Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  “I hate flying more than anything,” I grumbled, and refolded my paper napkin so the corners were more perfectly aligned.

  “Poppycock,” said my mother, sliding a couple of eggs that looked like brown lace onto my plate. The toaster popped, and she scraped the tiniest amount of margarine imaginable over an English muffin before handing it to me. I glared at her. She herself was so terrified of flying someone had to crowbar her out of the airport bar in order to get her on the plane.

  “And just think,” she added, “you get to be waited on hand and foot by those Irish biddies and pork up on butter, and drink Coke until your teeth rot.” She had a knack for making the things you looked forward to sound terrible.

  “Yeah, well at least I’ll be away from Adolf,” I said through a mouthful of toast. My mother whipped around from the sink, a bottle of dish soap in one hand, a sponge in the other. She narrowed her eyes at me, like smoke was heading her way. Whether my sobriquet for him insulted her, or whether it hurt her feelings, I couldn’t tell, but clearly she was pissed. Not that I cared. Now that we were at last spending quality time together—something I couldn’t believe I used to wish for—my mother was becoming less of an enigma and more of a liability. The bottle of Dawn slipped from her grasp, beaning the new dog, Dropout, on his massive head. Blue soap leached out like gore as we stared at each other. The arty metal cutouts of turtles and otters and porcupines on the kitchen walls looked down accusingly at me until I lowered my eyes, and my mother bent to clean up the soapy mess, apologizing profusely to Dropout, who squirmed and thrashed his tail like a delighted sea serpent.

  (Greta, to no one’s regret but my mother’s, was history. Upon her arrival in rural Virginia, she had adopted the mind-set of a homicidal psychotic. One minute she would be all heroic and Rin Tin Tin-like, posing with her keen eye upon the horizon, looking out for the 101st Cavalry, and the next she’d be enacting the canine version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. After she’d redecorated the neighbor’s henhouse with the blood of its residents, my mother was forced to ship Greta to the nearest active war zone. On her way home from the cargo terminal of National Airport she picked up a replacement. Dropout, as the name suggested, had failed attack school. He was the world’s largest German shepherd. He was entirely black, sweetly complacent, and lazy—and would eventually get mistaken for a bear and shot to death—an event from which my mother would never fully recover.)

  “Yes, yes, yes!” she now said to the behemoth creature. He clicked around her with joy, crashing into Obadiah, who fell over, and Piddle, who snapped at him before retreating under my stool. I gave Piddle my bacon and then put my plate on the floor for Obadiah, who was forbidden to have fried eggs because he liked to drag his ears through them, and then all over the house.

  Lightbulb: “Why can’t I just stay with Gaga and Granddaddy, and go to school in New York?”

  My mother took a swallow of her morning Tab and sighed, considering this wonderful possibility. “Fine by me,” she said, “but your grandfather would never go for it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you ain’t a boy, Toots, that’s why.” She scooped a handful of butterscotch Ayds from an economy-sized box and put them in a Baggie. “Better pack these,” she said, handing them to me. “I don’t want to have to go buying you new clothes before spring. Speaking of which, you better hurry up and get dressed for school, and pack your suitcase too. We still have the horses to do before the bus comes.”

  Weather took all the fun out of owning animals. It was barely December, but there was already a foot of snow on the ground.

  “The neighbors all have farmhands. Why can’t we hire someone to do all this stuff?” I asked my mother. I was cracking the ice out of the buckets in the barn so the horses could drink, while she threw extra flakes of hay into their stalls.

  “Oh, stop your grumbling,” she said, though not without sympathy. “You know how Pete is. He thinks we should be the lords of our own fiefdom, but he doesn’t want to pay for the serfs.”

  “Yeah,” I laughed, and went to help her buckle extra blankets onto the horses, their warm breath rising in grass-scented steam all around us.

  I had to feel for my mother; I was old enough now. Still, I would look at her sometimes and wonder what on earth she saw in her odious husband. I sensed she had little control over her domestic situation, even though she had put herself—and, more importantly, me—into it. It had to have been like toxic shock, her being thrown into all those different layers of servitude. Out in the sticks, Trader Vic’s and Dead Zombies a thing of the past, her studio gone and her artistic life confined to a room in the basement, her children requiring meals at least two times a day, her husband requiring sex the same amount (not to mention slavish devotion in between); when Pete was history, my mother would confess she’d married him because he was the most exciting man she’d ever met.

  My stepfather would have been delighted to have me permanently packed off to live in Burdenland. There was no love lost between us. I continued to hate him for any number of reasons, not the least of which was because he seriously sweated. No one in my family sweated like that. They maybe turned pink after a couple of sets of tennis, but never did quarts of perspiration drip from their noses or course in rivers from their pits. The Lord and Master claimed sweating was healthy. He eschewed the use of deodorant and antiperspirants, saying that to block it was unnatural.

  “Why do you drink so much if your just gonna sweat it all out?” I had asked him one broiling hot Indian summer Sunday before the weather had turned. My mother had been trying to kill two birds: getting me tanned, while encouraging a little family time. The Lord and Master was intermittently sunning his armpits, elbows raised to the sky, and slurping grape soda from a work crew-sized thermos that rattled with ice cubes every time he hoisted it up. I was working on a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of migrating Assateague ponies, that I had carried out on a card table. (Nothing leveled me better than a few hours spent on a good jigsaw puzzle—other than a stack of CREEPY comics and a big bag of Lay’s.)

  “I am like an Olympian, cooling the surface of my skins!” he proclaimed, turning himself slowly, like a vertical rotisserie, beside my mother’s deck chair on the patio. His thick Austrian accent only underscored his operatic delivery of anything—from the time of day, to a lecture on the proper way to simonize a Berlinetta Boxer.

  Olympian, my ass. He was a sweaty, disgusting satyr. He might not have had the pointy ears, but he sure as hell had the horns. And I knew from Greek mythology that satyrs went hand in hand with drunken, lewd behavior. They were always fornicating with nymphs, and goats, and little boys.

  I repeated my question about his excessive consumption of liquids.

  “Because it is excellent for one’s body to sweat!” he sang in reply, mopping his face with a towel. “This is merely thermoregulation! Men who are working, athletes who are running, they produce a gallon of sweat an hour!” His left eye, a wanderer, rolled around in a sickening manner.

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “And you will see, you will begin to have this sweat yourself, when you will have breasts!”

  “Eeuw.”

  “Yes, this is true. With this puberty will come these hormones, and these will produce the sweat glands from under your arms, and in your groin, and from your nipples!”

  “Gross me out.”

  The Lord and Master winked at me, and smacked my mother on the butt. “Women, they love sweat from a man. This is how we communicate our sex drive!”

  I stomped off inside, just in time so they couldn’t see the waterworks. Honestly, how could my mother be with such a complete perv?

  I may have been an idiot savant in terms of mortuary science, but I still had clichéd ideas of love and sex, Harold Robbins excerpts notwithstanding. Up until my mother’s unfortunate union I’d been able to pretty much ignore her proclivities. Now I felt like I’d been thrown into the carnal sea, not only on the home front, where the newly
weds kept to a regimen of hyperactive coitus in the master bedroom below mine, but at my new school as well.

  The Flint Hill Preparatory School had an erudite name, but venerable the place was not. My sixth-grade class was a mixed bag of future hucksters, sluts, and farmhands, albeit in regimental blue uniforms. On the playground with my classmates at recess, I’d watch as the ten-year-old boys stuck their hands in the panties of the obliging ten-year-old girls, withdrawing their fingers for all to smell.

  Will had it just as bad. Burgundy Farms Country Day was an “alternative school.” Before he’d gotten permanently assigned to boarding school, I’d gone there with him for fifth grade. Unmitigated disaster. All I got out of it was a phobia for sandals and a talent for eating mud. Fourth grade had been at the National Cathedral School for girls, praise the Lord. Now I was enduring everyone else’s puberty at Flint Hill.

  All of which contributed to my becoming a drug addict by ten.

  It began innocently enough—but then that’s what they all say. In New York for the weekend, I’d been stricken with nausea during a routine perusal of Ann Rose’s office. For the record, I have a world-class vomit phobia. I’d rather overdose on rhubarb leaves and bleed from my eyeballs than throw up. After the initial wave, I crawled to the towering cabinet of pharmaceuticals in Ann Rose’s bathroom. Next to the Pepto and the milk of magnesia was a giant-sized bottle of BiSoDol antacid tablets. Panting, I unscrewed the cap and sniffed—mint. My mouth was filling with that nasty gush of saliva you get right before you’re about to blow, so I ate a couple of the thick white tablets. Then I prayed to God not to throw up and guess what—it worked!

  You bet I brought the miracle drug home with me. I hid it in the headboard shelf of my bed, behind a propped-up copy of Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. It freaked me out that I became conscious of the BiSoDol’s presence at all times. In the beginning I’d just take the bottle out, open it up, and smell it. Then I started shaking a few tablets out into my hand and looking at them. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was taking one every night before I went to bed. Shortly afterward, I found religion.

  It could have just been a chemical reaction from the sodium bicarbonate, but within seconds of ingesting my nightly wafer, an inexplicable urge to worship came over me. The chalky mint would spread over my tongue like a shroud, staunching the flow of saliva, and assuring me that no matter what I had eaten—a whole box of Cap’n Crunch, mud, or an entire jar of Jif—God, and BiSoDol, would keep me from throwing up. Accordingly, I gave thanks, and lots of it. This was a peace I’d never known. My mother would have died if she’d seen me on my knees on my floral Dacron bedspread, swaying like a fly rod and praising Jesus and the Lord Almighty in a whisper.

  I’d tinkered with religion briefly as a six-year-old, when, in a desire for what I mistakenly considered to be textbook normalcy, I’d marched over to the local Catholic church and signed myself up for Sunday school. They didn’t seem to care that I was unaccompanied, nor did they inquire if I was a Catholic. In the true spirit of Christianity, they welcomed me with open arms.

  Sunday school was a huge disappointment. It was all about coloring pictures of Noah’s Ark or Jesus in the Temple with an incomplete set of Crayola crayons. We sat at a long, oilclothcovered table, and, after a couple of graham crackers and Dixie cups of lukewarm grape juice, the teacher handed out pages torn from religious coloring books for us to work on. The other children filled in the robes of Mary’s dress with whatever colors were at hand—orange yellow, or silver, or salmon—carelessly running amok outside the lines. They scribbled the lilies with pine green and mulberry, but then they all fought for the flesh crayon, even when I showed them you could color skin the same with a very light shading of melon.

  The teacher, a kind enough spinster in an ankle-length prairie dress, walked around peering at our efforts. When she stopped at my shoulder, I covered my drawing with my hands. I saw it as vastly imperfect. The teacher asked to have a look, and I shrugged and told her I would have given Jesus rosy cheeks if there’d been any carnation pink.

  “I’m done with this one,” I said. “Do you have any others, like of the dead guy coming out of his grave?”

  “You mean Lazarus?” the teacher said with skepticism.

  “Sure. Anyone’ll do. Or I could work on a puzzle if you have one. But it has to be over a thousand pieces.”

  “First let’s see how you’ve done with Jesus walking on the water, shall we?”

  I leaned back and uncovered my picture. The teacher looked down at it and put a hand to her throat.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered hoarsely.

  Ask any control freak and they’ll tell you how brilliant they were at coloring. When everyone’s picture was pinned up on the bulletin board at the end of the class, I already knew I wouldn’t be back the following week. How could I, in good faith, create masterpieces while surrounded by aesthetic imbeciles? The teacher begged me to stay, but I’d lost interest. Besides, I was an imposter—I was Episcopalian.

  In the future, I’d be able to resolve all kinds of things by invoking the proverbial “suffering is redemptive” theory. Like if my mother hadn’t married that dictatorial sphincter, I wouldn’t have acquired a sense of self so early in life. Or learned to drive a stick at twelve. And if my father hadn’t killed himself, I wouldn’t have inherited a few million at twenty-one. But that philosophy wasn’t working for me then, and I was as tortured as St. Augustine. I was serving God, but God had yet to reward me by smiting my stepfather. Therefore, He too was torturing me. And I was no Job. Switching gears, I decided to miss my father. It was the first time I’d given serious thought to him since his death four years earlier. A shrink might have told me I was embarking on a deferred period of mourning. I can tell you I was perihormonal, hooked on antacids, and living under the same roof as the Antichrist.

  But wait a minute . . . if God could stop me from vomiting, maybe he could bring back my father. It seemed like a parallel miracle to me. It was a long shot, but I worked it anyway. Every night when I took my BiSoDol, instead of praying for God to kill my stepfather, I prayed like a fundamentalist for God to produce my father. Initially I referred to him as Daddy, but it sounded really weird to me. I was obliged to ask my mother (when she was toasted—I wasn’t stupid) what Will and I had called him, but she was flippant and said things like “Well I don’t know, for Christ sake, what do all kids call their damn fathers?” When Will and I were together one weekend in New York, I asked him, and he responded by punching me in the stomach.

  I didn’t feel the least bit guilty that I hadn’t missed my father before drugs had reintroduced us. It was as if he’d never been there in the first place. I had maybe two memories of him, and both of them were at night. The first was of my father going after a giant bee in my room, which turned out to be a half-dead bluebottle. The second was of being in his arms on the Snow White ride in Disneyland, when the wicked witch held out the apple to our little cart as it swung past on its tracks. I was scared out of my mind, and he protected me.

  I remembered protecting him. Whenever it rained during the night, I would sit outside my parents’ bedroom door and monitor the puddles on the street and the sidewalk. I dreaded rain. I was convinced it would never stop, and that the world would flood, worse even than when Noah was around. I’d sit all night outside that door, ready to warn my parents when the water rose and began to tug at the tender walls of our house.

  In an attempt to discover any traces of my father, I combed our sterile house, but all I could find was an old check register containing his carefully recorded expenditures, like a check to Best & Co. for thirty dollars and fifty-eight cents (clothes for Willy and Wendy), or one to Johnson’s Garden, fifteen dollars even. I spent hours analyzing my father’s handwriting for clues, trying to identify my DNA in the dot of his i or the curve of his c. I hated having only half of myself accounted for.

  That was about all I had to go on in the memory department, so I settled for mi
ssing the idea of him.

  One is either born with the capacity to believe in God, or not. Apparently, I was not. About the same time I ran out of BiSoDol, I came to the conclusion that whereas God had neither resurrected my father nor drowned my stepfather in the boiling sea of shit and piss and vomit he deserved, He, She, or It clearly did not exist. This led to a disturbing chain of thoughts that culminated in the epiphany that everyone and everything was going to die. More importantly, I was going to die, and there was going to be nothing after that. As in forever and ever and ever. This got me screaming into my pillow, and making lists, and imagining ordered rows of shoes, or trolls, or jellyfish on the tide line of a beach. If you were born just to die, and then be dead for infinity, you might as well have never existed, so what was the point of anything? No wonder my father had killed himself.

  My mother, on the other hand, believed in lots of gods. She exhibited the primitivism of early man, and made few distinctions between animals and humanity. She was surrounded by her daemons and totems, and she glorified the animal spirit deities by treating her pets—her dogs and horses and chinchillas and tortoises and prairie dogs and coatimundi and old spider monkey—as equals, even though the latter would spray a fountain of go-away urine on anyone who walked in the door, and then bite them for good measure.

  It should come as no surprise that after my brother’s evil pony bucked me off in the field, and I staggered to the kitchen door, my arm like a twisted car wreck, the radius sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle, my mother took one look and said, “Jesus fucking Christ! Is the horse okay?” Luckily, shock had already set in. As red-faced as an India rubber ball, my mother called an ambulance, taped my former arm to a two-by-four, and then walked me back across the field to catch the pony. Hoisting me into the saddle, she grimly reasoned, “Listen, Toots, if you don’t get straight back on, you’ll be scared to do it again.”