The Queen Gene

by Jennifer Coburn

  “Yes, well, I really feel for you, Mother. What is trichotillomania?”

  “It’s a hair-pulling disorder, darling,” Anjoli said as though I were a dolt for being unfamiliar with the obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  “The dog pulls his hair?” I queried.

  “Poor darling is biting the fur from his paws. You should see him, Lucy. You can see his skin. It’s just awful to look at.”

  “And you think acupuncture is going to help?” I asked.

  “It has to! I’d do anything to help my little Paz,” Anjoli said. “He’s my baby. I coated his feet with nail polish remover so it would taste bad when he chewed, but nothing would keep him away. It’s like he’s possessed.”

  “You should take him to an exorcist, not an acupuncturist,” I joked.

  “Hmmm,” Anjoli said, considering it. “Kiki’s pet therapist — the one who diagnosed Paz — said we should consider antidepressants if it doesn’t get better pretty soon, but you know how I feel about western medicine.”

  With that, Paz yelped again. Dr. Hwang became frustrated that the little dog was not breathing deeply. Do his other patients cooperate? Has he ever treated a dog before?

  “Was he like this when you got him?” I asked.

  “Please, darling. Do you really think I would have picked a mentally ill pet?”

  “Mother!” I scolded. “He has a problem, that’s all. I’d think you’d be happy to help this puppy on his journey back to health.”

  “I suppose you’re right, darling” Anjoli began. “This is pushing my buttons, though. I feel so powerless to help my little Paz. It’s activating my issues. I don’t like feeling useless, Lucy. I have no experience with mental illness.”

  I wouldn’t go quite that far, I didn’t say aloud.

  After a few moments of silence, I asked Anjoli if everything was okay. “I don’t hear Paz anymore.”

  “Oh, Lucy, I think this is going very well,” she said with a tone of awe at what she was witnessing.

  “What’s going on?!” I asked, reminding her that I couldn’t see through the telephone.

  Gleefully, Anjoli answered. “Paz is totally relaxed right now. He’s not moving a bit, which is a relief because he was quivering a few seconds ago. He’s standing completely still, staring into the distance. God, I wish I had this kind of focus when I meditated.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked, wondering perhaps if he died.

  “He’s in another place, darling. Paz is in a completely altered state right now.”

  Poor dog was probably melancholy about his days on the euthanasia waiting list.

  “Pars,” said Dr. Hwang, “I’m going to take out the needles now.”

  Did this man have any concept of what a dog even was? Did he expect Paz to give him a knowing nod then lift a paw to help the doctor gain easier access to the needles?

  “Pars should be all better now,” said Dr. Hwang.

  “Dr. Hwang, look!” my mother’s voice cried with alarm.

  “What?!” I shouted. “What’s going on?”

  My mother remembered I was on the phone and replied. “Oh, Lucy, he’s chewing his paws again. His chi is still blocked,” she said with defeat.

  “It takes several hours for chi to fully flow again. Pars will be better by dinnertime,” Dr. Hwang assured.

  Say evening! I wanted to shout to Dr. Hwang. My mother doesn’t eat. She doesn’t understand this dinnertime of which you speak!

  After she left the office, Anjoli confided that she thought Paz’s acupuncture was a complete waste of time. “I hate to resort to western medicine, though,” Anjoli said. “I’m going to have to do some more research on canine nervous disorders and see what other options I have.”

  At that point, I heard Jack return home with Adam after having spent the afternoon at a birthday party at a kiddie theme-restaurant. I remember when I was thirteen, I spent every Saturday at a different friend’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Adam was in the toddler version of this circuit — the weekly birthday parties. After we both attended three of these parties, we both agreed that they were like Fear Factor personal challenges for us. First, you have to eat a piece of pita bread with ketchup and melted American cheese served by an overgrown rodent character who’s telling you it’s pizza. Then you have to force a smile as you watch your child climb through tunnels of rotavirus-infected plastic tubes only to land in a pile of colored plastic balls glazed with toddler snot. For the final challenge — and the grand prize of getting to leave — parents have to watch a two-year-old attempt to unwrap his presents and “ooh” and “ahhh” convincingly. All the while parents must suppress the urge to blurt, “Just for the record, if any of you ever give my child a toy that makes animal noises like the one little Cayenne has just opened, I will put a Mafia hit on you.” Anyway, after three of these parties, Jack and I agreed to take turns bringing Adam to these festivals of parental torture. Yes, I know I might sound a little like Anjoli with her aversion to zoos. The difference is that Jack and I actually make sure Adam goes to the parties. We hate it, but we take him anyway.

  “How was the party?” I asked Jack, giving the “I didn’t have to go” smug smile we each sported when it was the other’s turn.

  “Hell on earth,” Jack returned, sporting the “you’re on deck” smile we’d each perfected. He walked across the living room carrying Adam, and leaned over to give me a kiss. “Get a lot of writing done this afternoon?”

  “Some,” I said. “Not as much as I’d hoped. Paz called again. Apparently he’s got some sort of nervous disorder and is pulling his fur out of his paws.”

  Jack moved toward the kitchen and filled Adam’s bottle with orange juice. As he was screwing the nipple on, our little boy grabbed the bottle and said, “My do it!”

  “It’s all yours, little man,” Jack said, forfeiting the bottle. “Luce, want some OJ?”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “So tell me about the dog. Come sit,” Jack said, patting the kitchen chair beside him.

  We had recently finished remodeling the kitchen to maintain the rustic look of the rest of the house while modernizing it. The cabinets were cherry wood with handles that looked like pewter Rorschach splotches. Every appliance bore a stainless steel face. Brightening things up were oatmeal-colored limestone countertops and floors that were similar except for a few brown glass tiles inserted into the pattern. We had knocked down almost an entire wall in the kitchen to make way for a sliding glass door leading out to a deck that Jack built with the help of our neighbor, Tom. The two were so thrilled with the outdoor-indoor effect of our new kitchen that they later installed a large skylight, then moved on to our family room to do another there. Jack painted twelve ceramic tiles representing each month and hung them around the periphery of our kitchen. He is going through his abstract expressionist phase, so our kitchen has a Jackson Pollack meets Swiss Family Robinson feel.

  I sat next to my husband and couldn’t help notice how well his thick gray sweatshirt expanded across his chest. Smoothing his snow-dampened brown hair with his fingers, he urged me to continue. “So the dog’s got a nervous disorder?”

  “He pulls out his own hair,” I said, shrugging.

  “Trichotillomania?” Jack asked.

  “You’ve heard of it?” I was amazed.

  “One of my old clients had it. Put the hairs on the canvas, if you can believe it.” Before Jack started — rather, got back into — painting, he was an art dealer and owned a fabulous little gallery in SoHo. He continued reminiscing about the artist. “Sold well, though. Who’d’ve thought people wanted hairy art, but he was one of my best sellers.”

  “Well, Paz has got this trick, trick — what do you call it?”

  “Trichotillomania,” Jack offered.

  “Paz has got this trichotillomania thing and is pulling his paw hairs out. Anjoli took him to her acupuncturist today, and the poor thing went into a taxidermic freeze.”

  “You were there?” Jack asked.

 
“No, Paz called me right before he was taken out of Mother’s purse, I guess.”

  Jack sipped his orange juice and went to get Adam the cookie he was pointing at, demanding. “Luce, have you ever considered that Paz is calling you for help?”

  “Very funny,” I said, scrunching my mouth to one side. “Seriously, I feel sorry for little Paz. Can you imagine being so wound up that you’d want to pull your hair out?”

  Jack pondered that for a moment. “After living with your mother for a couple months? Yes.”

  “Jack!” I swatted him but couldn’t help laughing. “It’s a chemical imbalance. Anjoli’s not responsible.”

  “I don’t know, Luce. That whole nature versus nurture debate has never been settled. All I know is that a couple months ago your mother adopted a perfectly healthy puppy who is now in need of psychiatric care,” Jack said. “It explains a lot, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she raised you, didn’t she?”

  “You are just a riot,” I said, sipping orange juice into my straw then blowing it into his face. When Jack got up, I knew it was time to run. He caught me at the couch and tackled me down onto it and started tickling me, the ultimate torture.

  “Stop!” I shrieked, laughing uncontrollably.

  From the kitchen, we heard Adam squeal with delight in his high chair. “Mommy, Daddy silly!” he shouted.

  “Daddy is bad!” I shouted, still laughing.

  “Mommy, crazy!” Jack corrected.

  “I come play now!” he demanded. “Mommy come get now!”

  I whispered, “I’ve got to get him, but this, my good man, is not over. You have been very bad today. Tonight I shall exact my revenge,” I winked suggestively.

  “Counting the minutes, my dear. Counting the minutes,” he said. Then raising his volume, “Who’s ready for a snowball fight?!”

  Chapter Three

  The next week, Jack reminded me that we only had another twenty days before our first visiting artist and his wife arrived for their six-month stay with us. The other two would follow shortly thereafter. “Let’s get away for a few days before everyone starts arriving,” he suggested. Eventually, Jack and I would leave guests on their own, but we agreed that for our first season, we’d stay put and make sure everything ran smoothly. “Let’s visit your Aunt Bernice in Florida,” he suggested. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

  “Daddy freezing my ass,” Adam said, giggling. I was amazed at how he’d gone from chubby-cheeked infant to little boy in just the past six months. Like his dad, Adam had thick brown hair, a broad face, and mint green eyes.

  “Watch your mouth in front of the baby,” I scolded. “He repeats everything we say.”

  “Daddy’s freezing his ass off, not yours, little man,” Jack corrected. “Think about it, Luce. Bern’s always asking us to come to visit her. It’ll be warm in Hollywood. We can take some time off from house repairs and just hang. You’re always saying you miss Bern since she moved to Florida and we moved here. Let’s go.”

  “Maybe,” I considered. “We’ve got so much to do, though. Oh! By the way, thanks for rewiring my office. I can finally turn on my space heater and computer at the same time.”

  “Look, I said I’d get to it,” Jack defended himself against what he thought was my sarcasm.

  “No, I really appreciate your fixing the wiring in my office because —”

  Jack interrupted. “I didn’t rewire your office. It’s on my list, but I haven’t done it yet.”

  “That’s impossible, Jack. You told me the computer and heater couldn’t run at the same time unless the area was rewired. I had both on yesterday, so it had to have been rewired.”

  “Not by me,” he rebutted. “Maybe Tom stopped by while we were out. I mentioned it to him.”

  “Honey, Tom and Robin are in Jamaica this week.”

  “See how smart they are by escaping this cold? Come on, baby. Let’s make like the neighbors and fly south for the winter. One week. We’ll be ready for Maxime and Jacquie. Besides, they’re staying here for free. They’re not expecting the Four Seasons.”

  The house wasn’t in perfect shape yet, but the guest cottage Maxime and his wife Jacquie would stay in was comfortable. Jack and I had been hard at work for a full year, and yet it felt like we’d only made a dent in our list of repairs. We fixed the heating and plumbing in both guest cottages and were almost done with construction of the third. As I mentioned, we fully remodeled the kitchen and built a deck. We insulated, plastered walls, re-roofed, upgraded windows, and refinished 3,000 square feet of hardwood floors. Still, the place needed a lot more work and the landscaping was in dire need of tender loving care. Nonetheless, Jack and I were living our dream. When Maxime and Jacquie arrived in February, the dream would become reality. In early March, Chantrell the cellist would arrive, and by the end of the month, when his cottage was ready, Randy the glass sculptor would come to join us. The plan was to open our home to the community over Labor Day weekend for an art show where people could look at (and hopefully buy) Jack’s paintings, Maxime’s ink pen sketches, Chantrell’s recordings, and Randy’s sculptures.

  Jack and I were amazed at how many applications we received after we posted our advertisement on the Internet last summer. Most were dabblers simply looking for free room and board, but more than a hundred were serious artists, all worthy of our support. I loved Maxime’s work in which he used a pin point to dot his ink onto the page. When you take a step back, his work looked like a black-and-white photograph, but upon careful examination you could tell that it was a composition of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. Shades of black and gray were created by altering the density of the ink points. I fell in love with the concept of art that could dramatically change its appearance by repositioning the viewer. It was beyond a mere transformation in look. Maxime’s work took on the qualities of an entirely different medium when the viewer moved himself just a few feet. This seemed to drive home the basic principle that perspective and distance affect perception. Maxime was my choice. I must admit I also liked the fact that his wife was my age and seemed to have an easygoing manner about her. Perhaps it was because Maxime’s portraits of her conveyed a certain sense of etherealness. Maybe it was the photograph of the two of them hiking that Maxime submitted with his application. Whatever it was, I felt I would enjoy having Jacquie around the house for the season.

  I also liked Chantrell, but she was really Jack’s pick. He said he wanted to be sure that not all of our guests were visual artists, but I think it was her long flowing red hair that Jack really liked. I wasn’t jealous. I knew that Jack appreciated how hard we’d worked to get our marriage back on track and would never screw that up by straying. The fact that he noticed beautiful women was not the threat it would have been a few years ago.

  Chantrell said she had been part of a research project that investigated the claim that cello music made plant life grow better. It sounded like the flaky sort of assertion my mother would make. In fact, Anjoli once brought a harp player to her apartment while I was visiting to see if he could cure my insomnia. Chantrell, however, had well-documented evidence that suggested plants grew up to thirty percent faster when they heard cello music for three or more hours a day for 21 consecutive days. We were really going to need to hire a gardener in before she arrived. Chantrell asked if she could plant two vegetable gardens on our property when she arrived this spring. One would be right outside her studio, giving it exposure to her music the other would be out of earshot of her cello. Research had never been done on vegetable-bearing plants, only flowering and fruit-bearing trees. We figured, what the heck? Chantrell is exactly the type of person we weren’t meeting when we lived in the suburbs of New Jersey. Jack and I figured if we were going to start an arts colony in the mountains, we may as well open the doors to people and ideas we considered a little far-fetched. And who knew, she could be right.

  Of course, there were artists who were just a bit too bizarre for our taste. S
ome guy sent in a photograph of his painting titled Various Stages of Orgasm. He dipped his fingers in different colored paint as his intensity level rose. It began with periwinkle smatterings with his fingertips, which then became more curved and fluid. Then, the up-and-cumming artist moved into more dramatic, straight diagonal scratch lines in yellow and green. Finally, it appears he grabbed fistfuls of red paint and threw them onto the canvas as he climaxed. “We gotta try this sometime,” Jack teased when we saw the photos. I don’t have a problem with art that is sexually provocative. I just couldn’t get past the horror when I thought about what our cottage would look like on the mornings after he painted. Jack and I once watched an episode of Real Sex on HBO where couples had sex using dozens of different types of food from chocolate and butterscotch ice cream to self-adhering rainbow-colored sugar bullets called Dickin’ Dots. Instead of being titillated by the kinky exhibitionists frolicking around their white sheets, I watched in horror, thinking that’s gonna stain.

  Then there was the guy who painted a Freddy Kruger mask on Mona Lisa, and made Rodin’s Thinker hunch over to snort a line of cocaine. His letter said it was a pulling together of classic art with modern issues. We thought it was just plain trite.

  We almost accepted a woman who melted plastic toys until they were flat as pancakes. She called it “Hot Toys” and said it was a commentary on selling trends to youth, but I just thought the colors looked cool. As a parent, I suppose there was some sick satisfaction I derived from seeing Baby Bop fried like an omelet. Jack said the toys were probably melted in a microwave oven, but we still couldn’t run the risk of inviting a potential pyromaniac to our tree house in the woods.

  Jack and I mutually agreed on Randy the glass sculptor from Napa Valley. He found a way to use blown glass in concert with stained glass to create windows that were sculptures. At the sight of just one of his square-foot window inserts, we were sold. The glass pieces were cut into tiny geometric shapes to create a pink sunset over the 3D mountains. He claimed to have never been east of Michigan, but somehow managed to capture the exact view from Jack’s and my bedroom, which is exactly where we placed Randy’s piece. We had to cut out a piece of our window and have a wooden frame built around the sculpture to make it work, but it was worth it. No one sees our bedroom without commenting on our unique window.