Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

  “Okay, vamoose, you two.”

  I felt like some giddy fifteen-year-old again, trying to get rid of my mom and dad before some bad boy in his parents’ car showed up to drink Bud and make out to Led Zepplin records.

  “Is this okay, me taking Annabelle like this? I thought you and your mom and sister might like to be alone, have some space, talk,” Billy said, sliding into the driver’s seat.

  “But if you think her presence might help Mom, you know, distract her…”

  “Go,” I said, shutting the car door for him.

  Next time the phone rang I would just answer it, and in my best French accent, I’d tell the Cinnabon boy he had zee wrong number.

  On the first anniversary of my father’s death, we didn’t look at pictures, or plant a tree, or release butterflies, we didn’t bury Dad’s ashes on the Blue Mountain where he grew up (so far to drive, let’s not waste them), or even sit around and watch Dad on television, even though my mother had a stack of videos, most taken from Japanese board meetings. There are hours of my father scratching his ear with a pen, doodling boxes and arrows (none of his trademark orchids or naked women), the sound was bad, as it always is when he tries to talk in my dreams—like he’s scrambling his voice so nobody but me can understand, but I never understand it. Here, you could hear him cracking wise about dinner the night before at a sushi bar where a live fish was pinned down on a tatami board and filleted to death.

  “Fresh enough for you?” he says.

  Hot enough for you?

  Mom turned these videos on like background noise. She knew every chair scrape and every cough. It was the most boring surveillance footage you could imagine. Spying on Daddy living. Sometimes my mother would just stick one in, then go off and clean, or do yoga, or talk on the phone, and the tape would run but nobody would be watching it. Then you’d hear that laugh, my father’s laugh, and it would freeze you, and there he was, my three-inch-high daddy sitting in that fluorescent-lit conference room, again and again, in hell it appeared, and none of us was paying any attention.

  There was no clean way to do mourning.

  On the morning of the first anniversary of my father’s death, my mother, my sister, Annabelle, and I went to the mall. There would be no crying or tearing of hair for us. No banquet, no light show, no speeches—no indeedy. Just shopping. And what do you buy when you’re mourning? Diamond stud earrings. Yep, expensive studs—such a bold, we’re really living now statement, right? We were living high on the h-o-g, like a bunch of nighttime-soap-opera heroines. Falcon Crest bitches, get out of our way.

  It took about fifteen minutes. We picked, we pointed, we paid. It was exhilarating, in a strangely joyless way.

  “Wouldn’t your father love this?” my mother said, handing over her credit card. “Wouldn’t he be proud?”

  “Now we’ve got something to remember this day by,” Dee says. She kisses our mother’s cheek. I do too.

  Like, who could forget.

  I went into my mother’s handbag and found the ubiquitous pack of sugarless gum. I felt nauseous.

  While my mother and Dee were in the bathroom changing Annabelle’s diaper—“It’s a novelty for us,” they insisted—I slipped in my new studs, then ambled over to the Cinnabon stand. As I was paying for a sticky bag of twelve cinnamon rolls—what can I say, I was out of control—I saw a boy from out of my past. Not really, I mean he was the sort of boy who’d have sent my panties into a twist years ago.

  The girl behind the counter smiled at him, flashing him a blinding wealth of orthodontia. He smiled back. I wanted him.

  He was just my type. One of those precious, slightly arrogant boys who look as though they could have been raised by wolves, sensitive and a little mean, with dark brown eyes, a straight, prominent nose, and shaggy blondish-brown hair that hung in his face, so he had to keep brushing it out of his eyes. He was wearing a Hang Ten T-shirt, dark blue Levi’s, and Vans. I think he was really, really stoned.

  I wanted him. I made a deal with myself: if he talked to me, it was meant to be. Kismet. You could never guess what the gears of destiny were churning out for you. At seventeen I believed in kismet. Here, today, in the food court of the Christiana Mall with Grotto’s Pizza, Arby’s, and Mr. Steak, I believed in kismet.

  I asked him for a cigarette, and somehow—I haven’t smoked in years—executed a French inhale without choking to death. For some reason, men think this means you give good head—that, and being able to tie a cherry stem with your tongue.

  He smiled. He was checking me out. This boy who had not suffered one day in his life.

  I prayed my mother and sister and daughter wouldn’t come back from the bathroom just yet, for it occurred to me how no one thinks I’m beautiful anymore. How even if Billy tells me I’m beautiful I think he’s full of shit. He just wants to get laid. But here, this boy thought I was hot.

  How incredibly pissed off would my father be if he could see me now?

  Wasn’t that too fucking bad.

  I inhaled, felt the smoke swirling under my nostrils. Why had I stopped smoking?

  I wasn’t me anymore. I was someone else. I wasn’t some old married woman with a kid, going into a power slide toward thirty. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was for this boy to go down on me in the backseat of his car. His friend’s car. I didn’t care.

  It was morning. Ten o’clock in the morning, and already my life had changed. Anything could happen.

  “So, you at the U of D?” he asked, licking a piece of tobacco off his lip.

  “Nope.”

  I smoked. This is a boy girls throw themselves at, I thought. I checked his sneakers for lip gloss.

  “You work in the mall?”

  “Nope.”

  If you can’t be scintillating, be mysterious. Always say no. Men want what they think they can’t have.

  “So, how would a person find you?” he asked, as though he couldn’t care less.

  “A person, or you?”

  “Me.”

  His name was Dean. I wanted to chew on that Dean boy’s mouth. I wondered if he would want to make out for a long time, or if we could just get to the good part. If I were seventeen I’d make him wait, and wait, I’d grind my pelvis into his groin, and then I wouldn’t sleep with him, and then we’d break up. I’d leave him wanting me. Then, months later, we’d get back together, I’d sleep with him, and then we’d break up again. But no more, this boy was going to get lucky. I bet the girls he’d been with didn’t even swallow.

  Because I wasn’t me, and because my whole body was just jazzed and ready to ride, I scribbled down my mother’s phone number on the back of a Cinnabon napkin. What was the harm? Dean was stoned, and that kind of boy never called. As he walked away—he had almost no butt!—my hands started to shake. How did he miss that wedding band?

  He wasn’t yet old enough to even think of checking out the left hand.

  I was asking to be struck down. Watching him give some girl at the piercing pagoda the high sign, I wished I’d at least kissed him. It didn’t matter what I did.

  On the first anniversary of my father’s death, in the bra department of Macy’s, I looked at underwear and wondered what Dean would like—a tiger-striped G-string, a black garter belt—compared to what Billy liked—anything white, girlish, and defilable.

  Dee bought lingerie, a dark blue teddy, a long pink negligee, some white lace tap pants, and a pair of mules with a pom of pink feathers. We egged her on. As she paid, my mother told us a woman from her yoga class wanted to fix her up with some widower who, like my father, also “liked plants.”

  “Some old fart,” my mother said, turning her back on her image reflected from four angles in a set of mirrors. “Can you imagine?” She laughed her widow’s laugh. “He likes plants! I bet he’s got one of those, what did your father call them? You know, Ev.”

  I did know.

  “The amazing potted closet fern. Grows in the dark, needs very little sun or water. You can’t kill it. Indestruct
ible. Great for nursing homes, dorm rooms, and bomb shelters.”

  “Exactly.” She smiled broadly. “See, that isn’t lost.”

  It is my job to remember. Word for word, in my father’s voice whenever possible.

  My mother is obsessed with what has been lost since my father died. Information. Like the name of a restaurant they’d visited in Turkey, a kind of blue stone a Sherpa in Nepal had showed them, the title of a jazz song they’d heard in a club in Chicago and then listened to all the time in graduate school.

  What is definitely lost is my mother’s hair. It was one of the first things to go. For the past year my mother had been getting her hair cut at a beauty school that practiced on convicts, the criminally insane, and old people. Her wild honey-colored curls had been chopped off in favor of an undyed, dour brown dome that resembled a hacked-up hedgehog. This hair fairly bellowed, Don’t even think about it!

  “Mom, how are you set for underwear?” I asked, then felt like a jerk.

  Dee pretended I hadn’t said anything. She smiled at the cashier. My sister wanted the cashier to like her. My sister put that cashier’s smile in her little wallet like a penny for a rainy day. My sister had her eyes on the future.

  At Christmastime, Mom had really thrown down the suffering gauntlet while we were disposing of the figgie pudding—drunkenly flinging it off the back deck and into the woods, where we’d decided Dad’s spirit resided. Mid-fling, her blouse came untucked and I could see the white waistband of her underwear sticking out. My father’s underwear, a pair of old white BVDs.

  She had seen me staring, and sort of laughed.

  “Mine are dirty.”

  “Yikes,” I said. “Is the creek frozen, or did the washing machine crap out?”

  “Mother,” Dee said. She shook her head, her mouth pulled down into an exaggerated frown. “This is not good.”

  “Who would know?” she said, and shrugged, tucking the elastic waistband back down inside her skirt.

  “Oh, okay, Mom,” I said. I looked at her for bunchiness. Could you make out the crotch? Had anyone else noticed, were people whispering?

  “I wear it to garden in,” Mom explained. “Puttering.”

  Dee grimaced. She looked like she wanted to shake my mother.

  “Sure,” I say. “Is that all? Puttering? And by the way, it’s December…”

  She shrugged. That’s all. I couldn’t possibly compete.

  On the first anniversary of my father’s death, my sister, Dee, announced she was a Jew. Secretly, in her heart, where it mattered most.

  None of us mentioned the man that she’d started dating after my father died, or the fact that he was Jewish. He was a partner in the firm she worked for in Philadelphia, an unreasonably pretty man, who wore one of those big heavy gold signet rings that screams good school, good breeding, and does double duty for wax-sealing important documents. He liked to go hang-gliding on weekends. He didn’t laugh at my jokes. He held Dee’s hand like she needed protecting, and kissed her fingers when he didn’t think we were watching.

  My mother took the news well. She just blinked, as if the news that her Presbyterian daughter was now a Jew was a stone being throne at a rhino; it bounced harmlessly off her armored skin.

  As my mother drove us home from the mall, my sister read us the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Every day for a year you say the prayer and mourn. Dee had a Daily Prayer Book in her handbag. I wondered why she’d taken it to the mall. She half read, half recited it. Her voice rising on the part “He who creates peace in his celestial heights, may he in his mercy create peace for us and for all Israel; and say Amen.”

  “How nice,” my mother said.

  “You see,” Dee said, “we have nothing like that, no official prayer or mourning period. Our religion is inadequate,” she explained in her proud and zingy defensive-attorney voice. “You yourself have said it’s unreasonable, Evie.”

  “I have,” I said, trying not to laugh. I couldn’t imagine Dee as a Jew. Since my foray into a convent before Annabelle was born, I was off religion. Take this lamb of God and shove it!

  “Casseroles and cocktails,” Dee said. “That’s what we WASPs do, you said it yourself, Ev. That’s no way to grieve, right?”

  “Hello, don’t forget TV and Valium.”

  “Not everyone likes pills, Evelyn. Not everyone is comfortable going through life half stoned,” she said, rather meanly, I thought, but then again, I was a little out of it—all that sugar and nicotine, I guess.

  I did know I didn’t want to fight with Dee. We never fought. Ever. I loved Dee, and I didn’t want to fight with her, especially today.

  “You’d never blow a little weed, would you, counselor?” I said. “Thank God they don’t subject you upholders-of-the-rule-of-the-land to drug tests, huh? Deirdre?”

  Dee went pale. To be fair, it was only the second time in her life she’d gotten stoned, and she’d only gone along with it because Mom and I were doing it—chemo weed. Talk about peer pressure.

  Mom had since killed off the stash.

  “Evelyn Anne,” my mother said. That’s all she could say.

  We drove in silence for a few miles.

  “I’m going to stop at the liquor store,” my mother said. “I hope that’s all right. We don’t have one thing to drink at home.”

  Because we were in mourning, officially, and because Dee and I both suspected it would cheer our mother up, we bought some chardonnay, in a box. A big old juice box of vino with la spigot you could drink from. When you got down to the end, you could rip the top off the box, remove the bag, and squish it in your hands. It was fun to hold the silver bladder over your head like an astral wineskin and squirt the last bit of wine into your mouth. It was a happy sight.

  With Billy and Annabelle gone, and Mom and Dee inside, I prowled around the yard surveying the damage my father’s absence had wreaked. Out back was a full-scale gardening debacle. The tiger lilies had ravaged the austere irises, the black-eyed susans cowered like schoolgirls trying to escape a strangling vine, while the peonies were rangy and heavy-headed, like they figured, Oh what the hell! Out front it was slightly better, the danger more contained. By the front door the holly bushes bulged menacingly, like fat men with switchblades, and the forsythia bushes that lined the drive poked out their branches like vandals ready to gouge any car that dared cross our property line. My mother had tied up the weeping Chinese maple to keep it from collapsing like a drama queen into the grass, but she can only do so much.

  I could only stand so much.

  Inside I lie down for a second on the sofa. Every time I come home there are new pictures of my father, on the refrigerator, on the walls, in the bathroom, in the hall. There are outtakes, and boyhood pictures, some hand-tinted as though by a funeral home cosmetologist so they impart a rude health. And, because there will be no more pictures, and because we need to be reminded that my dad was really sick and in pain and should have died, there are pictures of Daddy ill. I can’t look at these.

  Instead, I stare at a gold-framed photo from the fifties, my mom and dad, in each other’s arms, leaning up against an old blue Mustang. My dad seems to be whispering a private joke into my mother’s ear. She’s laughing, her eyes half-closed. Young and in love, they are all promise. They can’t lose. I hate how clueless they are. I can’t even stand looking at them. I want to scream, It will only end in sadness. Don’t be fools. Save yourselves.

  I go into the kitchen for the wine. My mother is sitting out on the back deck alone. Dee is in the hall talking to her boyfriend on the phone. He was listening to her feelings. Listening to how rotten we all were, and how we scoffed at her announcement. She told him how I’d crashed the car into the garage wall yesterday and cried. She was such a traitor.

  He was the one. Really, the one, she’d assured us in the lingerie department. Not the one right now, like the other boys she’d been in love with. He was different. He made her feel safe.

  I carried the box-o’-wine outside t
o Mom. I knew she’d appreciate somebody waiting on her for a change. She was sitting at the table, which sported a pale array of food—Brie, Triscuits, a bag of microwave popcorn, cashews, and a little bit of spinach dip in a Chinese bowl.

  “Did you check messages?” she asked.

  “Zero,” I said. “All hang-ups.” I tried not to smile.

  When Dee came outside she looked refreshed. She’d put on lipstick and changed into white pants. My sister had become one of those women who can wear white pants.

  “Dee, would you like some wine, or perhaps a gin and tonic? I’ve got rum—it’s almost summer. I’d be happy to make you whatever you like,” my mother said.

  “I’m fine, Mommy, thank you,” Dee said, but my mother pushed a glass of wine in front of her anyway.

  “So,” my mother said, “I think we’re doing pretty well. I think your father would be proud of us.”

  “Me too, Mom,” Dee said. She reached out and squeezed my mother’s hand.

  “We’re moving on,” I said. “Now, wouldn’t that make a great PBS show? Move On! There’s my new job. Forget this art crap, I could be the host of a show dedicated to mourning. We could make armbands, share, I’d give them helpful tips for surviving in the real world, like how to drink on the job—the old coffee-mug trick, the wash-your-hair-with-baby-powder trick, when you can’t bear to bathe—there’d of course be a little scripture reading, done by some kind of animal—a lamb, maybe, or a lion, or both! Move On! I like it.”

  “Oh, Ev,” Dee sighed. I listened to the sound of her golden charm bracelet tinkling as she lifted her glass. The charms sounded like little trophy cups knocking together. Then they both drank their wine, and sat there. They looked like they were waiting for something to happen, for somebody to do something that seemed grief stricken or profound.

  “You know, Dee, Jews don’t believe in heaven,” my mother announced, as though she’d just remembered it, as though heaven were an exclusive gated beach community Dee wasn’t qualified for membership in if she switched sides. Like Dee would miss out on all our family volleyball games in the hereafter if she started going to temple.