Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  Cherie holds the bottle, its pump at the ready. She knows what to do. She puts some lotion in her hands, rubs them together to warm it, but not so hard that her skin absorbs it. She moves to the side of the bed and unwraps the tucked-in end of the blanket, then the sheet, to reveal his feet. Sitting at the end of the bed, she gently puts the dry hub of his heel on her lap. She feels as if her heart is in her hands, and, like a stone, she uses it to polish, erase the cracks, smooth. Soon her hands are not her hands; they move in silent prayer. Much later, she will think, If only I could have done this while he was alive. But for now, she has her purpose.

  Part IV

  What’s Left

  White Rabbit

  It starts with her picking up the dirty clothes that are scattered around the bedroom floor like fallen leaves; Goddamn it, I’m going to do laundry. But she can’t find the basket and doesn’t want to make trips to and from the garage, where the washing machine and dryer are housed, dropping panties and socks along the way. It has been almost three weeks since Michael died. Corseted by numbness, she has been on a get-shit-done tear, trying to carry out his instructions; laundry felt reasonable.

  The home phone rings. She stopped picking it up after Michael’s obituary ran in the Tribune because she’d been inundated with calls, as well as flowers, plants, and deli platters despite its stating “donations only.” But she figures she can’t ignore the outside world forever.

  “Have you seen the news?” Peter Martins’s voice is choked. “You must turn on the TV.” The last time someone sounded like this on the phone it was because airplanes were crashing into the Twin Towers. This time Saddam’s soldiers have entered Iraq’s museum complex with automatic weapons and grenades. Staring at the television, Cheri watches in horror as looters swarm the museum like locusts, ravaging, pillaging, leaving destruction in their wake. Baghdad was bleeding antiquities. The museum director was saying he thought a hundred and seventy thousand artifacts had already been stolen; the common heritage of mankind was lost. All gone. It was April 13; it wasn’t a Friday. In retrospect, she’ll want to believe the first thing that crossed her mind on hearing the news was What happened to Dr. Benaz and the museum staff? Are they alive? But Cheri’s first reaction had actually been What happened to the Tell Muqayyar tablets?

  On the drive to the university, Cheri’s mind kicks into crisis mode. Wartime looting is hardly novel, she reminds herself, and curators would have hidden the good stuff in the basement vault. While the museum housed items of far greater and more discernible value than the Tell Muqayyar tablets, given their suspected biblical link, Dr. Benaz might have successfully had them included in the vault. It dawns on Cheri that the last time she was on campus was for a meeting with the review board. Was that three months ago? In the haze of Michael’s final weeks, Cheri hadn’t even looked over the committee’s report. And when she finally did feel up to the task, the restrictions were worse than she had imagined. Tenure was off the table; she’d be working in a fishbowl, censored and monitored by academic bureaucrats. Plus, the committee’s findings were now part of her official record, her reputation marred by a claim deemed specious but damaging nonetheless. Her opportunities for research and scholarship were all tied into her professorship, so if she didn’t teach, she lost access to the Oriental Institute. She hasn’t even begun to think of how she could teach in those shackles.

  The hallways of the Oriental Institute vibrate with how-could-this-happen ululations of professors and scholars. Her colleagues wander from office to office, poleaxed and teary-eyed. The only benefit of the museum looting, she thinks, is that her colleagues are so ensnared by the enormity of the loss to mankind’s heritage—a past they devoted their lives and livelihoods to studying—that they seem to have forgotten about her suspension. No one mentions the Richards case. “I’m so sorry to hear about your loss,” Suzanne, the department secretary, says when Cheri passes by her desk. “I wouldn’t have expected to see you…so soon.”

  “How could the U.S. military leave the museum without even one tank, totally unprotected?” Cheri can hear Samuelson’s voice from outside his office. Dolores, his receptionist, waves her over, maneuvering her into a group of professors gathered in Samuelson’s doorway. Samuelson acknowledges her with a nod. “I told the DOD this could happen. The museum was the number-one site on my no-strike list. Number one. They stood by and watched as the looting happened and did nothing!”

  In the next chaotic days of speculation, rumors, and blame, Cheri and the rest of her department huddle in the faculty lounge like survivors of an earthquake, exchanging what little information they’d gleaned from contacts in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East. Dr. Benaz and the museum staff were safe, and when the looting was over, they’d returned to the site to sort and identify what remained. The number of stolen artifacts was already going down from the initial news reports of near-total loss. Recovery teams had even found one of the museum’s most valuable statues, stoking the flames of hope.

  But Cheri senses it is over even before it’s official. Certainly before she hears the news unofficially from Peter and then officially from Samuelson. Somewhere in the hang time between the museum director’s fluctuating accounts, she realizes it’s lost. The tablet fragments belonging to Tell Muqayyar weren’t fully cataloged and hadn’t been flagged and stored in the vault pre-raid. There was no sign of them in the rubble.

  This is the final straw. Cheri is broken.

  She moves in a pattern: bed to bathroom, bathroom to bed, bedroom to kitchen, then back to bed. Like an ant, although she can barely summon the energy to lift her arms, let alone carry her own body weight. Slovenly and shredded by despair, she cannot envision a future. If she tries to project past this moment, she sees nothing. Neither black nor white; what is the color of absence? It’s the color she feels when she wakes up on the floor of her closet, balled up in a heap of Michael’s clothes. How did she even get here? She must have migrated like a bird in the wee restless hours. Just outside her window, people are retrieving the papers, going to work, knotting ties, saying good morning and meaning it or not meaning it, buying lamb chops for dinner.

  Her neck is kinked, her tongue has grown a sweater, and she’s scratching like a junkie, having helped herself to Michael’s leftovers—pain pills washed down with codeine cough syrup—because she drank up all the booze. She envisions tugging on the corners of space, crumpling it in on herself until she’s a black dwarf emitting no signal, no trace evidence, in the immense stillness. There’s a bosky smell—the commingling of dust, stale cigarettes, and something with a sour tang to it, probably her and/or the pair of jeans she’s using as a pillow.

  Mustering all her strength, she makes her way to the bathroom. Looks like it will be OxyContin cut with Sudafed this morning. She chops up her DYI concoction with a razor blade on her hand mirror. She could walk to the liquor store down the street and get some vodka to throw in for good measure. But that would require going out of the house. Which would require pants. Pants were out of the question. She needs to get a fresh pack of cigarettes, but that also requires pants. Not going to happen. When was the last time she’d had something to eat? Oh, look: there are a few perfectly good butts in the ashtray. God provides.

  It’s amazing how sadness can make itself infinitesimally small so as to invade even the whisper of an opening. But once it enters, it transmutes into a vast, carnivorous beast, relentlessly gnawing through flesh and tissue, organ by organ. It had been waiting years, tick-like, for this moment. Despite her attempts to use drugs and booze as sealants to plug up the cracks, the sadness has found its way in. It’s consuming her; she can feel its tundra breath on her neck. Buckle, wail in widowed anguish, rend garments like a normal person, for fuck’s sake; give it what it wants. Take the pill to make you taller or stop running and take its grotesque head in your hands and kiss it on its open mouth. Then howl, Fuck you. Fuck you, U.S. tanks, fuck you, looters, fuck you, Michael, fuck you, Samuelson, and your academic gestapo fucks.
And fuck this self-pitying, roll-into-a-ball-in-the-closet-and-play-dead crap. You’ve got a mouth, open it, and call for fucking help.

  I can’t, the dangerous sadness inside her whimpers. I can’t.

  The beast has her by the toe; it has succeeded in dragging her into the lair of regret. One loss brings up all the rest. What did she expect? She lured it, poking into the landfill of her past with a stick, pulling up snacks to toss into its open maw. Cheri surveys what’s left of the pill powder on the mirror. She was a little too aggressive with her chopping and sent most of her product onto the floor. She gets down on her knees and hoovers it up with a rolled dollar bill. Her nostrils smart. The sensation is so familiar. The drugs, the despair, the regret, the anger. Fuck you, Eddie Norris, and fuck you, NYPD. She remembers her younger self, barricaded in her old room at Cici’s, on a Tilt-A-Whirl bender from speed laced with God knows what, sure that nobody from the job would ever find her in the privileged enclave of Eighty-First Street. Now she’s over forty but back in the same fucked-up place she was in in her twenties. A million uncensored images skitter along her buzzing neural pathways like lines on a 3-D subway map, lighting up, flashing, all moving at a nauseating pace. “If she plays one more opera I’m going to bludgeon her to death with a frozen leg of lamb.” “The back of my right knee itches.” “That was an inferior Hitchcock movie.” “You broke my heart, Eddie Norris. And I still love you.” “Cave canem.” She doesn’t know if she hates herself more for indulging in misery or for snorting up every last white speck on the tile.

  Suddenly she hears the sound of packing tape stretching and cutting. Riiip. “More!” A worker wearing overalls shouts to other workers making big cardboard boxes. Riiip. She sees Michael immobilized in a coffin-shaped box. His face is frozen, but he says, “Press the button.” “But I already did that, exactly like you wanted.” He’s trying to say more but she hears only rasps. She turns and now Michael’s on a conveyor belt going around and around like a piece of luggage.

  “Press the button,” someone says on the loudspeaker. She tries to tug him off the conveyor belt but his box doesn’t have handles. She can’t get a good grip. She’s sweating. He’s humming like he did while driving or making coffee in the morning and she’d say, “Stop fucking humming!”

  “If you don’t press the button, everyone is stuck. We must keep it moving,” a disembodied voice instructs her. She’s behind a glass partition watching as Michael is back on the conveyor belt heading into a furnace. A siren goes off, wailing, flashing lights. “Press the button.” She wants to break the glass and looks for an ax. Imagine an ax in your hand, think of it growing out of your hand. But her hand is just a hand. Michael goes into the fire and suddenly lunges forward, sitting up, his hands flaming, hair burning. He looks right at her and smiles.

  “We are sick from no news,” Cici says into the phone, “no-body, not her work even, has heard from her.” Cookie sits at the kitchen island, putting mozzarella balls in jars. She’s been hearing Cici worry to anyone who will listen. Normally, Cookie rolls her eyes at Cici’s hand-wringing, but this feels different, and it’s making her worry as well. Her arthritic fingers lose their grip on one of the balls. It plops to the floor. Now she’ll have to shimmy off the stool, which is too tall for her, like everything in this damned place, and get down on her hands and knees to wipe up the mess. With age she’s gotten a lot slower and stiffer and is in need of fortification more frequently.

  She can hear Cici in the other room saying, “Did I ever tell you she is smart enough to join Mensla?” She’s always got to work that in and say it wrong. Damn woman can’t even speak English after all these years. By the time Cookie has captured the errant cheese and put it back in the jar, Cici’s calling out that her wineglass needs refilling. Which reminds Cookie that she might as well have another teensy nip of brandy.

  “What you doing—you put oil first, then mozzarella.” Cici’s eyebrows are raised. Cookie didn’t think it was possible for those eyebrows to go up any higher—they had hit an all-time high the last time Cici had returned from injecting blubber into her face or whatever it is she had done, but it seems Cookie was wrong. Why does she do it? The woman was a beauty when she met her, and at almost sixty-three, she still looks pretty damn good without all that nonsense. “You are too slow. This could be done by now.”

  “I’m too old, you gonna complain about that?”

  “I will pay you double to not come in.”

  “Last week you said triple. I’m not retiring for less. Now just calm yourself down and address the problem.”

  “You are the problem. You do not listen.”

  “Oh, I listen, all right. And if it were me, if it were my Choo-Choo—like the time she ran off with that man who’d left his wife and three kids for her, then left her, broke, pregnant, with fifty thousand dollars of his unpaid gambling debts—”

  “You think Cheri is pregnant, has the other man?”

  “I think you should go to Chicago, that’s what I think.”

  “She will not want me there. She will be upset.”

  “She’s already upset. Her husband died, she’s got reason to be upset. Although that’s not always a bad thing, plenty of husbands better off dead.”

  “I do not know. What if she will not speak to me?”

  “If she doesn’t want to talk, then you just sit with her and be quiet. Children always be your children no matter how old they are. Don’t go there making this all about you and waving your hands and worrying. Just go there and be her mother.”

  “What if she does not answer the door?”

  “Come on now, you’re not as helpless as all that. You can pull yourself together when you want to. Question is: Do you want to?”

  On the plane, after a few glasses of champagne to settle herself, Cici realizes that she doesn’t really know her daughter or what she cares about in her life. It’s not so much of a realization as an admission, because she’s always felt that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t understand what made Cheri do the things she did. She and Sol had brought her up to believe education and culture were the most important things in life. Why, then, did their daughter throw away Yale for no-makeup, a gun, and an ugly blue uniform? Why did she want to put herself with drug dealers and thieves who could kill her? When Cheri quit playing policewoman and moved back home, Cici thought she’d finally come to her senses. But she was angry and mean and locked herself in her room for weeks smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and playing headache music. “Look on the sunny side,” Cici had said, “you can go back to school, you can become a doctor, a professor, be the smart girl you are.” All she got back was “Life is not La Bohème. Leave me alone.”

  Cici was not educated like Cheri and Solomon, but she knew things. She knew it was not just beer making her daughter’s mood black. Where she’d worked, in that park with the crazy tent people and trash, there were all kinds of drugs. Drugs going up the nose and in the veins to fill the dark spaces inside. She remembers the feeling of putting a blade on her skin, tracing the line and waiting for the first cut. After the blood came pain and with that peace; pain on the outside made her stop thinking of what was on the inside. She wore long sleeves in summer to hide the red lines and even when they faded to white, she was careful to cover them up in case anyone noticed. She did not want her daughter to be like her.

  She remembers thumping on Cheri’s door until her fists hurt, saying, “Open! Now, now, I am not fooling.” But Cheri wouldn’t even respond. Whatever Cheri needed in a mother, Cici thinks now, reclining in her seat, I do not seem to have it. If she’d come from my womb, then maybe we would be able to hear each other better, to listen. She cannot remember that feeling, the connection of blood and water and life inside of her. But she knows it existed many years ago. It makes her too sad to think about, so she stops and, despite hating reptiles unless they’ve been made into handbags, plucks a magazine from the seat pocket and reads a story about iguanas in Mexico.

  Cookie
had had better luck back on Eighty-first Street. “What do you think this is, a halfway house? I’m not soft like your mama. You either let me in there right now or next thing you know, the super’s gonna be taking the door off the hinges and leaving it that way.” When Cookie emerged from Cheri’s room hours later, she had a trash can full of empty bottles but few details. “That girl has a broken heart. I can smell it on her. Only thing for that is time.”

  About a week later, the entire apartment felt like a bunker. Cici was pulling her hair out, yelling at Cookie that they needed to drag Cheri to a hospital. “I can deal with you. I can deal with her,” Cookie said. “But both of you locked up in here together—ain’t no way I’m going to deal with that.” And then Cheri came out of her room. Skinny, disheveled, hair plastered to her head. Cici and Cookie followed her into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator, drank a Coke, and calmly announced that she had spoken to people at Yale and was moving to New Haven. Wasn’t that what Cici had suggested, wasn’t that exactly what she’d wanted?

  When Cici gets to Chicago she wishes she’d brought her fur coat. Although it’s spring, and fur in spring is almost as bad as white after the Day of Labor. She’s standing in front of Cheri’s house feeling chilly. It was painted purple when they bought it; she’d tried to convince them to repaint it in a nice neutral, an attractive ecru or eggshell, but they liked their purple house. So many stairs to walk up. What are all these newspapers doing on the porch? The robbers will think she is not home. Cici rings the doorbell and knocks, hard. Finally, she takes a few steps back and throws a small rock at an upstairs window like a child. Maybe Cheri is in her bedroom? It misses. Does that filthy black car across the street with all the tickets belong to her daughter? Would she leave town and not move her car? The last time Cici managed to get Cheri on the phone, Cheri was running into work because there had been a disaster at the museum in Iraq. But when Cici tried her at work, the secretary confirmed she hadn’t been in since then—and that was more than two weeks ago. Panic rises in Cici like reflux. Maybe Cheri leaves a key—but where? Cici is about to walk around the back when she decides to try the front door. It’s unlocked. A bad sign. “Cheri,” she calls. “Are you here?”