Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  She had dealt with my compound fracture in the same pragmatic way she’d administered to Piddle when her throat had been ripped out by a neighbor’s werewolf. Upon discovering the three-quarters-dead dachshund in the garage, my mother had calmly fetched a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a needle and thread. While I held the dog, trying to ignore the gushing blood and exposed windpipe, my mother stitched her throat closed. The vet said he’d never seen such practicality. My mother told him she worshiped the damn dog, so she did what she had to.

  A few days after I came home from the hospital, the doctor made a house call. My mother was on her way into town to meet the Lord and Master for dinner, and she fussed about my room in an attempt to hurry the doctor. She was wearing her new Yves Saint Laurent “Mondrian” shift and her favorite black Roger Vivier patent leather shoes with the Myles Standish buckles on them. It may have been late winter, but her legs were bare, and of that peculiar pumpkin color only QT can deliver.

  Examining me, the doctor remarked on the size of my stomach.

  My mother came to stand by the side of the bed and tapped her foot. “I told her to lay off the Fritos,” she said, shaking her head. “But honestly, Doctor, what can I do?”

  “I’d say this is more than just a case of snack food,” said the doctor, palpating my distended, rock-hard abdomen. “Your daughter looks like she’s in her second trimester.”

  “What!” my mother shrieked. She sank backwards into a beanbag chair, her pocketbook spewing lipstick, change, keys, and switchblade across the carpet. “Are you telling me—I mean, there’s no way she could possibly be—”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, sternly. “I’m afraid this poor child is severely constipated.”

  My mother made a sound like gas escaping a balloon.

  The doctor regarded his Timex, and snapped his black bag shut. “Do you know how to administer an enema, Mrs. Beer?” he said, giving her a dubious look over his glasses.

  Mother and daughter looked at each other in profound horror.

  Shit. If only I’d read the label on the bottle of BiSoDol. Not for children under 12. Adverse side effects include constipation.

  Never has a procedure been invented that so tests the mettle of the participants. My mother and I hadn’t been that intimate since I’d come through the birth canal.

  Spring arrived, my arm healed, Piddle was taken off the respirator, and the snowshoes were put away for the year. While the Lord and Master and his bride went scuba diving in the Bahamas, Will and Edward and I went to visit our grandparents in Hobe Sound, Florida.

  The Jupiter Island Club was once the most stultifyingly WASP enclave that closed society had ever produced. The town of Hobe Sound itself was nothing, a hole-in-the-wall with a Winn-Dixie and a Bible college. The club was on the adjacent barrier island, in between two game preserves. To be a part of it, you had to own a house on the grounds, but to own a house on the grounds you had to be a member. The Atlantic sparkled along a white beach on one side, and the Indian River, swarming with fat, amiable manatees, separated the island from the mainland on the other. Sun-kissed, fair-haired men, women, and children tooled along on bikes and in golf carts, and behind the Bakelite steering wheels of old Mercedes-Benzs. They went back and forth from the courts or the fairway, to the beach club or the snack bar or the clubhouse, to one another’s houses for cocktail parties. My mother only dreamed of such a Nirvana—sun, the beach, hot and cold running servants, flora and fauna, and an open bar at all hours.

  My grandparents honestly tried to make things fun for Will and me, but it was their idea of fun, not ours. Edward was happy to sit all day long in a sandbox with a pail and a shovel and a starfish mold and several doting caretakers, but for us they scheduled tennis lessons and swimming lessons and golf lessons and deep-sea fishing excursions, and even signed us up for tea dances. They rented us ugly bikes and brought Captain Closson down from Maine to drive us around—to no avail. Hobe Sound was my idea of Hell. I hated tennis, I hated golf, I hated swimming lessons, I hated lying in the sun—and I had no friends because I was inept at doing all those things. Lollygagging about the house with the grown-ups was supremely boring, but I endured it because I was too embarrassed to be out with Will, riding around on crappy rental bikes.

  Suffering, in addition to being redemptive, can sometimes be portentous. On a day that would herald the close of the Addams era, I was introduced to two wondrous things: Gothic literature and the obituary page.

  One of my father’s brothers, Uncle Bob, was staying with us in Hobe Sound. We had all just returned from the beach club snack bar, where the four of us had lunched respectively on stone crab and noon balloons (the club’s signature rum punch with an added floater of 150-proof Myers’s); salad and a glass of milk with two raw eggs in it; and bacon cheeseburgers with fries, multiple Cokes, and a couple of brownies. My grandparents had teetered off to their beds for the usual post-lunch sleep-off. Edward was being forced to do the same, and was wailing his head off in a far corner of the house. Will had (unbelievably) found a friend to hang out with and was gone. It was too hot to do anything other than drape oneself across a Bruno Mathsson chaise and get lost in the newest issue of CREEPY.

  Uncle Bob was reading Scientific American. He was blinking heavily behind his thick horn-rims, and making his trademark groany-grunty sound—something he did so habitually that we referred to him as Uncle urr-hhhhh-uuuuhhh Bob. I could see why he’d never been married. With his blue chin and gross hairy back, Uncle Bob often reminded me of Fred Flintstone.

  Finishing his article, he came over to see what I was up to. Over my shoulder he studied the black-and-white drawings of a body-snatching that was taking place in a dark, rainy cemetery. Rotting flesh and bone-bared limbs were sticking out of coffins and body bags, and worms were playing pinochle on decomposing snouts everywhere. The omnipresent narrator, Uncle Creepy, leered and cackled his trademark heh, heh, heh all over the pages.

  Uncle Bob straightened up and grunted. He asked me if I’d read the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. I shot him a look that said, Are you nuts? Like I would read school stuff on my own? But then he told me the name of the story was “The Body Snatchers.”

  “Really,” I said.

  Was it a red-letter day or what. That very morning I’d been in my grandparents’ bedroom, rearranging my grandmother’s jewelry and makeup on the dressing table while she had her breakfast in bed with the octogenarian poodles and Edward lay ripping up Babar books by her side.

  My grandfather was in the bathroom with The New York Times, doing big business with the door open, as usual. We heard the toilet flush and he shuffled back into the bedroom, the ties on his Savile Row pj’s undone, the bottoms half off and trailing over his long pale feet.

  “I say, Peggy, look at this.” My grandfather rustled the paper in the direction of his wife and cleared his throat to read.

  “Babar!” shrieked Edward, and stuffed a page in his mouth.

  “What is it, Popsie?” my grandmother said, her eyes locked onto the Today show.

  “In the obituaries there’s a woman who’s died. Some Bolshevik. Name seems familiar.”

  “Mmmm hmmmm,” my grandmother replied, sucking on the pit of a prune, eyes riveted to Barbara Walters.

  “See here, Peggy.” He squinted at the paper with his glasses down his nose. “This ‘aide of Lenin,’ they call her. Well wasn’t she that female your mother used to have those nonsense séances with?”

  Brffffftttttt. “I’m sorry, darling?” My grandmother was following the directions the guest chef was giving with small movements of her cereal spoon, building the Pineapple Surprise right along with him.

  “What’s an obituary?” I interrupted.

  “Ca-ca! Doggie ca-ca!” laughed Edward, lunging for a poodle turd on the floor.

  “Yes, I’m certain that was the woman. A hawkish type. Dour. No wonder,” my grandfather said, padding around with one hand scratching his stomach. His pajama bottoms suddenly dropped
to the floor and he stepped out of them.

  “What’s an obituary, Granddaddy?” I asked louder.

  “What?” He looked at me, surprised as usual by my existence, and said, “Look here, that’s an obituary.” He handed me the paper, pointing to a few columns with a fuzzy photo of a woman. Then he wandered off to the closet to get dressed for his tennis game. A commercial had come on, so my grandmother offered an explanation.

  “An obituary is a story they write in the newspapers where they tell about a famous person when they’ve passed away.” She reached for her lipstick on the bedside table and began to haphazardly apply it.

  “Gaga! Gaga, ca-ca!” said Edward, holding the turd out to her.

  “Do they talk about how the person died?” I asked, suddenly remembering that early sighting of my father’s.

  “Thank you, dearie,” she said to Edward. “Sometimes they do, but only if it’s because they were killed in an avalanche or sank with the Titanic, like that poor Astor cousin. You are too young to remember. Think of it as a sort of book report on a distinguished person’s life.”

  “Huh,” I said, scanning the rest of the page, but there were no interesting details. Then I had a completely brilliant thought.

  “Gaga, do all papers have them?”

  “Right-o, dearie,” my grandmother mumbled through tissue, blotting her lips. The poodles exchanged positions, and The Today Show returned from station identification.

  “Right-o, Gaga,” I said, and trotted off to the kitchen to see if there was anything more explicit in the Palm Beach Post. There wasn’t, but in due time I would discover British journalism.

  The next day, Uncle Bob returned from town with a couple of books, both of collected short stories. The first was by Edgar Allan Poe and the second by Stevenson. By lunchtime I had read “The Body Snatchers,” and by dinner “The Raven,” with Uncle Bob’s help in translating that bugaboo “Night’s Plutonian Shore.” By bedtime I had penned my first obit—a heartfelt, if sophomoric, send-off for the Lord and Master:Peter Christian Beer, an international arms dealer, died yesterday of horribly severe and unnatural causes. He was around 50 . . .

  I could have built a substantial career on the thousands that were to follow.

  When I returned to school after spring break, I decided to reinvent myself. Throughout the fall and winter terms I’d put in my usual time in the principal’s office for misdemeanors ranging from Extremely Poor Attitude to coauthorship of a slam book, which is basically a compendium of the filthiest words in the English language.

  Now I resolved to become a good student, starting with my English class. I remember exactly what I was wearing when I finally got an A for something other than an art project. It was free dress day and I was proudly dressed in geometrically patterned go-go boots, beige windowpane tights, a faux leopard hip-hugger miniskirt with a white plastic belt, and a black skinny-knit poor boy sweater. God, I was cool.

  “My, my,” said the teacher as she handed out graded papers to the class. “Somebody had a wake-up call this vacation. Either that, or some very much needed tutoring.”

  I accepted mine from her and checked out the big beautiful A. “I’ve been reading,” I said.

  The bell rang and students started leaping out of their chairs. Miss Gleason rapped her desk with a ruler for attention. “Quiet down! Now listen, it will be your own choice for next week’s book report, so I will expect creativity. And remember, comics and record liner notes do not count.”

  I smiled and patted my book bag. I was halfway through “The Monkey’s Paw.” Future book reports would practically write themselves.

  Oi,Yank!

  IN 1967 THE Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined, which was about the only thing that kept an American like me from being stoned to death in England.

  Call me unpatriotic, but if you’d been trailed home from school every day by a pack of mercenaries in blazers and kilts who, because of some genetic xenophobia, felt the need to verbally disembowel you (Get lost, you bleedin’ Yank! Go back to the colonies! Yeah—fuck off an’ bloody stay there!), you’d have cut up your American passport with pinking shears too.

  The annual exploding postcard arrived during the last week of camp, informing me that we were emigrating because of the Lord and Master’s promotion. The house had already been sold, and the dogs and horses given away. The life of the chosen one, Will, remained unaffected, meaning he got to stay in a stateside boarding school and spend his vacations in Burdenland, while my younger brother and I were measured for English school uniforms. Had Edward been older, no doubt my grandparents would have claimed him as their legal property as well. I was temporarily placated by a Vidal Sassoon wedge haircut before we sailed from New York to Southampton aboard the SS France, but I shouldn’t have been; it was hideous.

  England did not turn out to be a Yardley Slicker commercial after all. I emerged from the train at Waterloo station expecting to see the youthquake in full action: birds in oversized caps and textured stockings running in and out of red telephone booths; blokes with striped bell-bottoms and Edwardian jackets lounging on Jaguars; and benevolent bobbies everywhere. The magazines I’d consumed on the passage over had alerted me to possible sightings at any given place or time of the Beatles or Herman’s Hermits or, at the very least, Lulu.

  In reality, suburban London in the late 1960s was a dreary postwar scenario with rag-and-bone horse-drawn carts, blocks of dismal council flats, and a core population of spinsters and widows all vying for the parish vicar’s favor like they were trapped in a Barbara Pym novel. There was nothing fab about the place at all. The authorities had been forced to come up with commercially crazy places like Carnaby Street just to keep people from eating their young out of depression.

  Home sweet home was initially a small leaky house on a street named Strawberry Vale, in a town called Twickenham, in a suburb on the southwest side of London. The narrow garden behind gave on to the Thames River with a slippery cement quay that was perfect for accidental drownings. The interior of the house was furnished like a bordello: the squashy sofas and armchairs were upholstered in molting red velvet; the lamp shades were fringed; and all of the oddly sized mattresses had been stuffed during the Middle Ages with coarse black horsehair. Heating anything—air, water, or food—necessitated shoveling coal into the furnace, a quaint task whose novelty wore off within a day.

  We all pined for something—my mother, for Miami and iceberg lettuce and Tab; me, for Cheetos and American bacon. The Antichrist wished that his wife’s children would disappear. Only my little brother had what he wanted: unlimited Matchbox cars and his mother, whom he continued to adore unconditionally.

  Despite a yearlong crash course in Virginia, domestication continued to prove difficult for the lady of the house. “Goddamn it!” my mother would erupt with when the fat popped at her from the (non-Teflon) frying pan in the cold gray dawn. Somewhere she had read that English schoolchildren began their English school days with a stomach full of eggs and bangers, those pink phalluslike sausages the Brits love. She really was trying.

  “SHIT!” she would expostulate twenty times or so during the drive to school, first down our busy road and then into the traffic flowing into Twickenham, then past the Odeon and onto the congested high street that ran parallel to my school.

  “Jesus H. Christ! That goddamned mini almost hit me! Oh God, if only I had a tan I could handle this. Look at me! I’m the color of that shiny gray toilet paper the Limeys use!”

  You don’t know the meaning of fear until you’ve driven with a hungover, sunlight-deprived woman who is grappling with a stick shift on the wrong side of the road, and whose head is swiveling every two seconds because she is searching for a shop that just might, by some miracle, sell Shake ’N Bake or QT. In less time than it takes to say “public transportation,” I was commuting to school on my own.

  Twickenham County Preparatory School for Girls was another school with a fancy name. Howeve
r, this one was your basic state-subsidized institution: an assemblage of scarred desks, leaky fountain pens, and chalk dust in an archaic Edwardian setting that was permeated throughout with the odor of boiled cabbage and governed by teachers who enjoyed a good caning the way the landed gentry enjoyed blood sports.

  My school uniform was an all-inclusive one: itchy wool underpants, kneesocks, dorky sandals, drip-dry ecru polyester shirt, pleated kilt, V-neck sweater, necktie, crested blazer, wool overcoat, and felt boater. Listed by the outfitters as “Nigger Brown,” everything was the color of cheap chocolate cake.

  The academic curriculum for Year One included fourteen subjects and an overview of every competitive game played on British soil since the time of Cromwell. “God Save the Queen” was respectfully sung every morning at chapel. Refusal to participate on the grounds of unconstitutionality was not recognized as exercising one’s inalienable rights. It wasn’t long before I was on speaking terms with the top brass.

  “Don’t you guys know about the separation of church and state?”

  “The only separation you need to know about, Miss Burden, is your desk from the other students. You will sit in the corner until you are repentant and ready to honor the monarch.”

  The headmistress and I often met for these cozy chats in her office.

  “And I see, Miss Burden, that once again you have been using ink in your rough book. In our rough books, we use pen-sill and only pen-sill. Furthermore, Master Grimshaw informs me that you recently submitted an assignment—in your neat book—in ballpoint ink! Really! Let me remind you that here, unlike in the colonies, we use prrrroper ink and prrrroper fountain pens, and we practice the discipline for a rrrreason.”