Dear Bill, Remember Me?

by Norma Fox Mazer

  “Now that I have tasted true chocolate pudding, I’ve seen the light. Praise the Lord, I’ve seen the light! And it’s clear now that what has been packed into chocolate pudding tins and passed off on the world as chocolate pudding is really—” He paused, looked at me seriously, said, “Are you ready for this shocking revelation?”

  “Ready,” I said.

  “Then listen closely. That stuff in those tins is really hippopotamus mud.”

  “Hippopotamus mud?”

  “Absolutely. Mud in which hippos have been rolling and playing for days to get it to the proper consistency. I see it all now!” He picked up the pot and scraped the inside.

  I tipped back on my chair, watching Teddy. He was wearing a soft, clean, denim shirt, and worn-looking jeans. His jacket, which he had tossed over the other chair, was fur-lined. An image of his house suddenly sprang into my mind. It would have eight or ten rooms, each one larger than our whole trailer, a fireplace, wall oven, a garage for two cars, and two cars in the garage. It would have a patio in back, and big double glass doors that slid open. His mother played tennis and his father was, perhaps, a doctor.

  “Is your father a doctor, and do you have a fireplace in your house?”

  “No and qualified yes. He’s a lawyer and there are two fireplaces. One in the parents’ bedroom, one in the living room.”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Yes. And more rooms than we need. And furniture, and all kinds of garbage. Conspicuous, wasteful, disgusting consumption. Let’s not talk about my house or my family.”

  “Don’t you like them?”

  “Actually, I do. But the way we live—” He drew his thin shoulders together. “You people have the right idea. Everything basic. Where’s the john?” He stood up.

  “Privy outside. Go right around the side of the trailer. You can’t miss it.”

  “My God!” His face glowed as he rushed outside. I let my chair down onto the floor, took the pot to the sink and filled it with water to soak. Teddy came back in, shutting the trailer door carefully behind him, shaking rain off his shoulders and his head. “Do you use that in winter, too?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but at night I use a pot if I have to.”

  “It’s what we all have to come back to.” He leaned against the table. “We Americans use too much of everything. Too much gas, too much electricity, too much food, too much of all the natural resources. The figures per capita compared to the rest of the world are really gross. Wait a second, I’ll show you an article—” He dug into his pockets, taking out a handful of change, a few bills, keys, scraps of paper, throwing it all down on the table, talking about the world food crisis and how it could be solved. “Well, I can’t find it, but you know what I mean.” He pushed his hair back behind his ears. “You’re doing things right. Basic. Down to the bone. It’s terrific.”

  We went on talking. I made him laugh by telling him how I learned to read from chocolate pudding boxes when I was about four years old. It got dark outside. We drank milk, and ate bread with peanut butter. I turned on a light. It was warm in the trailer. That strange feeling of happiness crept over me again. It was an amnesiac feeling, as if happiness had made me forget all sorts of important things. After a few moments it came to me that I had forgotten to think about Uncle and Dad. I sat straighter, alert, listening for them in the rainy darkness outside.

  Teddy stood up. “I really have to go.” I gave him directions for getting out to the highway. He didn’t think he’d have any trouble getting a ride back to the Square. “If I get stuck, I can always call my mother from a gas station and she’ll come pick me up. She’s a good kid, my mother.” He took my hand. “Anyway. Right?”

  “Basic,” I said.

  “Chocolate pudding,” he said.

  “Okay. Chocolate pudding.”

  “Remember that. The two most important words in the world. Choc-o-late pud-ding.” In the midst of our silliness, we kissed again.

  Teddy left. I sat down at the table and opened my notebook. I found myself listening, as I had every night lately, for sounds which might be Uncle and Dad returning. I was chilly and got a sweater. How lonely the rain sounded tapping on our tin roof. Suddenly, I ran to the door and pulled it open.

  “Theodore Roosevelt Finkel,” I called. He was gone. I ran into the road. It was dark. Rain fell heavily all around. “Teddy,” I called. “Teddy!”

  “Over here!” His voice came from a distance. “Chrissy—you okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied. “See you tomorrow.” The rain seemed to wash away my voice. I put my hands around my mouth, and called as loud as I could, “Chocolate pudding!” And from a distance, Teddy’s voice came singing out of the darkness, “Choc-o-late pud-ding.”

  Guess Whose Friendly Hands

  Louise had had the cat dream again. She woke up with the echo of her dream voice shouting in her head … dyed GREEN? Her amputated leg was aching. Sometimes the leg that wasn’t there hurt more than anything else. Sometimes the pain centered in her belly, more terrible than anything she could ever have imagined. Drugs—she loved drugs now. She, who had never taken an aspirin.

  She was eighteen, and dying. She was quite sure she was dying, although nobody had said this in so many words. Not her mother, Mary Amelia Pesco, nor her sister, Beth, nor Martha Finley, the only one of her friends who still came occasionally to sit by her bed, to tell her lies, and talk about the things they’d do when Louise was up and around again. “Did you hear about the mob at Green Lakes on July Fourth? Did you see the picture in the Herald Journal? Next year, Lou, we’ll go together, you, me, the whole gang. What a riot. Danny got drunk on two bottles of beer, the jackass.” And later, as she was leaving, “You’re looking terrific, I mean … really better than before … I mean, you are …”

  The word death was never mentioned. Louise was “sick.” She was “improving,” or “getting better,” or “recovering.” That’s what they said.

  She had been dying for two years. Perhaps longer. But certainly for two years. On a January day, one of those metallic winter days when the air is hard and glinting, Louise had stepped off a Salina Street bus, stepped over a mound of dirty snow, and fallen. Gone down like a felled tree. She had been unable to get up.

  “Come on, Lou, quit kidding,” Martha said. They had been downtown, it was Saturday, and they’d amused themselves touring the stores, Dey’s, Sibley’s, Flah’s, snorting derisively over the prices of clothing neither of them could afford.

  “I’m not kidding, I can’t get up.” Louise had laughed disbelievingly. “My legs feel drunk.”

  “Maybe you sprained something.” Martha put her mittened hands around Louise’s ski jacket and hauled at her. No use. Louise was dead weight there on the frozen sidewalk. Hank Martelli, the barber, had come out of his little shop and helped Martha. They had half dragged, half carried Louise the three blocks home. “I feel like such a dope,” she kept saying.

  Two years of doctors, operations, therapy. Money and hope inextricably mingled. The one in increasingly short supply, the other manufactured afresh every morning. Louise often thought of them, money and hope: money was green; hope, blue. Why blue? Because it was her favorite color? She’d had a blue dress long ago, polka dotted, with a little round white collar. Also a blue glass cat, and a blue lucite comb and brush set.

  The comb and brush, enclosed in a stiff plastic case with a red snap, had been a birthday present given her by Beth, bought at Daw’s Cut Rate Store for $1.75. Louise should know: she’d lent Beth 75 cents of that money and, in fact, taken her to the store, as she took Beth everywhere. It had been Louise’s tenth birthday. The comb had snapped in half one morning as Louise dragged it through her thick, wiry hair—and the brush—? The brush, too, was gone, but Louise couldn’t remember what had happened to it. Yet she had always remembered everything! Telephone numbers, birthdays, dental appointments, how much Ma owed to what stores, and when it had better be paid to avoid those letters that said: LAST WARNING. WE ARE
FORCED TO HAND THIS ACCOUNT OVER TO A COLLECTION AGENCY. But now—now, she couldn’t remember a simple thing like what had happened to the blue hairbrush. No, she took it back! She didn’t love drugs. She hated them!

  It was a summer morning. The weight of moist heat and decay pressed down on Louise’s body. Beneath her neck, her pillow was damp. A pale pink-striped sheet, sweet as candy cane, covered her. She twitched at the sheet. What had happened to that brush? Her face went rigid with the effort to remember, but her memory balked like a big stubborn dog that sets its behind down on the ground, determined not to move. And there she was, tugging at the leash, but without the strength anymore to make that dog respond to her will—that dog which had once frisked, snapped, jumped, and rolled over at a snap of her fingers. She knuckled her forehead angrily. But even her anger, which used to course through her like a healthy river, was diluted, fuzzed, blurred by drugs and pain.

  She pushed herself slowly up in bed till she was leaning against the headboard. Only eight o’clock, and already Syracuse sweltered under sullen skies. For days, thunder had rumbled distantly, like cannon in a far-off war. “Oh, the war, the war,” she sighed, not knowing why she said it, and then thinking of all the books she hadn’t read yet, books about history, and wars, and the people who had lived through them. But the truth was she hated war books, and war movies, and war news, and military parades and drum rolls. All that military garbage!

  She was a pacifist at heart, if not in fact; believed fervently in peaceful ways between human beings, but had always been ready to tear to shreds anyone who might hurt, molest, scare, snare, ambush, trip, or trap her sister. Except herself, of course.

  Oh, the fights they had had. She remembered pounding Beth unmercifully, sitting on her head, pushing her down on the floor and trying to walk on her belly. Poor Beth, the baby, the younger sister, the one who had to obey Louise—or else! But now Louise was the helpless one, cared for, babied, everything done for her by Beth and Ma that once she had done so well for herself. She raised her hands into the air. They hung before her eyes, gross, rubbery, inflated. Useless.

  “Go away,” she said to the hands, shoving them beneath the pink sheet.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Good morning,” Beth sang, coming in with Louise’s breakfast tray in her outstretched hands. Did Louise only imagine that since her illness Beth’s walk had changed? Or had it actually become brisker, stronger, each foot set down with new assurance? Beth at sixteen. How buoyant she was. How pretty. How splendid. How perfect. How full of … life! She wore a pair of ragged-edged shorts and a green tee shirt with WHO ME? printed across the chest. Her breasts bounced gaily, her protruding blue eyes were calm. She was as Louise had once been; as, sometimes, for fleeting, dreamlike moments, Louise still thought of herself. She hadn’t seen herself in a mirror in, oh, five months. Ma had taken the mirror from her room first, then emptied the apartment of mirrors. Big mirrors and small, pocket mirrors, bureau mirrors, even the mirrored door of the bathroom medicine cabinet—all had disappeared.

  “I was thinking about that blue comb and brush set you bought me for my tenth birthday,” she said.

  Beth laughed. “You remember the funniest things.”

  “I remember throwing that brush at you once when we had a fight,” Louise said. A small shock of triumph made her lie back, close her eyes, and smile. There it was, the memory she wanted. You big bully, Beth had screamed in a rage, you’re always telling me what to do, I hate you, you big bully asshole.

  And Louise: Don’t you talk to me like that. I’m in charge here. Then the brush flying out of her hand, whizzing through the air, straight toward Beth. Smashing against the wall, breaking into pieces. And Beth, sniveling, crying furiously, I gave you that for your birthday.

  Louise opened her eyes. “Don’t you remember that brush, and the fight we had, Beth?”

  Beth put the tray down on the table next to Louise’s bed. “You know me, I don’t remember stuff like that. You’re the memory machine in the family. Don’t know what Ma and I would do without you.”

  “You’ll learn,” Louise said, sipping orange juice.

  Beth snapped up the window shade. Had she heard Louise?

  “Ugh, another hot day,” she said. “Wish it would rain, or something.”

  Or something.

  Louise heard in those words a wistful, painful plea. With all the love in the world, they wished her to die and get it over with. This business of being sick, of slowly dying had gone on too long! It was rude, disgusting, and expensive. No wonder they wouldn’t talk about it. No, they wouldn’t talk. They didn’t say one word. Not one. Not even mumble it under their breath, or whisper it suddenly in the dark on a night when she couldn’t sleep because of pain.

  And yet, look at her. Look at her. Look at her! Her breasts had been taken from her, cut off, one at a time. A leg was gone. Other parts, too. Her flesh had been cut, severed, skewered, implanted, eviscerated. Her face had ballooned into a shapeless swollen moon, and her hair had fallen out in clumps.

  Once she had loved her body. It did so well for her. She was nimble, coordinated, a runner, a jumper, a leaper. Her arms and legs were rounded, her shoulders smooth, her belly ticklish as hell. There were only her mother, her sister, herself: three females. They walked around the apartment with or without clothing, dressed, undressed, half dressed, calling to one another. She, the older sister, the responsible one, Ma’s right hand, kept Beth in line. When she heard Beth refer to her “peepee,” a word she had picked up at school, Louise was shocked in a slightly superior way. “Didn’t Ma tell you the right words?” she had demanded. “Didn’t I tell you one thousand times? It’s ignorant to call yourself by dumb names.”

  “I heard the boys say pussy,” Beth ventured. She was a frail child, without Louise’s sturdy, well-coordinated body.

  “Forget that,” Louise said, but without rancor. She had never been able to feel that such a word was bad. She was crazy about pussycats. Too bad they couldn’t have one, but Beth was allergic to everything, sneezing her head off whenever she was around dogs, or cats, or even a little harmless white mouse. No, they had no pets. They had no father. They had no money. They had only one another, mother and daughters. The two girls grew up very close.

  “Made your eggs the way you like them, with chives,” Beth said.

  Louise took a little bite. She had no appetite. Food nauseated her. She didn’t even like to look at the eggs, but Beth had made them specially. “You’re good, Beth,” she said.

  “Ah, you’ll do the same for me some day. I’ll get myself an interesting disease and lie in bed like a queen being waited on by you. Remember how you used to make me tea with milk whenever I got a cold? And let me eat all the chocolate marshmallow cookies I wanted?”

  “I remember,” Louise said. Every winter Beth had had sniffles, colds, sore throats, a runny nose. Louise, nothing. She would stay home from school to look after Beth, glad for the chance to read, or watch TV, or play checkers with Beth. “You’re healthy as a horse,” Ma said. And Louise complained, jokingly, that Beth had it all, that she never got a chance to be sick. Now, in two years, Beth hadn’t had so much as a sneeze.

  Later, Beth came back, took away the breakfast tray, mostly untouched. “Ready for the bedpan?”

  “Okay.” Louise looked out the window, in order to pretend it was happening to someone else’s body. Every day it shamed her that her mother and sister had to carry her body’s wastes out of the room. She looked at her reflection in the window. Nightmare face, moonface, stretched tight and shiny. Ma had never realized she had a “mirror” next to her bed. Stiff yellow bristles of new hair. Jack-o’-lantern face. Once she had been pretty. Now her cheeks were tremendous, evilly cheerful.

  They lived on the top floor of a two-family, flat-roofed house on Carbon Street. Louise’s window looked out on the gray clapboard walls of the house next door. Above the neighbor’s roof she could see a small patch of sky, gray today as it had bee
n for a week.

  “Maybe it’ll rain today,” Beth said, again. “This humidity—” She licked around her mouth, licking off the sweat. “Up you go.” She took the bedpan, left the room. The toilet flushed down the hall.

  She came back, carrying a bowl of warm water. “Hey, I forgot to tell you. Guess who phoned last night?”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, guess, lazybones.” All day Beth played little games with Louise. Guess what we’re having for lunch? Guess who I saw downtown? Guess what I found for you in the library? The less Louise ate, the less she could concentrate on reading, and the fewer people she saw, the more cheerfully and insistently Beth played guessing games.

  “I don’t want to guess, hon.”

  “Come on, guess! Don’t be a party-pooper.”

  Louise had her private name for Beth’s game—Never Say Die. Too bad she couldn’t share it with Beth; she really would appreciate it. On boring, rainy afternoons waiting for Ma to come home from work, smearing their fingers over the damp dusty windows, she and Beth would play the cliche game like mad, pat phrases and bromides tripping off their tongues (of course), while they (naturally) shook like jelly with laughter. And the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, there’s a silver lining behind every cloud, a rolling stone gathers no moss, and people who live in glass houses should pull down their shades. They could keep that up for hours, even after Ma came home, till she ordered them to stop before she went crazy. Beth: Bats in her belfry. Louise: Don’t be disrespectful. She has a wise old head on those young shoulders. And Ma, half laughing: Girls, I’m warning you for the last time, I mean it …