Earth Angel (5 page)

Mom tilted the can of popcorn toward me, I shook my head. The can was divided into three sections: caramel popcorn, cheddar
cheese popcorn, and plain popcorn. Mom was alternating between the cheese and caramel, leaving the plain untouched. It’s what
I usually did and it bothered me to see her doing it, too.

“You’re skinny, Season,” she said. “That’s no good. Your dad hates it when I get skinny.”

How would you know? I almost said, but let it pass. I was in a bad mood because Mom had spent all morning pressing me about
what I was going to do next with my life. It wasn’t just one direct conversation, either, it was a recurrent question that
she would just tack onto the end of other conversations so it became like a ghost that kept popping up and shouting “Boo!”
at me.

“That Jenny Jones looks good. Not fat but heavy in the right places.”

“She had breast implants, Mom. They went bad and she spent a fortune trying to recover.”

Mom shrugged, munched a handful of cheese popcorn. “She looks fine now. That’s my point. She went through
trauma, she recovered, now she’s getting on with life.” There it was: Boo!

“That was your point? You didn’t even know about her trauma until I just told you.”

“What does that have to do with getting on with life?” She switched into German.
“I lived through a war. I spent my childhood in bomb shelters. I was supposed to be an artist, go to the art institute, but
that was bombed, too. Instead I sewed in a factory and starved. But I managed to fall in love and marry your father. I started
a business, had children. Got on with life.”

“Now that you mention it, Mom, the minister who spoke at Tim’s funeral was kind of cute. The whole time he was praying I kept
wondering what he looked like naked.”

Mother stuffed some popcorn in her mouth and muttered, “Sure, you’re a doctor. Therefore you already know everything there
is to know.”

“You know, Mom…” I started, but ran out of interest in what I was going to say. Blah, blah, blah. There was no point to this
conversation. Mom was trying to be helpful because she felt helpless and I was being pissy because I felt pissy. We both turned
to the TV and let it absorb our mood.

Jenny’s guest, a chubby black woman, was sobbing and hollering at another chubby black woman who, when they were both in junior
high school, stole her panties from gym class and gave them to her boyfriend to tape up in the boys’ lav. All the boys stuck
their chewing gum to the crotch. At the end of the day the bully dropped them on the crying girl’s desk in study hall, the
wads of multicolored chewing gum lining the crotch like those bright neon pebbles in fish bowls. Very festive. The wronged
woman was screaming in the bully’s face and the audience was applauding her. The bully was not remorseful: “We were just kids,
get over it.” Someone in the audience stood up and
pointed at the bully: “You just don’t have any morals.” Someone else jumped up and said, “What about your children? Is this
how you want them to be treated?”

The doorbell rang. It was a delivery. A huge assortment of fresh fruit in a hand-carved mahogany bowl so fancy it had a little
printed card attached explaining the history of the wood and the mythical significance of the carvings. It was from an ER
buddy of Tim’s: condolences, etc., for my loss. I pulled off the yellow cellophane wrapping. “Kiwis. This even has kiwis.”
I showed a kiwi to Mom. “You want one?”

She looked at the popcorn, then at the kiwi. She shook her head.

“Look at this. A whole pineapple. What the heck is this thing? Guava? Makes me want to sit down and immediately write a thank-you
note: ‘Dear Stan, Thanks for the fruit. The guava really took the edge off Tim’s homicidal rampage and death.’ ”

“Your friends are just being supportive. Just letting you know that even though Tim is dead, you’re still among the living.
Among them. It’s a token of life.”

I wanted to dump the can of popcorn over Mom’s head, just for the hell of it. Just to see the puffy nuggets of popcorn stick
in her gray hair like Christmas tree ornaments. Instead I sat on the sofa next to her, took her hand in mine, even though
I had to wrench it from the popcorn bin and her fingers were sticky with caramel and cheese dust. “Mom, it’s like this. I
do not know what I want to do next. I know I don’t want to practice medicine right away, not right away.”

“No one’s talking medicine. I don’t care about medicine. I’m just saying, as a form of therapy if nothing else, you need to
keep busy. Do something, anything. Have a purpose.”

“Keeping busy is not the same as having a purpose.”

“If you have a purpose then you’re automatically busy. Common sense.”

“I have no idea what that means.” I sighed. “Mom, look at my life. My baby is dead, my fiancé is dead, my cat is dead. Doesn’t
it have the feel of some supernatural wrath or judgment?”

“What do you mean? Like God?” Mom had converted from Lutheranism to Judaism after marrying my father, but she knew I had never
been a believer. “You believe in God now?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You think God’s taking time out of his busy day to ruin your life?”

“Or something. It seems too focused, too directed to be random.”

“What exactly are you being punished for?”
Theology required German, as did money discussions or family secrets.
“Did you do anything so monumentally evil?”

I shrugged. Evil was so hard to define. Perhaps there was something I had done to cause the miscarriage, something unconscious.
That was where it all started. Everything else that had gone wrong in our lives had resulted from that. Tim had punched that
man and lost his job. Tim had murdered all those people. Tim had been killed. Everything was dead: my baby, my man, my practice,
my future, my hope. My cat.

I hadn’t noticed how bad Tim was, how close to the edge since the miscarriage. I’d lived with the man, for Christ’s sake,
I’d slept with him every night butt-to-belly and I hadn’t known he was capable of this. I was a professional at diagnosing
illness and I’d noticed nothing in the person I loved most in the world. My evil was the evil of neglect: I had neglected
my baby and then my lover, and both had died as a result. What use was I? But I couldn’t say any of this to my mother. She
had grown up in a war
and lost a twelve-year-old son. She knew about loss and getting on with life.

“Answer me, Season,” Mother said. “What evil could you possibly have done to bring down such wrath?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“You ever stop to think maybe it’s me who’s being punished,” she said. “Or your father. Maybe it’s worse punishment to see
your child suffer than to suffer yourself?”

I let go of her hands and sat back against the sofa.

“Popcorn?” she asked, tilting the can.

I grabbed a handful of caramel and crammed almost all of it into my mouth. We stared dumbly at Jenny Jones and her enraged
guests.

Tim was heavily insured, thanks to his dad being an insurance agent, and a not-too-successful one at that. Tim had bought
the policies more to make his dad feel good than because he wanted so much insurance. Whatever the reason, I now had the condo
and all our credit cards paid off and about $600,000 in the bank. I could open my pediatrics practice now, the one we’d always
planned on. Except I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the responsibility of other women’s children. I didn’t want to diagnosis,
treat, and worry over children that weren’t mine and weren’t Tim’s. And I didn’t have any confidence in my abilities as a
doctor anymore. I’d let Tim down; I didn’t want to add to the list of fatalities. Besides, for the first time in my life I
could afford not to work. To do nothing. To do nothing is to be nothing, my father always said.

Sounded good.

Jenny Jones returned from a commercial to introduce her last guest. Blue waddled in from the kitchen where she’d been eating
dry food. He jumped on Mom’s lap and Mom raked her fingers through Blue’s dark gray fur, leaving a yellow cheese dust trail.

“…and extraordinary tale of abuse,” Jenny said. “I know we like to think of small-town America as the heartland of
morality and good neighbors, a place where people move to so their children can grow up normal. But my next guest says one
young girl made her entire childhood such a hell that it was like a concentration camp. From Williamsport, Pennsylvania, please
welcome Tanya Zdunn.”

“Williamsport?” Mom said, leaning forward at the mention of our town. “You know this girl, Season?”

Indeed I did. Tanya Zdunn was one grade behind me all through junior and senior high school, part of the group of lumpy students
no one noticed unless we were bored. I had never considered myself as part of the in-crowd, but I had my own group of pseudo-intellectual,
political-activist, poetry-writing knuckleheads who drank black coffee and white wine and felt superior. Especially to the
bunch that Tanya Zdunn hung out with.

“I remember it so… clearly,” Tanya was telling Jenny. Tanya was heavy back then and even heavier now. Her hair was hacked
into some sort of style that accented her bad skin. She wore bright red lipstick that framed crooked teeth. “She used to call
me The Fly, the Human Fly. Because my last name begins with a
Z
. Whenever I passed, they’d all go
Zzzzzzz
and pretend to be flies.” Tanya was crying now, mucus bubbled out of one nostril. She couldn’t go on.

My stomach was puréeing a combination of acid and chipped ice. I remembered sitting in the cafeteria seeing Tanya approaching,
carrying the tray low to hide her stomach, and I know for a fact that I was the one who said, “Here comes Tanya
Zzzzz
dunn, the Human Fly.” And how everybody laughed and made buzzing sounds as she passed by. The look on her face, as if someone
had splashed hot soup on her, I never forgot. I might have made fun of her after that, but never to her face, never when there
was any chance she would hear. A childhood compromise. But I was the one who’d tagged her with her nickname. I had opened
the door to her private childhood
hell and booted her in. And now she was about to name me as her bully in front of millions of people. My hands balled into
fists which I pressed against my erupting stomach.

“And what was your bully’s name, Tanya?” Jenny asked.

Tanya stopped sniffling long enough to murmur…

I leaned forward. I felt dizzy with guilt.

“…Linda Timmons.”

“Linda Timmons!” I said.

“Linda Timmons?” Mom said. “That the one with the blue Mustang? She always seemed like a bitch.”

Linda Timmons hung with the ultra-popular crowd, the ones who all lived within the same four blocks of each other, went to
the same church and summer camps, and never had part-time jobs in their parents’ delicatessen that had a giant Star of David
on it—badge of the Christ-killers. The couple times Mom had met Linda, she’d made a big deal later of how poised and spunky
Linda was. I’d taken that as silent criticism at my lack of poise and spunk.

Now Linda walked out on stage, smiling at Jenny, at Tanya, at the audience. She was gorgeous, dressed in a modest dress that
nevertheless made her look as if she’d wandered into this room by mistake, could someone direct her please back to the models’
convention. The audience didn’t applaud, angry as they were at the parade of bullies who had spent their fifteen minutes of
fame trying to defend their cruel actions. But Linda marched right over to Tanya, hugged her, kissed her cheek, and started
right in talking.

“First, let me say this, Tanya.” She took hold of Tanya’s hands and looked her right in the weepy eyes. “What I did to you
back then was inexcusable. Yes, we were kids, but that’s just not a good enough excuse. I knew right from wrong, and I knew
it was wrong to hurt another person. So, even though I don’t deserve it, I’m asking you now to forgive me and to accept my
apology.”

Tanya just stared dumbly, like an animal who’d already gnawed off one leg in a trap sniffing what looked an awful lot like
that last trap.

“And to prove my sincerity, I’d like you to have dinner with me tonight, at which time I promise to reveal some of the deep
dark secrets of my childhood, which you can use as ammunition against me if I ever get out of line again. Including who I
lost my virginity to.” She smiled and patted Tanya’s thick, hairy arm.

The audience didn’t wait for Tanya’s response. They burst into lavish applause. Linda hugged Tanya again and the applause
grew even louder. Tanya was laughing now, enveloped by the warmth of audience approval and the embrace of her new best friend.

“Well,” Jenny Jones said to the camera, clearly moved. “That was a surprise. We’ll be right back after this break to see what
Tanya thinks of all this.”

“That was nice,” Mom said. She tried to push Blue off her lap. “Come on, Blue, let your old grandmother get something to drink.
Go to your mommy.” Blue jumped onto my lap and Mom took off for the kitchen. “You want anything?”

“No, thanks.” Amazing! I had started this evil nickname, but Linda, who undoubtedly had used it to torment Tanya more than
I had, not only got the blame, but turned that blame into a positive ceremony of admiration. Maybe that was my crime, starting
that whole human fly buzzing thing. I mean, what are the odds that someone I know would be on a talk show when I’m watching,
discussing something I did. It had to all be part of the pattern, the overall cosmic message.

That night I dreamed of Tim and the shooting. Everything happened just as it had in real life, except that after Tim got shot
by the cop and I dropped to my knees to tend his wound, the bullet hole in his back opened like a huge mouth, smiling. Inside
the mouth were a clump of
white maggots wriggling and fussing. They turned into flies and began buzzing around the room. “Locusts,” Tim gasped. “No,
Tim,” I said, “they’re just flies.” And I sprayed a can of Raid into his wound. Then Helen’s dead body came back to life and
she lifted herself onto one elbow, the whole front of her uniform shredded from the bullets and stained red from the blood.
Only now it wasn’t Helen, it was my mother.
“Season, was von die kinder?”
she said. “What about the children?”