The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

he goes off to his copters and jungles

  Sergeant Doctor Jonathan Moffat

  Jack, baby

  She used to call him John Wayne

  Sometimes when she gets into the car in the sun, for the minute while she waits for the plastic’s heat to mellow, she slackens and breathes on a sudden note of sexual excitement, shuts her eyes surprised

  and smiles

  as if she’s pulling out of a supermarket parking lot in Canada

  as if he’s really here

  Your head is bigger than my head

  Your arms are bigger than my legs

  Your hands are bigger than my breasts

  You

  got right

  through me

  man, so I

  lost so much weight

  I was so

  I don’t know (She put her knuckles to her mouth, she put the phone receiver to her lips, the cold plastic and its holes

  a nozzle

  nuzzle the nozzle and

  cry

  baby

  Are you ever really coming home

  My father used to say, if he’d had any sense, he would have stayed and protested against the war. We had no concept what hell guys went through there. War is about death, he would say, always remember that. Death.

  He liked to say these things because he was a decorated veteran. He said them at dinner to people who had not been to war.

  “It’s not something to envy,” said my father. “Not at all.”

  He said when we were grown up, there would never be any wars again. That’s what he was working for, and with God’s help, they’d get it licked.

  The manner of his death was a state secret. No personnel attended his funeral, and Mom was advised not to advertise it in the paper. They buried an empty coffin. We saw Mom in a dress for the first time.

  After that, often in the mornings we would find an uneven trench dug in the sand of our private beach. Mother had been out there pacing, and drinking, all night. Although it wasn’t his job, the gardener used to go down and clear the butts from this trench. He would even seem to try to fill it in again, shovelling with his boot tips. At such times, he looked sad in a private, Hispanic way, as if he realized that grief was something in the earth and it was vast and it would outlast him. As if Mexicans can cope with these things, are heavy enough and wise, although I know that’s stupid.

  “You Can’t Go Home Again And Chew Gum At The Same Time If You Won’t Listen To Me”

  1My mother died of complications following liposuction surgery.

  1.1A mild heart attack; pneumonia; septicemia.

  1.2Long-term alcoholism was the root cause.

  2For a while, it seemed that charges would be brought against the surgeon, who was clearly negligent.

  2.1But I had to bring them, and I was, at that time, living under my bed.

  3I had a mental illness.

  3.1I visited psychiatrists and took medication.

  3.2At first, the diagnosis was endogenous depression, meaning one that is just in my nature.

  3.3With time, I was changed to a personality disorder.

  3.4Mine is a “vulnerable personality,” also termed “inadequate.”

  4The nitty-gritty of the complaint was, dread.

  4.1Everything I noticed hurt: the act of perception was like walking on a broken leg.

  4.2If a lame bug struggled in the pool, that was me all over.

  4.3Eating beer nuts was a mistake that could never be rectified.

  •People didn’t like me.

  •Furniture brought back memories.

  •I couldn’t stop thinking.

  •I felt best under my bed.

  5I came out for the funeral, invigorated by just plain sorrow.

  5.1I notified potential mourners, signed documents, signed checks.

  5.2Because she had nothing suitable, I lent Mom the dress in which she was cremated.

  5.3Everyone remarked on my good sense.

  6. CONCRETE DETAIL

  The dress was a blue velvet strapless with a zipper up the back. I’d only worn it once, to my Uncle Jerry’s fiftieth, held on the rooftop restaurant of some hotel. Because it was white-tie-and-tails, my mother wouldn’t go to that party. She said she could wear a bathing suit to the bank, for Christ’s sake, and King Jerry could kiss her ass.

  On me, the dress swept the floor, on Mom it was calf-length: we were similar in girth but she much longer. I cut off the ribbon as being too festive. After some soul-searching, I neglected to have it dry-cleaned.

  I helped to dress her, at my own insistence. People love each other in flesh and blood – my then conviction. I told the funeral people: she is my flesh and blood.

  They gave her to us in the hospital gown, fastened with a sloppy bow over no underwear. I’d never seen Mom naked before, and I kept thinking, this is what I’ll look like when I’m fifty – even though my mother and I are not related, not the same race, and I was then going bald from eating nothing but Wonder Bread. I thought it over and over.

  At the same time the lipoed thigh like a butchered seal. Curly peacock blue stitches sprouted from brackish gouges. Even when she was alive, it stank.

  Mom looked wide-awake and pitifully frightened. Her fingernails were bitten down to the quick. I kept wanting to take her hand and swear I wouldn’t let them burn her.

  I cried and cried. Whatever I thought, I cried. My mother’s friend Marta, who was helping me, kept saying, “Let’s just get this over with. Please, let’s just get this over with.”

  I wouldn’t go in for the cremation. I waited outside in the car with my ex-boyfriend Stewart. It was a big station wagon which smelled of dogs. We listened to a call-in radio show about garbage disposal, and Stewart smoked. I wanted to smoke, but couldn’t, I was too anorexic. Smoking gave me the dry heaves.

  On the radio show, they were discussing the comparative environmental effects of garbage incineration and landfill. Stew kept trying to catch my eye but I didn’t feel like laughing at anything that afternoon.

  While we waited, a flight of Canada geese went by, very high up in their imperfect V. I kept hoping someone would shoot one down but of course they just flew away. Then Marta was knocking on the car window with the jar in her hand. When I rolled the window down, she said, “Here’s your mother.”

  The jar had the manufacturer’s name stamped in the bottom. I gave it to Stewart and made him promise to throw it away. It’s now in his cellar with his fishing tackle.

  He told me he opened it once, and the zipper from my dress was still there, curled among the ashes. “It scared the shit out of me,” he said. “I thought it was her spine.”

  7So that’s how it was when my mother was obliterated.

  8Leaving all her worldly goods to my brother Eddie.

  9Who was on a drinking spree: for a long time he could not be found.

  Initiating Event: “The Phone Rings”

  It’s 3:00 A.M., two weeks after the cremation. I’m lying on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, clutching a stuffed rabbit. I’m still in the black linen dress I wore to the funeral. I have taken showers since, but with the black dress on. To dry, I sit in the bathroom on a towel for as long as it takes. I have all the free time in the world.

  My nose is hot pink and my face chapped. There’s crust in my eyes and, on my lips, scabs.

  The bedroom is white and high-ceilinged. It’s densely hung with contemporary art. There are up to three rows of frames on each wall, starting at knee level. Because my mother’s oldest friend is a painter who works in No. 2 pencil, there’s a lot of gray, and torn, grubby paper. Words are conspicuous:

  SHIT VALENTINE

  bawl

  “MYSTERY MEAT”

  My favorite piece is drawn with the gilt paper stars doled out in primary schools as congratulations. On unpainted canvas, they cluster and bulge, straying from the No. 2 pencil paths of constellations. Some stars are only half stuck, with their legs curling. Some obscenely mount their fellow
s. It’s nasty, and it’s genius; and when I think about it, I’m not in pain. I’ve been staring at the stars all day and night, this particular night.

  and for two weeks long, I’ve been praying to my mother –

  and to God to please kill me instead –

  Mom can come back and burn me, in the same dress –

  but Mom was an electrical charge in a hundred pounds of meat –

  which never ever believed in God –

  And I’ve thrown her clothes out on the lawn; and sketched dead families on the walls; and spent an hour carrying all the food in the kitchen to my room, where I’ve put it in a duffel bag, awaiting my decision on how to offer it in sacrifice –

  and crying. That stuff. No point going into detail.

  Two weeks of this. Lying on the braided Colonial rug, Mom’s bedroom. Stuffed rabbit, ears damp from chewing.

  3:00 A.M.

  The phone rings.

  I crawled to the answerphone, and when I heard Eddie’s voice, I picked up hastily.

  “Hello! Hello?”

  “Oh! Yeah . . . Chrysa?”

  “Is it Eddie?”

  “I guess so. Isn’t that fucking depressing.”

  Then right off Eddie told me his scheme to turn our home into an institute for spiritual development.

  “You just need the premises, and we’ve got premises in spades. In. Spades. And then you, what, you could be channeling Moses with a garden hose. These assholes are desperate. Yeah, like cancer victims. Heal yourself through spiritual hose treatment, Moses of Sinai said ‘It made my teeth whiter in just six weeks!’ Oh no, it’s the peppermint schnapps talking.

  “I’ve got the guru already, you gotta love this guy. Can’t not love. We’re talking, people coming in their thousands, with their fucking thousands. Of thousands of dollars. I’m totally serious here, so just save the remarks, this is happening.”

  “Eddie. Did you hear about Mom?”

  “Yeah,” he said and shut up.

  Five minutes passed.

  It was weird because he couldn’t see me, all sticky with my pitiful rabbit. It made me tongue-tied, so I just listened to the fuzz on the line getting louder and softer; the traffic in the background. You could hear he was in a phone booth.

  At last he added, “Sorry, I’m a little down tonight.”

  “It’s . . . it’s good to hear your voice.” I hiccuped and pinched the rabbit hard. “Really.”

  “So what did I get? I mean, sorry I’m such a pig, but you know I never had the normal feelings a son blah blah for a mother. I thought when she died, I got all excited, I was sitting there with the Fed Ex, NOW I’m gonna get the feelings! Roll on, normal feelings! But nothing happened so I throw up my hands. I’m fucked. Up.”

  “You got everything.”

  “What? Everything. What everything?”

  “Well . . . I don’t think there’s much money.”

  “NO. That can’t happen. That shits the bed. How much not much?’

  I was crying again now. I blubbered: “You got the house.”

  “Well, yeah, the house. I mean, you can hardly . . . that’s something. But not much money, could you be, like, any fucking less specific? Oh. I’m being hard on you, without any justification. That’s not my intention. So that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  There was more fuzz. At last Eddie said, “I’ve got my guru with me.”

  There was more fuzz. Eddie said, “Is there any cheese in the house? I, like, I don’t have a cheese problem any more but I still need lots of cheese. So if there isn’t any cheese, we’ll have to stop on the way.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right! We’ll stop. Don’t need that . . . the cheese scenario . . . okay, look, we’re at the Taco Bell, we’ll do the cheese thing, be at your side in fifteen minutes. Kapish?”

  And he hung up.

  It wasn’t fifteen minutes but more like an hour before Eddie came. I had time to shower and change. I hid the rabbit in a clothes hamper. Then I stood in the courtyard for the longest time, expecting him.

  I stood there for the longest time.

  The moonlight reflected in the swimming pool was brighter than the actual moon. In its thin, chlorine light, everything looked like plastic. The masonry and plaster, tousled palms and ivy – and Remember III the mutt stood guard on the balcony, looking like a toy goat from a kid’s farmyard set.

  Odd articles were strewn about the lawn – by me in my earlier frenzies. Mom’s pink bra hung from a fig tree. A child’s blanket with a tiger’s face woven into it was spread on the pebbled drive. I kept stepping on spoons and forks in my bare feet. For the first time, these things appeared to me not as damning evidence but as a lead-in to an anecdote about my endearing frailty. I threw all this stuff off the balcony, I was so upset. Her bra ended up in a tree!

  It was so strange! So pretty and it sent chills –

  I love Eddie desperately, I folded my hands and pressed them, I was rooted to the spot with joy.

  At last I heard the tiny sound of the motor on our private drive. It rose and fell because the lane follows the coast and there are many bends and dips. When it came up full-throated, I pressed the button for the automatic gate and it parted to reveal Eddie’s rinky-dink yellow Hyundai jigging toward me over the loose pebbles.

  Parking, it shuddered and let out one long huff. Then both doors opened.

  Eddie came first, stepping out onto the tiger blanket. He was barefoot, in one of his suits with the tie loosened and hanging down his back. It surprised me; I’d heard he wore suits now but I’d never actually seen one. When I was in grad school, all he ever wore were Hawaiian shirts.

  He looked just the same. That surprised me too. It shouldn’t but you know it does. Like, my God, the likeness is uncanny!

  “Hi,” said Eddie. “Look, I got to apologize, what I said on the phone. Not like I remember what I said, cause I’m really smashed so you gotta forgive me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah . . . what do you care.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and then Ralph got out of the car.

  And when Ralph got out of the car and I saw him for the first time, it all rushed to my head. If I was expecting a guru at all, it was some little Hindu gentleman with curious whiskers. A paunchy gnome in orange robes, the guru would fold his hands, saying wise, innocuous things about “the lotus.”

  Ralph had no shirt on.

  Description: Ralph

  He’s named Allan Michaelson. No one has ever called him by that name.

  His mother was a gypsy fortune-teller. “Mistress Lola.” No psychic powers whatsoever, real name Irene.

  “Dave something Scottish” was his father, in his mother’s words. “I was fifteen, love. I didn’t write them things down.”

  He was born in Britain. He came to the U.S. at eighteen.

  Once I asked him if his kind of British accent was Romany. He said no, in his case, “gypsy” just meant “trailer trash.”

  Once he spent a year in the Rockies, meditating, only coming to town to buy tinned meat, tea and gas for his pick-up. He ate wild mushrooms and burdock. He lived in a tent and meditated ten hours a day.

  When I asked him what effect it had, he said, “None.”

  He was good-looking like an excellent statue of a homely man. He moved well, just that, but it gave him status in groups.

  6'2", broad-shouldered, baritone, that disheartening litany. White Male Deluxe.

  A nice guy who wiped his shoes, who said “Gesundheit.”

  Just walking around the car to Eddie’s side, he made me stare, I didn’t know what it was but

  it made your throat hurt and your heart speed up, and you didn’t understand what he said.

  He said something to Eddie and put one hand on the Hyundai, turned and first laid eyes on me. Then his face changed and he went absolutely still.

  “Chrysa, my guru,” Eddie said, and lit his cigarette.

  Ralph was absolutely fucking still.

&
nbsp; “Hello,” I said, which is the very hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  “Hi,” said Ralph, in this hoarse, carrying voice. Then he rubbed his eyes with one hand as if clearing an irksome misapprehension and turned to get his bearings.

  The courtyard is overlooked by two stone towers, each with a belfry from which the bells have been removed. Between them runs the coastal wall. Each tower develops into a house: the main wing to the left, with its balconies and fancy ironwork railings; on the right the smaller guest wing, whose rooms, on the ground floor, are only separated from the pool by sliding doors. On fine nights you can sleep there with the walls open, breathing in the jasmine. The pool is Olympic-sized, with mosaic fish and mermaids worked into the tiles. There are palm trees and statues. None of this seemed to surprise Ralph. The pink bra in the tree, the many spoons – none of it.

  He did stare at the keyhole doorway leading out onto the beach. It startles most people when they see it for the first time. Since we’re on a cliff, all it shows is greenish, yawning distance. It takes a while to put together the rumble of the ocean and the hole, which seems to open onto the Void.

  This Void impression colors a person’s first appreciation of what the property must be worth.

  Ralph seemed to ponder, looking up and down the high walls. At last he shook his head. “Jesus,” he said, “is this all yours?”

  Eddie and I looked at each other. In that moment we were actually brother and sister. To anyone else, that house is one magnificent piece of real estate. To us, it’s, oh, that’s where you ate a snail when you were eight and Mom told you the snail was in hell. And remember doing Tarzan off the balcony with jump-ropes? All our lives, too, we have been escorting new friends into the real estate and watching their feelings toward us insidiously change.

  Eddie raised his eyebrows and turned to follow Ralph’s gaze. “Yeah . . .” he drawled, chewing on his cigarette. “Doesn’t it make you sick, when you think of all the homeless people?”