by Margo Rabb
Kelsey fingered the plastic sheets, touching it all.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “You’re lucky to have had her.”
I sat beside her. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to me.
She lay back in bed, and we stared up at the shapes in the peeled-off paint of the ceiling. We lay in the quiet, and I thought that this was what she meant by lucky: simply this.
SEDUCE ME
Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.
—Gypsy Rose Lee
I nearly had a heart attack when I found the box of condoms in my father’s toilet kit.
I looked away, then back again. I hoped I’d imagined it, but there they were, staring up at me: Trojans, lubricated, ribbed, extra thin for extra pleasure. Oh, God, I didn’t want to think about it.
It was November, and I was on my way to visit him in the hospital again. It had become our home away from home. “My vacation spot,” my father called it. “Better than Green Springs.” His latest complication was an arrhythmia; the doctors had implanted a pacemaker-defibrillator, which stuck out from his waist like a deck of cards. He’d been in and out of the hospital over the last month as they made adjustments; this time he’d forgotten his toilet kit at home. Before I left the house I called Kelsey and told her about the discovery.
“Maybe he needs them to, you know, do it on his own,” she said. “It’s probably more sanitary that way.”
“You think my father’s masturbating?”
“Shh. Your whole neighborhood doesn’t have to know. And every guy does it.” She spoke with the authority of having caught her two brothers at it many a time. “Or maybe he’s not, though,” she considered. “Maybe he’s got somebody.”
“Like who? A girlfriend? Who would go out with my father?”
“What do you think he does when we go to parties on Saturday nights, or when you sleep at my house?”
“He stays at home and watches Murder, She Wrote. I think.” My voice wavered; maybe she was right, maybe he did have some woman on the sly. I never really thought of what he did when I wasn’t there; I just assumed it was the same thing he did when I was there, which was to mope around the house and read the newspaper. For the past two days, while he was in the hospital, I’d slept at Kelsey’s house at night and savored my solitude in the afternoons: sprawled on our living room couch, I ate chocolate chip cookies for lunch, watched steamy soap operas, applied Deep Sea mud masque, and painted my toenails as I talked endlessly on the phone.
I said good-bye to Kelsey and left for New York University Medical Center.
The first thing I saw in his room was an empty pizza box from Earthly Delites lying on his bed tray. I’d brought sliced melon and turkey sandwiches from the corner deli; I set the grocery bag down. “You got pizza delivered?” I asked, not knowing you could do that in a hospital.
“It’s cheeseless. Sylvia brought it,” he said. He nodded at a woman with thick, elbow-length dyed blond hair sitting on a plastic green chair in the corner.
She glanced up from her Astrological Times. She was wearing sunglasses; she took them off to glimpse me, then put them back on. “It’s so sunny,” she said. “Not easy on the glaucoma.” My father introduced us.
“How do you two know each other?” I asked.
His face lit up with pure wonder. “We met three weeks ago, after they put the pacemaker in. They’d just released me, and I got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor by mistake—I didn’t realize it was going up instead of down. I stepped out, and there she was.” He grinned.
“Sylvia has lung cancer,” he continued matter-of-factly. “She never smoked. It’s in remission now—she’s very healthy.” Despite that statement he went on to catalog her additional ailments: allergies to wool, rice, strawberries, peanuts, and eggs, and white sugar didn’t settle well with her either. “Sylvia and I have a lot in common,” he concluded. “Anyway, she knew her surgery would go well because she asked her garoo first.”
“Her what?” I asked. Her kangaroo?
“It wasn’t the guru,” Sylvia said. “It was the tarot cards.” She turned to me. “He gets it all mixed up. I only called the Psychic Network once. I read tarot cards myself.”
My father’s eyes widened with excitement. “But the garoo was right—he said to go in for the surgery three weeks ago, and she did. The day after, she met me.” He beamed.
“You met three weeks ago?” I couldn’t believe my father had met another woman, and all this time I hadn’t known.
“We did!” Sylvia said. “The Magician card came up—it means a great love or marriage is impending. I didn’t understand it then,” she went on, her eyes sparkling, “but I do now.”
My stomach turned over. I excused myself and went into the hallway to call Kelsey.
“My father’s sleeping with a clairvoyant,” I said on the pay phone.
“You still can’t be sure if he’s sleeping with anybody. Maybe he just got the condoms as wishful thinking. Like most guys.”
I felt something queer rise in my throat. “Let’s just not talk about it anymore.”
Our conversation moved on to Cover Girl Nail Slicks and new shoes, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Sylvia. I’d known that my father would start dating sometime. It was even natural. Perhaps I’d even hoped for it, wanted someone to rescue us from Spooky House and from our weekly dinners at Wendy’s, when we sat alongside the hordes of elderly couples squeezing out each other’s ketchup. I didn’t want to be the only person he depended on. But my father was old, with glasses and high-water corduroys, and I’d thought, Who would go out with him?
Sylvia. She was in the bathroom when I returned to my father’s room; finally I was alone with him. “Psychic Network?” I asked. “Tarot cards?”
He shrugged. “Personally, at first I thought it was a crock of shit. But she’s good at it, you know. She has ESP. She knows who’s gonna call before she picks up the phone, and once at her apartment we couldn’t find a missing casserole dish, and she sat down and thought about it, then opened the top cabinet and there it was.” He sounded sincerely impressed. “I really like Sylvia. We can talk to each other.”
I grunted.
“She’s picking me up tomorrow, when they release me.”
“What time? She doesn’t have to—I can leave school early and get you.”
“No, she’ll do it. But we were thinking that afterward we could all go out to eat,” he said.
Sylvia returned from the bathroom then, carrying a cup of water. She was tiny, and my father and I towered over her; I stared at the long white part running through her hair. She removed a vial from her pocketbook and squeezed two droplets into her glass. “I brew my own herbal tinctures in the closet at home,” she explained.
How would I survive this dinner? “Can I invite Kelsey?”
My father looked toward Sylvia. “Well, there’ll already be four of us . . .”
“Four?”
“Felix is coming too,” he said. “Sylvia’s son.”
“Felix,” I told Kelsey. “Felix Feinstein. He’s probably three feet tall. He probably has warts. I bet she didn’t give birth to him; she brewed him up from a tincture.”
“Oh, come on. Stop being so harsh. You never know—he could be cute. The whole thing is kind of touching—like the Brady Bunch.”
“Yeah. The Brady Bunch on crack.”
“Hey, could you get her to tell me my fortune sometime?” she asked.
“What do you want me to do, rent her out at parties?”
She sighed. “You’re so pessimistic. It could work out. Then you wouldn’t be complaining about your father all the time.”
“Don’t even say that. What if it does and Sylvia moves in with us or something, God forbid? Where would all her tinctures go?” I pictured her sitting in our kitchen, miraculously recovering all our missing flatware and cutlery.
“Hey, if nothing else, at least your father’s getting some. That’s more than we can say
for ourselves.”
“Thank you for that lovely image,” I groaned, and we said good night.
Women who care for their husbands their whole lives always die first.
I’d copied that into my journal right after my mother had said it, her fourth night in the hospital. Underneath that I’d scribbled a guideline to my future self: Never marry.
What had she meant, exactly? My mother had given up Rolf and all those other boyfriends, waiting to marry my father until she was thirty-two. And the year after they’d married, he’d had his first heart attack. After all the time I’d spent in the hospital with him, I could see how draining it was to care for him—she’d spent her life doing that.
The upsetting fact was that her death had changed him for the better. She’d complained he wasn’t open or affectionate enough before, and now he was. He’d placed framed, enlarged photos of my mom all over the house, made faithful weekly trips to her gravesite, and spoke openly of how he loved her. And now he wanted to go out, he wanted to talk, but with Sylvia. My mother had never gotten to all the possible futures she’d imagined, yet now here was my father, embarking on a new one. Maybe he’d learned from his mistakes, but Sylvia would get the benefit of that.
It couldn’t work out with him and Sylvia; it wouldn’t be fair. The past shouldn’t allow it.
Dinner was at Dreamfood in the East Village, at five o’clock. When I arrived ten minutes late Sylvia and my father had already started in on an appetizer of braised tofu.
“Sorry we began without you. It’s my hypoglycemia,” Sylvia said. “If I get too hungry, I feel like I’m gonna croak.”
I stared at her outfit, a turquoise velour pantsuit lined with purple.
“It’s reversible,” she said proudly, her eyebrows raised at this ingenuity.
She was extolling the virtues of the Home Shopping Network when Felix walked in. Sylvia had said he was eighteen, but he looked older; he was over six feet tall and tan, with brown hair and blue eyes, and wore a dark gray suit. Normally such an appearance would have an effect on me, but I hardly glanced up from my tofu as we were introduced. I wanted little to do with the Feinstein family.
“Felix had an interview with a Vogue photographer today,” Sylvia said as he placed a large portfolio against the wall. “For an internship. He’s studying to be a fashion photographer. And he’s not even gay!”
Felix laughed and planted a kiss on her cheek.
A fashion photographer. I wondered what he thought of reversible pantsuits. “You two don’t even look alike,” I mumbled, and thought, Lucky for him.
Sylvia held her son’s hand. “Felix is my only son.”
“From her third marriage,” my father explained.
Oh, God.
“Henry passed away from a tumor two years ago,” Sylvia said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The saga of my family was falling even more unnervingly into depths of TV-movieness. Felix could certainly be the star actor: he swigged his wheatgrass juice as if it was chardonnay, and seemed enthralled by my father’s detailed descriptions of defibrillation, and by my father’s theory that the hospital cafeteria’s chicken was really reconstituted breast implants.
And Felix kept asking about me. I didn’t have much to tell. “I’m a sophomore in high school,” I said, thinking that was a depressing enough statement in itself to quiet everybody.
“Your father says you do particularly well in English,” Felix said.
“Yeah, whatever.” What did he care? I wasn’t going to be sucked in by this pseudo-interest.
The conversation continued around me: allergies, ailments, medications, shark cartilage, cooking methods for tempeh, the fat content of texturized vegetable protein, a Health Now article called “Cheese: The Silent Killer.” After a shared slice of carob pie, my father hinted at whether I’d be staying at Kelsey’s tonight.
“Not on a school night,” I said with horror.
“I forgot it was,” he said sheepishly. I knew he wanted to stay at Sylvia’s, but I wasn’t going to let it happen.
“You could get me a taxi,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t pay for one in a million years. “I’ll get killed if I take the subway at this hour. Especially wearing this short skirt.”
My father slouched in his chair, considering the dilemma.
“I’ll get her a taxi,” Felix interrupted. “I have to go over to Third anyway—there are tons of taxis that way.”
It was odd being spoken of as a commodity, a package of loose goods being bargained over. And what did Felix want from me? Why was he being so nice? I wondered if Sylvia had paid him.
She quickly downed her decaf with herbal tincture, and before I could think of any other excuse for why my father had to take me home, he and Sylvia had their coats on and were ready to leave.
“Have a good time!” Sylvia said, and my father didn’t even look back as they walked away.
“Do you know, I’m still hungry,” Felix said when they were out of sight.
My stomach grumbled slightly too. “Soy isn’t very sustaining.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t bad. But you know what I really want? A sundae. With chocolate fudge and real chocolate ice cream. Would you want to share one?”
I wondered if Sylvia and my father had given him a handbook to all my weaknesses. But why not share one with him? I deserved some reward for enduring the evening.
We went to the Village Ice Cream Shoppe and ordered the biggest sundae they had. Gobs of ice cream, fudge, a Belgian waffle, and a thick rich brownie, with sliced bananas and caramel all over it. Ecstasy. Heaven. Orgasmic, Kelsey would say, though eating was as close to orgasming as either of us had ever come.
A half hour later we’d barely made a dent in the mountain of it, but Felix put his spoon down. “Actually, I had another motive for bringing you here. It’s rare—it’s nice—to talk to someone else who’s had a parent who’s died.”
“Yeah, the Dead Parents Club,” I said. “We should get T-shirts.”
“Are you always so sarcastic?”
“No.”
“I know it’s not easy watching your father with another woman. But don’t you want him to be happy?”
“Yes,” I said indignantly, and we ate the rest of the sundae in silence. I did want my father to be happy. Sometimes I felt wronged by him—exactly for what, I wasn’t sure. For not loving my mother enough, or for her death? I couldn’t escape that deep inside me I felt, in some essential way, that he should’ve prevented her death. Or perhaps it was her death that had wronged me, and he was the only one available to blame. But I loved him too—the last two days when he was in the hospital, I’d walked by Wendy’s on my way to the subway with a pit in my stomach, missing him. I missed the quiet hum of his television programs, his daily summations of the New York Times, even his treatises on the perils of wearing miniskirts on the subway. I was dependent on his company, on his conversation, on him, as much—or perhaps even more—than he was on me.
And he had loved my mother, I knew he did. I knew it like the sun comes up, like breathing. I remembered when I was ten, Lucy Gluckman came over and we looked through my parents’ drawers. (We’d already done it at her house, uncovering, among other things, a copy of The Joy of Sex and an X-rated movie we viewed for thirty horrified minutes.) In my mother’s drawer we found a diaphragm. “Ewww!” Lucy had cried, but when I shut the drawer I couldn’t help but feel relief, some odd kind of proof of my parents’ love.
It was just that there was still so much I didn’t comprehend. Like why was I sitting here with Felix right now? Because it wasn’t only the sundae that had drawn me here. A part of me wanted something to happen, to be seduced like the women in my books.
My days were filled with crushes and fantasies. And yet, despite all that Kelsey and I read about eternal love and passionate sex in our romance novels, neither of us had any inkling of it in reality.
But I had plenty in my dreams—in my dreams I was a slut. I dreamed of sex with Matthew Br
oderick, Rob Lowe, Mr. Waller (my math teacher), Steve Madrosian (in my gym class) . . . Sometimes even in the middle of homeroom my mind would go off and undress security guards, the grocer, men I’d seen on the subway, firemen waving from their red trucks. I kept running scenarios, dramas, sexual soap operas continuing each day in class:
Matt Dillon meets me at our high school. He’s come to talk to the drama class, he knows someone who knows someone who knows Mr. Klein, the drama teacher. I’m the only girl in the class who doesn’t fawn over him—I’m sensible, keeping my distance and playing it perfectly cool. (This was a dream.) He likes this. Afterward, the other students leave, and even Mr. Klein has to go. We talk and he kisses me and takes my dress off, and we make love on Mr. Klein’s desk. It hurts at first, but then it feels wonderful. He kisses my body all over. I’ve got chalk on my back. . . .
I wanted to be with a guy, to be lost in him the way I lost myself in books. I imagined that sex would be like that—that it would take away the world, and that afterward there’d be a sense of accomplishment, of having grown older.
The sundae was nearly gone; I stared into the empty bowl.
“I think my father wanted my mother to go out with other men after he died. I know he did. She’d be worse off staying home all alone,” Felix said.
I considered filling him in on the box-of-condoms situation but resisted. I shook my head. “My father’s too old—it’ll give him another heart attack.”
