After I got over that first thrill of shameful joy, my empathy kicked in, so much so that hearing her miserable made me miserable too. It also shook my confidence, because, if someone as supremely confident as Claire could get shaken like this, what hope did a neurotic like me have? Even though she was younger than me, Claire, I realized, had become one of my role models—in some ways, not all. I’d learned a lot about confidence from her.
(I also learned a lot about national politics, synthetic languages, exotic diseases, and rural Southern folk magic. Her mother wrote quasi-anthropological books about folk magic, some of which was pretty wild. For instance, if you want to keep a man faithful, cook a little of your menstrual blood into his food. Eeuw. As Tamayo said, it may not keep a guy faithful, but just mention it and he’ll think twice before he asks you to fetch his dinner.)
Long story short, what I learned was, schadenfreude aside, it’s better to have happy, successful friends, because unhappy friends are a lot more grief. Plus, it’s easier to borrow money from happy, successful friends, should the need arise.
How much the whole Jess thing tore Claire up became clear to me when I went to visit her in Washington, just after it all happened, and we rented Casablanca. Claire took Casablanca very personally. Did she defy her own nature and stay with Jess for the good of the nation, like Ingrid Bergman? Or did she choose television news, which would be the Humphrey Bogart character in this scenario? Or was it the other way around, was it better for the nation if she was a reporter and Jess was Humphrey Bogart? What about her needs? But it wasn’t just Casablanca, it was shots of happy couples on television, even TV commercials in which supportive wives did laundry, cooked, or otherwise fussed over husbands and kids. Everything she watched, heard, saw seemed fraught with meaning for her, pricking a different question in her head.
In this state, she was especially vulnerable to Solange, who knew it and exploited it. What Solange had to gain from it, I’m not sure. There was no professional advantage—Solange had her own huge show and Claire was in General News. Maybe Solange was still trying to attract attention away from her own near-scandal the previous year, when it was discovered that her best-selling self-help affirmation tapes were being manufactured by slave laborers in drafty Chinese prisons. (Operations were quickly switched to a factory in Malaysia where they only exploited law-abiding grownups.)
The No-Name burger joint is a brightly lit and clean yet somehow dingy lunch counter where the customers look like the cast of Barfly and the staff all look like Lon Chaney. And they’re not in costume. But the burgers are great and it’s open twenty-four hours. I ordered one, along with a Coke, from the limping one-eyed waiter. He brought me a Diet Coke. Yuck. But rather than make him limp back to the end of the counter to replace it, I just poured a teaspoon of real sugar into it. Not being on the air anymore meant I could eat as much as I wanted and not worry about my weight. (The weird thing is, when I was on the air and worried about my weight, I was actually a little heavier.)
While I waited for my delicious, greasy, undercooked burger, I called home to see if any more occasional boyfriends were planning to drop in on me this weekend and join the orgy. There was a message from my mother: “I had another lovely talk with your friend Sally this week while you were away. What a highly intelligent young woman.”
Though I didn’t approve of my friends’ consulting Sally, I thought it was kind of sweet, my mom and Sally becoming friends. Sally’s mom was dead, and it seemed like, well, good karma that she could enjoy my mom. It wasn’t like Sally could make my mom any nuttier than she already was, or vice versa.
My mom is nutty like a genius, and in a benevolent way. Sally has this theory about my mother, who believes she is a member of the British royal family. Sally believes my mother was a member of the British royal family—in a past life—and her past life and this life are just more mixed up together than is normal.
“I’m a bit worried about Sally, though. Did you know that experimental medication she is taking has caused a numbness in her left arm?” my mother said, and urged me to check up on Sally.
Now I had to worry about Sally’s left arm too, on top of everything else. I was rapidly approaching Worry Overload. Sally had been working as a human guinea pig since she found herself having a crisis of faith and on the verge of bankruptcy. “Cosmically,” one day she was scanning the back-page classifieds of The Village Voice “looking for a sign” when she saw that a local medical center was offering to pay people to participate in an eczema study. Having eczema was a prerequisite, and Sally didn’t have eczema or know how to acquire it, but the ad started her thinking. Turns out you can make decent money being a human guinea pig if you’re willing to take pills and sign a legal waiver. She was able to make $400 a week in a three-month study of headache medication, and was now getting $1,000 a week in a PMS-pill study. She said she figured it was her moral duty, and a good karma-clearer, to offer herself up and spare some poor lab rat the possible side effects: mood swings and weight gain. Lord knows, New York doesn’t need any more overweight, manic-depressive rodents.
“Don’t forget Sally’s birthday is coming up,” my mother concluded. “And don’t forget to call home on Sunday.”
I hadn’t forgotten Sally’s birthday, although finding a present was tricky. While in L.A., I’d gone looking for a present for her on Melrose.
“May I help you?” a young woman asked me, flashing a banal smile. I told her I needed a present for a girlfriend.
“What kind of woman is she?” asked the clerk. The question struck me as so bizarre. Did she really want to know? I knew what the clerk expected me to say, that Sally’s tall, about thirty years old, an Ivy Leaguer, favorite color is blue, that kind of thing. But I decided to tell her exactly what Sally was like. “Well,” I said, “she’s a bald witch with a degree in comparative religion from Princeton who can’t keep a boyfriend, and in a previous life she was a murderous Sumerian harlot.”
“Oh,” the clerk said, not missing a beat. “Perhaps a scarf?”
The limping one-eyed waiter brought my burger, and as I raised it to my mouth I caught my reflection in the window. My hair was even worse now. Now I looked like a redheaded albino Buckwheat. I had a lot of nerve criticizing Sally’s looks.
Then my reflection dissolved, and I saw past it to a disheveled guy outside, who was riding a bike in a semi-circle on the sidewalk. It was almost eleven, according to the Marlboro Lights clock on the wall of the diner, and he was riding a bike on the Bowery. What a nut. He looked like he was wearing yellow crime-scene tape as a bandanna, but when he got closer I saw that the yellow plastic tape, unevenly torn and unevenly tied around his stringy-haired head, said “Caution—Radioactive.” He was singing, loudly, over and over, “Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong,” while people dodged his shaky bicycle.
The microchip in my buttocks was beeping like crazy, and I fugued.
10
I READ SOMEWHERE that most people’s vision of the future is really just their idealized vision of the past, and I guess that’s true, because sometimes, when my job, my love life, and the big city seem too fucking complicated, I close my eyes to daydream and see this golden image of Ferrous on a childhood summer day, the smell of lawn, grape Kool-Aid, and charcoal briquets in the air, Julie Goomey and me on the porch, and Doug Gribetz riding his Stingray bicycle back and forth in front of my house.
Ferrous was a company town which, along with four neighboring towns, made up Five Towns County. Long after the iron-skillet factory finally closed for good in 1983, we had a sign at the town limits that showed a smiling, 1950s housewife holding a skillet with eggs and bacon in it. “Ferrous, Minnesota, Iron Skillet Capital of the World,” the sign said. Underneath in smaller letters was the phrase “Home of the Fanning Even-Flo Skillet.”
Sixty years or so earlier, Mrs. Gerda Fanning had complained about food sticking in her skillet for the umpteenth time, and her husband, Tikki “Tom” Fanning, the owner of a sm
all foundry that processed iron ore into bars, got an idea. What if there was a layer of air between two layers of cast iron? For months he experimented, until he came up with a skillet that worked the way he wanted, reducing stick and cooking food more evenly. This was a huge leap forward in skillet technology, at least that’s what the tour guide on the school field trip always said. And there would be more great leaps—carbon cores, grease-catcher troughs, preseasoned finishes, etc. etc.—before labor difficulties, Teflon, Pyrex, and foreign competition took away huge chunks of Fanning’s business, leading to its ultimate demise.
The sign survived for years, until Vision 21 Consolidated Industries moved its headquarters to Ferrous and began manufacturing new things, most notably the Zipper Sit-Down Scooter. You know, those motorized half-scooter/ half-shopping-cart contraptions that are taking over the Sun Belt.
That’s where we came from, me and Julie. It was a sweet-smelling place a hundred miles south of the Canadian border, where people tried to keep their secrets, and the town was ruled by two families, the Fannings, who owned the ironworks, and the MacCoshams, who owned almost everything else.
But if I daydream about it too long, the sunny image sometimes dissolves into another, less sunny one.
The first time I heard Julie Goomey’s name was just before Christmas in fifth grade, when Mrs. Oatwig, our teacher, told us we were going to have a new classmate the next day, Julie Goomey, who had just moved here, and whose father had died the year before in Vietnam. At recess, Mary MacCosham and Sis Fanning said they’d seen the new girl, and filled the schoolyard in on what they “knew” about her. The new girl looked like Lily Munster with glasses, Mary said, dubbing her Goony Goomey and declaring her to have cooties. According to Mary, Julie’s mom was a tramp and a drunk, and her dad had been killed running from a battle.
When Julie appeared in class with long dark hair and very white skin, Mary MacCosham’s Lily Munster imagery was fresh in our minds, and everyone started laughing. I admit I did too. I admit also that my first instinct on hearing about Julie was, maybe this is someone next to whom I’ll look great in contrast. Maybe she would replace me as a cootie girl and I could get promoted from outcast to neutral kid, or even toady to the cool kids.
Mrs. Oatwig chewed out the class for laughing, which did nothing to raise Julie’s stock. Any girl who got the whole class in trouble earned a fistfight after school with Herbie Hofstetler, who only liked to fight girls, preferably his own height or shorter.
Julie just stood there in front of the class, her white skin now burning red, her eyes shut, her jaw clenched, as if not seeing us would make us all go away. That’s when I started feeling bad for her. She was a fatherless cootie girl, and my empathy kicked in.
A couple of the neutral girls stopped after class very discreetly and kindly to say hello to Julie, but there was no move to actually befriend her. After they left and nobody was looking, I invited Julie to come over and hang out in my clubhouse, which was really a bomb shelter my father had put in the back yard just after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But, you know, she rebuffed me. Funny, I’d forgotten all about that, how Julie didn’t want to be my friend at first. She wanted to be Mary MacCosham’s friend, for chrissake, and set about trying to ingratiate herself to Mary in the subsequent weeks. Mary, oh so amused by it all, privately invited Julie to her Christmas Tea, and when Julie asked her, in front of other girls, what she should wear, Mary laughed and loudly denied ever inviting Julie.
“Who’d invite you to a Christmas Tea?” Mary said. “Maybe a Cootie Tea.” Mary MacCosham, class wit.
God, I felt so bad for Julie, because Mary had pulled the same stunt with me a year before, when she privately invited me to her Spring Strawberry Tea. (Mary and her coterie were big on having teas, at which soft drinks were served but never tea. They were pretentious that way.)
When I told my mother about Julie, she called Julie’s mother to invite Julie to my place for our own Tea. Mom also invited the other cootie girl, Mabel. So I guess we did have a Cootie Tea. That’s when Julie and I hit it off, discovering all the things we had in common, including a morbid infatuation with the late Robert F. Kennedy and a passion for pirate movies. Neither of us clicked with poor Mabel, who only wanted to play dolls, which Julie and I weren’t into by fifth grade. Mabel, poor Mabel. We pretty much ignored her. She didn’t even have another cootie girl to play with, just her beloved dolls. Though Mabel and I were outcasts, once Julie arrived it was she who bore the brunt of Mary and Sis’s tortures.
With the exception of a few cool teachers, the grownups thought Mary and Sis were angels, because Mary and Sis acted like angels in front of the grownups, and it was dangerous to rat them out to the grownups in our town. If you got Mary and Sis in any trouble, you earned yourself a whole lot more trouble. Mabel told her mother that Mary was torturing her at recess, and Mabel’s mother, a large divorced woman with BO and very hairy arms who worked as a cleaning woman at the ironworks, complained to Mary’s mother. Not long after that, Mary and Sis and a few of their toadies ambushed Mabel after school and took her to Sis’s house, where they played kangaroo court with her, tried her for crimes against them, the ruling elite, and as punishment made her drink a concoction made up of various condiments and pieces of Mabel’s favorite Barbie doll, which they had tried to puree in a blender. If Mabel ratted them out again, they warned, her mother would be fired.
Or so the playground rumor went. It didn’t help that most of our parents worked for either the MacCoshams or the Fannings and that Mary and Sis reminded us of this frequently. Neither of my parents had worked for them, and neither did Julie’s mom. Though we were pretty poor, they had no economic power over us. Hmmm. Now that I’m older and wiser, etc., I wonder if this wasn’t one of the things that ticked Sis and Mary off about me and Julie, and made them find a different kind of power, the power of the cootie.
Cooties, jeez. I hadn’t thought about cooties for ages. Water under the bridge. I was a long way from fifth grade. So why did I think to myself, “As soon as I have some free time, I am going to go to Mary MacCosham’s, wait outside her fancy Upper East Side apartment building, and then punch her right in her carefully doctored nose”?
On second thought, that would probably be overkill, because we got more or less even with Mary the summer before we went to high school. Among other things we did to harass her, we sent her name in as a sales lead to a bunch of industrial-trash-can companies, and a succession of salesmen of faux Dumpsters showed up on her doorstep. That one was my idea. Julie, of course, went me one better when we worked at the MacCosham-owned Camp Hapalot.
By this time, Mary’s tactics had improved. She knew she could silence Julie, me, or just about anyone else she wanted to with a few choice words. Now I know these to be control words. All Mary had to say to shut me up was, “How’s your mother the queen?,” and because I didn’t necessarily want to tell cute guy counselors from as far away as Canada and Chicago that my mother believed she was the rightful queen of England, I would just shut up and let Mary inflict all sorts of slights and insults on me.
Now I know that these control words work only if you let them work, so you have some control over them.
With Julie, Mary would talk about drunks, or cowardice in battle, or, even more nakedly, call her Garage Goomey, the nickname Julie graduated to in junior high, when she suddenly sprouted tits. The boys said she’d do it with anyone in her garage for a quarter. It wasn’t true, but nobody cared. I mean, they all chose to believe the worst about her, and me. The joke went that Garage Goomey would do it for a quarter, Hudson would pay the boys a quarter. Har-har.
(The Hofstetler kid, who only fought girls his own height or shorter, started the Garage thing. I’d have to remember to put him on my punch-in-the-nose list, show up on his doorstep one day, say, “This is what you get for beating on girls, you shithead,” and then pop him right in the kisser.)
While Julie and I worked at Camp Hapalot, in the kitchen and
sanitation respectively, for the money and the chance to meet college boys from exotic places like Chicago and Canada, Mary MacCosham worked as a full-fledged counselor, and went a different route, boy-wise.
The first thing Julie noticed after we arrived was that Virgin Mary had packed an awful lot of Intimate Secrets Deodorant, a feminine-hygiene spray to make one’s genitalia smell like an English country garden. As Julie figured it, nobody needed that much vaginal deodorant unless she was expecting someone else to do a lot of sniffing down there.
Julie was a damn good spy, better than Harriet the Spy, in part because she suffered from hyperaccusis, which is hyperactive hearing. (All the women in Julie’s family had it, and in her mother it eventually turned to objective tinnitus. Tinnitus is when you hear a ringing in your ears. Objective tinnitus is when other people hear the ringing in your ears.)
When Julie heard Mary sneaking out of the bunkhouse in the middle of the night, she followed, as quiet as an Iroquois, and discovered that Mary was making the beast with two backs in the chapel with Leonard, a handsome guy who worked in the stables. It was so Chatterley.
What I would have done with this information was go to Mary and say, “Look, I know about you and Leonard and I don’t think your family, especially your mother, would be too thrilled. So lay off me and Julie.”
But Julie was so much better at this. She said nothing. Instead, she left little notes around Mary’s bunk. Because Julie’s handwriting always gave her away, she asked me to type the notes for her on my portable typewriter. The first said, “The little chapel?” followed by a note saying, “Leonard,” and finally, simply, “I’m watching you.”
Revenge of the Cootie Girls Page 10