Drinking Closer to Home

by Jessica Anya Blau

  “Is it expensive?” Buzzy asks.

  “We can afford it,” Emery says. “We’ve been saving.”

  “So where do you get the embryo?” Buzzy asks.

  “We grow it in a test tube. We’re going to use Alejandro’s sperm.”

  “Where are you going to find a woman to give you an egg?” Anna says. “It’s a brutal process. You have to take all these shots that fuck you up so you pump up your eggs. I swear, any woman who would voluntarily go through all that hormonal shit is going to be someone slightly out of her mind. And is that the kind of person you want to be the egg-half of your kid?”

  “We were hoping you or Portia would give us an egg,” Emery says. Fucking Anna. It’s one thing if she doesn’t want to give up her eggs, but now she’s going to scare Portia off, too!

  “Seriously?” Anna asks.

  “You want our eggs?” Portia starts crying.

  “Yes,” Emery says. It would be fucking nice if his sisters would offer up their eggs like a few locks of hair (spread the remaining hair around and no one can even tell some is missing). He would love it if there were no thinking about the shots and the hormones, no wondering about what it might do to their psyches! If they were lesbians and needed his sperm to put in their girlfriends, he would give it in a minute! In a second! In as much time as it took to jack the sperm out! Christ! He’d give his sperm even if he had to shoot hormones into his eyelids for it!

  “That’s so sweet,” Portia sobs. Emery wonders if these tears are a delayed reaction to her lack-of-love revelation.

  “Portia’s already such a mess she’d probably become completely psycho on the hormones,” Anna says, and Portia cries harder.

  “Well, why don’t you guys think about it and let us know in a few days,” Emery says. He feels edgy. Shaky. Anxiety is running from his toenails to his nose hairs. If Portia refuses, he’ll blame it on Anna. If Anna refuses, he’ll be, sadly, not surprised.

  “But won’t the girls be the mother of the kid?” Buzzy asks. “And then wouldn’t the kid have a mother and father who are brother and sister?”

  “Well, I would be the father,” Alejandro says. “Emery would be more like the mother.”

  “The eggs are my proxy,” Emery says. He wants everyone to shut up now.

  “If it grew in someone else’s womb I’d have no feelings of attachment for it,” Anna says. “I think the only reason I love Blue is because it was so fucking hard to push him out of my body. He had to be worth the effort.”

  “I don’t know.” Portia’s crying has slowed. “It would be really hard not to think of it as mine.”

  “Well, think it over.” Emery tries to relax his voice. He doesn’t want anyone to see how upset he is. Alejandro puts his hand on Emery’s knee and he immediately feels calmer.

  “That’s a big thing to think over,” Buzzy says.

  Emery feels hope slipping from his mouth like air slipping out of a sliced tire. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “Did you tell Mom?” Buzzy asks.

  “No,” Emery says. “I’ll tell her tomorrow.” He wants to cry a little. Or go to bed. Or drink from the bottle of absinthe he snuck home from a trip to France.

  “Don’t tell her about Dad’s Stinky,” Anna says.

  “Of course I won’t!” Emery’s words are inflamed with spit and a surprising fury.

  No one speaks for a moment. Then Portia snorts in some snot. “Does your Stinky have kids?” Portia asks Buzzy.

  “Don’t think about this stuff!” Anna says. “It’s an affair. You don’t need the details.”

  “Is she married?” Emery asks. He’d rather be talking about this than the eggs.

  “I hope you all understand,” Buzzy says, “that I think your mother is the most brilliant, amazing person I’ve ever known.”

  Emery pictures his mother in the hospital: a gray-and-white woman in a bed with a sheet tucked down at her armpits and rubber hoses snaking along her arms. It is hard to reconcile that image with his idea of her as a vibrant, forceful presence, the person his father wrote a letter to, the person Buzzy called My Dearest, Darling, Love.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Emery says. “You haven’t answered our questions.”

  “She’s not married. No kids.” Buzzy takes a deep breath.

  “Dad, did Mom have an affair with that poet back in the seventies?” Anna asks.

  “What poet?!” Buzzy sits up straight.

  “I read your diary a long time ago. When we were kids. And you thought Mom was going to have an affair with some poet.”

  “Oh . . . oh, yeah, I remember,” Buzzy says. “I used to get jealous when we were younger. I worried about her having an affair.”

  “Do you think Mom had an affair?” Emery asks. He hopes she did. It would dull down the raspiness of his father’s Stinky.

  “I don’t think so,” Buzzy says. “She never admitted it if she did.”

  “Did you ever have an affair with Bitty Royce or Lompoc Lucy?” Portia asks.

  “Or Tits-N-Ass McCoy?” Emery adds. Alejandro starts laughing.

  “No!” Buzzy says. “I wasn’t interested in any of them. Your mother was out of her mind to think about that shit.”

  “Apparently not,” Emery says.

  “What do you mean?” Buzzy jerks his head toward Emery.

  “You’ve become a mystery,” Emery says. “I’m not sure if we can believe you.” Emery would like this to be the last he will say about the subject. He would rather walk away from a problem, let it dissipate or dissolve, than pick it up and face it.

  “How can you say that?!”

  “Dad,” Emery says. “At this point the only thing we know for sure about you is that you’re not gay.” And one can never really be sure about that, either, Emery thinks.

  “Or maybe you are gay,” Anna says. “Maybe your entire life has been one long attempt to hide it.”

  “Yeah,” Portia says. “You did let the rabbi suck you at your bris.”

  “What?” Emery asks. Alejandro starts laughing.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Anna asks.

  “Jesus Christ, Portia,” Buzzy moans, “I didn’t let him do anything. I was eight days old!”

  “What are you guys talking about?!” Emery is relieved the egg thing has shifted out of everyone’s mind. He wants to laugh now, and he does.

  “Dad had an orthodox bris,” Portia says. “And in an orthodox bris, the rabbi puts wine in his mouth after he cuts the foreskin, then he sucks the wound and exchanges blood for wine.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me!” Anna says. “Dad, is this true?”

  “Our kid is never having an orthodox bris!” Emery says. Alejandro nods his head and grins.

  “It’s nothing!” Buzzy says. “The rabbi leans down and staunches the wound. You don’t even notice it—it’s done in a second.”

  “Not with you!” Portia taunts her father with a sing-song voice. “He did a whole lot more with you!”

  Buzzy shakes his head and groans.

  “Portia!” Anna says. “Tell the fucking story!”

  “Aunt Sylvia told me that the rabbi went down and sucked Dad’s wound. Then he came up, took more wine, and sucked it again. You’re only supposed to do it once, but this rabbi did it, like, three times. And Bubbe was so upset that she went in the kitchen, stirred the soup, held a wooden spoon in her hand, and prayed for the rabbi to die and for Dad not to be gay.”

  Everyone, except Buzzy, is looking at Portia with some variation of a smile. All of Anna’s teeth are showing.

  “Who’s Aunt Sylvia?” Alejandro asks.

  “Bubbe’s sister,” Portia says.

  “How did Sylvia know that Bubbe stirred the soup with a wooden soup and how did she know what Bubbe prayed for?!” Anna asks.

  “I don’t know. That’s exactly how Sylvia told me the story. And she also told me to never bring it up with Bubbe because Bubbe would be upset.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tel
l us this before?” Emery asks. Another family secret kept from him!

  “Who even knows if it’s true!” Buzzy says. “Sylvia was a madwoman.”

  “Was she?” Alejandro asks.

  “Well, she claimed her dog Debby could answer the phone,” Portia says. “And she said her hair had turned white instantaneously when she was raped by the Nazis. But she was in Trenton, New Jersey, during World War Two.”

  Emery hopes Alejandro won’t look at his family history and reconsider the value of his sisters’ eggs.

  “When did Sylvia tell you this?” Anna asks.

  “A couple years before she died, when I was in high school. You weren’t talking to me then,” Portia says to Anna. And then she looks at Emery and says, “And you were too young to hear something like that.”

  “So Buzzy got sucked by a rabbi,” Alejandro says. His smile is enormous.

  “I bet Sylvia was the one who stirred the soup and prayed,” Anna says. “I always thought she was a lesbian. Maybe her fear of her own yearnings made her terrified that Buzzy was gay.”

  “She never did get married,” Buzzy says.

  “And she really, really loved that dog,” Portia says.

  Everyone, it seems, has temporarily abandoned talk of both the Stinky and the eggs. Emery thinks the two subjects are like naughty, wild children that have been tucked away in their beds, their absence giving a calm relief to those who are still awake. He wouldn’t mind if the subject of the Stinky were never awoken. But the subject of the eggs will have to be pulled out again in the daylight. By then, Emery hopes, he will have rested and stored up strength to deal with it further.

  Chapter 18

  1987

  Anna’s wedding was fairly traditional—flowers, a meal, and at least a hundred people. She wanted to wear a dress like a normal bride, have Buzzy walk her down the aisle like a normal father, dress Louise in lavender with a corsage like a normal mother. Louise agreed to the lavender, but she refused to put on the corsage, claiming the pin would ruin her silk dress. Emery was in a suit that Buzzy had bought for him, and Portia was in a floral Laura Ashley dress that Anna had picked out. She looked sexless and earnest in the dress, like one of the multiple wives of an extremist Mormon hiding out in the mountains of Utah. Anna thought Portia could wear the dress over and over again, but by the time she got the wedding photos back she realized how deluded she had been.

  She and Brian were married in a field out behind the flower and gift shop they owned near a covered bridge about thirty miles from Fulton Ranch in Vermont. It was a beautiful, warm day; the air felt as clean as sunshine. Brian was fifteen inches taller and ten years older than Anna (who was twenty-seven). He was a human longboard—as solid and stable as she was reckless. He spoke at half her speed, napped every day, and often sat completely still, meditating, while Anna spun around him like a whirling dervish. He calmed her and she invigorated him. Together they created a perfectly balanced energy.

  Brian and Anna had met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Santa Barbara. Brian had been going since he was fourteen years old—he was like a preacher at the church of NA. He went to meetings every day in Vermont, too, dragging Anna with him at least twice a week. There was no one in the family who wasn’t grateful for the fact that Anna’s variegated manias had been tamped down and diligently put to rest by Brian.

  Seconds before the judge (Brian’s friend from the Littleton, Vermont, chapter of NA) declared Brian and Anna husband and wife, a band of dogs began howling so loudly and intensely that the ceremony came to a halt. Everyone tilted their heads and tried to find the direction from which the invisible dogs were baying. And then the howling stopped, Anna and Brian kissed, and the crowd applauded, most people still looking off in the distance in search of the dogs. Sometime during the reception, while the three-piece banjo band was twanging out something no one had ever heard before, Louise told Anna that she was convinced the howling had been a message of some sort, as if the animal kingdom were aware of the importance of this particular human pairing.

  “Why’s this pairing more important than any other?” Anna had asked her mother.

  “Because how many people would put up with you?” Louise laughed. “I mean, no one’s allowed to make audible chewing sounds when you’re in the room, you can’t clink a spoon against a cereal bowl, you hate the way I exhale.” Louise blew out smoke, making the popping sound that made Anna want to shed her skin.

  “Mom! I get it!” This was her wedding. She was in a thick lace dress that trailed behind her and weighed about forty pounds. She wasn’t going to fight with her mother.

  Portia was married a month later; she and Patrick snuck off to the justice of the peace with a couple of friends as witnesses. This seemed to thrill Louise, who couldn’t help but mention to Anna on the phone how relieved she was that she didn’t have another wedding to go to.

  “Oy, gut,” Louise had said. “The only thing I hate more than weddings are bar mitzvahs.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Glad we spent all that money throwing a wedding!” Now that Anna was married and settled, her mother seemed to protect her less from her spiky thoughts. Anna wasn’t sure if it was because Louise knew Anna could handle it better, or if Louise was less able to censor herself the older she got. Her mother’s little comments did sit with her, however, like little pebbles gathering in her shoes. It seemed to Anna that Louise approved heartily of every lame move Portia made (moving back east after Patrick passed the New York bar exam, buying an old house in Greenwich, Connecticut, staying home and fixing it up while her husband earned what appeared to Anna to be fabulous sums of money at a law firm in Manhattan, etc.), while she seemed to disapprove of Anna working her ass off in the flower and gift shop, fixing up her house that sat above the shop, and keeping her shit together through a combination of NA meetings, shrink appointments, running, and regular sex with her husband.

  Anna called Emery at Haverford to complain about their mother and Portia.

  “I mean, she acts like Portia gave her some huge fucking gift by running off to the justice of the peace instead of having a wedding!”

  “Portia got married?” Emery asked. “Are you serious?!”

  “Yeah, she fucking got married! But of course she had to outdo me, do it better than me, by not having a fucking wedding for Mom to groan and bitch about!” Anna was loading the dishwasher as she spoke, shoving in plates and bowls. She secretly hoped she’d break one.

  “Wait. When did this happen?”

  “About six days ago,” Anna said. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “No! No one tells me anything! No one told me when you were in the hospital for bulimia.”

  “Well, you seem to know now.” Anna sniffed the sponge she was using, made a face, and tossed it across the kitchen to the giant open trash can that sat by the back door. She reached under the sink and got a new sponge.

  “I found out way afterwards. And no one told me you were a sex addict.”

  “Emery! How the fuck could you say no one told you if you know all this shit?! Okay? You know! And now you know that Portia one-upped me with her non-wedding wedding that Mom thinks is so fucking wonderful!”

  “What do you care which wedding Mom liked better?” Emery asked. “You had your wedding for you, right?”

  “I gotta go,” Anna said. She hated it when her younger brother was so wise. Things were much easier when she was the boss of him.

  Anna dialed the numbers for Portia’s house. The answering machine went off with Portia’s grotesquely cheerful voice: “Hey! You’ve reached the answering machine of Portia and Patrick who are now officially Missus and Mister Portia and Patrick! Ta da!”

  Anna wished there was some way to projectile vomit through the phone lines and have it come out in Portia’s lap. “Hey, it’s me.” She spoke quick and stern, like she was giving directions. “I thought you should know that in your rush to have a non-wedding wedding, you totally forgot to tell your little brother that you got married. Smoot
h one.” Anna hung up. And glared at the phone. She walked across the kitchen and replaced it in the receiver. “Fuck,” she said.

  Anna knew Emery was right. She had had the wedding she wanted and she shouldn’t really care what Louise thought of it. She also knew that Portia hadn’t done anything wrong. Portia had never even had a birthday party; of course she wasn’t going to have a wedding. The irritation Anna was feeling now was the itchiness she got when things were too easy. After nine months of planning, her wedding had gone off as beautifully as she imagined. The store was doing fine, making enough money to support them. Brian was happy and content, made no demands, and let her run the show. (When she wanted to tear down the non-load-bearing walls in the house and make the downstairs a giant, open, loftlike space, Brian said yes. When she wanted to throw out the old furniture they had collected in the few years they’d been together, he agreed. When she wanted to paint the walls of the kitchen tangerine, even though Brian hated the color orange, he said sure.) Anna realized that maybe the problem was that she needed the chaos of these big projects (wedding, house renovation) in order to feel steady inside. When everything was calm outside, things started to storm in her gut and her limbs felt encased in cement. Anna wanted to shuck the cozy life that surrounded her and come out new again—wet, glossy, ready to slip through the cracks and escape.

  During this period of itchiness, Anna woke up early from a dream one morning with an image stuck in her mind. She dressed in workout clothes and went out for a run. It was five a.m. and about sixty degrees. Anna liked these early runs because no one else was out, and the empty woods and dirt roads of Vermont were almost eerie. Frequently she saw deer and moose, and twice she saw a bear.

  The image from her dream was of herself holding a gun. She loved the gun—the cold weight, the hardness against her palm. In the dream she pushed it into her cheek and felt a rush of sexual energy.

  Anna’s footbeats made a wonderful chalky thunk. She ran faster, hurtling over a branch on the road as she thought about the dream, the gun. There were cows in the field beside her, a wooden slat fence holding them off the road. Anna envisioned herself lifting the gun and shooting a cow. She saw it crumple downward, like a falling cake. It would lie there, its giant ribcage heaving in and out, a pair of giant bellows.