‘Can you go see her?’ Mr. Paluska asks.
‘Of course.’
‘She miss her mother.’
‘I know. I’ll go right away.’
‘Thank you.’ He grabs my hand and holds if for a second and I feel ready to pass out because no one holds my hand. He lets go almost immediately, probably because I look stunned or something. My hand just dangles there in a cold wind.
‘Now my other children sick,’ he says. ‘Whole family sick.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
He shrugs and heads for the elevator. I watch his shoulders.
Kadylak’s lost more muscle mass and has trouble walking. I wheel her into the playroom. She wants to play house, invite me over, serve me plastic pies and cakes. She goes nuts when I give her the penguin, holds it against her face and kisses it. Of course I’m worried Princess Molly’s going to show up and snatch it from her.
‘What are you going to call it?’ I ask. ‘Is it a him or a her?’
‘A her,’ she announces. ‘I’m going to call her Sweetheart.’
‘That’s a nice name.’ The whole time I’m thinking how sick it is that I’ve been ogling her father’s body.
‘She’s going to sleep with me, beside Mischa.’ Mischa the bear is losing fur.
‘I’m sure they’ll get along great,’ I say.
‘Can you read me Tilly?’
So Tilly goes to the village and on the way back Hal is waiting for her with a net. He and his neanderthal cohorts drop it on her from a tree. She struggles to escape but just gets more tangled in the ropes. Kadylak looks worried out of her mind, gripping a piece of plastic cheesecake. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t read anymore,’ I say.
‘Please read.’
Hal starts ripping up Tilly’s petticoats while the other goons cheer him on. All of a sudden, you’ll never guess, the farmer shows up.
‘I knew it!’ Kadylak says.
The farmer carries her in his arms to the old folks’ cabin. He says he’s going to protect her from now on, but we all know he’s got cows to look after.
‘He should shoot Hal,’ Kadylak says.
‘Then he’d go to prison.’
‘He could say it was an accident.’
‘That doesn’t always work out.’
A couple of pages later, Hal and company have torched the cabin and the old folks have died from shock or whatever. Poor Tilly sees the smoke and charges up the hill.
‘Where’s Simon?’ Kadylak demands. Simon’s the farmer.
‘He’s shearing sheep or something.’
‘He said he would protect her.’ Which makes me think of all the times I’ve told Kadylak she’s not going to die and she’s believed me. We start out small, believing everybody, and then we grow up and figure out everybody’s full of it.
15
Waldo, the security guard, is hanging around the counter talking about two boys who spilled lighter fluid on a girl and set her on fire. ‘Like, can you get your head around that one, like what kind of psychos would do that?’
‘Maybe they saw it on a reality show,’ I say. Doyle’s slamming around the scoops and buckets because he gets jealous when I talk to Waldo. When Waldo isn’t around, Doyle scoffs, ‘What’s it take to get a job as a security guard?’
‘So this woman’s walking along the beach and finds a bottle,’ Waldo says, and I feel a joke coming on.
‘What kind of bottle?’ I ask, feigning interest to annoy Doyle.
‘Any kind, doesn’t matter. The thing is, there’s a message in it. So she gets it out and it says if she rubs the bottle, she’ll get a wish. So she rubs it and a genie pops out and the woman says, “How come I only get one wish, you’re supposed to get three?” “That’s the deal,” the genie says. “One wish.”’
You have to wonder why it’s always guys telling jokes, and how they don’t notice nobody thinks they’re funny. I keep looking fascinated to aggravate Doyle who starts cramming napkins into the dispensers.
‘So the woman says,’ Waldo continues, ‘“I wish for world peace.” The genie goes, “Well, that’s a little hard because there’s wars all over the place.” The woman says she’ll write a list for him and he can sum up all the war zones in one wish. He says he doesn’t know if he can do that, that’s a mighty big wish. She writes it out anyway – it takes a couple of hours – and shows it to him and he says, “No way can I pull this off, you’re going to have to think of another wish.” So she says, “Okay, how about finding me a good man who’s not afraid of commitment, who’s got a decent job, who’ll share the housecleaning and cooking and take the garbage out without me nagging him?” The genie looks real worried for a second then he says, “That’s a really big wish. Can I see that world peace list again?”’ Waldo sucks on his slushie, I do a fake hahaha laugh to bug Doyle. ‘Shouldn’t you be doing the rounds?’ he says to Waldo. He’s staking out his territory. Soon he’ll be raping rhinoceroses.
To my horror, Damian and the tomato appear, arm in arm. ‘Look at my hard-working girl,’ he says. ‘I like the hat.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘We just saw the most amazing movie,’ the tomato says, and I fear she’s about to tell me about it.
‘What’ll you have?’ he asks her.
This shuts her up; she’ll be choosing a flavour for a couple of hours.
‘Drew isn’t returning my calls,’ he says. ‘Is she alright?’
‘Swell.’
‘Has she gone out yet?’
‘Line dancing.’
‘Really?’
‘She’s met some pilot who takes her flying. She loves it.’ A smattering of jealousy purples the old lothario’s face.
The tomato, finger in mouth, pulls him to her side. ‘I can’t decide whether to go soft or hard.’
‘Less chance of botulism with the hard stuff,’ I say.
Damian fishes a piece of paper out of his pocket and hands it to me. ‘Your real mother’s number. You took off so fast I didn’t get a chance to give it to you.’
‘I think I’ll have the Cherry Cobbler,’ the tomato announces, clapping her paws together. I stuff the paper in my pocket and grab a scoop.
Rossi’s completely freaked because she masturbated on her cell and now Kirsten’s broadcast it worldwide.
‘Why did you send it to her?’ I ask, swallowing a Timbit. I ordered ten to share but, of course, I’m eating them all.
‘She said she was only going to show it to the guys we know,’ Rossi says. ‘Like, the ones going to the party.’
‘Did you get a list?’ Tora asks. She’s got her laptop out and is working on her essay for Swails.
‘What do you mean, did I get a list?’
‘Get it in writing,’ Tora says.
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
‘Why are you so desperate to be mated?’ I ask.
‘I’m not desperate.’ She’s got zits on her chin, a sure sign of desperation. ‘That bitch is sewering me.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t go to the party,’ I suggest.
‘And let her get away with it? No way. I’m going.’
‘How does your going stop her getting away with it?’ Tora the future shrink inquires, still tapping on her computer.
‘I’m going to hold my head high. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’
A young woman struggles through the glass doors on crutches. She’s missing a leg below the knee. I’m used to seeing limbless people in photos from Afghanistan or Iraq, victims of land mines. But this amputee shocks me because she’s white and smiling and talking cheerfully to another young woman who has both legs. Girls’ night out. Smiling and talking cheerfully with just one leg. I wait for Rossi to notice her but she doesn’t. I start reading a sports section that’s lying around, not because I’m interested but because I don’t know what to say to Rossi and I finished The Mayor of Casterbridge and haven’t gotten my glommers on a new tome yet. Tora’s no help because she’s busy getting another 100 percent.
Some Chinese basketball player is over seven feet tall. It turns out his parents were both tall and ‘encouraged’ by the Chinese authorities to copulate. They didn’t marry for love but to produce a giant for the Chinese government. The giant was treated by a special doctor who fed him bee pollen and caterpillar fungus to make him grow even bigger. Now he plays for the nba but he’s scared to go out of his room when he isn’t playing basketball because if he gets into any kind of scandal, the Chinese government will chew him out, not to mention the nba and all his corporate sponsors who’ve got million of dollars tied up in him. So the giant sits in his room playing computer games while the other players party.
‘I can’t believe you guys don’t care about what’s happening to me,’ Rossi says.
‘I do care,’ I say. ‘I just can’t relate.’
‘What do you mean you can’t relate?’
‘All this hoochie chasing.’
‘It’s not about sex,’ Rossi argues.
‘What’s it about then?’ I know it’s about being popular, accepted and all that but I want her version.
‘I like guys.’
Same old line.
Drew needs her teeth cleaned. She’s been putting it off and now her gums are bleeding. She’s agreed to go to the dentist if I accompany her, which means I get to play hooky. It takes her about four hours to get dressed. When she comes downstairs I notice her pants are hanging off her. More weight lost on the peanut butter diet. ‘You should eat something now,’ I say, ‘because you won’t be able to later.’ The dentist has to freeze her entire mouth before the cleaning because Drew is supersensitive. She doesn’t answer me, just pulls on a jacket that looks a size too big.
The subway is stacked with lifers. Drew stares out the window into the darkness while I watch the great unwashed, try to figure out what head-pounding is going on in their lives. Usually you can pin it on the job. They’re all working for some asshole. A bald guy in a leather jacket and square-toed shoes is reading a book called Think and Get Rich. Amazing how wealth goes on being the safety exit. Nobody seems to notice that the stinking rich are total screw-ups. Drew grabs my arm and hangs on to it. It starts to hurt but I don’t say anything.
My biological mother’s name is Constance Ramsbottom. Connie Sheep’s Ass.
The dentist is one of those fakers who asks how you are even though he doesn’t give a monkey’s turd. He sticks needles into Drew who looks scared out of her mind. I know she hates it when dentists yabber at her so I keep him talking until the hygienist takes over. Then I turn up the volume on the TV so chair-side chatter becomes challenging. Drew closes her eyes, numbed. I surf around the soap operas; some stud’s got a gambling problem and I decide old Lil could start gambling. I’m holding auditions tomorrow, even though I haven’t finished the play. It’s time to jerk some cretins around, Kirsten in particular. They’re all going for it, haven’t noticed that Lund and Huff aren’t in the loop and that the auditions are in my basement. I haven’t told Drew yet. I’m hoping she’ll be absorbed in her newspapers, sucking back another tragedy.
The oral hygienist is talking loudly about her new Shih Tzu dog who’s ‘doing his business on the carpet.’ Even when she lets it run around the yard it comes back in and shits on the floor. At night it sleeps beside her bed and yelps. She’s going to start caging it. Somebody told her that if you cage them at night, they’re so happy to get away from their shit and piss in the morning they run out and crap in the yard.
‘Castles with moats,’ I say, ‘used to have parts jutting out so humans could crap through a hole into the moat. I don’t know what the dogs did.’ Even with her mask on I can see the hygienist’s having trouble following my line of thinking, which is to get her to lay off poor old Drew who’s too polite to tell her to shut up and clean her teeth. ‘Castles without moats had shafts that would narrow into a pit. Some poor serf had to come and shovel it out once a week. There were flies all over the place. People got maw worms that would eat you up from inside. People were pulling worms out of the corners of their eyes.’ The hygienist clams up.
We stop at a juice bar and I make Drew drink some carrot and beet juice using a straw. She’s so pale I’m afraid she’s going to pass out. I’m not used to her looking scared. ‘What’s it like being out and about?’ I ask.
‘Fine.’
It makes sense that if you stop going out it gets harder and harder to go out. I read somewhere that the way to treat phobias is with exposure. So the less Drew is exposed to the harsh realities of Spaceship Earth, the harder it’s going to be for her to resume earning a paycheque. Don’t like to think about what will happen when the cabbage runs out.
Maybe Lillian will stop going out, after she blows up the bank. She’ll make some chatroom buddies. Tora’s dad doesn’t talk to his family because he’s too busy texting buddies he’s never met, buddies in Australia and South Africa who can’t see how mean and ugly he is, and buy his line that he’s a devoted family man. Likewise Lillian’s chatroom buddies wouldn’t know what a fuck-up she is. Nobody could trace her tales about her fabulous hat-making business and hot sex life. Maybe that’s where it’s going to go when the oil runs out. We’ll all sit at home and spew lies into cyberspace.
16
Eleanor of Aquitane’s father decided to become a pilgrim. Up till then he’d just been another stinking-rich warrior type. After some battle or other, he decided God did exist. It was Christmas and he got this radical idea to send bread and sweetmeats to his starving serfs whose feet were wrapped in rags. Next he marched off to Spain to find God, leaving his pubescent daughters to be chewed up by various rival factions. Everybody wanted to marry them because they were stinking rich. Their mother was dead, of course, dying of grief after her precious only son fell off a cliff. So old Eleanor and her sister Petronella were rattling around various castles, shitting into moats or down shafts, pulling worms out of their eyes.
Vaughn’s been using my computer, connecting with other tree frogs. ‘Thank you,’ he says when he’s finished.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘I’m a little worried about Drew.’
‘Me too.’
‘She’s very different.’
‘She got stabbed.’ On the way back from the dentist there was the usual wacko in the subway talking to himself, only this nutter kept pointing at people and saying, ‘Bam. I got you.’
‘She talks to you,’ I say. ‘What’s she talk about?’
‘You. And me. She worries about us.’
‘Why?’
‘She thinks we’re lost.’
‘Unlike herself.’
He sits on my bed, which is a little disturbing. ‘Do you despise everyone?’ he asks.
‘Not everyone.’
‘Who don’t you despise?’
‘You. Yet.’
‘Give it time.’
‘Perhaps.’ He’s looking in the direction of my aborted play and I’m worried he’s reading it and figuring out just how sick I am.
‘It gets tiring, disdaining everything,’ he says. ‘I used to do it, it wore me out.’
‘So now you love everything.’
‘Not at all. I just look at things from a different angle. There’s always another angle.’ He stares at a picture I cut out of the paper for my mother/daughter scrapbook. It’s an African mother with aids holding her baby girl with aids. What’s astonishing about the photo is they look happy even though they’re dying. They smile into each other’s eyes.
‘If you look for the worst,’ Vaughn says, ‘you see the worst.’
‘What do you look for?’
He thinks for a minute. ‘Nobility.’
‘You mean when you’re up a tree, and rednecks are coming at you with chainsaws, you look for nobility?’
He shrugs. ‘They’ve all got families to feed.’
‘So it’s okay that your friend fell down and broke his back?’ He blinks a few times then stares into oblivion again. I don’t buy this saintly shit. He’s as a
ngry as the rest of us.
The rival factions try to kidnap Eleanor and force her hand in marriage. She longs for Daddy-O but he’s headed for Spain in peasant clothes. After walking for a week he runs out of bread and decides to eat a fish some fisherman is hawking. After frying it up and gulping it down he pukes his guts out. The enlightened king manages to scribble a note to his daughters telling them he thinks he didn’t cook the fish enough, and that if they read this letter it means he’s dead from rotten-fish poisoning. He tells them they mustn’t worry because his death will bring him closer to God. Eleanor inherits his massive fortune and becomes even more marketable as a wife. Her evil elders marry her off to Louis the Fat’s son who’s devout and thinks laughing is a sin so you can imagine what a riot he was. Eleanor, accustomed to dancing, sun and sea, soon discovered that damp old Paris was no party town. Just like Marie Antoinette, she was scorned for being different. Unlike Marie Antoinette, she didn’t take shit from anybody. She put up with Louis for a few years then had the marriage annulled. She married Henry II and went off with him to the crusades to kill some heathens. He became King of England and she started popping babies. Some of the children died, of course, but three of her sons survived and grew into rebellious teenagers who plotted to steal the throne from Henry. The King’s forces killed two of the treacherous sons, which left Eleanor’s favourite, Richard the Lionheart. Eleanor started plotting with Richard to overthrow Henry. The King lost patience with all this subterfuge and locked Eleanor up for twenty-six years. Richard the Lionheart was killed in some battle or other. You have to wonder what kept Eleanor going. You’d think if both your parents died when you were a kid and your husband locked you up for decades and slaughtered your sons, you’d want to pack it in. But old Eleanor lived to be eighty-something, which nobody did in those days. Guess she had a life purpose.
Even Bonehead shows up to audition. I keep him waiting in the rain, along with Kirsten and Nicole. I hand out pages I’ve formatted to look like a screenplay so the dummkopfs will feel like they’re auditioning for Spiderman Twelve or something. I told Drew that it’s all part of a school project. She just got a Harper’s in the mail with a headline about how nuclear energy is going to kill us so she’s busy reading. But Vaughn’s doing laundry, which is unfortunate. He catches a couple of thespians acting out the Mike-chasing-Lillian scene, shouting ‘Arriba! Arriba!’ and calling her pussy gato. Vaughn doesn’t laugh or look askance, just does the tree-frog stare. ‘Later,’ I tell him, waving my hand to suggest he squat elsewhere.
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