Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  I ask the simpletons if they’re comfortable with nudity, which gets them all giggly and it becomes pretty obvious everybody wants to take it off. I even get them to dry hump on the mildewy basement couch. My intention is to demean them but they’re having a great time. They think they’re on a reality show. I give ‘direction,’ criticize how they look, walk and talk and they take it. I speak with authority, ‘direct’ Kirsten and Bonehead to fake it doggy-style. None of this makes me feel any better. I start thinking I’m no better than they are.

  On the radio a Jewish woman was talking about her mother who went up the chimney at Auschwitz. When the Gestapo showed up, the mother calmly told her daughter to run, to always keep moving so the Nazis could never find her. She gave her a leather bag full of papers. She told her daughter to keep the papers no matter what. The girl refused to believe she would never see her mother again and spent years searching for her. She couldn’t bring herself to open the bag and look at the papers because she feared it was a war diary and that reading it would rip her apart. Sixty years later she looked in the bag. The papers turned out to be a novel about the war. She had it published and it became a bestseller, sixty-four years after her mother wrote it. She said its publication helped her to understand what the point of her survival was. When you read a story like that you have to wonder what the point is in your survival.

  Bonehead and Kirsten are looking at me, waiting for direction. ‘Go home,’ I tell them.

  I sit on the mouldy couch thinking to be or not to be. I don’t see how taking arms against a sea of troubles ends them. There’s always more shit coming down the pipe.

  ‘All clear?’ the Tree Frog asks.

  ‘Yep.’

  He pulls clothes out of the dryer and starts folding them. I never fold, just stuff things in drawers. Vaughn has become our official laundry boy. I watch him fold a pair of my underpants, tucking in the crotch then folding the two sides. He mates socks and forms them into little balls. All this takes time, which I have.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asks finally.

  ‘Bitchin’.’

  ‘Do you feel any better?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Than before.’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘What happened here.’

  ‘What happened here?’ I know he’s hoping to assist me toward enlightenment, create an opportunity for self-reflection that will make me see, from another angle, that the world is resplendent with nobility.

  ‘You tell me,’ he says.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘What happened here?’

  ‘Who’s on first?’ I ask.

  ‘No, who’s on second. What’s on first?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I dunno’s on shortstop. Who’s on first?’

  ‘First’s on second.’

  ‘Who’s on first?’

  He keeps staring at me and I consider telling him I don’t need a straight man or big brother or a conscience but that would be reacting. I start singing, ‘Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don’t care if I never get back … ’

  ‘I’m making frittata, do you want some?’

  ‘Fri-who?’

  ‘Spanish omelette with potatoes.’

  ‘No, gracias. I’ve got to watch my figure.’

  I resume singing, more loudly, ‘Let me root, root, root for the home team. If they don’t win it’s a shame. For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out, at the old ball game.’

  He retreats and I am alone with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

  Kadylak’s blood count is low and she has a fever. They’ve put her on an antibiotic drip and have stuck another needle into her to get blood samples. I tell myself not to freak because at least they’re not putting her on a ventilator. When they wheel in the X-ray cart they tell me to leave. Even though Kadylak’s pretty out of it, she won’t release my hand. I loosen her fingers and tell her I’ll be right back. I wrap her hands around Sweetheart the penguin. I stand outside her door and try not to despise everyone. Molly, the princess, is on the prowl. I try not to despise her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing.’ She knows I’m lying. Kids with cancer smell lies.

  ‘Then how come you’re just standing there?’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Her parents are in there. I think I saw a new dvd in the playroom. Go check it out.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Go see.’ She schleps away, dragging her iv pole. The doctors and nurses bustle out and don’t notice, me which is good because they don’t want me in there. Kadylak’s still conscious but fitful and seems to be looking through me, to the other side. ‘Do you want me to read?’ I ask.

  ‘Tilly.’

  A blood infection can turn septic and kill one of these kids in hours.

  Simon, the farmer, is getting married and old Tilly’s pretty broken up about it. He invites her to the wedding but doesn’t dance with her because he’s too busy shtupping his wenchy wife. Dejected, Tilly heads up the road where old Hal is waiting for her. He jumps her but she fights him and he tumbles off the road, smacking into a tree. He tells her he can’t move.

  ‘He’s lying,’ Kadylak says.

  Hal says his back is busted. He begs Tilly to get help before nightfall because after nightfall the animals will get him.

  ‘Let them,’ Kadylak says. Her colour’s getting worse, her hands are mottled; her fingers and toes turning purple. I run and get a nurse. They wheel her to icu. Put her on a ventilator.

  I’m flinging a Nerf ball around with Wackoboy when Kadylak’s father shows up.

  ‘Where is she?’ he wants to know.

  I explain, watch him fall back against the wall. I tell him to wait while I find a nurse. They’re all busy staring at monitors. I get loud. ‘He doesn’t know what’s going on! His wife’s sick!’

  Brenda, fast-moving and efficient, grabs my arm. ‘Keep your voice down.’ She walks me down the corridor. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I said Intensive Care. I told him about the ventilator.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be discussing the patient’s care with the parents.’

  ‘He wanted to know. Nobody was around.’

  ‘You can always find us. It’s late, you should be going home.’

  I leave him with her. I should be holding his hand. Kids on ventilators don’t look comfortable. Beyond all the usual tubes and wires, they’re getting air forced into them. The machine wheezes. Just as the air’s going out and the kid starts to look half-normal, the ventilator blows another tornado into them. I try not to picture Kadylak’s torment. I try not to picture her father watching her. But it’s all in my head. And I forgot to give her the spinning tops.

  17

  ‘Why,’ demands Mr. Lund while digging around in his fanny pack for Tic Tacs, ‘did you hold auditions before we’ve even read the play?’

  ‘It was just very preliminary,’ I say, ‘to help me with the writing process. I’ve hit a bit of a block.’ I don’t tell him I’m disgusted with myself and will never pick up a pen again.

  ‘I’ve heard reports that you discussed nudity.’

  ‘Only in the abstract, to help with character development.’

  He pops a couple of Tic Tacs and fondles his beard. ‘Mr. Huff and I,’ he warns, ‘cannot offer our full endorsement until we read the play.’

  ‘I understand,’ I say. I don’t tell him I don’t give a goose’s turd about him or Huff or my grades. All I want is Kadylak running through fields of buttercups.

  I scram to the library so the maladjusted can’t ask me if they got a part.

  ‘You must read Clarissa by Samuel Richardson,’ Mrs. Wartowski tells me. ‘He invented the psychological novel, predates Austen.’ I don’t want to make her cry by asking if it’s about some girl pining for some guy so I just tak
e the book and start reading. Of course it’s about a virgin everybody wants to deflower. Because Clarissa’s dutiful, her grandfather leaves her all his cash and property, which puts her evil siblings’ noses out of joint, not to mention her nasty parents and uncle. Being dutiful and all that, Clarissa signs her cash and property over to padre. Well, the next thing you know, he’s trying to marry her off to some congenital idiot who’s also got cash and property. Meanwhile her sister Bella’s been getting hot and heavy with a no-good rake named Lovelace. Clarissa’s been watching these goings-ons and fancies him. She starts penning him amorous letters. Old Lovelace drops Bella so he can pursue this pious, chaste virgin. Stealing her virginity becomes his obsession. You have to wonder how we went from preserving our virginity at all costs to offering it to any scuzzbag just to get it over with. Nobody wants to be caught dead being a virgin these days. A hundred years ago, if you lost your hymen you pretty much were dead. Lovelace writes to his pal Jack about how he’s going to do Clarissa, how he despises her piety and self-importance. Meanwhile he’s penning her fake love letters. The whole novel is written in letters, which I guess is what’s so psychological about it. So old Clarissa, on the run from her evil family and the congenital idiot, falls for Lovelace’s lies about setting her up with a pious lady in London. The pious lady turns out to be the madam of a brothel, and old Lovelace is in the next room, clawing at Clarissa’s door.

  If I phone the hospital they won’t tell me anything.

  Old Swails is blaming Queen Isabella of Castile for the Spanish Inquisition.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t like Ferdinand had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Ferdinand was King Consort,’ Swails says. ‘Isabella was the ruler.’

  ‘He was as rabid a Christian as she was. There wouldn’t have been a Holy War if it weren’t for Ferdinand.’

  ‘What brings you to that conclusion?’ he says, switching to Prince Charles mode.

  ‘Women didn’t lead troops.’

  ‘She planned the campaigns.’

  ‘Yeah, but only Ferdinand was dumb enough to carry them out when they were short of cash. Genocide costs money. The Christians had blown entire kingdoms on trying to eliminate the Muslims and the Jews for centuries.’

  ‘How does this make Ferdinand responsible for the Inquisition?’

  ‘He was chomping at the bit even though Isabella said, “Whoa, boy, we’re broke.” She was supposed to get some cash when she married the creepy old King of Portugal. But King Enrique III, her sleazebag half-brother, found out she’d secretly married Ferdinand and went ballistic. He took away all the towns that were her only source of income. You’d think that would have cooled his jets but Ferdinand went on a killing rampage anyway.’ This, of course, brings to mind Clarissa’s situation when she refuses to marry the congenital idiot. Her father disowns her, leaving her destitute. All through history girls have been forced to marry hideous men or be left with nothing.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ I say, ‘Isabella was the one who sponsored Columbus. She must have had some smarts, even if she was a Jesus freak.’ I have to admit, she’s not on Drew’s Extraordinary Women shelf, probably because of all that Inquisition torturing and murdering.

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ Kirsten asks. ‘This is like, totally depressing.’

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ I ask her.

  She twirls her hair, thinking hard. ‘I don’t see why history has to be about people killing everybody all the time.’

  ‘What should it be about?’

  ‘Art, and I mean, like, palaces and stuff.’

  ‘They had to kill people to pay for art and palaces and stuff,’ I explain. ‘Henry VIII attacked all the monasteries so he could top up his treasury. His soldiers were raping nuns.’

  ‘Could we stay inside one century for once?’ Swails asks me. ‘Last time I looked we were discussing the fifteenth.’ He hates the way I jump around.

  ‘It’s all the same stuff,’ I say.

  I’m pretty sure old Swails is a wife-beater.

  ‘I asked for extra butter,’ I say. The attitudinal Muslim server sneers at me and I want to throw a burqa over him, see how he likes it. How are you supposed to tell all those covered women apart? I read somewhere that Afghani kids cling to their mothers because if they lose sight of them they’ll start chasing after some other covered woman. You’ve got zip peripheral vision in a burqa. The women are constantly tripping in the bombed-out streets. Plus they get headaches and chronic neck pain from the weight of the fabric.

  I phoned Connie Sheep’s Ass, got her voice mail. She sounds like a putz. I didn’t leave a message.

  ‘Did you study for Swails’ test?’ Tora asks me. She, of course, is studying.

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘So you don’t know who Catherine of Aragon’s parents were?’

  ‘Isabella and Ferdinand.’

  You have to wonder why the Muslims and the Jews, since they’ve both been persecuted forever, can’t get it together to form an alliance and blast the Christians. If they bombed the Christians instead of each other, they could take over the world. The way I see it, Christians have been top dog way too long. Old Isabella was only obsessed with discovering the Americas because she wanted to convert the pagans to Christianity. If you think about it, all Christians have ever done is invade, spread disease and exploit people and resources. Marco Polo was different, of course, hanging out with the Mongols, learning their language. He even started bathing regularly instead of stinking up the place. He couldn’t get over how Kublai Khan let religions coexist, didn’t run around slaughtering people if they didn’t believe in his god. Nobody was starving in China and the roads were paved with stones. No wonder old Marco didn’t return to muddy, bug-infested Europe for twenty-five years.

  I phoned Connie Sheep’s Ass because I was feeling guilty about ignoring her after reading about that Jewish writer going up the chimney and her daughter carrying her papers around for sixty years. I’ll get over it.

  Rossi swoops to our table. ‘They’re Twittering that I’m having sex with Babineaux.’

  ‘Are you having sex with Babs?’ Tora asks.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘You seemed interested.’

  ‘Particularly in his ambidexterity,’ I add.

  ‘I wasn’t serious.’ Rossi starts nibbling on a Boston Cream she’ll puke up later.

  ‘So, just ignore it,’ I say. Cyber-bullying is pretty common. People make up all kinds of stuff.

  ‘It could get him into trouble,’Rossi says. ‘Remember when Kirsten got everybody to agree online that Ms. Egan molested her?’

  Ms. Egan was gay and gave Kirsten lousy marks and sent her to the office whenever she was late, which was all the time. You don’t do this to a queen bee. Even with the allegations unproven, Ms. Egan’s career took a dive. There’s no question Kirsten has leadership skills.

  ‘Why don’t you stop reading what she’s writing about you?’ I suggest.

  ‘Because it’s there. Everybody’s reading it.’

  ‘Not I,’ Tora says.

  ‘Nobody cares, Ross. You’ve got this idea that people give a shit. They don’t. They don’t even give a shit about Kirsten. They trail her because it’s easy, it means they don’t have to think.’

  Before she became a boy toy, Rossi was an artist. Her favourite painter was David Milne and she tried to paint like him with lots of specks of colour. He did a painting the night his son was born that had huge snowflakes in it. Rossi went wild over the painting because she said it breathed joy. She said Milne was always trying to breathe paint onto paper. I got her a book on Milne, which I read since she just looked at the pictures. Old David never recovered from the carnage he saw during World War I. He was commissioned by the Brits to paint what he saw, charred bodies on tanks and all that. When he came back he moved to a cabin by some lake and never talked to anybody, only his wife and kid in the summer. He said you have to make your own small world perfe
ct in an imperfect one. Even though he had to crap in the woods and haul water and eat fried eggs and potatoes every single day, the cabin was his perfect world.

  ‘I hope this means you’re not going to Nicole’s party,’ I say.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Rossi demands.

  ‘Because they’re spreading lies about you!’ I almost shout.

  ‘And they’ve all seen your twat,’ Tora adds.

  ‘Don’t use that word, that is a disgusting word.’

  ‘Okay, so they’ve all seen your vagina.’

  ‘Shout about it, why don’t you.’

  ‘Seriously, Ross,’ I say, ‘I think you want to go for damage control here.’

  ‘If I don’t show up, they win.’

  ‘Win what?’ Tora asks. ‘A trip to Vegas?’

  ‘I have my dignity,’ Rossi says.

  ‘What dignity?’ I immediately regret saying this because the daycare kid I used to know shows up on Rossi’s face. ‘I mean,’ I backpedal, ‘dignity is something you feel yourself. It doesn’t matter what other people think.’

  ‘You care about what other people think. That’s why you wrote the play.’

  I gobble the last of my Sour Cream Glazed. ‘I didn’t write it.’

  ‘What do you mean you didn’t write it?’

  ‘I quit.’

  She looks as though somebody’s just died. ‘They all think you’ve written it.’

  ‘Won’t they be surprised.’

  ‘You got them to do all that stuff to audition and there’s no play? They’re going to be like, totally pissed off.’

  ‘So don’t tell them. I’m not telling them.’