Dora: A Headcase (6 page)

Then I pull out the new book Marlene gave me –
Fisiologia dell’Amore
. By Mantegazza. Hope the mall chimps didn’t drool on it or anything. I open it.

Yeah. So it’s in Italian. But that’s not the cool part. The cool part is, just underneath every line, and I mean every single line, there is another line. In pencil. For every line of the book. Translated by Marlene. Who, like Nico, knows four languages. Marlene’s lines under all of Mantegazza’s lines. Maybe she even rewrote some of it.

The second cool as shit thing is the Mantegazza quote that opens the book. It goes:

I close the book and hold it on top of my chest. Daughters of Eve. Fuck yeah. That’s me. I don’t think of Eve as a twat that got tricked by a snake. I think Eve was a badass. I think she showed Adam what to do with his dick, and without her, he’d be sticking it in knotholes and goat butts and suckerfish. Without Eve? Adam’s just a guy standing around with a dick in his hands. Daughters of Eve. Wicked band name.

And love:
The most glorious conquest of genius. The first force of human progress
. Fucking fuck yeah. I roll over and look at the ceiling. There is a crack in the plaster in the shape of a vag. Seriously. Under the sign of Vag, I feel positively dreamy with Marlene’s big book. Me and Obsidian. Obsidian Obsidian Obsidian. Daughters of Eve. I sit up and get the purple sharpie and write the Mantegazza quote on my bedroom wall. Under Nico. Vibrate. I grab my cell out of my back pocket where it buzzes my butt. “Obsidian?” Nope. It’s Marlene.

She goes, “Lamskotelet! How do you find the book?”

“Dreamy. I’m a Daughter of Eve!” She does the deep laugh. Even through a cellphone it’s something. “I just started it. It’s awesome.” We talk for a while and I agree to come over the next day to talk about the book. I lift Nico up again and write “Lamskotelet” in purple sharpie.

Yep, me jailed in the daughter box writing up a storm. But that’s not all I’m doing in the daughter box. I’m listening for family drama. Household electricity. My dad looks a little like Daniel Day-Lewis so it’s easy to picture him in some crappy historical drama acting all serious and righteous and crap. My mom looks a little like Catherine Deneuve. If Catherine Deneuve was glassy-eyed from antidepressants and evening cocktails. I listen for hours. Just the buzz of condo appliances.

The only other thing I hear my father say late in the evening is “I’ve got late work to attend to.”

And my mother going, in a voice even I have to admit is filled beautifully with tiny nails, “Your work takes you from the house in ways you positively relish.” Then the door slams. Then
I hear the sound of unscrewing. Vodka? Scotch? Courvoisier? What’r’we drowning in tonight, mother? I really don’t blame her. If I was stuck in some kind of psychotic housewife hell in a condo with nothing but rich people objects to clean while a philandering husbandaid escaped for his nightly escapades … I’d medicate the shit out of myself. Or just check out. For real.

I open my bedroom door a crack to spy on her. Ah. Well, I approve. She’s gone with Jim Morrison’s favorite booze. Live it up, mother. Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown. She looks … she looks like she’s melting into the chair. She looks like a Francis Bacon painting.

She wasn’t always a melted face. My mother, I mean. She used to be wicked smart. Read all kinds of books. And she was a concert pianist. When they got with each other. Apparently. That’s why a baby grand lives with us in the condo. But I’ve never heard her play. When I was born she had some kind of breakdown. Then when I was ten she ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. I remember watching my father slap her face trying to wake her up. I remember how she looked lying on the hardwood floor, her body in a little “s” shape. I remember going into the bathroom and eating toilet paper and crying.

After that she just sort of became an expert at rubbing things clean. That baby grand? Silent but spotless.

When I was five … jesus christ was I ever five?

I’m five and my mom and dad have me decked out in some kind of black velvety girl dress and black patent leather mary jane shoes and my hair is long and blonde and captured in a beautiful black satin bow. I have no idea what I look like to all the adults around us but I’m praying to the moon I look “pretty.”

We are at one of my mother’s solo piano performances.

My father and I sit on red velvet chairs, part of the “audience.” Everyone’s eyes are on my mother. Everyone’s heart is on my mother. Everyone’s leaning forward toward her, her face, her body, her hands, waiting to be pleasured. Her back is straight and strong. Her hair is wrapped and wrapped up and
around in great swirls of French twist. Her gown, is off white silk and chiffon, and off of her shoulders, so that her shoulders look to me like perfect pearl drops. Everyone is holding their breath in anticipation.

No one is everyone more than I am. I am hot underneath my black velvet and a little itchy and yep a little bit I have to pee but I’m also wanting. I could eat her. I want to run up that instant and crawl into her lap and fold my face between her jaw and collarbone and suck on her shoulder.

When her hands lift and then lower onto the keys and the first notes sound I think I might die. I start crying.

My father gently, so gently, puts his hand on my leg and whispers “Shhhh sweetheart, it’s OK, it’s OK” He puts his arm around me. He’s right, it is, but five-year olds can’t contain all the pleasure and pride and happiness I am feeling in their minds or bodies yet so now I’m not just crying I’m peeing, just a little, not enough for any kind of scene or anything, but enough to relieve some of this motherloving godforsaken pressure.

She is beautiful. She is playing franz shoe burt.

She is beautiful she is beautiful sheisbeautifulbeautiful-beautifulbeautiful.

When she is finished playing franz shoe burt I can’t hold anything in any more and I leap out of my red velvet seat which has the faintest trace of girl pee on it and I squeeze through the aisle of pretty dressed up people clapping and I run up to the stage and I crawl on up her leg, knee, into her lap and she’s laughing and people are clapping and she’s kissing me and holding me and a little bit I put my mouth on one of her shoulders and a little bit I’m about to suck her shoulder and then we both stand up and she holds my hand and looks down at me smiling and signals me and miraculously I know what to do.

We bow.

Together.

 

I PUNCH HER number into my cell. “Hello,” she goes.

“Hello,” I go.

“Ida,” she says.

“Mother,” I respond.

“Ida?” she asks.

“Yes mother?”

“Is there something you want to say?” She asks.

“I just … just wanted to say hello, I guess…” I stare at my ceiling.

“All right then,” she says, her voice barely audible.

“Bye,” I go, but she’s already gone.

I stick my phone in my ass pocket. I look up again at the vag crack on my ceiling. I dig inside my backpack and pull out a spoon. Yep, you know whose spoon. I put the spoon in my mouth for lubrication.

I close my eyes.

I picture Obsidian. Her hair black as a record album falling down on my face. The stone of her necklace jabbing my throat. Then I unzip my pants and pull down my deal and spoon rub my twinkle till it’s red. I’m a fucking daughter of Eve.

Dizzy.

White.

Vibrate.

I grab my cell from my backpack, my pants around my thighs. “Obsidian?” I go. Silence. “Obsidian?”

But it’s just my own ass calling me.

SOME MEETINGS I LIE, SOME MEETINGS I FLIRT, AND some meetings I box. With the Sig.

Think about it. Psychotherapists—they’re all hot for your deepest darkest secrets anyway, so the more you lie, the happier they are. It gives them the chance to
delve
.
Penetrate
. Use weird hand gestures. Write crap down. And the whole set-up of this doctor /patient shit is completely porno. You spill your guts and cry like a pussy while they “father you better.” Christ. How is that different than Mrs. K ass-up in my father’s study? Yeah. I’m pretty sure the word for that is subjugation. Marlene taught it to me.

All I’m saying is that you’ve got to get the upper hand in these deals or you are screwed.

Anyway. Today Sig’s hell bent on talking about my blackouts, so the gloves are off. Turns out that’s the only part of my story he’s interested in. Letcho. But there’s no fucking way I’m telling him anything about Obsidian. Like ever. Whatever comes out of his pie-hole, I will motherfucking one-up it.

In his cozy little liar’s den.

With oriental rugs and floor to ceiling book walls.

Me the girl on the couch. Catholic girl skirt with silver buckles.

Him in the blonde camel back chair. Dockers and a blue button down. Tweed sport coat. No I’m not kidding.

Hot girl on man mind fuck.

Let’s get ready to rumble.

We back and forth it a good while with neither of us going down. I’ll give the guy this – he’s persistent. He sort of hammers home with the same big words argument until it sounds true. Oddly, big words are kind of mesmerizing. Like neuropathology. Like psychosomatic. Paramnesias. If you don’t have what it takes, he could really hoo-doo you into thinking that you don’t know who you are.

To make sure I do not get tricked I stare at the clock behind his head. Get this. It’s a cuckoo clock. Only the cuckoo doesn’t shoot out like it’s supposed to. It cuckoos at the top and half hours, but no bird.

He goes, “There are neuropathologies created when the psyche is in an excited state.” It’s 4:30. The cuckoo clock does its thing. I get up and walk over to the clock. I reach up and push on the little door. It’s stuck in there. I stand on a chair and shove my fingers in the slit and try to grab that little fucker.

“It’s no use,” Siggy says, “it’s stuck.”

“So why do you have this broken fucking clock?” I ask.

“Nostalgia. It’s from Vienna. My mother gave it to me. But it keeps time.”

I get nostalgia. I remember hearing piano music before I could talk. But I’ve never seen it happen. I remember the smell of my father’s aftershave – when he’d hoist me up onto his shoulders – I remember how I could see the world from the perch of father. I remember laughing with his head between my little girl legs.

I sit back down on the couch across from him, but I keep my eyes on the stuck cuckoo’s door. Today Siggy’s got ants in his pants. He’s ratcheting up the lingo, I can tell, because his voice is ever so slightly higher and tighter like someone is slowly choking him.

That’s why when he says, “Ida, your hysteria is the case for sexual excitement,” I have to immediately drop my gaze back down from the busted cuckoo clock with its stuck bird to his head and upper-cut with “Gee, you mean to say my giz biz is what
makes me a psycho? Does it make you a psycho too? You know, when your little man salutes with a
pearly drop
on his little head?”

You got to have your junk at the ready. Like I told you, he’s a sly one.

Then I make a misstep though. I tell him accidentally about some pearl earrings my dad showed me that he told me he was going to give to me, then ended up giving to Mrs. K. I know because I saw her with them on when we bumped into the Ks at a restaurant. I have no idea why I tell him that. It just sort of came out when I said “pearly drop.” Goddamn it.

But you can’t just
say
things in the office. He leans way forward in his camel back chair and points his little black pen at me and goes, “Jewel drops. The gift of pearl earrings your father gave to his lover instead of you. The jewel drops are a sexual symbol for that which he has given her and not you – his affections.” Then jewel drops this and jewel drops that – jewel drops dripping all over the goddamn place.

Finally I snap out of it and left jab with “Jeez Sig, can you even make a sentence without your own cock in it?
Jewel drops
? Are you serious? When you’re walking around in the world and you see women with earrings on, is that what you are thinking? That their ear bling is dripping with … Eeeeewwwwwwww. Dude. That’s so boy teen cream dream! What are you, like seventeen?”

He counters with, “Ida, your inability to admit your jealousy of your father’s lover creates a crisis in consciousness.” Oh. Score. That one gives me a bit of a fat lip. There is something about Mrs. K. Her ass is … unforgettable. So white. So big. Like the moon split. I sit silent for a second on the couch across from him. My father’s lover. Big white split moon ass.

But no way is he gonna take this round. I give Sig the drop dead stare and part my legs just wide enough there on the couch to flash him some teen muff before I stand up and jet across the room. Panties on a need to wear basis only. You gotta have an ace in the hole.

He drops his pen on the floor and coughs. Coughs. A lot.
Something sticks in his throat. He stares at his thighs and rubs them briskly. Careful not to set your pants on fire.

Bring it, old man.

I pace around his office touching things, watching his progressively more anxious reactions.

“Hey Siggy,” I go, “Why are you so interested in my father’s ho, anyway? Do you read your notes to yourself at night and jimmy the pickle? Or are you writing it all down for a bestselling novel or something?”

“Ida.” He’s using the chin down gravel voice. “These discussions are not the material for some … roman à clef.”

I stop dead in my tracks. This could be interesting. “What the fuck is a roman à clef?” I go, and proceed to walk around and around his desk.