Fiction Ruined My Family (11 page)

“I don't think I got crabs from Patrick Ewing,” Martin said. “I only wore those once and then I waxed my car with them. They were too goddamn big.”

By the time I deduced that I got the crabs from borrowing a nightgown over Thanksgiving break from one of my best friends from high school, Maggie, a real traditional Westchester slut, I was no longer concerned with proving my fidelity to Martin. Martin had become a man who commented on my “freshman fifteen” and forced me to go jogging around campus with him, a man who knew I had become bored by him, a man who was obsessed with Tiffany's. More than any young marriage-crazed woman from New Jersey, that man loved that little robin's-egg-blue box. He was always giving me necklaces and bracelets from there. He even gave my three sisters Elsa Peretti necklaces at Christmas. Martin could be too traditional. Like when I peed in my bed when he slept over one night after a big night of drinking he acted like an outraged English butler he was so crispy about it. My feeling was I'm sorry if my urinating in the bed, my bed by the way not your bed, interferes with some kind of image you have of me, but just because you give me things from Tiffany's doesn't mean I'm the girl in the Tiffany's ad in the
New York Times Magazine
and/or it doesn't mean the girl in the Tiffany's ad doesn't pee in the bed when she drinks too much. Why don'cha put a lid on it and help me flip this mattress over so we can go back to getting a little shut-eye?

After three days of lathering each other up angrily with antilouse shampoo we got from the campus nurse, I broke it off with Martin and was catching a train into the city for Christmas break. As I waited for my cab to the White Plains train station, he said, “I just don't think this is over,” meaning us. I said I was pretty sure it was and tossed my little plastic lice comb into the garbage, and scratched my crotch one last time.

“Merry Christmas, Martin.”

 

 

 

I woke up one morning about three days into Christmas break and got up and made coffee. Julia continued to snooze on the pull-out we were sharing. If there was one person you didn't want on your pull-out it was Julia; she might not ever get up and she needed only a few short hours to transform any room into a Hooverville.

I sat at a table near the pull-out with my coffee, absentmindedly itching my cooch, wondering how she passed anything at school. “Jules, are you ever getting up?”

She rolled over and looked at me. “Is something up your heinie?”

“No. I just thought we should get up. It's eleven-thirty. Mom hates to come out and have there be pillows and bedding everywhere at noon.”

“Well, then she shouldn't have gotten a one-bedroom.” Julia stayed at Mom's on breaks even though she had a dorm room on University Place.

She rolled away from me and pulled the covers over her head. Getting up for another cup of coffee, I saw Julia's hand come up out of the covers and rake her curly blond head a few times hard. Then she got off the pull-out and started toward the bathroom, all the way scratching at her crotch. In the kitchen I put my cup on the counter and froze. I realized that not only did I still have the dreaded pubic vermin but now my sister might have them as well. I scratched my crotch and tried to think. I heard the clinking sound of the chain on my mother's bedside lamp hitting the porcelain base. She'd be lighting a cigarette momentarily and groping for her glasses. Mom, now that she lived alone, could indulge her most Plathian tendencies. Rather than waking up and opening the blinds in her bedroom, she now woke up and turned on lights. It seemed like the most hopeless thing to me. Day was something to get through, a stepping-stone to night, to drunkenness, sleep, and when she had had enough, death.

 

 

 

 

MY MOTHER HAD TIMED leaving my father so I could almost hear the curtain coming down on their marriage as I walked off the stage of the Bronxville High School auditorium with my temporary dummy diploma. When she moved from Bronxville into Manhattan after the divorce, she rented a two-bedroom for five women, which seemed rather shortsighted. We had just come from a five-bedroom house, so we knew something was up. Then Mom moved to a one-bedroom and shortsighted met statement.

The place was on Eighty-seventh Street, a half a block from the mayor's mansion in Yorkville. It was called Garson Towers. Residential buildings with names, unless you were talking about the Ansonia or the Apthorp or somewhere swanky, were depressing to me. They seemed like the kinds of places lonely, defenseless elderly people got murdered. My mother's maiden name was Gissy, and seeing that she seemed to be preparing to audition for any number of Tennessee Williams plays, retelling stories of her privileged youth over and over, we began calling the building “Gissy Towers.” If you were going to spend some people's entire childhoods getting tanked on Dewar's talking about your coming-out party at the Fleur-de-Lis Ball and crying about how Daddy never said he loved you, well, you were in for some shit, in our opinion. But in fact a Williams character like Blanche DuBois was a sharpeyed futurist, a trailblazing entrepreneur, she was Buckminster Fuller; Blanche DuBois was Steve Jobs compared to my mother.

Mom's bedroom door opened and the smell of smoke wafted into the living room, preceding her like applause for an old theater broad's entrance.

She entered the kitchen in some ridiculous silken Natori number, a robe that screamed, “I'm sleeping with my divorce lawyer,” to conjure up a cup of coffee for herself. I straightened myself to make my thoughts disappear, to make my crabaddled mind impossible to read.

“Morning,” I said. “I made coffee.”

“Morning, dolly. Did you use the Illy?” she said, passing me with her cigarette. My mother was like a bat with her lit cigarettes. She came impossibly close to you, you were convinced you were going to have to drop and roll any second, but somehow she always just missed you. I resisted the impulse to say anything about her cigarette, as we lived in a world, since selling our house, that was no longer ours but hers.

“Yeah, I did. It's delish.”

“It's Italian.”

Mom glided over and sat at the table. “Where's Julia?”

“In the bathroom,” I said, sipping guiltily.

“What are you girls up to today?”

“Christmas shopping I guess.”

“I'm going out with Mr. Sully tonight so you girls will have to get some dinner for yourselves.” Her divorce lawyer who was taking her for a huge ride, the kind of ride where someone leads you to believe they will leave their wife for you when the time is right, was Mr. Sully. “I'll leave you some money. You can get a pizza or go to Melon's and get a burger if you want.”

Julia came out of the bathroom.

“Good morning, Julia,” Mom said. With her deep voice she might have been Lauren Bacall greeting Bogie after a wild night.

“Hunfh shew naggeh,” Julia mumbled, and kept going.

“Honestly,” Mom said, widening her eyes.

Chitchat had never been Julia's bag.

Doris was forty-four. This was when forty-four was forty-four, before it was the new thirty-four and sixty-four was the new fifty-four and eighty-four was the new seventy-four and twenty-four was the new fourteen, but even so, she looked fantastic, had some dough in the bank after selling the house, and she might have gone off and done all kinds of things: opened a bike shop in Costa Rica, started an adoption agency for American gay men in places where communism has fallen, waited tables in a pub in Britain's seaside town of Cornwall. But this was back when forty-four was the age when women aged, fell apart—although according to my father, the “decline,” as he called it, actually started when she was a straight-A student at Manhattanville College embarking on her maiden breakdown, an event that was interrupted when she married and had four kids.

My mother's rehab years began when her four daughters went off to college. It was as if rehabs were her way of going back to college with all of us kids, eating bad food and being homesick. This seemed like a misguided attempt at youth, getting out of the house, enriching the mind. Had my mother not heard of postgraduate work?

I had gone to the pharmacy the day I got in from Purchase, and charged a couple bottles of RID to Mom's account, but the apartment was so small there never seemed to be a good time to exterminate myself. My plan was to chemical myself silly at night when everybody had gone to bed. Problem was, I kept falling asleep before Mom and Julia. To stay up past Julia one really had to have street drugs of some kind.

I began monitoring Julia for signs of crab life. I told myself the initial itching I witnessed during my first seven cups of coffee might have been nothing more than the traditional crotch-scratching one does as a guest in another's home while people are having breakfast. I was disabused of this notion when I caught sight of Julia scratching herself in the elevator and then later while we were Christmas shopping at Orva on Eighty-sixth Street. The girl had crabs. I had given crabs to my sister. What would Emily Post say? My mind raced to the inevitable thought: Had I also given crabs to my mother? While I shivered at this concept I did get a kick realizing that if I had given them to my mother I had probably also given them to her sleazy cheat-face divorce attorney, which then led me to realize that I had in all likelihood given crabs to Phil's innocent benefit-throwing wife and mother of six who was probably pawing her crotch on a ski lift in Vail while Julia and I shopped for Christmas presents. I was trying not to scratch in front of Julia. If she had gotten them I didn't want her to know from whom.

“I'm going home to take a shower. I'm totally grimy and . . . itchy,” she said.

After Mom split that night, Julia and I ordered in burritos and called VideoRoom, Mom's video place on Third Avenue that delivered as well as picked up your videos. Despite this free service, we never managed to get a single video back on time. Delivery was an important feature of our new postsuburban lives. Delivery and twenty-four-hour Korean delis. We thought these urban amenities were symbols of Manhattan, they represented the new “Mom” and, by default, the new “us.” We were city people now, kids of divorce, and as such we didn't cook, we ordered in or went out. When the VideoRoom guy buzzed I begged Julia to get the door because they always sent this guy from Purchase who worked there on school breaks who had a crush on me, but Julia had a sort of no-bullshitting policy that forbade her to fake anything. She thought you should just be completely forthright all the time. Anything else was phony.

The burritos were good. We had seen the movie before, the butter-meets-girl romantic comedy
Last Tango in Paris,
and it held up as a pleasant way to pass an evening. While we were eating and watching the movie I periodically asked Julia to pass the butter. She fell for it the first time.

In
Last Tango in Paris
, Marlon Brando forbids his young French lover to tell him her name, not her last name, like in an AA kind of way, but her first name. The thing is a steamfest, not the kind of movie best savored with your sullen, monosyllabic sister. I polished off my burrito, drained my Corona with lime, fluffed my pillow against the bed, itched my rowdy pubes as discreetly as I could manage with Julia sitting a foot away from me in a pastel chintz chair that looked like Baskin-Robbins had gotten into the upholstery business, and settled in for some fat-old-man-fucking-hot-young-girl fuckfest. At one point, the French girl—NO CHARACTER NAMES!—is stroking Brando's chest as he pretends to be the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” She says, “Oh, what a lot of fur you have,” and he replies, “The better for you to hide your crabs in.” I coughed loudly as soon as I heard this, hoping a loud, distracting sound going in Julia's earlobes would prevent the word “crabs” from entering her ear. Julia itched her crotch, but there was something new in her itching, a sense of her hand being connected to her brain. I tried to douse this hand-mind connection and quick by lighting one of Mom's True Blues and blowing smoke around madly. Julia looked right at me.

“What the fuck—”

“What-what, what the fuck?”

“You gave me crabs.”

Julia had been developing some kind of paranoid personality disorder over the last few years, but mathematically paranoiacs will hit the truth every few hundred accusations.

“I gave you what?”

“I have been trying to figure out how I got these things, but I should have known, it's you, isn't it?”

“Look, Jules, I like you, but we never fucked.”

“I'm going to fucking kill you.”

Julia got up and went into the bathroom. The bathroom light flicked on and she was cursing, stream-of-consciousness style.

I puffed on my True Blue and knew that Christmas was ruined, by someone other than my mother for a change. There was little point in trying to calm Julia once she had gone bananas. I blew a couple smoke rings and thought about how there wasn't all that much smoking in
Tango
for a film shot in Paris. I thought the scene in the bathroom where he says he wants her to fuck a pig and then have the pig vomit in her face and her eat it might be coming up. “You're going to miss the part with the ‘dying farts of the pig,' Jules. Julia!” I yelled.

“Get in here!” she screamed from the bathroom. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “Bugs! Look at them! Come here, Jeanne.”

I took a drag of my cigarette and went into the bathroom. I tossed my cigarette in the toilet. She had placed a pube on the edge of the sink.

“Look at it.” She yanked our mother's magnifying mirror, which was attached to the wall, downward and held it over the pube. “Look at it.”