Dead End Gene Pool (29 page)

“Did you think that would be easier?”

“No. I just wanted to make them beautiful, preserve them really well, so that the grieving parents could sort of, you know, keep them around?”

George finally put the book aside. Gathering his papers and his bag of tobacco, he began to roll the next ten cigarettes he would smoke in nearly as many minutes. I felt my face and neck flush with embarrassment. I knew he knew I was lying.

But he was a gentleman. “For one thing,” he said, running the tip of his tongue along the gummed edge of a rolling paper, making my armpits gush in the sweat of desire, “that would only prolong the grief. For another, it would be highly unsanitary.”

“What do you mean?” I was appalled he thought I’d do a bad job on the embalming.

George struck a match against the zipper of his jeans and put it to his cigarette. He sucked on the burning taper, squinting his eyes against the little cinders that flew up as the tobacco caught. Inhaling deeply, he turned back to me and said, “With a dead body there’s no immune system functioning to keep all the disease organisms in check. Microorganisms, bacteria and germs, all kinds of shit proliferate after the death of the host. Within twenty-four hours autolysis has gone mad—”

“Autolysis?” I squeaked.

“Yeah. When we shove off, the enzymes produced by the cells in our bodies break down the very cells that make them. Although embalming reduces the bacterium in a corpse by ninety-nine percent, rotting is unavoidable. Embalming is basically just for the funeral, so everyone can have a look-see.”

“I knew that.”

“Course you
could
use a greater concentration of formaldehyde in your solution when you embalm the kiddiewinks.” George looked out the window and smoked contemplatively, as if picturing pickled dead children.

“Medical colleges can keep cadavers around for donkey’s years,” he said, turning back to me, “but they don’t look very appealing, I’m afraid.”

He was a miracle. “I can’t believe you’re not in medical school.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Seriously, why aren’t you studying to be a doctor?”

“My dad’s dead keen on that,” he said, shaking the hair back from his glorious face and looking up at the ceiling. “He would love me to be a doctor like him. Go into practice with him. Father and son.” He gave a little laugh.

“So why don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, blowing a breath out. “Truth is, I’ve got a photographic memory.” He delivered this extraordinary talent like it was a freckle on his arm.

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Bloody fuckin’ wow. Here, I’ll show you. Find me something to read.” He handed one of the medical books over.

“Okay,” I said, and started paging through Syndromes—Hurler, Prune Belly, Sirenomelia (lower legs disconcertingly fused at birth)—I stopped at Cri du Chat syndrome because the name was catchy and the text long-winded.

“Try this one,” I said, folding my arms and leaning back against the headboard to watch.

George read silently. When he was finished he got up and paced around the room for a while, excused himself to go to the bathroom, returned, and then, standing in front of his bureau, he recited the page and a half worth of
deletion of the short arm of chromosome 5,
verbatim. It was unreal.

“It’s all very well to know the stuff,” he said. “I could pass the exams; that’s not the issue. Anyway, I’ve pretty much fried my brain on psychotropics. Nothing like a steady diet of acid, opium, and mushrooms.”

I wanted to say,
That’s okay, I intend to love you forever—even if you’re a completely brainless tape recorder. But couldn’t you please just kiss me?

“Hey, you want to see a book on ophthalmic surgery?” said George.

With that, all the seduc flooded out of the seductress.

“Could I, um, take a rain check?”

We descended through the silent house, and he and the beagle ferried me back across the water. George helped me out politely, but when I turned to thank him for a lovely evening, he had already climbed back into the dinghy and was languidly feathering his way home, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old and searching up at the sky.

My mother was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She was wearing a hideous terry-cloth robe. The hood was pulled up over her head and she had on her glasses instead of her contact lenses. This was always a sign of trouble; the only time my mother was not clad for coition was when the Lord and Master was away buying hardware in Beirut, or she was having a very bad day.

The rum bottle was at her elbow, and the roast beef pan from dinner, with its congealed drippings, in front of her. She was alternating spoonfuls of beef fat with slugs from her 7UP can. The diet notes on the fridge shivered as I entered. I steeled myself for a scathing comment on my outfit, or maybe my shutout with George, which I knew she could smell on me. However, it wasn’t
my
sex life that was on her mind.

“The shin of Shodom is upon us,” she said by way of greeting. She squinted down at the grease-caked pan. “The shin of Shodom is upon thish house.”

It appeared she was in a ruminative mood.

“Whatever you say,” I said, leaning against the fridge to cover the notes. It was the least I could do to help her.

My mother took a pull on her drink and fixed her Coke bottle lenses upon me. “Here’sh a word for you,” she said. “Analingush.”

Here we go again
.

I sat down beside her. She did look terrible. “Hey, guess what famous psychiatrist was embalmed at Harrods.” Anything Harrods usually cheered her up.

She shook her head and spooned up some more fat.

“Algolagnia,” she said.

“I’ll give you a hint—his first name is Sigmund.”

She sucked at the soda can, tilting her head so far back the hood fell to her shoulders with a
thwop
. “I’m gonna shell my ITT and my Guf ’n Western shtock and buy a place of my own.”

“That’s right,” I said, patting her hand. “Freud.”

“An my Kodak too.” She shook my hand off, and took another hit of suet.

“I’ll bet you didn’t know you could buy a baby elephant at Harrods.” It killed me to see her beaten down like this. We certainly had our issues, but when the shit hit the fan my mother was there for me. On a recent overnight school trip, I had stayed innocently out past curfew, but the school had responded with a barrage of letters to my mother about my very American disregard for authority. My mother, in turn, had launched a campaign against the teacher who’d outed me, one that only the daughter of a colonel steeped in Revolutionary history could wage. She was brilliant. I just had to learn how to be there for her too. It sure wasn’t easy.

My mother belched, and then fixed me with a surprisingly sober stare. “No, I did not—and frankly, Tootsh, all I care ish that I can get my hair colored on the fifth floor, buy a toplessh bathing shuit on the fourth, and a shix-pack of Tab on my way outta the door.” She sloshed a few more fingers of Bacardi into her 7UP can.

“You are so fucking selfish!”

“Up yours,” said my mother through a mouthful of rum and beef fat.

I took that as a good night.

Lucky I’m an optimist. I rationalized that George was shy, that he was the type that waited until the fourth or fifth date to get physical. Hey, I could wait, I had all summer. All my life in fact.

But this power thing, the notion of control through one’s sexuality, I was starting to figure it out. I had power over the butcher boys with the raising of my hemline. I had power over my brothers, because they were dyslexic, Type B non-survivors. My stepfather had tyrannical and financial power over my mother, but she was able to manipulate him with what she wore, or whether she put out, and whether she even stayed with him. And with my father, she may have wielded the ultimate power—if the rumors spread by my father’s shattered parents were to be believed.

A couple of weeks later I was at my usual position, at the window on the second-floor landing, with a high-powered telescope trained on George’s window. My transistor radio was tuned to Radio Luxembourg, the volume so low you could barely hear the bleat of the American disc jockeys. Stakeout provisions included two packets of salt-and-vinegar crisps, a Mars bar, and a copy of
Candy
, the filthiest book I had ever come across. Every three pages or so, I checked the window. Evening was coming on, and out of the goodness of her heart, Candy was having sex with her father’s brother when suddenly the lights flicked on in George’s bedroom.

I palpitated when I saw a figure enter behind him. I relaxed when I saw it was a guy. Must be one of his mates, I thought. But then the mate put his hands on George’s shoulders. And then the mate pulled George’s shirt over his head. And then he pulled off his own Led Zeppelin T-shirt. (That’s how good that telescope was.) George just stood there, arms and hands at his sides. That’s when the little shit leaned forward and put his lips on my George’s tender smoky mouth. And that’s when I went berserk and must have screamed, because my stepfather came running up the stairs,
Herald Tribune
still in hand. He snatched the binoculars from me. “Ha
ha
!” he snorted. “You are in luff with a pansy!” Shaking his head, he sauntered back to his armchair in the living room.

I got a bead on George’s window again. They were still standing. That was good news. But now the interloper was leaning down to unfasten the buttons on George’s Levi’s. He knelt to do it. That was very bad news. His head dipped below the sash of the window, so it was hard to rate his performance, or pick up tips for future reference. George remained upright, arms by his sides, like he hadn’t asked for this, but as long as it was happening and he didn’t have to contribute, it was bloody all right with him.

My mother suddenly appeared and pushed me aside. She watched for a moment in silence. “Well that’s just ducky,” she said. Straightening up, she patted me awkwardly on my drooping shoulders. I let down my guard and clung to her for a good three seconds. After my sobbing had subsided, she detached herself and began to dismantle the telescope, clucking sympathetically, and telling me how many handsome men were in my future, and how George wasn’t good enough for me, although she had rather liked the beagle.

Being young and resilient, I immediately transferred my affections to the reptile keeper at the zoo where I had a summer job.

A week before school started up again, I was road testing a new pair of Zeiss eight-by-sixty field glasses. I trained them on George’s window, sort of for old time’s sake. Lo and behold if he wasn’t in pretty much the same spot I’d left him: arms by his sides, gazing at whatever—only this time the hands unbuckling his belt and the mouth addressing his southern hemisphere belonged to a girl.

It didn’t take me too many years past puberty to figure out that it had been nothing personal; I’d just been too slow on the uptake.

I never saw George after that summer. His parents moved away and a professional race car driver and his bouncy-breasted girlfriend bought the house. I did hear from him once, though. A flimsy envelope the same color as his damn faded Levi’s arrived in the post a year or so later. It was the sort of old-fashioned airmail stationery that makes you think of the time when overnight transatlantic flights were full of adventure and promise. The stamp and postmark were from somewhere that echoed that notion. Anyway, he’d forgotten to put the letter inside, so that was that.

 

 

 

WE SHOULD HAVE anticipated a sea change when our mother insisted all three of her children accompany her on a pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock. Taking time out from our fun-filled tour of boarding schools, my mother, Edward, and I met up with Will in Boston and drove south
en famille
in a rented Plymouth Valiant—the irony of which was lost on our mother.