Dead End Gene Pool (35 page)

Slouched in a high-backed Hitchcock chair at the drop-leaf kitchen table, I was watching more than listening. My mother’s figure had taken on that melting candle wax effect women get in their fifties, when the soft parts begin oozing downward. She had given up her extreme dietary vigilance when she’d married a man that could drink with her. The calories of undisguised boozing, and a more sedentary lifestyle, had taken their toll. Unbelievably, she now had a stomach that no amount of sucking in could invert. I would have been overjoyed to witness the decay of her famous physique if it hadn’t brought so much fallout on me. Ever the competitor, it drove her crazy that I was young and that my skin still had elasticity.

“Have some,” she said, putting the bread down on the counter. “You can work it off with all that sex I’m sure you’re enjoying.” She moved closer. (Warning signal.) “Goodness, Toots. I never had wrinkles like that at your age.”

We were saved by the entry of the contractor. “Sun’s over the yardarm,” he said, reaching for the scotch.

My mother was right about the perks of Burdenland. They were pretty great.

On the second of January each year, my grandparents headed south to Hobe Sound. Over Presidents’ Weekend, I opted to take a break from New York’s kick-ass winter and flew down for a visit. I had issues with the Jupiter Island Club, starting with the dress code. All that Lilly Pulitzer, plus the frogs and whales and Nantucket red pants and kelly green everything, the Sperry Top-Siders and the Pappagallo shoes, the bleeding madras jackets and upturned Lacoste collars—they all made me queasy. It also bothered me that nothing bad could happen to you there (other than alcohol poisoning), and that the speed limit was ten miles an hour, and that if you exceeded it, one of the invisible policemen patrolling the tiny enclave would spring from the sea grape bushes, pull you over, and ask you whose house you were staying at. Then they’d let you go, even if you were doing ninety. I hated it that the worst thing you could do was to write
penis
in a sand trap on the golf course, or swim in the ocean when the red flag was up, or not attend the tea dances. And I loved it that when you were being snubbed, you received a black sweater on your doorstep. Try as I might, I could never get one.

In spite of all that, the island was lovely, as untainted and lush and picturesque as a collective billion dollars could make it. My grandparents’ house was built on two acres of the most overcultivated land this side of England. The house faced west over the Intracoastal Waterway with a view of spectacular sunsets that became positively trippy after a couple of Juan’s famous daiquiris. Everywhere orchids cascaded from the trees, and near the pool an aviary housed my grandmother’s hyacinth macaws and leadbeater cockatoos. (They tried flamingos one year, but they kept flying away.) The house was large and vaguely tropical, with lots of French doors and louvered windows. There was a courtyard on the west side, with a tree topiaried to look like a giant aspirin tablet, and a pool and guesthouse on the east. The lawn that ran down to the Intracoastal had towering, root-strung mangrove trees that made my macabre heart go pit-a-pat when I saw them in the moonlight.

Mr. Opie, the caretaker, picked me up from the West Palm Beach airport in my grandfather’s 6.3, which was surprisingly intact. Mr. Opie was eighty-nine, and a dwarf, which made him more suited to piloting a roller skate. He had to drive with the front seat all the way forward and extenders on the pedals. Mr. Opie never stopped talking. He lived in a cottage on the property with his four-hundred-pound wife, several macaws, and an organ, which husband and wife both loved to play, often in the middle of the night. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who belonged to the tiny shadow lurking in the potted gardenias and kumquat bushes whenever anyone went skinny-dipping in the pool at night.

Dan Rather was hosting the cocktail hour when I arrived, and I expressed gratitude for it as, gin and tonic in hand, I surveyed the situation in the light of the
CBS Evening News
. My grandmother was sitting in a bright yellow armchair. She was dressed in a hostess skirt that mimicked the Matisse cutouts on the walls, and her arm was in a sling fashioned from a matching scarf. She had recently taken one of her late night spills during a rendezvous with a bottle of grenadine in the pantry. An algae-colored bruise was yellowing over her left temple, and she had made an attempt to camouflage it with a heavy dusting of powder. Her head was coiffed, but it was lolling a bit as she munched on Finn Crisps and Brie that could have been riper. Poodle A was alternately clawing its way up and then slipping off her lap; Poodle B lay curled like a fossil at her feet.

My grandfather, who had recently suffered another stroke, was seated an arm’s length away, on a large pillow in his Harvard “University” chair. He was dressed in adult diapers and a pair of blue Turnbull and Asser pajamas.

Jesus,
I thought,
has the cypress paneling always been that screaming-loud turquoise? And what’s with all the Matisse paper collages?
There must have been a dozen of them struggling for exhibition space amid the jumble of aeronautic prints and autographed headshots of Gemini and Apollo mission astronauts. Potted orchids arced from every horizontal surface, lending the place an air of inconceivable sexuality.

“Will you be in for lunch, dearie?” my grandmother asked.

“Uh, sure,” I answered automatically.

“And will you be in for dinner?”

“I don’t know yet, Gaga, could I let you know in the morning?”

“Yes, of course. Just let me know if you’ll be in for lunch, dearie.”

“Yes, I will be. I said I’d be in for lunch, and that I would let you know about dinner.”

“Right-o, then it will be the four of us for dinner.”

“Phoo-ey,” my grandfather corrected.

But his wife had turned her attention back to the television. “She died of what? What’s this amahexia? Why would that poor thing starve herself?”

To banish the television image of an emaciated fashion model, my grandmother helped herself to some more cheese from the hors d’oeuvres tray. In the process she dropped the gooey bamboo-handled knife, and the dead poodle shot after it like the tongue of a frog.

“Anorexia nervosa,” I said. “It’s an eating disorder where you think you’re fat when you’re not.”

“Phooey!” my grandfather scoffed, and doused himself with Wild Turkey as he tried to get the glass to his lips.

More often than not now, dinner was served on trays in front of the television, and tonight was no exception. Juan and Selma brought in the first course, a cream of sorrel soup. My grandfather gave Juan a meaningful stare and pointed at his wineglass. He needed it now, not after the main course was served. Juan dipped his head in recognition and quickly returned with a bottle of Meursault. He poured a half inch into the glass for my grandfather to taste.

“Phoo-ey!” demanded my grandfather, tapping the top of his wineglass. Juan complied and filled ’er up. My grandfather could hardly grip anything with his half-frozen hand, but he managed to get the glass to his dry lips, and drank it off in one long guzzle before signaling for a refill. Juan complied, and then used the remote to switch to
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report
.

My grandmother overshot her mark and spooned green soup down her front. She dabbed at it absently, eyes on the television. She got the next one into her mouth. My grandfather wasn’t faring much better, but at least Juan had taken the usual precaution of tucking a jib-sized napkin in at his throat. I watched him eating and wondered how he could stand having no sense of taste. They say 50 percent of it is from stockpiled memory, which would explain why he didn’t seem affected by his lack of buds, as long as he kept to his favorite diet of haute cuisine and alcohol. A month before, I’d seen his insular cortex light up like Las Vegas when a waiter put a dish of flaming woodcock in front of him.

The soup bowls were cleared, a second bottle of wine was started, and now Juan approached Madame with a large platter draped in halibut. Oh God. I closed my eyes. Disassembling a large fish is tricky enough when one is sober. After several attempts to pick up the serving utensils, and then a few more to snag some of the fish, she succeeded in getting a piece in the clutches of the fork and spoon. Juan stood unflinchingly, as he had been trained. Whoops—she dropped it. There was another tussle, and my grandmother finally had a sizeable chunk and was half scraping, half lifting it off the platter when, instead of getting the fish onto her plate, she succeeded in depositing it right down—as in all the way down—the considerable depths of her bosom. Smiling, my grandmother replaced the serving fork and spoon carefully on the platter, mission accomplished.

My grandfather signaled for more wine, and my grandmother began stabbing at her empty plate. I gaped at Juan. A bead of sweat stood out on his imperturbable brow. After a few seconds, he took off for the kitchen and returned with a tea towel. Hands in front, as if he were approaching a wild animal, he attempted to remove the fish with the towel, but only succeeded in driving it further between my grandmother’s sizeable breasts. Juan stood back and for once looked utterly helpless.

“Delishosh fish,” pronounced my grandmother, and sucked at her empty glass.

“
Phooey!
” cried my grandfather.

“I’ll get the nurse!” I cried back, and bolted for the kitchen. The situation called for a professional.

I returned with the nurse, a heavily built and heavily mustachioed Florida temp with about as much command of language as her patient. “Well, well, well,” she said in a bass voice. My grandmother rolled her head backwards and beamed at her. The nurse plunged her hand so far down my grandmother’s front she could have wiped her, and scraped out the fish.

“Phooey! Phooey! Phooey!” Bits of food flew out of my grandfather’s mouth. One of them landed on a nearby sea urchin arrangement. Another struck a poodle in the eye.

I drained my own glass.

My grandmother was borne away by the capable arms of the nurse, and my grandfather and I, in our first and last act of unity, watched
Dynasty
in a dazed silence.

The next morning was as bright and shiny as a gardening staff and their hoses can make it. When I came over from the guesthouse to get breakfast, the evening’s events had been washed as clean as the grounds and patio. My grandmother crept into the living room, where I was having a cursory look at the obits. She eased herself into a chair next to the sofa, where I was stretched out amid the papers.

“Good morning,” I said, trying to be cool. “Feeling okay?”

She managed a rueful smile and handed me an envelope. She had written my name on the front in a very shaky hand. Then she struggled to her feet and made her way out to the pool to go talk to her crazy birds.

It was hard to read my grandmother’s sorry note because it was as legible as Sanskrit. The gist of it was that she was appalled at her behavior and deeply embarrassed. She promised, swore even, that it would
never
happen again. She was vowing off drink for good.

My grandmother had been raised a Christian Scientist. It was ingrained in her to disregard in life whatever she found too distressing to handle. Thus, she maintained that Popsie didn’t smoke despite his two-pack-a-day habit; that her eldest son hadn’t shot himself—it had been an accident; and that her sweet grandsons, young Will and little Edward, never touched even an aspirin, much less pot and hard drugs. Her note to me was a bombshell. I knew she had a problem, and I knew she knew I knew, but to admit it was so bleakly out of character, I wanted to vaporize. What the hell was happening to everyone? My grandfather was in diapers and couldn’t speak, my grandmother was becoming a caricature of a drunk, my mother was getting fat and trying to please me, Will was holed up in an un-winterized cabin in Maine and drinking himself stupid, and Edward was stealing the Percodans and Darvon and Valium from his grandparents’ medicine cabinets and making a fortune selling them at his new school.

My grandmother stuck to her guns all day, but by evening she couldn’t hold out any longer and was at it again, accepting her six o’clock cocktail from Juan and sneaking from the bottles she kept hidden all over the house. I was out of there by the time she woke up the next morning.

 

 

 

SURPRISINGLY, NO ONE in the family died that year, not that they didn’t try. Will dove headfirst into the empty indoor pool in Maine one night, and it was a big fat wake-up call. As in, time to get sober. At the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, my brother bunked down with the kind of die-hard alcoholics and addicts that only a state with Siberian winters could produce. I drove up for the requisite family confessional-slash-shaming session near the end, where those who were wronged get to publicly voice off at the recovering patient, who is now deemed strong enough to take it. It was the first time I’d been Downeast in the winter, and I really got a feel for why Maine has the highest rate of alcoholism and child pornography in the country. At the hospital, my mother and younger brother and I sat with a bunch of raggle-taggle, very local families, in an increasingly odorous room that had speckled blue industrial carpeting and bulletproof plastic seating lined along its perimeters. In the center of the room a single chair faced a small row of others. Each patient took a turn in it and was confronted by his or her family, who blasted the patient with their declarations of pain. How the guilty ones (now costing the state thousands of dollars to eat four meals a day, sleep in clean sheets, and spend the bulk of their time doing what others merely dreamed of—talking about themselves endlessly to professional listeners) had hurt them with their drug-ery, or thievery, or drunken fits of rage. The stories revealed in that circle, told by people dressed in an assortment of stretchy clothes and lumber jackets, had a harsh, native reality that contrasted sharply with my brother’s entitled misdemeanors. A seventeen-year-old mother told her husband that she could forgive him for not coming home every night, or even for beating her up, but when he got drunk and set fire to their trailer, well that was bad because now they didn’t have any place to sleep. But what really pissed her off was that he had traded the food stamps for drugs and now there was no money to feed the two babies.