Thrill-Bent (23 page)

“What are you doing with your clothes still on?” Betty asks, reaching up and tugging at the hem of my shorts. She nudges me off balance as she hangs onto my knee and leans way down to press her underarm into the space between the tub and the toilet where a few stray beads have rolled. I am not usually one to strip off my clothes at the merest suggestion, especially in the presence of a cellulite-free sylph who is known to be a troublemaker, but Betty is making this look like too much fun. I wriggle out of my backpack and quickly strip, then do a slow push-up into the pile of mystery balls, letting the hard pellets burst against my skin and roll down my neck onto my chest, where they tattoo me with faint butterfly-wing opalescence. A glittery cloud of fairy dust rises from the floor around us. I am a giant sugar cookie being decorated with colored candy sprinkles. I close my eyes and roll around the textured surface of the floor, bumping into Betty and various cool porcelain fixtures, ricocheting off of them in slow motion.

At some point, our ballet slows, and we sidestroke through the atmosphere in drowsy unison, our bodies barely touching as we paint the floor again and again, until we lie side by side on our backs, perfectly still. The silence comes back into the house then, and I can hear the air dissolve into each big room. Betty’s breathing sounds like a waterfall in the distance. After a minute, I turn my head to look at her, her body stretched out shimmering in the glow of the day/office/evening makeup mirror. She feels my gaze, and turns her head to look back at me. We smile, our teeth as white as the surrounding porcelain. We are both covered from head to toe with strange encrypted messages, orange swirls and smudged pictographs, dotted codes and feathery sky-blue maps. Betty’s pubic hair looks like a sugary Mexican pastry. Mine looks like an exotic sea anemone. Through the frenzy of scribbles, I again notice the hoop of wobbly freckles on Betty’s right breast.

“Did you get a tattoo around your nipple?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, lowering her chin to her chest, trying to see it. “I did mushrooms with Kincaid, the drummer from Monopause? He said he would only get a tattoo if I got one too, and so I just got what he got. He’s a radical fairy, and I guess it has some pagan significance, the circle of life or something. I think it looks cool.” She blows down onto her chest, which releases a gust of powder and hardens her right nipple at the same time. The halo of pagan dots tightens concentrically, rallying around her little flesh erection.

“Hot tub!” she cries, jumping up and running down the hall, leaving a trail of pearlized quasi-footprints on the eggshell-colored carpeting. I follow behind her, trying to wipe my feet on my wadded-up tank top while struggling into my underwear. I manage to stay relatively upright until I hit the laundry room, where I trip myself stepping into the second leghole and somehow end up prone, with my head in the dryer.

There is no downy-soft clover in the backyard, just sharp bits of lava raked in spirals and a path of glossy black stepping stones leading to the pool. I keep missing the stones and hitting the lava, yelping as I trot. Betty is deep in the hot tub with her head slung over the side, looking up at the stars. I sit on the edge and lean back, marveling at the clear dark night and the spew of astral glitter over the San Fernando Valley. The neighbors, I can tell by the identical gurgling hum one yard over, are enjoying the evening from a similar hot-tub perspective. I smell red wine and chlorine and honeysuckle.

Mixed in with the sound of the jacuzzi motor and a faint whine from the distant 405, I can hear a sort of animal bleating, intermittent, and blending at first with the general din. After a few minutes, I am disturbed by the sound—its rich tone of plaintive longing seems to be getting louder and more sorrowful—and I start looking around the yard for an injured pet.

“What the hell
is
that?”

Betty rolls her eyes. “Don’t even.” She nods her chin over toward the cluster of chaise lounges by the carport. “That’s just baby brother trying to get our attention.”

I squint at the darkness, and finally I make out the form of a body lying flat underneath one of the lounges. “Is he in pain?” I ask, as Jackson launches into another round of yowling.

She is still looking at the stars. “He’s fine,” she says after a couple of seconds, but she won’t look over at me, and her damp face, lit by the underwater jacuzzi light, looks like it’s made out of tin.

I decide to walk back across the lava very slowly, as though the stinging spikes and craters on the rocks are simply soft sand and cannot harm me. With each step, I feel the warm pain enter the sole of my foot and waft up through my body, popping out of the top of my head in a cartoonish spout. I wonder if this is how the sadhus do it, the ascetics who walk over hot coals. When I get to the chair where Jackson is lying, I look up and see the pain-puffs hanging there in the sky, strung like Christmas lights, thirteen wisps of fresh white agony rising over the hot-tub dappled backyards. I reach out, but they are already vanishing into the universe.

I sit down gingerly on the chair above Jackson and lower the seat-back until it is parallel to the ground. I stretch out on my stomach so I am lying directly above him and peer down through the plastic slats. His face is approximately six inches from mine, but he doesn’t appear to notice me. My weight is causing the seat’s banding to sag, and I can feel the heat from Jackson’s body spark me in stripes in between where the plastic protects me. His moaning sounds a lot louder from this proximity. I hear splashing from across the yard, and I know Betty is annoyed at me for indulging her brother. But gravity keeps pulling me down into Jackson’s perilous world, where a lamb bleats for its mother, a tire squeaks on its axis, an angry heart beats loud and uncontained on an operating table. His face looks like a choirboy’s—serious and innocent, his mouth perpetually open in a questioning “Oh!”

Whatever this is, it isn’t a prank. I may be floating on some surrealist, haloperidol-induced cloud, but Jackson needs help. He is flesh and blood, here right now, not some squiggle in the branches of a family tree.

I tease apart the slats under my mouth so I can sing along with Jackson’s mournful song. At first I just hum, listening for the tiny modulations in pitch, the exact rhythm of his starts and stops. But gradually a harmony comes to me, a high, strange accompaniment that isn’t exactly Appalachian or Tuvan, but something in between. I hear my own voice plunging down to join Jackson’s, and it’s not pretty or tuneful or civilized. In between each long syllable is a long rest, a rest filled with the eager sound of motors. I breathe in the distant thrill of speed and ignition and, with Jackson, breathe out a small stream of smooth cry. I wonder what the neighbors think. Do they recognize the sound of a human voice when they hear it? Why is he so sad? What could be so simple and yet so complex, so ancient and yet so imminent, to make a thirty-two-year-old boy-man lie down under a lawn chair and bray to the stars?

I am considering the question when three things happen simultaneously:

1) Jackson, for the first time since I lay down, looks directly at me through the slats in the chair. It’s not that he turns his head, or swoops his gaze toward me—nothing that dramatic. Just a subtle but fiery refocusing of attention, until I think I hear a distinct click, like a Viewmaster shifting to the next image.

2) I notice a fine stripe of iridescent dust glimmering on Jackson’s face. Microscopic specks of my paisley tattoo must have drifted down onto him. Squinting, I can almost see the grains—like the ones that cover his mother’s bathroom floor, that are sprinkled across her laundry room and patio, and that are embedded deep in his sister’s wet hair, floating in churning whorls on the hot tub’s oily surface, quivering and fluttering like restless bacteria—fill the air between us.

3) Betty’s bare feet slap wetly across the black stone path, and then the footsteps change to slower, creaky ones—she must be walking the plank of the diving board—followed by a brief but eerie silence. I know that during this pause her body is in midair, poised above the pool like a storm petrel over the open sea.

W
hen my mother got sick we were all relieved, including her, I think. Relieved, I mean, among other reactions: fear, anger, vertigo. She had been holding a loaded gun inside her for so long that it didn’t matter anymore which direction it was pointed: we just longed to hear the blast.

The Condor called me in New York to tell me the doctor’s verdict: my mother was
riddled
with cancer. I don’t know if those were the doctor’s words or my father’s, but I remember the term: riddled. As though it was an intricate puzzle, a trick, and if we pored over it long enough, if we looked at it from some outlandish angle, if we stood back and squinted, my mother could be solved. Like a Rubik’s Cube, she could be refit tightly into her original configuration. The word
riddled
unraveled its scurrilous cocoon inside my head as I sat staring at the pink plastic telephone and listening to my father’s strained breathing. It was suggested that I finish my semester at NYU before flying to San Diego. By then, my mother would be back home from the hospital.

I could barely leave my apartment. I forced myself to go to classes, but Manhattan was like a circle of hell; the subway’s smells and the people going on with their loud, oblivious lives were too vivid. I didn’t call anyone. I would wake up in the middle of the night, terrified, clinging to the underside of the world I knew, slipping, ready to fall. Then I would realize with a gulping sigh that it wasn’t me who was dying. When my breathing calmed a little, I would comprehend that of course it was me. That slick reptilian belly, that dark side of the moon, was waiting for me, too. Crouching under the captain’s table, peeking out from the scalloped edges of festive occasions and university lecture halls and Chinese restaurants. It didn’t disappear just because you couldn’t see it, and once you caught its eye you could never look away.

I read Dylan Thomas. I read Emily Dickinson. They didn’t seem scared. My mother used to tell me, when I’d had a bad dream,
Think about Disneyland.
I took to sleeping with my old baseball mitt. I’d wake, slam my fist into its mouth a few times, so hard both my hands would go numb.

When the semester ended and I walked into my parents’ house, my mother was lying on the couch in the living room, reading. She looked regal. I think I had expected her to already be dead, but she wasn’t. I dropped my bags and knelt beside her. She put her book down across her chest, marking her place. She smiled, her eyes focused directly on me. She didn’t have the look my mother had always had: a cloud that disassembles before making its way across the sky. Cancer had put her right here on earth. “Jan,” she said.

It took her only three months to die. I assumed that at some point during those three months we would have a tearful reunion, confessing and forgiving all our meannesses. We would reenact that scene from
Terms of Endearment
where Shirley MacLaine yells at Debra Winger’s doctor. Or she would awaken whimpering from a morphine nightmare, and I would comfort her. We would be propelled into a dramatic death scene. We would act like a family, I thought. Of course, it couldn’t have been a reunion, because the word implies that there once was a union. I honestly believe that my mother and I were functionally polite to each other even when I was in the womb. That was the most amazing thing about my mother’s death: all the politeness was gone. There was no gauzy scrim of solicitude between my dying mother and me, no Vaseline on the lens. Neither of us cried. Before she got the colostomy, I’d grab her around the waist and hoist her over to the toilet. Then I’d lean against the cool tile, holding her bunched nightgown up out of her way.

But I couldn’t bathe her. I’d stand in the doorway of the bedroom while the nurse unclothed her and swabbed her down. She lay inert like a shoe while she was vigorously buffed and shined. She’d watch me the whole time—not with accusation, but for memorization, I think. I’d stand with my hand covering my mouth, unable to look, unable not to look. If ever I’d wanted to see a woman naked, it was my mother. I had longed to see how her white breasts rested on her ribcage, the curve of her waist swelling out to there, the tops of her flushed thighs with their delicate, tiny hairs glistening. I had seen it all in my mind’s keyhole. But my mother had been modest, she had dressed in her walk-in closet with the door shut, and I had been the opposition. And now—the long skeletal limbs, the giant reddened joints, the gnarled toes, the flattened breasts, the thin shock of pubic hair, the blue and white span of pelvis, the tendons thick as fingers, the heavy skin, the unconquerable bones. She was laid out like a prostitute for my viewing. Her eyes never left my face.

The point is, for the first time in my mother’s life, she had power. She was center stage. We sat around awaiting her slightest wish, willing to jump through hoops to expunge our prior deaf ears. She didn’t have to say much. We all knew what was going on. The Condor was as paltry as a piñata. Now that my mother had the scepter she only wanted to hold it. Dying suited her. She finally had the chance just to be herself.

It got so that we, my father and I, atheists, prayed for her death. Her lips stretched back over her teeth and almost disappeared. I dribbled water into her mouth with my fingers. She made horrible sucking sounds with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Her eyes were yellowed and antique, loose in their sockets like oiled ball bearings. Her vertebrae galloped like knuckles up her spine. Metaphors are useful to describe moments, to provide brief glimpses into biology. These are the words we use for bodies: roof, sockets, spine. This is the way we build a body: roof, sockets, spine.

But when in the middle of the night my father tapped on my bedroom door, click click click, and we walked slowly down the long belt of hallway in utter silence, I knew that anatomy would ultimately fail me. Her limbs, her collarbone, the small of her back, the bridge of her nose, the backs of her knees, her jawline, her fingers, her skull, these were not her. There was a body in the master bedroom, but it wasn’t her. It was my mother’s dead body, but it wasn’t my mother, dead. She had drained off like an aqueduct.

The one part I hadn’t counted on, hadn’t prepared for, was being alone in the house with my father afterward. There we were, co-conspirators, inseverable at last in our private lair.

When two brawny young men from the mortuary came to take the body, one of them said to my father, “People sometimes freak out at this part. You might prefer to retire to another room until we’re gone.” His combination of dude slang and Jane Austen phraseology struck me as enormously funny, and I coughed into my hand several times to stifle a laugh. They waited politely for me to contain myself, and then my father and I preferred to retire to the den, where we heard a lot of confused shuffling and name-calling and finally the front door slamming. A few minutes later, the hearse rumbled down the driveway unevenly, and I pictured my mother’s body bouncing and jostling over the potholes and chasms I knew by heart in the old asphalt.

My father freaked out. He began pacing around the room maniacally, pounding his fist against any available object. He looked recently jailed; his eyes were absolutely wild. Then he stopped, put one palm up on the paneled wall and covered his face with the other hand and began to emit high-pitched, inhuman sounds.

I realized then that death is anathema to the logical mind. The art of reasoning cannot fathom the art of dying. The brain bumps and bumps against nothingness, and each time the welt on the forehead gets bigger. The power of the intellect has met its match. Maybe that’s why the voice steps in: the esophagus knows how to do the job, the nasal cavity can hold sound, roll it around, the lips can pronounce. My dad was trying to find a sound that was his, a sound he knew how to shape.

I came up behind him—he was facing away from me, toward the wall—and I put my hand softly on his shoulder. He moved away from me as though I had thrown a jolt of electricity down his arm, and he wheeled back into his frenzied pacing, like he was horribly impatient for something to happen. I was stunned by his rebuff, but I knew he was in a country beyond the possibility of comfort. I had the feeling that if we touched, or even looked directly into each other’s eyes, the sharp vitality that hung over both our heads would be released like the blade of a guillotine with a flick of recognition. I sat down on the sofa, somehow unable to leave him alone in the room, letting the softness pull my body into its core, wanting to be completely submerged in thick cushions, as if ballasted with sandbags; I wanted to be shored up, to never again leave the island of good intentions.

Eventually I made a pot of coffee, and we sat in the living room waiting for the sun to come up. This must have been a relief to him, having something tangible to wait for. We didn’t talk, except to confirm the most basic logistics, what time we would start calling friends and relatives, where the number of the day nurse was posted. Neither of us thought to switch on a light. There was a three-quarter moon nosing in through the picture window, washing the room with a faint steely glow, just enough to take a bite out of the darkness. In the eerie quiet before dawn, in the big living room that lurched out over a deep pine canyon filled with rose quartz and feldspar and coyotes, we didn’t have to speak. We knew who we were. Warming our hands around our coffee cups, sitting on opposite couches, we were the survivors. We were the winners. We were the appeased gods, the camp guards, the Romans.

At eight I called everyone who was anyone: my mother’s mother, my aunts and uncles, a couple of my mom’s friends who would spread the word to their respective circles. I settled into the business of calling like it was my first day at a temp job. “Hello, this is Jan Richman. I’m sorry to be calling so early, but I wanted to let you know that Dorothy passed away at two o’clock this morning.”

Passed away. It was such a genteel expression, such a cliché. And yet, when I had to gather up the exact combination of words that seemed truest, closest to describing the actual situation, I chose those. They didn’t claim to bear an apodictic message. They said: neither of us really knows what the hell happened, but here is some language to convey the vaguest of all ideas, the sphinx.

Then people started bringing hams. I could swear some of them must have had hams sitting in the trunks of their cars, ready to be delivered the minute the phone call came. Baked hams, canned hams, hams with pineapple rings, hams with cloves stuck in them. I don’t know what they thought we needed with all those hams; there would be no funeral service, per my mother’s request, no formal gathering. No ham-eating occasions. What was the ham-corpse connection?

It got to be a joke: the doorbell would ring, and my father and I would look at each other and mouth, “Ham!” The ham-giving ritual culminated one day when I opened the front door to find a ham sitting on the doormat. Just a ham. No person, no note, no cloves spelling out the name of a benefactor. Later we received a call from a long-time neighbor, apologizing for having had to run off to a Little League game.