Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  “But what about the relief?” I said. “Like: There go all my possessions and hey, I feel lighter.”

  “There’s probably some of that involved, sure. And without the trauma that comes with a tornado or hurricane, when you lose everything.”

  Was this poignant? Was he referring to something else? My experience is that men are the least subtle creatures on earth, so probably no.

  “What’s this one?” I pointed at what appeared to be a bowl of eyeballs.

  “Eyeballs.”

  “From toys and stuff?”

  “Yep.”

  “But who loses just the eyeballs? Wouldn’t you have lost the whole thing?”

  He nodded.

  “So wait. There’s a bowl of eyeballs and across the hall there’s a bunch of dolls and stuffed animals with gaping sockets? You’re saying that the people who run the depot chop the stock to up the price? Why would a blind Cabbage Patch kid and eyeball sell for more than the kid whole?”

  “Because a pervert will pay a lot more for a face with sockets than a little girl whose toys come secondhand.”

  “That is vile.”

  He grinned hugely and flipped the page to a double-spread photo. Eight stuffed bears propped upright against a wall like construction workers on break, each gazing at the camera with pits black as a well. The sight was so dreadful, I laughed. I laughed for at least two minutes. And the pleasure centers in my brain rejoiced.

  “Glad you approve,” he said. “Kam hates it.”

  “Oh, she’s just worried about the kid you’ll have.”

  Funny how mention of a kid can bring you up short. Even the ones who live in your head. He closed the portfolio. “And you? You think you want children someday? In all this madness?”

  “What?”

  “Children. You thought about it?”

  “Sure. Of course. But it takes two, you know.”

  I had been doing fine until then. I had been feeling fine, and then, suddenly, not. I’m sure my face went vagina pink. I looked down at my napkin. He flagged the waiter and said to me, “Well, sure. But that will work itself out. And anyway, we didn’t come here to talk about that.”

  “Why did we come here?”

  “I don’t know. Because you asked.”

  We’d already had cheeseburgers. The check was en route. How much lingering could I expect once we’d paid up?

  He tossed a credit card on the table. The green Amex of yore that almost no one still has.

  “Let me,” I said, recalling the cash I’d taken from Mother’s purse. Who’s thirty and still sneaks cash from her mom?

  “Lucy,” he said. The sound of it was tender. He cared. He cared! I sat up knowing the look I gave him was all sparkle and light.

  “Lucy, I’m worried. About you, I mean. We both are.”

  But that both, it was like taking it in the face with a nail gun.

  “I’m okay, Eric.”

  “You are not. An okay person does not call her oldest friend at three in the morning every night.”

  “What makes you think I’m calling her?”

  “Lucy, stop.”

  The obvious question here was: How much dignity did I have left to rally? Every unrequited love depletes your store of pride, which is unfortunate because pride will usually outlast hope, self-regard, and all that other good stuff ravaged by the love gone wrong.

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “Jeez.”

  “Are you going to meetings? Are you seeing a therapist?”

  I welcomed this line of inquiry because it reeled me back from despair. I was too annoyed to despair. Say your boyfriend does something horrible and when you react, he asks if you’re still going to therapy. As if you are the problem! I felt like smacking him. If he’d just love me the way he was supposed to, everything would be fine.

  “I’m doing what I have to do,” I said.

  He stared me down. He knew I was lying, which was the most unhappy thing to have happened at this lunch so far. How many people know you well enough always to know when you’re lying? I wanted so much to put hands on his skin. No, for him to put hands on mine. How was I going to experience the rest of my life alone? When the plague got here, and it would, who would I have to hole up with? Whose life would I have to fear for the most? In a calamity, the body forgets everything but love. That fight you had the night before, your hideous divorce, the ten years since you last spoke—who cares? When the bomb drops, your first thought is: How can I get to him? But for me, I’d have no one. No one to curl up and die with. The thought left me breathless.

  “Like what?” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking Hannah upstate. There’s a little school near the plant or maybe she can get homeschooled with some of the other kids. I think it’s too hard for her here.” He was shaking his head. “Look, it’s got to be an improvement. It certainly couldn’t be worse.” But he was still shaking, so I said, “What?”

  “Ben says you’re going back to rehab.”

  I nodded. “Texas. I hear they have antelope.”

  “So your idea is to bring Hannah upstate and then leave her there with a bunch of Orthodox chicken farmers while you’re in Texas?”

  Crest, fallen. I wanted to go home.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is so not my business.”

  Okay, so we had officially reached the point where everything he said was excruciating. If he’d just love me the way he was supposed to, it could be his business!

  “I won’t get another chance with Hannah for a while,” I said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be away. This is the best I can come up with. I have to do something.”

  “Is that what this lunch is about?” he said. “I’ll still be here when you get back. We both will.”

  The need for him to stop talking had suddenly become the most important thing in my life. Just stop talking. I was ready to beg. It crossed my mind that I might even lose my lunch if he didn’t.

  Outside, he walked with me a few blocks. The wind chafed my skin. My nose watered. More leakage. We held our arms close and hunkered down. This was less a jaunt than a mission.

  “I hate this city in the winter,” he said. “Stupid Christmas lights.”

  I threw my head back. Driblets like rain fell from my eyes. It was also very cold.

  Twenty

  For the trip back to ZOG Chicken, we take Mother’s SUV. Hannah, who is pleased to be fleeing the reach of classmates and media, has still insisted we bring her Young Einstein Chemistry set, desktop computer, and Euwin the Brew Bear, who makes porridge and soup and chili and grog with a wood paddle that’s Velcroed to his chest. I’ve often seen Hannah make short work of Euwin with the paddle, which makes me question the wisdom of his designers.

  I am driving. Stanley’s in the passenger seat, venting about the surrogates. Why couldn’t he find a good surrogate?

  “You only interviewed five. Didn’t you get like a thousand letters?”

  “Yeah, but those were the most promising.”

  Hannah says he should just grow his own baby at home. That probably there’s a do-it-yourself uterus for sale online.

  I look in the rearview mirror. Her impassivity, it’s starting to seem permanent.

  Stanley says Fertility at Will is not that expensive. That he pays about two hundred a month to keep Sylvie’s eggs frozen. I wonder where he gets the money, but then recall he has zero expenses besides liquor and chew.

  “It’s easy, too,” he says. “Doesn’t hurt at all. Only downside is having to take some fertility drugs for a while, just to produce a lot of eggs for extraction.”

  Hannah says I can always use my eggs to cultivate low-level titer viremia.

  “What the hell is that? And when did we start talking about my eggs? My eggs are going nowhere.”

  “I think that’s the point,” Stanley says.

  Hannah: It means just enough virus to trigger an immune response.

  Stanley: You’re not getting any younger. Wh
y don’t you think about it?

  H: Maybe your eggs could give us a cure for AIDS.

  S: This way, if you get married at forty, your eggs will still be thirty!

  H: Or that horrible disease where kids look a thousand years old by age ten. Your eggs could test-run gene therapy for progeria.

  S: I have some literature with me, if you’re interested.

  H: Though I guess some people might be offended. If you can’t abort your embryo, I guess you probably can’t give it AIDS, either.

  This goes on for about three hours.

  When we arrive, Hannah makes for the sentinel sheds even though the surveillance program is done for the winter. Also, it’s too cold for mosquitoes, migration is over, the chickens who tested positive for West Nile in the fall are dead, and the rest are back in the coop. No one is certain why the alarms triggered by the sentinel chickens did not amount to an outbreak. Possibly because mosquito control is pretty good these days, or that the escape of superplague preempted articles and TV spots about West Nile. How much disease is a news organization supposed to cover? It’d get boring. Ratings could drop.

  I follow her to the sheds, which are actually cages under tarp. Not much room to maneuver in there. Not much sunlight, either.

  “I don’t want to be here,” I say. “It’s mean. Not two months old and you’re getting bled from the wing.”

  “Actually, they get bled from the heart.”

  She says this with pleasure. Some girls like lip liner, others are just morbid. Morbid girls who also like lip liner are Alice Cooper.

  I suggest we unpack the car. She says no way is she sleeping in my guesthouse hovel and anyway, Stanley already invited her to his place. I’ve yet to spend a winter out in my barn, but I agree it is not ideal. On the other hand, Stanley lives in a trailer home, how is that an improvement? She says at least his doors shut.

  When we get there, he’s barbecuing outside. Snow up to his ass, and he’s barbecuing. Catfish burgers.

  I’ve never been in the trailer, and it’s bigger than I expect. Fullsize bed, lean-to privy, trundle couch, kitchen and round table. Photos on the wall, of him and Sylvie, I presume. Presume because he is unrecognizable—maybe thirty years old with Hitler mustache—and she, my God, she looks like a girl who rides horses bareback through the prairie. Flaxen hair and all that. She is seated on his knee, gazing into the camera with conviction—that I’m going to climb every mountain look you see in ads for antidepressants.

  I tell Hannah her stuff is not going to fit in the trailer and maybe we can leave the chemistry set in my barn.

  “And freeze the unction? You wish.”

  When Hannah talks disease and I have no clue what she’s saying, I don’t think it’s because I am obtuse in all matters emotional and humane. Whenever she says anything else, I feel like a brick.

  “Don’t say unction around me. You’re twelve. It’s freaking me out.”

  “Yeah, and I live for your pleasure.”

  “Soup’s on,” Stanley says. He’s steamed his glasses. The catfish burgers look more fish than burger, which is to say there are gills in my patty.

  We hear someone outside. Instinct: it’s Wanda Deckman. Instinct: whack her with a frying pan.

  “Door’s open!” Stanley yells. It is indeed Wanda. Wanda looking pissed.

  “Well, well,” she says, and rubs her hands because it’s brutal out there. “Could smell the catfish for miles.”

  “Want some? I got enough for another burger or two.”

  Stanley does not appear to notice he’s about to lose his job. Or that he’s already lost his job and simply needs to be told.

  Wanda looks the three of us over. “Who’s this one?” she says. “What’s the ransom?”

  “My sister,” I say.

  “Half-sister,” says Hannah.

  Wanda cups her mouth. “Wow, how you’ve grown!”

  Mother and Wanda have the sort of friendship that thrives on no contact. Would that all my relations worked out so well.

  “I guess I’ll have a burger,” she says, and waits for one of us to get up. Apparently, we’re conducting a threesome of rocks, scissors, paper, only it’s whoever has the nastiest look wins. I offer Wanda my chair. Hannah might be sitting there for the rest of her life.

  “So,” Stanley says. “How have things been getting on without us? Place fall apart?”

  He really is amazing.

  “Actually, it’s running better than ever.”

  “Well, never fear,” he says. “We’ll be back on the job tomorrow.

  “It’s only been three months,” she says. “I should just welcome you back!”

  I wonder if it’s time to start kissing ass. But Stanley has a better idea. He says, “Hannah is going to be with us for a little bit. Things are pretty rough at school these days.”

  Wanda looks out the window. It has begun to snow. Not one of those White Christmas snows but a forbidding tundra of Siberia snow where you stagger through the drift with finger pops and hypothermia.

  “Brrr,” Wanda says, and I know she’s staying the night. Also that we’re not fired. It’s Hanukkah, after all. I can’t remember if Hanukkah is the fasting one or the flight-from-Egypt one, but either way, I bet mercy is a part of it.

  Stanley suggests hot cocoa all around. It’s not clear what our sleeping arrangements will be, but camaraderie via cocoa might solve everything. That or a bottle of Scotch. Can you spike cocoa with Scotch? What about rum? There’s got to be a liqueur that goes with cocoa. Sure enough, Stanley produces a flagon of crème de something. It’s actually a flagon, which means he’s either dumped six bottles in there or, shudder, he’s made it himself.

  “You’ll like this,” he says to Hannah. “I made it myself.”

  “With an online kit?”

  He nods. The rapport between them is getting creepy.

  The flagon comes down from his lips, leaving a milky froth behind. I pour some in my cup. It smells noxious. Wanda says she’ll stick with cocoa. Hannah is more intrepid. I try to encourage temperance, but without much heart. A person who cannot heed her own advice does not diminish the quality of the advice, but so what, you still feel like a jerk.

  If you don’t stir the crème de, it congeals. I spoon out a chunk and wait for it to dry. Crème de crack, I think, miserably.

  Stanley decides there’s not enough cocoa to go around, so he opts out. Under guise of self-sacrifice, he’s just given himself permission to have a beer.

  Hannah curls up on a papasan cushion under the table. It looks like a dog bed. We can hear the wind lash the trailer, which rocks from side to side. The windows are crusted in rime. I scratch at the frost with my fingernail.

  “What’ll it be?” Wanda says. “Cards? You got a TV?”

  “I get some of the local stations. But the picture’s bad.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  I trot back to join her. Family Feud is next, after a commercial break. The spot is for a pharmaceutical company. It has a scientist talking about how hard it is to find a new drug that works and is safe for humans, but he has to try because bacteria develop resistance. And he wants props for this. For his company’s quest to find new drugs. This makes me ill. Half the reason bacteria develop resistance is that antibiotics are overprescribed. The drug companies lobby the doctors, fete the doctors, until their drug gets into every bloodstream in America. What’s worse, they glad-hand farmers and the FDA to ensure their product hits livestock. When chickens get the drug, their bacteria mutate to survive the attack. Upshot: people who get food poisoning now have no recourse to antibiotics because none of them still works.

  “Turn this shit off,” I say.

  “Beg pardon?”

  Blood boiling. In 1977, Congress buries a motion to curb antibiotic use in agriculture, citing lack of definitive evidence that such use undermines the benefits for humans. 1982, scientists match drug-resistant bacteria in a human with the drug-resistant bacteria in the livestock. Cong
ress demurs. And the FDA wimps out. 1988, a new fluoroquinolone antibiotic reaches the market. It’s a hit. A miracle! So naturally, the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain, and the United States approve it for veterinary use. Three years later, FQRESISTANT salmonella is up by 1.4 percent. By the time Congress actually revokes the licensing of FQs to livestock, the damage is done. Bayer company flips out, and hastens a PR campaign like the commercial I just saw.

  I make for the door, thinking I’ve had enough of this trailer. Close quarters are for prostitutes in Manila. As reward for my attitude, I get wind in the face like a switch.

  “Oh, look,” Wanda says, motioning to the TV, “here’s three Chinese women in leotards singing in, well I guess it’s Chinese. Oh, never mind, I got Schneerson.”

  I roll my eyes. Being at ZOG Chicken, it’s Schneerson this, Schneerson that. The man has been dead eight years, but he’s still the most influential rabbi in the Hasidic community. I often see him in wallet-sized photos hung from rearview mirrors or baby carriages. Up here it’s mostly Lubavitcher Jews, who are fairly progressive for their kind. And though Wanda’s not a Hasid, she’s still much moved by anything Schneerson has to say, which is usually that ours is the last generation of exile and the first of redemption. That we are living in a uniquely messianic age. Thing is, he’d been saying this for a while and now he’s dead, so when does an age stop?

  Wanda turns off the TV. She looks forlorn. I join her on the bed. She’s seeming less my ogre boss than a middle-aged woman with no reason to live.

  “I’m beginning to understand you,” she says.

  Oh, no. But it’s too late and there’s no place to hide. Maybe if I just don’t respond.

  “I mean,” she says, “I see you destroying your body and moping around with zero enthusiasm and I think: What’s with this girl? There’s so much to be grateful for.”

  If I burrow under the covers, will she stop? Stanley is at the other end of the trailer. I try to look at him so hard, it will draw him to my side. But he just catches my eye and waves like, Look how big my trailer is!

  “But now,” Wanda says, “now I’m starting to see it different. I guess it’s all this business about superplague. I can’t help but think it’s going to get me. I don’t have much money saved in the bank so I can’t just fly to Paris for a last hurrah. The one person I loved I never got to tell. So really, there’s nothing I can manage today that I always wanted to do before I die. And just thinking about that, it gives you perspective, you know?”