by Jeanne Darst
In Last Tango in Paris, Marlon Brando forbids his young French lover to tell him her name, not her last name, like in an AA kind of way, but her first name. The thing is a steamfest, not the kind of movie best savored with your sullen, monosyllabic sister. I polished off my burrito, drained my Corona with lime, fluffed my pillow against the bed, itched my rowdy pubes as discreetly as I could manage with Julia sitting a foot away from me in a pastel chintz chair that looked like Baskin-Robbins had gotten into the upholstery business, and settled in for some fat-old-man-fucking-hot-young-girl fuckfest. At one point, the French girl—NO CHARACTER NAMES!—is stroking Brando’s chest as he pretends to be the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” She says, “Oh, what a lot of fur you have,” and he replies, “The better for you to hide your crabs in.” I coughed loudly as soon as I heard this, hoping a loud, distracting sound going in Julia’s earlobes would prevent the word “crabs” from entering her ear. Julia itched her crotch, but there was something new in her itching, a sense of her hand being connected to her brain. I tried to douse this hand-mind connection and quick by lighting one of Mom’s True Blues and blowing smoke around madly. Julia looked right at me.
“What the fuck—”
“What-what, what the fuck?”
“You gave me crabs.”
Julia had been developing some kind of paranoid personality disorder over the last few years, but mathematically paranoiacs will hit the truth every few hundred accusations.
“I gave you what?”
“I have been trying to figure out how I got these things, but I should have known, it’s you, isn’t it?”
“Look, Jules, I like you, but we never fucked.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Julia got up and went into the bathroom. The bathroom light flicked on and she was cursing, stream-of-consciousness style.
I puffed on my True Blue and knew that Christmas was ruined, by someone other than my mother for a change. There was little point in trying to calm Julia once she had gone bananas. I blew a couple smoke rings and thought about how there wasn’t all that much smoking in Tango for a film shot in Paris. I thought the scene in the bathroom where he says he wants her to fuck a pig and then have the pig vomit in her face and her eat it might be coming up. “You’re going to miss the part with the ‘dying farts of the pig,’ Jules. Julia!” I yelled.
“Get in here!” she screamed from the bathroom. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “Bugs! Look at them! Come here, Jeanne.”
I took a drag of my cigarette and went into the bathroom. I tossed my cigarette in the toilet. She had placed a pube on the edge of the sink.
“Look at it.” She yanked our mother’s magnifying mirror, which was attached to the wall, downward and held it over the pube. “Look at it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Pubic louse. Real nasty fuckers.”
“You’re a real dick, Jeanne.”
“I thought I had gotten rid of them. I used RID like seven times before I left Purchase.”
“I had sex with Mark last night, Jeanne. I probably gave him these things.”
“I know. And tonight he’s probably giving them to someone else. I’m sorry, Jules. I gave them to Martin, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Who’d you get them from?”
“Maggie. She’s kind of the root carrier here, the Typhoid Mary of crabs.”
I busted out my RID like champagne on a ski trip and we lathered ourselves up. I checked the clock in the kitchen to time ten minutes. I went back to Mom’s bedroom where Julia stood in a gray T-shirt with her crotch all soapy with chemicals. When I walked in she angrily lit one of Mom’s cigarettes and smoked without acknowledging me. For the next ten minutes we stood, half naked, in Mom’s bedroom, finally getting to the scene where the really very lovely French girl sticks two fingers up Brando’s ass, an ass I couldn’t help feeling might accommodate more than just two digits, while she says she will fuck pigs for him and smell their pig farts. I finally understood what all the film majors at Purchase meant when they touted European filmmakers higher aesthetic and artistic sensibility. At nine forty-four I announced our ten minutes were up. The woman I had spoken with earlier at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had said that unhatched eggs can hatch seven to ten days after the actual crab is killed. I probably needed to do the RID treatment again, since the whole life cycle had started over now that Julia had them. I had now ruined two relationships on account of these wingless bloodsuckers. As I threw the towel in the hamper I realized it was not one of my towels from school, it was one of my mother’s and I realized I had used it the day before as well. Big whoops. I grabbed all the towels and threw them in the hamper, vowing to get up early the next day and do laundry.
I didn’t even want to think about what Mom would say if she got wind of this whole crab thing, not to mention if we actually gave them to her. I could practically hear her calling Aunt Carol in St. Louis at two in the morning: she would start off crying about the divorce she wanted, which was now a reality. My mom dumped my dad and then wanted people to feel sorry for her. A look-what-I’ve-done-to-me kind of logic that few people appreciated. Then she’d move on to how her sister Ruth was mean to her on the horse circuit, how there was never enough money, how she was no longer twenty-one, how no one helped her with the housework, how she had had to listen to my father talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald for twenty years. “And now the girls have given me crabs, Carol. I mean, honestly.”
And then I overslept the next morning and forgot about the towels. I rushed around finishing my Christmas shopping and then it was time to go out for Christmas Eve dinner, which was our first holiday dinner at a restaurant, with Kitty and a friend of my mother’s from Lenox Hill detox, an idea everyone thought was depressing except my mother. Katharine and Eleanor, who were living close by on the Upper East Side since graduating from college, were in the apartment when I got back.
“Why are we going to some dumb restaurant on Christmas Eve?” Katharine asked as Mom strolled around her bedroom in her black stockings, black bra and heels, smoking.
“Dumb? Café des Artistes is hardly dumb. Wait until you see the murals of nymphs on the walls. And the food is fabulous. It’s very elegant, Katharine. We’re hardly roughing it tonight.”
“But we always open up one present on Christmas Eve, after dinner.”
“Well, then, Kate, we can open one present at the restaurant.”
“What if someone gives you something embarrassing, like a big dildo?”
“I am just trying to have a nice Christmas here, girls.”
Once Mom said these words, anything could happen.
I stared at the murals at Café des Artistes through dinner. Since when does my mother have a thing for nymphs? Suddenly our family can’t live without nymphs? Our father was probably having a burger alone at the Corner Bistro, talking up some bewildered Danish thirtyish nanny, most likely with a fair degree of success, and our mother’s fantastic bombalooed cuisine was now being prepared by some coke-addled’80s power chef. I drank red wine and scratched my pooter under the table. Why I was still itching after doing so many rounds of RID with Martin and then again with Julia was unclear. Maggie was an awfully big slut—perhaps she had given me the super-slut kind of crabs?
Back at Gissy Towers, Mom headed into her bedroom where she made a few failed attempts to reach Phil Sully at home. I hated Phil Sully—he had dopey ’50s-looking black hair that looked greased down, like Jim Lehrer. And he was boring like Jim Lehrer, but he wasn’t benevolent and kind like Jim Lehrer; he was underhanded and two-timing, a cheat and a fucker. Maybe that is what Jim Lehrer is like, too, but I just don’t get that feeling. Mom was sobbing in her bedroom, and you could hear her flipping pages in her address book, looking for someone to call in St. Louis, where it was an hour earlier, to cry to about her horrible life. I was sorry she didn’t manage to get Phil Sully on the horn.
“I’m itching like crazy,” Julia barked, pawing at the crotch of h
er charcoal wool skirt.
I started taking the pillows off the pull-out couch. “Yeah, well, maybe that stuff wasn’t fresh. That pharmacy’s kind of for old people. They probably don’t get crabs too much so maybe the medicine was expired.”
“We’ll sleep on the floor tonight.” She lit a cigarette as if she had just come up with a diabolical plan that couldn’t be more airtight. She sat in the big pastel striped chair smoking. Julia was a person who fanned her own cigarette, as if someone else’s smoking were bothering her. She alternately puffed and fanned in an exasperated manner.
“Jesus Christ, awful,” she said. I watched her nonsmoker and smoker battle it out for a minute and wondered whether any Darst had been diagnosed as having a split personality.
“What—” I said, reaching for Mom’s cigarettes on the coffee table. True Blue was a smoke you endured only if you were out of cigs or too drunk to care. I tore the plastic cylindrical filter off, making it a little less like smoking some old lady’s vagina. “—are you talking about?” I blew a couple of smoke rings, a skill I wished at that moment were somehow in demand, as I didn’t know what else I was good at or would do once college was over.
“We’ve still got these things, Jeanne. Don’t you see that sleeping on the pull-out—that’s just gonna keep infestating the pull-out. And then what the fuck are we gonna do?” I considered the word “infestating.” It didn’t sound right. But you couldn’t bring these matters up with Julia. She was too volatile for grammar talk. She’d get up and do something bonkers, like grab scissors and give you bangs in the back of your head. “We’ll get something stronger tomorrow but until then, we’re not infestating the pull-out.”
“Okay, fine.” I put out my cigarette. There was a plushy carpet to sleep on, so it could have been worse. I got the pillows, blankets and comforters out of the hall closet, resigned to slave mode for the remainder of the break. We got in our little homemade beds on the floor and said nothing. Mom’s room was now quiet as well. All through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a dual-diagnosis depressive-alcoholic. But nighttime was the busy time for the buggers living in my crotch.
The next morning Mom came out and found us in two rectangular piles on her living room floor.
“What are you girls doing?” She stood over me, a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other.
“Trying to sleep,” Julia snapped from under the covers.
I rustled my feet out from under the little blanket trap they were in.
“I can see that. Why are you on the floor? Did you girls break my pull-out? That’s a very expensive couch I’ll have you know.”
“Jeanne has crabs. And she gave them to me,” came from under Julia’s pile across the room.
“What?” Mom said, pulling at her cigarette.
“Nothing. Nothing. She’s kidding.” I threw one of my heels at Julia.
“What did she say?” Mom asked.
“Nothing. She’s kidding around.”
“So why are you girls on the floor? I thought you said the pull-out was very comfortable.”
“It is. We just were too drunk to pull it out last night.”
“No we weren’t.” Julia pushed the blankets off herself abruptly and sat up. “Jeanne got crabs and gave them to me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jeanne. You’ve got lice?”
“Yeah, but they’re in our pubes,” Julia said.
“This is what you get for going to a state school, Jeanne. Why you couldn’t get in somewhere decent I’ll never understand. You’re so bright.”
“Mom, I didn’t get them at Purchase. Maggie gave them to me over Thanksgiving.”
“Honestly,” Mom said, going to the kitchen. I glared at Julia.
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, thank you. Fucking carrier.”
Doris came back into the room. “Now, who wants some coffee? It’s Gevalia. It’s Swiss.”
I got up, taking my pile of blankets in my arms, and headed for the bathroom. I stopped at the hall closet and opened the door. Julia was behind me.
“What are you doing? Please tell me you’re not putting those back in there! We’ve got to quarantine all bedding and blankets. Go get some garbage bags from the kitchen,” she ordered. We bagged up all our bedding from the previous night and shoved it into the closet, took showers and reconvened in the living room.
Doris was doing the New York Times crossword when we came back in and sat with our coffees. I don’t know why I expected to smell something coming out of the kitchen—I was having a Pavlovian moment, I guess—but I did. Bacon maybe, or those baked eggs in the ramekins with the olive oil and rosemary and oregano and Parmesan cheese on top she used to make. The lack of bedrooms was new, but the complete absence of food I had seen before. She stopped cooking for Dad before she left him and now there wasn’t even any food in the house ever. Mom was trying to starve us out of her life.
“Merry Christmas, dollies.”
“Oh shit, it’s Christmas,” I said to Julia, “the pharmacy’s not going to be open and I doubt any others will be open, either.”
“For what?” Mom said, eyes down on her crossword.
“Crab stuff,” Julia said loudly, knowing I hated explicitness.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. That again?”
“I used the medicine like six times now,” I said, defending myself.
“Six times? Well, then you’re fine.”
“So why are we still itching?” Julia sipped her coffee. “Anybody want to explain that?” my sister said, seeming to suggest that we had been the victims of foul play.
“You’ll have to give the medicine a chance. They’re probably in their death throes. I honestly don’t want to hear about it again. Can’t we just have a nice Christmas?”
Mom’s eyes welled up underneath her enormous Yves Saint Laurent wraparound tortoiseshell glasses, which might have doubled as welding goggles in a woodshop on the Côte d’Azur.
“Yes, yes,” I said, hoping to cut her off before she went too far into Divorced Ladyville.
“Is there a Rite Aid on Fourteenth Street?” Julia said.
“No one is going down to Fourteenth Street today. I mean it. I can’t take all this silliness. I really can’t, girls. Don’t push me because I am about ready to have a breakdown here.” Mom looked up from her crossword and wiped a tear from under her glasses. Weepylady was back.
“Okay, okay, Mom—easy, champ.” I got up and went to her bony shoulders and began to rub them.
“Now, when does school start up again for you girls?”
That night we opened up our presents at Gissy Towers. One by one Eleanor, Katharine, Julia and I unwrapped four black leather miniskirts from Ann Taylor.
“Aren’t they adorable?” Mom said. She loved giving presents as much as she liked getting them, no matter how big or small, silly or serious. Besides bulk, her other specialty was presents that only she found funny; the year before, we had all gotten socks that had rhinestones where your toenails would go. (“Can you stand it? I think they’re a riot!”)
It was unclear whether Mom actually imagined a scene wherein all four of us would wear the black leather miniskirts at the same time, like a Robert Palmer video starring her DNA, but if there was one thing you didn’t do if you didn’t want Mom to turn into Princess Runningwater before your eyes, it was show anything less than hysterical gratitude over gifts.
The day after Christmas, Julia and I went to the drugstore on the corner of Eighty-sixth and York where Mom had an account and charged some more crab medicine. We also got some thick, black Hefty garbage bags that Julia decided would be good for storing our clothes in when they came back from the laundry place. Mom asked why no one was wearing their new black leather miniskirts.
“We can’t risk it, Mom. The adult crabs are now probably dead, after the last treatment, but the eggs, the larvae, can hatch up to seven days after the actual crabs are dead, so it’s really too risky,” I said.
; “And dry-cleaning leather? Forget it. That’d be like fourteen bucks,” Julia added, taking off the big lid of the giant pasta pot on the stove to see if the water was boiling. Mom made her way into the small kitchen, scooching by Julia and reaching for the French press near the stove.
“Well, I was going to make some coffee in the French press. It’s the absolute best way to make coffee. Who’d like some?”
Julia was focused on slowly lowering hairbrushes like lobsters into a boiling cauldron. There were thin plastic round hairbrushes, like rolling pins with bristles, a wooden flat brush, a tortoiseshell comb and an oval brush. Then Julia began to lower a bunch of silver antique hairbrushes and combs on the end of a slotted spoon into the water. Mom slammed down the half-and-half and brought the tortoiseshell welding goggles that hung around her neck up to her eyes.
“What in God’s name are you doing? Those are antique sterling-silver brushes of my mother’s! Are you insane?”
“We’ve been way too lax,” Julia said, with no emotion.
“Take those out of there right now. I mean it, Julia. I have had it with this nonsense. You girls have been in this apartment for a week and you’re making me nuts. You haven’t even used those brushes. They’ve been sitting on my dresser for forty-five years.”
Julia began taking the silver brushes off the spoon.
“Get some plan together for today. Go to the Met or the Whitney. Something. I mean it. I am at my wit’s end here.”
Mom took her coffee and flew out of the kitchen.
Julia said we were “in the final phase,” and we needed one last push to get these things out of our lives forever. We decided to head down to Century 21 and bought some cheapo sheets and blankets we could throw out rather than have to schlep more laundry to the Chinese laundry place. As for our other clothes, we changed Laundromats, since the water obviously wasn’t hot enough at the old place to kill these things, bringing bags of clothes that had been washed thirty-one times in seven days to another place seven blocks down York Avenue.