by Wendy Burden
He was a miracle. “I can’t believe you’re not in medical school.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Seriously, why aren’t you studying to be a doctor?”
“My dad’s dead keen on that,” he said, shaking the hair back from his glorious face and looking up at the ceiling. “He would love me to be a doctor like him. Go into practice with him. Father and son.” He gave a little laugh.
“So why don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, blowing a breath out. “Truth is, I’ve got a photographic memory.” He delivered this extraordinary talent like it was a freckle on his arm.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Bloody fuckin’ wow. Here, I’ll show you. Find me something to read.” He handed one of the medical books over.
“Okay,” I said, and started paging through Syndromes—Hurler, Prune Belly, Sirenomelia (lower legs disconcertingly fused at birth)—I stopped at Cri du Chat syndrome because the name was catchy and the text long-winded.
“Try this one,” I said, folding my arms and leaning back against the headboard to watch.
George read silently. When he was finished he got up and paced around the room for a while, excused himself to go to the bathroom, returned, and then, standing in front of his bureau, he recited the page and a half worth of deletion of the short arm of chromosome 5, verbatim. It was unreal.
“It’s all very well to know the stuff,” he said. “I could pass the exams; that’s not the issue. Anyway, I’ve pretty much fried my brain on psychotropics. Nothing like a steady diet of acid, opium, and mushrooms.”
I wanted to say, That’s okay, I intend to love you forever—even if you’re a completely brainless tape recorder. But couldn’t you please just kiss me?
“Hey, you want to see a book on ophthalmic surgery?” said George.
With that, all the seduc flooded out of the seductress.
“Could I, um, take a rain check?”
We descended through the silent house, and he and the beagle ferried me back across the water. George helped me out politely, but when I turned to thank him for a lovely evening, he had already climbed back into the dinghy and was languidly feathering his way home, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old and searching up at the sky.
My mother was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She was wearing a hideous terry-cloth robe. The hood was pulled up over her head and she had on her glasses instead of her contact lenses. This was always a sign of trouble; the only time my mother was not clad for coition was when the Lord and Master was away buying hardware in Beirut, or she was having a very bad day.
The rum bottle was at her elbow, and the roast beef pan from dinner, with its congealed drippings, in front of her. She was alternating spoonfuls of beef fat with slugs from her 7UP can. The diet notes on the fridge shivered as I entered. I steeled myself for a scathing comment on my outfit, or maybe my shutout with George, which I knew she could smell on me. However, it wasn’t my sex life that was on her mind.
“The shin of Shodom is upon us,” she said by way of greeting. She squinted down at the grease-caked pan. “The shin of Shodom is upon thish house.”
It appeared she was in a ruminative mood.
“Whatever you say,” I said, leaning against the fridge to cover the notes. It was the least I could do to help her.
My mother took a pull on her drink and fixed her Coke bottle lenses upon me. “Here’sh a word for you,” she said. “Analingush.”
Here we go again.
I sat down beside her. She did look terrible. “Hey, guess what famous psychiatrist was embalmed at Harrods.” Anything Harrods usually cheered her up.
She shook her head and spooned up some more fat.
“Algolagnia,” she said.
“I’ll give you a hint—his first name is Sigmund.”
She sucked at the soda can, tilting her head so far back the hood fell to her shoulders with a thwop. “I’m gonna shell my ITT and my Guf ’n Western shtock and buy a place of my own.”
“That’s right,” I said, patting her hand. “Freud.”
“An my Kodak too.” She shook my hand off, and took another hit of suet.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know you could buy a baby elephant at Harrods.” It killed me to see her beaten down like this. We certainly had our issues, but when the shit hit the fan my mother was there for me. On a recent overnight school trip, I had stayed innocently out past curfew, but the school had responded with a barrage of letters to my mother about my very American disregard for authority. My mother, in turn, had launched a campaign against the teacher who’d outed me, one that only the daughter of a colonel steeped in Revolutionary history could wage. She was brilliant. I just had to learn how to be there for her too. It sure wasn’t easy.
My mother belched, and then fixed me with a surprisingly sober stare. “No, I did not—and frankly, Tootsh, all I care ish that I can get my hair colored on the fifth floor, buy a toplessh bathing shuit on the fourth, and a shix-pack of Tab on my way outta the door.” She sloshed a few more fingers of Bacardi into her 7UP can.
“You are so fucking selfish!”
“Up yours,” said my mother through a mouthful of rum and beef fat.
I took that as a good night.
Lucky I’m an optimist. I rationalized that George was shy, that he was the type that waited until the fourth or fifth date to get physical. Hey, I could wait, I had all summer. All my life in fact.
But this power thing, the notion of control through one’s sexuality, I was starting to figure it out. I had power over the butcher boys with the raising of my hemline. I had power over my brothers, because they were dyslexic, Type B non-survivors. My stepfather had tyrannical and financial power over my mother, but she was able to manipulate him with what she wore, or whether she put out, and whether she even stayed with him. And with my father, she may have wielded the ultimate power—if the rumors spread by my father’s shattered parents were to be believed.
A couple of weeks later I was at my usual position, at the window on the second-floor landing, with a high-powered telescope trained on George’s window. My transistor radio was tuned to Radio Luxembourg, the volume so low you could barely hear the bleat of the American disc jockeys. Stakeout provisions included two packets of salt-and-vinegar crisps, a Mars bar, and a copy of Candy, the filthiest book I had ever come across. Every three pages or so, I checked the window. Evening was coming on, and out of the goodness of her heart, Candy was having sex with her father’s brother when suddenly the lights flicked on in George’s bedroom.
I palpitated when I saw a figure enter behind him. I relaxed when I saw it was a guy. Must be one of his mates, I thought. But then the mate put his hands on George’s shoulders. And then the mate pulled George’s shirt over his head. And then he pulled off his own Led Zeppelin T-shirt. (That’s how good that telescope was.) George just stood there, arms and hands at his sides. That’s when the little shit leaned forward and put his lips on my George’s tender smoky mouth. And that’s when I went berserk and must have screamed, because my stepfather came running up the stairs, Herald Tribune still in hand. He snatched the binoculars from me. “Ha ha!” he snorted. “You are in luff with a pansy!” Shaking his head, he sauntered back to his armchair in the living room.
I got a bead on George’s window again. They were still standing. That was good news. But now the interloper was leaning down to unfasten the buttons on George’s Levi’s. He knelt to do it. That was very bad news. His head dipped below the sash of the window, so it was hard to rate his performance, or pick up tips for future reference. George remained upright, arms by his sides, like he hadn’t asked for this, but as long as it was happening and he didn’t have to contribute, it was bloody all right with him.
My mother suddenly appeared and pushed me aside. She watched for a moment in silence. “Well that’s just ducky,” she said. Straightening up, she patted me awkwardly on my drooping shoulders. I let down my guard and clung to her
for a good three seconds. After my sobbing had subsided, she detached herself and began to dismantle the telescope, clucking sympathetically, and telling me how many handsome men were in my future, and how George wasn’t good enough for me, although she had rather liked the beagle.
Being young and resilient, I immediately transferred my affections to the reptile keeper at the zoo where I had a summer job.
A week before school started up again, I was road testing a new pair of Zeiss eight-by-sixty field glasses. I trained them on George’s window, sort of for old time’s sake. Lo and behold if he wasn’t in pretty much the same spot I’d left him: arms by his sides, gazing at whatever—only this time the hands unbuckling his belt and the mouth addressing his southern hemisphere belonged to a girl.
It didn’t take me too many years past puberty to figure out that it had been nothing personal; I’d just been too slow on the uptake.
I never saw George after that summer. His parents moved away and a professional race car driver and his bouncy-breasted girlfriend bought the house. I did hear from him once, though. A flimsy envelope the same color as his damn faded Levi’s arrived in the post a year or so later. It was the sort of old-fashioned airmail stationery that makes you think of the time when overnight transatlantic flights were full of adventure and promise. The stamp and postmark were from somewhere that echoed that notion. Anyway, he’d forgotten to put the letter inside, so that was that.
Maine Revisited
WE SHOULD HAVE anticipated a sea change when our mother insisted all three of her children accompany her on a pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock. Taking time out from our fun-filled tour of boarding schools, my mother, Edward, and I met up with Will in Boston and drove south en famille in a rented Plymouth Valiant—the irony of which was lost on our mother.
“It’s time you three started appreciating the other side of your family,” she lectured, hands on the wheel at precisely ten and two as she barreled along down Route 3. Edward and I quarreled in the backseat while Will, who at sixteen was in the throes of silent adolescence, glowered out the window. “All those servants waiting on you hand and foot in Burdenland must have your Colonial ancestors rolling in their graves!”
“It’s not our fault our grandparents are so rich,” I said.
“It’s not our fault our grandparents are so rich . . . ,” she mimicked back. “Well d’you think it’s their fault they didn’t pass some of your father’s money along to help me pay the goddamn bills? They cut me out of the bloody will, for Christ sake!”
We had all heard this story many, many times. Will turned to give her a mutinous look, and I was about to jump in when we were saved by the vision of Plymouth Harbor.
“Look! There it is—” said my mother in campy reverence, and her eyes actually welled up. It was maybe the third time I’d ever seen her cry.
Later, when I caught her whipping out a chisel and mallet from under her yellow and black cape, I tried to stop her, citing the words written on the “Do Not Touch!” signs everywhere, but she only said, “Oh, don’t have a cow. I have a right to some of this. My great-great-great-great . . . great . . . oh, whatever he was, my uncle Myles Standish was one of the first men to land on Plymouth Rock. Besides, they used to sell pieces of this thing as paperweights. My father even has cuff links and a watch fob out of it.” Shouldering me away, she found a foothold for the chisel. “I’m just taking a little souvenir for the Beast House,” she muttered, and with the muted chink of the professional, she clipped off an eight-inch piece from the seaward side of the iconic landmark.
The Beast House, that stunted, eighteenth-century Chinese chest of drawers that housed the artifacts of my mother’s forebears, now stood in a place of honor beside the large fireplace of the very small cottage my mother had recently purchased. We’d all questioned her motives when she’d cashed in her blue chip stocks six months before, but she must have known she would be needing a safe house. The cottage sat directly behind a hedge next to a busy road that led out to the causeway between the Old Town harbor and the ocean—and it had no view. It was the kind of beach house that owners never bother to winterize—a funky, sandy-floored, rundown thing with a kitchen too small to eat in, a bathroom with a rusty metal shower stall, and a well-rotted porch. And this was after the contractor had supposedly been working on it.
Six months later we were in our second semesters at boarding school—seven-year-old Edward at North Country School in upstate New York and fourteen-year-old me at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Our mother was back in her English prison. A telephone call came on a spring evening just as the lady of the house, wearing nothing but Saran Wrap (another of their favorite outfits), was serving the Lord and Master his dinner. He got up to answer the phone (Beer here) and remained for some time in the hallway, listening intently as a woman on the other end of the overseas line delivered a death sentence.
Ten minutes later the plastic-wrapped Accused, even as she soaped the Dutch oven, was handed a twenty-four-hour eviction notice. My mother hightailed it out of there faster than you can say Tab, leaving everything behind except the dog. I still wonder what became of the contents of my room: all my hippie clothes, childhood books, LPs, posters, letters, and drawings—all my precious, identifying junk.
My mother’s two-timing came as no surprise to me; her appetite was bound to singe a hole through that marriage sooner or later.
That August, before the wronged wife’s call, my mother had been acting disturbingly unlike herself: soft, gooey, and transcendental. I’d seen that look on Maria Schneider’s face in Last Tango in Paris, when my roommate and I had used our fake IDs to see it.
“I’ve made a wonderful new friend,” my mother kept saying every time I passed through the kitchen.
“That’s great! How many legs does it have?” I kept saying in return.
“Don’t you want to know who it is?” she’d simper as I rummaged through the fridge.
“Friendships are so fun when they’re kept secret.” How stupid did she think I was? My mother didn’t have friends.
One Sunday morning she couldn’t hold back any longer. When I came into the kitchen to make toast, she was waiting to ambush me. I busied myself with the kettle, keeping my back pointedly toward her, but she continued from where she’d left off the night before, as if we were actually having a conversation about this. “He lives in Marblehead—”
She might as well have said: Okay, so I’ve been screwing the contractor I hired to fix some stuff on that beach house I bought back in the States, and I forgot what it’s like to be all infatuated and horny for someone, and so what if he’s married, only now I’m back over here in this miserable little house with that sodomizing S.O.B. and I’m all moony over the contractor, and I really want to tell someone about it, but since I don’t have any friends, I’m going to unload it on YOU, Toots.
When I was young and nosy, and all I wanted were answers, I couldn’t get anything out of her. Now that I was older and didn’t want to know anything, I couldn’t get her to shut up.
A British Airways flight from Heathrow to Logan brought the Accused back to the land of her forebears; more specifically, the New England town of Marblehead, where her grandfather had summered, and where the Spirit of ’76, that emblematic portrait of young America, hangs in the town hall. My mother moved into her tiny one-bedroom beach house. When news spread that the ex-pat home wrecker had moved to Marblehead, the contractor’s wife kicked him out, and he and his Labrador, Mac, moved in with my mother. For all of her trouble, the wife then got cancer and died.
My mother threw herself into the role of wicked adulteress. She streaked her hair platinum and didn’t get out of a bikini all summer. She sold off Kodak stock and bought herself a red Fiat convertible and drove around town with the top down, plying her fake English accent on anyone who would listen, like the checkout girl at Schube’s liquor store. In the beginning the contractor, whose name was Gil, tried to get us to like him. And we were prepared to—anything
would be better than Hitler’s littermate—but we just couldn’t. For one thing, he was old. He had gray hair and a gray beard, and he was barrel-chested and bowlegged and tubby, and had the kind of hands that only look comfortable holding a can of beer or a hammer. He tried the Dad thing by palling around with Edward, who wasn’t having anything to do with tossing a football back and forth or building a shoe box, and he tried to be cool bumming cigarettes and mixing Will and me drinks and trying to smoke pot, but he wasn’t cool because he was still old. The first time I went to visit (armed with three girlfriends for moral support), my mother and the ancient boy toy gave us the bedroom, and they slept in a tent in the scraggly backyard. You could hear them doing it all night, what with the tent bouncing around like its stakes were going to pop out of the ground every time one of them climaxed.
“You do know that Gil went to Williams,” my mother kept saying, whenever she thought we were brushing him off.
“Uh huh,” I’d answer, thinking, So fucking what.
“And he’s a member of the Eastern Yacht Club, which is very snooty.”
“Wow.”
“So I really don’t understand why you can’t treat him with a little more respect!”
“Well, he is a contractor,” I’d fake-joke, like that was the real reason, and I was just the worst snob ever.
Going “home” became a necessarily brief, annual event. And with the three of us spread up and down the Eastern Seaboard in boarding schools, we were able to keep it that way.
Through the miracle of Island Divorce (and it will come as no surprise that the island was Haiti), my mother and the contractor became man and wife. They moved from the one-bedroom beach house into a one-and-a-half-bedroom beach house next door. The new house had even more of a transient feel to it than the old, despite their proud makeover of the bathroom, which boasted a plastic all-in-one tub-shower-and-tile unit that looked like it was pressed out by a Mattel Vac-U-Form. The living room had my mother’s signature hard couch, and a couple of small, square armchairs that were as comfy as bleachers, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets to protect it from the dogs. The rear of the house had two enormous sliding glass doors that led onto a deck and provided, at last, a wide view over the marsh to the sea.