Drinking Closer to Home

by Jessica Anya Blau

  “Yeah, gross,” Portia always said, but Anna could tell from her face, skin as smooth as a polished stone, that Portia had no idea what she was looking at.

  One day, as Portia was stacking a cuff of bracelets up her thin arm, Anna found Buzzy’s diary. She sat back against the black, shellacked headboard and started on page one.

  “Boooring,” Anna said, as she flipped through the pages. She thought her father was an overly sensitive whiner—I feel this, and I feel that, wah wah wah wah. And then she landed on something that made her gasp.

  “What?” Portia asked.

  “Mom might have an affair.” Anna felt like she had just swallowed a handful of tacks. Her stomach was pinging with pricks that made her eyes burn and water. The affair was proof of Louise’s shortcomings as a mother and a wife. Her mother should put on a wedding band, a bra, and a headband. If her hair weren’t swishing across her face like a teenager’s, and her nipples weren’t showing, people would understand that Louise was married, had three children, and was unavailable.

  “Who’s she going to have an affair with?” Portia asked. Anna wanted to whack her across the head with the diary. Portia was smiling, flopping her hands around to make the bracelets clink. It was obvious that she didn’t see herself entwined in anything Louise or Buzzy did; she simply skipped around them the way one skipped around mossy, glistening rocks when hiking up a stream.

  “Dad caught her flirting with another poet,” Anna said, and she felt the tacks pierce into her belly. Unlike Portia—dashing from one dry rock to the next—Anna parked herself in the center of every treacherous, slick stone she found—sitting there with a scowl on her face and her arms crossed until someone listened to her protests.

  “So,” Portia said.

  “SO?” Anna said. “Dad wrote that if something happens, he hopes it’s just a one-fuck deal.”

  “What?!”

  Anna was thrilled that Portia was shocked by the word. Of course, their parents used it frequently: fucking Nixon, fucking schmuck, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, too! But they never used it like this. They never used it as a verb, as an action, as something dirty, and nasty and forbidden. Now she had her sister’s attention; finally Anna could get Portia to understand how serious this all was.

  “He hopes it’s a one-FUCK deal.” Anna leaned toward Portia, she was almost smiling from the grittiness of the word. It felt like she’d taken her bellyful of tacks and thrown them at her sister’s face.

  “What’s a one—”

  Anna loved that Portia couldn’t get the word out. She felt older (which she was) and more powerful (which she wasn’t always). “One-FUCK deal! Get it? One-FUCK deal!” She turned the diary and pointed at Buzzy’s slanted, tight script on the page of the black leather-bound book. Anna wanted Portia to understand how demented their parents were, how perverted and disgusting. It was as if Portia’s head were made of soft cheese with no holes for any of this information to enter. Portia was happily oblivious, roller-skating through the streets with her friends, never thinking about the sick state of affairs in the house. Sometimes when Anna was flipping through the Diane Arbus photo book that sat on the coffee table in the living room (there were photos of freaks in nudist camps in the book, more proof of her parents’ perversions), she would pause at the pictures of the retarded people at the end of the book. They were happy, holding hands, shuffling through the fog with veiled hats on their heads and dopey gap-toothed smiles on their faces. That’s like Portia, Anna thought, blissfully stumbling in a fog.

  “What does that mean?” Portia shook her wrists. The bracelets sounded like wooden wind chimes.

  “It means that if she has sex with the poet she’s been flirting with, he hopes she only does it one time.” Anna stared at Portia’s small, freckled face. She wanted to insert worry and outrage into her sister the way you’d put stuffing in a turkey.

  “Why doesn’t he just hope that she doesn’t do it at all?” Portia asked.

  “Because he figures she will. Mom is a slut.”

  “She is not. She just likes to go to the nude beach.” Portia looked down at the bracelets and deliberately clinked them.

  “She’s a slut.” Anna said the words as if they were a karate chop. “She’s a married woman who flirted with a poet and might have sex with him.”

  “I like Mom,” Portia said. “She’s fun and she’s pretty.”

  “She has hairy armpits and wears patchouli oil that stinks like gym socks!” Anna said.

  “She doesn’t stink,” Portia said. “And she doesn’t follow us into the kitchen, like all my friends’ moms do. We eat whatever we want and do what we want.”

  Anna imagined grabbing Portia’s head and knocking it repeatedly against her own until the stuff in her own brain poured out like sticky lava and flowed into her sister’s cheesy head.

  “She wants to have sex with a poet!” Anna said.

  Portia slid the bracelets off her arm and examined them. Anna stared at her, not blinking, willing her into submission.

  “Is it the poet from that party?” Portia finally asked.

  “Probably. Dad just calls him ‘the Poet.’ That’s what it says here: ‘the Poet.” Anna thumped her pointer finger against the words.

  The girls had heard their parents talking about a famous poet who was living in Santa Barbara that spring. They had been invited to a party where he was the guest of honor. Louise had told the girls that he had stood in front of the fireplace and read some of his poems and she had almost cried. Anna thought her mother must be stupid or simple, to almost cry at a poem. It was ridiculous, like when Cathy L. cried at school because she heard John Denver was going to do a concert at the Santa Barbara County Bowl.

  “Mom likes his poetry,” Portia said. “It doesn’t mean she’s going to have sex with him.”

  “That’s not what Dad thinks!” Anna said, and she slammed the book shut and replaced it in the drawer.

  “Dad’s a worrywart!” Portia said. Anna could see that even Portia didn’t believe that to be true. Buzzy never seemed to worry about anyone in the family. If he was worrying, it was about work, or trying to decide if he should put coffee grounds in the compost pile or not.

  “Mom’s probably in her studio right now with the poet having a one-fuck deal! And when he leaves I bet some other guy will come in and do it with her! There’s probably a sign-in sheet, like at the doctor’s office, and every guy has to wait his turn!”

  “Where are they waiting?” Portia asked. “In the front yard?”

  “And,” Anna continued, “Mom might even have diseases like syphilis or gonorrhea! In fact, she probably has them now and that’s why she’s so crazy because that stuff affects your brain, too, you know!” Anna’s speech had the wrong effect: instead of making Portia cry, it made her cry. And the calmer Portia remained, the more frustrated and teary Anna became.

  “You’re so gross,” Portia said, casually. She gathered up the bracelets and returned them to the jewelry box. “And you’re such a liar.”

  “Don’t believe me,” Anna said, her voice stuttering with grief. “See if I care.” She sat with her back against the headboard, crying in little jags. Anna wished she had more control over herself. She didn’t want to be anything like her mother, who cried at poems, or like moony Cathy L. who cried at even the idea of John Denver. But emotions were like a runny nose for her—there was nothing she could do but wipe them up as they poured out.

  When Portia had finished putting the jewelry away, and had returned the boxes to the top of her mother’s dresser, she crawled up next to her sister on the bed. There were tears in a continuous stream down Anna’s cheeks; her mouth felt as if it had been pulled shut like a drawstring bag.

  “I believe you,” Portia said. Anna knew she said it just to make her happy.

  “Get ready for divorce,” Anna said.

  “Don’t you think it would be kind of fun if they divorced?” Portia asked.

  “Do you even know anyone whose
parents are divorced?!” Anna thumped her back against the headboard to make her point.

  “No,” Portia said. “But in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Eddie lives only with his father and it looks like they always have fun together, walking on the beach, finding shells. And in The Brady Bunch, Bob and Carol married each other after . . . I don’t know, maybe a divorce, and their kids each got new, fun, supercute siblings. If Dad remarried and Mom remarried, we could have two new homes with lots of kids running around, and maybe even a playmate for Emery so he wouldn’t have to spend so much time wandering the outdoors alone.”

  “It would be awful if they got divorced,” Anna said. “Dad would have all the money and Mom would be poor. And maybe someone would marry Dad because he’s got a good job and he’s not very bossy or anything. But no one would marry Mom because she’s a slut and she has three kids and no one wants a used-up lady with three kids.”

  “But she’s so pretty,” Portia said. “Everyone thinks she’s the prettiest mom ever.”

  “No one wants other people’s kids.” Anna thought that only someone who was mentally ill would want kids who looked like orphans and smelled like a compost pile.

  “They wanted each other’s kids in The Brady Bunch,” Portia said.

  “You’re dumb and Emery’s dirty,” Anna said. “No one would want us.”

  “Let’s go listen at her studio and see if she’s having a one . . . a one-time deal right now!” Portia appeared to be on the verge of laughing. She hopped off the bed and went toward the door. Anna hurried off the bed and pushed herself ahead, out the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the garage to their mother’s studio.

  They stood with their ears pressed against the door, Anna’s head stacked above Portia’s. The radio was on, a talk show of some sort with a woman who was taking calls. Louise mumbled something then laughed. Anna pulled her head away from the door, wiped her eyes, then mouthed, “See.” Her heart flipped around with grief and joy. She so wanted to prove to her sister that she was right that it was worth the horror of catching her mother in the middle of a one-fuck deal.

  “I bet she’s talking to the radio,” Portia whispered.

  “She’s not talking to the radio! What she said didn’t have anything to do with what that lady on the radio said!” Anna had no idea what Louise had said, but she wanted Portia on her team and was willing to color in the blanks in the story.

  “What did she say?” Portia asked.

  “I’ll tell you later. Now don’t move!” Anna gave her sister the open-palm stay sign, then ran into the house.

  Moments later Anna returned to the garage holding two empty gas station glasses, like the ones Portia used in the tub when she washed Emery. Anna handed her sister the Road Runner glass. She had Bugs Bunny. They each put the open end against the door and placed their ears against the bottom. It was a trick Louise herself had taught the children in a hotel in Boston one summer when she was convinced the men in the room beside theirs were planning a robbery.

  “Quit moving!” Anna said as her sister squirmed beneath her. Once Portia had stilled they could hear the radio more clearly. A woman was asking for advice on how to persuade her husband that she should be the one to balance the checkbook since he seemed to mess it up every month.

  “Oh, shut your fucking mouth!” Louise said, and she laughed again.

  Anna pulled her head away and rapidly pulsed her finger at the door as if pointing at the proof.

  “She’s talking to the radio!” Portia whispered. Anna knew she was probably right. Louise talked to the radio in the car, she talked to books and magazine articles, she talked to the TV on the rare occasion she sat in front of the small black-and-white one in the family room. Once, Louise gathered the family together to watch a movie she had read about in the Los Angeles Times called A Girl Named Sooner. There was a scene in which a retarded boy was pushed into a pond by the local kids. “Big boy push me in the water,” the boy cried, “he hurt me!” Louise laughed, and each time that kid came on screen again she’d shout in the muted boggy voice of the mentally disabled, “Big boy push me in the water, he hurt me!” Later, when Anna was visiting Portia in Berkeley, and they went to see Blue Velvet at a movie theater in nearby Oakland, Anna discovered a whole culture of people who talked to objects that couldn’t hear. She knew her mother would have loved it when the guy sitting right in front of them shouted at the screen, That’s a BULLSHIT bird, that ain’t no real bird! (Although the idea of her mother joining in and publically vocalizing her thoughts during a movie still horrified her.)

  But just because Louise was talking to the radio didn’t mean that someone else wasn’t in the studio. So Anna stayed where she was, ear posted against the glass on the door, for at least another hour while her sister went inside and finished the game of solitaire someone had laid out on the family room floor.

  Shortly after that, when summer started and Louise spent less time in the studio and more time at the nude beach, Louise decided that Buzzy was having an affair with one of three women she collectively called the Gorgons and individually called Lompoc Lucy, Tits-N-Ass McCoy, and Bitty Royce.

  Lompoc Lucy was a lawyer who lived in the small inland town Lompoc. She was consulting with Buzzy on a case she was working on. Tits-N-Ass McCoy was Buzzy’s receptionist, a soft, dough-faced woman who was always friendly with the kids, and who gave Christmas presents to Anna, Portia, and Emery every year. Anna hated the presents and thought they weren’t worth the work of the thank-you note that had to follow. And she was disgusted when her sister gushed over her gifts: ladybug compact perfumes from Avon, bubble bath with a lid shaped like a flower, boxes of stationery with paper that folded around itself to make its own envelope you could seal with a sticker.

  The third gorgon, Bitty Royce, was the paralegal Buzzy had hired to help out in the office that summer. She was younger than Buzzy and Louise, a child and an embarrassment—according to Louise, who could spend an entire dinner discussing the disadvantages of doing business with a girl who wore lipstick two shades too pink.

  Buzzy usually rolled his eyes and grunted while Louise went on verbal tangents attacking the Gorgons. Every now and then he’d throw up his hands and yell—like a dog with a sudden startling bark—“For chrissakes, I don’t give a shit about any of them!”

  But Louise would not relent, and by the end of the summer the children were so accustomed to listening to the anti–Bitty Royce, –Lompoc Lucy, and –Tits-N-Ass McCoy rants that if Louise didn’t bring it up at dinner, one of them would.

  “Did you see Bitty Royce today, Dad?” Portia would ask. “Take her to lunch?”

  Buzzy would openly laugh, while Louise smiled and shook her head.

  “You girls have no idea,” Louise said to Anna and Portia one night, when Buzzy had a dinner meeting and wasn’t at the table. “Your father has done horrible things. Horrible, awful things!”

  Anna silently gnawed on her hamburger and watched Portia who seemed not to have heard what Louise had just said. She was decorating her open hamburger patty with a smiley face made of peas.

  “Does he love Tits-N-Ass McCoy instead of you?” five-year-old Emery asked.

  Louise threw her fork onto her plate, picked up her glass of wine, and left the room.

  The following evening, when Buzzy had yet another dinner engagement, Louise decided she’d had enough.

  Portia was setting the table while Anna finished preparing dinner. Anna was shouting to her sister from the kitchen, “Put soup spoons out!” She was serving homemade matzo ball soup from a recipe their paternal grandmother in New Jersey had mailed to Louise. Portia went back to the kitchen for spoons when there was a thunderous bang, somewhat like the boom from an earthquake. Anna stopped stirring the pot on the stove and stared at her sister. More thumping and banging followed. It was coming from the stairway.

  The girls ran to the entrance hall where they found their father’s lumbering antique wardrobe stuck like a dead wooden whale on the stair
s.

  “Mom?” Anna called up toward the second floor. A drawer from Buzzy’s night table came flying down the stairs, over the wardrobe, and splattered on the marble landing. Papers, receipts, and Buzzy’s diary flew out of the drawer as if they were running for their lives.

  “MOM!” Anna yelled. “What are you doing?!” Anna was convinced her mother was suffering from syphilitic brain damage. She clicked back into her mind to the chapter she had read about syphilis in her health book (it hadn’t been assigned but Anna had read it before bed one night). The primary symptoms were canker sores and, indeed, her mother often had canker sores on her mouth. Surely the one Louise had a few weeks ago, that she was dabbing with Campo-Phenique so often that the whole house had that eucalyptus-alcoholic smell, was the start of syphilis from her one-fuck deal. The syphilis would have then gone into the secondary stage, a rash. But Anna wouldn’t have seen the rash since every time her mother walked around the house naked Anna turned her head or left the room so she wouldn’t be affronted with Louise’s naked body—her jiggling square butt, her long nipples, her feathery brown pubic hair. The quiet latent stage of syphilis would have followed, and maybe her mother had a short latent stage considering her one-fuck deal couldn’t have been more than a few weeks ago. But now, clearly, she was in the final stage, Anna thought. This was the brutal end to what could have been an easily treatable disease. From here on out her mother would have brain damage, delirium, insanity. Vincent Van Gogh-style.

  “OUTTA THE WAY!” Louise yelled down, and the two girls jumped back as three cologne bottles hit the ground and exploded, sending a small fireworks of green glass up toward their heads. The musty, spicy smell was so strong it was almost nauseating.

  “It’s irreversible brain damage,” Anna said, and she began crying.

  “WATCH YOUR HEADS!” Louise shouted, and the remainder of the heavy black night table came down, bouncing once off the wardrobe, before tumbling into the glass and landing against the front door.