by Ashley Ream
“Perfect,” I assured him and scooped a spoonful of korma onto my plate, using a bit of my own bread to sop up the sauce.
“Are you working?”
“Like a beaver.”
“I’d ask if you were eating,” he said, “but under the circumstances—”
“Don’t worry. This is food for the week.”
He looked at me, then at his watch, and stood up. “I have to go. I’m late.” He leaned over the table, holding his tie against his stomach so it wouldn’t drag through the achaar. “Moderation, okay?”
“In all things,” I said.
After he left, I pushed my plate away, all the serving dishes still more than half full. Dolma came by, said nothing about his departure, and asked, “Dessert?”
“Yes, kheer,” I said. “And some boxes.”
I put the sack of leftovers in the fridge and took off my shirt and pants. There was some paint near the hem that would never come off. I stood in my underwear and pushed a finger into my bloated belly. Funny how overfull started to look like distended starvation.
I took an extra-large T-shirt out of a drawer and shuffled blindly to the bathroom as I pulled it over my head. I opened the medicine cabinet, watching my reflection swing toward me and then away with the door. The bottom shelf was full of white-capped, brown-bodied prescription bottles. There were almost more than I could hold in both hands at once, but I managed, carrying them the three steps to the side of the tub. I sat down and set the bottles next to me, lined up like soldiers.
I opened the first bottle, performing the complicated adults-only press-down-and-turn maneuver that would prevent any clinically depressed toddlers from getting their mitts on my stash. I upended it into the toilet. The white and baby blue capsules plinked into the water and sent up a fine splash. A few drops landed on my knees.
“Good night, Depakote.”
In went pink tablets. Plink-plink-plinkplink. Those had caused exhaustion.
“Adios, Seroquel.”
I upended the bottle. Those were fun—dizziness, constipation, and weight gain.
“Ah, Thorazine.” I poured the orange pills into my palm and spilled them into the crapper. They had made it impossible to fuck, plus I had been nervous all the time. “It was absolutely not a pleasure.”
More tablets. More bottles. Finally in went the last of it: the pink capsules that had made everything taste like I was sucking on nails. I lost fifteen pounds on those, which was a change from some of the other meds.
For twenty years, my body had been one pharmaceutical experiment after the other. I walked around feeling as if the air around me were dense and thick. My movements and thoughts and sensations were slowed and dampened. I had taken things that drained my personality and, worse, my desire to work, to bathe, and to breathe. But when I stopped taking them, I was at the mercy of the fanged black monster that settled on my chest for days only to leap off and leave me thinking and moving in fast-forward. Two years before, I had locked myself in the bathroom for three days only to come out and repaint my kitchen cabinets in the middle of the night.
And that was nothing—nothing—compared to the horrors that could happen. I had seen them up close and personal and a repeat was unthinkable.
I couldn’t live with the pills. That I knew for certain. And life without them was dangerous, not only for me but for those who got too close to me. That I knew for certain, too. So this was it. The only possible choice.
“Good-bye, Lithium,” I said and flushed away the swirling pharmacy.
Somewhere in the bay, fish were overdosing on antipsychotics. Under no circumstances should they be operating heavy machinery.
29 Days
“State your business,” I said into the receiver.
“Where are you?”
Carla ran the Taylor Gallery, which mostly made her in charge of corralling artists, who, as a general rule, are prone to things like getting arrested in Panama with a shipment of illegal parrots. She has a master’s degree in art history from NYU and the self-flagellation tendencies of an Opus Dei follower. She deserves better. She wasn’t getting it from me.
I dropped three strips of bacon into the hot cast-iron skillet and hopped back to avoid the spitting grease.
“I answered the phone. That’s your first clue.”
“You’re supposed to be here. Your work is supposed to be here. We should be discussing placement this very minute.”
“I’ve decided to devote myself to bacon.”
In honor of that, I peeled another strip from the pack and tossed it into the skillet. The smell was a heady, intoxicating thing. There is nothing like the sweet, smoky smell of dead pig.
I heard Carla pull the receiver away from her mouth and mumble to someone else.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said when she came back to me.
“I’m not coming into the gallery.”
I tucked the phone between my jaw and shoulder and opened the fridge. Carton of eggs. Pickled jalapeños. Shredded cheddar. Onion.
“You’re not coming in today?”
“Ever. I’m having a transformative month.”
“Is that some sort of artsy new age crap?”
“Probably not. There’s booze involved.”
“I’m going to have blank walls, Clementine. Big, blank white walls. I’ve printed a catalog. People are coming to the opening. Buyers are coming to the opening. Critics. They are going to expect the art in the catalog to actually be on the wall. That’s how this works. That’s how we make money. That’s how you make money.”
“Fifty percent of the selling price.”
“You’re negotiating now?”
“Nope.” I pulled the bacon out of the skillet with a fork and cracked two eggs into the bubbling pork fat. “I’m not negotiating at all anymore. Not at all.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Clementine. Is Jenny there? Let me talk to Jenny.”
“I fired her.”
“You fired her?!”
I had to pull the receiver away from my ear.
“Last week,” I said when the yelling stopped.
I dropped the cheese and jalapeños into the eggs and moved over to the kitchen table. I shook the computer mouse and waited for the screen to wake up.
“Clementine, the show is in a week.”
“Gonna have to do it without me,” I said and hung up.
Chuckles hopped up onto the table and sniffed my plate before giving me the pleasure of his puckered ass in my face again. Chuckles feels about jalapeños the way he feels about dogs.
“You keep that up,” I warned him, gathering him up and setting him down on the floor, “and the best we’re going to be able to do is a kitten hoarder with the petrified body of her dead sister in the backroom.”
He meowed at me, which I took to be back-sass.
I’d started my Internet search before the urge for pig took over. This was the only meal I could make that turned out well reliably enough to be worth the effort. I picked up a strip of bacon and chewed on it. I couldn’t believe how good it was. The fat was still soft enough to be harboring trichinosis, which was just how I liked it. A meal without the risk of parasitic worm larvae is no meal at all.
I’d already considered, researched, and discarded several plans, and it wasn’t even 10 A.M. I was a marvel of efficiency. For example, hanging takes too long. Contrary to popular mythology, your neck does not break. You just dangle there twitching and gagging. And when it’s all over, you are not going to look good. Firearms are much faster, but the cleanup is hell. The police don’t do that, you know. They just take the body away. The brain matter lodged in the drywall is your family’s problem. There was a suicide fad in L.A. several years back. People were parking their cars on train tracks, which hurt a lot of other people in the process.
As much as I hated those meds, I was starting to regret flushing them. Maybe I could’ve come up with some sort of antipsychotic cocktail spiked with a little g
in and a twist.
I typed “intentional overdose” in the search engine and clicked on an archived newspaper story about elder suicide.
U.S. Customs officials have confiscated a record number of animal tranquilizers being brought north across the U.S.–Mexico border in recent months. Most confiscations are from elderly citizens and their families, who purchased the controlled substance over-the-counter in largely unregulated Mexican pharmacies. The tranquilizers, when used in high doses, are fatal to humans. Seizures have sparked new debate over the right-to-die issue.
Cases of terminally ill patients overdosing on these medications are on the rise, according to a review of records by Times-Press staff.
I read the rest of the article—all six pages of it.
Garden Grove sounds like a nicer place than it is. Thirty-five miles south of Los Angeles, it’s tucked deep in the heart of Orange County, where the light and soil are just right for strip malls and Republicans. I would know. At fifteen, I moved there. I was the new girl in school, which is especially great if you happen to be six-foot-one and not inclined to look anyone in the eye. Bonus if you can also arrange for some really hurtful rumors about your family situation.
I exited the 5 and made two left turns and a right onto Spring Lake Drive. My aunt’s house is the third from the corner on the left. It’s important to count because the houses are all beige. They have driveways on the right, two windows, and porches with three stairs. They each have one tree in the front yard. Sometimes a tree gets sick and loses its leaves. This is a helpful, if somewhat unreliable, landmark. It’s best to count. There was a rumor someone in the ’70s tried to plant a rosebush and was never heard from again.
I parked in the driveway where my dinged right front fender would cause a motion to be passed at the next neighborhood association meeting. I climbed the three stairs to the beige porch and rang the doorbell, put my hands in my pockets, and sniffed. The place smelled the same, and I shrank inside my skin.
Aunt Trudy had been baking herself again. She was lubed from hairline to ankles with the same Banana Boat Dark Tanning Oil she’d favored for decades. I still couldn’t smell a coconut cake without Vietnam War–style flashbacks.
“You coulda called first.”
The skin on her legs drooped at her knees like a pair of stretched-out panty hose, and her arms, even though skinny, wobbled.
“What would be the fun in that?”
She looked me up and down. “Well, you might as well come in before the air-conditioning bill puts us in the poorhouse.”
I stepped in after her. Her green and blue plaid one-piece was cut low around the legs and, when she turned around, bagged in the seat. She had the flat butt of an elderly man. She kept walking and I followed, past the living room and through the kitchen. She kept going right out the sliding glass door into the backyard.
Her usual chaise longue was set up by the pool I’d never seen her go into but which was maintained weekly. I knew. I paid the bill. She lay down and turned her nut-brown face to the midday sun. We can only assume skin cancer has some sort of preservative quality.
“Iced tea in the fridge if you want some.”
She had her own glass at her elbow, the ice melted down to slivers floating at the top.
I sat in the opposite chaise, feet flat on the concrete patio.
“I want to know what happened to Dad.”
She didn’t look at me, but I saw the pattern of her rising and falling chest hiccup and change.
“Why?”
“Because I do.”
She made a face like I’d asked her to hold my hair back while I vomited in her shoes.
“He run off,” she said, eyes closed and face still turned to the sun, like either a blooming flower or a lizard regulating its body temperature, depending on how you looked at her.
“Do you know why?”
“Got himself another woman, I suspect. How is another matter altogether. Your father was not a looker.”
My memory of my father was a child’s memory; I didn’t know if he was handsome or not. Even if he had been, I wouldn’t have expected Trudy to acknowledge it. I didn’t have any pictures of him, either. Not much had survived the dissolution of my nuclear family core, and what had had not made its way to me. No hand-me-down furniture filled my college dorm. No family photos sat on my mantel. Not that I had a mantel.
“Did Mom know?”
“Your mother did not like to talk about such things, and I didn’t pry. Wasn’t my business.”
She turned her head just enough to shoot me an accusing look, reminding me it wasn’t my business, either.
“Why are you asking me this now?” She used her disciplinarian tone of voice. Before marrying Bob she had been a schoolteacher and a feared one at that.
“I want to know.”
The truth was I remembered almost nothing about my father. I remembered a lot about his leaving but almost nothing of before. He was a fuzzy, indistinct shadow hovering on the edge of memories, a grown-up on the edge of a birthday party or administering chamomile baths the week my sister and I both got the chicken pox. I was pretty sure his hair had been brown, but that was really all I had.
“You picked a poor source of information,” she said. “I never heard from him once he took off. Not a single word, and don’t think that wasn’t hard on your mother. Doesn’t excuse her. I’m not saying it does.”
“There was never a clue? A credit card charge or something?”
“Not that I ever knew about.”
I looked down at my feet. They were big. Shoes never looked good in a size as large as mine, so I got around it by not caring what shoes I wore. That day they were heavy work boots, and my feet were baking inside them, sweat turning the insides into a foot swamp.
Aunt Trudy gave an exasperated sigh that sounded like it used a little spittle in the process.
“Leave it be, Clementine.”
“Tell me what you remember, and I’ll go home and you can get back to your sunbathing.”
“I’ve already gotten back to my sunbathing.”
I waited.
It worked.
“He was an accountant. He worked for a firm in Encino, an accounting firm. Parker and something, it was called. He had a mustache that he was always getting food stuck in, especially yellow mustard from the hot dogs. He had skinny legs and liked to wear his watch on the underside of his wrist, Lord knows why. He was tall like you. Your mother married him young and had you girls young. They met in the lobby of a movie house. Dated maybe six months before he popped the question. Jesus, Clementine, he could be dead now for all we know. What does it matter?”
I felt something sharp poke quickly into my stomach like a pin into a party balloon. She was right. Mom was dead. There was no reason to imagine he couldn’t be, too. Orphaned wasn’t that different from abandoned. It just came without the possibility of parole.
“I have to pee,” I said and went inside.
I opened the fridge, the same one she’d had since the ’70s. The tea pitcher was heavy and glass with bright orange sunbursts around the middle that any midcentury collector would’ve creamed his pants over. I poured a slug into a matching glass from the cabinet and carried it with me down the hall. Posed portraits of Trudy and her second husband, Bob, lined the walls. They’d had them taken every few years since they’d married, and there were now a dozen of them hung in chronological order like a flip book of aging.
I passed the bathroom with the fuzzy pale blue toilet seat cover and went on to my bedroom, which wasn’t my bedroom anymore. The walls were yellow and just far enough apart to hold a bed, dresser, and desk if you weren’t too fussy about banging your shins all the time. Before my mother and sister died, it had been Aunt Trudy’s quilting room, which saw very little quilting but a lot of soap operas on the black-and-white television set up in the corner. She moved the television out when I came in and put it back the day I left for art school. I walked across to the windowsill and ran
my hand under the ledge. My initials, carved with a penknife, were still there, which I supposed was something.
I didn’t remember much about the three years I’d slept in that room, and I didn’t feel like trying. I really did, after all, have to pee.
By the time I made it back into the yard, Bob was back from the grocery store. The paper sacks were still sitting on the counter, but he’d stripped off his shirt and was sitting bare-chested in a chair near Trudy. His entire body was completely hairless due to a genetic condition. He didn’t even have eyelashes, which sounds like a small thing, but you miss it when you’re looking at someone. He was nearly but not quite as brown as Trudy.
“Clementine!” he said.
I guessed Trudy hadn’t mentioned I was there.
“Didn’t know you were coming for a visit.”
“Just going over some old family memories,” I said.
He nodded. Bob had always liked me more than Trudy did. It was probably nice, looking back, having another freak in the house.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” he said, pushing off with his hands on his knees and standing to a full height of just under five-foot-six. “I’ve got ice cream melting away in there.”
Trudy and I both watched him put his full weight into pulling open the sticky sliding glass door and then toddle inside.
“He’s a good man,” she said.
I didn’t disagree.
“I was luckier than your mother.”
She had always referred to her that way, as “my mother.” Never by her name.
“Most people are.”
I showed myself out, picking up a half-drunk bottle of Single Barrel Jack Daniel’s from the open liquor cabinet on my way. I figured I’d earned it.
28 Days
“Would you say a chicken is like a person?”
Both the butcher’s hands were flat on top of the meat case, his fingers sprouting black, wiry hairs between the second and third knuckle. Under the glass were rows of marbled red steaks stacked one over the other like shingles, waves of ground chuck, and prekabobed kabobs separated from one another with stiff, bright green leafy garnish that looked like it might be a petroleum by-product.