Scary Old Sex

by Arlene Heyman

  “‘All right, Gussie,’ he says. ‘Then we’re getting married—right away.’ And we did—the next day.”

  How much of this story is fabricated? As an eleven-year-old, Marilyn had fought back tears at the wedding—her father had been dead less than a year. It was held at a synagogue, and her mother had her hair done up with reddish streaks and wore a fancy wine-colored dress with décolletage. There was a crowd and a big white cake, which said CONGRATULATIONS GUSSIE AND JACK! How could it all have been put together in twenty-four hours? And had her mother really never slept with Jack before? Marilyn had come home a couple of evenings from Girl Scout meetings and found the front door chain locked; she’d waited quite a while in the cold for her mother to open it.

  Does Gussie talk about her three husbands incessantly because Marilyn has never had any? And the story of refusing to have sex before marriage, is that cooked up because she suspects Marilyn of having affairs, which Gussie disapproves of?

  Marilyn has had a few affairs, one before Huang, several after, although not immediately after; she even had a brief fling with a woman, an inhalation therapist working at a nearby hospital. But Marilyn is discreet around her daughter, perhaps too discreet. Lately Mi-yay has taken to saying, “Mama, go out! Stop clinging to that one dead Chinese dude! I don’t want to bear all the responsibility for you!” (Marilyn wonders, a little bitterly, what responsibility the girl thinks she is bearing out in Berkeley and Xian. Although Mi-yay is entitled to her own life.) But Marilyn has never again experienced the passion she felt for that one dead Chinese dude.

  In some ways, it has been a lonely life. Her work keeps her blood flowing—she has no intention of ever retiring—and her daughter has given her joy. Gives her joy.

  Then she thinks her mother, of course, must be lonely, too. Perhaps it is paranoid to imagine there is some competitive motive behind her mother’s stories; perhaps her mother is only recounting past glories, even confabulated past glories.

  “Let’s play gin,” Gussie says, and Marilyn gets up right away to take the cards out of the desk. They often play during Marilyn’s visits. Her mother is still sharp at cards, so usually it is a real game. They both enjoy it. Lately, her mother has unwittingly taken to tilting her cards and Marilyn can see them if she doesn’t dutifully avert her gaze. Today Marilyn feels she has to win, and if it takes looking at her mother’s cards, so be it. During her mother’s tilt, Marilyn sees that her mother has two kings; Marilyn sequesters her lone king, which she would have discarded had she not seen her mother’s hand. The knock is ten or under. After a few picks from the deck, her mother discards one king. Marilyn does not know whether she should pick up this king, counting on her mother to discard the third one so Marilyn will have a set. Her mother always throws out high cards, understandably, when the knock is high. So Marilyn picks up the king. Her mother then takes a card from the deck and knocks, using the third king as her knocking card. Marilyn is stuck with, among other cards, the two kings, which are worth ten points each. Her mother wins by forty-one points, a sizable victory. Gussie grins widely, exposing two stubs of teeth in the dead center of her lower jaw and a few empty spaces on the sides where molars used to be. Marilyn, angry at herself for losing so roundly and even after cheating (serves her right!), wonders when was the last time she took her mother to have her teeth cleaned.

  Looking at that jack-o-lantern jaw, Marilyn has to remind herself that as a child she thought her mother very beautiful. When Gussie was out of the house, Marilyn would often sneak into her mother’s bedroom (she never thought of it as her parents’ bedroom, although, of course, it was) to try on a see-through nightgown or a pair of high-heeled strapless shoes. (Marilyn does not want to look down now at her mother’s wide black orthopedic shoes.) And she remembers Gussie, whom she’d disdained as a teenager for having “no intellectual interests”—which was not inaccurate—once explaining “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to her when she was home on college break and having trouble writing a paper on modernist poetry. Impressed and momentarily humbled, she’d asked her mother, “How did you understand that?”

  “Oh, it’s just from living and loving—you’ll catch on as you get older.”

  Now Marilyn collects the rotten cards and shuffles them.

  Gussie continues looking very, very proud. “You may be a fancy schmancy doctor, but I’m still a better cardplayer!”

  “Well, we’re not finished yet,” Marilyn responds. She is surprised at how churlish she sounds.

  “So what’s new with my granddaughter, Mi-yoo, Mi-yay? Why didn’t you name her Miriam or even Mary?” Gussie is still beaming. “How is she? Way out there. Any chance she’ll become a doctor?” From the lamp table she picks up a pearl-framed photograph of Mi-yay, one of her in high school, ice-skating in a lemon-colored short tulle skirt and long-sleeved silk top. She is trim. Her black hair is pulled back in a tight bun and she has a concentrated, happy look on her face.

  Marilyn tries to sound nonchalant, although she is still irritated. “Oh, Mi-yay’s fine, Mom. I don’t think she wants to be a doctor. She’s considering majoring in Chinese literature. Maybe she’ll become a doctor of Chinese literature.”

  Gussie waves dismissively, her gold ring glinting. “What can you do with Chinese literature? You can’t make any money off of Chinese literature.”

  Marilyn is dealing the cards. She counts and recounts them to be sure she hasn’t given her mother an extra card. Then she remembers she has to give her mother an extra card. Marilyn lost the last hand, so her mother gets to discard. “Maybe Mi-yay will become a professor. A professor of Chinese literature.”

  Gussie is positively gleeful. “A professor at Harvard!” Neither Marilyn nor her brother got into Harvard undergraduate or Harvard medical school, to Gussie’s chagrin.

  Marilyn waits for her mother to pick up her cards and arrange them and discard. This takes Gussie a considerable while these days. Marilyn herself doesn’t have two cards that match. She is disgusted. She gets up and turns on a lamp beside her mother so Gussie will see better.

  Years ago, when Marilyn wanted to adopt, Gussie was adamantly against it. “No one will marry you. Who wants a forty-eight-year-old woman with an infant? With a Chinese infant!” It was then that her mother told her something she’d never revealed before. While Gussie’s first husband lay dying of cancer, Gussie was pregnant. She found a “doctor” in Newark, and there, for three hundred dollars (she’d bargained him down from five hundred), in a dark back room, on newspapers, she’d had an abortion. Marilyn has wondered over the years, should she have thrown her arms around her mother? But Gussie had not looked sad. She seemed to be presenting her action as practical, indeed exemplary behavior. Marilyn had certainly felt sad, but she had also felt angry and manipulated, blindsided.

  Gussie never gave her approval for the adoption, but she bought the layette and paid for a year’s worth of Pampers when Marilyn returned from China with Mi-yay. And had Macy’s deliver baby intercoms for every room in Marilyn’s apartment. Later, Gussie went to ice-skating meets, insisted the girl be bat mitzvahed (Marilyn left it up to her daughter, who declined), and, in her wheelchair, attended Mi-yay’s high school graduation.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Gussie suddenly yells, dropping her cards.

  Marilyn quickly helps her mother move from the couch to the wheelchair.

  “Come with me!” her mother cries out.

  “Why?”

  “I need you to pull down my pants!” There is anxiety, almost panic, in her mother’s voice.

  “Mom, since when do you need help with your pants?”

  “Hurry up! Push me!”

  “I’m pushing you!”

  In the small bathroom Marilyn puts the brakes on the wheelchair so her mother can lean against it to stand up. Then Marilyn shimmies down her mother’s slacks and yanks down her underpants, but she is not quite fast enough. Some loose beige-colored stool splats out onto her mother’s buttocks and the back of a t
high before her mother turns and manages to land on the toilet seat. Gussie’s face contorts and whitens around her lipsticked cheeks. A volley of explosive sounds emanates from her. The bathroom is instantly malodorous. Gussie leans over and grabs her loose belly.

  “Are you all right, Mom? Are you all right?”

  Gussie is grunting, lost in concentration. Or is it pain?

  Can Marilyn leave the bathroom? Wouldn’t it be kind to give her mother some privacy?

  But her mother may need her.

  After a few minutes Gussie straightens up. She pees voluminously. Marilyn is trying to breathe shallowly. Although she is no stranger to blood and urine and feces, and she sees many people unclothed in the emergency room, almost none of whom are lovely, she does not want to see her mother’s scrawny, veiny legs and nearly hairless pubic area.

  What is wrong with her mother? But Marilyn knows that a little incontinence in someone her mother’s age is not unusual.

  As her mother wipes herself, she gets a yellow-brown streak on the right sleeve of her pale-blue pantsuit. “Damn!” Gussie says. Grabbing some more toilet paper, she tries to clean her sleeve with it, but she is awkward with her left hand and succeeds only in soiling her fingers.

  “Hold on, Mom, wait!”

  Gussie takes more paper to clean her fingers and ends up with both hands besmirched. “Get me out of here!” she yells, grabbing on to one of the armrests of the wheelchair. There is now a faint yellow-brown blush on the dark armrest.

  “Don’t move! Stay put, do you hear me?!” Marilyn’s voice is higher than usual, almost as shrill as Gussie’s. She wants to call for an orderly, or a nurse, but she is not at her hospital.

  “Where are you going?” her mother cries out, nearly rising from the toilet.

  “Down to the front desk!” Marilyn says in what she hopes is a commanding tone. “There must be someone who can give us a hand.”

  “No, no!” Gussie whispers. “Don’t tell anyone, do you hear me?”

  “Mom—”

  “Don’t leave me!” Gussie howls. She waves her arms in the air.

  Afraid her mother will clutch her hair or pound a dirty fist against the wall, Marilyn moves away from the door and hurriedly returns to the stinking bathroom.

  Gussie reaches for her daughter’s hands.

  Marilyn backs away in the small room.

  “Shush!” Marilyn says, not meeting her mother’s eyes. Confused and uneasy, Marilyn tries to turn the volume down. “Don’t touch anything,” she says—quietly, she hopes. In her mind she hears herself singing, “Everybody loves a baby, that’s why I’m in love with you, shitty baby.”

  “What? What?” Gussie yells. She claps her hands twice, as if for a servant. “Just get my pants up. Get me out of here!”

  The microscopic fecal cloud her mother must have created with each clap!

  Marilyn explains, as from a very great distance—although she is only (still) two arms’ lengths away, standing with her calves up against the cold bathtub—that she will have to clean Gussie, change her jacket, maybe her underpants.

  “I’m not dirty!” Gussie cries out. “I’m your mother!”

  “Look at your hands!”

  But Gussie bucks up and down on the toilet seat, one hand on the wall, the other on the sink for leverage. “Get me out of here!”

  If Marilyn has to wrestle with her, how will Marilyn clean her up? How clean herself up? Marilyn sees two naked women struggling in the mud.

  “Where are you going?” Gussie whines.

  From the kitchen Marilyn gets a pink plastic bowl and half fills it with warm soapy water.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  Marilyn explains slowly and, she hopes, patiently, as if she were talking to two-year-old Mi-yay—she is trying for an almost crooning tone—how they will both wash their hands for starters, just put everybody’s hands, four hands, twenty fingers, in the soapy water. “Remember, Ma, how you taught me—after the toilet—wash-uh, wash-uh, wash-uh.” Marilyn puts her own hands in first. How will she wash the woman without gloves? Ah, it is her mother!—and keeps singsonging to her. Gussie looks doubtful, but after a while allows her hands to be moved into the water. “Rub-a-dub-dub,” Marilyn says. “You used to tell me that.” Did her mother tell her that? Marilyn even manages to get her mother’s nail brush off the sink counter and into the water.

  “That’s enough!” Gussie suddenly screams, and Marilyn realizes she is bruising her mother’s thin skin with the brush and slowly, regretfully, throws it overboard. Rinses her mother’s hands and pats them dry. Then she gets her mother’s arms out of the jacket and drops it into the sink and turns on the hot water.

  “You’re ruining my suit!”

  “Shh, shhh, little dear,” and then, inspired, Marilyn sings, “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

  “Who the hell are you talking to?” Gussie slaps a clean hand out at Marilyn but misses her face, barely grazes her shoulder. Gussie slaps out again, but Marilyn has quickly backed away. Her mother sits sputtering on the toilet in a blue sleeveless cotton shirt, the flesh of her upper arms dangling, a few wisps of gray hair hanging from her armpits.

  Careful to keep out of striking distance, Marilyn washes the armrests of the wheelchair—Just whistle while you work, she thinks but doesn’t sing, although she does give a little whistle. “Up now, Mother, come on, dear, stand up.” As they both know, once Gussie is up, she will lose her balance if she lashes out. She stays seated. Marilyn stays standing behind the wheelchair. Finally, half clacking her tongue, half whimpering, Gussie slowly, jerkily, rises and leans against the armrests so Marilyn can wash her butt and thighs. Wipe her mother’s asshole until the sponge comes away clean. “Clean as a whistle,” Marilyn beams, showing the sponge to her mother.

  Gussie goes silent.

  Marilyn gets the slacks and underpants off over her ankles and shoes, leaving the underpants to soak in the sink, although it is possibly overkill—no, there is dried shit on the waistband; when did that get there?—helps her mother into clean underpants from the dresser. Marilyn’s sure hands are unsteady. After inspecting the powder-blue slacks, she pulls them up over her mother’s legs and gets the elastic waistband above her mother’s belly.

  Should she hire an attendant for her mother? But how can Marilyn afford that?

  She lays a sweater over her mother’s bare slumped shoulders, then helps her get back into the wheelchair and gives her a little push out of the bathroom.

  Marilyn sprays the toilet seat with disinfectant, sprays the air in repeated vigorous lunges as if she is attacking mosquitoes. Then she washes her own hands, washes her arms up to the elbows nearly the full length of time that surgeons must, though she longs to run from the room. Then she rubs soap and water over the shoulder of her jersey where her mother slapped her, even though she is almost sure her mother’s hand was clean. Any minute, she expects Gussie to yell from the living room, “What are you doing in there? Are you here to visit me or what?” But there is no word. Marilyn finds one yellowish fecal fingerprint on the wall and scrubs at it, cleans the sink, then washes her hands again briefly. At last she leaves the bathroom and closes the door tightly behind her.

  Her fingertips are water wrinkled. Half-moons of sweat glisten on the underarms of her black jersey. She feels vaguely tremulous.

  Some fancy schmancy doctor.

  But she is not displeased with herself.

  She sits down in a heavy armchair facing her mother. Gussie does not look at her. After a few minutes, Marilyn asks in what she hopes is a matter-of-fact tone, “How long has this been going on?”

  No answer.

  What is the right way to put it? “How long … that … you can’t get your pants down … by yourself?”

  Gussie keeps a fierce silence.

  “Mom?”

  In a sudden rush, Gussie cries out, “I can’t walk. I can’t hear. I can ha
rdly—pull down my own pants!” A tear comes out of one eye. “And other people can dance.”

  Marilyn goes to her mother. She touches the tear on her mother’s cheek. She squats down and kisses her mother’s forehead lightly. Marilyn can still smell the odor from the bathroom and she feels suddenly like putting a cloth over her nose, as she has seen people do on the TV news when they are looking for dead relatives among a slew of bodies massacred days earlier.

  Will her own daughter feel the same way one day? Will she ever have to clean her up, and in what humor will Mi-yay do this? Will she even be there to do it?

  And Marilyn wonders for the first time, unbelievable that it is for the first time, how much longer will her mother live? For a moment she feels profound grief, and then she is aware of a wish to get it over with, to get Gussie into the ground.

  Marilyn envisions reaching into her pocketbook for the Swiss Army knife she keeps there. And still bending over her mother—perhaps it will look as if she is embracing her—Marilyn might punch swiftly through her trachea, hack at both carotids. Bright blood spurts wildly out of Gussie, who gasps, gurgles, looks disbelievingly, malevolently, at Marilyn.

  Marilyn moves the cards aside and helps her mother flop onto the velvet couch. She hands her mother her cards. Marilyn will discuss the attendant with her brother the obstetrician, who is wealthy but stingy. She will push him to split the cost with her.

  They play two more games of gin and Marilyn does not cheat. Her mother wins one, Marilyn wins one.

  DANCING

  One

  I am sitting in my first-period class, Calculus AB, which I signed up for because I’m lazy. The really genius kids, and there are a lot of them here, take Calc BC, which would have been a shitload of work. But maybe I should have done it because I am sitting in class feeling bored and trying not to look as if I’m staring at the really knockout breasts of Gina Pappadopolis (her face is lovely, too, but if you look at someone’s face, they notice faster) or just plain dozing off. The teacher is making diagrams on the board and yada-yada-yada-ing and even though I know it won’t be great for getting into college if I don’t ace this mother (which I should be able to do with my eyes shut), unfortunately, my eyes are shut. My mom is starting in on me about college these days. “You’re a junior and this year counts and it would be masochistic of you …” She’s a psychiatrist, my mom is, you could tell? And maybe she feels she has to keep nagging me so I don’t think she’s stopped being my mother and become my dad’s full-time nurse, which is all right with me, her being his nurse, my father needs her.