Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (17 page)

“Pretty soon they’ll be cloning us,” the waiter said, while refilling Eva’s water glass.

“Well, that’s a shame,” said Eva. “It’s dying.”

She did not know this to be true. She remembered reading something about sheep dying. Cloned cells were as old as the parent cells they’d come from. But she had read this in college, some years ago, and it was possible that things had changed since then. Progressed. She watched the kitten swatting at its toy, and bit into a piece of warm bread.
Run, damn you,
Eva thought. The kitten kept swatting at the string. The newsmen pretended to be awed. Eva winked at the waiter and asked for another drink. He nodded, taking the opportunity to glance down her dress.

 

 

The blender is
not just a blender. It cuts and dices and purees. Eva liked to cook, William had thought when he bought it. When she visited him, which she hadn’t recently, she opened his refrigerator and looked disappointed to find it full of take-out cartons. She’d walk him to the downtown grocery, though left to his own devices, if he shopped at all, it would be right down the block at C-Town, the fluorescent light and big red discount signs less disorienting than the cramped aisles, dark lighting, and six-dollar heads of lettuce at the store Eva preferred. She’d make him buy food for himself, remind him that it had been a long time since he couldn’t afford to eat better. By the time she’d finished filling baskets with dried pasta and fresh vegetables and jars of floating artichokes, they had so much food they had to take a cab back, food it took him months to entirely dispense with.

Back at his apartment, she’d make elaborate salads and stir-fried vegetables and pasta that always seemed to him a touch undercooked. She ’d cut vegetables into thin slivers and squirt them with fresh lemon and tahini. It was watching her cut that made him think of the blender a few months ago. He’d searched for the right one online, evaluating the photos and assorted specifics of blender after blender the way you might compare real estate or personal ads. It would make her life easier. Maybe she would cook at her apartment and think of him while pureeing soup. She would pick up the phone and invite him for dinner. He’d imagined arriving just in time for dinner, finding the table set with her mismatched and brightly colored dishes. He’d imagined eating salads with perfectly julienned carrots.

Thinking it through, though, even if Phil let him in, he should probably leave the blender. Contamination, and all that. Besides, Eva was the type to dwell on things: she’d look at the blender and start talking about the old apartment, or gentrification, or the way they were all slowly dying of chemical poisoning. She’d never cook with it. She’d put it in a closet, or she’d take it to her studio and mount it on one of her sculptures, fence it in with chicken wire. Better that he just buy her another and hope she didn’t remember it was a replacement for the first one he’d promised her. Besides, he’d be buying himself a whole new set of kitchen supplies anyway; if Eva would come to stay with him for a bit, she wouldn’t need her own. He’d make sure she had everything she wanted; the kitchen in the new place was small, but sunny, and he’d let her pick what it was she needed. Better that he wait to see what she said this afternoon before he gave her one more thing to cart to Brooklyn.

 

 

The waiter returned
with Eva’s second drink. Her father had told her this was a celebratory lunch, she reasoned, though he hadn’t said what it was a celebration for. Eva was still watching the television, but between the volume on low and the woman at the bar tipsy and giggling, she couldn’t hear a word. The president was mouthing something from behind a podium, and she supposed she didn’t care.

“What happened to our kitten?” the waiter asked.

“Dick Cheney ate him,” said Eva.

The waiter laughed.

“Are you still waiting to order?” He nodded toward the empty chair.

Eva blushed, realizing she looked for all the world like a woman being stood up for a lunch date. It had been so many years since Eva had been without at least one lover on call that she was surprised by how quickly awkwardness could come back to her. Now she had the sense again that anyone could just by looking at her see that she did not belong to anyone, anywhere. Until the last few years of her life, when she’d gone flinging herself from lover to lover like a pinball, she’d considered her not-belonging a badge of honor rather than a source of shame. It had been the rallying cry of her motley crew of high school friends—Kim, the purple-haired girl in tortoiseshell glasses and leopard-print leggings; Lenny, who’d known he was gay before most of them knew the word as anything but an all-purpose pejorative; Irene, the only other black girl in her suburban private school class—they’d sit together at lunch and watch the petty dramas of their classmates and say out loud,
Who wants that? Who wants those people, anyway?
But high school had turned into college and then the handful of years afterward—Kim was living in Cameroon with the Peace Corps; Lenny was a lawyer in San Francisco; and Irene was busy playing Gallant to Eva’s Goofus in their parents’ black professional circles—working for an investment bank, appearing regularly at AKA charity events in designer suits, her doctor fiancé at her side.

While all the others had turned into more self-possessed versions of themselves, Eva felt further than ever from her old self. Where once she’d taken her self-sufficiency for granted, somewhere in a dizzying string of morning afters she had started to feel her aloneness was a mark of incompletion, faintly spreading.

“I’m waiting for my father,” Eva said to the waiter, who seemed ready to snatch away the second menu. “He’ll be here. He’ll be late, but he turns up eventually.”

She pulled out her cell phone and feigned a search for a text message; the waiter wandered off and left her to her pretense of human interaction.

 

 

“Phil,” said William,
“I lived in that apartment for twenty years. I grew up in the Bronx. If breathing debris hasn’t killed me yet, it won’t, ever. Explain to me why the city that still hasn’t gotten all the asbestos out of its own damn public housing and rents the Bronx out for landfill space is suddenly so concerned about my lungs.”

“I’m not the city,” said Phil. “Explaining is not my job. You really just want a few photographs?”

“That’s all,” said William.

Phil motioned him down the block, and they began the short walk from Phil’s place to the old building. They cut through the City College campus, and when they got to the other side, Phil stopped for a coffee at the corner store and, while stirring three sugars into it, said with his back to William, “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“This irreplaceable stuff you need me to open the building so badly so you can get—why didn’t you take it with you when they told everybody to get what they were going to get and get out?”

William didn’t answer until they were halfway down the block. He considered pretending he hadn’t heard the question. Finally he let out a breath and said, “The truth is, I forgot it was there.”

William told himself that forgetting something didn’t mean you’d forgotten the person associated with it. His own mother, he reminded himself, never could keep up with photographs, wouldn’t have expected a drawing to last a week in a two-bedroom apartment with four kids in it, let alone tried to keep it for twenty years. But then, there were four of them, and she had two thirty-hour-a-week jobs, and still she checked in with them every night, still he remembered the cocoa-butter smell of her kissing him good night, and still he sensed that if something had been the only reminder of how things used to be, she never would have forgotten it—not even during all those trash-bag moves from place to place before they got settled. Yet, he couldn’t remember to take one box in a closet.

Phil cleared his throat; they were standing in front of the old apartment. Phil looked over his shoulder, as if any one of the kids on the steps across the street might be an undercover city housing operative, then released the chain and padlock from the door and stepped aside.

“I’m waiting for you for fifteen minutes,” he said. “Something falls on your head and knocks you out, I’m telling the cops you’re a fool and I don’t know you.”

William walked up the creaky staircase to the third floor, fast for the first two levels, then wondered if one shouldn’t walk gingerly in a building people kept threatening was going to fall. He went straight for the closet, left the blender in spite of himself, and pulled out the box in the back of the closet. Most of the things in the box used to be in his office, but when he’d moved up in the world—literally up—he’d brought the box home, instead of to the new place. In his new office, he had only two pictures of Eva, including the most recent picture she had given him: her in a park somewhere, smiling at he probably didn’t even want to know who, the streaks in her hair a shade of fluorescent red like the color of the lighted trim on an old jukebox.

But the old boxes, they were full of pictures of his daughter the way he remembered her. Debra had sent him one for every school year, plus one for every recital, plus an annual Christmas picture taken on the steps of the church Eva had refused to attend once she turned sixteen. Debra had mailed them meticulously to everyone at the holidays, letting Eva cut the wallet-sized photos along their white lines by herself (he could see the jagged edges on the early photos). He wanted to display these things again, he thought, to display them where Eva could see them.

From just after the divorce until Eva was a teenager, Debra had dropped her off one Friday afternoon each month, spent the weekend with friends in the city, and come to collect her Sunday morning. William still had seven years’ worth of those Friday-afternoon visits stored up in the box. Fridays must have been art days at school; he had all sorts of odd ceramic and papier-mâché animals, though he suspected he had only the ugly ones, the ones that Debra didn’t want. Dogs without legs and the like. He was more fond of the paper: years’ worth of elaborate abstract drawings Eva made by coloring over interoffice memos in red, black, and blue pen, the scribbled-on pages she had ripped out of coloring books and left with him.

He pulled out one crinkled page from the corner of the box where it had been jammed. It was from the year of the self-esteem books, the year after he’d showed up for Eva’s eighth-birthday party and found that the guests were all eleven-year-olds. Debra swore she’d get to the bottom of it, and indeed she had. Eva, it seemed, had begun spending lunch and recess with the fifth-graders, after the third-grade bully called her a nigger and told her she couldn’t sit at the lunch table.
William, we have to do something about this
, Debra had said. Her first solution was to take an early lunch hour and accompany Eva to the cafeteria every day, a plan that Eva had promptly vetoed. Next she swore they were moving.
Where,
William had asked,
to another planet?

In the end, Debra had purchased a year’s worth of coloring books with names like
I am Beautiful
and
Why I Love Myself
, the idea being that Eva could learn to be her own champion. He had tried to talk to Eva about all of it once, but all she would say was that she wished her mother hadn’t told the lunch monitors what was going on, because she liked the fifth-graders better. She had given him that page, the page she was coloring at the time. It began:
I am special because . . .
and had lines, presumably for listing the conditions of one’s specialness
.
Eva had ignored the lines and finished the sentence:
I am just special. I am special because I am just special.
There was Eva, he thought, not unkindly. There was Eva, and what did you do with a girl like that? William collected himself, sealed the box as best he could, then went downstairs to assure Phil he was uninjured, and hail the first cab going downtown.

 

 

Eva heard the
door jingle as her father walked into the restaurant. She took a sip of water so that he wouldn’t smell her breath and know that she’d been drinking. She wasn’t sure why she got that way around him, guilty about things she had no reason to be ashamed of, but that was how it was.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said, kissing the top of her head and sitting across from her.

She smiled across the table, then looked curiously at the box he had set down beside them. She had long ceased to be amazed by her father’s lateness, but admired that his reasons were always surprising, involving some unsuspected feat he had undertaken while most of the late people in the world were missing trains or sleeping through alarms.

“What’s in the box, Daddy?”

“In this box,” he said grinning, “are the fruits of a morning’s labor.” He told the story of his morning uptown.

“Poor Phil,” said Eva. “Bad enough his building got condemned, now he’ll have nightmares about ceramic animals living in it.”

“It was me the building almost fell down on,” her father said. “Don’t go feeling too sorry for Phil.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. Is everything OK? Mom said they weren’t going to let you get all of your things back.”

“Your mother knows better than to think I’d give up that easy. Like I was going to leave all this for the city to burn?” He reached into the box and pulled out the first solid object, a framed picture of Eva after a tap recital. Her hair was teased into glossy curls, and she was wearing the kind of stage makeup that makes children look garish up close.

“I’m going to put these up in the new—”

“God,” said Eva, staring at the photo, “I look like JonBenét Ramsey.”

She flinched at her own lack of social grace and continued, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean—What were you saying?”

But her father was saying nothing now. He looked at her, confused, and they let the awkward silence sit until the waiter came to rescue them.