“Jackson, don’t start.”
“I haven’t started. I’ve barely started—”
“You don’t want to get Flicka overexcited.”
“I making you overexcited, Flick?”
“You stopped talking about taxes and spongers and ‘Mugs and Mooches,’” Flicka drawled. “About how the Asians are taking over the world. How ‘nobody in this country makes anything anymore that doesn’t break the first time you use it.’ How ‘we’re turning all our kids into pussies’? Then I’d get overexcited, yeah.”
The girl may have looked ten years old and sounded semi-retarded, but Flicka was a smart cookie—or “high functioning,” an expression that had always struck Jackson as insulting. It wasn’t fair, since Carol did most of the parental heavy lifting, but Flicka was always in cahoots with her father. She may have been a pale, scrawny kid with limp hair, red blotches, and—a biological network he’d never heard of before her diagnosis—an “autonomic” system on the fritz, while he was a dark, burly, half-Basque tradesman of forty-four, but their emotional default setting was identical: disgust.
“Don’t you go repeating that stuff about ‘the Asians taking over the world’ without adding that your dad said they deserve it,” Jackson chided; in the presence of anyone who could decode her slurred whine, that kind of charged racial rhetoric could get Flicka, or more to the point her father, into massive trouble. “The Chinese, the Koreans—they work hard and ignore their teachers’ sad-ass advice to wait to learn the multiplication tables until they feel like it. They’re the real Americans, like Americans used to be, and they’re colonizing all our top universities not from some patronizing helping hand of affirmative action, but from merit—”
As usual, Carol wasn’t paying the slightest attention. Fucking off at Knack, he garnered plenty of little-known information on the Web, but his wife figured she’d heard it all before, and dismissed it. Some women would be grateful for a man who brought home new, fascinating (if enraging) factoids every day, and who had an unusual, incisive point of view that made (if depressing) sense of the world. But no such luck with Carol, who would apparently have been more content with a docile drudge who credulously washed out his mayonnaise jars even though most of his “recycling” ended up in landfill, who cheerfully donated to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in defiance of the fact that the word benevolent didn’t belong within five miles of a cop, and who championed the sacrifice of nearly all his disposable income to bureaucratic shysters and incompetents as an act of civic-mindedness. In sum, she’d have preferred a husband who bought into the whole brainwashing hoax of “patriotism,” which slyly converted an arbitrary accident of birth into the kind of mindless go-team frenzy of pom-pom waving that had driven Jackson to get stoned in stairwells during pep rallies in high school.
Sure, her politics had always been wet, but otherwise Carol didn’t used to be like this. When they met she’d been doing the landscape gardening for a house where he also had a big Sheetrock job; they’d found common cause in the owner’s being an asshole, and their both being underlings had put them on the same level. So it hadn’t been a factor then that, despite the just-out-of-college scut work, she turned out to have a degree in horticulture from Penn State, or that her father (who always thought his daughter had married beneath herself) wasn’t any old seat-of-the-pants “handyman” but a property developer. Back on that job, Jackson had been drawn to a pretty woman who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, and who hefted her own thirty-pound bags of peat. But most of all he’d liked that she could spar. She disagreed with him on everything, but had seemed to enjoy disagreeing with him, and over beers after work they’d really got into it. Nowadays it was as if she’d summarily won already so why bother, which was a puzzle, since Jackson couldn’t remember losing a single argument.
And she never used to exude this killjoy seriousness. She’d been a hoot before, or she’d at least laughed at his jokes, which gave him an even better feeling than laughing at hers. He put it down to Flicka. The responsibility, it changed you. One of the reasons that Carol hardly drank anymore: at any given time their daughter’s life might depend on her mother’s mind being sharp. It was like being a doctor yourself but without the golf. You were always on call.
So Jackson returned to the subject that at least seemed to engage his wife. “You don’t understand why it’s so important to me that Shep follows through with his exit from this travesty of ‘freedom.’ But let’s turn it around. Why is it so important to you that he doesn’t?”
“I didn’t say it was ‘important’ to me,” said Carol. “I said he’s a kind, considerate person who would never leave his family in the lurch.”
Jackson slammed his boot back down on the blue parquet of their Forbo Marmoleum (and who had helped him to install it? Shep Knacker). “You just can’t stand the idea that somebody might get out! That somebody might not trudge through their life like an automaton and march in lockstep to the grave! That there might be such a thing as a real man. With courage! With imagination! With volition!”
“So you want to pick a fight? Great, that’s a surefire, hundred-percent-guaranteed route to upsetting your daughter. But go ahead, make her tense,” Carol murmured temperately, with that calmness she had that bordered on insanity. “You’re not the one who has to shove the diazepam up her anus because she can’t keep down the oral kind.”
At the mention of pharmaceuticals, on cue Heather flounced into the kitchen and demanded, “Isn’t it time for my cortomalaphrine?” Jackson had no idea; he could never remember if they were pretending she had to take it before or after meals.
“Heather, I’ve got to get this dinner ready because we’re having a guest, who could be here any minute, so why don’t you take them when Flicka grinds her meds after we eat.”
“But I’m starting to feel funny,” Heather objected, introducing a slight weave to her stance. “Dizzy and prickly and sweaty and stuff. I can’t concentrate or anything.”
“Oh, all right then; pour yourself a glass of milk.” Carol unlocked the high cabinet; keeping sugar pills under lock and key was obviously gratuitous, but part of the theater. So was “cortomalaphrine,” a name they’d effortlessly made up after years of the Catapres, clonazepam, diazepam, Florinef, Ritalin, ProAmatine, Depakote, Lamictal, and Nexium that filled out Flicka’s pill chart like nonsense rhymes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Cortomalaphrine” and its recommended dosage were printed on formal Rx labels. Jackson had been dumbfounded to learn that pharmacists keep sugar-paste placebos as part of their standard stock, so presumably it wasn’t only Heather who was scarfing down little brown vials of Good & Plentys at ten bucks a pop.
As Carol shook out three capsules, Jackson looked away. He didn’t believe in this crap. Oh, he took Carol’s point that Heather always had to assume a backseat to her sister’s ceaseless medical crises. But if Heather needed more attention, a fake prescription wasn’t the answer. She should be taught to treasure her good health, to be grateful for it. Sure, back when Carol was pregnant with Flicka the labs didn’t have a test for familial dysautonomia, and once they were told that the baby was fine they’d relaxed. (Ha ha, big surprise in the offing. When their pediatrician finally stopped hiding behind his lame nineteenth-century diagnosis of “failure to thrive” and identified why their newborn couldn’t suckle, was losing weight, and puked all day, that false reassurance from the first trimester made the news much harder to take.) But Jesus, by Carol’s second pregnancy a test had just been developed, and they already knew the chances of another FD kid were one-in-four; getting the results of the amnio, they’d been nervous to the point of stroke. When the obstetrician beamed a big smile and gave them the all-clear, Heather’s mother-to-be was so relieved she cried. Did Heather have any idea that if her fetus, too, had carried the two copies of the FD gene she seemed so foolishly to envy she wouldn’t be here? Well, no, you didn’t tell children that they had ever been an inch away from an abortion.
And you didn’t let your older kid know that, either, since the obvious implication was that if they’d known they’d have marked Flicka “Return to Sender,” too. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that they would have, or should have, but he’d wondered about it. During some of the worst of it—once the corrective surgery for scoliosis had barely healed, they then had to break it to her that it was time for a “Nissen fundoplication” to cure her chronic acid reflux—he’d suspected that Flicka was angry not just in that why-me way, but angry at her parents in particular, who made her be here. Just be here at all.
However much it cost her, he’d assured Flicka many times—and thanks to her very refusal to embrace that hackneyed angel-of-innocence shtick, which would have bored her father senseless—that she really did brighten their lives. It was his fault that she was a brat—a caustic brat, an entertaining brat, but still a brat. Yet how could you not spoil the girl, at least a little? As hard as he tried not to see it, FD was a degenerative condition, and Flicka was duly deteriorating. She used to be so cute. If she was still cute to her father, he sometimes recognized that her chin had started to round upward and jut forward like Popeye’s, lending her face a permanent pugnacity. Her smashed-looking nose was growing in the opposite direction, its tip rounding downward and curving inward, as if the nose and chin were trying to touch each other. Her mouth had grown disproportionately wide, her eyes had migrated too far apart, and as the chin grew up and out she had started resting her front teeth on the outside of her lower lip. He wasn’t concerned about her having grown less fetching; he was concerned that these were outward manifestations of something much more dire happening that you couldn’t see, something he still didn’t quite understand, although it wouldn’t matter if he did.
He’d started out thinking about Heather and then ended up thinking about Flicka again, so maybe Carol was right about Heather’s feeling neglected. A few sugar pills were probably harmless enough, and she got to name-drop to her friends about taking “cortomalaphrine.” Most of the kids at Heather’s primary school were drugged to the eyeballs, and apparently a diagnosis was her generation’s must-have, the equivalent of fringed suede jackets in the sixties. But what really floored him about this placebo business was that as soon as she started popping those pills Heather, already on the stocky side, had started to put on weight. It wasn’t the pills themselves, which couldn’t have been more than five calories apiece; it was pure suggestion. All her classmates on antipsychotics and antidepressants and every other anti-be-difficult prescription were porkwads.
Jackson was disheartened to detect that already at eleven Heather showed signs of being a joiner. He’d never understood this impulse to be just like everybody else when everybody else was a fucking moron. Even as a boy, Jackson had always wanted to stand out; his daughters’ peers seemed driven to blend in. The sole exceptions, the only truly ambitious kids determined to draw attention to themselves as a cut above, clinked to school with an arsenal under their trench coats.
On the other hand, maybe he was more of a conformist than he liked to admit. Take Heather’s name. They’d picked it because they thought it was unusual. Now there were three other Heathers in her class. What was it with this name thing? You think you’ve never heard it before, but it’s in the air or something, like a smell or a gas, and meanwhile every other pregnant couple on the block is deciding to name their kid Heather because it’s unusual. At least by some miracle their firstborn’s high school wasn’t chockfull of Flickas. Thank fuck for Carol’s hang-up on stupid horse books as a kid. Look at you, he kicked himself. Flicka again. You can’t keep thinking about your second daughter for ten seconds. Still, there was sure to come a time, no telling how soon, when he would have to think about Heather because Heather was the only daughter he had.
“Jackson, should I go ahead and feed the kids? It’s getting late.”
“Yeah, probably. Shep and Glynis likely got into a thing. If I know Glynis, she won’t let him go without a fight. No telling when he’ll get here, really.”
“Sweetheart,” Carol said gently. “You should prepare yourself for the possibility that he gets cold feet. Or sobers up and realizes that he has a son and a wife and a life, and this Pemba thing is ridiculous. Cloves. I mean, really.” It was a particularly female form of condescension: men and their juvenile notions, their vain, impractical little projects.
Jackson glared. It was one more of those moments when looking at his wife was an outright torture. She was unbelievably beautiful. It sounded mean-spirited, but he’d been a little exasperated that as she’d grown older she’d remained as sexy as ever, tall—taller than he was—with long amber hair and perfect round breasts the size of halved grapefruits. She never gained an ounce. Not from dieting or jogging either, but from hauling eighty-five pounds of writhing, gagging human flesh to an upstairs bed or emergency room. He was no longer sure whether Carol’s face had always been set in that serene, impassive expression, as if carved in marble, or if she had developed that stillness and infuriating composure in order to project a soothing, tranquil presence for Flicka. In any event, for years now she’d been so hard to rile that she inspired him to try.
He was always proud to be seen with her in the company of other men and their washed-out, lumpy wives, but here at home the only adult for Carol to be better looking than was her husband. He wasn’t outright ugly or anything, but he worried that they were one of those couples about whom other people wondered in private, Carol’s a knockout, but what did she ever see in him? Why would such a fox pick a short, stocky working-class stiff with hair on his shoulders? He’d read somewhere that one of the things that made for a successful marriage was that both parties were roughly the same level of physical attractiveness, which had made him nervous. Most men would think him crazy, but he wished she were a shade homelier. The fact that homelier and homier shared so many letters didn’t seem a coincidence.
Jackson laid out plates for the kids, catching Flicka’s look of dread. Sausage and peppers was one of Carol’s signature dishes, always a crowd-pleaser, but fennel seed and garlic were wasted on Flicka. With little sense of smell and a tongue smooth as shoehorn, she couldn’t taste for shit. She may have learned, painstakingly, to fold down her epiglottis to prevent food from leaking into the trachea, but she still chewed every bite so long that she might have been gnawing her way through the table itself, and if her mother turned her back for an instant she’d scrape the remains of her plate in the trash. The weird truth was that she made no association between hunger and food. Accordingly, she found the amount of time squandered on cooking bafflingly disproportionate. The cultural folderol to do with eating—separate salad bowls and fish forks, anguish over orders in restaurants, shared disappointment over a soggy homemade pizza crust that was keen enough to ruin an evening—was as impenetrable to Flicka as the sacrificial rituals of an arcane animist cult. Her chunky sister’s stuffing down chocolate when the organism didn’t strictly require more calories seemed simply nonsensical, as if Heather were continuing to squeeze the nozzle when gas was bubbling out the cap and running down the side of the car.
“Flicka, I made you a separate portion, without any sauce.”
“Keep it,” said Flicka sullenly. “I can just load in a can of Compleat.”
“I don’t want to have this fight with you every night.” Carol’s delivery was so smooth that anyone listening would have thought, what fight?
“Yeah, yeah, the family that swallows together stays together. Makes a lot of sense.”
“Your feeding therapist says you have to try to eat something every day, and that serving is very small. Being able to eat even a little bit is important for making friends.”
Flicka’s intended snort came out more like a gurgle, and she wiped the drool from her chin with the terrycloth sweatband on her right wrist.
Since it was always soaked, the rash underneath had grown chronic. “What friends?”
“We pay for that therapist out of our own pock
ets—”
“Yeah, well how’d you like some goon sticking their fingers in your mouth all the time? Karen Berkley’s not for me, but for you—”
“Just eat it.” Good Lord, Carol almost sounded flustered.
After filching into her school backpack for a large battered Ziploc, Flicka pulled herself up with Carol’s cornflower-print curtains and lurched to the small pan of undressed sausage and peppers on the counter. Before Carol could stop her, she’d upended the pan in the blender, sloshed in two mugs of water, and turned the appliance on high. The meal churned to an aerated brownish pink that immediately put Jackson off his dinner. With a malignant glint in the Vaseline around her eyes, she fastened the wide-bore syringe to its clear extension tubing, the other end of which she connected to the capped plastic port on her stomach—one not much different from the screw-off pour spouts on cartons of Tropicana. She removed the plunger and drained a measure of the blitzed pink gunk into the plastic syringe. Its clamp released, the tube’s translucence made it all too easy to follow the progress of the vomit-colored drizzle. Flick raised the syringe high in her right hand with a victorious look on her face, like the goddamned Statue of Liberty.
Okay, it was hostile. Rubbing salt in the insult, Flicka announced, “I’m eating it.”
“That tubing will be very difficult to clean,” said Carol, giving in to a hint of iciness as the phone began to ring. “Sweetheart, could you please get that? It seems I have some tidying up to do.”
Well, that’s that,” Jackson announced curtly on return to the kitchen. “He’s not coming.”
“He’s not coming, or he’s not going?”
“Neither.”
Carol fetched two more plates, and he caught a flicker in her face.
“So what makes you so fucking happy about that?”
So Much for That: A Novel Page 4