Dora: A Headcase

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  It’s just a television.

  “I’m at a Holiday Inn just outside of Kelso.”

  “Oh,” I go.

  Then it’s just us sucking in and blowing out air into our cellphones. I can hear her breathing. She can hear mine. We don’t breathe alike, as near as I can tell. I try to match hers. A kid thing.

  “Why Holiday Inn?” I go.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “How was Vienna?” I say.

  Dead air. Television backdrop.

  “I have something for you,” she says.

  My voice comes out all in a rush. “For the longest time I thought it was the word ‘shoe,’ and the word ‘burt.’ Isn’t that dumb? I used to imagine a guy with great footwear and beautiful hands … Isn’t that the stupidest fucking thing you’ ve ever heard?” I say into my iPhone. I look at Obsidian. In her eyes there is something like a mirror. I see a girl leaving my own face, and someone I’ve never known replacing her.

  “Room 324,” the tin mother goes.

  “Tomorrow is my birthday,” I say, but my voice is unrecognizable to me.

  “I know, Ida,” she whispers, signaling through the flames.

  34.

  THEY DON’T TELL YOU LOVE CAN SNEAK UP ON YOUR ASS and sucker punch you.

  When my mother opens the door of room 324 of the Holiday Inn she looks like what Catherine Deneuve would look like if Catherine Deneuve loved you unconditionally. And if Catherine Deneuve loved you unconditionally? Trust me, you’d swoon.

  Catherine Deneuve’s real name was Catherine Fabienne Dorléac.

  I fight the swoon with all my might. I grab Obsidian’s hand so we’re two-fisted. My mother stares at our hands and takes it in. She looks up and collects Ave Maria and Little Teena in her gaze, too. She stands aside and lets us all in to the hotel room like it’s in her nature. The room smells like a mother’s perfume, a little like vodka, a little like bath salts. Clothes sit neatly folded in a black suitcase – the lid open. Toiletries stand guard over by the sink, neatly. The carpet is the color of dirt. The bedspread and drapes pattern a combination of dirt and ochre colors. There is a painting of horses on the wall. A crappy painting. The television bubbles. News. When I look at the bed I see a slightly rumpled hollow where a single woman has been there watching TV and drinking alone. I don’t see any pill bottles but they must be here somewhere.

  “Oh GAWD this room is so dreamy!” Ave Maria chirps, throwing herself onto the mother bed, caving in instantaneously. Typical.

  My mother mans the remote control and points our attention in the direction of the nightly news. It’s us. The nightly news is us. Sort of. There’s been an arrest of a well-known psychoanalyst. A missing girl. A fire in a Seattle condo. An incident at a juvenile halfway house up north. The news reporter on scene at the halfway house is interviewing an eye-witness. There is a short clip of Ted. “MAWR,” he bellows, and sucks his hand. Local authorities are investigating.

  Gee, other than that, we’re free and clear.

  “Christ,” Little Teena says.

  “There’s no mention of Marlene,” I say to Little Teena. “Or the showbiz goons.”

  “I noticed,” he goes.

  Obsidian comes up behind me and spoons me and says, “She got away, I’m sure of it.”

  My stomach feels pretty much like I swallowed cement and my bunghole is forever encased in stone. I feel dizzy. I sit on the edge of the dirt brown and ochre bed and put my head between my legs. What are they going to do to “Ted?” Is Sig in jail? And where in the hell is Marlene? Alive? Dead? All because of me? “Fucking fuck …” I exhale.

  A hand rests on my shoulder. I clamp on it – thinking it’s Obsidian – but right away I feel the wedding ring and elastic skin so soft skin and realize it’s her. My mother.

  “Ida,” she says.

  I look up and straighten up and shoot a defiant look upwards. “My name is Dora now,” I say.

  “I see,” she says. Not even fazed.

  “Dora, then.”

  I stand up and pace the room. I don’t look at her. I try not to smell her skin lotion or bath salts or vodka breath, all of which feel familiar as a teddy bear to me. I try not to want to touch her waves of hair. I try not to remember sitting in her lap and wanting to die there. “I have a plan,” I stammer. “Obsidian and I just need to get to the airport is all. We have … wigs.”

  “Wigs?” My mother crosses her arms over her chest. She is wearing a black cotton turtle neck and black straight leg jeans. She looks like a pretty middle-aged Catherine Deneuve spymom. “Dora,” she says, clearing her throat, “may I speak to you alone? In the bathroom?”

  Ave Maria grabs a hotel pillow and covers her head and ears with it. Little Teena proceeds to fix himself a drink. Obsidian looks at me with “if you want we can run” in her eyes.

  Every part of me doesn’t want to speak alone in the bathroom. Except for of course my entire self, who just once wants more than oxygen to get to be alone with this beautiful spymom. To bury my face in her chest. To have her hold me and rock me like a tiny fucking baby and sing to me and FUCK. GODDAMN IT. GET A GRIP, PUSSY.

  “Fine. Whatever.” I stomp into the bathroom.

  Once we’re in there, my mother unbuttons her pants and pulls her pants and underwear down and pees. A great waterfall of gushing piss. I mean my mom’s vag is in full view. I stare at the sink.

  “Oh gaaaaawwwwwwwd,” she moans. “I held that too long.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek so I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is doesn’t that feel kind orgasmically good?

  My mother finishes peeing and stands up. The room smells briefly like very pretty bums. Then she flushes and sits on the edge of the bathtub. I lean against the closed bathroom door with my arms crossed over my chest. I stare at the shower head.

  “Ida – I mean, Dora,” she goes, “this is a little awkward.”

  No shit.

  I sneak a peek at her face briefly. She has mother worry eyes and eyebrows. Her mouth purses. She blinks. Long eyelashes on a blonde are always beautiful. I quickly stare at the toilet paper roll, then feel dumb, shift my gaze to the mirror. That way I can look at her without looking at her. “You can tell them to release the Sig,” I go. “No one outside of my immediate family has done anything bad to me,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  She closes her eyes. She sighs. Her sigh has years in it.

  “Look,” she says, and her voice is tired out. She rubs her temple. She opens her eyes. I’m still looking in the mirror to see her. She stands up. Her hair smell wafts between us. Goddamn it. It’s the kind of hair smell that makes you want to bury your face in the waves.

  “Too much has happened for me to try to change it. I mean you and me. You’re all grown up.” When she says “you and me” she waves her hand in the air between us like she’s shooing away flies. When she says “you’re all grown up” she puts her hands on her knees and spanks her kneecaps twice.

  Something at the corner of my left eye aches.

  She stares at her knees. “I blew it. I know it.”

  My throat squeezing.

  “You know, when I was pregnant with you, I left your father.”

  Breath jacked. Lock jawed. Wha-wha-whut?

  “I mean I thought I would leave him.” She looks up at me. “I came to this Holiday Inn. This room. I laid down on that bed,” she points to the bathroom wall. On the other side Ave Maria is probably laying right where she did. “I drank an entire bottle of vodka, and I put an entire bottle of Xanax in my mouth. The television was on. I rested there like that for some time. Some of the Xanax dissolved and went down my throat. I put my hands on my gigantic bare belly. You were in there. You kicked.”

  She laughs that ironic kind of laugh people do when they don’t believe what they just said and closes her eyes. “You kicked really hard. Hard enough so that I yelped. Like you were already wearing your Doc Martens. It was just so obvious you were pissed off at me.” She laughs again. “
I spit the pills out onto the floor. Then I slept.”

  If I have feet, I don’t feel them. Or shins or knees. Even my hands and face feel like feathers. Still, I don’t move my eyes off of the mirror. Even though they’ve gone all watery blur, I don’t blink. I got no words for this. What sentence do you make when your mother just told you she tried to off herself with you waiting inside her belly for your ticket out?

  “Dora, I want to tell you something important.”

  Really. Great timing.

  “You aren’t going to like it, but it will be true anyway.”

  Awesome.

  “Dora, you’re gonna have to learn to choose your battles. You have to stop fighting everything, and learn when to fight something that matters.”

  Part of me wants to punch her straight in the kisser. You’ve been NUMBO for seventeen years and NOW you want to deliver some sage advice? Like we’re a mother and daughter? I clench my jaw and unclench it and clench it and unclench it. Wish I could put something in my mouth and bite the fuck out of it.

  “S’that it?” I ask.

  “Oh fuck it,” she says. She stands up, turns away from me toward the shower curtain, then turns back. It’s just that,” and she reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. “This is for you,” she says, holding the piece of paper out to me. “It’s why I went to Vienna. Somebody died. Somebody you never knew, but I did. At least for a while. My … my mother.”

  For about thirty seconds I just let her hand and the piece of paper sit suspended in the air between us. A mother, a daughter, a piece of paper. It’s the most large thing that’s passed between us in a very long time. Maybe ever. On the other side of the wall Ave Maria is trying to match television commercial jingles with her voice. Finally I take the piece of paper.

  You know what? It’s not a piece of paper. It’s a big bank check. Powder blue. A check for $1.7 million. You heard me. Made out to Ida Bauer. My birth name. Whoever she is.

  Money. Again. Sig. Silverfuck. Now her. Is everything there is about being a girl in this world about money or genitals? Is life just a giant series of transactions?

  My breathing goes weird. The check looks like a forgery. A cartoon. A graphic art project. A Xerox. A reproduction.

  Anything but real. I quickly crumple it up hard in my hand and pop it in my mouth. My mother doesn’t flinch. I stare at her staring at me in the mirror. Inside my mouth the crumpled up fortune tastes like wood pulp and ink. It fills my mouth and jabs at the flesh of my cheeks. I turn and look at my mother head on.

  She tilts her head and crosses her arms over her boobs. She sighs. She has the hint of a smile. “She wanted you to have the silver set as well,” my mother says, “but I suspect you’d just bend all the heads over or something equally … imaginative.”

  I can’t help it. It makes me laugh. All those spoons with their heads bowed like dutiful fucked up silver nuns. I reach down into my kneesock and pull out the spoon I nearly always have with me. Against my skin. I hold it up between us. On the convex side is my elongated spooky looking head. On the concave side is hers. We both smile. Alike almost. Only my smile has paper where teeth should be, like when you put an orange peel there. I bend the head of the spoon over and hand it to her.

  “I’ll treasure it,” she says, maybe kidding.

  I turn back to the mirror. I spit the crumpled up $1.7 mil out of my mouth into the bathroom sink. I uncrumple it. I stare at it in the sink. It’s damp, but salvageable. I don’t mean the check just. I mean my life.

  “Happy birthday, Dora,” my mother says, as she almost seems to move toward me kinda like we might embrace.

  Epiloguish Thingee

  HOSPITALS. FUCK’EM. I’VE HAD MY FILL, I CAN TELL YOU.

  Same creepy fluorescent lighting, same odd assortment of losers waiting in earth-toned little hell rooms, same bizzaro industrial floor cleaner smell mixed with sweat and blood. Flocks of fucky doctors and nurses milling about. Ave Maria is sitting across from me in a – you guessed it, Naugahyde chair – swinging her legs up and down. Little Teena is thumbing through an issue of American Sailing. I’m making my signature fingernail patterns in a Styrofoam coffee cup.

  We’re waiting for Marlene to come out of surgery. They won’t let us anywhere closer because we’re not family.

  There’s a lot I could tell you about that word family.

  A month after the Holiday Inn episode me, Ave Maria, and Little Teena ate lunch in the restaurant on top of the Space Needle. Courtesy of Ave Maria’s mom. All three of us high as kites, higher even than the Space Needle. Ave Maria pitched bites of food with a fork over her tipsy mother’s head, Little Teena wore a fez, Obsidian ordered some dessert on fire and for the first time I noticed that the view up there? It’s kind of awesome. If you walk around the thing in a circle, and you can avoid the freaky vertigo because of the slightly-slanted walkway and the ever-so-slowly-spinning disk, it’s downright gorgeous. The sound. The mountains. The city. All the neighborhoods and sigh and bulge of life.

  I ordered lamb for lunch. I’ve never eaten lamb. I feel bad for eating baby sheep but FUCK it’s good. Like melt-in-your-mouth good. And after two martinis, who gives a shit about PETA? It was kind of a going away party. Ave Maria is going to Yale. You heard me. What? I told you they were rich. I do wish I could plant a nanny cam in her room just to see how the snooty snoots react to her. Little Teena got a paid gig down in San Francisco to tickle the ivories at a gay jazz club. I know! Life is good.

  About our … teen drama, well, I already told you: wigs, work. No one ever had any idea who we were. Or are. There is not surveillance camera footage. No evidence we were ever there. Except some cockamamie story the three men who were arrested told.

  The three stooges, A.K.A. the publicity agent and his goons, were arrested for attempted kidnapping. Turns out Marlene was in the trunk of their car. When they ran out that night to chase us and discovered the Obsidian-slashed tires, Smiley called the cops from inside the halfway house and enunciated perfectly into the phone that three perpetrators who had killed the intake guy at the halfway house also had some big black tranny in the trunk of their car and they were trying to escape. “Murderous perverts,” Ted kept saying into the phone. “Preying on helpless trapped children!” But when the cops arrived, Smiley just went back to his tard shtick.

  There was no record of Obsidian ever having existed.

  Someone in the hospital waiting room farts. I look at Little Teena. He nods his head up and down in the universal yup,’twas I gesture, then says, “Why does everything about sailing sound like gay sex?” He looks up from his magazine. “Check it: able bodied seaman. Aft bow spring line. Anchor ball. Anchor chocks. Barrelman. Back and fill. Bimini top. I mean Christ, it sounds like some kind of SM play party.”

  Ave Maria laughs like a shy little girl and covers her face. Then she goes, “Whoa,” solemnly. She holds her arms out in front of her. Her wrists have brown and yellow and blue bruises on them. Faint, but there. From me. “Aren’t those the coolest bracelets in ever?”

  I love her I love her I love her.

  I look down at my dirt water coffee cup. In spite of myself, I’ve carved a fingernail heart.

  Obsidian and me, we’re having an A-frame built in the woods near a crazy lesbo aunt she has who got booted off the reservation for constantly beating all the men at poker and making her own peyote-laced hooch. I don’t mind telling you, that hooch is tasty. And whirly. We might expand that into a business.

  I’d tell you where exactly but frankly I don’t want to talk to people much for a while. It’s near the Nisqually wildlife refuge though. Bats, rabbits, beavers, bears, foxes, coyotes, salmon, harbor seals, and all manner of birds … I had no idea how cool animals were until I met them. The wingnut lesbo aunt, who isn’t wingnut at all but we help her keep the story up – she gave me a present. It’s a sealskin hat. It kind of looks like a union soldier hat only you know, seal skin-y. She says the seal is my animal totem.

&nb
sp; Animal totem, huh? I knew a guy once who told me all about totems … what’s your feeling about rats? Crazy lesbo aunt said they were sacred but gross. I said, well is there some kind of ritual or prayer thing I should do? Can I switch being from whitey space city and become part of your tribe? She looked at me like I was a tard. “This isn’t fucking Dances with Wolves, kimosabe, but it’s a good hat in the rain,” and she laughed, and I laughed, and Obsidian laughed, and we drank whirly wine and can I just say, laughing is cool.

  As for my girl wall story, well, I remixed it and turned it into a bitchin’ little art installation called: “Dora: A Headcase.” You have to enter a Dora room lined with pink plastic and vag fur and Vaseline in order to experience it. When you get inside, the walls are words. There are stories about everything that’s happened to me in my dumb little life. There are lines from sex books and lines from bands and lines I collected in bathroom stalls all over the city. And letters to Francis Bacon and even advice here and there to Sig, like “Sig, you gotta decrease your douchehood next time you get a girl client.” On the ceiling of the girl room is a film with the most bitchin’ soundscape you will ever hear in your life playing in a loop. The sounds of boots on pavement and wind and rain banging the cord of a flagpole. The sound of dog breath and Lexus engines and bum pee and violin concertos all mixed together. Ave Maria’s high notes and things waitresses at Shari’s yelled at us and falling glass. The sound of water. Of a metal bar rolling on the concrete of a parking garage. Birds and electricity hum. Sound is everywhere besides in your voice.

  I won a buncha arty awards for it. Very cool.

  The hospital waiting room smells like air freshener and hand sanitizer and plastic valves mixed with Little Teena’s fart. Ave Maria stands up and says, “I’m going to sing a hospital sex change song!”

  Some old bag walks by right when she says that and makes a raisin-faced grimace at us.

  “Bite me,” I say. The old bag shuffles away like someone bit her ass.

  “Good christ,” Little Teena says, and goes back to his magazine.