Kamikaze Lust (14 page)

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, we’re going for the weekend, we leave tomorrow. I need a break, you know things haven’t been easy for me lately.”

“For you, what about Aunt Lorraine?” I paced, grabbed my hair. Mom pushed another pile of pecans closer to her knife with her shiny fingernails. Calm down, I thought. It’s her life, she can go to Bermuda if she wants.

“That’s what I’m saying, why I need some time away. For my health.”

“You leave every weekend.”

“Oh, some nerve you have; you, bringing death into this house. If you really wanted to help, you’d move back here and take care of Lorraine.”

“She has a nurse, we’re paying the nurse. You can’t make me feel guilty for having a life. This isn’t Victorian England.”

“Then I won’t feel guilty for taking a little weekend.”

Her tempestuous chopping was making my head spin. I envisioned her slicing up her fingers then felt wicked for the thought. I counted backwards from ten, breathing deeply at the onset of each number, a technique I’d picked up in a daylong meditation workshop—two hundred bucks to learn how to count. Finally, Mom put down the knife, then brushed past me en route to the refrigerator. I turned my back and mumbled, “Go ahead, have your little weekend!”

“What?”

“Nothing, Mother.” I was almost out of the kitchen, still huffing to myself. “Your whole life’s been one long, little weekend.”

“I heard that!”

She had to have the last word. I sunk into the sofa and stared out the living room window. My heart began to slow. A couple of kids raced bicycles down the street. The sky was overcast. Gloomy with ghosts. I’ll bet the sun was shining in Bermuda. I longed for someone to whisk me away to Bermuda or back to my terrace in Miami with Shade lounging on a chaise of pink and yellow plastic in her bikini top and tight cut-off shorts. I realized my memory took a porno spin, but the day really existed.

I wore a conservative, one-piece Speedo and next to Shade felt fat, clunky, and prudish, watching her rub coconut oil into her caramel limbs. When I asked to borrow some she laughed.

“It’s number four, black-girl shit. You need roots deep in the deserts of Africa.”

“My people were slaves in the land of Egypt.”

“Hah! Slaves of the Cossacks maybe,” she smiled and pointed to her book,
Crime and Punishment.
She was the only person I knew—myself included—who still read serious books. They clashed with the pastel jogging suits and ice cold shopping malls. Miami was a land of recycled best-sellers. There were as many of them in the library at Grandma’s nursing home as there were in an airport kiosk, the endless soft-cover spines cracked by tiny granules of sand.

“Who do you think crossed the Sinai?” I said. “Remember the Red Sea?”

“I remember Charlton Heston. The fascist.”

“My father called him Charleston Heston.”

“I like that, it makes him sound like an old southern queen,” she said. “But you still need sunscreen, and none of that eight or fifteen nonsense, we’re into the cancer hours.”

Had it been a fantasy, I would have nixed the cancer and we would have made love as if it were a sex film:
Hot Terrace Babes.
Maybe we still could. Not satisfied merely imagining myself as Silver Ray, I had begun casting sex-extra roles to those around me. Why shouldn’t my life be more like a porn film?

The doorbell rang. Answering it, I found Dr. Milford P. Kaminsky holding two plastic shopping bags, the weight of which seemed to push his frail body to its limits, as if he might fall over if you breathed on him too hard. One look at his sunken eyes and skeletal cheeks was all it took to eclipse my own problems.

Kaminsky handed me his tan parka, but insisted on keeping his shopping bags. I was hanging his coat in the front closet when I heard him say, “Hello.”

I turned and saw him standing in the living room. Mom stood about fifteen feet from him at the dining room table, the knife at her side. She opened her mouth as if she were about to speak and collapsed to the floor, the metallic blade erect and glistening in her hand.

“Good Lord!” Kaminsky said, and dropping his bags rushed over to Mom. He removed the knife from her fingers and felt her pulse. “She’s further along than—”

“Oh no, no. That’s my mother,” I said.

“This happens with some frequency then?”

I nodded and ran into the kitchen for the ammonia. No matter how many times Mom fainted, no matter how certain I was she’d brought it upon herself, I couldn’t shake that initial flash of fear: What if it’s real this time, if all along she’d been right? Even that day at the airport when I was leaving for Miami with her begging me not to go, I was at first terrified. She cried, grabbing at my coat, scratching my face. “Don’t leave me!” she’d screamed.

I was sweating, weighed down by too many carry-ons, which I gripped tightly as Mom clung to my left arm. Trying to shake her off, I twisted my ankle. My sunglasses slipped down my nose. I stared at Aunt Lorraine, who tried to restrain Mom’s arms with both hands. They were going to haul Mom off to Creedmore and I’d never get on that plane. The job, the apartment with the spiffy sundeck, the car I’d been waiting all my life to own would be history, and I would be stuck in Bay Ridge with my mother, who before that day had never shown so much interest in me or my life.

Aunt Lorraine held Mom back and turned to me. Her brow creased, her lips sewn with seriousness. “Rachel, go!” she said.

“Ungrateful, you!” Mom wailed. My eyes met Aunt Lorraine’s who kept signaling me to leave, so I turned and took a few steps forward. Mom cried about losing her baby. I wanted to run to her and hug her, but we were never touchy-feely like that, and I resented her turning my departure into a scene at La Guardia airport. I peeked over my shoulder and saw her starting to teeter. She was fighting off Aunt Lorraine with her eyes open, but not fainting. On impulse I turned and walked back to them. Mom stared at me as if she were looking into her own grave. “I’m your mother…you…you’re so selfish!” she sputtered, her face pink with frustration. I knew she was trying to faint, but couldn’t. The way I sometimes tried too hard to come. Not to be undone by the physical boundaries of the act, however, she simply placed her hands in front of her, eased her body onto the airport floor, and lay down.

Aunt Lorraine and I hovered over her, watching dumb-foundedly as she bent her left elbow over her fluttering eyelids.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “This is ridiculous.”

She didn’t budge. Just lay awake, playing at fainting as people ambled toward us one-by-one, forming a crowd. Aunt Lorraine stared at me. “Go,” she said again, and I didn’t look back.

I found the ammonia under the sink, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and returned to Kaminsky. His fingers curled around Mom’s limp wrist. I wondered if anyone had ever fainted in front of him before, had seen in him the face of death. I folded a paper towel in quarters, wet it with Ammonia, and leaned down next to Kaminsky.

“Here, let me,” he said.

Handing Kaminsky the towel, I caught sight of Hy coming into the living room. He screamed: “STELLA!”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing, but the way he shouted her name…it wasn’t her fault she was called Stella. Besides, this was serious. Mother has fainted—again. If I didn’t get away I was certain to say something nasty. I counted backwards, as Kaminsky went about business, holding the towel to Mom’s face as if he were a paramedic on a rescue show, pumping life back into Mom through white electrodes.

“Give me that!” Hy ripped the towel out of Kaminsky’s hands, practically shoving the doctor out of the way, and I realized he might not be as benign as I’d thought.

“Hy!” I shouted. “Are you crazy?”

“Stella? Come now, doll?” Hy tapped Mom’s cheek a few times with his fingers and then looked up at us. “Go away, would you?”

I apologized, touching Kaminsky’s arm for emphasis. Mom’s body stirred beneath her housecoat. She shook her head from side-to-side and said: “Monster!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let him near you.” Hy continued shooing us away.

I led Kaminsky through the living room as Mom’s screaming echoed. We came to the stairs with that damn Baby Jane chair, and I tried to pretend it was normal to have a wooden chair strapped to a dolly on the staircase by suggesting that we walk single file next to it. I started feeling slightly ghoulish myself with Kaminsky rustling his plastic bags behind me, making me think of candelabra, blood-sucking vampires, and loud, fearful screams. Like Mom’s.

As if that weren’t enough, we found Aunt Lorraine asleep with an Alexis Calyx movie playing on her giant television set. We were so alike in temperament, my old aunt and I. I knew she’d be curious about the videos, and remembering what they’d been doing to me, I became embarrassed for her. She herself was less stressed about the subject matter, leaving those tapes running continuously like a peep-show booth.

I shut off the TV and offered Kaminsky a chair. Either he hadn’t noticed the movie or he was pretending not to, just as he’d followed my lead with the Baby Jane chair, and with Mom. Besides, in his circles, he must have seen things stranger than a dying woman who’d developed a taste for come shots and daisy chains.

I leaned over and rubbed her arm. “Aunt Lorraine?”

“Honey,” she opened her eyes and slowly moved her head to the side, turtlelike, as if her neck were a periscope. “Oh, and Milford, you made it! You don’t look a thing like I pictured.”

“Most people tell me the opposite.”

“So how was your trip?”

“Fine.”

“You took the D train?”

“No, I have the car,” Kaminsky said. “There was hardly any traffic, I made it in less than an hour.”

Within minutes, they were laughing and talking like old friends, obviously continuing one of the numerous telephone conversations they’d had in the past few weeks. They didn’t need me, and hardly noticed when I excused myself to go downstairs and check on Mom, who was sipping from a ceramic cup at the kitchen table with Hy stroking her arm and whispering to her as the coffee pot burped in the background. For the first time in a while, Mom looked settled. I suppose Hy soothed her, made her world more manageable, just as Kaminsky would do for Aunt Lorraine.

I sat down on the steps next to the empty Baby Jane chair, trying to remember the last time I felt settled. Certainly not with Sam in Miami, and never with Ethan, and not even with Jeremy, my.… I never knew what to call him, my journalism professor at Brooklyn College. In the beginning he told me he’d been sent to guard me from the world, and thinking back to the night Dad sat on my bed to shield me from Neil, I felt comforted. Like I’d found home. As time went on I realized Jeremy was mostly protective of our secrecy so his friends and colleagues wouldn’t realize he was screwing a student. At least he’d phoned Columbia for me. All told, I traded my virginity for a scholarship to journalism school.

I never missed him. Never missed any of them once they were gone. It was Alexis’ voice I heard next:
Rachel, are you a lesbian?
Again I ignored the question, tired as I was of these people battling for air-time in my mind.

The front door clicked open and in walked Rowdy. His face was stubbled, and he wore a torn flight jacket over khaki pants a few sizes too big for him. I used to think he might be gay. Back when I was a teenager and he had a girlfriend, a hairdresser named Betty. Betty had auburn curls and thick fingers that dwarfed my hand when she took it in hers and, in her curbside drawl, said: “Hello, Rachel, darling.” After she and Rowdy broke up, Neil told me she used to be a man. “Sick fuck cuts it off and then she’s hot stuff, too good for our brother.” Neil laughed in that eerie way I never quite heard, but felt in the small of my back. “Serves him right the fucking faggot.” As far as I know that was the last relationship Rowdy ever had; nobody ever mentioned it.

Rowdy leaned his elbow against the banister and shook a cigarette from a package crushed so badly I couldn’t recognize the brand. They were simply cigarettes: generics. He lit up and inhaled deeply, opening the screen door to toss the match outside. Cigarette smoke blended with the scent of wet leaves.

“You like that asparagus in the can?” he said.

“Sure.”

“It’s on sale, three for two by Waldbaums. They let you take three at a time, but I go back to a different cashier.” He smiled as if he’d discovered a secret stash of gold, then pulled a few cans out of a paper bag. “Here, take a few with you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Rowdy sat down in the doorway, propping the screen door open with his right foot. His vinyl athletic shoes had no laces, his feet had grown too wide for them from the phlebitis, and his experimentation with the Baby Jane chair had left a huge raspberry on his left hand, like the ones he used to give me whenever we played Knuckles. The card game was a lot like Spit. “One, two, three, Go!” we screamed as our hands flipped quickly the diamonds, clubs, hearts, and spades and the higher number gobbled up the pile, winning that round. When the cards were gone and winner had taken all, the loser shuffled and whatever number was drawn was the number of times the winner got to scrape the deck over the loser’s knuckles. I never won.

Odd, how the menacing forces of youth have a way of weeding themselves out in adulthood, Rowdy mutating from a teenager who’d ripped the skin from my knuckles to this off-kiltered man with the huge raspberry and swollen feet, who might be gay and had a hard time remembering anything that wasn’t written on a coupon insert. “Business sucks,” he said, and I was afraid of the business he was up to these days. “Used to be a guy could make a buck around here before the tree-lovers took down the recycling business. They don’t know all they’re helping is the mafia.”

“Looks like you need a new line of work,” I said, remembering the fights he and Mom used to have over the hundreds of cans and bottles he’d collected from the streets, some bought at a cut rate from people more indigent than himself, the bottom of the bottom-feeders. He would clean and sort the stash, then return them to the supermarket for deposit money.

“Funny you say it.” He dragged from his cigarette and craned his neck sideways to look at me. “Maybe you can help.”