by Jeanne Darst
“Do as I say!” she snapped, and then went into the kitchen to put a gizmo in the oven that emits the smell of baking apple pie throughout your house.
We changed our shirts quickly and got in front of the fire and pretended to be reading on the carpet while strangers came through our house and looked into closets and asked about property taxes. She sold our house for five times what she bought it for, in just under four hours.
My graduation, the thing that my parents were waiting for, was almost upon us, but the spring before I was supposed to go to college I had nowhere to go. I had gotten into George Washington University and Boston University but was partying too much to read my acceptance letters, which asked for deposits to secure a space. So I had nowhere to go. My mother and I drove to Washington, D.C., to convince George Washington University to let me in even though their fall class was now full. My mother’s version of “making a few phone calls” was to put in a physical appearance, as if she were a celebrity whose name the admissions committee failed to see on my application. “Perhaps you didn’t recognize the name? Doris Gissy Darst, child equestrian? Cover of Sports Illustrated, 1956? Youngest person ever on the cover until Nadia Comӑneci?” Surely there had to be someone my mother could take out for a drink that would “get it” about my situation. Apparently there was not. We drove home. A few weekends later, in late May, my mother took Eleanor with her to the State University of New York at Purchase, having Eleanor fill out an application form for me in the car on the way there. I must have been accepted because my parents dropped me and a few suitcases off there for Orientation Weekend in late August. I didn’t go shopping with my mom for new bedspreads and shower caddies and framed posters of Degas ballet dancers. As mother and daughter we made no lists of things I would need, picked out no special sweaters for the fall classes, we didn’t figure out how I would call home or when I would check in with her. My mother told me to watch out for the food, that it would have a lot of starch in it that would make me gain weight. That was about it for preparations and going-off-to-college bonding. I brought my old bedspread and my pillows and some towels from the bathroom and I got in the car. I was set up with a meal plan and given some money and then they gave me a hug and took off. College. No big deal. Just like I suspected.
CRABS AND REHABS
MY BOYFRIEND, Martin, pointed to the light on his desk, the twisty neck of which was pulled down, like a microscope, over a sheet of loose-leaf paper.
“Look,” he said.
Martin was twenty-four to my eighteen; we had begun dating in my junior year in high school and then he had followed me to college, although we never talked about this—one day he just said he was going to college also, my college. It wasn’t hard to get in, you could pretty much call the morning you wanted to come and start that day. So he did. And it wasn’t going well. I’m the youngest kid—I don’t like anyone following me.
“Get under the light. Really get in there,” he insisted.
I bent over the desk and looked at the light’s circle.
“What is that, a pube?”
“Yes, mine. What else do you see, Jeanne?”
I leaned in again, wondering why Martin had to act so bananas all the time. And then I saw it. A teeny little black creature on the pube.
“Is that a flea?”
“I wish it were, Jeanne.”
“Well, what is it then, Martin?”
“You don’t know what it is? You have no idea?”
“No.”
“It’s a crab, Jeanne.”
“A crab?”
“Yes, a crab. A louse. A pubic louse?” Martin yelled. His roommate, Mark, a Keene State transfer student who was a “nontraditional” student (read: older, loser), like Martin, walked in.
Martin glared at me, which was confusing. If he found lice in his mattress, shouldn’t he let Mark know their room had bugs?
“Let’s go,” Martin said, swiping the loose-leaf sheet of paper off the desk and dropping it in the garbage. Mark hung his coat up in the closet.
“Later, man,” Martin said.
“Later,” Mark said.
I was about to say, “Later,” but it seemed like it would have been too many.
Martin walked quickly ahead of me. When we got a little way down the hall he turned back and yelled, “You fucked somebody over Thanksgiving break. I can’t believe you fucked somebody!” A drowsy, bathrobed student walked past us to the hall bathroom with her little pink plastic bathroom caddie.
“I did not fuck anybody over Thanksgiving.” I had drunkenly made out with a couple people but they’d have to have a pretty bad case of crabs to transmit them to me that way. “This is what I’m talking about, Martin. These wacko accusations.”
“Well, then where the fuck did I get crabs? Huh?”
“Would you relax? Maybe you got them from the sweatpants I stole from the gym.”
The New York Knicks had taken over the school’s gym, the least used gym ever constructed on American soil, SUNY Purchase being an arts school. Other than the couple hours a week that the acting department practiced fencing there it was totally deserted. So the New York Knicks took it over and now the parking lot was full of BMWs and Cadillacs and seven-foot-tall men roamed the halls of the gym, asking me if I’d seen their massage therapist. Their lackey would come by “the cage” and dump their gargantuan sweats in the laundry machines behind my desk. The cage was the name of the check-in area where I worked, which housed fencing swords and face nets and squash rackets. I checked IDs and handed out towels to sweaty actors who wrapped them around their necks like Kate Hepburn walking the Connecticut shore in 1942. Mostly I sat at the desk and read because hardly anyone ever came through.
One day I stuffed some of the Knicks sweatpants into my backpack. It wasn’t like their financial officer was going to shut down the franchise because of a bloated sweatpants budget. When I got them back to my dorm I realized I’m five-seven. These sweats, while seriously thick and plush and a nice classic navy color, were about a foot too long. You couldn’t roll them up, either, because the cuff was so thick your ankles looked like you had elephantiasis. I cut them and made shorts out of them.
The other problem with the stolen sweats was that they didn’t say “New York Knicks” on them anywhere, so I’d trot them out expecting enormous recognition for my winning shorts but to other people they just looked like navy cutoff sweatpant shorts.
“Aren’t these shorts cool?” I’d say to Emma, my friend from the city.
“They all right. They’re not all that if that’s what you’re askin’.”
“They’re New York Knicks sweats.”
Emma looked me up and down. “They don’t say New York Knicks.”
“That’s because these are their private sweats. You know, like their private collection. These are theirs, not that massmarketed shit for fans. You can’t buy these.”
“So where’d you get ’em?”
“I stole them.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. From the gym. From the Knicks.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. They wear these. They rehearse in these.”
“Practice. The Knicks don’t rehearse. Shit.”
So I had to have this long, tiring conversation before I’d get the recognition I deserved. It just wasn’t worth the trouble. At an arts school, no one’s impressed with the Knicks. If they had been sweats that Kevin Kline rehearsed in while doing Shakespeare in the Park with Meryl Streep, somebody might have given a fuck.
“I don’t think I got crabs from Patrick Ewing,” Martin said. “I only wore those once and then I waxed my car with them. They were too goddamn big.”
By the time I deduced that I got the crabs from borrowing a nightgown over Thanksgiving break from one of my best friends from high school, Maggie, a real traditional Westchester slut, I was no longer concerned with proving my fidelity to Martin. Martin had become a man who commented on my “fr
eshman fifteen” and forced me to go jogging around campus with him, a man who knew I had become bored by him, a man who was obsessed with Tiffany’s. More than any young marriage-crazed woman from New Jersey, that man loved that little robin’s-egg-blue box. He was always giving me necklaces and bracelets from there. He even gave my three sisters Elsa Peretti necklaces at Christmas. Martin could be too traditional. Like when I peed in my bed when he slept over one night after a big night of drinking he acted like an outraged English butler he was so crispy about it. My feeling was I’m sorry if my urinating in the bed, my bed by the way not your bed, interferes with some kind of image you have of me, but just because you give me things from Tiffany’s doesn’t mean I’m the girl in the Tiffany’s ad in the New York Times Magazine and/or it doesn’t mean the girl in the Tiffany’s ad doesn’t pee in the bed when she drinks too much. Why don’cha put a lid on it and help me flip this mattress over so we can go back to getting a little shut-eye?
After three days of lathering each other up angrily with antilouse shampoo we got from the campus nurse, I broke it off with Martin and was catching a train into the city for Christmas break. As I waited for my cab to the White Plains train station, he said, “I just don’t think this is over,” meaning us. I said I was pretty sure it was and tossed my little plastic lice comb into the garbage, and scratched my crotch one last time.
“Merry Christmas, Martin.”
I woke up one morning about three days into Christmas break and got up and made coffee. Julia continued to snooze on the pull-out we were sharing. If there was one person you didn’t want on your pull-out it was Julia; she might not ever get up and she needed only a few short hours to transform any room into a Hooverville.
I sat at a table near the pull-out with my coffee, absentmindedly itching my cooch, wondering how she passed anything at school. “Jules, are you ever getting up?”
She rolled over and looked at me. “Is something up your heinie?”
“No. I just thought we should get up. It’s eleven-thirty. Mom hates to come out and have there be pillows and bedding everywhere at noon.”
“Well, then she shouldn’t have gotten a one-bedroom.” Julia stayed at Mom’s on breaks even though she had a dorm room on University Place.
She rolled away from me and pulled the covers over her head. Getting up for another cup of coffee, I saw Julia’s hand come up out of the covers and rake her curly blond head a few times hard. Then she got off the pull-out and started toward the bathroom, all the way scratching at her crotch. In the kitchen I put my cup on the counter and froze. I realized that not only did I still have the dreaded pubic vermin but now my sister might have them as well. I scratched my crotch and tried to think. I heard the clinking sound of the chain on my mother’s bedside lamp hitting the porcelain base. She’d be lighting a cigarette momentarily and groping for her glasses. Mom, now that she lived alone, could indulge her most Plathian tendencies. Rather than waking up and opening the blinds in her bedroom, she now woke up and turned on lights. It seemed like the most hopeless thing to me. Day was something to get through, a stepping-stone to night, to drunkenness, sleep, and when she had had enough, death.
MY MOTHER HAD TIMED leaving my father so I could almost hear the curtain coming down on their marriage as I walked off the stage of the Bronxville High School auditorium with my temporary dummy diploma. When she moved from Bronxville into Manhattan after the divorce, she rented a two-bedroom for five women, which seemed rather shortsighted. We had just come from a five-bedroom house, so we knew something was up. Then Mom moved to a one-bedroom and shortsighted met statement.
The place was on Eighty-seventh Street, a half a block from the mayor’s mansion in Yorkville. It was called Garson Towers. Residential buildings with names, unless you were talking about the Ansonia or the Apthorp or somewhere swanky, were depressing to me. They seemed like the kinds of places lonely, defenseless elderly people got murdered. My mother’s maiden name was Gissy, and seeing that she seemed to be preparing to audition for any number of Tennessee Williams plays, retelling stories of her privileged youth over and over, we began calling the building “Gissy Towers.” If you were going to spend some people’s entire childhoods getting tanked on Dewar’s talking about your coming-out party at the Fleur-de-Lis Ball and crying about how Daddy never said he loved you, well, you were in for some shit, in our opinion. But in fact a Williams character like Blanche DuBois was a sharpeyed futurist, a trailblazing entrepreneur, she was Buckminster Fuller; Blanche DuBois was Steve Jobs compared to my mother.
Mom’s bedroom door opened and the smell of smoke wafted into the living room, preceding her like applause for an old theater broad’s entrance.
She entered the kitchen in some ridiculous silken Natori number, a robe that screamed, “I’m sleeping with my divorce lawyer,” to conjure up a cup of coffee for herself. I straightened myself to make my thoughts disappear, to make my crabaddled mind impossible to read.
“Morning,” I said. “I made coffee.”
“Morning, dolly. Did you use the Illy?” she said, passing me with her cigarette. My mother was like a bat with her lit cigarettes. She came impossibly close to you, you were convinced you were going to have to drop and roll any second, but somehow she always just missed you. I resisted the impulse to say anything about her cigarette, as we lived in a world, since selling our house, that was no longer ours but hers.
“Yeah, I did. It’s delish.”
“It’s Italian.”
Mom glided over and sat at the table. “Where’s Julia?”
“In the bathroom,” I said, sipping guiltily.
“What are you girls up to today?”
“Christmas shopping I guess.”
“I’m going out with Mr. Sully tonight so you girls will have to get some dinner for yourselves.” Her divorce lawyer who was taking her for a huge ride, the kind of ride where someone leads you to believe they will leave their wife for you when the time is right, was Mr. Sully. “I’ll leave you some money. You can get a pizza or go to Melon’s and get a burger if you want.”
Julia came out of the bathroom.
“Good morning, Julia,” Mom said. With her deep voice she might have been Lauren Bacall greeting Bogie after a wild night.
“Hunfh shew naggeh,” Julia mumbled, and kept going.
“Honestly,” Mom said, widening her eyes.
Chitchat had never been Julia’s bag.
Doris was forty-four. This was when forty-four was forty-four, before it was the new thirty-four and sixty-four was the new fifty-four and eighty-four was the new seventy-four and twenty-four was the new fourteen, but even so, she looked fantastic, had some dough in the bank after selling the house, and she might have gone off and done all kinds of things: opened a bike shop in Costa Rica, started an adoption agency for American gay men in places where communism has fallen, waited tables in a pub in Britain’s seaside town of Cornwall. But this was back when forty-four was the age when women aged, fell apart—although according to my father, the “decline,” as he called it, actually started when she was a straight-A student at Manhattanville College embarking on her maiden breakdown, an event that was interrupted when she married and had four kids.
My mother’s rehab years began when her four daughters went off to college. It was as if rehabs were her way of going back to college with all of us kids, eating bad food and being homesick. This seemed like a misguided attempt at youth, getting out of the house, enriching the mind. Had my mother not heard of postgraduate work?
I had gone to the pharmacy the day I got in from Purchase, and charged a couple bottles of RID to Mom’s account, but the apartment was so small there never seemed to be a good time to exterminate myself. My plan was to chemical myself silly at night when everybody had gone to bed. Problem was, I kept falling asleep before Mom and Julia. To stay up past Julia one really had to have street drugs of some kind.
I began monitoring Julia for signs of crab life. I told myself the initial itching I witn
essed during my first seven cups of coffee might have been nothing more than the traditional crotch-scratching one does as a guest in another’s home while people are having breakfast. I was disabused of this notion when I caught sight of Julia scratching herself in the elevator and then later while we were Christmas shopping at Orva on Eighty-sixth Street. The girl had crabs. I had given crabs to my sister. What would Emily Post say? My mind raced to the inevitable thought: Had I also given crabs to my mother? While I shivered at this concept I did get a kick realizing that if I had given them to my mother I had probably also given them to her sleazy cheat-face divorce attorney, which then led me to realize that I had in all likelihood given crabs to Phil’s innocent benefit-throwing wife and mother of six who was probably pawing her crotch on a ski lift in Vail while Julia and I shopped for Christmas presents. I was trying not to scratch in front of Julia. If she had gotten them I didn’t want her to know from whom.
“I’m going home to take a shower. I’m totally grimy and . . . itchy,” she said.
After Mom split that night, Julia and I ordered in burritos and called VideoRoom, Mom’s video place on Third Avenue that delivered as well as picked up your videos. Despite this free service, we never managed to get a single video back on time. Delivery was an important feature of our new postsuburban lives. Delivery and twenty-four-hour Korean delis. We thought these urban amenities were symbols of Manhattan, they represented the new “Mom” and, by default, the new “us.” We were city people now, kids of divorce, and as such we didn’t cook, we ordered in or went out. When the VideoRoom guy buzzed I begged Julia to get the door because they always sent this guy from Purchase who worked there on school breaks who had a crush on me, but Julia had a sort of no-bullshitting policy that forbade her to fake anything. She thought you should just be completely forthright all the time. Anything else was phony.
The burritos were good. We had seen the movie before, the butter-meets-girl romantic comedy Last Tango in Paris, and it held up as a pleasant way to pass an evening. While we were eating and watching the movie I periodically asked Julia to pass the butter. She fell for it the first time.