Kamikaze Lust (17 page)

“It’s cool, ay?” he said. “Tony gave me a whole bag, from the movie theater.” He pointed his thumb to a green Hefty bag near the front door.

“I love movie popcorn,” Evan said, grabbing a handful and popping it into his mouth. It didn’t have a healthy crunch, sounded like he was chewing on styrofoam. But Evan, his right cheek bulging, said it was delicious. He had inherited Hy’s droopy features, although his thick brown mustache and tortoise-shell glasses made his face seem wider. He was dressed like a manager on his day off: knit sweater with an Oxford shirt beneath it and tan corduroys. His wife Ellen wore a forest green pants suit and humongous gold hoops in her ears, a fringe benefit of working in the family jewel business. She smiled and bent down to help me clear the popcorn as if she were used to accommodating people.

“Hey, don’t take it all,” Rowdy said.

“We can’t just serve popcorn, much as we’d like to,” I said.

He winced.

“We’ll just shuffle things around a little,” Ellen said. She smiled kindly at my brother, the way people who didn’t know him usually did at first. Next came the desire to help him. He had the kind of look that inspired the need to feed him, clothe him, bathe him, and then send him away. A Hefty bag full of popcorn was loose change. I’d seen him come home once with a leather jacket, fresh lobster, and some hand-me-down electronic equipment; just that morning he showed me a clunky old videocassette recorder a guy at the supermarket had given him the week before. He said he’d been videotaping Aunt Lorraine. Kaminsky’d suggested it, and Rowdy figured he could make a
Docudeath
tape as good as anyone.

Amateur, I thought.

Like the amateur porn Alexis railed against. The idea was too populist for her: if people started making their own videos, then her images decreased in value. Alexis had that Marxian sense of exploitation common to many who made a living in the skin trade.

Ellen and I fit the vegetables, a cheese board, and basket of crackers on the table and left room for two bowls of popcorn. Rowdy planted the rest of the bowls throughout the living room, setting them on shelves and side tables, and then started fiddling with his video camera. He lifted it to his face and commanded us to smile.

Still in Q&A mode, I asked Evan and Ellen how they met as Rowdy haunted to and fro with the camera at his face.

“I work for them,” Ellen said.

“You should see her, Ray,” Hy said. “Got sales in the blood. She was employee of the month, not once or twice, six times in a row. Even sold to the Army. The Army, can you believe it? What soldiers need with satin flowers? Unreal.”

“She asked how we met, Dad, not for a resume,” Evan said. He picked up the conversation from there, taking me from the first time he saw Ellen in the office to the day just last week, when after months of searching for a home in New Jersey, they’d closed the deal on a house in Upper Montclair near Ellen’s parents.

“Say that again,” Rowdy said. Evan squinted at him, obviously perplexed. “Come on, come on, I had my hand on the wrong side, just say what you said.”

“The same thing?”

“What, you got wax in your head or something? Yeah.”

Evan repeated the story of their olympiad search for the perfect house, hardly conscious that it was the second telling. Rowdy held tightly to the camera, occasionally slipping his left hand down to scratch his balls. I remembered first Alexis the other day calling her camera the best dildo she ever had, and then my father years ago posing us in front of his 8 x 10 camera, picking at his dick as he ordered us to wet our lips for the camera.

We were a clan of voyeurs, devouring newsreels and newspapers, musicals, movies, weekly magazines, still photographs, and yes, porno films. We fit ourselves behind the camera; in my case, I justified my voyeurism on the pages of a city tabloid. We were always watching. Only Mom with her canned performances in the living room came close to actually doing. Corny as Kansas and crazy as it was.

Then, we were all slightly torn around the edges, especially juxtaposed with Evan and Ellen who shared a typical habit of finishing each other’s sentences. As when Ellen offered the reason they’d chosen their particular New Jersey suburb. “I want the kids to really know their grandparents,” she said.

“And our office is just outside of Hoboken,” Evan added, reaching for a cracker to catch the sliver of brie hanging from his knife.

A more normal couple I couldn’t have invented. They were married. Had a house. A mortgage. Plans for children not yet born. It was everything I was supposed to want, yet imagining myself in their lives I felt restrained, as I’d been earlier when Mom gripped my biceps. Besieged by a string of wet sneezes, I longed to be on the set of an Alexis Calyx film.

I wiped my nose with a cocktail napkin and listened politely until we heard Aunt Lorraine’s friend Kiki yell: “Gang way! Look out below!”

Everyone ran to the stairs. Aunt Lorraine sat at the top, strapped into the Baby Jane chair. She looked okay from where we stood, rather like a film director in the Yankee cap Kaminsky had given her and those tinted glasses. Yet, with her legs strapped at the calves and her bare feet poking out of her leggings, I thought if you tilted her on her back she would resemble the fallen turkey.

Aunt Lorraine pressed a button. “We have clearance, Houston,” she said. “Geronimoooooooooh!”

“Ain’t no stopping us now,” Kiki said, and thus commenced the buzzing of the electronic conveyor belt. The rest of us stood quietly. Evan and Ellen looked captivated but alarmed, as if they were watching firemen burst into a burning building. My fears about the chair breaking down or catapulting Aunt Lorraine forward were assuaged by Kiki walking next to her. They’d been friends since before I was born, from their days of weekend trips to the Catskills, bingo tournaments, and bottomless glasses of bourbon and ginger ale. Kiki, whose proper name was Gertrude Sapperstein, lived around the corner, again since time immemorial, and worked in the meat department at the A&P.

“See, she loves it!” Hy said. “You love it!” Rowdy came running up with his video camera, and I thought his
Docudeath
would resemble something by Fellini or Almodovar. I laughed. Then I wanted to cry.

Meanwhile, Aunt Lorraine held tightly to her patent leather pocketbook. She reminded me of a toy figure. Nothing sinister like that damn Bermuda gun, but more like a fluffy gizmo out of a battery commercial: little old lady descending a staircase. I wanted to jump in her lap and ride down with her. If only I could be her pocketbook.

“How ya doing?” Rowdy asked.

“I feel like a piece of luggage going round and round.”

At the bottom of the stairs, the chair screeched to a halt and, after a few awkward seconds, everyone cheered. I kneeled to help Kiki unfasten the safety belts. “Oy, I’m still hunched, you could mop the floor with my titties,” Kiki said.

Aunt Lorraine laughed, her face so ruddy I might have forgotten she was sick but for the shiny head beneath her baseball cap and the bandages shrouded by her favorite sweatshirt, oversized and white, with swirls of gold and silver painted around a few strategically placed rhinestones. Casual with a flair, she always said of her style. A reaction to the many weekdays of dreary dresses worn to her bureaucratic job.

“Yo, yo, Aunt Lorraine, look here.” Rowdy zoomed in on her face. “Tell us what you feel.”

“Not so close, please.” Aunt Lorraine flagged off the camera and rose from the chair. “I’m not one of Rachel’s porno gals.”

“You could have been in your day,” I smiled, hoping Evan and Ellen had heard her say my name in conjunction with the word porno as they scooted around us and walked back into the living room. I wanted my outsider status confirmed for them.

“Porno? Like on cable?” Kiki said. We each locked onto one of Aunt Lorraine’s arms and started the slow trek over the foyer and through the living room to the dining room table. “I get all the channels, Stevie hooked ’em up for nothing—now slow down, Lo, we’re not running at Belmont. Rachey, you know my brother Stevie?”

“Of course she knows Stevie,” Aunt Lorraine said. “He was at Louie’s funeral.”

“How do I know what she remembers?”

“Her father’s funeral she should remember.”

What I remember most about Dad’s funeral was wishing Mom would come back from the hospital. Then, when she finally showed up, making her grand entrance with those nurses who looked like porn stars themselves, and fainting before the ceremony ended, I wished only that they would get her out of there before people started talking. I also remember feeling comforted that Aunt Lorraine was there with me.

At the step between the living room and dining room, Aunt Lorraine grabbed my wrist tightly. Kiki and I practically had to hoist her up, a feat that left me feeling sad and lonely, yet protective. I reminded myself that I would do anything she wanted.

We were settling Aunt Lorraine into her customary seat at the head of the table when Mom sauntered into the living room. Iridescent in her green lamé blouse and golden brown bouffant, she pivoted in front of Hy, stopping to give his cheek a kiss and then carefully wipe off the lipstick stain. “My god,” Kiki said, “she looks like a lava lamp.”

Mom beamed her way through the living room and headed over to us.

“Aren’t you something,” Aunt Lorraine said.

“Thank you, dear,” Mom smiled, then turned to me. “I need you in the kitchen.”

Inside, she said, “I wanted Hy and me on each end of the table, it’s been a long time since we had a gentleman at the head of the table.”

“A what?” I could barely speak. Aunt Lorraine had no hair, a hole from the catheter in her chest, and Mom was tormented over seating arrangements.

“You should have asked.”

“Fine, go tell her to move.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Well, don’t look at me.”

“All I’m saying is next time ask me.” Mom opened the oven and started removing the casserole dishes. “Things are gonna be changing around here, you’ll see.”

“Yeah, she’ll be dead.” The words tasted like acid, but I didn’t budge.

“That’s not what I meant, you…ow! Goddinga, Hy!” Mom pulled her hand from the oven and started shaking it. The oven door bounced up with a bang.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“You see I’m not okay!” Mom shoved her index finger in between her lips and sucked it. Hy came running and, as if on cue, threw his arms around her.

“I burned my finger!”

“Here, let me see.” Hy took my mother’s hand and sat her down at the kitchen table. He patted her head, whispered in her ear as I stood awkwardly to the side.

“Don’t just stand there, Rachel,” Mom said. “We have to cut the turkey.”

I was so angry I’d slipped into my statuesque mode, silent and glaring. Hy jumped up. “Man’s work, Ray. I’ll take care of it.”

A wind of spices snared me as Hy opened the oven and leaned down before the steaming bird. I looked over and for a second saw the turkey’s leg over Hy’s ear, just as Tessa what’s-her-name had enveloped Mark Vladimir with her thighs that day on the set. I was struck by a sudden need for Shade, and imagined myself crawling deep inside of her legs.

As it was, I stayed silent while Hy, following Mom’s instructions, scooped the stuffing from the bird’s stomach. It smelled of onions and oregano and had thick chunks of bread mixed with celery and giblets and juice. My stomach growled, and I felt as if I could devour the seventeen-pound bird and all of its complements myself. I hated that Mom’s food could do this to me, that her turkey looked so damn delicious, its skin flecked with pepper and rosemary, and the occasional clove of garlic nestled against its torso.

Hy pulled back the turkey’s skin with his fingertips and took a large fork and knife to it. “Gee, Mister, you sure know how to carve,” Mom said, and they laughed together.

Pressure walled inside my face, behind my eyes. I wanted to rip the turkey to pieces with my bare hands and then pull the cloth from the dining room table so the china and crystal shattered, disrupting every sign of Thanksgiving Day propriety. Nothing had meaning. Nothing felt safe anymore…
Aunt Lorraine was really dying!

I had to get out of the kitchen. Away from my mother and her turkey-carving man. I brought the bread baskets into the dining room and took yoga breaths along the way to cap the sadness, the anger, the hatred. Mom and I avoided each other’s eyes as we passed between the kitchen and dining room. Soon the food was out and everyone took their seats. Hy ended up sitting to the left of Mom, and next to me, and Aunt Lorraine looked happy at the head of the table with Kiki on one side of her and Rowdy on the other.

We ate quickly and quietly, as was our habit. Away from the family, I had to check myself so I wouldn’t finish first, but here there was always someone with greasy fingers beating me to the serving spoon for seconds. Usually it was Rowdy, who stacked his plate so high he barely had room to cut his meat. He was a lefty, too. Poor Ellen kept bumping up against his wandering elbow as Aunt Lorraine asked her the story of her life this time.

Rowdy reached into the turkey platter, pitching his fork in one piece after another, looking dismayed.

“What is the matter with you?” Mom asked him.

“There’s no ass,” he said. “How can you have no ass?”

“I see an ass,” Kiki stared at him.

“I got it this year,” Aunt Lorraine smiled.

“Oh man,” Rowdy said. “That’s my favorite part.”

“Just like your father,” Kiki said. “Louie used to love the ass. And turtles, too. Remember that guy who sold the turtles out of a plastic bag? Only Louie would eat them.”

“Down in Bermuda, we ate little hens,” Mom said. Her face, like the rest of ours, was red from food and wine. We were so pink, so precious; skin so thin you could see the blood running through our veins. “Hy, tell them about the hens.”

“It was unreal.” Hy shoveled a fork full of string beans into his mouth. “You’da thought they were pigeons or something.”

“The chinks eat pigeons,” Rowdy said.

“They do not,” Hy said. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody, it’s one of those things everyone knows.”