Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  Adolphe whispered to my grandmother that dinner was served, and the grown-ups went up the low stairs beside the fir trees to the table. Will and I remained behind, lying across the huge cushions on the sofa, sucking on the sugary crushed ice at the bottom of our Coke glasses, he reading the funnies from the Ellsworth Times and I one of the vintage Vault of Horror comic books that I kept stashed behind the American Heritage series on the fifth shelf. I watched as the butler pulled out my grandmother’s chair for her, and she carefully set her drink down beside a trio of wineglasses before half falling onto the slippery, modern plywood seat. Gathered around the table, the grown-ups looked like crazed surgeons in a slasher film, their faces flushed above the silly bibs they’d tied around their necks, and sharp instruments for torturing crustaceans lying menacingly alongside their place mats.

  An enormous bowl of steamed clams was borne in. Adolphe stood unflinchingly beside my grandmother as she tussled with them, then he continued round the table as if he had the entire summer left to serve just this course. He reappeared to pour Taittinger champagne into the oversized V-shaped Steuben glasses, each so heavy you needed two hands to lift it. A skinned white peach was wedged into the point at each base; as the meal progressed the fruit flavored the champagne and the wine macerated the fruit.

  That left Selma with the lobster. She stumbled a little under the weight of the scarlet carapaces, her old-fashioned spectacles opaque from the steam. Anna trailed with a bowl of buttered peas from the garden. Next out the swinging door of the kitchen would come corn on the cob, and then the golden ballooning popovers, and then a refill of champagne. I knew the drill like I knew bedtime followed brushing your teeth, and maggots followed flies on the decomposing body of a seagull.

  Obadiah had singled out a woman at the north corner of the table, though she was as yet unaware. At dinner parties, he liked to position himself exactly in the middle of the diners and, from this advantageous position, choose a patsy. Plonking himself down at the victim’s feet, under the table, in line with his or her crotch, he would gaze steadfastly up, the deep red pockets of his eyes sparkling with eye goo. If pressed, Obadiah might even moan a little. Should the victim need more encouragement, he’d give his or her ankle a lick. During summer, most of these ankles were tanned and unsheathed, and the startling effect of Obadiah’s long, hot, dripping wet tongue usually resulted in something being thrown at him. If it happened to be food, he scarfed it down with the speed of a raptor. Obadiah had flashes of real intelligence.

  Back on the sofa, I’d moved on to a moldy issue of Chamber of Chills. A grisly pictorial of zombies ransacking a kitchen afforded me a sudden brainstorm.

  “Hey, Will,” I said to Will, nudging him with the toe of my sneaker.

  “Mmm.”

  “I just got an idea and it’s a really good one.”

  “Uh huh.” My dyslexic brother was laboring through Mandrake the Magician. I kicked him.

  “What!”

  “Listen—when everyone’s asleep after lunch—”

  “Ayeeeee!” cried Obadiah’s quarry, upsetting her champagne glass and elbowing her popover to the floor. Obadiah snatched it up and waddled briskly off through the fir trees and out the screen door.

  Will and I slunk out the other way; he was, after all, our dog.

  A fog had crept in during dinner, rolling silently off the ocean to hang in droplets from the needles of the pine trees and the thorns and blossoms of the wild rosebushes that grew at the top of the seawall. It clung to my hair and stood out in tiny wet granules on the thick wool of my sweater as we walked up the gravel path from the main house to our cottage. Obadiah clambered to the top of the stairs ahead of us. As I let him in, light spilled out onto the red painted steps, and the welcoming bulk of Henrietta spilled out after it. Edward was on her hip, sucking on a block, and he glared at me. I told him I was sorry for wrecking his wall, and he broke into a smile. “Bedtime,” said Henrietta, hugging us with one arm, and exhaling the smoke from her Winston over our heads. That suited me fine. I had a night of planning to do.

  The following day we waited until it was the quiet hour when the adults were sleeping off the effects of a morning in the sun and a boozy lunch, and the help watched soap operas behind their bedroom doors or dozed in green wicker rocking chairs on the porch overlooking the vegetable garden.

  Will and I started with the walk-in refrigerator. Silently, we picked up a massive blue enamel pot of bouillabaisse, and last night’s tin-foiled lobster carcasses, destined for tomorrow’s stew. Then we filled a laundry hamper with brown paper bundles of beef tenderloin and stewing chickens, and the waxed packages of smoked salmon and sturgeon from Zabar’s in the City. We moved on to netted sacks of grapefruit and oranges, bundles of leeks and carrots, wooden crates of Bibb lettuce and spinach and corn, and newspaper-wrapped cones of arugula, and mâche and frisée picked in the garden that morning. I pricked my fingers grappling with the artichokes, and broke more than a few of the quail eggs when I threw them on top of everything in the hamper. Working as a team, Will and I emptied the room systematically, transporting everything with buckets and a pulley system to where we cached it behind the three massive chimneys on the dead-flat roof.

  Nothing was spared. We loaded up packages of bacon, a bunch of bananas, the four mackerel my brother had caught off the dock yesterday, a bundle of Italian parsley, half a crème caramel, and all the stinky cheeses flown in from France. We took the basket of local chanterelle mushrooms, and the bags of mussels, the barnacles on them scratching us through the burlap as we hoisted them to the roof. Up went a white enamel tray of lavender-colored squab (neatly dressed and lined up like the dead of battle), matchstick bundles of haricots verts, wooden pints of raspberries from the garden and fraises du bois from the woods, and cartons of tiny blueberries handpicked by my brother and me at ten hard-earned cents an hour. We stacked the remains of our grandfather’s black-and-white striped birthday cake (inscribed “TO POP WITH OP”) on top of some crates of Coca-Cola and ginger ale, and lugged it all up, only breaking a few of the bottles in the process. We left Arturo’s ray.

  When we’d cleaned out the walk-in, we emptied the kitchen and pantry refrigerators, taking all the milk and cream, the cottage cheese and ham and mustards and mayonnaise and jams and jellies, and the pitchers of iced Constant Comment tea and the orange juice squeezed that morning, plus about a hundred eggs, and fifteen pounds of Land O’Lakes butter (salted and unsalted), and every kind of Pepperidge Farm bread they made back then (whole wheat, sandwich, very thin, and toasting white), and the twelve packs of Thomas’ English muffins that my family went through in a week—with at least ten of the one-pound packets of the (salted) butter.

  We took a short breather before clearing out all of the drawers, cupboards, and bins. Flour, sugar, chunks of Belgian baking chocolate, cornstarch, rolled oats, tins of anchovies and StarKist tuna, tomato paste and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, baking soda and candied violets and vinegars and Tabasco, Grape-Nuts and Corn Flakes and Cap’n Crunch. We left nothing—with the exception of my grandmother’s essential All-Bran (out of respect). By the time we’d packed the hamper with Triscuits and Finn Crisps and Martinson coffee and Fauchon tea, dried prunes and Fizzies, and boxes and boxes of Pepperidge Farm cookies (Assorted, Bordeaux, Lido, Milano, Pirouettes, and shortbread), and macadamia nuts (twelve jars) and After Eight dinner mints and Lay’s potato chips, which I ate while I worked, we were dead tired. We tossed a couple cans of Alpo and a box of Milk-Bones on top and lugged the final load up to the roof. Back in the kitchen we sat panting on the cool gray linoleum floor, and realized that we’d overlooked the freezer, but it was perilously close to teatime. As a compromise, we wound it up with a roll of duct tape. After a quick check on the progress/decay of Number Four and Number Nine, Will and I hopped on our bikes and rode into town for ice cream.

  Seated on the glittery stools at the soda fountain, we giggled a little at each other while we waited for the ice cream to be dip
ped and then packed into the sugar cones.

  “Boy are they ever gonna get a surprise when they go to start making dinner,” I said, swinging my legs nervously. It had been a bold reprisal. “Maybe Granddaddy’ll have a heart attack when he finds out and I won’t have to do the rat poison thing.”

  “Yeah,” said Will.

  “I hope Arturo has to go back to stupid Italy. Maybe they’ll fire Gloria too—wouldn’t that be great.”

  “I guess.”

  Will was looking a little pale—and more than a little uncertain, the pansy.

  I said, “You know I was never really going to poison Granddaddy.” And I wouldn’t have. It was just that I like to plot big.

  The euphoria of our delinquent deed was beginning to sour. In our unfolding awareness, I found I’d lost my appetite, even for a double-scoop cone of fudge ripple. We were like a couple of terriers that had gutted a herd of goats in a blood orgy and, now that the adrenaline was subsiding, were thinking, Holy shit—why did we do that? Our master is going to kill us.

  We charged the melting ice cream to our grandparents’ account and coasted silently home.

  DC

  MY MOTHER WAS nothing if not practical. She owed this trait, her saving grace, to her ancestors. The end product of twelve arrogant generations of New Englanders descended from a handful of Plymouth Colony founders, Leslie Hamilton was the only issue of an army colonel and a melancholic ex-spinster whose sole objective in life was to search out, examine, cross-reference, and interpret every branch, twig, leaf, and aphid of her family tree. According to my mother, her mother’s premature death was due to hypochondria, but I’m convinced she was a victim of genealogical nervosa, a debilitating disease that attacks the brain cells of the afflicted with the speed of a tanker’s oil slick. Research has correlated the illness to membership in societies such as the Colonial Dames Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Mayflower Society. Sadly, there remains no cure, only preventive abstinence.

  In a celebratory wrap-up of her first—and final, as she saw it—year of widowhood, my mother relocated us to the arty environs of Georgetown. The house we moved into was a comfortably disheveled federal row house on Reservoir Road. It was painted a peeling biscuit color and was set back from the herringbone-brick sidewalk by a wrought iron fence with the world’s clangiest gate. There were three skinny floors, a basement, and a cool finished attic. Naturally, my brother got the attic.

  I had the front room on the second floor, and a bunk bed, which I did not ask for. I am not a bunk bed sort of person. Edward had his crib in a cubicle next to mine. My mother’s master suite took up the rest of the floor. Henrietta had her smoky domain in the basement, and hanging out with her down there, watching TV, shooting the prepubescent breeze, felt like patronizing a grotto nightclub.

  Behind the house, a narrow garden ran twenty feet or so down to a freestanding garage barely large enough for my mother’s new Austin Healey Sprite. The garage was accessed by one of the alleys that ran behind the houses of Georgetown like convoluted but biologically necessary plumbing.

  Alley life was like ant farm life. The cramped thoroughfares were not only practical, they were highly social. They were where you took a shortcut to the bus stop, or met up with your friends, or roller skated, rode your Stingray, skateboarded, and jumped rope even though there was a continual flow of pedestrian and motor traffic and the pavement was maybe as wide as a 1965 station wagon.

  A lot of artists had studios in the old garages and carriage houses, and my mother had hers two alleys over, in a lopsided structure that had once been a car repair shop. Before that, it had purportedly been the shanty of a freed slave, though that was never validated and was probably a stab at historical sensationalism on the part of the Realtor. It was a ramshackle little space made airy by a glass-windowed garage door on one side. When it was warm out, everyone kept their doors up or open, and neighboring artists would trickle by when they grew bored with their own endeavors.

  My mother did mostly animal sculptures, stylized turtles and seals and otters and bears that she carved from huge blocks of alabaster and soapstone, or chiseled from stumps of wood the size of small cars. I adored being in her studio. It was at once cozy and macabre, a cross between the school art room and a serial killer’s lair. The room smelled of earth and stone and wood, and everything in it was coated with a lovely soft, carcinogenic dust. Torturous tools of the trade—rasps and files and chisels and mallets—lay about on the worktables amid sculptures in various stages of progress. On the rough wood shelving photographic reference books leaned up against boxes of sandpaper, drills and their bits, and buckets permanently lined with a coating of hard white plaster. Next to an old laundry sink was a ten-pound block of modeling clay, swaddled in thick plastic sheeting to keep it malleable. Aprons, welding masks, and safety goggles hung from pegs along a wall. Sacks of plaster of Paris used to make the molds the finished bronzes would be cast from lay in a heap in a corner. When you opened the sacks up, they smelled divine, just like a dank mausoleum.

  Normally our mother didn’t have the time of day for us, but in her studio she took on her birthday persona. We could run amok in there and she just laughed. We ripped into the clay like mice into a bar of soap, and made action figures (Will—soldiers and guns; me—horses and victims for the guillotine), and dipped our arms and legs in buckets of wet plaster she made up for us so we could pretend we were victims of ghastly car wrecks.

  If a homework project called for creativity, and she happened to be in town, our mother became a wildly enthusiastic collaborator. The Nagasaki After the Atom Bomb project she helped me build for Social Studies was not to be believed. I considered it the apogee of my five years of combined elementary school training, and if the terrain displayed over the four-foot length of chicken wire and painted plaster was more doomsday lunar crater than Japanese ground zero, the care that went into depicting human carnage and vegetative devastation was justly rewarded. But I couldn’t have scorched the model trees without her knowledge of acetylene torch work.

  Gomez and Morticia would have been so proud of my A+.

  As it turned out, so was my mother. When I presented her with my inscribed gold star, she stunned me by putting her arms around me and awkwardly kissing the side of my head. I, in turn, nearly forgot myself and leaned in to receive it—but then I remembered that she had only just arrived from Miami and was leaving for Haiti in the morning, so it wasn’t too difficult to remind myself of all the literary mothers she wasn’t, which was one of the formulas for hating her that I followed. Blame it on the lower school English Department.

  Lamenting the fact that I wasn’t an Addams was really only 75 percent of the equation; the rest of the time I longed to be my favorite character from A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry, if only to have her mother—the gifted, beautiful, wonderfully vague but fiercely doting Mrs. Murry who was always there to support her nearsighted, ugly duckling daughter, someone I resembled not a little. The fact that Meg Murry’s father (also achingly brilliant) had vanished, and was subsequently found to be not dead but merely on another planet in a glass tube, the prisoner of a giant brain named IT, would have no bearing on my obsession with this book.

  Matters ran smoothly at home when our mother was out of town, thanks to the domestic superintendancy of Cassie Diggins and Henrietta. When she was home, everything went out of whack. Like I couldn’t go to the bathroom. Which is why I remember November 22, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was shot, as the day of the Kennedy Poo, because my mother had left for Mexico that morning.

  Other than that, things were okay. Meaning, I was mostly having a decent childhood, other than the glaring hole of deprivation caused by my not having a pony. Since my father hadn’t had much of an impact on my life when he was alive, I can’t say I missed him. It’s hard to miss someone you didn’t know in the first place. To save my brother from the dishonor of having to repeat fifth grade and be in the same class as me, Will was sent off to
boarding school. But we were already beginning to part ways gender-wise, so I didn’t really miss him either.

  The most cherished thing in my possession then was an autographed copy of Charles Addams’s book Nightcrawlers. I had purloined it from my grandparents’ library in the city, along with Homebodies, Drawn and Quartered, and Dear Dead Days. I deserved them more than my grandparents. Besides, they were friends with the Maker himself, referring to him as “Charlie” even, so they could get more copies anytime they wanted. I’d met Him once, when He was over for lunch in the country. I’d been suitably starstruck, and uncharacteristically polite, but He hadn’t found me amusing enough for conversation. The whole thing was reminiscent of my meeting with Walt Disney, when, during our visit to California, my brother and I had knocked on the back door of his Beverly Hills house. Old Walt had actually answered the door himself. I don’t remember what my expectations were at the time. I was five, so undoubtedly they were vast, but they probably weren’t that Mr. Disney, creator of Cinderella and Bambi, would glare at us and snap, “Scram!” before slamming the door in our faces.

  Oh, happy mournful day! On September 18, 1965, the Addams Family came to television. Even though I much preferred her two dimensional persona, I stepped up my slavish emulation of Wednesday Addams. I even built a replica of her guillotine. This was a crude but fully functional piece of engineering that I constructed with pieces of wood from my FAO Schwarz riding stable after watching the episode where Wednesday chops off the head of her Marie Antoinette doll. The blade was problematic, since Cassie Diggins would have missed even a piece of Saran Wrap from the kitchen, so I had to make do using a pocket mirror and pair of industrial-sized scissors that I snapped at the exact moment the mirror fell, which was sort of cheating but ultimately had the desired effect.