“Noon. You meet us here, okay?”
“Okay.”
Streep glared at me as I left. At least the junkies bought coffee.
I thought about going down to Foster Circle anyway. It was a traffic island some idealistic mayor had decided to beautify with grass and flowers and park benches. Now it was just another junkie hangout the straights avoided even in daytime. It wasn’t likely anyone would be hanging out there now, certainly not anyone who wanted to see me. I trudged back to the bus station, picked up my bag, and went to my parents’ place.
I hadn’t told my parents to expect me but they didn’t seem terribly surprised when I let myself in. My father was watching TV in the living room while my mother kept busy in the kitchen. The all-American nuclear salt-of-the-earth. My father didn’t look at me as I peeled off my coat and flopped down in the old green easy chair.
“Decided to come home after all, did you?” he said after a minute. There was no sign of Joe in his long, square face, which had been jammed in an expression of disgust since my sister Rose had had her first baby three months after her wedding. On the television, a woman in a fancy restaurant threw a drink in a man’s face. “Thought you were going to Connecticut with your rich-bitch girlfriend.”
I shrugged.
“Come back to see him, didn’t you?” He reached for one of the beer cans on the end table, giving it a little shake to make sure there was something in it. “What’ud he do, call you?”
“I got a postcard.” On TV the drink-throwing woman was now a corpse. A detective was frowning down at her. Women who threw drinks always ended up as corpses; if she’d watched enough TV, she’d have known that.
“A postcard. Some big deal. A postcard from a broken-down junkie. We’re only your parents and we practically have to get down on our knees and beg you to come home.”
I took a deep breath. “Glad to see you, too. Home sweet home.”
“You watch that smart mouth on you. You coulda phoned. I’d a picked you up at the bus station. It ain’t like it used to be around here.” My father finished the can and parked it with the other empties. “There’s a new element coming in. You don’t know them and they don’t know you and they don’t care whose sister you are. Girl on the next block, lived here all her life—raped. On the street and it wasn’t hardly dark out.”
“Who was it?”
“How the hell should I know, goddamit, what am I, the Census Bureau? I don’t keep track of every urchin around here.”
“Then how do you know she lived here all her life?”
My father was about to bellow at me when my mother appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “China. Come in here. I’ll fix you something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Her face didn’t change expression. “We got salami and Swiss cheese. I’ll make you a sandwich.”
Why not. She could make me a sandwich, I wouldn’t eat it, and we could keep the enmity level up where it belonged. I heaved myself up out of the chair and went into the kitchen.
“Did you come home on his account?” my mother asked as I sat down at the kitchen table.
“I got a postcard from him.”
“Did you.” She kept her back to me while she worked at the counter. Always a soft doughy woman, my mother seemed softer and doughier than ever, as though a release had been sprung somewhere inside her, loosening everything. After a bit, she turned around holding a plate with a sandwich on it. Motherhood magic, culinary prestidigitation with ordinary salami, Swiss cheese, and white bread. Behold, the family life. Too many Leave It to Beaver reruns. She set the plate down in front of me.
“I did it,” she said. “I threw him out.”
“I figured.”
She poured me a cup of coffee. “First I broke all his needles and threw them in the trash.”
“Good, Ma. You know the police sometimes go through the trash where junkies are known to live?”
“So what are they going to do, bust me and your father? Joe doesn’t live here anymore. I wouldn’t stand for him using this place as a shooting gallery. He stole. Took money out of my purse, took things and sold them. Like we don’t work hard enough for anything that we can just let a junkie steal from us.”
I didn’t say anything. It would have been the same if he’d been staying with me. “I know, Ma.”
“So?” She was gripping the back of a chair as though she didn’t know whether she wanted to throw it or pull it out and sit down.
“So what,” I said.
“So what do you want with him?”
“He asked for me, Ma.”
“Oh, he asked for you. Great. What are you going to do, take him to live with you in your dorm room? Won’t that be cozy.”
I had an absurd picture of it. He’d have had a field day with all of Marlene’s small valuables. “Where’s Aurelia?”
“How should I know? We’re on notice here—she does what she wants. I asked you to come home and talk to her. You wouldn’t even answer my letters.”
“What do you think I can do about her? I’m not her mother.”
She gave me a dirty look. “Eat your sandwich.”
I forced a bite and shoved the plate away. “I’m just not hungry.”
“Suit yourself. You should have told me if you wanted something else.”
“I didn’t want something else. I didn’t want anything.” I helped myself to a cigarette. My mother’s eyebrows went up but she said nothing. “When Aurelia comes home, I’ll talk to her, okay?”
“If she comes home. Sometimes she doesn’t. I don’t know where she stays. I don’t know if she even bothers to go to school sometimes.”
I tapped ashes into the ashtray. “I was never able to get away with anything like that.”
The look she gave me was unidentifiable. Her eyelids lowered, one corner of her mouth pulling down. For a few moments I saw her as a stranger, some woman I’d never seen before who was waiting for me to figure something out but who was pretty sure I was too stupid to do it.”
“Okay, if she comes home, I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t do me any favors. Anyway, you’ll probably be out looking for him.”
“I’ve always been closer to him than anyone else in the family was.”
My mother made a disgusted noise. “Isn’t that sweet?”
“He’s still a human being, Ma. And he’s still my brother.”
“Don’t lecture to me about family, you. What do you think I am, the custodian here? Maybe when you back to college, you’d like to take Joe and Aurelia with you. Maybe you’d do better at making her come home at night and keeping him off the heroin. Go ahead. You’re welcome to do your best.”
“I’m not their mother or father.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” My mother took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it. “They’re still human beings, still your brother and sister. So what does that make me?”
I put my own cigarette out, picked my bag up in the living room and went to the bedroom I shared with Aurelia. She had started to spread out a little in it, though the division between her side and my side was still fairly evident. Mainly because she obviously wasn’t spending a lot of time here.
For a long time, I sat on my bed fully clothed, just staring out the window. The street below was empty and dark and there was nothing to look at. I kept looking at it until I heard my parents go to bed. A little later, when I thought they were asleep, I opened the window a crack and rolled a joint from the stuff in the bottom drawer of my bureau. Most of the lid was still there, which meant Aurelia hadn’t found it. I’d never liked grass that much after the novelty wore off, but I wanted something to blot out the bad taste the evening had left in my brain.
A whole joint to myself was a lot more than I was used to and the buzz was thick and debilitating. The smoke coiled into unreadable symbols and patterns before it was sucked out the window into the cold and dark. I thought of ragged ghosts fleeing a house like rats jumping off
a sinking ship. It was the kind of dopey thought that occupies your mind for hours when you’re stoned, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to have to think about anything that mattered.
Eventually, I became aware that I was cold. When I could move, I reached over to shut the window and something down on the street caught my eye. It was too much in the shadows close to the building to see very well if it was even there at all. Hasher’s delirium, or in this case. Grasser’s delirium. I tried to watch it anyway. There was a certain strength of definition and independence from the general fuzziness of my stoned eyesight, something that suggested there was more to it than the dope in my brain. Whatever it was—a dope exaggeration of a cat or a dog or a big rat—I didn’t like it. Unbidden, my father’s words about a new element moving in slide into my head. Something about the thing made me think of a reptile, stunted evolution or evolution reversed, and a sort of evil that might have lain thickly in pools of decay millions of years ago, predating warm-blooded life. Which was ridiculous, I thought, because human beings brought the distinction between good and evil into the world. Good and evil, and stoned and not stoned. I was stoned. I went to bed.
But remember, said my still-buzzing mind as I was drifting into stupor-sleep, in order to make distinctions between any two things like good and evil, they first have to exist, don’t they.
This is what happens when would-be intellectuals get stoned, I thought and passed out.
The sound of my father leaving for work woke me. I lay listening to my mother in the kitchen, waiting for the sound of bacon and eggs frying and her summons to get up and have a good breakfast. Instead, I heard water running briefly in the sink and then her footsteps going back to the bedroom and the door closing. That was new—my mother going back to bed after my father went to work in spite of the fact that the college kid was home. I hadn’t particularly wanted to talk to her anyway, especially if it were just going to be a continuation of the previous night but it still made me feel funny.
I washed and dressed, taking my time, but my mother never reemerged. Apparently she was just not going to be part of my day. I left the house far earlier than I’d intended to, figuring I’d go find something to do with myself until it was time to meet Farmer and the others.
In the front vestibule of the apartment building, I nearly collided with my sister Rose, who seemed about ready to have her baby at any moment. She had dyed her hair blonde again, a cornsilk yellow color already brassing at the ends and showing dark roots.
“What are you doing home?” she asked, putting her hands protectively over her belly, protruding so much she couldn’t button her coat.
“Vacation,” I said. “How are you?”
“How am I ever? Pregnant.”
“There is such a thing as birth control.”
“Yeah, and there is such a thing as it not working. So?”
“Well. This is number five, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know you were keeping score.” She tried pulling her coat around her front but it wouldn’t go. “It’s cold down here. I’m going up to Ma.”
“She went back to bed.”
“She’ll get up for me.”
“Should you be climbing all those stairs in your condition?”
Rose lifted her plucked-to-nothing eyebrows. “You wanna carry me?” She pushed past me and slowly started up the first flight of steps.
“Come on, Rose,” I called after her, “what’ll happen if your bag of waters breaks or something while you’re on the stairs?”
She turned to look at me from seven steps up. “I’ll scream, what do you think I’ll do?” She resumed her climb.
“Well, do you want me to walk up with you?” I asked, starting after her. She just waved a hand at me and kept going. Annoyed and amused, I waited until she had made the first landing and begun the next flight, wondering if I shouldn’t run up after her anyway or at least stay there until I heard my mother let her in. Then I decided Rose probably knew what she was doing, in a half-assed way. My theory was that she had been born pregnant and waited sixteen years until she found someone to act as father. She hadn’t been much smaller than she was now when she and Roger had gotten married, much to my parents’ dismay. It hadn’t bothered Rose in the least.
The sun was shining brightly but there was no warmth to it. The snow lining the curb was dirtier than ever, pitted and brittle. Here and there on the sidewalk, old patches of ice clung to the pavement like frozen jellyfish left after a receding tide. It wasn’t even 10:30 but I went over to Streep’s Lunch, in case anyone put in an early appearance. That wasn’t very likely but there wasn’t much else to do.
Streep had the place to himself except for a couple of old people sitting near the windows. I took a seat at the counter and ordered breakfast to make up for the night before. My atonement didn’t exactly impress him but surprised me by actually speaking to me as he poured my coffee. “You home on vacation?”
“That’s right,” I said, feeling a little wary as I added cream from an aluminum pitcher.
“You like college?”
“It would be heaven if it weren’t for the classes.”
Streep’s rubbery mouth twitched, shaking his jowls. “I thought that was what you went for, to go to classes and get smart.”
I shrugged.
“Maybe you think you’re already smart.”
“Some people would say so.” I smiled, thinking he should have asked my father.
“You think it’s smart to keep coming around here and hanging out with junkies?”
I blinked at him. “I didn’t know you cared.”
“Just askin’ a question.”
“You haven’t seen my brother Joe lately, have you?”
Streep made a fast little noise that was less than a laugh and walked away. Someone had left a newspaper on one of the stools to my right. I picked it up and read it over breakfast just for something to do. An hour passed, with Streep coming back every so often to refill my cup without any more conversation. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the machine just to have something else to do and noticed one of the old people had gone to sleep before finishing breakfast. She was very old, with frizzy gray hair and a sagging hawk nose. Her mouth had dropped open to show a few long, stained teeth. I had a half-baked idea of waking her when she gave an enormous snore. Streep didn’t even look at her. What the hell, her hash browns were probably stone cold anyway. I went back to my newspaper.
When the clock over the grill said 12:10, I left some money on the counter and went outside. I should have known they’d be late, I thought. I’d probably have to stand around until close to dark, when they’d finally remember they were supposed to meet me here and not show, figuring I’d split.
A horn honked several times. George poked his head out the driver’s side window of a car parked across the street. I hurried over as the back door swung open.
“Christ, we been waiting for you,” Farmer said irritably as I climbed in. “You been in there the whole time?”
“I thought you were meeting Priscilla here.”
“Change of venue, you should pardon the expression,” Farmer said. “Streep won’t give you a cup of water to go.” He was in the front with George. Stacey and the kid were in the back with me. The kid didn’t look so good today. He had dark circles under his eyes and wherever he’d spent the night hadn’t had a washroom.
“Why aren’t you in school?” I asked him.
“Screw it, what’s it to you?” he said flippantly.
“Haven’t been home yet, have you?”
“Chrissakes, what are you, his probation officer?” said Farmer. “Let’s go, she’s waiting.”
The car pulled away from the curb with a jerk. George swore as he eased it into the light noontime traffic. “I ain’t used to automatics,” he complained to no one.
Farmer was rummaging in the glove compartment. “Hey, there’s no works in here. You got any?”
“I got them, don’t worry. Just wai
t till we pick up Priscilla, okay?”
“Just tell me where they are.”
“Don’t sweat it, I told you I got them.”
“I just want to know where.”
“Up my ass, all right? Now let me drive.”
“I’ll give you up your ass,” Farmer said darkly.
Stacey tapped him on the back of the head. “Come on, take it easy, Farmer. Everybody’s gonna get what they need from Priscilla.”
“Does Priscilla know where Joe is?” I asked.
“Priscilla knows everything,” said Stacey, believing it.
Priscilla herself was standing on the sidewalk in front of a beauty parlor, holding a big Styrofoam cup. She barely waited for the car to stop before she yanked the door open and got into the front seat next to Farmer.
“You got works?” he asked as she handed him the cup. “This asshole won’t tell me if he’s got any.”
“In a minute, Farmer. I have to say hello to China.” She knelt on the front seat and held her arms out to me. Obediently, I leaned forward over the kid so she could hug me. She was as bizarre-looking as ever, with her pale pancake makeup, frosted pink lipstick, heavily outlined eyes, and flat-black hair. The junkie version of Elizabeth Taylor. She was a strange little girl in a puffy woman’s body and she ran hot and cold with me, sometimes playing my older sister, then snubbing me outright, depending on Joe. They’d been on and off for as long as he’d been shooting, with her as the pursuer unless Joe knew for sure that she had a good connection.
Today she surprised me by kissing me lightly on the lips. It was like being kissed by a crayon. “How’s our college kid?” she asked tenderly.
“Fine, Priscilla. Have you—”
“I haven’t seen you since the fall,” she went on, gripping the back of the seat as George pulled into the street again. “How do you like school? Are you doing real well?”
Farmer pulled her around. “This is very sweet, old home week and all, but do you have anything?”
“No, Farmer, I always stand around on the street with a cup of water. Don’t spill it.”
“I’ve got a spoon,” said the kid, holding one up. Stacey took it from him.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 59