Shaken and Stirred

by Joan Opyr

  Abby stood her ground. “I thought there was. Maybe I was wrong.”

  I sighed and looked away. Cyndi Lauper danced across the television screen. Lying to my best friend was the next best thing to lying to myself. I didn’t want to do either.

  “You’re not wrong,” I said, “but we’ve got to get out of this rec room. I can’t talk about this while Cyndi screams ‘Girls just want to have fun.’”

  I couldn’t see Abby’s face in the darkness. She sat next to me on the wooden swing at the bottom of Kim’s parents’ garden. Above our heads, a cool breeze shook the needles on the pine trees. They made a whispering sound. Something scuttled through the grass a few feet away. It was after midnight. More people had arrived during the course of the evening, and we’d left them in the rec room, dancing the Time Warp to the soundtrack of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  “I’m glad you told me,” she said at last. “You know it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to hell?”

  “I don’t believe in hell. Even if I did, why would I think you’d end up there?”

  A siren sounded in the distance, a few miles from where we sat in the semi-wilderness. Probably a wreck on the Beltline. The freeway circled downtown Raleigh and separated my home and Abby’s from the rich suburbs on the outside. I could feel the hard thump of the music resonating behind the concrete wall of the rec room.

  “That’s some shitty music,” Abby said.

  “And those boys can’t dance. I know. You’re my best friend, Abby. Do you still feel . . . you know . . . comfortable around me?”

  She laughed. “Of course I do. So far, you seem to be resisting your desire to throw me down and have your wicked lesbian way with me.”

  “Abby,” I warned.

  “It was just a joke, Poppy. Lighten up. If you’re happy, then I’m happy for you.”

  The cloud that had been covering the moon blew away, and the yard was suddenly illuminated. The gray and black forms of trees and bushes took shape, and the thing that was rustling through the grass turned out to be an enormous black cat.

  “Here, kitty, kitty,” I called. The cat stared at me with its bright yellow eyes for a second or two. Then it hissed and ran beneath an azalea bush.

  “That pussy doesn’t like you,” Abby observed. We sat for a moment in silence. Then Abby began laughing. She laughed so hard that she knocked us both out of the swing. I helped her up and we sat cross-legged on the grass.

  “I suppose I’m setting myself up for a lifetime of your pathetic jokes.”

  “Of course you are,” she said. “I’m not going to stop cracking on you now. You don’t have a disability or a fatal illness. You like girls. That’ll freak some people out, but so what?”

  “How’d you get to be so enlightened?”

  “Look at me. In case you haven’t noticed, I look a little different than all your other friends. I look a little different than all of my friends. While you puzzle that one out, why don’t you tell me how you came to make this discovery about yourself?”

  At the bottom of the DiMarcos’ garden was a path leading to Shelley Lake and the Greenway Trail. “Do you want to take a walk?”

  “What, in the dark?”

  “The moon’s out.”

  “It won’t be out for long,” she said. “Look at the clouds.”

  “Would you rather go back inside and do the Time Warp?”

  She stood up. “Let’s walk. If I fall in the lake, you better jump in and save me.”

  “We’ll drown together,” I promised.

  The Hokstra Center didn’t look like an abortion clinic. It was an unassuming building on Old Wake Forest Road, nicely landscaped with flowers and juniper bushes. There were no protestors out front the day I took Kim DiMarco in to terminate her pregnancy. We were both relieved. Kim had had nightmares about running into an Operation Rescue blockade.

  “But I’ll do it,” she said. “I can’t have a baby. I can’t. Not now.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “We’ll call in advance. If there are protestors, we’ll work something out. Maybe they have a back door.”

  She didn’t say who the father was, and I didn’t ask. It might have been Jack Leinweber, or Alan, or even Nick Stybak. He’d gotten contact lenses for graduation and suddenly looked eccentrically handsome rather than hopelessly geeky. The name of the father didn’t matter. Kim was seven weeks pregnant, which put the conception date squarely in the middle of our week at Cookie’s beach house.

  Hunter and Jean dropped their bombshell on Tuesday, June 5. Hunter busted Jean out of her rehab at Hilton Head. Susan went home, I went crazy, and Kim took a midnight walk through the sand dunes with Jack. They were gone for hours. I felt responsible. I didn’t care what went on in the house after Susan left. I didn’t care if they burned it down around me. I sat on Abby’s bed and cried. It was hard not to feel as if Kim were paying the price for my inability to pull myself together.

  Under other circumstances, my mother might have insisted we all come home, or she might have come out to join us. Instead she said she was glad that I was gone. I was spared some of the worst scenes Hunter had ever staged, and also the sight of Mike Sava weeping for hours on end at our three-legged dining room table.

  The staff at the Hokstra Center were uniformly kind and soft-spoken. Kim and I had an hour-long session with a counselor before her surgery. We met in a room with dim lights and multi-colored floor pillows. The counselor asked questions about how Kim felt, what her plans for the future were, and whether or not she had anyone to take care of her when she went home. I said I’d be staying with her over the weekend, and longer, if necessary.

  The counselor went with Kim into the operating room. Kim said she held her hand and talked to her during the procedure. Afterwards, I went in and sat with her in recovery. She was reclining on what looked like a dentist’s chair. There were two other patients in the room. Both appeared to be in their twenties. One had her husband or boyfriend with her. They spoke quietly to one another, the woman crying, the husband-boyfriend making reassuring noises. The other woman was alone. She sat with a heating pad on her stomach and listened to music on a pair of headphones.

  After an hour or so, Kim was released with a list of instructions and a prescription for tetracycline. I helped her to the car. We were driving her mother’s cast-off Volvo, a pumpkin orange station wagon. They’d given it to Kim in lieu of a new car, theoretically to teach

  her the value of a dollar. Since they also gave her a four-hundreddollar-a-month allowance, she couldn’t see the point, and neither could I.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “I’m okay. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The doctor was very nice.”

  “Good.” I tried and failed to think of something comforting to say. “Good.”

  Her parents were on the first week of a six-week tour of England, Scotland, and Wales. I collected their mail from the box and put it on the kitchen table. Kim sat down in a recliner in the living room. I made iced tea, and we watched television.

  “What I feel,” she said quietly, “is relieved. Is that wrong?”

  “How you feel is how you feel. It’s not right or wrong.”

  “You got that from the counselor,” she said. “What do you really think?”

  “I think . . . that I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to have a baby right now. I don’t know if I ever want to have one.”

  “I want one,” she said. “Someday. Maybe more than one.”

  “You can have as many kids as you want, when you’re ready. And you’ll be a good parent.”

  “Better than Vince and Norma. Jesus.”

  I could offer no answer to this, so I waited. The painting over the fireplace in the DiMarco living room was an Italian seascape, a watercolor Norma had painted during a month’s stay on the Riviera. It was all in bright, primary colors, the sea, the sky, even the people basking on the shore. It was executed with some skill, but it
didn’t go with the room’s heavy, dark furniture. It was a painting for a sunny piazza, not a mock Tudor morgue. If Abby had been there, she’d have taken Kim’s hand. She’d have held her close until she felt better. It was the middle of summer, and I didn’t feel warm enough to comfort anyone. I felt cold and confused, and so I sat and silently ruminated on Norma DiMarco’s strange decorating taste.

  “I have a follow-up appointment with the counselor in two weeks,” Kim said.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “No.” She took a sip of her iced tea and adjusted the heating pad on her belly. “I think I can handle that on my own.”

  I was born in Raleigh’s old Rex Hospital in the same room where my mother had been born twenty-two years earlier. This, coupled with the fact that the Abernathys and the Bartholomews had lived in North Carolina since it was a colony, should have been enough to qualify me as a true Southern woman. But it wasn’t.

  Those eight formative years in Michigan were one strike against me. Another was my mother herself. She wasn’t antebellum; she was anti-belle. Instead of being a hard-bitten beauty full of ruthless charm and feminine wiles, she was a quiet and self-contained woman. She never flirted with any man, my father included. She wore big, thick glasses and preferred reading books to batting her eyelids, and she had no interest in hiding the fact that she was smart. I grew up believing that the Southern woman was the gold standard of femininity. She was the Coca-Cola, Q-Tip, Band-Aid original against which all others were judged. It didn’t matter if she were slinging hash or shoveling shit, the ghost of a hoop skirt hovered around her hips. Susan Sava’s ethnic makeup was just the same as my own. We were hybrids, the product of WASP mothers and Eastern European fathers, and yet she conveyed the very essence of Southern woman. She was all woman, all the time.

  My mother used to say, usually in reference to my father, that she wished there were a third sex to choose from. I wondered how she could be so blind. I was the third sex, large as life and twice as ugly, to quote Hunter C. Bartholomew.

  I pulled the waistband of my underwear down and considered my reflection in the bathroom’s full-length mirror. My hysterectomy scar was still angry and red.

  “I’m halfway to a sex change,” I said experimentally to Abby.

  “What’re you talking about?” She was tired after her visit with Vivian and aggravated with me. I was late. After my dinner with Susan, I’d spent the night in my old bedroom at Nana’s house. We’d visited Hunter in the morning, and then my mother had dropped me off at the hotel. I’d asked Abby about her visit, and she’d said “fine” in that clipped tone she usually reserved for the particularly stupid.

  “No uterus, only one ovary. If I started taking testosterone, I could be Frank Koslowski in six months’ time. For real, this time.”

  “What do you mean this time?”

  “Some kids in Michigan had started calling me Frank, just before we moved. No doubt sensing the butch-to-be.”

  “Hmm,” she said. Her hair was freshly braided. The beads on the ends were bright blue. I knew the braiding process took about six hours. Perhaps she and Vivian had spent part of the day at a salon together. That seemed odd, considering.

  “You’d need a double mastectomy,” she continued. “Not to mention chest reconstruction and a phalloplasty. It would take a hell of a lot longer than six months to make a man out of you.” She finished buttoning her blouse and tucked it into the top of her pants. The blouse was new, silk I thought, and the exact same color as the beads. If it weren’t for her expression, exasperation mingled with some emotion that I couldn’t read seething just below the surface, the overall effect would have been almost cheerful. She turned to me and sighed.

  “You’re grieving. For a lot of things. Just at the moment, we don’t have time to talk about any of them. We’re going to be late meeting Kim. She’s been at the Rathskellar—” she looked at her watch—“for the past ten minutes.”

  I pulled my pants on and slipped into my shoes. “I’m sorry I was late. We left the hospital in plenty of time. My mother just drives slowly.”

  “I’m not angry that you were late. You have to spend time with your grandfather. That’s why we’re here, or some of why we’re here. We can talk about all of this when we get back this afternoon. Maybe we could go out tonight, have a quiet dinner somewhere.”

  I grimaced.

  “Or not. Susan again?”

  “No, not Susan again. It’s Nana and my mother. We’re having dinner tonight at the Kanki.”

  Her face relaxed, and the transformation was remarkable. She did look cheerful. In fact, she looked happy. I realized suddenly that I’d been waiting for this look to reappear ever since Rosalyn died.

  “What are you grinning at?” she said.

  “Sorry, I just . . . you’re coming with us. To the Kanki. My mother specifically invited you.”

  Abby smiled. “You, me, your mother, and your grandmother. All at the same table?”

  “You know it. Unless, that is, you’ll let me sit somewhere else.”

  “Not a chance. You’ll be my garlic necklace.”

  I buckled my belt and walked through the door Abby held open for me.

  “Poppy,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was kind of on edge when you came in this morning.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You let me get away with murder. But you don’t need to. Not anymore.”

  “We do have a lot to talk about,” I said. “But first, we must dine with the lovely Kim DiMarco. Shall we walk or ride?”

  “Walk, I think. If you’re up to it.”

  “Lead on. I feel like a million bucks.”

  For the fit and healthy, it was a five-minute stroll to the Rathskellar. At our steady but relaxed pace, it took us ten.

  “Kim can order a drink,” Abby said. “Noon is not too early for Ms. DiMarco to have a cocktail.”

  “She always liked a cocktail,” I agreed. “So, for that matter, do I. About tonight, Abby. My grandmother—she has blind spots. Big, huge, honking blind spots. Some of it’s generational and some of it’s, well, I don’t make excuses. Nana was wonderful to me when I was a small child. She was my rescuer. When Lucky Eddie was a bastard to me, which was most of the time, I could always count on Nana to do or say something that let me know that I was okay, that the problem was him. She wrote me letters, she called me on the phone, she . . .”

  “You don’t need to explain or defend,” Abby said. “Your grandmother has flaws. We all do. No one is perfect.” She opened the door to the Rathskellar. “But if she pretends like she doesn’t know who the hell I am, I’m going to knock her block off.”

  Kim had three ex-husbands, not two, and no boyfriends on the horizon.

  “It’s so great to see you guys,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re here for such a sad reason, though.”

  She reached a pudgy hand across the table and patted me kindly. She’d put on about twenty pounds since high school, most of it in her breasts and hips. As far as I was concerned, it only made her more attractive. Kim DiMarco, now DiMarco-Andrews-Stewart-Cooke, had a pleasant, open face. Her bright green eyes, no longer masked by corrective lenses, were framed by long dark lashes. She’d had laser eye surgery—best four thousand dollars she’d ever spent, she said. As I watched her, I felt a familiar wave of attraction sweep up from the pit of my stomach. Kim could have seduced the chair she was sitting on. She pulsed with good humor and charm, and she interacted with everything and everyone with an animal sexuality that wasn’t so much aggressive as inevitable. I reacted to it the same way I reacted to a warm, sunny day, soaking it up and enjoying it for what it was, a gift of nature.

  “It must be hard,” she went on. “I know you and your grandfather were estranged.”

  Estranged. Were we? I’d seen him twice during the last ten years, once when I was delegated to make sure that he arrived on time and sober to my cousin Sammy’s wedding, and then again a few years later when I went with my mother and Nan
a to visit him in the nursing home. We took him out to lunch, to some barbecue place about half a mile down the road. I asked him what he wanted, and he mumbled something that my mother interpreted as fried chicken. He’d lost his false teeth, having wrapped them in a Kleenex one night and thrown them away, but that didn’t stop him from tearing into a drumstick and gnawing it down to the bone. I didn’t ask any more questions. He knew who I was—he seemed mildly pleased to see me—but the spark of personality was gone. My grandfather, the Hunter Bartholomew I’d known, had been dead for much longer than a decade. I tried and failed to pinpoint the exact moment when he’d died. He’d died drop by drop, like Chinese water torture, drowning my awareness of him as a separate, sentient human being. Now he seemed like someone I’d dreamt up.

  I made each decision about his care as it became necessary, and I had nothing but support from my mother and Nana. I was here for a reason. I was here to pull the plug. Everyone approved—Abby, the doctors, my mother, and Aunt Dot. Dot had trooped into the hospital room just a few hours ago, patted Hunter’s leg, and said, “Well, I guess it’s his time.” We were all agreed; he was going to die. If I’d said, “Now it’s time to put the pillow over his face,” I don’t think anyone would have stopped me.

  “We had a complicated relationship,” I said.

  Kim laughed. “Is there any other kind? My oldest is thirteen and precocious as hell. She’s had little boyfriends since she was in kindergarten. Now, she wants to date. I tell her she can date when she has her Ph. D. and not before.”

  The waitress came to take our order. She didn’t look old enough to drive a car, much less work in a restaurant that served alcohol. I wondered when I’d gotten old enough to notice how young other people looked.

  “The Greek burger, please. And could I have a side salad instead of fries?”

  “The same for me,” Abby said. “Only I want the fries and the salad.”