Dead End Gene Pool (3 page)

She would leave us at the departure gate, Will in a blazer and clip-on bow tie, me in a scratchy plaid jumper from Best & Co., and then stride off. In the beginning, I pretended she was only going to the restroom, and that the line there was so long that by the time she rushed back, we’d already boarded. I imagined her lingering until the plane departed, blowing kisses and waving to our tiny portholes as the props whined us out to a speck in the sky. I pictured her driving home in her humpy red Volvo to an empty and joyless house where, in despondency, she’d spend the weekend organizing our rooms and planning vacations to Disneyland until she picked us up on Sunday night. But I got over that pretty quick.

Truth be known, our mother delivered us to any person wearing any semblance of a uniform standing anywhere near the gate, and left without waiting for the plane to board. From the “Standing Only” spot she had parked in, she could make it downtown to Trader Vic’s in less time than it takes to put on a pair of sheer black stockings and get the seams straight.

In the early 1950s everyone married early, and my parents had been no exception. My mother had been a nineteen-year-old anthropology major at Radcliffe, and my father had been twenty-one, and a junior at Harvard. Now, a decade later, she was a young widow, and was she ever making the most of it.

“Surprise!” she would say to us at breakfast on the mornings after her returns. She’d take her hands from behind her back and plunk down some huge, hairy arachnid suspended in an alcohol-filled jar.

“Wow,” we would slur through our Froot Loops, “you went to Haiti again.”

“Look what else I brought you!” she’d say, holding out batik swimwear you’d rather get rat-bite fever than be seen in.

“Thanks,” my brother and I would say as we grabbed our book bags and headed out the door like we were worried about missing the bus.

The presents our mother brought were our only clue as to where she’d been. Ice plants meant California. Live alligators in shoe boxes meant Miami and the Roey Plaza Hotel. Dead ones on handbags meant Tijuana. So did jumping beans. Gardenias were routine; they came from an evening of scorpions at the Outrigger Bar at Trader Vic’s. We would open the fridge to get out the orange juice and find them, bruised and dog-tired from floating around in rum and dodging the straws of my mother and her date. You could see the little stab marks all over them.

For the sake of convenience, I’d learned to do a passable forgery of my mother’s signature by second grade. The teachers mostly let it slide (it was a liberal primary school for the children of Washington diplomats), but when I okayed four Ds and an F in a parental note, they reeled me in.

“I’m truly sorry about your daddy,” my homeroom teacher said, addressing me across her desk with compassion. “And I know your mommy is frequently out of town, no doubt dealing with her own . . .
grief
. ” She adjusted her glasses. “That must be very difficult for you and your brother.”

I nodded and gave a little sniff for good measure. Ha. Was she kidding? It was completely cool to have a dead father. I was the class celebrity. And I loved it when my mother was away. I hung out in the basement with my governess, Henrietta, lying on her double bed, inhaling secondhand smoke and watching
Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour
or
The Ed Sullivan Show
—she with a tumbler of whiskey, and I with a bag of Wise potato chips. One thing my mother knew how to do was pick out a good governess.

Henrietta and I had a running joke about my mother’s schedule.

“So when’s Mommy coming home?” I’d say.

“When she’s darker than Sambo, lassie,” Henrietta would say back, laughing and choking on her own phlegm. Lighting a fresh Winston off the glowing butt of the last, she’d reach over and tousle my hair. “A wee more dip with those crisps, lassie?” We absolutely understood each other.

Over the PA system, the captain came on again. “I’m sure y’all have noticed we’ve been circling. We’re trying to use up some a that big ol’ tank a gas before we come on in.” He proceeded to tell us that there was a little ol’ problem with getting the landing wheels to go down. That got everyone thinking. Now all you could hear was the vibration of the propellers slicing evenly through the dark, and the muffled terror of people mentally preparing to die. Only the Indians in the back appeared unconcerned; what did they care—they’d be back.

My brother had gotten the window seat, despite my efforts to scratch and bite my way into it first, and since the captain’s announcement, he’d been springing up and down, calling out numbers. Every time I told him to shut up, he said he was counting the moons.

“Fifteen . . . sheesh! I can’t believe how many there are,” Will said to his tiny oval aperture. He had his nose flat against its own reflection. The cabin lights had been dimmed for landing (or whatever), and an eerie column of light from the reading lamp bounced off my brother’s crew cut.

“George is gonna be mad we’re late,” Will said to the glass.

“He’s probably hoping the plane’ll crash and we’ll be dead, so he won’t have to drive us anymore.” I was trying to sound tough, even though my heart was starting to make weird little jumps in my chest.

Will turned from the window. “You think we have time for one last Coke?”

At LaGuardia (or West Palm Beach, the gateway to our grandparents’ house in Hobe Sound; or Bangor, ditto for the summer house in Maine), we were always met by George, our grandparents’ marzipan-pink, chrome-domed, unsmiling German chauffeur. He treated my brother and me like medical waste, propelling us through baggage claim by the back of our collars with a gloved vise-grip, out to the waiting Cadillac limousine. In magnanimous moments I reasoned that because George had never married, he was unable to appreciate children, let alone share our enthusiasm for acrobatics in the back of his car. Chaperoning us was clearly beneath his dignity, but he couldn’t afford to lose this job because George was a Nazi escaping justice. I knew he was a Nazi because one of my uncles was into Hitler. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham (we called him that because he said everything twice—like “Hitler was a good man! A good man!”) was my father’s younger brother. He liked to neutralize the effects of his Thorazine, which he took for an as yet undiscovered but clearly out there mental condition, with coffee, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, NoDoz, and four packs of Parliaments a day. This made him more than a little chatty, even to a kid. Over the course of a weekend with Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham, you could, through osmosis, learn enough about the Third Reich to write a dissertation on the Nuremberg Rallies.

A Jewish friend of mine from summer camp had told me that German people liked to cover their lamps with lamp shades made from the skin of Jews gassed at Auschwitz. She was three years older than me, and I believed her.

You think my grandfather’s shofur has some?
I’d written her by return post. (No way could I spell
chauffeur
.)

Duh
, she had written back, and had gone on to graphically describe all kinds of atrocities on several sheets of Snoopy stationery, the visualization of which had kept me awake at night for a month.

I’d asked Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham if he thought George had human-skin lamp shades in his apartment, and he had laughed and nodded his head vigorously.

“You mean the green ones with the circles and squares on them?”

“That’s right! That’s right!” he had chortled, blowing smoke out through his nose while guzzling a highball of straight Coke.

“But that’s
gross
!”

“Yes! Yes! The color was unfortunate! Unfortunate!”

After that revelation, I resolved to behave as badly as possible on George’s watch, and I warned my friends that if anything fishy were to happen to me, like my skin got removed for redecoration purposes, to tell the police the chauffeur did it.

The stewardesses were demonstrating the crash position. Miss Bossy Beehive stopped and clucked her tongue at me. “
Sweet
heart, where is that seat belt? I know this is all terribly exciting, but I want your belt securely fastened. Now, show me the position you need to be in—in case we CRASH. No, sugar pie, all the way down . . .” With a hook like Cassius Clay, she slammed my head down so hard I got a carpet burn from my dress. She turned to my brother, saying, “Buckle up, little man!” Strafing me with her concrete bosom, she leaned over and nipped in his waist so hard, his rib cage shot out over the metal fastener. She nodded to herself and moved on.

“What d’you think it’ll be like?” I heard Will mumble in a nasal voice. His head was turned on his lap away from me.

“What?”

“To die.” He turned toward me, one eye on the retreating back of the stewardess.

“Messy, I guess.”

Will sat up and grinned. “I think it’s going to be pretty cool. I think we’ll make a gigantic fireball and everyone will see it, from California even, and we’ll get our names in the papers. Maybe they’ll even name a ride at Disneyland after us.”

It didn’t sound so bad the way he envisioned it. In fact, it did sound sort of cool. Dammit, he would probably get to die first.

Number One Son got everything before me. Even psychoanalysis.

On Saturday mornings Will went to see Dr. Berman. He had started going after our father died. According to my grandfather, it was necessary for the son to talk to someone but not the daughter. When Will returned from his appointment, I sniffed him all over like a dog checking out a mate who’s been to the vet. “So?” I would demand. “Did he ask you any weird questions? Did he stick needles in you? Did you have to take down your pants?”

“Naw. We just played games,” Will said.

“Well what kind of games, idiot? Cards? Mouse Trap? Stratego? Does he have Creepy Crawlers?” After jigsaw puzzles, I was obsessed with Creepy Crawlers. It was a control freak’s dream set with a baking unit that could leave scars worthy of an acetylene torch. You put this liquid Plasti-Goop into molds carved with half reliefs of things like cockroaches and stinkbugs and silverfish, and scorpions and millipedes and bats, scratching the stuff into the antennae and spindly bug legs with a needle. Then you baked them in the cooker right there on the flammable shag carpeting of your bedroom floor.

“I don’t know—just games!” Will didn’t recognize his hour with Dr. Berman as the spotlit, center-of-attention shower of love I knew it to be.

I was burning up with curiosity; I needed to
know
what I was missing. But inevitably, my weekly joust for the dirt ended with no answers, and Will punching me in the stomach and declaring, “Dr. Berman says you’re acting out ’cause you’re jealous.” No shit.

Anyway, that stewardess was wrong. I did not find the present situation exciting. Tragic would describe it more appropriately, because I was going to miss my eighth birthday party.

My birthday was the single day out of the year when my mother behaved like a mother. In fact, she behaved like she was running for Mother of the Year, though that didn’t make up for the 364 other days when she either embarrassed me, ignored me, or was geographically elsewhere. I summoned a birthday hostess image of the Merry Widow: she was wearing her signature black stretch pants, Beatle booties, and favorite swirly Pucci blouse. Her skin was as toasty golden brown as a pretzel, her shoulder-length lemon-colored hair side-parted like a starlet’s, and she held out a layer cake of heroic color and proportion, and questionable flavor. She was fond of maple or tutti-frutti cake mixes, which she enhanced according to whim, with whatever was on hand, like adding to the batter tinfoil-wrapped charms that you broke your new molars on. She wasn’t great with presents either. She was the kind of person who told you on the gift card outside exactly what was on the inside. However, she made up for it with her contagious enthusiasm. And her decorations and games were truly inspired. No insipid Pin the Tail on the Donkey for us; it was a real donkey and a real horse tail that you had to slap on the animal’s butt with masking tape. Or, in the case of my brother’s most recent birthday party, a thumbtack, which caused the donkey to place his hind feet on the ribs of Brian O’Donahue and send him flying backwards into the library bookcase.