Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  I surged through the water ahead of my brother. He passed me and, well, you know the routine. Except suddenly he wasn’t in front of me, he was knee-high in the water behind me, triumphantly calling, “Fake out!” from the shallows, and I was so far out that the water was immeasurably deep, and calm, and yet when I tried to paddle back in, the sea refused to let me.

  What a day. First the unquiet stirrings of puberty, and now the premature onset of death. I’ll spare you the details, but picture trying to swim against a herculean current, and getting the reverse of nowhere, and almost pooping in your one-piece because, having seen a photo of a drowned person in Look magazine, you knew yours was going to be a grisly crossing of the bar.

  When I was quite far out, and had actually kind of given up and was halfheartedly treading water, the current lessened and I found I could swim sideways a little. I eventually managed to make my spluttering, panic-stricken way to a line of partially submerged pilings that must have been put there by Ponce de León, judging from the buildup of barnacles encrusted over them.

  There I clung, caterwauling for my mother, dammit, barfing up seawater, and praying for rescue—just not by the cute lifeguard, because that would be a fate worse than drowning.

  But there he strode, and there he swam, a merman with look-at-me, gliding strokes, and a flutter kick that didn’t disturb the water. He arrived by my side in no time, underscoring my humiliating proximity to shore, and gave a head toss that flipped the hair out of his eyes in a perfect arc. He unhooked me from the piling one limb at a time, as though I were a starfish sucking on to it with all one million of my tube feet.

  Oh, the extreme mortification. To be carried through the water draped like a heroine over his arms, and to be a nine-year-old without even the buds of breasts to press against his godlike chassis. For miles he carried me, past gawking families on the hotel beach, past the cabanas where the bronzed men and women nodded and whispered sympathetically, past the pools where the round-eyed teenaged girls sighed and shook their heads in envy, and finally to my mother’s deck chair, where she stood, hands on her hips, waiting.

  “This had damn well be worth getting me off the phone for,” my mother said.

  “Will m-made me swim out th-there,” I sniveled, as the cute lifeguard deposited me on the deck chair. I was scraped all over by the barnacles, and my bathing suit had little rips on the butt and on the frills above the leg openings.

  “Jesus H. Christ, now what have you done?” My mother’s face was flushed, and she had that look she wore when something bad or scary or emotional was happening, but no way was she going to give in and publicly admit it. Instead, she regarded me with the disapproval she reserved for Obadiah when he gunned the house with diarrhea.

  “Omigod . . . this kid is yours?” The lifeguard looked at the two of us with idiotlike perplexity.

  My mother acknowledged her ugly spawn with a Pepsodent smile and a hand on the lifeguard’s golden forearm.

  “Thank you so much,” she purred. “I’m sure a rescue at sea wasn’t necessary. My daughter tends to overdramatize.”

  “Hey, like no problem, miss,” the lifeguard said, smiling back and holding her gaze. The perfect white stripe of zinc oxide on his nose had not been the least bit smudged by our encounter.

  Mr. Innocence suddenly appeared, like nothing was wrong. Like he hadn’t basically held my head underwater and tried to shove me into Davy Jones’s locker.

  “Gee whiz! What happened?” my brother said.

  “Nothing,” said my mother, pushing her boy watchers on top of her head like a hair band. “Birdbrain here did something stupid.”

  The lifeguard suddenly remembered his duties. “Maybe we should check the kid out. She got pretty banged up hangin’ on to that piece a wood out there.” He took hold of my ankle and lifted it up, revealing a cross-hatching of bloody scrapes and cuts all along the inside of my legs. As he replaced it, I watched the soft flesh of my upper thigh wobble. Then the lifeguard unfolded my arms, and after he inspected them, he returned them to where they’d been, clamped around my shivering torso. My mother didn’t interfere, but stood close by, watching, chewing on her thumb. I thought she was looking for flaws. I couldn’t stop thinking of Glamour magazine’s Dos and Don’ts pages. I distinctly saw myself with the black bar across my face (“That hair! That one-piece! No grooming at all!”) and my mother, opposite, on the Dos page in a flattering enlargement.

  My cuts were all stinging like crazy from the drying salt, and I was trying not to cry. I struggled to channel my heroine, even though I knew Wednesday was not fond of seaside activities. Certainly she would have been stoic, and delighted by any injuries brought on by a near snuffing.

  “Shheesh. You’re really bleeding,” my brother said.

  “Hey, little dude, don’t cry,” urged the cute lifeguard. He was proving much better at this than my mother.

  “Oh, she’s fine, aren’t you, Toots? They’re only superficial cuts. I’ll get some Bactine and we’ll fix you up.” My mother patted me awkwardly on the rump. “Will, go fetch her a Tab, would you?”

  Turning back to the lifeguard, she said, “Listen, I wish there was some way I could thank you properly.” She reached into her bag by the chair for her Fabergé lipstick and started piling it on.

  Gross, I thought. I knew the signs. I stood up, wrapped a towel around myself, and demanded the room key. I could look after my own first aid.

  She figured out a way to thank the cute lifeguard all right, starting with the mai tai she bought him at the Tiki bar when he went off duty. As for the person on the other end of the interrupted long-distance call, turns out he only wanted to know her ring size.

  A Dose of Religion

  THERE MUST BE a trillion ways to deliver bad news by letter.

  I’m sorry to be the one to tell you . . .

  By the time you read this . . .

  Someday this will all seem like a horrible dream . . .

  My mother dispensed with the usual epistolary protocol. On a postcard from Cozumel she wrote:Guess what! Pete and I were married last week! The dogs are fine, and we’ve moved to Virginia! You’re going to love your new school! It’s co-ed! Love, M.

  P.S. Henrietta got a new job.

  Like she could fool me with exclamation marks. What she was really saying was:Listen up, Toots, your life is about to get ugly. I’ve gone and married that sleazy Austrian gunrunner, Peter Beer. You know, the guy that was your father’s best friend? Yeah, him. The one with the accent and the ugly pointy nose. The guy that sweats a lot and doesn’t use deodorant. So you’ve only met him a couple of times, big deal. You’ll get to know him soon enough. And you’ll get to hear us doing it all night long and on Saturday and Sunday mornings because your bedroom is right over ours, and the house is one of those new ranch types they built in under a minute. Whoops! Forgot to tell you we moved to the middle of nowhere. You’re going to hate your new school.

  P.S. Pete thought Henrietta was fat and lazy so he canned her. Guess it’s just me from now on! There’s a chore list already up by the back door and you’re down for about sixty hours a week.

  Too bad camp can’t last forever, M.

  Since my mother was conceived, born, and raised without a sense of humor, I couldn’t regard her bulletin as anything other than the stone cold truth. The few times I’d met Herr Peter Christian Beer were enough to convince me that my new stepfather and Hitler had been littermates. I already knew I hated everything about him. Like the way he answered the telephone with a razor-sharp “Beer here!” Or how when he patted the dogs, he did it so hard they fell over. It would have been more humane if a soldier in uniform had shown up at the door of my cabin with a folded flag.

  Summer camp had been sort of a bust that year anyway. I couldn’t figure out who I was supposed to be, nor could I find a niche among the jacks-playing, skinny-legged, madras-wearing Brookes and Whitneys. It was hard to be ghoulish in a cabin by a lake under sun-filtered pines, with campfires, and s�
��mores, and “Kumbaya” ringing in your ears. After a couple of fruitless weeks combing the Maine woods for hemlock (not that I knew what it looked like) and recording the effects of formaldehyde on bats snared by the camp nurse, I gave in and learned to play jacks (horribly), swam and canoed, and played Capture the Flag.

  Next to Breck shampoo, the hottest seller at the Camp Four Winds supply store was stationery. The amount of summertime mail that went in and out of the Sargentville, Maine, post office was of North Pole magnitude. Following lunch there was a mandatory rest period during which letters were furiously penned by the homesick inmates. The rusty springs of ancient bunk beds squeaked with the force of all those Bics, and tears were staunched by autographed stuffed animals and Lilly Pulitzer sheet ensembles. Even I had gone so far as to miss my mother. Whether this was a genuine sentiment, or one born of peer pressure, it didn’t last longer than the time it takes to skim a postcard.

  Home was suddenly a low-ceilinged, split-level ranch made entirely of brick—both real and faux, but mostly faux. The floors were brick, the walls were brick, the shelving and the alcoves, the stairs and the basement, they were all brick. There was a brick patio off a living room that had a brick fireplace, and the brick kitchen had plastic brick counters and brick-colored Kenmore appliances and a linoleum brick floor. Even the cupboards had brick-patterned contact paper. It was like living in a kiln that had been air-dropped onto the middle of an eight-acre field. Over the summer, my mother and her new husband, whom she addressed as “my Lord and Master,” had put up ten linear miles of raw wood fencing and erected a barn, into which they had moved four horses: hers, a big gray named Puck; his, a palomino killer named Mighty Mo; Will’s once coveted but now bratty and loathsome pony; and an obese bovine piebald named Beethoven. It was like the Instant Grow version of Green Acres, minus the pigs.

  My stepfather was an arms dealer. He and my mother had not been brought together by serendipity alone; he had been my father’s closest friend, their initial bond having been an obsession with all objets de guerre. As manager of an American organization called Interarms, he bought and sold surplus weaponry to governments and civilians all over the world. The founder of Interarms wasn’t picky about who was pushing the shopping cart—Castro, Batista, or Nixon—because he claimed neutrality, and thus was able to equip home guards, national reserves, civil wars, revolutions, defense wars, and insurgencies alike. My stepfather was paid very well, and then some, for his hazardous line of work, and he put the money into his stable of cars, as well as the vault full of gold bricks that he kept in Zurich.

  Applying the managerial skills of his business to the home front, the Lord and Master’s first official act had indeed been the brutal firing of my beloved Dewar’s-slugging, Winston-puffing Henrietta, whom he detested. (In a double whammy, Cassie Diggins felt compelled to quit in protest.) My mother had been aghast, but her new husband had bullied her into going it alone. I was bereft. I’d been looking forward to taking care of Henrietta in her demented years, after she had hand-reared my own children. That’s what Scottish nannies were supposed to do—stay on till death. The other side of my family, the happy, well-adjusted Uncle Shirley side I dreamed of belonging to, had one. Her name was Magoo (or something like that), and she was about a hundred and fifty. Her adoptive family had built her a little apartment in their gargantuan house in New Canaan, Connecticut, a place I would have given my heart and lungs to have lived in. Magoo toddled down for meals and babbled in atmospheric Scottish gibberish in her designated corner throughout. Since three, I’d been planning to build Henrietta a wing on my English country estate, complete with her own tap-room and cigarette and candy vending machines.

  On the hot September day we arrived at the new house, Will and I stood in the kitchen and gaped at the chores chart the Lord and Master had bolted to the wall. We had never been assigned chores before.

  “I changed my mind,” I said, turning to my mother in total neurogenic shock. “I do want to go to boarding school. I do. In fact, I insist.”

  “Too late,” my mother said, swinging six-packs of Tab onto the pantry shelves. She was organizing her supplies, something she did on a weekly basis. My mother stocked up like the Russians were scheduled to drop the Big One at 0800. There was a spare for the spare for the spare that was the spare for the item in use, be it salt or Bacardi or Comet. Her personal staples, Lip-ton Iced Tea Mix, strawberry Carnation Instant Breakfast, Metracal shakes and cookies, Sweet’N Low, and Tab, she bought by the case. There was a measurable blast of carcinogens whenever you opened the cabinet doors.

  My mother stood back to admire her work. She frowned, and then switched the five jars of Bac-Os with the five boxes of Rice-A-Roni. Still not satisfied, she transferred the Rice-A-Roni to the shelf above, and put the seven bottles of Good Seasons Lo Calorie dressing in their place. Obadiah was rooting for crumbs beneath her, and she kept tripping over him and sliding on his slobber as she struggled to place the Rice-A-Roni far enough back to accommodate six tins of roast beef hash and five of deviled ham on the front of the shelf.

  “There!” she said, emerging from the tiny pantry, which was really a cupboard stashed under the back (brick) stairs. “Anyway, Toots, school starts in a week, and you’ll make lots of new friends, just like you always do. Some of them might even be boys.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively as she unscrewed a jar of powdered iced tea. I caught a whiff of the nuclear fallout from ten feet away. She spooned some into a glass, added water from the tap, and pulled a tray of ice cubes out of the freezer. Slamming it on the counter, she gave the frosty handle a yank, which sent most of the cubes thumping across the counter and onto the floor. Obadiah dove after them in a commendable burst of energy. My mother wiped her hands on her bikini bottoms. “So you might consider laying off the potato chips for a while.” Inspired, she wrote out DIET!! on a piece of paper and Scotch taped it to the fridge, where a dozen similar notes were already displayed. She claimed these motivational reminders were for herself, but she made a point of being reminded by them whenever I was around.

  Will leaned against the screened back door, smirking. He left for school in a couple of days.

  “Shut up, jerk,” I hissed, turning on him. “I wouldn’t want to go to your re-tard school anyway!”

  “Ah, ah, ah!” cautioned my mother. “Now, that’s a little unfair. Glayden is for kids with dyslexia too.” She smiled at Will as she sipped from her glass. If this affirmation of my brother’s school really being for retards insulted him, he didn’t show it.

  “At least I don’t have to live here and shovel shit and wax cars,” he said snidely, and slammed out the door into the stifling humidity.

  I went back to staring at the Lord and Master’s work detail. Jeez. The guy had no clue how to go about doing this. He had never been married before, plus he was old. Like forty-something. There wasn’t enough time in the day for all the tasks I was supposed to perform. Spoiled? You bet I was. But this was hardly a case of not wanting to take out the garbage or feed the dogs. This was about mucking out the horses in the dark before school, whitewashing all that fencing in the middle of a heat wave, picking up every Monday after school the shit three dogs had broadcast over eight acres, and waxing one of my stepfather’s stupid sports cars every other Wednesday.

  That afternoon found my brother and me doing time with buckets and brushes, working on our own little chain gang. As soon as you applied the paint, the thirsty wood instantly slurped it up like a sponge. After a couple of hours, we felt like we were getting nowhere.

  Our mother came out with some Kool-Aid, and her two tortoises, Mr. Turt and Miss Tort. Obadiah greeted her by rolling onto his back and flapping his dinner-plate paws. Will and I collapsed beside him in the long buggy grass and feigned heatstroke.

  “Honestly, you two,” she said, setting the tortoises down gently in the deep jungle, whereupon they instantly slammed all four doors shut. “You’d think you were being worked like darkies down on the old plantation.”
With her face turned to the sun, she managed to locate and remove a tick the size of a baseball from Obadiah’s neck. She flicked it into the grass, sparing its evil little life so it could live to suck the blood of basset hounds again.

  I glowered at her from under my paint-streaked bangs.

  For the first time since bearing them, our mother actually had to take care of her children. Will was mostly away, either at school or camp, or at our grandparents’, but Edward made up for Will’s absence by being an omnipresent toddler. Without Cassie Diggins we were suddenly, horribly, at the mercy of our mother’s cooking: Early New England Regional Cuisine as Interpreted by an Alcoholic with an Eating Disorder.

  Everything went into the Teflon frying pan: Spam, hot dogs, “grilled” Velveeta cheese sandwiches, steak, spaghetti, hearts of palm, fish sticks, and any and all leftovers, which, with an addition of onion, were then relabeled “hash.” Meanwhile, my mother rarely deviated from her own regime of cottage cheese, diet soda, Ayds candies, and raw hamburger meat dipped in Lip-ton onion soup mix—except when she was loaded. Then she sucked up drippings from the roast or frying pan with a straw.

  The cook soon became fed up to here with cooking. In the nick of time someone invented Shake ’N Bake, Birds Eye boil-in-the-bag frozen vegetables, and a coffee cake mix in a plastic bag that you added an egg to before squirting it out into its own little baking pan. Those technological advances, along with Chun King sukiyaki in a box, helped my mother evolve.

  The Lord and Master left for work at dawn, so it was relatively peaceful in the mornings. Edward would watch cartoons in the living room, while I’d sit at the kitchen counter before school and watch my mother fry eggs in bacon grease. On certain Fridays, I went to visit my grandparents for the weekend. I hated flying, especially alone. I was torn between my fear and wanting a breather from my stepfather’s autocratic domain, not to mention babysitting my little brother, a drudgery that was hardly worth its twenty-five-cents-an-hour compensation.