Amor and Psycho: Stories

by Carolyn Cooke

  (Here I am, thought Sura, bargaining with a German woman! A book Fay had given her said bargaining was the first stage of death.)

  “This, too, is what your doctor says?”

  “Sure,” said Sura.

  Greta looked up at the sky through her big black rose-tinted glasses and made a screaming sound: “AAAAGH!” Then she said, “Listen, you don’t want to cure yourself, don’t do it. The regimen isn’t for everybody, but I wanted to see my grandchildren grow up, you know? So I go to Dr. Santino. My doctor has killed me off already with his chemotherapy. I’ve lost fifty pounds and I’m supposed to die in two weeks. So I buy myself a juicer. I eat nothing but vegetable juice I make myself. This is five years ago. I go in once in a while and get my platelets counted, I get a marker. And no cancer! I’m not talking you into anything. I’m just telling my experience. You spend four hours a day in the kitchen, juicing it all up. Every morning, you wake up and you take a coffee enema to purge. This is every morning for the rest of your life.”

  Sura watched the German woman’s enormous dogs dig their claws into the neighbors’ turf lawn, which covered the front yard like a green rug.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  SURA WAS her mother’s only child. The way they ate in those days, when food was love! Her mother made latkes and borscht with sour cream, and stewed fruit with more sour cream, not much meat because of the expense, but lots of dairy. Her mother bought cream cheese on a stick (she pulled the money out of her knee-high stockings) and they ate it walking home, just like Popsicles. Her mother poured creamy milk from the bottle into a glass. The milkman came every day to the door. Sura’s mother would walk in from work, tie an apron around her waist and start cooking. Two hours she cooked, just for supper. She set one place at the wobble-legged table and watched Sura eat. She never talked, not really, just stray phrases in Yiddish about food and sleep and fabric and fit, because in addition to working in the dress factory and keeping a kosher kitchen, Sura’s mother made all their clothes, and took in extra sewing. But there was no single conversation Sura could remember in which they exchanged thoughts or impressions. What her children wanted from her, she couldn’t tell them. Sura didn’t even know what shtetl her mother had come from in Poland, just that it was in the Bialystok region, taken by the Russians in 1939 and invaded by the Nazis in 1942, when her mother was already on a boat to America.

  Then Sura ran away to Nat—he arranged everything—and she never saw or spoke to her mother again, though she wrote to her, of course. When Fay and Daniel asked about her life, about their history, she reached into her mind for happy things to tell them. “We ate cream cheese in the street, just like a Popsicle on a stick,” she told them. But they, especially Fay, were never satisfied—they wanted other, more terrible stories.

  SURA WENT INSIDE and sat down on the couch, which puffed up cold air. She opened up her book on surviving. Fay moved around the kitchen, making smoothies in the blender. Sura appreciated this gesture for her health, only she wished Fay wouldn’t use bananas; they had one hundred calories. When the noise of the blender stopped, Sura read out loud to Fay about a toll-free number in Washington, D.C. “I can send my medical record number to the office of the armed forces. They have state-of-the-art cancer equipment. There is no cost,” she called into the kitchen.

  Fay came out with a juice glass Sura remembered getting free years ago with a five-dollar purchase at Lucky’s. She reached for the glass carefully. All these articles were family history.

  “Is that all you got from that book?” Fay asked. “You’ve been reading the same paragraph for three days.”

  “It haunts me,” Sura said.

  “What haunts you?” Fay asked.

  Sura’s voice rose. “Let me do it my way, that’s all!”

  She closed her eyes. She remembered certain stories she’d saved and never told her children. One time, her mother took her on a bus trip to the factory where her father worked. It was in another state—Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, somewhere like that. They stayed overnight in a boardinghouse. In the morning, they walked to the factory where Sura’s father worked and her mother asked for him. After a long time, he came out front, smoking, and right away she started yelling at him in Yiddish for him to come back, to send money. He said in English, “You can’t come around here,” and sent them away. Sura, pulling on her mother’s arm, felt glad. He came home sometimes, though, for a week or a month. When he went away again, the women from the neighborhood would take her mother to have a “hot bath”—that was how you got rid of babies. Her mother grew sick and weak from her “hot baths,” yet Sura remembered her working all the time, taking in extra sewing she did at night, cooking with two sets of dishes, everything kosher. She was strong as an ox, and before Sura ran away, she depended on her mother completely.

  Why hadn’t her mother taken a hot bath to get rid of her? Because she, Sura, was her mother’s Love, her Hope.

  (Years after her mother died, Sura’s father turned up in California and took two rooms in a not-bad hotel downtown. He brought with him a few old sewing machines, which Sura saw in his room when she and Nat drove downtown to pick him up. They drove him out to the valley for a family supper so the children could meet their grandfather, but she could hardly bear to look at him or speak to him. “How could you be so rude to your own father?” Fay asked her later. “You embarrassed all of us.”)

  FAY DROVE Sura to Dr. Frank’s office in her funny old car.

  “Why don’t you get an automatic? It’s easier,” Sura told her. Then she said, “How many earrings have you got in your ears?”

  “Nine earrings,” Fay said. “Ten holes.”

  Dr. Frank made them wait. Fay had brought along pictures of the trip she and her boyfriend, Ted, had taken to Mexico with another couple. The other woman had long red hair, beautiful hair, almost too much of it, like a wig. Someone—Fay, Sura guessed—had pasted bubbles over the heads in the photographs, which were supposed to show what everybody was thinking. In one picture, the four of them sat at a table around enormous plates of food and bottles of beer. A bubble over Ted’s head read “Are we eating again?” In another photograph, Fay stood in front of a pink shack. A bubble over her head read “You see old-world charm—I see a bathroom down the hall.”

  Fay rattled on about Mexico. Sura waited, listening for her name. As Fay showed her pictures of hotels, restaurants and pastries, Sura said, “That looks expensive. That looks fattening.” Of the countryside, she said, “That looks dirty.”

  While Fay talked, Sura watched the scrawny woman with baby hair jump up out of her seat and walk to the front desk. She lifted the glass knob of a jar of lollipops, pulled one out, unwrapped it and stuck it into her mouth. Walking past Sura, she winked and, removing the lollipop, held it like a cigarette between two fingers. “What the hell, right?” she said.

  Sura shrank back, horrified by this series of gestures, by the way the woman picked her out, winked at her. After Sura’s first round of chemo, Fay had told her how beautiful she looked without her wig, how her face looked wise and sculpted. But Fay had also said Sura looked great the year she separated from Nat, those years before he died, when Sura was so independent and went back to school for her A.A. degree.

  “You’re crazy!” she told Fay. “I didn’t sleep for a year! I got those shadows under my eyes that never went away!” She hated it when Fay or Daniel brought up that rough patch. Every marriage had one.

  “Why do you bring that up?” Sura had demanded. “Now he’s gone, who cares?”

  Looking back, it was the years of marriage that counted. Then, ten years ago, Nat had died. He never got to the stage of bargaining. He stayed angry. Fay brought him CDs of the operas he used to like, but he couldn’t stand them anymore.

  The woman with the lollipop struck up a conversation with the people waiting near her. They all leaned forward, talking at once. Sura felt proud to have her daughter with her in this place; it reflected well to have your adu
lt children care what happened to you. But she found herself tuning out Fay’s talk about Chiclets and Incas, actually leaning across Fay’s lap a little bit, her ear drawn to these others, even though they weren’t talking about selenium and Taxol.

  “In kindergarten, I felt I was a special soul,” said a man who was very bad off, missing one leg. “My father dragged me in a sled to school. My brother and I shared a pair of mittens to keep our hands warm. I remember warm tears on my cheeks on a snowy day, I loved that girl so much, what was her name, five years old.”

  “I still think I’m special,” the tiny woman with the lollipop said. “You know, God used to talk to me, sit down inside me and say, ‘Well, Lila, how are we doing?’ That went on until I had my children. I don’t blame Him for giving me a little trouble, He knows I can handle it. Or else there’s some other reason.”

  The man in the wheelchair said, “I used to think I was solid all the way through. No organs, no bones. Same on the inside as on the outside. Skin all through. Not so far off—now I got no bones,” he said, and they all laughed.

  Fay put away her photographs and picked up a magazine. Sura took a pen and a pad from her purse and made a list of things she needed: a new pink bath mat, a bag of spinach, a salad spinner with a cord you pulled, photograph albums for the day she finally got around to putting her pictures in books, which would be harder for her children to steal without her noticing. When the good nurse, Julie, came to the door with her clipboard, Sura stood up automatically, as if, somewhere, a button had been pushed. Fay said, “Why don’t you complain, Mom? You let Dr. Frank walk all over you, keeping you here for two hours. You’re the client.” But Sura didn’t think of herself as a client; she thought of herself as a patient, and anyway, she didn’t mind waiting. She waited for Dr. Frank with a kind of attention she couldn’t gather at any other time, as if waiting well might bring a reward.

  She followed Julie down the narrow hall, past the chemo patients sitting under their bags of cisplatin and Adriamycin, and felt a strange longing to be among them, having chemotherapy together while Dr. Frank worked in his office nearby. Sura had hated chemo, the depression, the anxiety and the sickness, finding herself at Longs as if waking up from a dream with a shoe tree in her cart. After the first time, the count of platelets in her blood fell so low that she needed three transfusions, and she worried to Dr. Frank that she might get AIDS. Dr. Frank said, “Don’t worry about AIDS. You’ve just got cancer, Sura.” And now she wanted it; she felt a hunger for the wire in her Broviac, and the antidote and the hydration and the nausea. She wanted to be there, with the other cancer patients doing their protocols together, in the hall.

  Dr. Frank told her how well she’d taken the chemo, how determined and strong she’d been. But her white blood count neared zero. Red, too. Shots would bring the counts up, but he knew she wanted the truth. They’d tried everything. The idea had been to give her some time.

  “Right!” she assured him. “Time’s what I want.”

  FAY DROVE her home. Sura tried to remember which of her children had had scarlet fever, which one would eat only tuna fish. It was so long ago she was a young mother with a child hanging from her hip, the legs wrapped around her waist. The years she herself had been a child still felt more real than the years she had been a mother. She thought of her mother brushing out her hair at night by the warm stove, and then, more dimly, of herself, brushing Fay’s hair. She remembered how, last summer at the Elderhostel, the female ape had leaned into the male, plucking at his hairy shoulders, and how Sophie, the night before she died, had painted her toenails in their dormitory room in Seattle after dinner.

  “I want to take that clock I told you about back to Longs, if you’ve got time,” she told Fay.

  “I’ve got time,” Fay said—but then she took the clock into the store herself and left Sura in the car. “I know you, you’ll lose yourself for an hour,” she said.

  “Get me one made in America or China, I don’t care,” Sura told her.

  Once Fay had disappeared through the electronic doors, Sura climbed out of the car and walked along the ell of the minimall. The Isle of Wigs was kitty-corner from the Waxing-Manicure. The Vietnamese women did the best waxing. They had a private room in back where you lay down on a table that was covered with a clean white sheet. One of the women leaned over you and brushed out your eyebrows with a tiny black brush. She put one hand on your ankle, very calm and steady—she had to be. But Sura didn’t need those women anymore.

  She tugged at the kerchief on her head and released it, stuffed it into her purse. Her leg buzzed beneath her. She felt the sun beating down on her head. It felt good, the hot sun beaming down from the indifferent blue sky.

  She opened the door and went inside. The woman behind the counter had on the same baseball cap she’d worn the last time Sura saw her—and the time before that. Across the bill of the cap Sura read the words: I’M OUT OF ESTROGEN—AND I’VE GOT A GUN.

  “I know you. You bought the bob,” the woman said.

  “And the pixie!” Sura told her, hearing the shrillness in her voice. She walked quickly to the rows of Styrofoam heads and stood before them, looking at the chiseled faces, the empty eyes, the white lips, the human hair.

  “And now you want something a little more—”

  Sura fastened her eyes on the heads. “I don’t want anything,” she said. “Just looking.”

  SHE BITES

  This man—Froyd—is constructing a postmodern doghouse designed by an architect in Brazil. Froyd doesn’t yet own a dog. His role: patronal, advisory. The hired carpenter works in the yard below, laying joists for an outbuilding ten feet wide, twelve feet long and ten feet tall (just small enough not to require a building permit). Plans call for a pine frame sheathed in low-grade plywood and metal siding. The structure will sit thirty feet from the house where Froyd lives with his wife and daughter and a neglected betta fish.

  The structure’s windows all point west, not to the southeast, where a more energy-aware person would put them. This irritable thought bleeds from the brain of the carpenter, who spent the morning sawing galvanized metal for the doggy door. That job brought small irritations to the surface. The carpenter considers the aesthetic pains the Brazilian architect has taken with the design of this outbuilding/doghouse a kind of insult against craftsmanship. The doghouse irritates the carpenter on at least two fronts, being both a cheaply built outbuilding and an extravagant doghouse—a willful marriage of bad ideas. The carpenter has long tried to liberate his career from inefficient traditional construction (tarted up in galvanized metal and Plexi) and start his own hay-bale construction business. Working with the noisy, awkward metal sheathing and flashing reminds him that he still lives with his dazzlingly gorgeous blond wife and two blond boys in a thirty-year-old trailer and has been living this way for the past six years.

  Froyd, on the other hand, finds the structure beautiful and modest. Two of the front-facing walls, composed almost entirely of wide sheets of Plexi, offer vistas of the redwoods, which contribute to his property’s aesthetic and resale value.

  Every half hour or so, Froyd checks the progress of the building by making a pot of coffee for the carpenter and chatting with him for a few minutes—or by looking out the window from his upstairs office. (He has to stand, lean a hand on his desk and crane his neck.) Earlier this morning, Froyd positioned himself for one such look, spilled a jar of pens and cried out in frustration. The carpenter, caught in the act of lighting one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, met Froyd’s eye and smiled aggressively.

  This tiny shame has not abated yet. It pricks at Froyd. Why should a man apologize for looking at his own doghouse? Even the carpenter (who tried to guilt-trip him into a lugubrious hay-bale “alternative”) stands back, looking at the house, judging it. From the tilt of the carpenter’s head and from the cigarette smoke billowing around his face, Froyd discerns that the carpenter might be contemptuous, or envious.

  Froyd’s friend Palmer recommen
ded this carpenter, a favor Froyd appreciated early and regretted immediately, as the unnecessary intimacy of the connection feeds Froyd’s paranoid fantasy that the carpenter might mention something to Palmer—something compromising—about Froyd. “He seemed anxious and defensive the whole time,” the carpenter might tell Palmer, or “He kept staring at me”—neither of which is true.

  While keeping half an eye—a quarter!—on the progress of the doghouse, Froyd prepares a lecture for a course he teaches in the city, a course on forms. In it, Froyd attempts to prove that traditional forms are still the most radical ones. Although he works up his usual heat in arguing this position, Froyd no longer really believes it; he feels contemptuous of the new forms (the constraints and chance patterns) that have replaced the despised forms he knows. In this, Froyd identifies with the hay-bale-loving carpenter, contemptuous of traditional techniques—concrete foundation, floor joists, wall studs, eight-foot ceilings, and suspicious of new architecture. The hay-bale carpenter rages passively against the dumb tradition that proclaims its supremacy over more interesting, more original forms simply by replicating itself again and again—house after house built facing any which way instead of south-southeast, so that a woman reading a book at eleven o’clock in the morning has to burn fossil fuels to make out the words. A similar idea—about forms generally and forms of building in particular—flits like a line of text across the screen of Froyd’s mind, and he skims the line as it passes.

  Days have passed, and the question remains: Why a doghouse? Froyd needs one, although he doesn’t own a dog. He doesn’t own a dog for the obvious reason that he doesn’t yet have a doghouse. He explained this to the carpenter, who asked. He explained it to his daughter, who asked—repeatedly—for the dog.

  When the dog does come, the perfect Plexi sheets will be scratched by the animal’s urgent toenails and muddied by paws, breath and drool. Over time, the Plexi will yellow, too—but for now, at this moment, Froyd looks at what he still thinks of as “the doghouse I built for my dog,” or “the doghouse I built for my kid,” or “the doghouse we put up”—the jocular “we” leaving a generous space around the structure, which is, after all, part of this gift to his wife and his daughter—a doghouse with a dog in it. Every time Froyd looks out the window, though, the harder it is to imagine a dog in the doghouse. Froyd steals another peek at the construction, leaning over his computer, with its cursor blinking over the words “alienated labor, power structures of late capitalism,” and cranes his neck until he can see the man to whom he is paying carpenters’ wages, whose broad tanned back faces Froyd as he hangs Sheetrock on the walls. What Froyd sees is not a doghouse, but a place of possibilities.