by Margo Rabb
“It’s not like when you’re older you suddenly lose your passion or ability to love.”
“Well, Alfred Lord Tennyson, how do you know that?”
“My mother’s been married three times.”
“Another reason for them not to. She has bad luck.”
“She has good luck—it was my father who didn’t. It took him a year to die. Every day he suffered, in pain.”
I played with my spoon in the empty bowl. “My mother died in twelve days. I don’t know if I could’ve taken it if the dying went on so long.”
“I think whatever happens you just somehow take it.”
I had to admit, it was good to talk about all this with someone who’d experienced it too. I wondered if his father’s death had made him as crazy as my mother’s had made me. Sometimes, lately, I felt a sense of recklessness, of being ready to cast off my cares (and my virginity) in a blink. I thought of the countless times I’d cried in the past ten months, the classes I’d failed. How I still carried the image of my mother everywhere, how I thought she was watching me, all the time, from a corner in the room. Perhaps there she was, by the doorway, even now. Watching us.
The ice cream shop was closing up. “I took photographs of it, when he was dying,” he said. “I think that helped me get through it, as some kind of release.”
“I kept a journal,” I said. “I wrote in it every night.” I glanced at his portfolio, resting against the wall. I wanted to see his father’s picture; I wanted to know what he looked like. “Could I see your photos?”
“There are only fashion ones in there. The rest are back at my place. My apartment’s only three blocks away—do you want to come see them?”
Felix lived above Big Boy’s Leather on St. Mark’s Place, in a third-floor walk-up. “My roommate’s out all night,” he explained as he unlocked the door. “He’s an insomniac, a painter. He works the night shift at the Kiev.”
Their apartment was railroad style, a thin corridor of rooms. It was the messiest place I’d ever seen. You couldn’t even see the floor. He draped his suit jacket over a chin-up bar in the doorway to his room. With one fell swoop he cleared two feet of clothes off the couch so I could sit down. The whole room smelled like skunk.
He made coffee in the kitchen. “Instant okay?”
“Sure.”
He locked the front door with a loud click. Maybe he would deflower me right there on the couch. That would be an interesting story to tell. Hey, Kelsey, Felix found his way into my furry domain. And there I’d be, queen of the schoolyard that day, telling everybody what it was like to no longer be a virgin.
But he didn’t make any moves—he took out a folder from the depths of his closet. “I haven’t looked at these in a long time,” he said, almost nervously.
He sat down on the couch beside me and opened the folder. There were pictures of street people, classmates, several pages of a naked, booberific girl that he quickly flipped through, some of Sylvia, and then his father, the IV, his sickly gray skin.
“I haven’t seen these in so long,” he said again.
I couldn’t stop staring at it: the pain in his father’s eyes, his boniness. He looked like a concentration camp victim. In other pictures his body was puffy, like a cartoon.
“The worst was just watching him deteriorate. Bloat up like a balloon from the medication. God, in the end I couldn’t even recognize him.”
He turned the page. “We had the whole bed, the IV, everything set up in the living room. The house looked like a hospital.”
We came to the last photograph—his father’s body deflated, like a rag doll, a skeleton with soft bones. It was then that Felix’s voice cracked and he started to cry. I couldn’t believe it; I’d never seen a young guy cry, except in anger.
“I’m sorry I brought you up here,” he said, his voice quavering. “I didn’t do it planning to look like an idiot . . .”
I put my hand over his. It happened naturally; I touched him without my even willing it. I waited patiently while he cried, relieved not to be the one sobbing, for a change. When the tears stopped he squeezed my hand tighter, bent toward it, and kissed my fingers. Then he kissed me.
His hand ran up my calf, to my knee, under my skirt. (What underwear did I have on? Oh, good, the nice pink ones.) Along the outside of my sweater, to my neck, he kissed my neck, his hands back over my sweater, right across my breasts. Not a slip of the hand; he was unabashedly touching my breasts.
I didn’t want him to stop. I arched toward him as he slipped his hand beneath my sweater’s trim.
“I want you,” Felix said.
I wished he hadn’t said that, because all I could think of right then was my mother again, watching us, laughing her head off. Maybe she’d be up there with Henry, Felix’s father, the two of them shaking their heads.
“I want you,” he said again.
Or maybe not. More likely they had better things to do. My mother was up there somewhere with her aunts and cousins, getting her hair and nails done at the great salon in the sky.
“I want you.”
How could she not be laughing? I’d told her once, long before she got sick, that I’d wait till I met someone I loved to have sex. There was no rush, I told her. I wanted it to be real. And she was pleased to hear it. You have a lot of sense, she had said. You already know something about love.
His fingers reached into my underpants. He was playing with the edges, the bikini elastic. His fingers reached down and lingered between my legs.
For a moment it felt so good I thought I was going to die.
Then he started pushing his fingers inside of me. Reaching one, then two; I squirmed. He took this as a good sign, and dug deeper, like he was urgently searching for something. What, did you lose something in there? A fingernail? A ring?
He kept on digging, and I kept squirming until finally I grabbed his wrist, his fingers slid out of me, and I said, “I have to go.”
He lay still, searching me with his eyes. “I don’t want you to go.”
Maybe it was a mistake to leave. Maybe I’d never get the chance to have sex again. Maybe I’d get hit by a bus on the way home, or stabbed by a drug dealer, or diagnosed with cancer and die in twelve days.
Or maybe my mother wasn’t watching me after all—I was just watching myself.
“I have to go,” I said again. I straightened my clothes.
“Come on—you can stay. We won’t do anything, I promise—”
“I need to go. I’ll—I’ll see you.” I put on my coat and left his apartment. I reached my arm out for a taxi, and I went home.
“You’re lucky you didn’t have sex with him,” Kelsey said. “Can you imagine? What if you got pregnant? Then no matter what happens with your father, you’d be related to Sylvia.”
We were upstairs in my bedroom; downstairs Sylvia was cooking lentils for dinner. “The way things look, it seems like I’ll be related to her no matter what,” I said. “My father’s been seeing her almost every night.” He’d been home from the hospital a little over a week, and I told Kelsey how the night before, while he was out with Sylvia, I’d snuck into his bathroom and peeked inside his toilet kit again. The condom box was still there. I’d opened it, tensing my shoulders—it was empty.
“It’s gross, really gross,” I told Kelsey. “There were twelve condoms in that box. Twelve.”
“That must be one hell of a pacemaker he’s got.”
“Or one of Sylvia’s tinctures.”
All throughout dinner Kelsey and I stared at Sylvia and my father, searching for clues to their libidos. We ate the lentil casserole (“Maybe it’s the lentils” Kelsey whispered) while Sylvia told us Felix had gotten the Vogue internship and was in Antarctica photographing models on ice floes.
“Great,” I said. “He must be happy.”
“Imagine him with all those gorgeous models!”
I forced a smile, and Kelsey asked Sylvia if she would read our tarot cards. She agreed to, and after din
ner we began.
She read Kelsey’s cards first, revealing the Empress, a woman holding a wand that resembled an ice cream cone—it meant future success, Sylvia said—and the Knight of Wands, the King of Cups, lots of handsome, lusty-looking men, even one who oddly resembled Matt Dillon. All guaranteed good fortune in some form or another. Kelsey beamed.
Then Sylvia read mine. She laid them out on the coffee table, the colorful array. In the center of it all was a picture of a red heart with huge swords stabbing through it.
“Oh, figures,” I said. “Story of my life.”
But Sylvia said no. She said one card is never all that we are.
CURES FOR HEARTBREAK
Depressing business, heartbreak, no picnic no matter how you look at it. But never fear, you can cure yourself if you feel like it. Follow these handy instructions.
—Cynthia Heimel
Sex Tips for Girls
The napkins were the wrong shade of lilac. “It’s not exactly lilac, is the problem here,” my father was saying on the phone to Denny of Denny’s Discount Party Rentals. “My fiancée, she’s a little nuts. Everything has to match. . . . You’re telling me. Okay, it has sort of a shimmer—no, shimmer’s the wrong word. It’s—what do you call it? When it’s multicolored in different lights, almost like a rainbow? Like a dragonfly wing?”
“Iridescent,” I shouted from the dining room table, where piles of iridescent lilac invitation components were spread before us.
“Don’t help him,” Alex said.
I shrugged.
“Batshit. He’s gone completely batshit,” she mumbled.
“It’s the psychic’s fault,” I said. Sylvia had splurged on a visit to a fancy psychic-to-the-stars after my father had asked her to marry him. Elizabeth Taylor sees her all the time, Sylvia had told us with pride. The psychic had informed Sylvia that she “needed to do it right and have a proper fête” this time, for what would be her fourth marriage.
Our father had asked Sylvia to marry him on Valentine’s Day at their favorite eatery, Dreamfood. After a mouthwatering repast of bulgur cassoulet and yucca quiche, Harold, my father’s favorite waiter, brought out the leatherette bill folder. Tucked inside was a note: Will You Marry Me? My father had typed it at home on the Smith Corona.
My father was telling Denny the story.
“I had Harold put the ring inside that pocket doohickey where the credit card goes.”
Alex rolled her eyes.
“Best part was, the meal was on the house! . . . Thank you . . . I know, it’s not a common color. What can you do? . . . Thanks for your help! . . . You too.”
He hung up the phone. “Guess I’ll be hemming the napkins myself.”
Hemming them? When my father sold his shop, he’d sworn he’d never stitch another thing again. We still had his mother’s old Singer sewing machine, but he hadn’t used it since he sewed my Snoopy costume in fifth grade.
“If Sylvia wants matching napkins, then she should sew them.” Alex shook her head. “Or use paper ones. This whole thing is crazy. You’ve only known her five months.”
My father shrugged. “When you know, you know.”
“It could be worse,” I told my sister. “We could be heading off to Vegas—that’s where she eloped last time.” I pictured my father in a sequined suit, being married at a drive-through chapel.
“Her other two weddings were at City Hall,” my father said. “She never even had a wedding dress! She wore the same cream suit to the last three. This time she’ll have a lovely dress, and our families will be there, our friends, a rabbi, and maybe a live musician or two.”
Our parents had gotten married at the Parker North, a small hotel in upper Manhattan that no longer existed. Our mother had worn a short white sixties dress that now lay in a box on the top shelf of my closet. In the pictures my father had a full head of hair and a huge bohemian daisy in his pocket. Not an iridescent lilac in sight. She’d been dead a year and three months now.
My father turned to me. “Do you still have that xylophone?”
“What?”
“Maybe, for the procession, you could play—”
“You want me to bang out Pachelbel’s Canon on the xylophone?”
“You wouldn’t believe what these harpists charge.”
Alex grumbled something unintelligible under her breath.
“What did you say?” my father asked her. “Catshit?”
She shook her head.
“Girls, please don’t kvetch. I need your help.”
“We are helping,” Alex said. “Look.” She pointed at the stack of finished envelopes that we’d hand-addressed for their July wedding. Our father had asked us to address them after boasting about our penmanship to Sylvia.
The invitations had been ordered off the Forever Yours catalog and featured two intertwined silver hearts on ivory paper with lilac trim. Alex picked up her calligraphy pen and started writing out an address. “We’re almost done. Who the hell is Prina Norval, anyway?” she asked our father.
“I don’t know. Someone from Sylvia’s side. Wait. I forgot, I have a couple more pages of addresses too.” He disappeared upstairs to fetch them.
“Had I known this was how I was going to be spending my spring break, I would’ve stayed at school,” Alex said. She stamped the return address with the rubber stamp our father ordered that said “Pearlman Palace” above our address. He thought that was quite funny.
“You would do that to me? Leave me here to deal with this all alone?” I asked.
“The whole thing just galls me. Mommy’s only been dead a little over a year.”
“I’ve heard of worse. A guy Kelsey’s brother knows, his dad remarried four months after their mother died.”
She shook her head.
“At least she’s not moving in,” I said, glancing around the living room. “Thank God.” Sylvia refused to give up her apartment in Manhattan on West 90th Street, so they were going to keep their separate homes. As long as I was okay with it (I was) he’d spend a couple of nights a week in Manhattan with her, and she’d spend weekends in Queens at her new “country home.” Unfortunately, her presence had materialized on a few weeknights as well. She was coming over this afternoon, a Friday—I was on spring break too—for lunch.
Our father returned with three new pages of scrawled names and addresses.
Alex glanced at them. “Morty Grossman? Why does that name sound familiar?”
It took me a second and then I remembered. I grabbed the list. Cindy and Alva Curry. Gina Petrollo. Richard Bridgewald, Gigi and Sasha Backus, Shelly Petra.
My mouth opened in horror. “You’re inviting people from the hospital and Green Springs? Why?”
“They’re friends,” he said.
“They’re not friends! You never saw them again!”
“I’d like to invite them,” he said.
Alex smiled brightly. “We can give nitroglycerin tablets as favors.”
“Whatever you do, you’re not inviting that crazy social worker. No way.” I swiped the black calligraphy marker across Gina Petrollo’s name, and then did the same through Richard Bridgewald’s underneath it.
“How’d you get all their addresses?” Alex asked.
He shrugged. “The sheet from Green Springs had everybody there on it . . . and Morty and the others I looked up in the phone book. Sylvia said we needed to invite more people. She wants a big wedding.” He glanced at the clock. “Shit. She’s going to be here any minute. I’ve got to start lunch—eggless egg salad okay with you girls?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Delicious,” Alex said.
I picked up an envelope and wrote Gigi and Sasha’s address, 800 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York, in my best handwriting. I pointed to Sasha’s name. “That’s the cancer guy,” I whispered to my sister.
“No.”
“Yup. He lived.”
She squinted. “Who else is he going to invite? Rabbi Elvis?”
“Shh. Don
’t give him any ideas.”
I stuffed the envelope and put it on the stack. I couldn’t believe that it would go to Gigi and Sasha’s house. “I’m sure they won’t come,” I said.
“Let’s hope not.”
“What if no one shows up? Can you imagine?” I asked.
“Please. I’m praying no one shows up. It’s going to be humiliating.”
I nodded and drew a swirl around the y in Alva Curry’s name.
Our father turned on the kitchen radio to the country music station. A woman twanged about her heart being trampled into one million pieces—one million pieces, the chorus went, one million pieces, one million pieces. A few minutes later Sylvia walked through the door, out of breath.
“I spent the whole morning registering!” She wore a fuchsia trench coat and eyeglasses that darkened in the light. Indoors, the lenses were the color of a thunderhead.
“He let her register by herself? Oh, God,” I whispered. I could only imagine what she’d registered for. I gazed around the living room at the flourishes she’d added to our house since she’d become engaged to our father—the green-flowered valances that now perched atop our windows, the chintz cushions daintily aligned on our plain brown sofa, looking like princesses who’d sat down in the wrong place. She’d packed our fridge with herbal tinctures. Then, two weeks ago, she’d brought over her beloved Zingy-Dell Collectible Figurines and housed them in a cabinet in our hallway. I’d never heard of Zingy-Dell figurines before, and neither had my father nor Alex, though according to Sylvia they were extremely popular. “What a load of crap,” my father said (out of earshot of Sylvia) when he finished assembling the authentic Zingy-Dell cabinet she’d special-ordered. The Zingy-Dell figurines featured puffy-cheeked children, bears, and bunnies smiling on pedestals in honor of such occasions as birthdays and Valentine’s Day; others dispensed general advice such as “Smiles” (a bunny with a toothy grin), “Just Sunshine” (a special limited-edition bear clutching a sun), and “Keep on Truckin’” (puffy child in a tow truck). Each came with a Guaranteed Certificate of Authenticity. “Because you wouldn’t want a fake Zingy-Dell,” Alex said. “God forbid.”