A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “Mostly. Not really. I guess I’ve been kind of bitchy.”

  “Does he want you?”

  I think of how Nick bones up every time we meet. “Oh, yeah.”

  “So you’re in control,” she says complacently. “Keep the heat on, but hold out until you know what you want, then take it.”

  “I know what I want,” I say, sighing, and sit up, wiping my face.

  “Nonsense,” Jilly says. Phase two has begun: breaking me down. She reaches across the bed and slides open the bedside drawer and takes out a fifth of cheap blended Scotch and splashes some into the empty champagne flute. I look at it numbly. “You never know what you want. You’re impossible to buy for at Christmas. Oh, baby girl.” She sighs. “What am I gonna do with you? You can’t play this man right if you don’t have a plan.”

  “Like your plan for Doc Roger?” I say sharply. “Married Doc Roger?”

  “Oh, thanks for reminding me!” She flips open her phone. “Hullo baby? My daughter came by. Can you pick up another bottle and glass? Hell, yeah, she drinks,” Jilly says, winking across the bed at me. “I love you too, honey,” she simpers into the phone. “Bye.”

  “Jilly, don’t drink anymore.” It just pops out. Why do I take the bait every time?

  “So,” she says briskly, tossing the phone onto the blanket. “We have two questions. How do you get Mr. Fed to want you if you’re legal, and what do you do with him when you’ve got him?”

  “Ma, he wants me legal. He just thinks I’m not.”

  “And whose fault is that? You never eat. You could have titties like these if you ever, like, allowed a morsel of fat past your lips.”

  I’m regretting once again that Mom isn’t Betty Crocker, or at least Morticia Addams. If Mom was Morticia I’d of got vampire glory out of my system long before I met my fate.

  “Nick is not going to accept me if I start eating bacon.”

  “Is that his name? Sounds devilish.”

  “Well, I’m hellish,” I say, thinking it’s not so much wit as a sad, ugly truth.

  “Bring him by sometime. I’ll ask him about his intentions.”

  “I bet,” I say glumly, picturing Jilly dissecting Nick as well as me, without benefit of anaesthetic.

  Again, it’s like she can read my mind. She shoves the flute full of Scotch toward me and I take it, take a long drink. My eyeballs feel twice normal size and extra-hard. Maybe my head would feel better if I rammed it against the steel hospital room door. I drink the rest of the Scotch. Jilly fills it up again.

  “You’re right,” I say, feeling beaten. “I don’t know what I want. I’m not in control.” Dread fills me. I put my hands over my face again. “Stop me, Mom.”

  “You’re so stingy with yourself,” she says. “Cast your bread upon the waters, isn’t that the line? I can never remember if that’s Buddhist or Jewish. If you won’t be generous with yourself, you’ll never offer a man enough. They’re like children. They respond to bounty.”

  Jilly should know.

  I think of my scrawny self and my starvation diet. I can’t imagine what Nick wants with me. “He’s resisting me because he thinks I’m too young.”

  “And why are you resisting?”

  I hear the Scotch bottle clink against the champagne flute and I jump up and take the bottle out of her hand. She looks at me over the brimming glass and her eyes glitter, and I know she’s maneuvering me into a corner. I can see it coming and I can’t do a thing to protect myself. I’m so good at staying out of trouble in every other area of my life.

  “I don’t know why I’m resisting,” I say through my teeth.

  “Habit. Stinginess. Stop fighting your hunger and thirst.”

  Oh, that’ll be good. “The way you do.”

  “Yup.”

  “Drink like a fish my whole life? Make myself so sick I end up in the hospital,” I say, my voice rising, “and then make a play for a married doctor?”

  “Only if he’s the good stuff.”

  “Ma, he’s somebody else’s good stuff.”

  “She’s already lost him.”

  “You’re helping.”

  Jilly shrugs. “Law of the jungle, sweetie. You’re gonna marry this dick—” She looks at me, but I don’t take that bait. “And I’ll have to support myself somehow.”

  Helpless rage and despair are clogging my throat. The thing I hate most about her happens. The thing that makes me keep loving her and needing her.

  Remorse softens her voice. “I’m sorry, honey. I know this is tough on you. You needed a father all along. Instead you’ve had twenty years of my half-ass parenting.”

  “Fifty,” I choke out, past my tears.

  “I’ll only take responsibility for twenty years. You’re on your own after that.” My ma, one-woman comedy club. “Roger’s a good guy. You won’t hate him. I promise.”

  I take a long, long, deep breath. I feel like all these years of living on the very edge of life and death have cracked open. I’m out here in new country, beyond calculated risk, where I have to take new risks or die. Stupid risks. What-the-heck-am-I-saying risks.

  “I know what happens now,” I say in a shaky voice. “Now I’m supposed to give in. You’ve apologized for screwing up and you’ve promised to try to make things better — by screwing somebody else’s husband — and you’ve kinda hinted that you love me and want the best for me, and that’s supposed to silence me. And usually it does. First you break me down. Then you — you guess all my most valid beefs and you — you sugar-coat them somehow. You bury them under your good intentions. But you’re only trying to buy my silence, so you can keep drinking and screwing around.”

  “But, honey, I told you, I’m trying to settle myself.” Her voice rises plaintively, with a little panic in it. “So you can be free.”

  I feel bone tired and hateful and mean and sorry for myself. “Ma. You’re never going to lose me. But you might — you might wear my love down. It still runs. But it — it gets tired.”

  She sits up, looking at me, then at the Scotch in her champagne flute. “I see. And if I stop drinking, this will make you happy.” I’ve never heard such a hard voice out of her.

  “You might live longer,” I say wistfully.

  Ma looks down at the IV needle in her arm. Her gaze follows the drip up into the bag hanging from the stork by her bedside. She looks at the phone on the sheet, and the empty champagne bottle. I think she may have forgotten I’m here.

  I clear my throat.

  “Well,” she says.

  She doesn’t look at me. She looks sad, a rare thing for Jilly. Great. I’ve slapped my mother until she wants to cry.

  She turns over on her side, setting her glass down without looking at it as she rolls, and pulls the sheet over her ear.

  I decide not to wait for Roger and his second and third champagne bottles.

  Chapter Eleven

  I am at the practice rink, exterminating rats. Two other girls are with me, Sacker’s co-captain Irrita Belle, a fireplug-shaped blocker, and the massive Dom-De-Dom-Dom. They have poodle canes, same as me, but what they do not have is super-hearing and super-smell. They move slowly along the baseboard, tapping the walls, hoping to drive the rats toward their escape holes and out into the space where they can zap the little beasts with their poodle canes.

  I walk slower, my hand against the wall. listening for their heartbeats. When I feel a warm spot, hear the patter of their blood in motion, I stop. I lean against the wall, trying to decide how far inside they are. The gap behind the wall is so narrow, they can’t be more than two inches away. That’s within my reach.

  Pitty-pat, little rat. I hear you living.

  I’ve found the jackpot, a whole nest, warm and rat-smelly. Momma and one, two, three, four babies. I crouch at the baseboard and lay my palms against the wall. My hands are only three-quarters of an inch away from their lives, the thickness of the drywall plus the derby padding.

  I close my eyes and breathe in.

 
The sounds of blood pounding grow dim. I get a tiny rush of panic, belated adrenaline, and I hear a faint squeak — Momma rat cussing because her judgment has fatally betrayed her.

  Her squeak spooks another rat I haven’t noticed yet, about four feet down the wall from where I squat. It erupts out of its hole onto the track, twelve feet away. Tude is onto it with her poodle cane in seconds.

  Now there is a dead rat on the floor, along with some rat diarrhea and rat pee. And inside the walls, five dead rats have dissolved into a light, fluffy dust that will eventually find its way into the ventilating system and shiver down onto the floor and onto any sweaty derby girls who happen to be there, falling like gray snow, coating our wheels and making our skin sticky.

  The poodle cane method is actually less messy. But my way is more secret.

  I am thinking about secrets.

  Jilly’s big secret, that she is utterly in the grip of alcoholism — wow, there’s a no brainer, that was easy — but it’s a secret all the same, never spoken, the invisible five hundred pound canary in the room. Blew that one yesterday. My stomach hurts with guilt for saying it to her and rage at her for making me have to say it.

  My own secret is so huge that, like Jilly’s, it floods my life like a broken sewer main, poisoning everything until I can’t believe nobody else knows.

  The trouble with secrets is that they are like rat-dust in the walls. You think they’re out of sight, but really they’re just floating out into everything else, attracting other dirty little secrets. Poisoning everything.

  Nick is right. Magic has compromised the world, even my world, to the point where I am twisted like a pretzel trying to live with it. The way I eat, or don’t. The jobs I take, the way I’m not paid, not promoted. Even little Breck and his helpless mommy have problems that they are treating, God help us, with magic, not with medicine. Not that medicine has done Breck a whole lot of good so far.

  And I’m part of the problem.

  I’d love to talk this over with Dr. Springe, but she is away this week at a conference.

  The hour for practice arrives. Dom and Belle and I put away our poodle canes and put on our skates. Pound of Venus shows up in a terrible mood. I recognize it instantly — she feels just like I do — and I wonder what rats in the walls she has been dusting.

  I do not ask. I leave Venus strictly alone.

  Nick and his Federal agency and the Hinky Policy, all these are threats, yes, but Venus can put me away the fastest. I wonder if Nick would defend me against a city authority.

  Maybe.

  But only if he doesn’t know what I really am.

  Once he knows the truth, he’ll hate me, and I’ll be in even more trouble than I am now, because I can’t see Nick tolerating being fooled. Or having fooled himself.

  So I’m distracted at practice. I forget to push my speed, and I don’t bother evading blockers, and I go down a lot. The prana in the practice rink tastes glum and defeated. I wonder where that mood is coming from.

  It’s probably me.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next day, our team has a bout against Stump City, but I miss it. Jilly has an episode early Thursday morning. I’m at the hospital for four days straight and get hardly anything to eat, prana-wise. I end up riding the elevator at shift changes, draining the poor nurses a sip here and a sip there, hating myself. I have to cancel my appointment with Dr. Springe. I’m keyed up, bitter about missing the bout, anxious about Nick, still horny, and frantic about my mother.

  At times like this I write her letters. I tell the absolute truth. Then I burn them.

  It helps that I have sneaked four large bottles of cheap Scotch into the hospital and mixed them into the horrible hospital coffee as I wait by her bedside, writing.

  o0o

  Dear Ma.

  I write you these letters on nights when I’m restless, confused, lord I don’t know.

  Dear Ma.

  You don’t know this, but your daughter is an energy vampire. She wants to hold you in her arms and suck on your happy life force because it tastes so good. I sometimes think I remember what your milk tasted like. It must have been at least as tasty as your life energy. So happy. So sweet.

  Dear Ma.

  Once you are gone, I will start trying to kill myself.

  Dear Ma.

  How can I say such things, even to myself? I had larger ambitions for my life once. It must be the booze. Drink just depresses me. Why can’t I be a happy drunk, like my mother?

  Dear Ma.

  Can I crawl back inside your womb and start over?

  Didn’t think so.

  o0o

  I take a deep breath, blow my nose, and start over.

  o0o

  Dear Ma.

  Nothing good can come of me dealing with this Federal agent, so of course I want to do it. How can someone who lives such a careful life have so many self-destructive urges? Conundrum.

  Dear Ma.

  Next time, no coffee. I can’t sleep. I’m drunk and angry and hungry and tired and I can’t sleep. I hate this feeling.

  Dear Ma.

  I am so happy. I have met a man who seems like he could handle it if I told him the truth.

  That’s impossible. I’ve lived through a lot of improbable, a lot of it. I know the difference between impossible and improbable.

  He would be so annoying to talk to.

  I don’t want to talk to him, anyway.

  Dear Ma.

  I have not killed anybody in more than two years. I have learned the hard way that if I let my guard down, somebody pushes me into a corner and then I have to you-know.

  I’m not sure that it’s “have to.” What I fear is that I’m merely being lazy. The first time blew me away, terrified me, horrified me, created this self-hatred that has never left me.

  Since then, the kills get easier each time.

  Dear Ma.

  I have this fear that I am doing this spy thing because I am so bored. I have run out of interesting ways to be self-destructive. I am afraid that I will talk myself into believing that Mr. Federal Agent can make a difference in this crazy messed-up world, and that if I help him, I can make a difference too. Any excuse.

  Because the fact is, my off-the-wall boys are very sweet and all, but I get tired of associating with people who speak in words of one or two syllables. I want adult problems for once. Not just who peed in his pants today.

  Dear Ma.

  I am so drunk. Does it feel like this for you? If you are so happy, why do you drink? I am unhappy, that is why I drink. I think it is, anyway.

  Dear Ma.

  I am starving to death. I no longer know for sure if it is prana I starve for, or if it is simply human touch. Would I feel fully fed, if I held someone for as long as I really want to hold them? What if I first filled up on prana, say, at a derby bout, or in the subway? God, do you know how many hours I’d have to endure that grim, crabby subway energy? Argh.

  But if I could. If I could really be fully fed for once.

  Could I hold you for an hour, just hold you, feel you touching me?

  Could I have sex with a man and not kill him, not accidentally suck him dry and feel him crumble to dust in my arms? What a horrifying experience that was. I never want to go through that again. Ever.

  Dear Ma.

  What would make me happy?

  I don’t know. I simply don’t know.

  Dear Ma.

  I love you. Don’t die yet. I need you to teach me how to be happy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jilly perks up. The doctors say she’s incredibly lucky. I’m too exhausted to shrug.

  I return to work. Panic over Jilly’s bills drives me to visit Dr. Katterfelto so I can earn that eighty-five thousand dollars. I use poor little Breck as my excuse.

  Virginia drives me to Katterfelto’s lab, along with Breck. She bubbles with good news. “He’s so much better. I think he does that exercise fifty times a day. It’s really working.”

  I�
�m not sure what’s working, but I would say Breck does his exercise more like a hundred times a day. If I’m at the front of the class, I often catch his eye and his hands are stretched out on the desk, and he’s slumped just a little so they’re at chest height, and his lips are moving.

  Straighten up and fly right.

  Half a dozen times during playtime this week, I’ve seen him throw his arms around a classmate and yell, “I love you!” This usually earns him a punch, but he seems to take even that really well. My heart fills with a hot kind of hope and fear and hope again.

  If there’s hope for Breck, there’s hope for me.

  So I’m listening pretty closely to Virginia, especially about what he does when he’s at home. When he’s with me, of course, I drain him of excess prana all day long, in little sips. “How’s he doing at breakfast?” Morning is when Breck has been away from me longest.

  “He helped me put dishes in the dishwasher this morning,” Virginia says in an awed, breathless voice.

  I look over my shoulder at Breck in the back seat. “How about it buddy? Feel any different?”

  But he just smiles at me. There’s something so mature in that smile that I blink. I raise my eyebrows at him. Huh.

  o0o

  Dr. Katterfelto bustles us both through his rainbow picture machine and we all settle down at a round table at kid height. He looks the printout over with a hand magnifying glass. Then he starts circling stuff.

  “Behold. Vot shtrides we see already. Young man, you have been vorking very hard, ja?” He nods at Breck.

  Breck nods back. “Ya,” he says.

  “Ve will continue this exercise a little longer. I am seeing great improvement. You vork hard. This is goot. Soon you vill be with all the other boys runnink and playink vitout struggle.”

  Virginia wants to keep the printout. “I’m so happy!”

  “I print you a fresh one, vitout my scrawlings on it.”

  They go to the printer together. There is a fresh picture of me next to the picture of Breck on the table. I squint, trying to make sense of the rings of bright color that make up this sort of human form. I can’t figure it out.