He shook his head. “Fucking patriarchy. Fat talk, even now? Even with all this?” He wasn’t angry with Delph, though. He was angry for her. We like to think of ourselves as feminists, but Eddie had us all beat. And not in a porny Joe Hopper way. In a genuinely appalled Eddie Glod way.
He went to take a shower, and Delph topped off her drink and chugged it down. While he was toweling dry and dressing and doing his hair, she was returning to the kitchen and dusting a little baking powder on the tattoo, which was oozing again.
He stopped in the kitchen before leaving for the day, surprising her, scaring her all over again. She stood on one foot, hiding the decorated leg behind her body. She supposed she looked like she needed to pee.
“All right, sweetie,” he said. “Off to Mr. Moon’s.” He walked up to her, patted her poufy hair. He found it irresistible, he always said. He said he sometimes could see his handprint before it poufed back up. “Don’t forget Vee.”
On Saturdays he delivered Mr. Moon’s savory buns to restaurants in Chinatown. When it came to cash flow, he, Vee, and Delph were just getting by. Vee made the most money at her paralegal job, but it still wasn’t much. Eddie’s jobs, Delph’s job at Elite Information Exchange—they all paid minimum wage. This meant that the three of them lived on white rice and soy sauce, on spaghetti and Kraft blue cheese dressing, on peanut butter and grape jelly, the jelly from the individual plastic packs Delph took by the fistful from the Barnard cafeteria. On weekends they lived on stolen savory buns.
In the bathroom Delph walked over the jeans and briefs and wet towels Eddie had dropped on the floor and took a shower with what little hot water remained. Drying off, certain now she was alone, she launched into a medley of dead teenager songs—“Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss” and the one about the ghost who shows up at a dance. This was another secret she kept, the only secret she didn’t feel guilty about: she had a good voice. She had daydreams in which she was coaxed up to a microphone in one of the live music clubs, one of the performers singling her out. “You, the girl singing along to every song. Yeah, you. You see any other girls here? It’s just me and you, sister. Come on up here, let’s see what you got.” People smirking, nudging each other, expecting her to make a fool of herself. But instead . . .
In her bedroom she chose an outfit that went with both a tattoo and a hot summer day. She stepped into a short denim skirt and a pair of flip-flops, and intending nothing symbolic or metaphorical, but winding up being symbolic and metaphorical nonetheless—there are days and even entire eras when it’s hard to avoid—she put on her lavender T-shirt with the skull and rose logo from the Grateful Dead’s second live album. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Keep on truckin’,” she said, and waggled her finger at herself.
At St. Luke’s, Delph rode up to Lady’s room in a mammoth stainless-steel elevator designed to accommodate gurneys being wheeled to surgery. Vee had lain on such a gurney a little more than a year ago, this upon the occasion of her first cancer diagnosis. “Lumpectomy,” Eddie kept saying. “What kind of name is that for a serious medical procedure? It sounds like something you do to gravy.”
He hadn’t been joking, he’d been genuinely horrified and offended, but Vee had found it funny and laughed uproariously. She was already sedated and was babbling happily. There’d been a shower cap stretched to capacity over her thick pile of hair, and, sticking out of the sheet that was covering most of her torso, there was the end of the needle locator a nurse had earlier stabbed into her breast. “Doesn’t it look like a meat thermometer sticking out of a pot roast?” Vee had asked, lifting her head and trying to look at her chest, which gave her the appearance of having a double chin. But it hadn’t looked like a meat thermometer in the least. It had looked like a huge hypodermic needle stuck into Delph’s sister’s boob.
That day the elevator had held Lady and Delph and Eddie and Vee and an orderly. Vee had become enamored of the word orderly, prattling on about how it was an adjective that looked like an adverb being used as a noun. “It would be like calling a housekeeper a tidily or a hairdresser a prettily,” she said. After they wheeled her away, Eddie had begun to cry. “What if those were her last words?” he’d said.
But that had been last year’s trauma, last year’s story arc in the soap opera. This time it was Lady, not Vee, in the hospital, and Delph had the cavernous elevator to herself. She bounced on her heels, excited and anxious because she was not going to the third floor, the floor for the out-of-control crazies who were being observed, although the staff used the term loosely due to a nursing shortage, and the floor where Lady had spent the past week, her wrists tied to the bed rail with soft flannel shackles that were less true restraints and more a plea from the nurses that she not complicate their day by doing something rash, rash being the term everyone, even the psychiatrists, used to describe what Lady had done. Instead Delph was headed to the fifth floor, where they kept recovering patients. Delph had initially gone to the third floor, but the desk nurse, recognizing her, called out, shouting that Lady had been moved, and Delph reboarded the elevator. It was odd, she thought, that the healthier you were, the higher up they moved you. It seemed the opposite should be the case, that the sickest people should be the farthest from the bustle of the lobby and the revolving door that led to the noisy street, but perhaps, she thought, it was like Bloomingdales, where the better clothes—the designer lines housed in mini-boutiques—were up on four and five, while the tarty junior wear was on two. Not that she could afford a goddamn thing sold at Bloomingdale’s, but sometimes she walked through Cosmetics after work and returned home with fragrance spritzed on one wrist.
Even before she got to the hospital and learned that Lady had been promoted, Delph had been in a good mood. Part of that feeling was attributable to the two cocktails she’d enjoyed in the apartment, plus the third she’d gulped down at the West End on the walk over. It was so hot that July. The air was so thick it was nearly chewable. As Delph walked east, making eye contact with no one, reprising “Teen Angel” under her breath like a crazy person, she’d found it necessary to pull her hair off her face and neck. She held it up in the air to dry the perspiration on her forehead and nape, to keep her own sweat from soaking the roots. Her hair, so fibrous and thick, sticking straight up in the air: she was sure she looked like a troll doll. But a cool and curly-headed troll doll. A Hell’s Angel troll doll, what with the short skirt and tattoo and drunken, dancelike stagger.
When she reached Broadway, she’d ducked into the bar for a brief air-conditioned moment. She let her hair fall, and almost all of it did. The West End was the only bar she felt comfortable entering alone, back in those days when unaccompanied women tended to frequent only the new fern bars. Unlike those bars, the West End maintained no brightly lit section for its female customers—the wives of the old Beats, mostly, but also Barnard students who were dating their professors—but it was so near our apartment that Delph felt about it as she felt about Mondel’s, the elegant chocolatier a few doors down: it was her local candy store. Also, not once, not ever, had anyone tried to talk to her there. Even the bartenders only grunted when taking her order.
She took a seat at the bar and peered around as she always did, looking for Allen Ginsberg. As usual, he appeared not to be there, though it was impossible to say for sure. It was always dark in that bar. Anyone could be slumped down in one of the booths. She turned to the bartender and ordered a bloody mary. Fewer vitamins than her V8 concoctions, but better tasting and with an actual vegetable or whatever you wanted to call the limp stalk of celery so old it was white. She downed the drink quickly, and when she was finished she sat for a moment and ate the celery and let herself think about the tattoo and the tattooers.
Two nights ago, that other tattoo artist, the one named Gurley, having taken her phone number off her check, had called the apartment.
“Delph?” Vee said when she answered the phone. “I’m not sure. Let me check.” Delph shook her head. “Sorry, no,” Vee said. �
��I guess she’s gone out.”
He called twice more, once that same night, again the next day. Every time the phone rang Vee and Delph were sure it was the hospital calling to say Lady had taken a turn for the worse, but it was only this Gurley, this bowler, this pest.
Vee finally got fed up with both him and Delph. The third time he called, she’d changed her voice a little and said that, yes, this was Delph; what could she do for him? and Gurley had asked her on a date. That had caught Vee completely off guard. Delph had been lying, saying she’d met this Gurley person at a club, and Vee had assumed he was calling for Joshua’s number. That had made sense to Vee; each time the guy identified himself on the phone, Vee’d thought he was saying his name was Girlie.
She opened her eyes wide and gestured at Delph with such urgency that Delph had obeyed and come to the phone. They stood there, Vee and Delph, their temples touching, both of them listening to Gurley suggest that he and Delph meet up on the weekend, maybe bowl a few rounds, maybe smoke a few bowls, maybe go clubbing.
Delph let her jaw drop to demonstrate her utter surprise and substantial disgust. She, too, was surprised that Gurley wasn’t gay. She’d assumed all the men in the tattoo parlor had been. How lucky she hadn’t known that at least one of them was straight or bi or whatever Gurley was. She’d have been even more unnerved than she’d actually been had she realized he was sizing her up, looking at her leg in a different way from the others.
Vee gave Delph a look: yes or no? Delph shook her head vigorously.
“Sorry,” Vee said in her Delph voice, which was beginning to acquire a slight Scarlett O’Hara tinge. “I’m busy next Saturday.”
“What about Sunday?”
“I’m sorry. Look, the truth is, I don’t date at all.” Vee smiled at Delph reassuringly.
“Oh, bullshit,” Gurley said. “Hey, what if I stand under your window and serenade you until you change your mind?”
An idea came to Vee then. “Look,” she said. “The reason I don’t date is because I’m married.”
She thought that would stop him not only now but forever, but it hadn’t helped at all “You’re married?” Gurley repeated, as if this were the most preposterous thing he’d ever heard, and Vee said, “Don’t sound so shocked,” and Gurley said, “Not to that little homunculus you were with the other day, you’re not. I know you’re not his type.”
“Are you referring to Joshua?” Vee said. She scowled at Delph. The southern accent became a touch more pronounced. “No, I am certainly not married to Joshua.”
“All right,” Gurley said. “Then what’s your old man’s name, if you’re so fucking married?”
Delph mouthed and Vee dutifully parroted, “Allen Ginsberg.” They had to cover their mouths to keep from laughing, until Gurley said, “So where does this Ginsberg work? Because I’m going to go there and wait outside and beat him into hamburger and then you’ll be available.”
Vee found herself furious. “That’s my husband you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t want anyone else.” She raised her voice. “I love only him.”
As Vee declared her love for Allen Ginsberg, Delph had, to her surprise, begun to weep. She made a helpless, frantic waving gesture with her hands and ran into Vee and Eddie’s bedroom, empty given that Eddie was at his afternoon job handing out flyers to tourists in Times Square, trying to get them to head to a nearby menswear shop and purchase two suits for the price of one. Meanwhile Gurley was apologizing.
“Hey, calm down. It was just a joke, for fuck’s sake—pardon my French.”
“I pardon nothing,” Vee said, and she hung up and went after Delph. Delph’s head was beneath Eddie’s pillow, so Vee sat on the edge of the mattress and patted her through the percale and foam rubber.
“I know you don’t like to lie to people,” Vee said, “but he was so persistent we had to do something.”
“It’s not that,” Delph wailed, muffled and sniffling. She wasn’t crying because Vee—and she—had lied to Gurley. Nor was she crying because it might have been the first time she’d been asked out on a date, albeit in a roundabout way. She was crying because she had never before participated in a lie that felt so much like the truth. “I don’t want anyone else. I love only him,” Vee had said in her role as Delph, and Delph, hearing Vee say this out loud, had been struck by how painfully true it was. She wanted no one else. She loved only him. And he—he did not love her and never would. He was gay, and she knew what gay meant. It just hadn’t been Allen Ginsberg they were talking about.
The first person Delph saw in Lady’s new room on the fifth floor of the hospital was Vee, who was sitting on a gray-green vinyl chair and looking up at a TV somehow affixed to the ceiling. Stepping farther into the room, she saw Lady, propped up in her bed, looking at the ceiling, too, though not at the television.
“About fucking time,” Vee said. “Pardon my French.” She was wearing one of her paralegal uniforms, a cheap suit in royal purple from the sale rack of Dress Barn, pantyhose despite the evil temperature, sturdy Pappagallos that looked like men’s cordovan wingtips, but with short, stacked heels. The leather briefcase she carried, a hand-me-down from the firm’s only female lawyer, who’d recently purchased a swankier version, lay on the floor. Delph saw that Vee had also taken the time to do her hair that morning, not just letting it dry but going at it with a blow dryer and round brush. The weaponry hadn’t worked, though. The wings framing Vee’s face had already begun to frizz.
Delph walked past her, strode directly to Lady’s bed. She kicked off a flip-flop and flung her leg up on the rail as if it were a barre. “Look,” she said. “This is for you. Read it and weep.”
There was no weeping, just Vee catapulting out of the chair, Vee yelling what the hell’s wrong with you and are you crazy and who does such a thing. On and on, the self-assigned mother. And answering her own questions too: “You want to know who does such a thing? I’ll tell you who does such a thing. Sailors and drunks and whores, that’s who.”
“Who you calling a sailor?” Delph said merrily, her leg still elevated.
Lady was having trouble finding her glasses. “What is that?” she said. “What does it say?”
“Nothing,” Vee said. Then, reconsidering, she came out with it. “It says no matter what we do, our lives will be shit. It’s very encouraging. It’s the perfect thing to show someone who’s just done something rash.”
The rash thing was already a joke with us.
“It is a nice thing to do,” Delph said. She lowered her leg. She was becoming weepy. “It is encouraging. The curse only goes to the fourth generation, which, yes, okay, is us, but we’ve always known there was a dark cloud over our heads. What was last year with the cancer and divorce and Mom if not proof of that? But the good news is, it all stops with us too. The fifth generation is exempt. Our children will be spared.”
This was back when we all thought we’d have children.
“What are you two talking about?” Lady said.
“It’s a goddamn tattoo,” Vee said. “The sins of the father blah blah blah to the third and fourth generations.” She ran her hand through her hair as she spoke. A mistake, always, to mess with curly hair that’s been tortured straight. The strands kinked at the touch of her fingers. Spaghetti to rigatoni, she sometimes said, laughing, but not now. Now she was in no mood for self-deprecation. “Great,” she said. “Now we all have ridiculous scarring.”
Lady’s hand went to the choker of shining raw skin at her throat.
Vee, of course, had it over both Delph and Lady when it came to scars, even then, before her double mastectomy. Although maybe if, as Albert Einstein used to say, the past, present, and future are all a delusion, and time is just a series of random moments played out in random order, and some of those moments feel like they happened after others, but only because those “later” moments contain the “earlier” moments—well, then, if we accept that this is true even though, given our limited mental capacities, we are incap
able of truly understanding any of it, then maybe Vee had already had her double mastectomy and her chemotherapy etcetera, etcetera, and that was why she was so put out when Lady and Delph voluntarily mucked up their previously unmucked-up bodies.
But in the moment we believed we were living in, Vee still had both her breasts. On the other hand she also had a biopsy scar and a lumpectomy scar and, along the side of her rib cage, a faint but large circular scar where she’d ripped off a loose scab the size and color of a blueberry tartlet that had formed over her radiation burn. These disfigurements, as she thought of them, weren’t nearly as visible or dramatic as Lady’s and, now, Delph’s, but they were more numerous and, because she had never asked for any of them, much sadder.
In fact, now that she thought about it, Vee even had a tattoo of her own. Like her scars, Vee’s tattoo had been acquired during her first case of cancer; it consisted of four blue dots delineating the corners of what would have otherwise been an invisible square on her left breast. Every weekday for eight weeks after the lumpectomy she’d been required to show up at a clinic where poisonous rays were blasted into the heart of the square. Into her own heart as well, which, after all, beat right there beneath her flesh that was hardly too too solid, that was actually porous and useless when it came to deflecting death rays she was meant to think of as lifesaving.
By the sixth week the radiation had so badly burned the skin not just of her breast but also of her armpit—that innocent bystander—that she had to keep it free of all contact with fabric, razors, deodorant, even her own skin. She had to walk around with her arm extended off to the side or sometimes up in the air as if the universe had asked a question and she, by virtue of the wisdom she’d recently acquired, wished to be called on to answer. But she tolerated the burning, the blood rushing from her arm, the ensuing pins and needles, because it was going to be over in just a few weeks. Also what else could she do but tolerate it? She had to have the treatment. Eddie Glod had demanded she live.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 12