeans; when my mother wasn’t Mrs. Peel, or the Girl from U.N.C.L.E., she was the Girl from Chelsea in Mary Quant shiny plastic raincoats with upturned collars, and wet-look microminis, and skinny-rib sweaters. I tramped around in Roman-style lace-up-to-the-knee leather sandals, or short, fringed suede booties; my mother was into thigh-high white patent leather boots. My drawers were stuffed with shapeless, long-sleeved T-shirts. She had a closet full of YSL see-through blouses.