“I assume your mother has let you in on her latest fiasco-in-the making,” he said, pouring an inch of vodka into the tall glass and rooting around in the chaotic fridge, removing a half-eaten container of yogurt, some mold-furred strawberries in dented plastic, a glass jar with a smear of Marshmallow Fluff left in it. “This refrigerator is exactly like her mind, by the way. Filled with sweet, rotting substances of no use to anyone, least of all herself.”
“I have someone coming in half an hour, Dad,” Deirdre pleaded. “I’m going to need you to stay upstairs for a little while.”
“Stay upstairs?” he asked her with a show of magnanimous agreement. “Of course I’ll stay upstairs! I’ll stay in the closet. She wants a divorce.”
Deirdre’s seventy-year-old mother, Libby, slipped in at that moment wearing a diaphanous pouf of a turquoise nightgown that just covered her matching panties. Her short blond hair was tousled. Mascara seemed to have been applied with feathery brushmarks all around her eyes. She was very tanned.
“That’s right, you old shit,” she snarled, leaning back against the wall. “I’ve had it.”
Don, having cleared the first tier of the fridge, found a bottle of tomato juice in the very back, then theatrically checked the expiration date, squinting, a vaudevillian expression of disgust on his face.
“He can’t even see,” said Libby in a voice hoarse from shouting. “You can’t read that without glasses,” she called out to him. “Stop showing off!”
“I’ll clean out the fridge later, Dad,” said Deirdre.
Breathing heavily through his nose, Don filled the tumbler with tomato juice, seasoning it without haste.
“Guys,” said Deirdre. “This woman is coming in twenty minutes. Can you please stay married that long?”
“Sweetheart,” whimpered Libby, tiptoeing up to Deirdre. She only came up to her daughter’s chin. “He’s killing me. I mean literally. I am dying. I am suffocating. He is so fucking pretentious. I have to save myself.”
“Mom,” said Deirdre, “look. You come to the house. Okay? Just walk over there. Put a coat on. You can take a shower over there. Or I’ll treat you to the beauty parlor. How’s that? And Dad, you go to your den and read, and when the woman leaves, we’ll talk it through. Okay?”
Deirdre rushed her mother over to the big house, holding a yellow slicker around her narrow shoulders. Libby, still in her aqua-blue cloud of a shortie and rain boots, veiny legs kicking out through the open jacket and revealing a streaky orange fake tan, was uncharacteristically silent; Deirdre wondered if this time her parents really would split up. They had only started drinking heavily in the past five years, since they had moved into the parent trap. At first getting sloshed together had bonded them, but it had gotten rapidly ugly.
Deirdre called the beauty parlor in town, made an appointment for her mother, ran back to the parent trap to find her something to wear, then drove her downtown, trying to ignore the tears that were running down Libby’s cheeks and staining her fuchsia velour sweat suit. She made it back to the parent trap just as Mrs. Drexler, her client, drove up.
“Call me Mimi,” said Mrs. Drexler, craning her short neck, standing on tiptoe, and giving Deirdre an awkward hug. They had only met once before. Mrs. Drexler was pinched and petite. She made Deirdre feel enormous. In the living room, Deirdre opened the book of samples she had prepared for the Drexler home, casting a critical eye on her own large hand.
“I just love this beige for the sofa,” said Mrs. Drexler, fingering a swatch with slender digits.
“It’s linen,” said Deirdre.
When she picked Libby up from the beauty parlor, Deirdre found her mother’s spirits had been lifted, along with her hair color. She was chatty on the way home, twice mentioning the possibility of getting breast implants. “Why not?” Libby said breezily, looking out the window, her snub nose in the air, wrinkled little hands with their bitten-down nails limp in her velour lap. As often happened to Deirdre, she found herself wondering how this could possibly be her mother. She seemed more like a girl. It had always been this way. A typical school day in Deirdre’s childhood would start with her mother harrumphing into the kitchen, red pillow lines stamped into her cheek like a road map. Furious that she had to get up early, she’d slam the door open and start frying food: bacon, sausage, eggs. Nothing could keep Libby from her frying pan in the morning. She woke up and reached for the pan. Deirdre always watched her mother’s performance with quiet interest each morning as she ate her cornflakes. This was a kind of statement she was making to her husband and child. She was saying, I’m cooking you a real breakfast, how many mothers do that anymore? Now leave me alone. But once she’d had her coffee, put on her face, and found a cute outfit, maybe a pair of high-heeled boots, she could be kittenish and loving, embracing her daughter and flirting with her husband. Libby’s moods shifted fast. Not that she was an ignorant woman. She had gone to Connecticut College, majoring in American literature. Deirdre used to pore over scrapbooks of her mother’s college days, when she was sloppily sexy, with oversized sweaters, no bra, tousled brown hair, and the same petulant little pout of a mouth she had now. Her eyes were small, downturned, intelligent, and suspicious. Even now, at seventy, she had a kind of puffy charm. Yet over the years—probably because she was married to Don, the most pretentious man on the planet—Libby had come to hate intellectual ambition of any kind. She watched crap TV, read books she bought in the drugstore, and derided anyone who even tried to hold a scrap of an elevated conversation. Yet Libby had, Deirdre knew, a far subtler mind than Don, the Yale man. Don had gone to college on scholarship to study economics. The fact that he had gotten nowhere in life was almost entirely due to his pathological negativity—that and the fact that his parents weren’t socially connected. If she parsed it out, Deirdre could see how her mother had come to be the way she was, and in a way she even respected her for choosing a way to be, rather than blindly becoming. Yet Libby’s childishness riled her, and she found herself getting more and more dour in her mother’s presence, as if to discipline her, or water down her tastelessness. The more time she spent around Libby, the older Deirdre felt.
For Deirdre, there had never been any question of not going to college. Don wouldn’t hear of it. In the end, she chose Duke. She liked the pace of the South, she liked the way the men talked, and she loved being away from her parents. After college, she stayed in Chapel Hill and got pregnant by a nervy business major two years her junior by the name of Armand. Once he graduated, the two of them came back to the Northeast armed with a baby and very little else; they were running out of money—and interest in each other. Armand was a Long Island native and had ambitions to open a restaurant in Westhampton. Within a month of their arrival, however, they were separated. Deirdre was on her own with little Bud.
Having grown up in Connecticut, Deirdre didn’t know people in Long Island. Yet she didn’t want to move back home. The idea of living near her parents, who had driven her nearly crazy before she left for college, was depressing. She couldn’t afford to move to Manhattan, or even Brooklyn, where a couple of her college friends had ended up. So she found an apartment above a dry-cleaning store on Patchogue, Long Island, Main Street, and decided to enjoy it. She relished her weird, disconnected existence shared only with her serious little baby. Deirdre and Bud slept in the same bed every night, curled up like lost puppies. She worked on her short stories whenever he took a nap, got a job eventually, and went out recreationally with the occasional fellow, but the dates were futureless. Bud and Deirdre had twinned, and moved through their days in unspoken complicity. It was as if Deirdre had extended the skin of her self, stretched it over her head like a thin membrane to include her child. As Bud grew up, the two of them coexisted inside that invisible fiber, unreachable, peaceful, until Leslie rescued them back into the world.
Leslie came home from work early to do some paperwork. He had forgotten about Ms. Parr bringing Stevie home. Yet there she was in the living room, leaning ove
r his willowy son. Shivering, leaf-shadowed afternoon sunshine blasted through the plate-glass window, silhouetting the two of them. Leslie watched the boy in profile. His pale irises, suffused with light, shone translucent as two drops of water. Neck bent like a drooping stalk, he was poised, immobile, over a pristine page of paper. Abruptly, his arm flared out, causing an unbroken line to arc from one end of the paper to the other, his hand one with the pencil. The child’s mark was pure, unhurried, confident. Drawing was his solace. Ms. Parr noticed Leslie and smiled.
“Ms. Parr. I forgot you were coming,” he said.
“That’s okay, Jenny let us in,” she said. Leslie walked into the kitchen.
Jenny, his daughter-in-law, was making a cheese sandwich in the kitchen, her baby on her hip.
“Where’s Deirdre?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “She just called and asked me to let Stevie and his teacher in.” Jenny’s hair was in braids. She was wearing a gingham dress. The old spaniel was licking up crumbs at her feet, like Toto’s understudy.
Leslie walked back to the living room. He stood at the doorway and watched his son drawing, the tendrils of Ms. Parr’s hair floating above the paper. He could smell the woodsmoke wafting off her from where he was standing. He saw the hint of a bleached mustache on her upper lip, glinting in the sun.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked her softly. She looked up at him, straightened, smoothing her long cotton dress over those prodigious hips.
“Yes?” she said. He backed up a few steps from the room, nearly to the front door. She followed him, an expectant look on her face.
“Mentally,” he said, barely audibly, though the boy was deaf, in the other room, and engrossed in his drawing, “do you think there’s something?”
“In what way?” said Ms. Parr in a small voice.
“At home, he … he’s unpredictable. You never know. He gets real angry sometimes. Or … sad. Screaming. He hits. I’m not sure how he is at school …”
Ms. Parr looked up at him with a solemn, level gaze. Her humorless honesty had a shriveling effect on him. “I think it would be prudent to have him assessed,” she whispered. “All the behavior you describe is normal, to a point, for a deaf child. They get frustrated. But see? How he is when he draws. Maybe that’s the key.”
Deirdre decided to bring her mother to the main house rather than leave her at the parent trap and risk a big blowout with Don. She was surprised, then, to see her father, shaved and showered, playing with Stevie in the living room. When Don turned and saw his wife, he grabbed his heart. “Who is this glorious woman?” he exclaimed. Libby giggled and sashayed over to the bar. “Mom,” said Deirdre, “it’s three o’clock.”
“I need a drink after all the emotion,” said Libby, one bitten-down hand already strangling a bottle of vermouth.
Deirdre sighed, blinking slowly. In a langorous show of defeat, she tossed off her shoes and fell onto the couch. Stevie ran over, nuzzled up to her. She held the frail boy tight, her eyes shut. Leslie watched them lying there. Every day with Stevie was a struggle for her, Leslie knew. He wished it were otherwise. He wasn’t proud of her, in that way. He wished he could be proud.
That night Leslie kissed naked Deirdre in the dark. A crack of light from the bathroom they shared with Stevie, eternally illuminated for his sake, limned the outlines of her cheek, her arm, the rounded pitch of her hip, with silvery strokes of light. He swept the hair back from her face with his rough palm. She lay on her side, slid her hand over his massive shoulder, down his back. “You’re the only man in the world who can make me feel small,” she whispered.
“You are small,” he said. “You’re my tiny little wife.” As she smiled, a glistening thread ran along her temple. Leslie wiped the tear away with his thumb.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just … I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.
“Sometimes I get scared,” she whispered.
“Of what?”
“How much I need you.” He took her in his arms, her full, warm flesh relaxed against his taut belly. He nestled his face into her neck, felt her heart beating at the base of her throat, the skin vibrating against his lips.
13
I sat basking on a warm windowsill recently scrubbed by one of Masha’s many sisters, or possibly the housekeeper, in preparation for the coming Shabbat. I had realized some time ago that I didn’t need to go anywhere in order to keep up with Leslie or Masha. I couldn’t escape them. Their two stories were switched back and forth in my mind ruthlessly. The only thing that prevented me from going mad during this period was the sensual delight of sublunary existence. I had, in the past days, become fat from the nano-scraps unwittingly left around by the scores of children, cousins, friends, and neighbors bouncing around in that house on any given day. It was a fly’s Eden. Not that it was dirty—Pearl spent much of her time sucking up dust with her vacuum, wiping up or sweeping crumbs, spraying sterilizing sprays all over every ceramic or glass surface—and yet still the specks fell from the food. For me, one iota was a feast. And I was not the only fly attracted by this bonanza. Other samples of my species—largely female, I am happy to announce—were born in the Edelman house every day of the year. I had achieved a bit of a reputation among the girls by now, and the virgins tended to congregate coquettishly around me, gathering like, well, flies, hoping I would inseminate them.
I never realized it before, but there is a charming little mating ritual for houseflies: the male, having spotted the female (there were, I admit, occasional encounters with male flies, but these were flirtations, I assure you), begins to follow her, occasionally beating his wings very quickly and making a distinct buzzing noise. The female, if a virgin, might slow down at this (female flies only like to mate once). The male continues to follow. The female pretends she doesn’t know what’s going on and walks along, nonchalantly licking up stray drops of food or excrement. Then—this is my favorite part, and I have to say I take my hat off to the Creator for being so generous to even the lowly fly—the male sneaks up behind the female and gives her vagina a little lick. He didn’t have to give us that, but he did. The female is then often somewhat more interested, opens her wings, and the male strikes, leaping onto her while curving his abdomen forward and entering her, stroking her face. We could remain in this happy position for up to two hours. Though I am not one hundred percent sure I was fertile, being a demon, I did fuck a lot of flies that spring, and, whatever their paternity, a generation of them bashed their way out of maggots—so many that mother Pearl was forced to buy a selection of fly swatters, and I nearly lost my life on a number of occasions. Pearl Edelman had a vicious swat and surprisingly good coordination. I did not give much thought as to whether these new flies—very possibly my own children—were incarnated souls, or just flies. To be honest, I was so incapacitated by the stories of my two humans as they flashed through my poor brain that I was barely able to think at all. My only recreational activity was lust. Its satisfaction brought me a blissful, fleeting respite from the stories of Leslie and Masha.
I did, however, try to remain in Masha’s presence as much as possible. Her animal beauty soothed me; her pain saddened me. I had accepted the fact that I could not have her and that my love for her was an absurdity. All I wanted now was to change her destiny.
Masha woke from a nap but kept her eyes shut, alert for the pain. She took in a breath that swept through her chest, searching for a catch, a dig, an impediment. She sat up carefully. Nothing hurt! She swiftly said her morning prayer of thanks for being returned to her body, reached under the bed to draw out the water-filled red plastic bowl and pitcher, performed her ablutions, dried her hands on a towel that was crumpled near the bed. She stood up, tentatively at first, then, pain-free, she bounded past the tidily made beds of her two younger sisters, Suri and Yehudis. She passed the desk the three of them shared, covere
d with Suri’s earnest homework, out the door, along the hall, passing the petite Sri Lankan housekeeper, Trina, who was vacuuming, and clattered down the stairs. Pearl, who was in the kitchen making challah, looked up at Masha, worried.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Masha announced, automatically touching the mezuzah screwed into the wall by the door, then kissing her hand.
“Baruch Hashem,” said her mother. “You still need to take it easy.” Masha took an apple from a basket and bit into it with gusto.
“Wash the apple,” said Pearl.
“Can I help?” asked Masha, holding the apple under the tap.
“You sit down,” said Pearl, using her wrist to wipe a stray hair from her flushed face, then retying her headscarf good and tight with dough-covered fingers. Eighteen-year-old Yehudis, who looked much like Masha, only rounder, with smaller eyes, her prettiness lacking the haunted fierceness of her sister’s, smiled sympathetically.
“You want some tea?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” answered Masha, yawning luxuriously and sitting on a bench beside the long Formica table, drawing her knees up to her chest, pulling her long dress down to her ankles. “Where is everybody?”
“The baby’s sleeping, and I let the little ones take out the portable DVD thing because it’s Friday,” said Pearl.
“They’re watching The Lion King again,” said Yehudis in a teasing tone.
Jacob's Folly Page 10
