And Then Things Fall Apart (7 page)

How am I supposed to digest that? What is family anyway but people who are always supposed to be there for you? Family should be rock solid, the earth beneath your feet, wind beneath your wings, and all that. What do I do, now that it's not? I'm dog-paddling here with the pox, just treading water until this sea of betrayal washes me back to shore so I can function like the earthbound mammal I am. I mean, Christmas is screwed. I can't imagine opening presents without my dad there, for Christ's sake. The very idea of never sitting at the same table again with both my mother and my grandmother just makes me want to scurry into the nearest crawl space with a bottle of pills. It's even harder to imagine my mom and dad not eating together, because of the restaurant. They are always around food or preparing food or delivering food. Thinking about my disintegrating family made me sob and sob and cry my freaking eyes out under the hundred-pound coverlet after watching JJ.

I wish this all wasn't happening, but it is. My dad drags his feet into Gram's house looking at the floor, as if that's where he's going to discover the secret to restoring everything to the way it used to be.

When I lie on the couch, he pats me on the head. Says, “Feeling any better, Keek?” not waiting for an answer. He stabs a fork into a bowl of cold pasta Gram left out for him
before she went to bed. He drinks a tall glass of milk alone at the kitchen table like a boy from the 1950s having an after-school snack, and I know for certain that my mother can't take him back. He has hurt us all too much. He seems smaller to me, his shoulders slumped, his face long. I want to pat him on the shoulder or crawl into his lap like a kid and ask him to read me a story with a happy ending. But he hasn't even sat me down for the big heart-to-heart that all guidance counselors recommend to shepherd your only child through a divorce, an event that will transform her entire life and affect all her future relationships. Like losing my virginity, my parents' splitting up is an event for which there will forever be a defined before and after. And that's not even factoring in the devastation of Amanda's faux friendship and betrayal, my own trust and love and sex issues with Matt, which Dad doesn't even
know
about. Or the sad fact that I have accidentally on purpose estranged myself from my true friends. And my mom isn't even here for me to cry to, talk with, etc.

You know how when you have the flu or are extremely tired it feels like there is melted lava in your bones and it hurts to move? Well, that is how I felt last night while I watched JJ for twenty minutes, daydreaming of justice. I imagined my mom and I were the plaintiffs. Dad and Amanda, the defendants. Gram, Nic, Matt, Jorge, Sebastian, and Mrs. Dougherty, my fifth-grade English teacher, were in the
audience, rooting for us. Amanda wore her most ridiculous and low-waisted polyester suit from H&M. Dad wore an apron covered in Italian beef juice over his suit—the suit he wore to my eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Mom and I looked good, really good, and my hair didn't have brown roots and I didn't feel sad or pitiful or furious or depressed, because Her Honor Judge Judy Sheindlin looked exactly like Sylvia Plath on the inside cover of
The Bell Jar
, Harper Perennial 2006 edition, with the pearls and the smile and the bun in her hair. JJ read Dad the riot act and she was merciless.

“How dare you?” she asked. “What kind of stinkin' thinkin' goes on in the back room of your restaurant? Don't spit on my cupcake and tell me it's frosting. Excuse me. I'm talking to you, Bozo.” Basically all the things I wanted to say to my dad but haven't. Everything was out in the open. Everyone knew what had gone on at the Dine & Dash. Everyone saw how Mom and I were women wronged and once this trial was over, once judgment was passed, fees were levied, sentences were meted out, we could all go home and start over again, like in movies when families enter the witness protection program.

“And you, the wrestler,” Judge Judy said suddenly, talking to Matt, “don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. You misrepresented yourself. You owe this girl an apology.” And just as I was about to address the court and make my
closing arguments, both sides of my abdomen seized up with cramps, and each and every single pock, and there are about a hundred, itched as if there were a thousand fleas all over my body.

And I realized that I felt especially bad not just because I, um,
have the chicken pox,
and my parents are
splitting up
and my
so-called boyfriend
seems to have
fallen off the face of the earth,
and someone I thought was a
friend stabbed
me in the back about a thousand times like a serial killer, and my mother is in California visiting a
dying
infant with a
lightbulb-shaped brain
—aka my brand-new
cousin
—but hooray, hooray, caloo, callay, I also have my freaking
period
.

Oh, the humanity.

Today did not begin well. First of all, I am weak. It's hard to support myself on what feel like linguini legs, let alone brush my hair or put on some lip gloss. Or talk on the phone. But Mom called, and I practically fell head over heels like a mouse in a cartoon to get to the telephone.

Hearing her on the phone was surreal. She was the bass player and backup singer in a band in college and has a really nice voice. Melodious, really, but I'm her daughter and am missing her so much that if I weren't so sick, I'd be embarrassed. I tried to be cool and not lay my itchy forehead on the desk and weep like a baby. She had a lot to tell me, and here is a list:

1. The weather in California is
hot,
and because of the smog, the sun doesn't really come out until noon in LA, which is especially depressing to
my mother at this particular moment in her life.

2. The baby has gained seven ounces since Mom got there, and the doctors are what they call “cautiously optimistic.”

3. The baby is a
girl
. (But of course she is. All of the boys in my family married in.)

4. Auntie has named her: Aurora. I know. Like freaking Sleeping Beauty, but whatev. It's sort of sophisticated, and maybe the
Sleeping Beauty
reference was totally on purpose, which just dawned on me this very second.

5. Aurora has jaundice. She is yellow and under lights. She has respiratory distress syndrome because her lungs weren't totally developed when she was born, but they should be, soon. And she has prongs smaller than TicTacs in her nostrils to keep the tubes supplying oxygen in place.

6. I've been asked to pray for Aurora, although everyone knows I'm not a pray-er. I will anyway.

7. Mom said two things while whispering as if she didn't want anyone to hear, and they were:

• Aurora looks like a boiled Cornish hen.

• How's your dad doing?

How's that for fancy tabbing and bulleting on this practically prehistoric typewriter? How's Dad doing? Why
should she care about how he's doing? And thanks, Mom, for replacing the Hobbit-in-formaldehyde image with a chicken-on-life-support visual. I refuse to freak out about the baby. If the baby dies, we might as well just pack it in and pull a Sylvia Plath, sticking our heads into our ovens and waiting for the eternal blackness. The worst thing is that there's nothing I can do to help, like give blood or make coffee or paint my aunt's toenails with yellow (Lemonade Stand by Your Man) and black (Caviar) nail polish so it looks like leopard spots, which I did that time we all went to visit her in California.

I mean, I was a little premature when I was born. Not by months or anything, but a few weeks. I was skinny, probably slightly chicken-esque. I made it, obviously, and Aurora will too. She's one of us. She has to live through this. If I have to, Aurora has to. The scary thing is, my mom cried a little bit before we hung up, a little sniffling and hard swallowing. A lot has been going on for a long time with our family, but I haven't heard her cry like that since the night Dad moved out. God. These parents of mine are worse than teenagers. Hello? Is this mike on? I am the teenager here. Me. With the
chicken pox
. And the
divorcing
parents, and the boyfriend from
Ragin Hormone High
. And
they
are crying. WTF?

I have a totally high tolerance for gore and otherwise vile things. They just don't skeeve me out like your average
girl. I'm not
into
gross things, like an eight-year-old boy who would be fascinated by pus and boogers and grasshopper-eating villagers in Mexico, okay? I'm more like an ER doctor or a combat medic. There is some philosopher we read about in English who said, “Nothing human is foreign to me,” or something like that (not like I can even Google it in this
Little House on the Prairie
), and I'm that way about body stuff. No problem with the dissection in biology; no problem cleaning up after Coffee when she had that intestinal reaction to her heartworm pills.

Once when my dad was really sick with the flu, he vomited every twenty minutes. My mom—you know, his then-wife—was physically unable to clean up after him without dry-heaving herself, so it fell to me. And it was no big deal. At the restaurant, when Jorge is busy busing tables, I'm often the one who hoses out the Dumpster, which actually gets hot from the anaerobic respiration of rotting food in the corners. I'm the one who is expected to clean up all the messes, and maybe I'm a little burnt out from it. Maybe I want a transfer. Maybe I'd like to give two weeks' notice. Maybe I need a freaking vacation and getting chicken pox was the only way to do it, people.

This is the long way of saying that it was not the blood that freaked me out. It was forgetting that I was expecting it. I was so sick, I thought I was eight instead of almost sixteen. Good God. I got up to go to the bathroom, and it was
as if an otter had been slaughtered in the center of my bed. I had to grab on to the dresser to keep from keeling over, but knocked the clock radio onto the floor in the process. Which is what brought Gram running.

Behold! The blood! And not just the big stain, but all the random polka dots of pox oozings. How disgusting. And do you know what my Grandma said?

She said: “Oh, my poor baby.” Which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me my whole life. At least that is how it felt. And she gave me a real hug as I swooned. She walked me to the bathroom, sat me on the toilet. She started the water for a bath—hot. She ripped open an Aveeno soothing bath treatment and poured it under the tap. (
Soulage l'irritation et la demangeaison
: Relieves itchy, irritated skin.
Sans parfum.
) She told me to raise my arms above my head, and she tugged my nightgown, one of Matt's giant T-shirts, over my head and then pulled my blood-soaked underwear down to my ankles and helped me step out of them.

These were things that my father could never in a million years have done to help me. It was the most personal and private thing I have ever done with anybody, even my mom. Even Matt. I was so weak and helpless, it didn't even occur to me to be embarrassed or modest. Of
course
Gram was once fifteen. Of
course
she has seen worse. Of
course
she loves me more than she says out loud.

I stepped over the edge of the porcelain tub and held
on to her hands as I lowered myself into the milky water like a lasagna noodle. The itching stopped. Ribbons of pink swirled up, and I let the steam settle on my face. Gram kissed the top of my head and told me to lean forward. She dunked a washcloth into this slightly disgusting, yet oddly cleansing, hot water and rubbed it over my back and rib cage and neck, which felt so good I thought I was going to pass out.

In
The Bell Jar
Esther is totally into baths, especially when she is miserable and lonely. When she is nervous or depressed, she hunches down below the water line and waits for the bath to cure her. My bath didn't really cure anything, but it was, in its way, totally transformative.

So when I stood to get out and blood poured down my wet legs, I didn't really care. I was totally without shame or anything. Gram used a towel to dry me off and found a fresh pair of my underwear and a menstrual apparatus that she said she'd been holding on to “for a moment just like this.” Even though I felt like crap, we both stood there giggling our heads off. Clean itch-free body, clean nightgown, clean sheets, two Tylenol, and I slept for fourteen hours.

In.

A.

Row.

Ahhhhhhh.

Last semester, right before my life went all Bell Jarian and we were a starry-eyed and crazy-in-love new couple, Matt made fifteen hundred dollars by drinking revolting things at lunch. Wrestlers have to make weight all the time, and like everything else body related, Matt was extremely talented at knowing how to keep things in his stomach and how to get them out.

It started right before winter break. The guys were all sitting around eating their stupid protein bars and salads with chicken and ice-cream cups and whatever else wrestlers eat the week before nationals. Matt had a tall glass of milk, not glass-glass but plastic, the pebbled-shower-door-looking kind. They were impersonating Coach Pernaki and his insistence on healthy weight maintenance. “Try a tofu, fruit, and yogurt smoothie before a workout, son. Add a raw egg for extra protein.”

Then someone on the team said, “A little ketchup, for
stamina,” and squirted ketchup (spelled “catsup” on the packets at school, which totally infuriates me) into Matt's milk.

“Yeah, and Italian dressing!” Into the milk it went. And on and on. Peanut butter, Orange Crush, gravy from the Salisbury steak.

“Drink it, Matt,” Earl the Squirrel said. (Who else would want to see that?) “Five bucks you can't.”

“Make it ten.”