The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (19 page)

After lunch that day, Lisa’s sister drank too much.

“Saying I drink like a fish doesn’t make sense,” she argued. “It’s like saying I read like a word.”

Lisa could only stare blankly in response. Being with her family was both cruel and unusual, a barbarous act that no decent society should permit. She stood in damp grass on the wide green lawn behind their mother’s house. Lisa and her sister were in their thirties, and neither liked coming home.

“Who said you drink like a fish?” Lisa asked. “Mom just said you shouldn’t drive.”

“I don’t think of myself as a fish,” Amanda said. “I think of you as a fish.”

“I’m ignoring that,” Lisa replied.

Amanda had settled herself on the rope swing that hung from the mulberry tree whose trunk held the girls’ initials, carved one preadolescent day when they believed they would be not just sisters but best friends all their lives. The pine board on the rope swing was barely wide enough to hold an adult, although Amanda, like Lisa, was bone thin. The rain had turned the bare ground beneath the swing into a bog. A gin bottle rested in the muck at a festive angle, with neither its cap nor its label. Amanda peeled labels. She chewed nails, ate the caps of pens, picked scabs. Twice she had tried to kill herself. Scraps of the label littered her white satin dress.

Lisa decided to find their initials on the mulberry. Nostalgia might be the best they could hope for this weekend.

“Here we are,” she said, keeping her shoes on the grass and out of the mud. The trunk’s widening girth had gnarled the letters, and erased whatever sense they had once made. The marks looked like a cubist face. The dot on the
i
in Lisa’s name had become a ghastly hollowed eye, while the
m
in Amanda resembled a pair of tortured lips, puckering up to report something it couldn’t quite say. “Never mind.” She did not know how to be with her sister, but these tree-distorted words weren’t going to help.

Amanda took a slug of gin out of a Big Gulp mug.

“Want some?” she asked.

Lisa liked the idea but didn’t want to venture into the swamp. Her sister’s running shoes were caked in mud.

“You’re too hard to get to,” she said.

Amanda pat-patted the mud with her feet, making a sloshing sound.

“Don’t be a haddock,” she said, smiling at her own cleverness. “You’ve always been a haddock.”

“And you’ve always been a charmer when you drink,” Lisa said. “Why are you wearing running shoes with that dress?”

Amanda laughed as she swallowed. Gin flew out of her nostrils. Instead of replying, she gave herself a push. Mud flew from her feet, forcing Lisa to back off.

“Whee,” Amanda called out. “Tweet, tweet.”

At least she didn’t drink gin through a straw, Lisa thought. At least she isn’t out here naked, clucking like a chicken. Lisa liked to look on the bright side, but she was often too perceptive to find one. Invented bright-sides encouraged creativity, she liked to think.

On the downswing, Amanda’s foot tapped the neck of the gin bottle and it began to spill. Neither woman made a move to grab it.

“Now nothing will ever grow there,” Amanda said sadly.

Like any reasonable person, Lisa hated to see good liquor go to waste. But there was no way to save it without getting muddy and likely kicked in the head.

“You may have invented a new drink,” she said. “Beefeaters and Mud.”

“A Muddy Mary on the rocks, please,” Amanda said. “ Garçon, bring me a turbid toddy,
por favor. A murk
arita, no salt. A bourbon and bilge water, if you please.” She set her feet against the silt to stop the swing, splashing her dress. “Come on, Sis. You can come up with something, can’t you?”

“Sydney’s making margaritas for happy hour.”

Amanda glared at her, as if the comment were a rebuke. “I have a memory.”

“Of course, you have a memory,” Lisa said, her voice light and false. “No one could get by without a memory.”

Amanda took another swallow from the Big Gulp. “That’s not what I mean.”

Lisa knew what she meant, but didn’t want to hear about her sister’s wretched past. They were only two years apart, and Lisa could not see how her childhood had been more or less ordinary, while her little sister’s had been made up of nothing but anxiety and pain. Amanda had a grudge that she could neither release nor satisfy, and Lisa was weary of it.

“Okay,” said Lisa. “I’ll bite. What is it you’re talking about?”

Amanda shook her head. “Lost your chance.” She bent low to retrieve the bottle, and almost fell from the swing. She dipped the mouth of the bottle to let muddy water roll in. “A mucktail,
s’il vous plaÎt.
” She held the bottle up to the sunlight and studied the brown swirls. She took a drink. Almost immediately, she spat it out. “Let’s have ourselves a cognac,” she said. “Cognac is the proper drink for dusk.”

Lisa crossed her arms against the whole display.

“The sun won’t set for another three hours.”

“Head start,” Amanda said. “With a head start anything is possible. You of all people should know that.”

As she climbed from the swing she dropped the bottle into the mud. It landed upright, and she kicked it over as she sloshed her way to the damp grass.

Pelicans can fly three thousand miles without stopping. The pelican skims the surface of the ocean at speeds equal to a commuter train. In the purse of its whopping beak, the pelican is capable of carrying a newborn hippo. During the Second World War, pelicans were used to transport supplies to troops trapped behind enemy lines. Sexual intercourse between pelicans and humans has never been documented, despite persistent rumors to the contrary.

Lisa had dressed like a trout—a new but shabby silver dress with a glossy diaphanous exoskeleton, and everyone else at the dinner party was in jeans. It wasn’t the kind of mistake Lisa often made. In fact, she had never before purchased such a dress, a thing of such formal ugliness that one could not help but think the wearer slightly deranged, lost either to nostalgia, stupidity, or mild brain trauma. She recognized this but thought she could pull off “ironic yet funky.” Optimism, once again, did her in.

To make things worse, the dinner party was an excuse to introduce her to a single heterosexual male who had just started working with one of the hosts. There was also a new couple in the neighborhood there for filler. The hosts, Max and Roberto, had become Lisa’s best friends, and they hated to see her without a man. “No one should be without one,” Max liked to say. He directed local commercials and had invited a new cameraman, who arrived at the house in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, his chin as square as Clark Kent’s. Heterosexual, employed, and possessing a chin: he seemed too good to be true.

Max and Roberto had a gift for decor. Their house had little details that made it stand out, such as the chrome molding along the floors and ceilings. Lisa had predicted the chrome would look ridiculous, but instead it reflected the glitter of the chandelier Roberto had found at a garage sale and lent the room definition and dignity. Something about this chrome experiment had led Lisa to buy the trout dress. It was really their fault.

Max sized her up the second he answered the door. “This is a cry for help,” he said. “Do you want a cap? Then no one could mistake your intent to look foolish.”

She waited on the doorstep while he retrieved a Dodgers cap, which she wore backward. The single man, whose name she has mercifully forgotten, flinched when he saw her, literally flinched. She thought he might fall down and break something.

“I usually dress normal,” she said. “Utterly average dresser on most occasions.”

Max and Roberto backed up this claim. The new neighborhood couple decided the best way to be polite about the dress was to make endless inquiries about its purchase, a technique Lisa recognized as a way to seem complimentary and yet remain virtually honest. They would begin laughing as soon as their car doors shut. They’d be up a good part of the night laughing in bed, and then they’d make riotous love. Lisa understood the advantage of having a stooge at a dinner party. She just didn’t relish the role for herself.

She drank too much. Around midnight she was carried to the couch. Max and Roberto pulled up chairs and chatted with her once the other guests were gone.

“How’d I do?” she asked. “Sweep him off his flip-flops?”

Cheerfulness in the face of utter humiliation seemed to Lisa a noble form of self-deprecation.

“He seemed to enjoy carrying you,” Roberto noted.

In the morning, hungover and still in the stupid dress, Lisa joined Max and Roberto in their kitchen for breakfast. They had just had a dinner party the night before, yet the room was so clean it hurt her eyes.

“I’m going to be alone the rest of my life,” she announced.

“Get a pet,” Roberto suggested. “Take up golf.”

“Go see your family,” Max said. Lisa had told him about her mother’s invitation. “And come back feeling sane in comparison to the others who share your genetic curse.”

“Hear! Hear!” Roberto said, and the decision was made.

Lisa found her mother—her given name was Ophelia—sprinkling white powder on a window ledge.

“Ant poison,” she explained. “Don’t let your sister sniff it up her nose.”

The house was old and stately, but, as their father had liked to say, the foundation held more cracks than hard places. Ophelia lifted the rugs and salted every crack with the poison. “They wish to eat me,” she went on. “I shall not be eaten just yet.” Their mother liked to strike an imperial pose now and again, usually during happy hour. She spoke as if she were accustomed to being waited on by maids and menservants when in fact she had worked all her adult life as a postal employee and had retired only two years earlier. When Ophelia and the girls’ father bought the house in the early 1960s, it had possessed a kind of majesty. The girls’ father—everyone had called him Snookie—had come into a modest inheritance and put it all into the purchase of the house. He’d had no siblings with whom to share his parents’ wealth. When Snookie died, the paternal line ended.

“We’ve had ants before, but never like this,” Ophelia said, lifting a couch cushion and shaking powder onto the covered springs.

Sydney, their mother’s lover, stirred a tall pitcher of margaritas, his free hand in his pocket “counting his cock,” an expression for male self-fondling Lisa and Amanda had used when they were teenagers. One of their uncles constantly played with himself, but their mother insisted he was counting the change in his pocket. Amanda had come up with “counting his cock,” and did impersonations of him for their friends.

“One,” she would say, her hand working her pocket. “No, no,
one,”
she’d say. “Let’s see…
one.”

Sydney wore no shirt and whistled “Oh, Susannah” while he stirred. Lisa wished that she and Amanda could be friends again; at the same time, she didn’t really want to put up with the bother. Her sister was a mess and seemed at her worst around the family. Three times she had taken “vacations” in places now called therapeutic health centers. Her letters, a requirement of the first institution, eviscerated her binmates with such comic clarity that their mother had argued she must be ready to come home.

“Where is our young one?” Ophelia asked now.

Why one drink made her into Queen Victoria and three drinks took her out of it, Lisa could not guess, although she had the same kind of reaction to men: one date made her imagine what their kids would look like, and three dates had her wondering about the machinations of restraining orders.

“She’s sleeping off the morning,” Lisa said.

Sydney spoke up. “I made the margaritas in her honor. I was under the impression she loved margaritas. What on earth will we do with all these margaritas?” Sydney possessed no redeeming qualities that Lisa could see. He had a fat, fleshy head with gray sidewalls and a habit of going shirtless. His bare stomach revolted her. The freckled folds of aging skin reminded her of the disintegrating dishrag she used to clean up after the cat. “Margaritas don’t keep well,” he said. “That’s a fact that most people don’t understand about margaritas. Mixed drinks should be consumed quickly, especially margaritas.”

“What’s that a pitcher of?” Lisa asked.

“Margaritas,” Sydney said.

Her mother gave her a disapproving look. “Go retrieve your sister,” she commanded, accepting a festive glass from Sydney as she spoke, the rim heavily frosted with salt. Her other hand still held the shaker of poison.

Don’t confuse them,
Lisa thought.

Upon climbing the stairs, she found Amanda passed out on the hallway’s Turkish rug. She lay on her side, stinking of gin, her legs bent, dress askew and spattered with mud. A line of ants marched over her satin dress, disappearing into its folds. Were they attracted to the gin? Did ants have noses? There were things in the world, often the simplest of things, that Lisa did not know. Did ants like alcohol? Shouldn’t one know this? She bent down to swat them away. Her sister stirred, rolled over onto her back. The ants were actually marching through a fold of the dress to the hem and then crawling in under it.

Lisa lifted the dress. A black mass of ants swarmed on her sister’s panties, so dense that Lisa’s first thought was that Amanda wore no underwear. Her pubis was alive.

The ant not only has a nose between its black oracular eyes, but also one in the pit of each appendage. The ant is attracted to the genitals of all mammals, female and male. Autopsies have revealed colonies of ants living in the bowels of many humans. The scrotum of a drone is so small that close to one million would fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen. While the individual ant has the IQ of an insect, a colony of ants acting in unison has an IQ exceeding that of most U.S. senators.

Through a downpour of rain, Max drove Lisa to the airport in his convertible, water slinking through the wretched top he rarely put up. The windshield wipers, in their mechanical squeegee rhythm, made Lisa think of bad sex.

“Maybe we could have a teeny crash in this storm in this stupid car that doesn’t even have a roof,” she suggested, “and I could stay here in a hospital and not have to see my mother and sister.”