by Fiona Maazel
Mother was staring out the window. We were well above the clouds, which looked like bedding. I asked about her plans.
“I don’t know. I’d like to have another blot this month.”
I threw back some peanuts.
“You really believe in that stuff? Odin and Thor and all that?”
“You’re asking me now? After all these years? The truth is, I don’t know. When your father started spending all his time in the lab, it gave me something to do.”
“Really? So Asatru is a diversion?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. It gives me comfort.”
“What, Ragnarook? That end-of-the-world stuff actually calms you down?”
She nodded. “But only because I like the idea of starting anew. ‘After the war, only two shall remain. For meat they will feed on morning dew, and from both shall man be reborn.’ Beautiful, no?”
I nodded. “Would you like to be one of them, you think? One of the last? Or I guess the first?”
“No. I’m too old. But I like the idea of it just the same.”
“Me, too, I think.”
She bared a peanut fallen in her lap and posed a question of her own. I still could not acclimate to her being lucid and communicative, so whatever she said caught me by surprise. She wanted to know what gave me comfort.
I shook my head. “I have no idea anymore.”
“What did it use to be?”
“I don’t know. No Face, probably. Painkillers.”
“That’s dispiriting.”
“You’re telling me. Are you going to keep eating once we get home?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to stay off the drugs?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to try. It just gets so lonely in that apartment.”
I put my hand on hers and said, “But how lonely can it be with me there?” I had meant this to sound funny, to satirize what small consolation this was, but it came out awful, and my heart sank.
Raymond was waiting for us at the gate. “Mrs. Clark. Ms. Clark.” We followed him to the garage.
In the car, I watched people in other cars. I looked at billboards for new movies. An ad for the lottery, now $24 million. Everything looked as it had before Bluebonnet, which gave me the disconcerting sensation that after all I’d been through, I was not going to behold my life with new eyes. Also that life in New York had a way of soldiering on.
I asked Raymond what he’d been up to the last few weeks. He said he’d used his vacation time to help the National Guard enforce the quarantine in California, and then joined a bounty hunt for the fleas. I asked if that’s what the pros were calling them now, the fleas, and what was wrong with plague bandit? He had no response. The fleas. How clever. I could just see a national map with pushpin bugs for every sighting.
“I haven’t heard anything about those people in a while. Did you get ’em?”
“They are still at large,” he said, grimly.
“You realize if they’re still alive, they can’t have plague? The people who were asymptomatic, it turns out their incubation period was just really long.”
“Your sister has reason to believe that some among us are genuinely immune.”
“Hannah? You’ve been talking to Hannah? And passing on what she says? That’s crazy.”
The glass partition began to rise.
“Oh, leave him alone,” Mother said. “You know how Hannah likes to talk.”
I sat back in my seat. “What if she’s not okay? What if we get home and she’s just not okay?”
“Lucy, you can’t just start caring and expect everyone else to sympathize.”
“I always cared.”
Mother did not even bother to reply. I dribbled my head against the window.
“You only just got rid of the last bump,” she said. “Stop that.”
I noticed a clot of powder base on her cheekbone, and thumbed it over.
“Mom,” I said. “I always cared.”
She asked Raymond to turn up the radio. It was on the hour, news time. A crocodile was making waves in a Jersey family’s pool. The health of fish tissue in the Mississippi was at an all-time low. James Watson said in public that being stupid was an inherited disorder and should be arrested with gene therapy.
I turned to Isifrid and said, “Okay, I don’t like this at all. Being back. Things just can’t be like how they were before. All petty and meaningless. Fish tissue in the Delta? Come on.”
“Not me. I like it just fine. Drink?” and she poured herself some sherry.
“You’re not supposed to drink.”
“The day sherry is crack, I will have died and gone to heaven.” She drank her glass and poured another.
When we arrived, there was no one at home, just a note on the door saying Stanley had gone out to eat and Hannah was at Indra Denton’s. At least that friendship got patched.
Mother withdrew to her quarters. I had learned enough to know that I could not keep her from drug use and that if two months at Bluebonnet had not deranged her will, I wasn’t going to do it in ten minutes. Still, I knocked on her door. Prayer was a few hours away, but I asked all the same if maybe He could spare her.
The shower went on, a toilet flushed. I headed for my room. The bed was unmade and one of Stanley’s undershirts was strewn across the pillow. I guess he’d been sleeping there, which was nice. Nice until I made for the kitchen, from where, I realized, Stanley was just trying to sleep as far away as possible. Everything there was fine except the sink, in which a lubricant thick as chowder drizzled down glassware and dishes piled high. Who could live like this? I’d been out of rehab not eight hours and already I was starting to see Bluebonnet through a scrim of nostalgia.
I retreated to my bed. I think I’d been hoping for a welcome-back party. As if Hannah and Stanley, Eric, too, would be eating crudités in the blue room under a banner that saluted my achievement. There might be gifts. Something felicitous rendered in needlepoint by my sister, who’d have discovered in my absence a hobby that affirms life. At the very least, a cake with my name on it. Maybe a card.
I turned on the TV and began to surf through our six hundred channels. On 527 I found a movie about transsexual kung-fu exiles incarcerated in a hippodrome tripping through space and headed for the Hole of Sisyphus. A family favorite.
I called Eric. Voice mail. Said I was home, the place was a landfill and that I wanted to set up a time for Agneth.
Then I made my bed. I felt restless and afraid to feel restless and afraid to feel afraid and then just afraid to feel at all because feelings incite drug use. I returned eyes to the transsexuals. They were versed in martial arts. They were spiked with estrogen. Still, it would be another hour before the movie got good. I traipsed down the hall. Put an ear to Mother’s door. Sounds of shower and excitable kung-fu transsexual, let’s call her Elbow Toast, ruing her fate.
I paced the hallway. Picked at my nails. And finally resorted to an old standby: the despoiling of Mother’s walk-in closet. Closets, because Mother had five, of which three retained vestures from the sixties and seventies, e.g., neon hip-huggers of combustible fabric and trim. I’ve heard it said these pants can ignite a dryer and ruin your life. I loved them. On occasion I even tried to fit into them, under the illusion that radical changes were happening to my body or her wardrobe. This visit, though, I didn’t bother, just flung them at a column of drawers in which handkerchiefs and belts fashioned from skins you never thought could make a belt—porpoise, for instance—and a shoe box. I hadn’t been through the drawers in several months, but I think I’d remember a shoe box. Naturally I had to open it. And naturally, it was crammed with secrets. Letters from Dag Bersvendsen, fiancé of yore. The only surprise was that Isifrid had kept them. And that she’d obviously been going through them recently. I thought back to her meltdown at Bluebonnet and began to piece it together. I could not read Norwegian, but the marrow of his subject was evident in the hearts he’d drawn in the margin. A man who draws hearts.
The letters were dated 1970 and one from 2002. 2002? The handwriting was not much changed, but there were no hearts. Just a couple lines and his initial, D. I sat down on the carpet. What were the odds that Dag, who never married, had continued to love my mother all these years? Even as she had become monstrous in her addictions and self-disgust? I was just about to return the box to the drawer when I noticed a small envelope, small like what you’d find in a bouquet of flowers, taped to the inside. On the front, my dad’s cursive, addressed to Mother.
I opened it without hesitation. It was dated 1992, shortly after Hannah came to live with us. It said two things. Izz, I’m sorry. And underneath: Go back to him.
I flipped it over, thinking there had to be more. But no. I returned the card to its envelope and the box to the drawer. I was waiting for some kind of response. Like my head would spit out a feeling as if from one of those mixing chambers at a lottery draw. I wanted, at the very least, to be curious. If my mother had a secret life, maybe I could forgive the one she led in front of us. But it wasn’t happening. What the letters and note suggested about her inexorable and doomed attachment to Dag Bersvendsen was so horrible, no sooner was it exposed than it ran away. There was no thinking about it. None whatsoever.
I returned to my bed. The kung-fu exiles had just cleared the lip of the Hole of Sisyphus and were wondering just what sort of trouble they were in. This was my favorite part. The hippodrome had to progress through a gas membrane so toxic it nearly killed everyone on board. But they made it. And they rejoiced. Thing is, what now? The Hole of Sisyphus is bleak, goes nowhere. So they think: Oh, crap, our fate is to peruse this hole for eternity. All faces stricken. All hands on deck for debriefing by ship captain. He’s just about to say there might be other life-forms in the hole, that crossbreeding is not so bad, when the power goes out and, wham, they are headed again for the Hole of Sisyphus! And the toxic membrane! No one wants to endure this. But they do, at which point the sous-captain produces a book of Greek mythology three thousand years old, from which he reads aloud. The camera pans from one crew member to the next as they realize this is their punishment, to traverse that fucking membrane for eternity. I’ve seen this movie eight times and yet I always find this hilarious. Duh, Sisyphus. Duh, homophobic allegory. And, now that I think about it: Duh, reincarnation allegory, too.
“But why?” shrieks killer she-male nine, let’s call her Yang Yuehai. “We’re the same as everyone else!”
I rolled onto my back and eyed the crown molding in my room. Crown molding is tacky. My bedroom was tacky. Maybe I should paint it black. Maybe I needed a do-it-yourself ambition to keep me occupied for the rest of my life.
Stanley knocked on my door. Thank God. I guess he wasn’t expecting the welcome because when I barreled into his chest, he caromed off the wall. “I’ve missed you, too,” he said, and kissed my ear.
I stepped back to have a look. So long as Stanley was still Stanley, everything would be fine.
I led him to my bed because this was where we had our best talks. He kicked off his boots and settled in. I was relieved and also alarmed to feel nothing by way of interest pressed against me. Maybe I looked awful. Maybe he was sleeping with someone else.
“Where’s Hannah?” I asked.
“Didn’t you see my note? She’s at Indra’s.”
“When is she coming back?”
He hesitated just long enough. “Oh no,” I said, and shot out of bed and into her room. Empty. Or empty of everything that mattered. The West Nile map. Her chemistry set. Books, clothes. I glanced at some notebooks stacked on the desk and grabbed the top one, feeling like I had to acquire something of hers before it vanished.
I returned to my room and very quietly got back under the covers.
“She’s been staying there awhile,” he said. “I didn’t think it would do you any good to know. And besides, have you seen what the rest of the house looks like? This is no place for a kid.”
“But I’m here now,” I said, pleading, essentially, for Stanley to believe I could make things well between me and my sister.
“She’s a little afraid of you, I think.”
“That’s great, Stanley. You should have told me she moved out. I would have come home sooner. Did she know I was coming home?”
He looked at me with such pity, I had to turn away.
“I should go talk to her. Maybe take Isifrid, because she’s cleaned up some. You think I should go talk to her?”
He stroked my hair and said, “Sure. I bet she’d like that.”
I opened the notebook. I skimmed. “Oh, this is horrible,” I said. “Listen to this, it’s from her journal.”
“You took her journal? You shouldn’t do that.”
“No, no, it was this thing she started doing. Like a chronicle. Stories from her life or something. Just listen.”
I read highlights out loud.
If there was no superplague, my biggest problem would be the dance. Two of the most unpopular boys like me. The first is George. It seems to me he is very confused. He only cares for himself. Maybe he is running away from himself. Then there is Adam. He is chubby and rude. Sometimes I feel sorry for him, nobody likes him, but I guess he deserves it.
“Oh, Jesus,” Stanley said. “You forget how awful it is being twelve.”
“Shhh. It gets worse.”
There is one student who does everything right. Charles is his name. He always dresses fine, he never complains. It is funny that I think he has the most complex problems of all. He is an overachiever. He pushes himself too hard and so do his parents. He always has to be Mr. Perfect. He is probably going to kill himself.
I put the notebook down. Stanley said, “No, no, don’t look like that. This is good. She’s just a normal girl. This is how girls think.”
“How do you know?”
“Did you think like that when you were twelve?”
“No.”
“My point exactly.”
I snorted.
Michele likes Mark and has already asked him to the dance. He is sickminded but in a way so is everybody. He has frenched and he has given girls hickeys. He is cool. I have a date for the dance but I am not satisfied with it. His name is Carlos. He was the first boy to ask a girl for the dance. I said yes because I was afraid that I might not have a date. Well, now I’m stuck.
At this I laughed. “It’s kind of dramatic, actually. I wonder what happens next!”
Stanley grabbed at the notebook. “I want to read! My turn!”
But then there was a pause. “Well?” I said.
“Oh, never mind. She starts talking about algebra.”
He tried to close the notebook, but I took it back.
I wish I had a brother to be a father figure in place of my dad. There is Lucy, of course, but she’s a baby. She’s also never home. She tries to pretend like she wants to be home with me, but I see through it.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Come on, she’s just a kid. She doesn’t really mean it.”
But I started to cry. “She hates me. How am I supposed to take care of her?”
Stanley drew me to him with such calm I realized there was something different about him. He wasn’t drinking. I blinked through tears and said, “What have you been doing these past couple months? I never even asked.”
“Not much. I finally stopped looking for a surrogate. It was a crazy idea, anyway.”
I sat up. “It was not. It was a beautiful idea. And I don’t think you should give up.”
“I can’t raise a child.”
“You can.”
“Plus I’ve been thinking. What if I want to do it for the wrong reasons? What if I just want to bring our child into the world out of guilt? My drinking ruined Sylvie’s life, it took her life. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yes. But it’s also possible you want to bring into being evidence that you loved and were loved. And that’s good. What’s a life worth if you don’t have that?”
He sig
hed heavily. “I don’t know. Maybe I just want a family.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s good to have you back,” he said.
“Did you stop drinking?”
“Trying.”
“Really? How long?”
“Couple weeks.”
“You astonish me. How has it been?”
“Awful.”
I rolled onto his stomach and lost my face in his neck. “Proud of you,” I said.
After a few minutes he asked if we should check on Isifrid.
I said no. I knew exactly what we would find. And it could wait. I was having trouble enough with the day’s disclosures. All I felt, lying there with Stanley, was a vague affinity with the space shuttle whose failed reentry was a cautionary tale, and the thing I had feared most about leaving rehab. Not so much you can’t go home again, as you could die trying.
Thirty-seven
A hour later, I was back in a basement, sitting among my peers, who were delighted to see me. Actually delighted. I did not shirk human contact, I returned embraces as they were given. In attendance were the regulars—Phil, Allan, Fran, and the Blade—a couple people I didn’t know, and Odette, who was talking about her mother. Her mother, I gathered, had died while I was away. And Odette was saying how painful these last few months had been, not for her mother but for herself. “Every night I’d pray to keep her health,” she said. “But it was a lie. I knew it and God knew it. I was praying so hard and loud to drown out what I was really praying for, which was that she’d die. That God would take her. Not for her sake, but for mine.” She jabbed her breastbone with her index. “For my sake. And now I gotta live with that. But you know what? God takes when he sees fit. And I loved my mother. And I know she’s happier now. And somehow, knowing that, I feel stronger. You gotta take care of number one, else you are good for nobody. I got three kids. They need their mama.”
