Eating With the Angels

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  My dad looked down and softly clicked his fingers, at which point the dog collapsed panting in a heap on the floor. I half expected him to reach out a paw for one of Emmet’s cigarettes. Pop smiled stupidly at the heinous creature and then back at me.

  ‘Why didn’t you come and see me at the hospital?’ I asked him. ‘I could have died.’

  ‘Ah, darling, I did,’ he answered, looking sheepish. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you?’

  ‘Only Mary-Constance could be killed by a pretzel,’ my mother said dismissively from the tiny adjoining kitchen, where pots and pans were being banged for no apparent reason. ‘Always, you have to be different.’

  ‘I think being killed by a pretzel would be cool,’ Emmet drawled. I was pretty sure he was stoned. Well, it was 11 in the morning after all. ‘Beats cancer. Or diabetes. The sort where your legs go all green and black and then get amputated.’

  I don’t know what it is about being back in the home where you grew up but it sure as hell brings out the childishness in me.

  ‘Oh, shut up, you big dope,’ I snapped.

  ‘Don’t you talk to your brother like that,’ my mom barked. ‘You’re not the Queen of Sheba here, you know. You’re a guest in this house.’

  ‘Yeah, and shut up yourself anyway,’ laughed Emmet flipping me the finger behind her back. ‘Guest.’

  ‘A five-letter word that means harmony,’ Pop said to himself, contemplating the Times.

  It was like I had never left and the horror of it turned my stomach. Not even bothering to make a feeble excuse I just took my bag into the bedroom I had once shared with Emmet. It smelled of old socks and I didn’t want to think what else. He had posters of women tennis players on all four walls and a collection of bongs on his dressing table. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and shaking a figurative fist at the unfairness of being stuck in the middle of such a nightmare.

  That night my mother served up the worst macaroni and cheese I have ever not tasted in my whole entire life. I don’t know what she had put in it but it was brown, with chunks of carrot and beet sticking gluggily to the pasta. Don’t think about it for too long, you’ll be put off food forever. Emmet, who’d smoked so much pot his eyes were blazing red like raspberries, inhaled his like he’d never eaten anything before while my dad cheerfully ploughed his way through, congratulating my mother with every second mouthful.

  I felt weak with hunger. I hadn’t left the apartment all day so I knew I had to eat some of it myself. It felt every bit as bad as it looked. The pasta was overcooked and the sauce so sticky it attached itself to the roof of my mouth in a huge ball. It just about had to be scraped off with a fork. The carrots were limp and the beets raw. After half-a-dozen forkfuls, enough to make sure I could get through the night without starving to death, I gave up, pushed my plate away and asked to be excused.

  ‘What’s the matter? Not good enough for you? Not up to your usual high standards?’ my mother asked.

  ‘I can’t taste anything,’ I said diplomatically. ‘There’s not much point.’

  ‘You’ve gotta eat, darling,’ my father said, smiling at me.

  He seemed so detached. Had he always been that way?

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, going over and giving his freckled bald head a kiss. ‘I should ring Ty.’

  ‘Tell the Wheat Man I said hi,’ Emmet instructed, his mouth full of food.

  The Wheat Man was out again, much to my relief. I knew Fleur had rung him the night before to tell him where I was so I left a message saying I was now going to stay at my folks’ place, that I needed a few days to myself. I asked him not to call me there and suggested he keep Paris off my back as well. Actually, I nearly caved in and asked for him to come get me. At least there was decent food at his house and my own beautiful bedroom with walk-in closet. But I remembered hearing him talk about me with Paris, and feeling the despair of not quite being the person to whom they were referring, and slunk off to bed to cry myself to sleep.

  The next morning I toyed with a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. I was so hungry but it was like eating wet cardboard. Usually I loved oatmeal but I bought mine organic and untampered with from the Whole Food Market; the stuff Mom had was radiated with strawberry and vanilla flavouring and could be made in the microwave in 15 seconds. Of course, I couldn’t taste the difference but I knew it was there. It tainted the experience unforgivably, as did having Frankie trying to rut my slippers under the table.

  ‘Guess who’s got a little crush,’ Emmet grinned blearily as the foul creature’s yelps punctuated the air.

  I was finding Frankie’s affections hard to stomach. He was just another example of how out of kilter my life was. Thirty-six-year-old women weren’t supposed to live at home with their parents. Restaurant critics weren’t supposed to have no sense of taste. Dogs weren’t supposed to have sex with human footwear.

  Later, after my shower in the apartment’s tiny bathroom, I stared at my naked self in the steamed-up mirror. The weight was still coming off me and I was looking more and more like a stranger. According to the bathroom scales I was now 120 pounds. And the colour of my skin had faded to a pale and uninteresting shade of grey. I looked like a person who was getting ready to disappear and that was such a scary realisation that I put my pyjamas back on and went straight back to bed, napping on and off for the rest of the day until darkness fell and I could go to sleep for real.

  Emmet bought me Gourmet magazine the next day but the pictures just made me cry. I pulled my knees up in my bed until I took up the least amount of space possible and willed myself back to sleep but he was bonging up and the smoke was getting caught in my lungs and giving me coughing fits. I couldn’t even be bothered yelling at him to leave. Instead I stayed there, all scrunched up and choking, until I felt myself drift off. Well, I was probably inhaling enough to send me into the middle of the following week.

  That night, my dad bought me a punnet of New York strawberries that he’d got from his friend Barney whose son had moved upstate to farm. At first the sight of them, so glowing with the vitality of summer, depressed me, but I’d always loved strawberries, especially New York ones, a much more rewarding prospect than their year-round California counterparts. And there’s a lot you can do with a strawberry without tasting it, as it turns out. Just twisting the hull and listening for the tiny ploop as it came out kind of cheered me up. Then when I bit into each fat juicy berry, I felt the pulp explode, the juices release, and the comforting grain of the seeds against the roof of my mouth. I savoured each biteful, imagining as much as I could, then swallowing with a gulp and feeling the berry mash slide down my throat.

  ‘Ah, don’t cry there, Connie,’ my dad said, sitting on my bed and looking at me sadly. I hadn’t known that I was crying, actually, but I dragged the back of my hand across my cheeks and he was right. I was trying to hide the awfulness of my situation from myself but it obviously wasn’t working.

  ‘Your mother thinks it’s unhealthy staying cooped up in here all day,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think, Pop?’

  ‘I think you should do what your mother says.’

  That figured. He pretty much always thought that. I loved my dad, I really did. He was there, had always been there, for a hug or a kiss or a pat on the back but anything more exacting and he faded into the wallpaper of my memory. Anything for an easy life, that was his motto. I could see it written on his gravestone. And while I was grateful that at least it meant he had shown me love and compassion in my life, I was sad that he had shown me so little of the person he really was.

  Outside in the hallway, I heard Mom turn the vacuum cleaner on and start bashing it against the closed bedroom door. When I lived at home this had been her way of telling me to get up out of bed and I had always obediently done just that. I had always obediently done whatever she told me. I froze, a strawberry halfway to my lips. Anything for the easy life. Oh brother. Maybe I was my father’s daughter, destined to waft through life without making a dent. I re
turned the strawberry to its plastic punnet, uneaten, and turned back toward the wall.

  ‘Thanks for the strawberries, Pop,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a nap now, okay?’

  ‘Okay, Connie,’ he answered me, a little sadly maybe. Did he see myself in him? Did he regret it? I doubted I would ever know as I heard him shuffle out of the room, talk in a murmur to the Queen of the Hoover, and then, thankfully, there was silence.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get up off your ass and start doing something?’ Emmet said to me the next day when he came in to swap one dirty bunch of sweats for another. ‘I don’t feel right being the most active member of the family. Besides, I’d quite like my room back so if you could just move home with your boyfriend … The old man does nothing but watch the History Channel all day out there. I’m learning way too much stuff. I need to come back and spend some quality time with Anna Kournikova.’

  ‘How long has Pop been sitting around watching TV all day?’ I’d been thinking about this all night in between swirly black dreams and thrashing wakefulness.

  ‘Hey, don’t knock it,’ Emmet said, sniffing a pair of socks. ‘He spent 40 years repairing shoes. He should be able to put his feet up if he wants to.’

  He had worked hard, our father, for Joe Rivera’s shoe repair shop over on Lexington, going off to work at eight every morning and coming back at six at night. He’d hardly made a fortune but we had never wanted for anything, other than vacations, which was Mom’s fault. She said she had only once left the island of Manhattan, the ocean was dangerous, and nowhere else was any better, so why the fuss? Plus, we’d had pretty good shoes considering our income. The store had a policy that any shoes repaired but not picked up within six months reverted to whichever family member fitted them. Joe had four tiny little daughters whose feet never got bigger than a size four while I was the only bigfoot who fitted a perfect size nine. As a result I was probably the only girl in junior high who wore thrift-store jeans and $300 loafers.

  ‘But what kind of life is that, Emmet, fixing shoes and watching the History Channel?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Emmet looked in the mirror on top of the dresser and spiked up his hair. ‘Looks okay to me. He’s been a pretty good dad, hasn’t he? Never got loaded and spent the rent money or ran off with his secretary.’ He turned around to look at me and to my surprise he was nervous.

  ‘Hey, sis, we need to talk,’ he said. ‘And I know now is probably not the best time to be asking you about this, but we had an arrangement after all so I need to know how soon you think I can get the 20 grand.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Come on, Connie, the $20,000 you said you’d loan me. I really need it now. I’ve waited a whole month already, remember, while you were in the coma but the situation is getting urgent.’

  My spirits were already so low that I could not even rustle up incredulity. I had known that Emmet was capable of stooping extremely low, but this was positively subterranean. My own brother exploiting my memory loss for his personal financial gain: how much did that suck?

  ‘You know they didn’t take out my brain when they operated, Emmet,’ I said coldly.

  ‘But, sis,’ he whined, ‘you promised me. And my guy needs the money by the end of the week otherwise, man, I’m going to miss out on the investment of a lifetime.’

  ‘Emmet, buying drugs cannot be described as an investment. It is money down the toilet the same as it always has been. Jesus, what is the matter with you?’

  ‘Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Connie, but I’m not scoring. I told you, before the, you know, thing with Woody Allen. My buddy Ron needs some capital to get his hot towel dispenser business off the ground. If I don’t get my share to him soon I’m out and it’s going to be a winner, I know it is.’

  ‘Well, you know what Emmet,’ I’d had it with him by then, ‘I don’t even know if I have $20,000 but if I did I am pretty sure that the last person on earth I would give it to would be you. How much do you owe me already? I’ve only bailed you out like 150 times before. Well, maybe I am the one who needs bailing out this time. Did you ever think of that? And by the way, next time you try to fleece me out of my hard-earned cash, can you at least do me the honour of thinking up a better story than some phoney crap about hot towel dispensers? It’s insulting.’

  ‘I see what Mom meant,’ he said, ‘about the coming back mean.’ He slammed the door on his way out.

  I thought a lot about what he said about our dad that morning, though. He was right. He’d been a good father and there were no signs at all that he was anything other than content with his life. And that was being married to my mom. Later that day I went and watched the History Channel with him for a while. Frankie eyed me lasciviously from the sofa, his tongue hanging out, drool sliding off of it. I tried to ignore the excited pant of his breathing and concentrate on the Mystery of Stonehenge but it wasn’t easy.

  When Mom came back from the market she fed Pop and, begrudgingly, me fried bologna sandwiches. Despite the fact I could still feel the fat swilling in my stomach way after I’d finished eating, she hadn’t done too badly. Nothing was rotten or walking off the plate and the whole combination was an acceptable colour and temperature.

  ‘Nice sandwich, Mom,’ I told her when I brought our plates out to the kitchen.

  ‘Finally, I get something right,’ she said, taking the plates without even looking at me. ‘Saints be praised. Whatever did I do to deserve such a thing?’

  Wordlessly, I slunk back into the living room where Frankie licked his lips and looked ready to pounce. Then I went back to bed.

  In the night, my swirly dream woke me up again and I lay in bed in a cold sweat, my head pounding, my heart thumping. I was fighting an overwhelming dread that this was how I was going to feel for the rest of my life and it was unbearable. I just could not face a future that wretched. Something had to change, something had to shift, to improve. A person could not be expected to live with that level of despair. Panic fluttered inside me as I tossed and turned until sometime in the early hours I heard the front door open noisily, and the unsteady stagger of Emmet’s feet across the living-room floor. But instead of collapsing on the sofa as I had expected him to do — it’s where he’d been sleeping while I was at home — he burst into my room, flicking the light on and shrieking with surprise at the sight of me sitting upright in his bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

  He looked terrible. His eyes were unfocussed, his hair was plastered to his head and he was sweating profusely.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, looking at me, then down at himself. ‘Jesus.’ He staggered and fell against the dressing table, knocking MC’s collection of lotions and potions so that some fell over like ten pins and others rocked noisily on the surface.

  I jumped out of bed and went over to help right him. ‘Be quiet, Emmet, you’ll wake Mom and Pop,’ I hissed, but it was too late. Frankie’s overgrown sausage of a body came bustling into the room and behind it, a vision in yellow quilted satin: Mom.

  ‘Oh man, I’m going to throw up,’ Emmet burbled, lurching past the both of us and into the bathroom where we heard the sound of him bringing up the contents of his stomach. It was not pretty.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ my mother said, looking at me with features so pinched they all wound up in the middle of her face. ‘Is this what you wanted? Is it? You know, we were doing just fine until you came back.’

  I felt a physical pain in my heart then. An actual searing pain. I didn’t know how I had hardened myself against her in the past but I couldn’t do it any more. The outer shell I had obviously built up to deflect her cruelty was simply not there. I couldn’t turn my back and pretend she hadn’t hurt me, I couldn’t laugh off her words or seek refuge from them in the arms of someone else. There was no one else. I was on my own. I was at rock bottom and she was right there on top of me. But why?

  ‘You weren’t fine,’ I said to her. ‘You were never fine.’

  The look of sho
ck on her face almost stopped me in my tracks. I was scared of my mom the way you are always scared of the people with the most ammunition against you, the ones who can inflict the most pain. But as I stood there in my old bedroom next to a larger-than-life poster of Venus Williams, my brother retching noisily in the bathroom down the hall, my mother blaming me for I don’t know what, I realised that she could not hurt me more than she already had. It was time to stop doing anything for an easy life. It was time to change, to shift, to improve.

  ‘And of course I’m not happy,’ I said to her. ‘How could I be happy? There’s only one person in this family who seems happy and he spends most of his time visiting the castles of England.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk about our family like that,’ my mother rasped, pulling her dressing gown closer to her body, her knuckles white as she strangled every last synthetic fibre to death. Frankie sat at her feet, ears pricked up, one eye shut, the other fixed on me. ‘There’s nothing wrong with our family.’

  ‘Nothing wrong? Jesus, Mom, have you never heard of the word “dysfunctional”?’

  ‘Don’t you dare take the Lord’s name in vain in my house!’

  ‘I’m not talking about the christing jesusing Lord, Mom, I’m talking about us!’ My voice was getting louder and louder, my unhappiness fighting to get out of me.

  ‘You do that one more time and I will throw you out in the street on your head, Mary-Constance, and so help me God maybe this time you will get some sense knocked into you.’

  She turned and swept out of the bedroom toward the kitchen, but instead of swallowing my emotion and going to bed with a pillow over my face I followed her. She slammed the cupboards open and closed looking for a water glass; her hands trembling with rage as she turned on the tap and filled it, then slugged it back, her tiny shoulders hunched up and quivering.

  Who was this woman? I thought to myself. And why was she so angry? Why was she always so angry? We stayed there for a few moments, her radiating rage and me staring at her stiffened back as I dissected our plight, felt the heat of her fury. I hadn’t done anything. I knew I hadn’t. So she wasn’t really angry that I’d left my husband or been half-killed by a pretzel or made my brother come home and puke his head off. She was just angry, period.