Dead End Gene Pool (26 page)

A thump on the door brought me up sharply.

“Oi! Yank! D’you fall in, then?” called Chris. I hurriedly wiped up and dashed out. He grinned at me but then reeled back dramatically and clutched his nose.

“It wasn’t me!” I squeaked.

“Right,” he laughed, and continued to hold his nose as he entered.

I wilted down the stairs. As I entered the living room, Mrs. Doran pressed a large mug of milky coffee into my hands. I looked at it with trepidation, not knowing then that it would be the first of ten thousand four hundred and fifty something cups of instant Nescafé that I would consume under that roof. I was offered a cigarette, which I declined, and then a seat, and then a biscuit. For a good hour I sat on a sprung couch amid a pile of old papers and
Radio Times
magazines and quietly took the place in. The boys from the back of the car had invited themselves for supper and were now going judgmentally through a shelf of LPs under the windows. The working-class, beer-bellied man of the house sat next to the television, smoking and flipping through the evening papers, his eyes up and down on everybody in the room, doling acerbic one-liners out sparingly and to great effect. A dog that looked like a stegosaurus lay with its armored head on the master’s feet.

Trying to absorb the dialogue gave me vertigo.

“. . . If Manchester don’ bloody win next week . . .”

“Shut up, you lot! I can’t hear the bleedin’ news!”

“. . . And the stupid git carried on about the Magna Carter until break . . .”

“Is everyone rich in America, then?”

“Bloody hell . . . Granny’s back up in the loo again . . .”

“Ma, Jo stole my nail varnish. Ma . . .”

“. . . Oh, don’t get your bloody knickers in a twist, Jane . . .”

“D’you know the Monkees, then?”

“. . . and that fuckin’ Wilson, you wait till the next election . . .”

“Does everyone talk like you in America, then?”

“Oh, leave the girl alone! It’s not your fault you speak funny, is it, ducks?”

“No, it is NOT my turn to do the washing up, cuntface.”

“Dad, Granny’s screamin’ bloody murder . . .”

“But why can’t I leave school at fifteen? It’s no bloody use to me . . .”

“. . . with his willie stuck in the effing milk bottle . . .”

“No, YOU deal with her—she’s not my bloody mum—”

“. . . he got it at the beach fight in Brighton over the weekend . . .”

This is bloody brilliant,
I said to myself, trying on Josephine’s favorite expression. If I’d wanted to remain silent, it would have been a snap; you had to fight to get a word in edgeways with this lot. But unaccustomed levels of caffeine opened the linguistic floodgates, and I began to rattle on about the number of radio stations on US airwaves, and frozen food aisles in supermarkets the size of rugby fields, and the proliferation of McDonald’s and Hot Shoppes and Burger Kings and Roy Rogers and Howard Johnsons and White Castles and Kentucky Fried Chickens, and how many Ferraris my dreadful stepfather had and how it did less than nothing to make him appealing.

“We’ll take you in as a lodger in exchange for one of those cars then, right?” joked Mr. Doran carelessly. I prayed he didn’t catch the sudden welling of my eyes. If only. I was happy for the first time in eons, happy and stupidly full of hope. And then I remembered that I had my own puny family and they had no idea where I was.

“I think I better use a phone,” I said to Mrs. Doran. She told me theirs (their
single
theirs) was in the kitchen. I thought about how my grandparents had his ’n’ her four-line telephones on each side of their beds, and next to the toilets in their bathrooms, and how there were two on either side of the sofas in each of the living rooms of their four houses. I thought about how many bathrooms there were in each of those houses, and felt ashamed. In the New York apartment alone there were fourteen.

The phone was answered on the first ring: “Beer here.”

“Oh—uh, hi,” I said. “I’m, um, just calling to let you, um, know that I’m okay and, um, I’ll be home soon, after I have supper which, um, the Dorans have, um, in-invited me to, um, stay for.”

There was a silence, and then my stepfather responded, “Do you have any idea how many
ums
you have just said?”

I was pretty well used to this, he having been married to my mother for four years now, so I told him I had no idea, and that I would be taking the bus home.

“No,” he said, with the kind of heaviness the air has when thunderheads are getting ready to crash about. “One of us will collect you.”

I gave him the Dorans’ address, hung up, and began to fret over which was going to be more embarrassing—being picked up by Hitler, or by Barbarella.

The latter, as it turned out.

Josephine and I were taking a magazine sex quiz when the doorbell rang. Jane, the youngest, scrambled to pull open the front door. There stood
ma me
e
, resplendent in a white leather miniskirt and matching vest, and thigh-high wet-look vinyl boots that revealed a good four inches of her bare orange thigh. A silver Dino Ferrari was inefficiently parked with one wheel on the curb behind her. Jane gaped. Everyone in the living room rushed to see the apparition, and I felt my lunch percolate near the region of my colon. Lowering her oversized sunglasses, my mother said, “May I come in?” That was my cue to stream up the stairs to the fortunately empty bathroom.

When I came back down ten minutes later, my mother had not disappeared, but was sitting in Mr. Doran’s armchair with a glass of water and a napkin folded on her naked knee. Everyone was sitting up straight, minding their Ps and Qs and trying not to stare. My mother was chattering away about her upcoming trip to the Canary Islands, and how these fabulous new bikinis were designed to let sun in so that you could get an allover tan without being nude, and how she had just been accepted to Christ College at Oxford University. With her phony accent, she sounded like Churchill doing a drag act.

“Oxford. How luffly,” said Mrs. Doran with a tremendous tick of her nose and upper lip.

“Yeah. But if you don’t mind me askin’, what on earth for?” said Mr. Doran. He wore a bemused expression, like someone half-tolerating the parlor tricks of a pomeranian.

“Hell no, I don’t mind! I’m getting my doctorate in numismatics,” my mother explained with a toss of her hair. Her roots were showing and I couldn’t wait to tell her.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Chris politely. His pinky crooked out daintily from a coffee mug that depicted Sneezy and Bashful in an act of homosexual congress.

“It’s the study of coins. In my case, ancient Greek coins. I’ll be doing my dissertation on a particular hoard from the island of Aegina. It’s absolutely fascinating because some of the coins have tortoises with three marks on their backs and some of them have four, though they are of the same denomination, which has led experts to conjecture—”

“Time to go,” I yipped, snatching up my things and heading for the door.

“I thought you were going to stay for supper,” Josephine said. “We can give you a lift home, can’t we, Dad?”

“Well, I am a bit hungry,” my mother began. I pushed her rudely out the door and down the uneven sidewalk and wrestled the driver’s side door of the Ferrari open with so much force it nearly came off its shiny little Italian hinges. I practically threw her in. A small crowd had grouped themselves around the car, but they took off when they saw the lightning bolts shooting out of my eyes.

After a couple of failed attempts, my mother got the engine going and we moved off.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “Those are MY friends and you are NOT welcome there.”

“Oh, poppycock,” my mother retorted, missing the gate on the gearbox for third and grinding the lever back into first. The engine nearly leapt out of its compartment in anguish.

“I’m serious,” I said. “You leave them alone. If you don’t, I’ll dump out every bottle of Bacardi I find from now until I leave home for college.”

We had stopped at a zebra crossing to let a group of ladies in blue raincoats and orthopedic sandals cross. My mother had her hands on the steering wheel in a death grip. In a quiet voice she said, “But I’m lonely too.”

Poof!
I made the sudden (unwelcome) sensation of compassion disappear. “Get your own friends,” I said coldly, and turned my face to the window to hide my shame. The car bucked into first and stalled, and we sat there.

Christ. I finally get a life, and I can’t shake her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t really, but honestly, it didn’t cost me much.

“Yeah, well I’m sorry too.” After that, neither of us said anything, we just stared at the black leather dash and the swoop of sparkly platinum metal beyond it, until finally she restarted the engine and turned the car around, bumping up over the center island and scraping the low front of the undercarriage with a sickeningly expensive sound, and drove me back to the house on Stanley Road. I told her I’d be home by ten and climbed out.

The Dorans were having a meal my mother would have appreciated, if not partaken of: fried eggs, fried streaky bacon, fried sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, deep-fried chips, and tinned beans. We ate on our laps in the living room with the telly on and the wireless squawking in the kitchen. Mr. Doran and Chris and his friends chain-smoked while they ate. Jane had a crying fit because she felt ignored. She would remedy that situation in the not so distant future by giving birth to her first child at fifteen.

Mr. Doran ran me home in his battered Rover. He dropped me at the end of my street as I requested, too embarrassed for him to see the house I lived in. It was modest by American standards, but a mansion compared to the street of dismal houses and tiny littered yards where I’d just been.

“Night, then, Yank,” he called from the rolled down window. His long gray face, his eyes narrowed from the smoke of a No. 6 permanently hooked in his mouth, would become unimaginably dear to me. But I had only an incandescent inkling of that as I hurried down the dark street to my mother’s house.

 

 

 

THIRTEEN WAS
HUGE
for me. I finally got to see a grown man naked, and I fell in love—although not with the same person. The naked man was my stepfather, and seeing his fruit bowl only increased my aversion to him.

It was late at night and I’d been up reading
Forever Amber
. Ravenous from all that wanton behavior, I decided to make some toast and slather it with butter, Restoration London style. My room was adjacent to the kitchen, which was extremely convenient for nocturnal refreshment, and at night the kitchen became an integral part of my bedroom suite. So you can imagine my irritation when I opened up the door to see my stepfather bare-assed in front of the refrigerator.

I had to stuff my hand in my mouth to keep from screaming. Apart from my two brothers, the
David
was the only male anatomy I was familiar with, and his was the aesthetic penis of high art—a tidy marble package crowned with a pyramid of tastefully coiled tendrils. On backlit view in front of the Tupperware and cottage cheese and orange juice was a limp sea cucumber, one of those nasty, squirting, shell-less things that untalented fisher-persons like myself are forever pulling out of the ocean in a clump of dark, stringy kelp. No wonder my mother hit the Bacardi.

My stepfather was busy chugging a bottle of milk so I knew he hadn’t seen me, even though his wandering left eye seemed to stare out from beneath the Adolfian thatch of hair. I watched until he drank to the end of the bottle. He replaced the foil top, leaving an inch of spittle-laced backwash for someone’s cereal in the morning (my brother’s, because I wouldn’t tell him), farted robustly, and exited the kitchen. I closed my bedroom door on feathered hinges, leapt into bed, and yanked the covers up over my head. My appetite had vanished, probably for life.

One week, sixteen hours, and twenty minutes after my conception of idealized manhood was shattered (teenaged diaries are all about detail), I sat at the kitchen table slogging through a government-issued copy of
The Merchant of Venice
—in German, which made it even more gripping, if possible. My mother leaned against the sink in the late afternoon sunlight, reverentially bathing a head of jet-lagged iceberg lettuce like it was the Christ child. Her recent discovery of the Food Halls at Harrods—and, consequently, other long lost friends from departed shores: Tab, Rice- A-Roni, Chef Boyardee, Chun King, and Carnation Instant Breakfast—had so appeased her, she’d cut back on her dosage of Miltown by 200mgs.

A mound of raw chopped beef lay on a piece of butcher paper beside the sink. From time to time my mother would pinch off some of the meat and dunk it into what looked like floor sweepings.

“How the bejesus have I survived for two years without Lip-ton onion soup mix? And
dreamy
iceberg,” she said, smiling beatifically down at the puny lettuce on the drain board. Slicing a minuscule wedge, she spooned some gelatinous dressing over it and, shuddering with pleasure, took a bite. I flinched from habit as her teeth rang annoyingly on the tines of the fork.