Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  “Now, ladies and gents,” he began, “there’s nothing for y’all to get worked up about. This is a standard safety procedure we instigate whenever there is the little ol’ bittiest chance of an incident acurrin’.” His voice was creamy, with just the right amount of manly authority. But no one was buying that sky commander crap if the plane was going down.

  A roar swelled up. Women cried out, babies squalled, and businessmen grabbed at the sleeves of the stewardesses, pleading for information and emergency cocktails.

  “Oh, great,” I muttered, folding my arms, “we’re gonna miss My Favorite Martian.”

  “Well, if the plane crashes, maybe we won’t have to go to school tomorrow?” my brother said helpfully.

  “There’s no way the plane’s crashing, stupid. You gonna drink the rest of that Coke?”

  My brother Will and I were en route from Washington, DC, to New York’s LaGuardia Airport to visit our grandparents. In spite of our youth—I was seven and Will eight—we were traveling alone, as we’d been doing for as long as I could remember. Our grandfather’s secretary, Miss Pou (satisfyingly pronounced pew, as in pee-yoo), had been forced to book us seats in the midsection of the cabin. The humiliating rear, that quarantine semicircle reserved for losers and the grandchildren of safety-conscious men who sat on the boards of TWA and Pan Am, had already been taken by a group of dark, glittering Indian women and their children. Will and I were thrilled not to be back there and, up until this recent announcement, had been deliberately out of control—which is understandable when you’ve consumed five Coca-Colas in under an hour.

  I couldn’t decide whether to cry or hit my brother. I’d been in a horrible mood ever since that morning when I’d noticed our tickets were printed out as “Master William A. M. Burden IV and companion.” Being a girl meant squat in my father’s family. Honestly, you’d think I’d been born to Chinese peasants. So there hadn’t been any of us for a couple of generations; you’d have thought everyone would be delighted. I liked to think that my grandmother was, but her efforts were curtailed by my grandfather. It was obvious that he would have preferred me to have Will’s quieter disposition—and vice versa. He was forever telling me to stop talking and let my brother speak, and wanting only Will with him in the photo when my grandmother pulled out her Brownie.

  My mother’s advice was to (quote) shut up and put up. Leslie Lepington Hamilton Burden (and eventually Beer and Tobey) was not one to coddle her children with parental guidance. She’d lectured me one evening while I was lying on her bed making snow angels on the striped Mexican bedspread.

  “The sooner you figure out how to deal with being a female in your father’s family, the better.” I’d admired her covertly as she’d cinched a wide calfskin belt over her narrow black sheath, yanking it into an extra hole with a slight grunt. Her waist was smaller than mine and she made sure I knew it.

  “I’ll figure it out, I guess,” I’d grumbled. My mother’s way of dealing sure wasn’t going to be mine. On the rare times I got to see her around my grandparents, she was weirdly unlike herself and acted as sweetly subservient and dumb as Snow White. It was so fake.

  “If I were you, Toots—”

  “Don’t call me Toots!” I said. I hated the nickname she used interchangeably on my brother and me. It was like some stupid moll-speak. But she had her own little language, a kind of lexicon she substituted for the vocabulary of humor she lacked; adages and names and twisting up of words that I guess she thought were funny. I found it unfunny and embarrassing. And I was already missing her. These days, it seemed I only spent time with my mother when she was getting ready to leave. My brother and I had recently come to view her as a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite.

  “Why do we have to visit Gaga and Granddaddy so much, anyway?” I whined. “I feel like I live on Eastern Airlines.” Dusty Springfield sang from the phonograph in the corner and I waggled my legs in time to “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” Ever since our father had abruptly died the year before, Will and I had become virtual commuters shuttling back and forth from our home in Washington to those of our grandparents in New York, Maine, and Florida.

  “Oh, don’t be so bratty,” my mother replied, blacking in her eyebrows with a red Maybelline pencil. “There are lots of little girls who’d give up growing tits for a chance to hang out on Fifth Avenue and be waited on by servants. Hand me my lipstick?” She passed the frosted tube across her mouth and smacked a Kleenex to set it. Fabergé Nude Pink was her lifelong color of choice, a pastel shade that brings to mind Sun Belt drag queens and leather-faced Junior Leaguers. She would die wearing it.

  “Anyhoo,” my mother said, giving a blast of Final Net to her French twist, “you know your grandparents have insisted on this visitation schedule ever since your father turned up his toes. And so have their goddamn lawyers.” She walked across the room and stood over me then, a tanned blond bombshell in a cocktail dress, fishnets, and stilettos, reeking of Diorissimo. When she leaned down, I was afraid she was going to kiss me or something, but instead she remarked with disbelief, “That can’t be a pimple on your chin already!” I clamped my CREEPY comic book down over my head as the doorbell chimed.

  Then she and Dusty sang their way down the stairs, leaving me to search my reflection in the mirror for the dreaded signs of preprepubescent acne.

  It never occurred to our mother when she left us at the airport that we might not be returned in the same condition. The notion that our chaste little bodies could be taken aside and fingered by unfamiliar hands didn’t cross her mind. Nor did thoughts of Tunisian white slavery, the narcotic courier trade, Lower East Side sweatshops, or abduction by green pedophiles in silver pods. Or maybe they did.

  She would leave us at the departure gate, Will in a blazer and clip-on bow tie, me in a scratchy plaid jumper from Best & Co., and then stride off. In the beginning, I pretended she was only going to the restroom, and that the line there was so long that by the time she rushed back, we’d already boarded. I imagined her lingering until the plane departed, blowing kisses and waving to our tiny portholes as the props whined us out to a speck in the sky. I pictured her driving home in her humpy red Volvo to an empty and joyless house where, in despondency, she’d spend the weekend organizing our rooms and planning vacations to Disneyland until she picked us up on Sunday night. But I got over that pretty quick.

  Truth be known, our mother delivered us to any person wearing any semblance of a uniform standing anywhere near the gate, and left without waiting for the plane to board. From the “Standing Only” spot she had parked in, she could make it downtown to Trader Vic’s in less time than it takes to put on a pair of sheer black stockings and get the seams straight.

  In the early 1950s everyone married early, and my parents had been no exception. My mother had been a nineteen-year-old anthropology major at Radcliffe, and my father had been twenty-one, and a junior at Harvard. Now, a decade later, she was a young widow, and was she ever making the most of it.

  “Surprise!” she would say to us at breakfast on the mornings after her returns. She’d take her hands from behind her back and plunk down some huge, hairy arachnid suspended in an alcohol-filled jar.

  “Wow,” we would slur through our Froot Loops, “you went to Haiti again.”

  “Look what else I brought you!” she’d say, holding out batik swimwear you’d rather get rat-bite fever than be seen in.

  “Thanks,” my brother and I would say as we grabbed our book bags and headed out the door like we were worried about missing the bus.

  The presents our mother brought were our only clue as to where she’d been. Ice plants meant California. Live alligators in shoe boxes meant Miami and the Roey Plaza Hotel. Dead ones on handbags meant Tijuana. So did jumping beans. Gardenias were routine; they came from an evening of scorpions at the Outrigger Bar at Trader Vic’s. We would open the fridge to get out the orange juice and find them, bruised and dog-tired from floating around in rum and dodging the straws of my
mother and her date. You could see the little stab marks all over them.

  For the sake of convenience, I’d learned to do a passable forgery of my mother’s signature by second grade. The teachers mostly let it slide (it was a liberal primary school for the children of Washington diplomats), but when I okayed four Ds and an F in a parental note, they reeled me in.

  “I’m truly sorry about your daddy,” my homeroom teacher said, addressing me across her desk with compassion. “And I know your mommy is frequently out of town, no doubt dealing with her own . . . grief. ” She adjusted her glasses. “That must be very difficult for you and your brother.”

  I nodded and gave a little sniff for good measure. Ha. Was she kidding? It was completely cool to have a dead father. I was the class celebrity. And I loved it when my mother was away. I hung out in the basement with my governess, Henrietta, lying on her double bed, inhaling secondhand smoke and watching Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour or The Ed Sullivan Show—she with a tumbler of whiskey, and I with a bag of Wise potato chips. One thing my mother knew how to do was pick out a good governess.

  Henrietta and I had a running joke about my mother’s schedule.

  “So when’s Mommy coming home?” I’d say.

  “When she’s darker than Sambo, lassie,” Henrietta would say back, laughing and choking on her own phlegm. Lighting a fresh Winston off the glowing butt of the last, she’d reach over and tousle my hair. “A wee more dip with those crisps, lassie?” We absolutely understood each other.

  Over the PA system, the captain came on again. “I’m sure y’all have noticed we’ve been circling. We’re trying to use up some a that big ol’ tank a gas before we come on in.” He proceeded to tell us that there was a little ol’ problem with getting the landing wheels to go down. That got everyone thinking. Now all you could hear was the vibration of the propellers slicing evenly through the dark, and the muffled terror of people mentally preparing to die. Only the Indians in the back appeared unconcerned; what did they care—they’d be back.

  My brother had gotten the window seat, despite my efforts to scratch and bite my way into it first, and since the captain’s announcement, he’d been springing up and down, calling out numbers. Every time I told him to shut up, he said he was counting the moons.

  “Fifteen . . . sheesh! I can’t believe how many there are,” Will said to his tiny oval aperture. He had his nose flat against its own reflection. The cabin lights had been dimmed for landing (or whatever), and an eerie column of light from the reading lamp bounced off my brother’s crew cut.

  “George is gonna be mad we’re late,” Will said to the glass.

  “He’s probably hoping the plane’ll crash and we’ll be dead, so he won’t have to drive us anymore.” I was trying to sound tough, even though my heart was starting to make weird little jumps in my chest.

  Will turned from the window. “You think we have time for one last Coke?”

  At LaGuardia (or West Palm Beach, the gateway to our grandparents’ house in Hobe Sound; or Bangor, ditto for the summer house in Maine), we were always met by George, our grandparents’ marzipan-pink, chrome-domed, unsmiling German chauffeur. He treated my brother and me like medical waste, propelling us through baggage claim by the back of our collars with a gloved vise-grip, out to the waiting Cadillac limousine. In magnanimous moments I reasoned that because George had never married, he was unable to appreciate children, let alone share our enthusiasm for acrobatics in the back of his car. Chaperoning us was clearly beneath his dignity, but he couldn’t afford to lose this job because George was a Nazi escaping justice. I knew he was a Nazi because one of my uncles was into Hitler. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham (we called him that because he said everything twice—like “Hitler was a good man! A good man!”) was my father’s younger brother. He liked to neutralize the effects of his Thorazine, which he took for an as yet undiscovered but clearly out there mental condition, with coffee, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, NoDoz, and four packs of Parliaments a day. This made him more than a little chatty, even to a kid. Over the course of a weekend with Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham, you could, through osmosis, learn enough about the Third Reich to write a dissertation on the Nuremberg Rallies.

  A Jewish friend of mine from summer camp had told me that German people liked to cover their lamps with lamp shades made from the skin of Jews gassed at Auschwitz. She was three years older than me, and I believed her.

  You think my grandfather’s shofur has some? I’d written her by return post. (No way could I spell chauffeur.)

  Duh, she had written back, and had gone on to graphically describe all kinds of atrocities on several sheets of Snoopy stationery, the visualization of which had kept me awake at night for a month.

  I’d asked Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham if he thought George had human-skin lamp shades in his apartment, and he had laughed and nodded his head vigorously.

  “You mean the green ones with the circles and squares on them?”

  “That’s right! That’s right!” he had chortled, blowing smoke out through his nose while guzzling a highball of straight Coke.

  “But that’s gross!”

  “Yes! Yes! The color was unfortunate! Unfortunate!”

  After that revelation, I resolved to behave as badly as possible on George’s watch, and I warned my friends that if anything fishy were to happen to me, like my skin got removed for redecoration purposes, to tell the police the chauffeur did it.

  The stewardesses were demonstrating the crash position. Miss Bossy Beehive stopped and clucked her tongue at me. “Sweetheart, where is that seat belt? I know this is all terribly exciting, but I want your belt securely fastened. Now, show me the position you need to be in—in case we CRASH. No, sugar pie, all the way down . . .” With a hook like Cassius Clay, she slammed my head down so hard I got a carpet burn from my dress. She turned to my brother, saying, “Buckle up, little man!” Strafing me with her concrete bosom, she leaned over and nipped in his waist so hard, his rib cage shot out over the metal fastener. She nodded to herself and moved on.

  “What d’you think it’ll be like?” I heard Will mumble in a nasal voice. His head was turned on his lap away from me.

  “What?”

  “To die.” He turned toward me, one eye on the retreating back of the stewardess.

  “Messy, I guess.”

  Will sat up and grinned. “I think it’s going to be pretty cool. I think we’ll make a gigantic fireball and everyone will see it, from California even, and we’ll get our names in the papers. Maybe they’ll even name a ride at Disneyland after us.”

  It didn’t sound so bad the way he envisioned it. In fact, it did sound sort of cool. Dammit, he would probably get to die first.

  Number One Son got everything before me. Even psychoanalysis.

  On Saturday mornings Will went to see Dr. Berman. He had started going after our father died. According to my grandfather, it was necessary for the son to talk to someone but not the daughter. When Will returned from his appointment, I sniffed him all over like a dog checking out a mate who’s been to the vet. “So?” I would demand. “Did he ask you any weird questions? Did he stick needles in you? Did you have to take down your pants?”

  “Naw. We just played games,” Will said.

  “Well what kind of games, idiot? Cards? Mouse Trap? Stratego? Does he have Creepy Crawlers?” After jigsaw puzzles, I was obsessed with Creepy Crawlers. It was a control freak’s dream set with a baking unit that could leave scars worthy of an acetylene torch. You put this liquid Plasti-Goop into molds carved with half reliefs of things like cockroaches and stinkbugs and silverfish, and scorpions and millipedes and bats, scratching the stuff into the antennae and spindly bug legs with a needle. Then you baked them in the cooker right there on the flammable shag carpeting of your bedroom floor.

  “I don’t know—just games!” Will didn’t recognize his hour with Dr. Berman as the spotlit, center-of-attention shower of love I knew it to be.

  I was burning up with curiosity; I needed to know what I
was missing. But inevitably, my weekly joust for the dirt ended with no answers, and Will punching me in the stomach and declaring, “Dr. Berman says you’re acting out ’cause you’re jealous.” No shit.

  Anyway, that stewardess was wrong. I did not find the present situation exciting. Tragic would describe it more appropriately, because I was going to miss my eighth birthday party.

  My birthday was the single day out of the year when my mother behaved like a mother. In fact, she behaved like she was running for Mother of the Year, though that didn’t make up for the 364 other days when she either embarrassed me, ignored me, or was geographically elsewhere. I summoned a birthday hostess image of the Merry Widow: she was wearing her signature black stretch pants, Beatle booties, and favorite swirly Pucci blouse. Her skin was as toasty golden brown as a pretzel, her shoulder-length lemon-colored hair side-parted like a starlet’s, and she held out a layer cake of heroic color and proportion, and questionable flavor. She was fond of maple or tutti-frutti cake mixes, which she enhanced according to whim, with whatever was on hand, like adding to the batter tinfoil-wrapped charms that you broke your new molars on. She wasn’t great with presents either. She was the kind of person who told you on the gift card outside exactly what was on the inside. However, she made up for it with her contagious enthusiasm. And her decorations and games were truly inspired. No insipid Pin the Tail on the Donkey for us; it was a real donkey and a real horse tail that you had to slap on the animal’s butt with masking tape. Or, in the case of my brother’s most recent birthday party, a thumbtack, which caused the donkey to place his hind feet on the ribs of Brian O’Donahue and send him flying backwards into the library bookcase.