There was one thing she really appreciated about Mr. Lipton, though, she thought, approaching a table full of snacks. There was always food and plenty of booze in his house. She helped herself to a slice of gelatin salad and a glass of red wine. She didn’t like the poems, but she liked many of the things that the king of the nonconformists offered his guests. Ham and bananas hollandaise! She had to try that.
“Are you having fun?” Noelia asked her.
Josie nodded. She licked the spoon. Yuck. Bananas shouldn’t be mixed with sauce hollandaise. She was tired. She wished that Russell was there to walk her back to her place. But he wasn’t there. She was at the mercy of her friends, and presently, it seemed safer to spend the rest of the evening at Lipton’s house and suffer his eccentricities, than to walk all the way to her pad on the canals.
“Where is Kerouac?” she asked Noelia. Maybe he was a good looking guy.
Noelia pointed to a man with dark hair who sat on a couch across from Larry, resting his face on his left hand, staring at the floor. That was him? He didn’t seem to be paying attention to the poem. He looked tired, surly, and definitely not good looking.
Someone approached to say hello to Josie’s friends. Josie turned aside. She noticed a young man with blond stubble standing at the other end of the table next to the wine. Short, but quite handsome. Could he be a poet? She hoped not. He wore glasses. Probably a Jew. She got closer to fill up her glass. She took a small sip and played with the hair on the back her neck, pretending not to have seen him. She found Jewish men sexy. The nose, the penetrating eyes, the thick eyebrows. It was the women that were all cunts.
She waited for him to ask the first question.
But he didn’t.
“Did you read his last book?” she asked, then, biting the nail of her pinkie. “The…uh…I forgot the name,” she laughed sillily.
“Mexico City Blues?” the cat responded, guessing that she meant Kerouac’s book. “A wig tightener—I read the whole thing in just one night.”
“That good, huh?” Josie laughed. “I haven’t had a chance to get to it. But I’m Mexican—my parents are. Maybe I could borrow it from you?”
The man hesitated. “Thing is, I only have one copy.”
“I would take care of it,” Josie smiled, coquettishly.
“I don’t know…”
He was definitely handsome. His hair looked so thick.
“I’m like, weird with books, you know?” the cat continued with a grin that revealed slightly crooked incisors. Josie felt the urge to kiss him. “Did you read On the Road?”
“No,” Josie bent her head to one side and closed her eyes. “I prefer to read at home. I get dizzy if I try to read on the bus.”
“No,” the young man laughed. “On the Road is the title.”
“Oh,” Josie laughed, “I thought you were asking… I did! I’m sure I did. I just don’t remember what it’s about.”
“You would remember if you did. Man, that book is unforgettable. It’s my favorite—well, one of my favorites. I love William Burroughs, too. Did you read Naked Lunch?”
Josie sipped her wine and shook her head shyly. Her grin grew bigger. What was wrong with this guy? He hadn’t complimented her yet. Who gave a shit about William Burroughs? She hated when men talked of things she didn’t find interesting.
“Naked Lunch?” She remarked, taking a deep breath. That way he would notice her hooters. “What a dirty title.”
“You haven’t heard of it? Man, you need to read it…”
Had he just called her a man again?
“Kerouac himself suggested the title. ‘Naked Lunch: a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’”
Josie put a hand on her neck. She loved his accent—was he from New York?—but oh, boy, what a bore this man was. She would give him a blowjob, but nothing else. He couldn’t make conversation.
“What happened to your shoes?” he asked.
“I lost them,” Josie responded.
He laughed. “What’s your name?” The cat touched her arm briefly.
Finally! She had started to think he was one of them gayboys. Where was Eva? She wished that that Polish cunt could see him flirting with her. And that she went straight to tell Russell. He’d get all mad. What would happen if he entered the room right then and saw them kissing? Maybe he’d get into a fight with this cat. Maybe Russell would punch this little Jewish boy on the nose and tell her she was his and no one else’s. Heather would be jealous too…if she was still alive.
“Josie,” the girl responded. “And yours?”
A third glass of wine, some Benzedrine dissolved in orange juice, and a dozen unknown authors later, Josie found herself slumped on a couch, lost in a cloud of tobacco and marijuana, listening to a theological argument between Noelia’s husband, and a blond man with a goatee wrapped in what looked to be a Hopi blanket, about whether the gender of the Maker affected free will.
She had long lost her handsome Jew. Kerouac had left too, back to his hotel, after reading just one poem. Apparently, he had found the “coolness” of Larry’s guests dreary and preposterous.
Lipton was recording the conversation between George and the man in the Hopi blanket. Because of that, and because they were heavily intoxicated, the two men preferred to speak in short sentences.
George entertained the idea that God was a woman: “She is everywhere,” he explained with a simper. “And because she is a mother, she knows. She’s warm and nurturing. She cares about you and she cares about me. She is everyone and everything. And it is because she cares, because she loves us so intensely, that she lets you be. It breaks her heart, but she lets you be.”
Josie disagreed. What is George talking about, referring to God as a woman? God cannot be a wimpish woman. God is man.
The man with the goatee snorted. “God doesn’t care,” he said. “That’s enough proof that he’s a man: women are nice and generous; God is a selfish dick.”
Josie concurred. She could barely keep her eyes open.
“There is no reward or punishment in the afterlife,” George’s interlocutor continued. “There is probably no afterlife. What for? God doesn’t care about what you do or what you are. He’s like a government official in charge of designing a new highway in a city he will never set foot in: he doesn’t care if he has to tear down a house or ten thousand. He listens to everyone in general and to no one in particular. He doesn’t think of today, tomorrow, or a couple of years from now. God’s plans span over millennia—over hundreds of thousands of years, over millions of years, when you and I and everyone else on this planet will cease to exist. What does he care if you kill or rape or steal? He’s planning to exterminate us all, anyhow, when he destroys this planet. That’s why we can, because he doesn’t give a shit.”
“We can what? Kill, rape, steal?”
Yes, Josie gave a mental nod. That sounded more like the God she knew. Her father had once told her that in order to speak to God, you must first recite three Lord’s Prayers, three Hail Marys, and three Guardian Angels, the same way you needed to dial seven numbers to make a telephone call. If God was almighty, why would he need such a useless preamble? An omnipotent being should be able to hear your every word. It could only be because he didn’t really care that he made it so difficult to get his attention, as the man wrapped in the Hopi blanket insisted. What had he said about destruction? It would be a shame, though, if the world was coming to an end, Josie thought, because she really liked Christmas.
“God relishes in observing the shape of the galaxies, in the color of nebulas, in the shape of a grain of sand. He does not care if your wife gets sick…”
She missed especially the posadas, back at home. She didn’t miss much else. Theirs was a tiny little house; they were poor and too many. She missed the singing, the smell of the burning wax, the excitement of breaking
a piñata…
“God is a man. He can’t be a woman.”
Christmas was the only time of the year she didn’t care if her father drank. He never beat them on Christmas. Boy, she’d give an arm right now for a piece of sugar cane!
“You are wrong. The goddess is love,” George insisted. “She is forgiveness. She is communion. She is the world and eternity. She was and she is and she will be, because there is no time. No millennia, like you say, for her there is only eternity…”
“And how do you explain change?”
“For her, there is no change. She reigns over the chaos, she directs and she forgives. She’s eternal, omnipotent, and ever present.”
“He may be,” the man with the goatee insisted, “but we’re not. We’re only minuscule microbes, parasites on a planet that’s merely a speck of stellar dust in His master plan.”
“There is no plan. We’re the goddess’s plan.”
“How do you explain catastrophes then? How do you explain evolution?”
“Men coming from monkeys? Biology is her most beautiful song. The whole thing is a riddle.”
“To be solved by whom?”
“Nobody—everyone! That’s the beauty of God. She creates a perfect world, perfect in its most infinitesimal detail, so perfect that she cannot be found. No matter how far you go, no matter how deep your analysis, you cannot see her. Yet, she is revealed in the whole…”
Josie stepped in front of the two men.
“You know why Christmas is over?” she wailed. “Because you broke it!”
The next thing she remembered was opening her eyes to a sunshiny morning in somebody else’s bed.
“Good morning,” Mrs. Lipton said to her, standing by the door with a big grin. “Did you sleep well? You passed out. You drank a little too much. Larry and I are having breakfast outside in the backyard. Would you care to join us? Then we can give you a ride back home.”
Our short, tight-lipped, ugly little witch had lost the battle with Morpheus too. She was lying on the wooden step off the kitchen door, cuddling the rolling pin she had held all night in hopes of capturing Josie, when she was awakened in a much less courteous manner than the target of her prey:
“We’re hungry,” said her sister Victoria, as she poked her little sister’s head with her walker.
The little woman rose in surprise.
Where was the girl? She turned her head in every direction. Had she come back? Was she upstairs? She would have heard her climb up if she had. Still, the little woman climbed up. The room was empty.
“Rosa wants pancakes,” her sister called from the bottom of the stairs, flummoxed rather than annoyed by her sister’s reaction. “I want eggs.”
The little woman darted downstairs to the kitchen. She stepped on a stool and opened the freezer. The head was there, wrapped in wax paper. Not the one she originally wanted, but still a head.
“I said I want eggs,” her sister repeated.
“Pancakes!” They heard Rosa’s voice coming from the living room.
The little woman nodded. She changed clothes and returned to the kitchen. She began to pull out the ingredients to fix breakfast for her sisters.
There was only one egg.
“I cooked a twelve-egg frittata last night,” her familiar said with a grief-stricken face. “I was worried about you. And when I worry, I get hungry. I feel so fat now, that’s why today I’m wearing a girdle.”
“Porridge?” the two elder sisters exclaimed when the little woman served them the only thing she managed to prepare for breakfast.
Rosa tossed her bowl against the wall. “I said I wanted pancakes!” she yelled.
The little woman stared at the broken bowl. She had killed once, she thought in cold anger. She returned to the kitchen, closing the door behind her. She had a big pot on the flame and now the water was close to boiling. She had decided to start her potion and pay no attention to her sisters complaining.
“I said I wanted eggs,” Victoria bawled, stamping her fist on the dining table. “Do you think we’re horses?”
She banged with her cane, too, but the little woman didn’t care. She was busy adding ingredients to the pot: cardamom, garlic, a year-old cobweb—everything that the recipe for beauty and young looks called for.
“We’re starving!”
Finally, the little woman began to unwrap the package that she had previously taken out of the freezer and submerged in water to thaw. Her hands were shaking. She was so nervous, she prayed to God for the recipe to be successful.
The whole chin was gone. She felt her heart sink to her feet. The flesh had been gnawed to the bone and only the teeth remained of what had once been Heather’s enchanting smile.
“I am so sorry,” President Buer cried behind his mistress. “The eyes and the tongue were so good I just couldn’t stop—I just couldn’t! I was so hungry. That’s why I made the frittata, to fill me up. I ate a whole pound of cheese, too, but human fat is so, so, so delicious! I swear I just wanted to lick it. I thought: Just a lick. I’ll just lick it once. But then I bit it, and then I just couldn’t stop eating. It was so yummy…”
The little woman stared at the fiend with such a look, President Buer couldn’t discern whether it was loathing or disappointment. Her fists were clenched to her chest; her whole face puckered with agony. The fiend turned around to check if she was looking at someone else behind him.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked, stepping back.
She didn’t have a chance to respond. Rosa had wheeled herself into the kitchen and gave her sister a resounding blow with Victoria’s cane.
“You soulless, senseless little chimp!” the old woman bawled. “Giving your sisters a bowl of oatmeal as if we were peasants. I am going to call Social Services! We’re going to kick you out of this house! This is not your house, it is ours! Our mother left it to us. If you’re out of eggs, go buy them!”
She needed no more. The little woman wrapped the head up and put it back in the freezer. Then, she grabbed a basket and left on her bike to go to the market.
When she returned, twenty minutes later, a loud honk startled her.
“Give us a ride to church,” her sister Victoria demanded from the passenger seat inside Heather’s red Fairlane.
She had completely forgotten about the vehicle.
“And then to play bingo,” Rosa added, from the back seat.
Both sisters had their heads wrapped in scarves, had applied makeup, and wore sunglasses. Rosa carried little Dorothy’s Angel in her arms.
“I told them they shouldn’t,” President Buer said, from the stairs landing. He too was dressed as if he were going for a car ride. “But they never listen, do they?” He rolled his eyes, trying to avoid tears. “It’s almost as if I weren’t here. I have a voice, but—do I have a vote in this family? Not for as long as they cannot see me. I said no, no, no. I said no at least forty times, but it was pointless. I felt pity for Victoria having to do all the work by herself, so I helped her put Rosa’s wheelchair inside the trunk and I did their makeup… Don’t they look beautiful? Fifteen years younger, at least. The secret is a double coat of mascara.”
Victoria honked a second time. “We’re running late.”
“It’s such a nice sunny day for a car ride,” Rosa sang to the baby.
“Take them to Mulholland!” Buer added.
No! She couldn’t take the risk of driving again. Not in plain daylight! Then again, the little woman thought, if the girl came back now and saw her friend’s car parked in the alley, she would start asking questions. The girl would find out what she had done, and bright as the day was, she would have no way of surprising her. She had no other option. She opened the door and stepped into the car. The keys were already in the ignition.
Victoria welcomed her with a smack on her temple. “That’s for making us wait. I
t’s hot in here.”
Perhaps because she was too upset, this time it wasn’t difficult for the little woman to pull out of the alley. She turned right on Dell Avenue towards the Circle.
Riding with Mr. and Mrs. Lipton, Josie saw the car at the intersection of Venice Boulevard.
“That was Heather’s Fairlane!” she said from the back seat.
“That was our tenant,” Rosa said, noticing Josie in the Lipton’s car as they passed, “riding in God-knows-who’s expensive car.”
“A total wanton, that girl,” responded Victoria. “She will not end well.”
“That was Heather’s car!” Josie exclaimed a second time to the bewildered couple. “She’s alive!”
“Who’s Heather?” Larry asked.
“My friend,” Josie laughed. “Don’t you know her?” Her expression brightened up. “From the Gas House? Oh, Larry, I was so scared for her. But she’s alive!”
“Why wouldn’t she be alive?” Mrs. Lipton asked. “What happened?”
“Nevermind,” the girl said with an ear-to-ear smile. “Some stupid joke. I’m so relieved that she’s fine! I thought the worst. I was so scared. My, she must have stopped at my place to let me know she was alright—I don’t think she saw me. I’ll give her a call tonight. I feel so relieved! I cannot be mad at her anymore.”
The little woman felt as if her entrails were about to come out through her mouth. Had the girl seen them? She pressed the accelerator. If the girl had seen them, she would be calling the police. And if the police came, they would find what she had in the freezer. And if someone found the head… She had to go back and put it somewhere else, somewhere safe. She should have left it inside the shed and asked President Buer to…
Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle Page 28