I Must Have You

by JoAnna Novak

  Out the window, the Flagg Creek Motel advertised bargain nap rates in the same lot as Georges’ Flowers: VALENTINE’S DAY BOUQUETS ORDER NOW ROSES $36.99/DOZEN. Affair city! Park’s new marquee reminded me of the upcoming three-day weekend: MONDAY, JANUARY 18 *** MLK ***. Anna sang harder and the heat got hotter and the Saab smelled like all the grody bands my mom adored—Blind Melon, Guster, Alice in Chains—were rotting in the backseat, nodding off next to my black backpack and her black tote.

  “Can we stop at Walgreens?” I asked, leaning forward in my seat. My question abutted our neighborhood—sidewalks, river birches, cotton candy mirror balls, cedar swing sets a Frisbee’s arc from granite patios: that’s what shaped Lisa and me.

  The Saab veered onto the shoulder and the music abruptly stopped. I braced myself, pressing my boots against the salt-crunchy floor mats. Anna’s prettiness diminished without music: her bloodshot eyes wore shadowy bibs, and she looked staggered, as though driving two minutes to the drugstore were scaling the skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur that were supposedly taller than the Sears Tower. We were stalled, inches from a ha-ha that bricked off the cemetery touching St. Catherine of Siena Church, where once I’d attended Mass with Lisa’s family.

  “Woah—okay.” I watched cars whiz past us. A blue Maserati I recognized laid on the horn. “Um … we can just go up to the next light.”

  “What do you need at the store, babe? It’s been a day, arduous, catastrophic. A gas leak in my office, traffic, I’ve been hungry since my run. You know I hate to be steering our ship by the stomach’s prow but I’m just … I’m ready to relax.”

  I never knew with Anna: maybe she’d fasted or anticipated this meal like a date with Robert Downey Jr. I felt guilty for bothering her, even if I didn’t want to postpone copying Real Talk pics.

  “We have Band-Aids and Neosporin, you know,” Anna added. Through the lenses of her sunglasses, I saw her squint at me.

  “Band-Aids? What are you smoking, crackhead?”

  “Elliot. Really? Why talk like that.”

  “Sorry. Rocyo was tellin’ me about this movie Friday. But actually, don’t worry about it. I can go this weekend. Really. It’s just a thing. For Bio. What Rocyo and I were doing. We’re making a diagram of a tree, like, showing the parts. Hey, this is cool: did you know the trunk is called the bole? Like, b-o-l-e. Not um … like soup bowl. Isn’t that word weird? I thought of you.”

  “It’s always something, isn’t it, El?”

  Anna eased the car onto the road, her neck drooping. She patted my shoulder. She’d been doing this my whole life: we didn’t hug or kiss, but I depended on her touch, gentle, like I was an heirloom being passed around during show and tell. Lisa was jealous of my low-key mom, and though it hurt the scratches on my wrist to stretch that way, I squeezed my mom’s gloved hand. Beneath our tires, snow gristle crunched. A grimy, gray-brown film of wiper fluid and ice shadows painted the windshield.

  ··

  “What do you want to eat?” I asked my mom, after I’d stomped upstairs. I’d unpacked my backpack, arranged my books and Trapper on my desk, a dark cherry antique with two bottom drawers and a narrow top shelf and a locking cabinet (minus the key) that my dad bought me in Dresden. I’d tried to start a Real Talk column based on my meeting with Rocyo, titled, tentatively, “Don’t Fake It.”

  I was meeting with a new client one winter day when she offered me a snack. “These are healthy,” she said. “Fat-free cookies.” I declined—but this poor girl proceeded to eat—in front of me, her diet coach—eight vanilla sandwich cookies.

  “Do you always eat this many?” I asked.

  “I mean, what’s the big deal?” she said. “No fat.”

  The reason this poor girl needed to eat a downright obscene number of cookies is because they’re FAKE. None of us want to be posers in life. I mean, seriously: would you still want a pair of underwear that said ‘Calvin Klein’ if it was a knockoff? No.

  But my brain hurt. I didn’t know where to go with the article. I signed onto AOL, and fruitlessly scrolled the chat list for Lisa and Marissa Turner, while being bombarded with messages:

  RoHo1984: waz better, chicken or beef

  RoHo1984: pasta or rice

  RoHo1984: to be fat or retarded hahahaahahha

  ElleGirl80: depends on the chicken … … …. white > dark, lean beef > drumsticks … … ….. rice is better no question more filling, get brown rice if you can or wild, lots of fiber … … … …. and that’s way offensive, take that back.

  RoHo1984: wat you eat for dinner

  ElleGirl80: good question … … ….

  “Mom,” I said, standing over her on the couch. “Anna. Hey! You said you were hungry. And you wanted to talk. C’mon. Let me help. You’re supremely zapped.”

  The centerpiece in our living room was a Danish three-seater, donkey gray. My mom lay on her stomach, rubbing one hand over the suede, changing the saturation of the color with every stroke. On the coffee table there was a twig-stemmed glass filled so to the brim the red wine made a meniscus. On TV, in tonight’s Seinfeld rerun, George stood next to a garbage can. A chocolate éclair practically leapt out of the trash, its bite mark smiling up at him.

  “You wouldn’t do that, would you, El?” Anna said, to me and the upholstery.

  I sat by her feet: her heels white and rough, her toes milky blue like mine. That hue, on adults, turned my stomach. It was as though, in her oldness, my mom had gangrene.

  “Eat an éclair? As if, what do you think?” I said, playfully. I didn’t assume anything about her Band-Aid comment because Anna was straight with me: she accepted I wasn’t an eater.

  When my dad first started traveling for business, one night he was gone she’d told me how his opinion of my body was … different. We were splitting a bag of Caesar salad (minus garlic croutons and dressing packet—those sat in the fridge until my dad, a democratic snacker, returned). Anna said, A father always sees his daughter—and I don’t mean this perversely—as a miniature of his wife. You’re a girl and woman, a woman who has the potential to be me. Not a terrific fate. But there are worse. Your father thinks you have a problem. He’s suggested doctors, or, what he fed you as a toddler: oatmeal and peanut butter. “Bulk her up,” he still says. “She won’t grow.” Of course, El, it’s clear to me—and, I gather, to you—there are more nuanced ways to grow. One might grow by subtraction. A sculptor begins with her or his block of marble and chisels to find shape. This is true of poetry, too. All writing, at that.

  “Would you do that?” I said, using a light tone. “Take food out of the garbage—not eat an éclair.”

  Anna considered, blinking, her eyes staying closed longer than open, like the lids were stuck, flypaper or death mask. She looked stoned.

  “I would do both.”

  I laughed. Anna wouldn’t even share a straw.

  “Yeah right. I bet Dad would, though. Did you hear from him today?”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Mhmm yes or mhmm no?”

  “The latter. Your father’s busy-busy.”

  I hugged my hands around my mom’s icicle toes. Pink peppermint lotion—I remembered my dad dribbling that into his palms, massaging my mom’s feet as she sat on the pale-green tub in their bathroom, a few years ago, when she was all blisters from starting to run. Dusty pink roses, leftovers from Charlie Trotter’s, calf-hair BB pumps: he was so romantic when he was here.

  “You should try to find a time,” I said. “He misses you. Don’t you miss him terribly?”

  My mom laughed. “Are you reading Edith Wharton, miss?”

  “What? Who’s that?”

  “Oh, miss him terribly, I don’t know. She was a writer. A novelist in the early twentieth-century. Beyond well-to-do family out east. She’d draft manuscripts by hand, from bed, and toss off the pages as she finished them. For her amanuensis.”

  “Amanue—”

  “Typist, secretary, scribe. Skilled slave? Your call.”

  “That’s so sp
oiled.”

  Anna laughed and nodded. “Your spoiled is my idea of the life.”

  I hopped off the couch. “Well, this is the life! Your loving daughter prepares your meal, madam! What would you like?”

  Anna sucked air through her teeth, like she was inhaling a cigarette. If I asked her if she smoked, she’d probably be insulted. As if, she’d say, like a girl, my age.

  “Ah. Ugh. Um. Something … red?”

  ··

  My mom and I were sewn together, a black double stitch in the hem of life, one big gnarly knot without a man, so I copied her, minus the wine. I forked the cellophane on two black trays of cheese cannelloni, pasta tubes the size of toilet paper rolls, shoaled with marinara, furred with ice and specks that could’ve been herbs or gnats.

  I set them inside the microwave to spin, side-by-side, on the turntable. X-rays didn’t frighten me: In front of the dark glass, I tabulated my day. Two Listerine strips, 13/16 of an apple, one unpeeled carrot, and the Lean Cuisine, 240 calories: 350 calories, rounding up. Under five hundred—that was par.

  If my dad knew the computations I did, he’d have to be proud, despite my flaca. I missed him. I missed him so much I would’ve eaten garbage to make him laugh, I would’ve gobbled an éclair (okay, spitting in a napkin) to prove I remembered family-vacationing in France, before I was Elliot Le Petit. No, his travels hadn’t prevented him from centering an MJ poster on my closet door or teaching me to program the VCR to record the Bull’s sixth game in Phoenix, when I was too drowsy, chicken pox-y to catch John Paxson clinch the three-peat, but his absence reminded me that daily presence, consistency, showing up, was important.

  With a minute left on the timer, I did curtsey lunges, one leg a radius out behind me, like an ice skater. My knees shook, and I held onto the counter for balance.

  Now my dad was probably asleep, a big, red-headed yeti of a man, in Venice. I never remembered time differences. He was a dad: I didn’t understand what he did. My classmates’ fathers had one-word jobs, careers landed in the Game of Life. Accountant. Lawyer. Chef. Even Lisa’s shady Pops: WBEZ reporter, political beat. My dad analyzed Global Markets and Supplies; he was a mechanical engineer who collected passport stamps the way Ethan Suva collected bruises he got from moshing at the Fireside Bowl.

  Monday, when we last talked, my dad told me what he ate and how Beachy Head in England, one of the most famous places to commit suicide, had crumbled tons of chalk cliff into the sea. A bad season crashing with waves and rainstorms had been one cause, decades of global warming another. That’s an issue for your lifetime, Smelliot. Your generation. Politicians say verdict’s out—and then? It’s like, all right: man makes ruin.

  The microwave beep-beep-beeped. Beachy Head, schnitzel: my dad’s world contained so much more than words. I’d imagined flinging myself off Beachy Head when he described it. The world seemed so much more immediate, so much more consequential than literature. Last quarter, when we’d read “The Necklace,” I’d felt nothing. Sometimes, I wondered if I was even meant to write Real Talk or if all I was truly good at was devising beautiful ways to die. Words were just Lean Cuisines, approximations of rocks and dumplings.

  I carried a tray with forks and knives and batik napkins into the living room. Our house felt empty, even with my dad home. Of the five bedrooms (my father had confided: he’d wanted a real family), most days only two heard gasps and laughter, the yawns of our wants. In his continentalism, my mom and I were cloistered, informal, clairvoyant. How else to explain her question?

  “Do you want to stay home from school tomorrow?”

  Anna was still supine on the couch. I set the trays on the coffee table and sat on the floor and peeled off the soggy cellophane from my meal. Cannelloni smelled like Park’s caf, pizza day. With my fork, I loosened a curl of part-skim mozzarella.

  “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

  I set the cheese on my tongue and waited: how long could I hold the first bite in the first stage of digestion?

  “We have PE testing tomorrow,” I said, swallowing. “But I hate that … I’d skip. Are you going to the spa?”

  It was a hope, far-out but not impossible. Usually Saturdays were spa days: we’d bunny downtown in velvet leggings, get our hair done, meet Marky and Fernán for brunch. Even though he was a pastry chef at a Gold Coast five-star (that served what my dad called “frou-frou” food) who probably should’ve been fed up with restaurants, my uncle always made eating special: he’d take us to Sunny Side Out, the 312 queer intelligentsia’s most exclusive club. His loft in an old Nabisco plant, his mauve macaron tattoos, his black-framed glasses, his sugar plum dimples—Marky was cool, not an artist but—when we’d meet him and Fernán on St. Clair, take an elevator to a dining room beaming with sunlight and Lucite, his ditzy voice outdazzled the others. He sounded like a valley girl, but Anna’s kin? Duh, he was a brainiac—Quill and Dagger before moving to Chicago to work pastry and sometimes-teach Confectionary Arts. That’s where he’d met Fernán—Ben Stiller’s clone but buffer, brown, one of ten adults who wanted to learn from my uncle how to weave chocolate baskets and spin sugar swans.

  “Oh, no,” Anna said. “No. God, I wish. My roots are Cruella. No, I’ve got one of those awful professional development days. All G.D. day. Diversity training, mental health and comp, retirement over lunch, lord, if that won’t be sad. Speaking of pastries, El, do you know how pitiful a frozen food-service croissant tastes? Provincial liparoid death. And, oh joy, the assessment task force on at-risk youth. Can you see your mother there?”

  I couldn’t imagine “Anna in classroom.” I couldn’t see her as anything but ornament or oracle.

  “That sounds gross. Like, that last assembly, did I tell you about that? Where the Vietnam vet came and talked about, like, the dangers of drinking, and he brought in a paper bag and got in trouble because there was, like, for real an empty beer can inside. The security guards came and interrupted the speech, and he was all, hey man, hey what gives, and everyone in the audience was freaking out … I mean, in a tizzy because no one had the brains to evacuate us. But still, who even likes all-school assemblies? I don’t get it. If you’re not into, and I’m not into …” Her eyes were closing. “Hey, Anna.” I snapped in her face. “Hey! Sit up. Up! Don’t you want to eat?”

  She blinked. For a second it looked like she didn’t recognize me. “Elliot, don’t rush me! Dinner yourself. I mean—fuck.”

  “Do you want more wine?” I said. “I was going to get some water, I can get you wine or a tissue. Mom, it’s all right. The day won’t be so bad. You always joke about them afterwards. You’ll get through it. Why don’t you write … what’s it called … a found poem? Is that where you take stuff people say and make a poem out of that? You could start with, like, I don’t know, what you said: ‘at-risk croissants.’ That’s funny.”

  “Just worry about yourself!”

  She let out a breathy cough. A hand steepled her eyes. Then she started to sob.

  I swallowed, lost in our living room: the black chain mail curtain hiding the fireplace like a dungeon wench’s tunic, the gaps between the floorboards cruddy with mysterious hairs and fuzzes and bugs. My mom’s tears annoyed me. The burning behind my own eyes made the food vomitrocious. I swallowed some cheese: it tasted like phlegm.

  “I’m trying to cheer you up.” It sounded lame, a line I’d lifted from an old, cheesy movie like Pollyanna. Today I’d made two people cry.

  “Well, you can’t, El,” she said. She flicked a finger against the cellophane on her meal. “You don’t know everything, so don’t make light of my situation. It’s not flattering to patronize your mother. Avoidance will come back to haunt you. Enough. If you’re dabbling in self-mutilation, take a day and think about it.”

  The ground shifted beneath me. “What?”

  “Take a day,” my mom said. There wasn’t room for disagreement. “That’s all I’m asking. If you’re not going to let me in on your oh-so-shocking secret, can you think
about it yourself? Figure out what statement you want to make before your gym teacher leaves me ‘I’m-calling-DCFS’ messages. Are we clear?”

  “Are you punishing me for something you don’t even know?”

  “Elliot. Just take a day to collect yourself.”

  “What are you even talking about?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Fine.” My stomach crunched itself. One measly piece of cheese. I felt fat. And even though Lisa had told me that her therapist told her that “fat isn’t a feeling,” I knew that was b.s. I felt like a dirty, sweaty, bristly hog. The Seinfeld credits played, burping. “Sure, I’ll stay home. That’s a great way to … to solve this non-problem.”

  Blackness spun as I stood. My mom’s eyes were closed—I couldn’t remember her ever acting so immature, and the behavior was contagious. Two could be tired: I was tired of this day, which had made me desperate and grabby. I wanted to sleep, wake up in tomorrow. There was so much Real Talk. Tomorrow, I’d be productive. I’d walk to Lisa’s—she hadn’t ever missed only one day of school for a cold (her sicknesses came in waves) and we’d talk, at her house, in her room, since no one ever wanted to come up to mine.

  “Good night, Anna,” I said. “Enjoy your dinner.”

  I threw my napkin over her food. Underneath the steamy plastic, the cheese was congealed.

  FRIDAY

  1 ·· ANNA

  TO WAKE THICK-HEADED AT FOUR in the morning without stirring princess-and-the-pea from Xanadu, do not stumble to the kitchen, where gray lumps of snow tumor the windowsill, moonlight inks hulking appliance and pendulum sauté pan shadows across the floorboards; where the coffee pot timer ticks the seconds until 5:13, thirty minutes before you should leave for yoga; where the oven frowns in disuse, its racks stacked with cookie sheets, a pizza stone birthmarked in char. Leave your body on the couch. Let Rot or Carlos, Charles, whoever, break, enter, demoralize your organs; let him tongue out your tar. Goodbye, Anna, offed by wooziness, can’t-find-your-ass drunk.