“Mom, no. We’re not calling the police.”
“Can’t we call the police . . . just a little bit?”
“Absolutely not. There is no Special Cum Division.”
She sizes up the distance between herself and the phone and then somersaults across the bed. It’s a nimble move, the move of a burglar on her way to steal a Pollock from MoMA. If the police won’t help her, she’s going to take matters into her own hands. She rises out of the somersault with catlike grace, snatches up the phone, and starts to dial the front desk, but I see where this is going and wrestle it bodily away from her. I was once forced to switch hotel rooms at midnight because she saw a pube on the bathroom floor, and I swore to myself I would never let that happen again. (“Pubes aren’t contagious,” I told her. “Then why do we all have them?” she retorted.) I slam the phone back down and we stand staring at each other, panting.
Craftily, she decides to switch tactics. “Do you think I am overreacting?”
I consider my answer carefully. My mother’s reactions are very often indistinguishable from demonic possession, but it isn’t always wise to say so.
She presses on. “I guess a ‘fun mother’ wouldn’t care about all the cum?”
“I think a . . . fun mother . . . would care the most about it.”
Bingo. “That’s right. Because you can’t have fun if you know that somewhere in the world, someone is being disgusting.”
“Mom, it’s late. Let’s just sleep on the cum beds. Let’s just sleep on these cummy, cummy beds.”
“Tricia,” she says, “beds are supposed to be comfy, not cummy.” Oh my god, she really is my mother. There were times in the past when I had my doubts, but no longer. I have gazed into a puddle of genetic matter and seen my own DNA. We are more related than we’ve ever been; we are the Cum Queens of Hyatt Place. All opposition between us dissolves and we find ourselves in perfect cooperation. We hide the spot with a fresh hotel towel and then lie awake for the next hour making puns to each other. How did we end up here? There was a moment, when she first turned back that blanket, when we looked into each other’s eyes and a blue current crackled between us and our bodies made a sudden decision: we were going to say the word “cum” to each other. It had to be done; the story had given us no choice; there was no turning back.
“Who did it?” we wonder. She thinks it must have been a pervert who “gets off on voyeurism of porno,” but I think it was probably a businessman with a hotel fetish who shouted the word “amenities!” as he came.
“A jizzness man, you mean,” she says, and I feel like I just taught a baby how to read.
The art on the walls has become more abstract. The squares are creaming themselves, and the roses are practically giving birth. I close my eyes and see bright splotches. After a while I start to drift off, but I can feel my mother’s eyes burning a hole into my left cheek. She is awake. She will be awake forever. “Tricia,” she whispers, “I can’t fall asleep. I’m afraid to turn around and face the cum.”
The next morning she stomps down to the front desk and registers a complaint about the amount of semen in our room—the ideal amount of semen in a hotel room being none, the amount in our room qualifying as an actual wad. She has never felt more alive, you can tell. She is enjoying herself with all the immensity of a recently inseminated elephant. She inserts the phrase “COME on” into the conversation wherever possible, and when the concierge attempts to make excuses, she tells her not to give her that load. The concierge’s face is serene—so serene that I become suspicious. Perhaps she is the cummer. A concierge SOUNDS like a person who cums on beds. Maybe she got to be the concierge because she was able to cum on more beds in one night than any other employee. I believe it, actually. I have never had a real job in my life, so this scenario seems plausible to me. In my secret heart I believe this is how the president is elected.
My mother continues to talk, sounding more persuasive with every word. If Daisy’s voice was full of money, my mother’s voice is full of coupons for free appetizers. She once sent back a piece of Weight Watchers cake because it was too small, and the waitress ended up giving her three additional pieces of Weight Watchers cake to take home. If you think that defeats the whole purpose of Weight Watchers, you’re missing the point. The point is that my mom wasn’t even trying to lose weight.
“Let me get the manager,” the concierge says at last.
I’m not capable of listening to the story one more time, so I slip outside and watch the interaction through a window, concealing myself behind a large potted palm. The manager looks to be an ordinary woman, but not for long. The scene begins to unfold, and it’s more dramatic than even I expected. My mother is starring in a one-woman play called Biohazard and the critics are loving it. Unable to capture the full feeling of the experience with words, she resorts to interpretive dance, throwing back her head, making jackoff gestures, leaping back in horror, and finally shaking both fists at God. At one point she appears to yelp, like a guard dog who has been trained to bark whenever cum gets near it. The manager watches in a trance. She’s completely caught up in the drama. She needs to know what happened next. What happened next is that your hotel ejaculated on my mother—at least as far as she’s concerned. An open mouth, a shuffling of papers, a tapping of keys! Hotel managers are geniuses at accommodating my mother without ever admitting that her wild-eyed pubic speculations might be true. Now the manager is taking my mother’s hand and my mother is squeezing back gratefully, as if to say that she might recover someday with the help of the purest, most asexual angels, but that day will be a long time coming. She crushes a Kleenex against her face, as if to say that she can never wipe away what she saw.
My mother walks through the sliding doors triumphant, and informs me that we have been awarded a staggering ten thousand Hyatt points. If you’re not familiar with the Hyatt point system, that’s like . . . the most you can get. She believes this is in recognition of our trauma, but I think it probably has more to do with the fact that she was flashing the manager her Let’s Call the Police Look the whole time. Either way it means we get to stay in the hotel again the next night, except this time it’s free. Success. We join hands and set forth into the morning, united by that human glue which cannot be dissolved.
10
SWIMMING HOLE
After two glorious nights in the old city, which I spend replenishing my dangerously low lard levels and remembering what it’s like to wear ho clothes, we return to the welcome news that Jason has been offered a job at the local paper in Shawnee, a barren suburb just across the state line. The news in Shawnee is a bit sideways, as it is in all the rest of Kansas. During his first few weeks, he writes a story about a patricide in a cornfield, interviews the owner of a “gun store for women,” and profiles a man who keeps nine thousand pounds of bees as a memoriam to his dead father. He takes it all in stride. “At this point,” he tells me, “I would be happy taking minutes at a cow meeting, as long as the cows didn’t talk about religion.”
The seminarian, meanwhile, has disappeared to help out at another local parish, where the goddesses of the congregation grow their hair to their waists and invite him over for hearty, home-cooked dinners on a weekly basis. One woman, he tells me in an awestruck, passionate voice, even has a fig tree in her backyard, and as far as I can tell this is not a euphemism whatsoever.
Now that he is gone and Jason is at the paper all day, I am left alone to write for the first time in months. I ought to be rejoicing, living on nothing but coffee and oranges, reveling like a madwoman in my newfound freedom and writing whole stream-of-consciousness novels on rolls of toilet paper while my hair grows progressively more deranged, but instead I find myself in a lull. Somehow I feel more alone here with my family than I ever did in our long succession of isolated apartments. Back then, it was just me with a cat on my lap, but at least the cat was like-minded. Here, I have fallen away from the world. I cannot
bring myself to call or write my friends; my situation is too strange, and conversation in this house travels right down the vents. The solitude presses in on all sides. As T. S. Eliot put it:
I should have been a big crab
pinching loneliness on its ass
under the water
I sink back against the pillows, turn on the TV, and watch an Esther Williams marathon, culminating in that film where she dresses up as a mermaid and breaks her back doing a hundred-foot dive. Nostalgia washes over me in warm, sequined waves. As a teenager, whenever I found myself alone in the house for a miraculous afternoon, I raced to the television and flipped through the channels until I found an old movie. It hardly mattered what it was—I watched the Nicholas Brothers tap-dancing up and down stairs, Marilyn Monroe stretching her bright lipsticked mouth as if she were speaking two languages at the same time, Bing Crosby with the voice that glided in lazy swooping figure eights and the barely concealed fatherly rage just underneath the blue of his eyes. I watched everything, swimming with the sensation of learning what I liked.
Then, usually just before the movie ended, my dad would come through the door, strip to his underwear, take the remote from me, and without ceremony switch the TV to something like Bag of Guts: How Much Blood Is in a Human Body? or Boom! A Toot from the Bum of the Apocalypse or Ragged Claws: Hideous Mutant Poem from the Deep.
Esther Williams hits the water, and I wince. Then, as if to distract me, a savage burst of sound comes cannonballing across the hall from the direction of my parents’ room. In the summertime, my father watches action movies, one after another, pumping his fist, hooting with overflows of masculine feeling. Above all else, he loves trilogies. There has never been a trilogy he didn’t like, and if you don’t understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about “moral choices the Transformers are forced to make.” At no point did I interrupt him to say, “But Dad, they’re cars.” This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.
I brought a box back with me from the storage locker, stacked with half a dozen filled-up notebooks. I haul it up beside me on the bed and begin flipping through them until I find an old scratched draft, the pencil gone soft and ghostly. Alice walks over to sniff it, touching her eraser-pink nose to the page. It is calling her back home, but she doesn’t understand how. I wrote it tipsily the night before we packed up and left—I remember almost nothing about it except the title.
I GUESS THE PLOTS OF MY FATHER’S FAVORITE MOVIES BASED ON THE SOUNDS COMING THROUGH THE WALLS
Two guns are in love, and they CANNOT stop shooting fucks at each other all day long.
A rapping kangaroo witnesses the brutal murder of his wife. Ever after he wanders the earth, searching for her killers and rapping brokenly about his grief.
A remake of The Ten Commandments where the lead actor is just an AK-47 wearing Moses robes. He parts the Red Sea by shooting it.
Some of the lambs are being silent . . . and some of the lambs are being so loud they are breaking the sound barrier.
Someone is trying to give Dirty Harry a bath, but he does not want it. “I SHALL . . . NOT . . . BE . . . WASHED!” bellows Dirty Harry at the top of his lungs.
Sherlock Holmes keeps having insights, in the form of huge cannonballs blowing themselves out of his face.
A lightsaber has figured out how to masturbate, and every man in the world is cheering.
Indiana Jones flips through his dad’s diary and finds a map to the clitoris. “IT’S MINE,” he yells, but will the Nazis get there first?
God is a cop with a monkey sidekick, and the monkey sidekick is mankind.
I examine the handwriting. The lines slant sharply downward, the way our floorboards used to, toward the river. I’ve always held that you get your best thinking done on the top floor, because the roof forces your head up—it’s the reason all those historical geniuses did their finest writing in towers. Still, it might have done them some good to breathe fresh air once in a while.
“SEE YOU IN HELL!” some cinematic voice screams, and a murderous splash blasts through the wall. I add another plot to the list, “Jaws has learned to crave the flesh of Jesus, and now he’ll stop at nothing for another taste,” and slam the notebook shut. “All right, I need to get outside.”
• • •
SUMMER, LIKE A GOVERNMENT, has instituted a permanent noon. The curfew calls everyone out of the house. It’s a cicada year, so when I walk through the door to get a sense of the temperature, green missiles bomb tunelessly into my face. The scream of them is shrill and fuzzed at the edges, and fills the sky with the signal of an ancient technology. It sounds like the Old Testament is yelling at me.
I turn on my heel and walk back inside. When this spell comes over the Midwest, there is only one thing to do. “Is there anyplace to go swimming around here?” I ask my mother. She’s standing at the kitchen sink rinsing a colander of blueberries, so thoroughly that the front of her shirt is soaking wet. According to her philosophy, if you do not rinse blueberries thoroughly, then you end up eating chemicals, and if you end up eating chemicals, you die twelve minutes sooner than you otherwise would have.
The outlines of a getaway begin to sketch themselves above her head. “Have you ever been to the Shut-Ins?” she asks.
Excuse me? “How rude. I very certainly have not. I have many friends, and am well-loved across America.”
“No no no,” she says, losing control of the sprayer and shooting it across the room. “Johnson’s Shut-Ins. It’s a state park, a couple hours southeast of here.”
“It sounds like a hospital. It sounds like Nature’s mental hospital.”
The sound of two ambulances having sex whirls down from the upstairs room, followed by the sound of my father’s passionate appreciation. “YEAH, BAY-BEE!” we hear him call out.
My mother looks at me with silent laughter and shrugs. “Maybe it will cure you.”
• • •
IT IS SETTLED. We make plans to spend a day at the Shut-Ins with my sister Christina, her husband, Paul, and their six children: Wolfgang, Aria, Seraphina, John Paul, Gigi, and Gabe. The babies are homeschooled, and when times were trying, they all lived with my parents too, piled together on two futons in the basement of a bygone rectory. Ever since they left, they’ve been homesick for my mother, and probably also for the stained-glass window of a hunter raising his rifle to shoot a deer in the face that featured so prominently in one of the rectory’s walls.
Certain signs set them apart. In the course of regular conversation, they sometimes burst into Latin. In regular children, this would indicate a need to call the exorcist, but in them it is just the opposite. The boys wear the sort of navy uniform pants my brothers used to wear to school, and the girls wear long skirts and veils on Sunday. This is hard to reconcile with the daisy-patterned short shorts Christina used to wear as a teenager, or the T-shirt she once smuggled home from the mall that was printed with the words PLEASE BLOW ME (on the front) and A KISS (on the back). I still have trouble parsing this. Are people blowing girls, or was that shirt meant for a dude, or what? The question was settled for good when my mother found it wadded up in a laundry basket and cut it into a hundred pieces.
The kids call my father Big and Scary. Not your typical Pop-Pop or Pappy or Gramps, but it suits him. When he enters the room, they regard him with a row of pale, solemn faces, and then he drops his jaw at them like a tall shaggy wolf and a suppressed communal giggle runs through them faster than a flick through a whip. They cannot l
augh until he gives them this signal. When the patriarch of your family is a priest, it can be difficult to tell what is church and what is not. As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it. After five minutes—I clock it—he heads upstairs again. He likes them to be there, but five minutes is his limit.
• • •
WE DRIVE UP in a caravan one Saturday morning, with my mother leading the way. The highway carries us by tame scenery for a long stretch, but after a while the vegetation ceases to comb its hair, and we find ourselves out of reach of all cell and internet service. There are no gas stations, and houses turn to prefabs and then to trailers and become fewer and farther between. When we do pass them, the yards are full of heaps of rusted parts that come to look increasingly foreign and strange, as if they were once components of dismantled time machines. At one point we pass a little dirt path called DeCuntry Road.
“Can you still see the rap van?” my mother asks, peering into the rearview. My sister and her family are supposed to be close behind, but my mother is nearly impossible to follow, so they vanish from the road every once in a while.
Jason and I twist around in our seats and keep watch through the back window. After a minute, thegrindup.com crests a hill in all its majesty, and we note the crumpled dent in the front hood where the man’s shoulder must have made contact. “Did you ever hear anything more about that guy?” I ask. The collision of the rap van with the desperate, unheeding pedestrian has been haunting me.
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