Fiction Ruined My Family (13 page)

“Well, I was going to make some coffee in the French press. It's the absolute best way to make coffee. Who'd like some?”

Julia was focused on slowly lowering hairbrushes like lobsters into a boiling cauldron. There were thin plastic round hairbrushes, like rolling pins with bristles, a wooden flat brush, a tortoiseshell comb and an oval brush. Then Julia began to lower a bunch of silver antique hairbrushes and combs on the end of a slotted spoon into the water. Mom slammed down the half-and-half and brought the tortoiseshell welding goggles that hung around her neck up to her eyes.

“What in God's name are you doing? Those are antique sterling-silver brushes of my mother's! Are you insane?”

“We've been way too lax,” Julia said, with no emotion.

“Take those out of there right now. I mean it, Julia. I have had it with this nonsense. You girls have been in this apartment for a week and you're making me nuts. You haven't even used those brushes. They've been sitting on my dresser for forty-five years.”

Julia began taking the silver brushes off the spoon.

“Get some plan together for today. Go to the Met or the Whitney. Something. I mean it. I am at my wit's end here.”

Mom took her coffee and flew out of the kitchen.

Julia said we were “in the final phase,” and we needed one last push to get these things out of our lives forever. We decided to head down to Century 21 and bought some cheapo sheets and blankets we could throw out rather than have to schlep more laundry to the Chinese laundry place. As for our other clothes, we changed Laundromats, since the water obviously wasn't hot enough at the old place to kill these things, bringing bags of clothes that had been washed thirty-one times in seven days to another place seven blocks down York Avenue.

We repoisoned ourselves with new prescription stuff containing lindane, which we got at a free clinic in Harlem, since the stuff from the German pharmacy clearly was defective. The person who examined us said it didn't appear that we still had any crabs but Julia let her know that they were indeed still among us. Not really giving a shit either way, the clinic worker called in a prescription to the pharmacy, and we got “the good stuff” later that afternoon. The old Yorkville German at the pharmacy must have been half a
Gugelhupf
away from calling Doris and letting her know that her pubic lice medicine bill was astronomical this month. Walking up York Avenue, I told Julia this was the last time I was going to slather my poor vag with napalm.

“The lindane bottle instructions said that too many applications could cause intense itching even though the crabs were gone. We don't have them anymore. I don't think we've had them for a while.”

She looked both ways before whispering that I was the one who had brought these microscopic pubic gorillas into our lives and she was only trying to get us out of this mess.

I started to answer her but she shushed me as an older woman in a navy-blue quilted coat steered her beagle around the two of us and made a left in front of us.

“The people in this neighborhood are really unbelievable. You gotta keep it down, Jeanne.” This is precisely what I was afraid of: the crab medicine seemed to be penetrating Julia's frontal lobe.

“By the way,” she added, sotto voce, “make sure you rip off the label on those bottles. I for one don't want my name connected with this whole fiasco.” Not realizing Julia was planning on running for public office, I clinched the pharmacy bag to make it unrecognizable as a bag from the pharmacy containing crab medicine while we walked past Mario the doorman into the building.

That night Mom was out with Phil Sully and we did our last “treatment,” lathering ourselves from head to toe in soapy poison. We did our crotches, head hair, eyebrows, arms. We shaved our legs and armpits, used depilatory cream on the blond hair on our upper lips. Then we sat on towels watching Tod Browning's
Freaks
while rhythmically pulling our little combs through our tresses and depositing imaginary eggs on a towel in front of us.

“Why did we rent this movie again?” Julia said, sitting on a garbage bag, tapping nonexistent bugs off her little pube comb. “These people are so sad.”

After the movie we decided to call it a night. I was tired and had a backache from sleeping on the floor.

“Julia, I think we can sleep on the pull-out tonight. I think we're clear.”

She eyeballed me for a few moments. “Fine.” She walked out of the room and then came back in, holding two garbage bags. “But we'll seal off our crotches with these,” and she handed me a garbage bag. She took a scissors off the desk and cut two holes in her bag. She then stepped into the Hefty bag holes and pulled the bag up around her waist. “Now all this needs is a little belt.” Julia left the room and went into the kitchen. Too tired to argue, I cut two holes in my bag and pulled it on.

“Okay. Got it,” Julia said, coming back into the room. “Check it out, better than a belt, that would be uncomfortable to sleep in.” She shoved her hip at me where there was now gray duct tape.

She waddled over to the coffee table in her big plastic garbage-bag diaper and pulled a True Blue out of a pack sitting on the table. She lit it and sat on a chair.

“See? You can sit anywhere, too. We should have been wearing these the whole time,” Julia said, handing me the duct tape. She took a little drag. “God, these things are disgusting. Smoking is disgusting, you know that?”

I took off my T-shirt and duct-taped the bag together with a depressive's flair. I went to take a piss in just my garbage bag.

As I walked back into the now darkened living room, the front door opened, blasting voices and light. My mother and a man. The golfy bellow of a lawyer. Before I could grab a blanket to cover my chest, Mom flicked on more lights. Mom and Phil Sully, both totally drunk, stood at the door. Julia was asleep in her bra and garbage bag on the pull-out. I was standing, frozen. I grabbed a needlepoint Picasso pillow off a chair and covered my breasts, and before I knew it my manners kicked in and I stuck out my hand.

“Hi, Mr. Sully.”

Mr. S. shook my hand and took in my getup.

“Jeanne, nice to see you again,” he managed to eject out the side of his little lawyer mouth.

“Girls, what in God's name is going on here? What are you wearing? Oh, for God's sake.” If she hadn't been totally bombed she would have really been pissed. Being so drunk, though, she was about forty percent open to something happening that was not what her eyes told her was happening. Julia continued to sleep, despite the light, the conversation, the scotch vapors emanating from my mother and her boyfriend like dirt off Pig-Pen. Mom objected to every guy Julia had ever dated, and yet Julia had never taken a married divorce lawyer to the fall Sports Dance at the Bronxville Field Club.

“Jeanne, go get some clothes on.”

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Sully,” I mumbled as I slunk off, toward Mom's bedroom.

I came out after I heard the door closing. Mom was sitting in a chair, smoking.

“Well, that was quite a display,” Mom said, and she went into her bedroom without saying good night.

I had a hard time falling asleep; each turn in my garbage bag gaucho made a noisy, crinkly sound, reawakening me and reminding me of the clingy creatures that seemingly wouldn't go away, creatures that may or may not still exist, I didn't know anymore, bugs, things that passed from one person to another. Mom didn't believe we still had them, if she ever believed we had them in the first place. Why couldn't we get rid of them? I could hear Mom yelling and then laughing and then crying to somebody on the phone. I got up and opened the window. I was hot, though it was January 5. The bag made my legs feel clammy and sweaty. I wondered whether I was losing any of my freshman fifteen in all this, not that I really cared.

To get out of Mom's hair, so to speak, Julia and I went to Bronxville the next day to see some high school friends. As the train pulled out of Grand Central, Julia gave me a few orders.

“Do not sleep at Maggie's tonight,” she said, sipping a sugary Zabar's coffee. “I like her and everything, but she's a slut and she gave us crabs.”

“Maggie's not a slut, Julia. She's an alcoholic.”

“Well, she didn't get crabs from a bottle of tequila. That's a worm in the bottle, not a crab.”

“Okey-doke, Jules. Can we talk about something else? I'm trying to block out the garbage bag rash I now have all over my inner thighs.”

Julia leaned into me. “Could you please keep it down, Jeanne? God. Don't you think these Bronxville businessmen would love to pass on a nice crab tale starring the Darst girls to their daughters at dinner tonight?”

The conductor came around and punched our tickets, sliding them in the backs of our seats, a practice I have never fully understood. It just seems like fake work. We agreed to meet on the NY side platform for the nine-o'clock train back Saturday.

When we got back to Mom's on Saturday night we came in quietly. We had gone to Bronxville to see friends as much as to stave off a hissy fit from Mom. We had made it through Christmas break. We would be going back to school tomorrow and for once Mom hadn't had her annual Christmas meltdown.

There was no sound coming from her bedroom, strange considering it wasn't that late and the light was on. Julia looked at me and shrugged her shoulders, turning into the bathroom. I stood outside Mom's bedroom. The worst thing one could do at this point in the night was to engage Mom, unless you wanted to hear about how she fell out of her bedroom window at eleven and was sidelined from the Lexington Junior League Horse Show, the most important twelve-andunder equestrian event in the country, but since I was leaving the next day for school and we had really pissed her off with the whole Phil Sully/garbage bag thing, I decided to go in and say good night.

I opened the door and Mom was lying facedown in the ivory-colored carpet. The rug around her head was red and black. I went to her and pulled her up by her shoulders as well as I could, her head drooping forward and gushing blood onto my T-shirt and jeans. I called out to Julia. She phoned 911. They told me to apply pressure to where her head was spurting blood until the ambulance got there, which was within about four minutes. They took her to Doctors Hospital around the corner. We walked the block and a half there ourselves, rather than get in the ambulance. I had a lot of blood on my shirt and hands. We spent most of the night talking to doctors, who said she would be okay but would have died if we had not gone in her room until the morning. There was also a social worker who took her alcohol history from us. (It was either eight or nine rehabs she had been to at this point, we couldn't remember.) We called Eleanor and Katharine but they did not come that night. Mom was handled in shifts by this time. They would come in the morning. They would take it from there. We were all so close in age, there was never a feeling of we're older, we'll take care of this, this is the thing to do with Doris. They were more competent and responsible than Julia and I were, yes. But no one could handle Doris. Not us, not my dad, not her friends, not her shrinks, AA, married boyfriends. People were never called to come and rectify the situation. People were called to give other people breaks. They would check her into Lenox Hill detox again or some other rehab. We should go back to school.

Leaving the emergency wing, walking down East End Avenue with Mom's watch of Nonnie's and her wedding rings and diamond earrings in our jeans pockets, Julia and I walked in silence, bleary, blood on our shirts and jeans, having no idea what time it was. It seemed crazy, but I wondered whether we should have asked the doctors to check our mother for crabs.

E
VERY ONE AT PURCHASE had artistic purpose. They were painters, actors, opera singers, classical musicians, film directors, dancers. They were there to become artists. I was there because I was an academic fuck-up, which, thankfully, looks a lot like being an artist.

It was conceived and built as New York's state art school, the artsy child of the SUNY (State University of New York) system. The campus itself looked like a prison during a drought. The buildings were brown brick—rumored to have been donated by Governor Nelson Rockefeller's construction business—low and drab. Construction began in 1967, and as it went on, it seemed that Purchase chose Kent State as its muse, adding features such as an underground tunnel system so no students could take over a building, and giving the dorm rooms about six inches of space under the doors so campus police could throw tear bombs in and smoke out rioters. Cheery stuff.

In an upside-down collegiate universe, the arts departments were first-rate and difficult to get into, while the other departments had all the cache of a community college. So Humanities students were the losers at Purchase. History, Psychology, Math, Science? Scram. I have a movie to cast. Many of the students had gone to The High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, the “
Fame
school,” but I didn't see much dancing on cabs while I was there. While I was used to being around kids who were smart and driven, they were driven out of some robotic obligation to be rich like their parents. The students at Purchase were making art, films, studying opera singing because they wanted to, because they loved these things. I met all kinds of interesting people there. But that doesn't mean they knew how to drink.

 

 

 

The first weekend there I looked around and realized I was living with three other girls. Just like home. Why did everyone else seem so excited? My roommate and the two girls in the other room of our suite let it be known they liked to party. One evening the whole gang came bounding into my room and announced their devilish intentions.