by JoAnna Novak
A woman answers, alacritious: “Rottingham’s, who may I say is calling?”
“Is Carlos there?”
“Carlos?”
“Carlos Rottingham?”
Anna, stalking tyro: perhaps I miswrote the number.
The woman sneezes wetly. “Ah—excuse me. Are you looking for Charles or Chip … Charles Senior, by any chance?”
“My apologies.” Had I time for reflection, I may worry at how quickly I accept this appellation adjustment. “Yes, I’m calling from the registrar at College of Cook County, in response to Carlo—Charles’s transcript request. Is he available?”
In an oriel window on the peacock house, a light goes on. Peacocks, I think, when no figure appears. I keep an eye on the window, a feather, Carlos. His lie debouches me from my cramped fantasy. Bold and capable, liberated from motherly, wifely duties to which I have never fully subscribed (yet even unborne burdens require shouldering), I could never go home—the thought pulsates my chest. I, too, could tell people I’m someone else, Carlos, build a future on mistruths.
“He’s at the pool until eight. Should I tell him you called?”
“Oh, no,” I say, meekly, opening the car door. The cold smarts. “I’ll follow up. Easier to be in touch with him, his professors tomorrow. Thank you.”
Outside, my knee sears as I stand. Charles I whisper. Rot. Rot. Slowly, I circle the car, a lion tracking its hunt. I run my bare hand along the cold black surface, waiting for the green plumage of a man or a bird to appear, my fingers shivering up the wet, burning cold until I realize I don’t know why the hell I want what I want.
The louder the volume, the slower my speeding feels. I want to outpace traffic, to lift off. This is how I get annual tickets. I pass a school zone, the white metallic crosswalk stripes dazzling beneath a streetlamp. The sky is turgid with burgundy clouds, like hell is ascending.
Anna. Really. Slow down.
I hate to. Decelerating, the panic might set. What am I doing, where do I go from here, what will tomorrow be, tonight? I press rewind and drum the steering wheel, like rapid arm movements can keep me from despondency, like action will lighten me, like young people in a band will bring me youth. They do, so I sing.
Elliot tells me I’m a year late on her music, but this is the girl who didn’t understand the notion of now. Current, this minute, this very instant: now is relative. Because singing now I remember glee, joy, twenty-five years ago, learning to drive, blasting The Stooges and David Bowie when I took my dad’s red Chevelle, alone, and every mile, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” the odometer wasn’t a mortal countdown—how many more miles were there to drive in a life—but a challenge, “Fame”: how far could I go? Chicago Ridge Mall? The Fox River? Starved Rock? Rot, Carlos, Charles—Fata Morgana: how does he do this to me, show me another way—alive in fantasy, reconstituted by desire—how limitless life could be without … without my family.
At a blinking red light, I spit in my palm. Au revoir, Rot’s number. I cup my hand to my nose. It is a woman’s hand, up to no good. Fetid, foul—that’s my saliva. So I will retrieve my daughter, with delectation and noise, my gorgeous gloves back on.
10 ·· LISA
FOR AN HOUR, MY MOM doesn’t come upstairs, doesn’t even look for me or huff into my room shaking the thermometer (I’d bite to tempt mercury poisoning). I stay under the white down comforter, in bed, holding my breath and feeling the one good trick Elliot showed me: the heft of thousands of goose feathers sewn into neat little squares heaped on my breasts.
I’m crying lightly about my grandma. I stop. Sometimes, to feel real, you need other people to see your sadness. Acknowledgment is vital, Dr. Ogbaa says, and she’s right.
I try to picture Junior Carlos’s sex face, but all I see is fangs like those ones kids whose moms aren’t anti-Halloween let them buy from Murray’s Party Supplies.
Then memory bats me. I remember: I’m at my grandmother’s house, in a bed that once belonged to my mom, and I refuse to nap. I must be three. Zoobilee Zoo beckons from a Beta tape, but my grandma has insisted “everything good waits.” I didn’t know words like refrain or mantra then. I knew mad. No. Want now. A tumble of bleeding feelings (injustice?). The afghan covering my face is striped with wavy seas of avocado green and cream, flecked with hairballs from dogs I never knew. I breathe my sour air. If no one finds me, I might disappear. I might plunge through the mattress, into another dimension, a bizarro my-house or my-grandma’s-house, where I can run my hand along the ballet barre on the wall, without anyone telling me to stop.
This hope belongs to being three years old, my first memory. It was a glimmer of an idea—I had power—before I found a voice, according to Dr. Ogbaa. She’s shown me how repressing my appetite and shrinking myself may have origins in what I’d learned from Catechism, CCD, the Church’s elaborate investment in self-denial, its propagation of afterlife myths.
Today, under the covers, hearing my mom open white birch cabinets and slam very organized drawers and turn the television on and then off, shouting at my dad on the phone and finally turning on the Oreck, I realize I don’t want to disappear or be invisible anymore—what once served me no longer does.
Instead, I open my eyes and mouth my dramatic monologue for Speech Team.
The monologue is so depressing I’ve blue-ribboned off it twice. It’s told by a woman, who—sorry, spoiler—reveals she’s actually dead. The windshield wipers, she says, the wipers, the wipers. Like that scary-not-scary joke about the Russian guy saying, I vant to vipe your vindows, this lady keeps talking about wiper blades, that’s all she sees, and you think she’s crazy, until you learn through her first-calm and then-frazzled narrative, that one night, as she was driving through a thunderstorm, she couldn’t clear the rain fast enough and she couldn’t see a red light and she sped through an intersection and into a head-on collision with a Mack truck. The theme is mistakes haunt you or, maybe, death is insanity.
I practice in whispers. When I act, my brain disappears. I am all face and body, inside a set of borrowed feelings, like thrift shopping at the good Salvation Army on Clybourn with Junior Carlos: toss me that mink stole and I’m two seconds from Joan Rivers. My voice quavers until desperation and terror fondle every word. I scrunch my nose to choke my vocal chords and pinch my sentences until my mom opens the door and I stop.
Kim Orlowski-Breit has a mushroom cut, which does her wispy corn-silk hair zero favors. Right now, she’s in a state of half-dress. Her brown, seal-fur hat sits on her head like a shaggy box. She wears John Lennon glasses and shapeless blue jumpers with appliqués of women and dogs or fruit and squirrels. Six-pointed snowflakes and snowmen are today’s patches. The snowmen are eyeless. Those naked photos in the album in the basement: I wonder what her babe-self would say to her now. I wonder why some women suck when they become adults—so much more than men.
Would I be so harsh toward my mom if it weren’t for Elliot?
Before she miscarried with my brother Paul (we celebrate his would-be birthday each August by listening to Eric Clapton’s “Tears From Heaven” and walking over to the cemetery with a bouquet of baby’s breath), and fulfilled her womanly duties with me, before she decided to devote her life to stacking dented cans of Campell’s soup at the Cook County Food Pantry and spreading Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip and Velveeta at St. Catherine of Siena’s women’s shelter, my mom taught first grade on the South Side, at a school where kids were always fairy-godmothered by social services, the sort of place where little boys would accost little girls, touch their pee-pees and tell them about where they’d put their wees. That time endowed my mom with an unparalleled death stare. This is what I get now. She pulls off the covers and glares, a look that growls, Lisa get up. She yanks open my bottom dresser drawer.
“Where are your pants?” Her yell sounds like it’s traveled up from underground to attack me. “Do you have to be flaunting your body all day long?”
“What are you doing?” I shriek. “Stop! You’re going thro
ugh my stuff!”
My mom turns, hands on her hips, so big they bump our minivan’s parking brake. Honestly, I’m pissed on principle; it’s not like I’d be dumb enough to hide anything after my mom became the Stasi in sixth grade. Junior Carlos keeps a topless Polaroid he took of me in his wallet; he supplies his own glow-in-the-dark condoms.
“I’m not going through your stuff. I’m getting you ready. Your grandmother wants to say goodbye, and you—Lisa, I need you to be dressed five minutes ago.”
“I don’t want to get Grandma sick. Er. Sick-er. And I hate hospitals. You ruined them for me.”
“You ruined them for yourself. Don’t take your issues out on your grandmother.”
“Don’t rush me,” I say, stretching. I stretch my arms wide like wings. I let my fingers traipse through the air like a ballerina’s.
“These are God’s minutes, on His clock. You pray, missy. Let’s both better hope He’s not running fast, or you’ll—this will be your burden. You’ll regret today for a long, long time.” She flings a pair of sweatpants over her shoulder. Up and down the legs, they say, SPEECH DOES | IT LOUD. They land on the foot of my bed, where only Junior Carlos’s feet have ever reached. “Your—what in the world are these?”
She holds the freezer-sized Ziploc bag of Fen-Phen. Diet pills from Elliot. That stupid, stupid Christmas thing.
Above my mom’s eyebrows, her forehead sprouts two bulging knobs. Fury lumps. She looks like a devil—God, she’d loathe that. She shakes the bag once, like she’s weighing it, and the bottom bursts and pills pour everywhere. The first thing I think of is the clatter they’d make getting sucked into the vacuum cleaner, a lotto machine of candy.
“They’re Elliot’s,” I say, sitting up rigidly. “Elliot’s pills.”
Now I kneel on my bed, so my mom and I are closer to the same height. I channel the part of the windshield wipers monologue where the woman gives her shakiest confessions.
“They’ve been here since Christmas,” I say, trying to keep my voice from punching up. “She gave them to me, I think she thinks I’m still into that, all that stuff, which, no, I’m not, because I know Dr. O told you I’m doing really goo—well. Really well. I’ve been meaning to give them back, or throw them out or whatever, but I don’t really wanna talk to Elliot anymore because I know you don’t want me to and, she’s, like, the worst, so they’re not mine is what I’m trying to get at, Mom, okay?”
The devil horns on her forehead flatten. Her skin eerily smoothes; it’s like the ice that kids on the news plummet through while driving snowmobiles. Her eyes close. She sniffles: she’s a person whose breathing belies her mounting tears.
“You’re popping right now,” my mom says. “You’re lying to me.”
“Popping? What? No, like, not even. I’m trying—I’m being honest, Mom, I swear, this—”
“You think you can lie. That all of this is nothing. Your grandmother is dying, so you think you can lie to me. ‘My mother’s mind is elsewhere so she must be gullible and ready to be the fool, to be the mourning, God-fearing fool.’ Are you addled now? Should I have your stomach pumped? Is this what you do when you stay home sick?”
“I watched TV, Mom! I drank warm 7UP! Hey, relax.”
My mom dumps the contents of my pink backpack on my desk. Pens and paper clips and wadded up gum foil and pennies and some random chalk I stole (I don’t know why) pour onto the big, flat calendar that covers my desk. It’s a mess. I really hate her right now. Maybe forever.
“What happened, Lisa, to Colossians, she ‘laid aside the old self with its evil practices.’ Psalms, Lisa: ‘he who practices deceit shall not dwell within my house.’” She pauses, grabbing pajamas and cramming them in the backpack. “We can’t have this, this relentless insistence on lying—is this … how long has this been going on? Do you have a schedule for your deception? A diary for me this time?”
“Mom, you’re scaring me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re freaking—maybe you’re upset about Grandma, which—” my voice breaks here, for real, in a way I always wish I could do on command, which, someday, I’ll master if it kills me—“and I’m upset, too, but I swear, I swear to God, and you, and Grandma, and Dad, that I’m not taking diet pills, I haven’t even opened that bag, I’m not lying—”
“This disease, like a serpent in your brain—what is it offering you? What is it saying to you? Why is it lying with you? And you subscribe to it. Why do you keep hiding yourself from God? You need—oh, Dr. Ogbaa is so wrong. So, so wrong. Poor, imbecilic, ineffective woman. You’ve deceived her? That’s—Lisa, the heavenly Father told me we might come to this. That. Pack—finish packing. We’re going back to the hospital.”
I pull the comforter over my head. Inside my chest, fear smears itself across my lungs until I can’t breathe, I can’t think. I start to cry, and then, embracing the temper tantrum, I pound my fists into the bed, pummeling the mattress, its response like a timpani.
“Kill me! ” I scream through the blankets. “Just kill me now! You want me dead! Stop pretending you don’t. You wish Paul had survived and I’d died.”
That’s the jugular. The knife twist. The clinch. My voice sounds ripped up, and I pause when my mom leaves the room. The door slams. I’m quiet then, cool and relaxed, apathetic and alone, which is the eternal aftermath of acting.
11 ·· ELLIOT
“WE NEED TO TALK, EL,” Anna said, then two seconds later: “What do you want for dinner?” Before I could reply to anything she cranked the volume and started singing.
“Who-ooh ever you are!”
She belted Geggy Tah so hard I could tell she was bullying herself into a good mood, the sort I’d force if I ever bombed a spelling quiz. Another kid would’ve been blasé or pissed—my mom didn’t say hi, just flashed me a half-smile and led me to the edge of the cliff, from the depths of which I might chew up hours obsessing over food choices, calories vs. fat vs. what remained of my taste-budular preferences—but I was glad to be off Rocyo’s porch. In the Saab’s spazzy heat, headed home to my room, where I’d chill on AOL and try to catch Lisa, I was thankful for my mom. She treated me like an equal, not a child to baby and coddle. Compared with doomsday Mrs. Orlowski-Breit, my mom was a godsend, the one person in my life who made me feel like I could win, even when something weird was definitely eating her. Someday, I would grow up and wear gloves like hers, black and tight, catsuit gloves, gloves that protected my writerly digits, but I wouldn’t holler out alternative music like a sped.
“I don’t know about dinner,” I said during the song’s trancey bridge. “Anything? What do you want to talk about?”
But the chorus was back. Anna sang, throwing her hands off the wheel. My questions floated, bubbles unpopped by response. That wasn’t unusual. My mom was a poet, with an enjambed temperament, thin beautiful focused, so focused that, once, on Thanksgiving, her break as much as mine, she’d been writing a crown of sonnets and was so absorbed she hadn’t heard our fire alarm. That was fifth grade, when I’d slathered a twelve-pound turkey with butter and sage: the alpha and omega of my culinary endeavors, after which I augured that food and I would never be friends.
Her question was pointless, anyhow. I knew what we’d be eating—Lean Cuisines, the vegetarian meals, the same dinner we’d had every night since we were downtown at Uncle Marky’s loft for Christmas, when he’d served ropa vieja, i.e., old clothes; Fernán, Marky’s partner, was Cubano: the peas and carrots I’d stabbed out had been delicious. Sometimes, I wished they were my parents. When Marky talked, I could tell Fernán actually listened, the way he nodded and made little mhm-noises, covering his mouth with one hand. They did cool things, like go to plays at the Steppenwolf, and they were both so effortlessly handsome in their dark jeans and Gucci loafers. Really, the only downside would be the food. Uncle Marky was a pastry chef—the only pastry chef in town who actually liked dessert. (Lil’ Bit, he’d say, which, according to Anna, was what he’d been calling me since I was in utero, mo
st of us are just too anal to sauté.) My willpower would have to be airtight to resist the no-big-deal pecan shortbread he kept around. Well. I couldn’t remember the last time Anna had cooked: apples, lemons, and a Brita pitcher were the contents of our fridge; our freezer had ice cube trays and glossy white boxes covered with hi-def photos of oxymoronic meals like low-fat fettuccini Alfredo.
In the passenger seat, I sank into my coat. I sucked in my stomach. Decoding required subtlety. I tried not to stare at Anna: Her mouth stretched, blurring at the corners of her lips. She was hard to look at, the way she was so unashamed of her face.
The song changed, and Anna stayed quiet, waiting, ready to pounce on the next lyric. I took it as a sign that I should be quiet, too. A good silence was friable, ground into particles of disparate awkwardness. Anna and I—whatever she wanted to talk about—we were too together for that.
We drove through the neighborhoods under Park’s purview while Anna merged her voice with Shirley Manson’s. School was the body, and the gated communities and subdivisions were the racemose glands and muscles and tendons, each responsible for its own function, producing its own type: Soccer players mindlessly heading out in Willow Glen; Girl Scouts in Lindendale dusting their old collectible Beverly Hills 90210 Brenda dolls; rich brats chucking croquet mallets come summer in Saddle Brook. What architects could’ve overseen such trends? It was amazing, like life was built according to a grand mastermind design, all these hubs in our chunk of Illinois, not Chicago, not the exurbs, an almost-white suburb, where nothing was walkable.
