The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  “Your mother’s tried to kill herself!” he wailed. “I found her in the shower with her wrists open. She’s in the hospital now.”

  The words were like a crack to the head with a baseball bat.

  “No,” she offered. “I’m not sure you remember that right.”

  “Where are you?” he said. “I wanted you here tonight!”

  Elmer sat down next to her and began rubbing her back. Then he made a snorting sound and laughed, and the others laughed, too. “Are you speaking an alien language, babe?” he asked.

  Netta half heard him and shuddered, because her body couldn’t withstand a second crack to the head. She dug her fingers beneath her ponytail, feeling for a patch of scalp on the back of her head from which she was certain was leaking dark crimson blood. Her vision was the darkest green it had ever been.

  “Netta,” her father said, his voice well modulated now, “this is serious. They said it was lucky I found her. I was teaching—I don’t know how long it was she’d been there like that.”

  Netta ground her teeth. Now he’s acting calm, of course. Then came an image of her mother in the shower and she vomited on her dress.

  The next time she was aware of her body in space, it was much later in the evening and she was in Leticia’s studio in Uptown, her hair and chin still smelling of her own vomit. Leticia was getting a sweatshirt and sweatpants ready for her and pulling her soiled dress off her head while Netta said something about how she had missed her mom’s death, how she was such a horrible daughter that she’d driven her mom to kill herself. And Leticia was assuring her that she was wrong, telling her multiple times that she’d spoken with her father and that he said her mother was alive at the hospital and sedated and stable, saying she could call him again if Netta wanted. But Netta didn’t want to talk to her father again—she wanted to take a shower, and then she wanted to go home and lie in her childhood bed and cry for her father and mother, cry for how small and sad and scared of the world they were, cry for how she’d traveled far from them without inviting them along. Leticia listened as she talked, and Netta knew that if she let herself think about those years of unanswered AOL “Hey”s, those lunches during which Leticia had sat silently while Netta told some stupid story about tripping at a Pearl Jam concert, she’d vomit again. How smug Netta had been! How sophisticated she had thought she was! But she knew nothing of the world, and Leticia in her shitty studio apartment with her washed-out jeans and accounting textbooks knew more! Netta couldn’t tell whether it was worse that Leticia had always known more or that she’d kept her knowing more a secret.

  Then Netta was out of the shower and in Leticia’s strange clothes, pushing open a door that was the entrance to her mother’s hospital room. She was watching her father speak with a nurse wearing a Santa hat while her mother slept noisily against the hum of the machine that was monitoring her heart and helping her breathe. Netta’s father hugged Netta, then Leticia, and Netta wept helplessly, dirtied her father’s shirt with snot and tears. She approached her mother’s bed and realized with horror that she was still high, that she had been high for hours and would probably be high for many more. She was just a frightened little girl come to share her mother’s bed in the middle of the night, and she nudged her mother awake, the nurse saying, “Careful!”

  Her mother blinked and sat partway up and her hands, mittened with bandages and restrained at her sides, tensed as she tried to move them. Then she looked at Netta in confusion that Netta watched change to anger, then to something between pity and fear. She was sea green—the color of a child.

  “Why are you here now?” her mother asked.

  Netta bit her lower lip and shook her head. Her mother watched her.

  “Speak up,” she said. “Why are you here, Netta?”

  “Oh, Ma!” Netta said, and threw herself across her mother’s lap, the nurse pawing ineffectively at her back. “I’m sorry!”

  “What the hell are you sorry for?” her mother asked, and laughed.

  Netta felt her mother’s little pink burbles of laughter and clung tighter to her, pressed her face into her mother’s needles and tubes.

  “I thought I was ready to leave, but I’m not.” Her mother said this lightly, as though they were discussing running errands. “I thought I was all alone, but I’m not.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Netta repeated, not knowing what she was assenting to. She felt far off, like an object in the lens of a telescope. Her mother was the victim of a world built to hate her, to deny her existence—her grandma had been as well. And so was Netta herself, sitting on her ailing mother’s hospital bed in her twenty-dollar choker and United Colors of Benetton, her brain dyed a fucked-up purple from the mox-c, and she hated to think about who she’d been, about who she would eventually become.

  That March, Netta graduated from SAIC. Her mother was still in the hospital. She broke the lease on her River North apartment and moved back into the beige apartment with her father, slept in her sixteen-year-old twin bed, and began a freelance job as a figure drawer for a small publisher of anatomical textbooks, a gig she found through Peter. She’d broken up with Elmer in January after they had a fight about whether she was “too emotional”: he maintained he’d tried to help her that awful night but she’d called him a fuckstick and told him to get away from her; she had no memory of any of that and didn’t really care.

  In the weeks after her mother returned home, Netta spent most of the day at her bedside, reading her the literature she liked: surrealist poetry, magazines in which decorated writers were interviewed at length by overeager journalists. Sometimes she would ask for Popular Science or some obscure medical journal, and Netta would have to dig in a cupboard in the kitchen where her father had stored all those magazines, the oldest ones yellowed and bound together with a rubber band. But she never read long from these—Netta’s mother would tolerate four or five paragraphs and then demand to be returned to the author interview. After a month her mother’s depression lifted enough for her to get out of bed in the morning, and Netta would walk with her to Hollywood Beach, where her mother scattered stale Saltines among flocks of desperate-looking seagulls.

  At SAIC, Netta had abandoned her drawings of people for representational surrealism like Ernst’s and Magritte’s: a fire hydrant with human hands, a white woman emerging from the mouth of a panting dog, a mise en abyme of birds’ eyes. But now she returned to people, to her charcoal and her parchment paper. She took the train to Cabrini-Green and drew the old women wheeling their metal carts in and out of public housing, drew a coked-up young man from the neighborhood who approached her almost daily asking for a date. She babysat every other week for Michel and his wife, took the two bougie Hyde Park kids (by then Talib was a first-grader and Shalia just out of diapers) on walks through Englewood and Auburn Gresham, where she would take photos of bored-looking young women behind convenience store counters, of teenaged boys on their bikes trying to act bigger than they were. When Talib tripped and skinned his knee, she preserved the mental image to draw later: a little boy on his stomach at the corner of Sixty-Seventh and Halsted, hands splayed at his sides, mouth open wide in pain.

  And she drew her mother. Over and over and over again she drew her mother: waking up in bed, counting empty jars in the kitchen, searching for employment on the ancient computer she’d finally talked her father into buying. She did studies of her mother’s ankles, feet, hands, arms, neck, ears, face. She drew her mother in situations she had never been in, was unlikely to ever be in: dancing, playing basketball, conducting a train. A homeless woman under the Lake Shore Drive overpass became her mother. A cheerful docent at the DuSable Museum of African American History became her mother. A woman taking her order at Lou Malnati’s became her mother. The best of the drawings she copied onto canvas with the best acrylics she could afford. In six months, she produced more drawings than she had in four years at SAIC. She stacked them on every available surface in the apartment—those she couldn’t fit in the
apartment she stored in the closets and dressers of Leticia and Elise, who had now begun the decent-paying jobs they’d been studying for. She called Satvika, who was starting work as a public defender in Montpelier, and told her about the drawings, about her mother.

  “It sounds like you’re ready for your first show,” Satvika said, her voice the same orange-red it had always been.

  And of course Satvika was right. Michel’s wife, Sandra, who was a professor of art history at the University of Chicago, said Netta’s work reminded her of later Loïs Mailou Jones. Soon after that Netta was offered a show at the South Side Community Art Center in Bronzeville, and she invited everyone she knew to attend—even the old women from Cabrini-Green and the convenience store girls in Englewood—promised everyone free food and wine if they’d just stay and look at the pictures she’d painted of them. The show, which she called The Big Heavy World, featured twenty of her character studies and thirty-five twelve-by-fourteens of either her mother or other women as her mother. Her father came and cried with pride; her mother said she was too tired to attend.

  Netta sold all but five of her paintings from The Big Heavy World and began work on a new series the next day: pictures of black Chicago women of all ages and stations, some commissioned portraits, some drawn from memory. She didn’t tell any of her clients that she was really just drawing her mother over and over, hiding her dimpled cheeks, wide nose, and sleepy eyes in theirs. It took her only three months to finish the series, which she titled Alo, Manman! (In Haitian in honor of her grandma’s roots.) The second show was at a gallery in Wicker Park, even better attended than her first. People noticed common features in the women’s faces and attributed them to Netta’s “style”—one reviewer went so far as to write, “As the artist develops her work, we will come to recognize a Barochin in much the same way we do a Botero: a diversity of character communicated through the same plump face, the same almond eyes and rounded nose.” An agent approached her and suggested she move to New York. She told him he could represent her, but she had no interest in leaving her hometown.

  One of the portraits in Alo, Manman! had been of a girl named Shanea McQueen and her mother, Roxane, a cherubic pair from Cabrini-Green whose round faces both nicely concealed and revealed Netta’s mother’s features. Roxane had been the beauty of her family, it was easy to tell: she walked with confidence, commanded both the respect and fear of her children. While Shanea had inherited her mother’s looks, she often hid them. She hugged herself whenever she sensed she was being watched, pulled her large T-shirts over her knees while sitting cross-legged on the couch. Roxane had asked for the portrait so Shanea would understand not only how beautiful she was, but that she came from a long line of beautiful women. At the opening, the portrait, titled simply Mother and Daughter: Cabrini-Green, had drawn plenty of praise, and had left Shanea biting her lower lip with embarrassed joy.

  Two weeks later, Shanea and her older brother were walking home from school on Hudson when a policeman asked them where they were going. Her brother had offered the truth. Shanea had asked the policeman what was so suspicious about walking home. The officer said there was nothing suspicious, said she’d need to calm down and let him do his job, asked her to show him some ID. Shanea said her name was Shanea McQueen, she was fourteen, and he could speak to her mother if he wanted. The officer withdrew his gun and said she’d better produce some ID. Shanea sighed and reached into her jacket pocket and the officer shot her.

  Netta followed the story obsessively. The McQueens sued the city for $3 million. The officer—Albert Kowalski, whom the media kept describing as a “family man,” “proud Polish immigrant,” and “father of three”—hired the same lawyer who’d defended Mayor Daley’s nephew after he killed David Koschman. In court, the lawyer claimed Shanea had been aggressive and argumentative; Kowalski feared she was about to withdraw a weapon, so he’d acted in self-defense. In the testimony, Shanea’s brother became a suspected gang member and Shanea became a disruptive delinquent. The judge ruled in Kowalski’s favor.

  Netta lost sleep over it. She ignored her agent’s phone calls and went back to making detailed pen sketches of the backs of hands and neck tendons for the small publisher. She drew her mother again, but this time more out of rage than curiosity: her mother with monstrously large teeth, her mother with a bolt through her head, her mother aflame. She saw her life as a sad downward trajectory from clueless child to leeching adult—she should have stayed in that penthouse with Chloe and Danielle, reading Cosmo and getting fucked up and making fake art for rich white people. She called Chloe and Danielle for the first time in a while and they snorted some coke, went to a bar in Wrigleyville, snorted some Valium, made out, passed out. She felt like shit: she knew now that being with them had always made her feel like shit, but before it’d been gold-leafed shit. When she woke up the next morning she had a voicemail from her friend Ray Simon, failed artist turned community organizer turned real estate entrepreneur, who said there was going to be a protest and remembrance ceremony for Shanea in Cabrini-Green on Saturday and could she come?

  Of course she could. It was September and getting cold again; she wore long sleeves and a vest, a pair of baggy jeans that had once belonged to her mother. As always, men hassled her as she walked, asking her what she was so mad about, why she couldn’t just give them a smile. She had no patience for them today—she spoke back, swatted them off, told one old piece of shit who claimed Shanea had been sleeping with Kowalski to cut off his dick. He leered at her but she didn’t care—she was feeling reckless. Let one of these assholes shoot me, too, she thought.

  At the corner of Sedgwick and Erie there emerged from the crowd another man, heavy-browed. This one seemed lost. She didn’t care. She was so fed up with him. She was so fed up with all of them.

  “What’s this?” He locked eyes with her and didn’t break his stare—the “this” could’ve been her or the protest.

  “It’s a protest,” she snarled. “A fourteen-year-old girl was murdered by a cop.”

  “Oh.” He nodded, glanced around him. “I parked a few blocks away. I was wondering where—”

  She jammed a spare sign in his hands and told him to hold it. He smiled and snorted a laugh, both of which wore on her patience.

  “I don’t know where the fuck you’re from,” she said, “but people in Chicago get murdered for acting confident.”

  That seemed to sober him up, and he held the sign and marched alongside her. He, the man she’d fall in love with, didn’t speak to her all the way east on Erie and south down the Magnificent Mile. She pretended she was alone and not guilty, a little girl whose understanding of the world still involved magic, who listened to her mother’s stories in a big, bright kitchen.

  PART III

  LEE BLOOM-MITTWOCH JR.

  (1989–)

  1996

  Florida

  When he was just six, Lee Bloom—he didn’t want to bother with the M part of his name, it was too hard to say—had a whole backyard to himself. The trees in his private backyard went curvy like elf-trees and had long palm-hair and swayed when he came close to them and stood still when he went away. There was a mud path that led from his backyard to the swamp, and if you walked along it your feet sunk deep and the mud was warm and soft and gross because it sometimes felt like a person’s hands. One time, he walked down the mud path and stayed still for a very long time—days and days—next to the swamp and he saw one alligator eye on the first day and another on the second day and then on the third day he saw alligator teeth and on the last day he saw a whole alligator mouth. The alligator mouth opened and snapped shut at him.

  His mom was named Diedre and she was pretty; she wore makeup most of the time but in the morning her face didn’t have any makeup, and sometimes it looked softer but sometimes it looked sleepier. She carried him around the house in the night when he was a baby and he couldn’t stop crying. She carried him upstairs and downstairs. When he was bigger she stopped carrying him but some
times he walked behind her around the house and she told him “Here is where we keep the mops, here is where we keep the orange juice,” in case he ever had to show anyone. She drank bad-smelling vodka with orange juice, in a chair outside. She smoked outside—she told him not to do what she did. His dad told him her life had been a very sad one before, but he didn’t say why it was sad.

  His dad was named the same as him: Leland. But he didn’t get called Lee, he just got called Leland or Senior. His mom sometimes said, “Don’t be so stupid, Senior,” and kissed him on the nose so then there was lipstick on his nose. He laughed: he had a deep laugh. He was taller and older than she was. His skin was tan-colored but hers was white like the 2 percent milk that Lee had in the cup with the alligator on the front of it. The alligator wore purple shorts and said “Aloha from Miami!” She said to Lee, “Someone spilled milk all over me and didn’t get your dad.” And his dad said, “Lee’s going to tan like his father,” and Lee said, “I can’t get a tan.” But his dad said, “You’ve got cinnamon skin already. That’s how all the Bloom-Mittwochs tan.” Lee didn’t know about any other Bloom-Mittwochs, except for his dad’s other son, but he’d never seen him. Sometimes Lee thought maybe he was adopted from a different mom and dad because he looked different from them and tanned different from them. Sometimes his dad talked fast and sometimes he talked slow. Sometimes when his dad talked really fast his mom talked really slow.

  His mom’s name was Diedre Bloom-Mittwoch but before it was Diedre Mifkin. She didn’t like her mom and dad, who were Lee’s grandparents. They lived far away in another part of Florida; he hardly ever saw them. She told Lee his grandma Mifkin used to be very proper but now she saved everything in bins in her house and the whole front part of the house where the kitchen and living room was had bins full of twine and newspapers. Lee’s dad’s parents were dead. They used to live in a dark forest-city on the other side of the world that his dad called the Vald. When Lee thought of the Vald he thought of yellow eyes in the trees and animals that could talk. He asked his dad if animals could talk in the Vald and his dad looked at his mom and said, “Good question. Nazis could talk, couldn’t they?”