Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  Naturally my mother endorsed this new trend.

  “Hey, Toots,” she said to me one afternoon. “I passed you on the high street today when you and that Doran girl were walking to school. I like the new look. You know, the skirt-up-to-your-ass look. Just don’t let your teachers catch you.”

  I folded my arms and sunk my chin into my fiber-assisted chest, and stared mutinously at the floor.

  “But you know,” she went on, “your legs would look a lot better if you’d lay off dairy products for a while.”

  “But do YOU know,” I spat, “if you were normal, you’d be mad—like Josephine’s mother would be, if she caught her.”

  My mother whirled around from the stove.

  “Maybe you’d prefer I was one of those sagging old bats that hang around the house, porking out on the stuff they cook for their fat families.” She shook a wooden spoon at me, making her huge Diver Dan self-winding Rolex go whirrrrrrrr.

  Sulkily, I shook my head.

  Emma Peel (M-an-A-p-PEAL) was the fashion icon my mother lionized. Accordingly, today she was all in black in an Avengers-style stretchy faux leather catsuit and stack-heeled patent leather knee-high boots. She had on her favorite lipstick, Fabergé Nude Pink, which made her look like she’d been eating pink marshmallows. My mother probably had a couple more good years to carry on this Bond girl stuff, but she was thirty-nine and looked like a J-O-K-E in my opinion. I, on the other hand, was ever so slightly pudgy, and wore glasses, and was understandably resentful as hell. When not in my shit brown school uniform, I tended to cover my body up in floor-length hippie skirts or patch-adorned, bell-bottomed jeans; when my mother wasn’t Mrs. Peel, or the Girl from U.N.C.L.E., she was the Girl from Chelsea in Mary Quant shiny plastic raincoats with upturned collars, and wet-look microminis, and skinny-rib sweaters. I tramped around in Roman-style lace-up-to-the-knee leather sandals, or short, fringed suede booties; my mother was into thigh-high white patent leather boots. My drawers were stuffed with shapeless, long-sleeved T-shirts. She had a closet full of YSL see-through blouses.

  Poor thing, she must have really thought I’d had a breakthrough when she spotted me on the high street.

  What she should have appreciated even more was that summer’s Herculean efforts to make peace with the Lord and Master. Naturally, there was a motive: I needed the surveillance equipment from the middle sanctum to track the movements of the deity whose family had just moved in across the canal from us. His name was George, and I was throbbingly in love with him. He was the quintessence of summer, androgynous youth, and exquisite pathos. He was tall, nicotine-stained, and consumptively slender, and had straight, straw blond hair to his shoulders. His beautiful open face was sunburned, and his wide-spaced eyes were the color of his faded Levi’s. A study through a pair of German Zeiss military eight-by-sixty binoculars revealed fingernails bitten to the quick, a gold St. Christopher medal, and an appendicitis scar I wanted to lick.

  Most evenings, when it began to get dark, George would wander down to the canal, untie the blue dinghy that lay moored there, and set himself adrift. The canal was maybe thirty feet wide, running the length of the two streets whose houses backed up on it, and it flowed westward into the Thames. George never followed it though; he just allowed the dinghy to swing gently about in serpentine patterns, as if it were stuck on a Disneyland ride, unable to stray from an underwater track.

  An elderly beagle always accompanied him, and the two sat in silence, the dog’s nose stretched toward the twilight scents, George chain-smoking. I’d watch him until the night grew solid and the boat fused with the dark water, and the only discernible details became the glow of George’s cigarette and the woofling nostrils of the beagle opening and closing.

  You’re wondering how on earth I could see those nostrils in the pitch dark. That’s where a night vision device—an NVD—comes in mighty handy. My stepfather kept one in the middle sanctum, and, once I’d sighted George, I began to barter Ferrari waxing time against the use of it.

  The first time I used the night vision goggles to spy on George I just about threw up—not from guilt, but from motion sickness. I hadn’t read the label on the inside of the head strap that said, “Proper Scanning Critical to NVG Operations.” Looking through the goggles was sort of like looking down a tunnel to a green television screen. There was no peripheral vision, so you had to swing your head from side to side, which, if you’re bumbling about in a dark place with a weird thing strapped over your eyes, can make you feel pretty ill. I couldn’t see much farther than four hundred feet, but that was far enough. George looked heavenly in pistachio green.

  He didn’t seem to mind it when I got the nerve to insinuate myself into his conspicuously ample downtime. I began to sit with him in his dinghy in the evenings, and on Sunday afternoons he’d allow me to accompany him to the pub down the street, the beagle in perpetual tow. We’d sit out back in the grassy garden that fronted on the slow-moving Thames of summer, a couple in my mind. George would order room-temperature bitter, which he drank silently, in deep drafts, while I had to settle for shandy, a lager-and-lemonade mixture invented to placate the meek and underage. We’d share a Ploughman’s Lunch—two slabs of bread with a hunk of dry, aromatic cheddar cheese in between. “Share” isn’t the right word really. George would have one bite and chain-smoke while I nervously demolished the sandwich, wallowing in the hazy nimbus of his sweet pollution. On the rare occasions he spoke, I’d give him the consideration of an oracle, gazing at him with more reverence and veneration than any god has ever been afforded. As he stared out at the river, or at a cloud, or at the beagle, I’d venture shamelessly love-struck glances. When I’d look at his mouth, an unfamiliar worm would flip around in my future uterus, and when the golden hairs of his forearm accidentally brushed against mine, I’d envision our dogs mating.

  When George finally invited me chez lui for dinner, it wasn’t the formal, hand-delivered note and forest of roses that I’d fantasized about, but rather a casual offering from his embankment as I drifted downstream in a kayak.

  “It won’t be much,” he said, studying the path of a bumblebee on the gunwale of his dinghy. “My parents are out.”

  How terribly disappointing.

  I would have long since petitioned George to come over to my house, but for the obvious deterrent: my mother. I knew from experience that she would attire herself in one of her favorite slutfits—like the chrome yellow leather micromini and matching zip-up vest (no shirt, no bra)—and would ambush George as he made his way up from the water. Or, as she had done on my only two previous dates, she might appear in her après-dinner togs, a filmy leopard print negligee left open to reveal a crotch-length, see-through baby-doll. There was always a reason to bend over, to offer some beer, which she kept conveniently on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator even though no one in our house drank the stuff, or to myopically check the dog’s water bowl. Whoops! Why, she forgot to put on any panties! (Again!)

  The problem with my mother was her looks were peaking—big-time. Her beauty was the kind that is not only strictly physical, but of an era. Once she took her glasses off, she’d looked great in the fifties, and fantastic in the sixties. Now it was the early seventies and she was still hot, but definitely on the downside. To get a sense of the evolution of my mother’s looks think Brigitte Bardot then (minus the boobs) and Brigitte Bardot now (minus the hairpieces).

  In preparation for the big night I bathed slowly, with extreme care. “This is the last time I’ll lie in this bath as a virgin,” I said aloud. “This is the last time I’ll shampoo my hair as a virgin. This is the last time I’ll pluck the hairs out of my mole as a virgin . . . step into these underpants as a virgin . . . brush my virgin hair with the hairbrush belonging to a virgin.” I had high expectations for the evening.

  At the appointed hour I traipsed beguilingly down to the water’s edge in a tail-dragging multicolored paisley skirt, a gauzy Mexican embroidered blouse, and cork-soled platform sandals. My hair
was nearly waist-length, and I wore it loose in cool-hippie style with two little braids at the sides. I concealed my glasses in a fringed shoulder bag, along with a hairbrush, three pots of No. 19 lip gloss, and a tube of spermicidal jelly I was forced to shoplift from Boots the Chemist because I was too embarrassed to buy it.

  George appeared thirty minutes later and punted languidly across to my side. The beagle grudgingly moved over, and I settled my voluminous ensemble, posing and composing myself for the ninety-second passage to the other side.

  From my side of the canal it had been difficult to observe much of George’s house through its protective screen of shrubbery and vines, but now I saw that it was disappointingly middle-class, and thoroughly devoid of all previously imagined topiary, turrets, and cupolas. We entered through graceless French doors that led to a back hallway papered in an enthusiastic, if faded, chintz. A gray-haired wedge-shaped woman wearing an apron emblazoned with a psychedelic map of the London underground transportation system came forward to greet us. She turned out not to be the serving maid or tenured housekeeper but George’s mother. I suppressed a cry of dismay. What the hell was she doing here?

  Cooking dinner, it turned out.

  “You two go on up to Georgie’s room,” she said, waving her hand toward the rear of the house. And I thought my household was loose. I followed George up the narrow staircase to the third floor, the beagle struggling behind. At last, I was able to look out instead of in through the large garden-facing windows of George’s bedroom, and I did so with smug ownership. The room might have belonged to a six-year-old; there were no posters on the walls like in other boys’ rooms that I’d seen, and the shelves held only juvenile literature—picture books, Enid Blyton stories, and the graphic tales of Tintin. The only concession to the maturity of the occupant was the double bed and a pair of enormous sneakers in the corner.

  In his own domain George became uncharacteristically chatty. He walked about, showing me his things like a kid with a new friend over; memorabilia like a Jerusalem hotel ashtray; his original front teeth, which had been knocked clear out of his head when he’d slammed his Triumph motorbike into a wall; and his collection of hash pipes, which I obligingly gawked at. (He does drugs. How cool.)

  “And this is the pistol I had to carry when I worked on a kibbutz in Israel.” He indicated something that looked like a prop and laughed a bit sheepishly. “I’m afraid I kept it.”

  I was thinking, You call that a gun? Come over to my house and I’ll show you a gun. Still, I followed him around, hyperventilating in what I hoped was an adorable fashion, trying to tell him through an admittedly beginner level of body language that it was quite okay for him to ravish me whenever he felt like it.

  There was a tap at the door. “Hullo!” called the motherservant as she staggered in under the weight of an enormous dinner tray. I pushed the sudden image of Selma, my grandparents’ octogenarian maid, out of my head. George rushed forward and took the tray from his mother, setting it down on the bed. On it were two plates heaped with roast chicken and potatoes, a bowl of salad, a lemon tart, and a straw covered bottle of Chianti. I half expected George’s mother to wink as she backed out the door. George inserted a Ravi Shankar cassette into the tape deck, then uncorked the Chianti and poured some into a pair of heavy pewter goblets. “Cheers,” he said, raising his wine and lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of his old one.

  We ate, the beagle between us on the bed, periodically rolling his tongue out for the master to place bits of food on. The newly loquacious George yakked on about the last three years he’d spent on the kibbutz, and I lay back on one elbow, trying to look like a sexpot while I frantically channeled Julie Christie and Marianne Faithfull.

  When the meal was finished, meaning I had stuffed myself and George had rolled and smoked at least five cigarettes, he yawned and gave a long, slow stretch that was mind-blowing. I actually left my body as I imagined George taking me roughly into his arms to ply me with his manhood. But instead of ripping off my clothes, he picked up the dinner tray and headed for the kitchen. The beagle fired a salvo of farts and flopped over on its side, whereupon it fell instantly asleep and began to snore. I got up and checked my teeth in the mirror above George’s bureau. I ran my fingers through my hair and under my mascara-smudged eyes and then returned to the bed, where I shoved the beagle to the floor and arranged myself in what I hoped was an irresistibly salacious pose.

  George was taking his sweet time. Was he doing the dishes? Was his mother giving him advice? I checked my teeth again, then re-coiled myself on the pillows, hiking my skirt casually up one thigh. Had he run out for condoms? Was he washing himself? That would be good; I could deal with a clean unknown better than a smelly one. I was worried about my lack of experience. Really, when faced with the business end of a penis, how could a first-timer possibly know what to do? The wine had made me sleepy, and I closed my eyes (for the last time as a virgin) and drifted.

  George plopped suddenly down beside me. I caught my breath. This was it. I slid my eyes toward his with what I hoped was an encouraging gaze. George smiled down at me—and then he reached under the bed and pulled out a colossal textbook. He opened it up across his lap. I sat up to examine the title: Skin Diseases of Sub-Equatorial Peoples.

  “One of my father’s medical books,” George said, giving me a conspiratorial grin.

  With a yellow fingertip he directed my attention to a close-up of some poor native’s skinny foot, and its huge, ulcerated wound filled to the bubbling brim with a zillion wriggling maggots. I fished my very unsexy glasses out of my bag. It looked like raw hamburger left in the garbage for a month.

  “Poor sod,” said George, shaking his head. “Severe myiasis.”

  “What?”

  “Myiasis—the invasion of tissue by dipterous larvae. Flies. Disgusting, really.” He skimmed to another page. Slavic children wearing diapery undergarments lay in cots. Crusted, cracking lesions covered their sunken little stomachs, their hands and feet encased in scar-tissue mittens and gigantic blister bubbles.

  “Recessive dystrophice epidermolysis bullosa,” George said, pointing at a whimpering toddler holding out stumpy arms with paper basketballs for hands. “Kid’s a goner.”

  My stomach put dinner on blend.

  George tapped his cigarette on the face of a dark-haired woman who would have been beautiful if her left eyeball and nose hadn’t been rotting away. “Funny that the principle chronic infections—you know, tuberculosis, syphilis, leprosy, and leishmaniasis—all have rather a fondness for the nose.” Flipping to DNA mutations, he said, “Check it out,” indicating a picture of an infant’s head. It looked like a Mayan frog. “Anencephaly. Absence of the cranial vault.”

  “Anencephaly?” I looked fearfully at the blob.

  “No brain.” He turned the page, humming along with the sitar on the tape deck. God, I loved him for that. We were talking about a baby with NO TOP TO ITS SKULL and he was like, ho hum.

  He stopped at a picture of a little blond girl with a charming Dutch girl hairdo, and eyes that were fried eggs running off on either side of her face.

  “Treacher Collins syndrome,” stated George. “Bloody sad, really.”

  We were straying way too far from the task at hand. “You know,” I interjected, as George turned to a page of African men with elephantiasis, one proudly displaying his scrotum in a wheelbarrow, “I used to want to be a mortician.”

  “Did you now,” said George politely.

  “Yeah,” I said, warming to the task of impressing him. “I wanted to concentrate on preparing the bodies of children.” I was completely bullshitting, of course. What idiot would want to embalm kids?

  “Did you think that would be easier?”

  “No. I just wanted to make them beautiful, preserve them really well, so that the grieving parents could sort of, you know, keep them around?”

  George finally put the book aside. Gathering his papers and his bag of tobacco, he began to roll the nex
t ten cigarettes he would smoke in nearly as many minutes. I felt my face and neck flush with embarrassment. I knew he knew I was lying.

  But he was a gentleman. “For one thing,” he said, running the tip of his tongue along the gummed edge of a rolling paper, making my armpits gush in the sweat of desire, “that would only prolong the grief. For another, it would be highly unsanitary.”

  “What do you mean?” I was appalled he thought I’d do a bad job on the embalming.

  George struck a match against the zipper of his jeans and put it to his cigarette. He sucked on the burning taper, squinting his eyes against the little cinders that flew up as the tobacco caught. Inhaling deeply, he turned back to me and said, “With a dead body there’s no immune system functioning to keep all the disease organisms in check. Microorganisms, bacteria and germs, all kinds of shit proliferate after the death of the host. Within twenty-four hours autolysis has gone mad—”

  “Autolysis?” I squeaked.

  “Yeah. When we shove off, the enzymes produced by the cells in our bodies break down the very cells that make them. Although embalming reduces the bacterium in a corpse by ninety-nine percent, rotting is unavoidable. Embalming is basically just for the funeral, so everyone can have a look-see.”

  “I knew that.”

  “Course you could use a greater concentration of formaldehyde in your solution when you embalm the kiddiewinks.” George looked out the window and smoked contemplatively, as if picturing pickled dead children.

  “Medical colleges can keep cadavers around for donkey’s years,” he said, turning back to me, “but they don’t look very appealing, I’m afraid.”