Live Fast Die Hot (8 page)

But I couldn't deny feeling a sting as I locked eyes with Rocky. He probably had the scooter I always wanted, too—and the hot-pink Rollerblades, and the giant lips phone, and the beeper with the clear case. I squeezed Sid's little body like a Capri Sun and walked into the guest bedroom to drink him in, opting out of the tour.

“Choppy! Wait up! This is the best part,” she said, like a little kid about to attempt a stunt on the monkey bars. Jason continued without me. My mom was too engrossed in her sconces to notice.

“Sconces can really make or break a room,” I heard her say through the wall.

The Moc was always renovating whatever place she currently called home. At least once every six months I'd get an e-mail with pictures of new backsplashes for her kitchen, new tiles for her shower. Each time, she'd become utterly engrossed in the process. And yet, once it was done, she'd inevitably find a reason to shed her skin and move somewhere else. As a child, we moved every year, sometimes to a different state, sometimes just down the block. For as long as I'd known her, my mom's environment was in flux. And in her younger years, this included the players in it. Both as a homeowner and as a woman, she was restless and fickle. She could be the adoring doting parent one minute and a total stranger the next.

I recognize some of the same instincts in myself. Like her, I too have a track record of cutting relationships short, keeping people at arm's length, trying to outrun my own vulnerability. I understand the impulse, but I was determined to break the pattern. No matter how uncomfortable motherhood made me, the only running I planned to do was on the treadmill.

I sat down to take some of the pressure off my throbbing leg when my mom and Jason entered.

“What do you think?” my mom said, holding up the corner of her new teal bedspread. “I might have been too jazzed on Sudafed when I chose the color.”

“Love it,” I lied.

“It's maybe a little bright,” Jason said, “but—”

My mom's face started to fall and I stopped Jason before he could finish.

“No, baby. It's perfect.”

Like judging one of my mom's boyfriends as a kid, weighing in on her decorating was pointless and would only hurt her feelings. I found it easier to just smile and wait for things to change.

Later that night, I tucked Sid into his travel crib before collapsing on the teal bedspread I knew would be fuchsia by Christmas.

Jason rubbed my back, encouraging me to stay positive about the trip. He listed all of our favorite dive sites on the island and talked about how thrilled he was to test out his new scuba gear. I knew full well he'd probably end up impulse-buying some other shit he'd never use as soon as he wandered into the next dive shop.

For all my mixed feelings about my mother, I too was grateful to be in such a beautiful place, even if my bed didn't have a canopy.

I knew something was wrong when Sid started crying around 3 a.m. and I couldn't stand up to get him.

“Baby,” I said to Jason, who was sound asleep next to me. “I can't put pressure on my leg. Something is wrong.”

Jason flipped on the matching teal bedside lamp. “What do you mean?”

“I honestly don't know. It's too swollen to walk on.”

Jason told me to stay put while he went to check on Sid. When he came back, Sid was in his arms with a hungry smirk on his face. He smacked his lips and latched onto me without opening his eyes. Jason, meanwhile, bent my leg up and down like a physical therapist.

“Does this hurt?”

“No,” I said.

“How about this?” he asked, tapping on my patella.

“It's only when I stand,” I explained tearily.

Jason waited for Sid to finish feeding, then changed his diaper and placed him back in his crib. Watching Sid float away in Jason's arms while I sat glued to the bed, I felt powerless and incompetent and like a human gas pump.

I woke up earlier than usual the next morning because of the time change. To my surprise, Sid and Jason were both still sleeping. I tested my leg and, sensing that it hadn't improved, I rolled off the bed and crawled on my hands and knees along the marble floor toward the bathroom.

Before I could get there, my mom stopped me.

“Chop? What are you doing?” She had a cup of coffee in one hand and Rocky in the other.

“My leg is really fucked up. I seriously can't walk on it.”

My mom cocked her head at me like someone looking at a Sudoku puzzle for the first time.

“How are you gonna dive with one leg? I guess we can just throw you in and strap your tanks on once you're in the water.”

Though I might have preferred a little concern, I had to admire her ability to make the best of a situation. She was always telling me to “buck up,” to “get over it.” When I was sick or injured as a child, she always found ways to keep the party going. She created portable ice headbands for dental work, started at-home IVs for menstrual cramps, and was never without a full prescription of Percocet. In some ways, the fact that my mom was a nurse was amazingly convenient. And in other ways, it was really fucking annoying. Having a parent in the medical field means never really getting any sympathy unless you're dying of
AIDS
. “Oh, your stomach hurts? Well, at least you aren't dying of
AIDS
.” “You pulled a muscle in your groin? That sucks. But you know what sucks more?
AIDS
.” This isn't to excuse her lack of empathy, but there is a certain desensitization that comes with seeing real illness on a daily basis. By comparison, my ailments were minor.

From my spot on the floor I heard Sid crying. Jason woke up to a half-empty bed, hyperventilating.

“Everything okay? Baby? Baby?” he called out, like he'd just dreamed I was mowed down by a school bus.

It didn't surprise me that I'd married a man who was the exact opposite of cavalier when it came to injuries. Jason was an overreactor of the highest degree. Not only was his threshold for pain low, but he was an actor. On countless occasions, he would take what I'd consider a small event and heighten it to a full-blown catastrophe. When he stubbed his toe, he'd start screaming like he was being sodomized with a hot poker.

“Oh
MY GOD! FUUUUCK!
” he'd howl, then do a Chaplin-esque pratfall and writhe on the ground in agony.

Sometimes I'd laugh at his act, but for the most part, I ignored him and charged ahead—the same way my mom was now doing with me. I never intended it to be hurtful. It just never occurred to me to make a big deal of it. He was
fine.
And he didn't have
AIDS
.

“Babe?!” he called again, then jumped out of bed and scrambled toward me.

“Yes?” I said, lying on my back now, staring up at my mom.

I explained to Jason that I was too afraid to stand on my leg for fear of damaging it further, but I needed to pee and hadn't wanted to wake him. I still needed to pee, but Sid was demanding he be removed from his crib and placed back on my boob. So Jason grabbed Sid while I climbed up my mom's body like a toddler and used her shoulder as a crutch to the toilet.

“This really blows,” my mom said.

“Is there a doctor on the island who could look at me?” I sat on the toilet, defeated.

“Only on Maui.”

Maui was a forty-five-minute boat ride away. The idea of packing up my leg and heading over to have some nurse practitioner give me an Ace bandage seemed like a giant waste of time. The other pitfall of having parents in the medical profession is that you become a know-it-all medicine snob. Whenever I needed a prescription my dad would write it for me. If I wanted to see a specialist I got right in. I was quick to throw around medical jargon: subcutaneous, anaphylaxis, hyperlipidemia. And aside from the one time I offered my high school boyfriend's father a Xanax instead of a Zantac, I was fairly adept. In many ways I feel like my entire life has been building to that one watershed moment where I get to storm through a crowd of concerned citizens and say, “Clear the way, people, I'm a doctor's daughter!”

From the bathroom my mom helped me outside to her new teak lawn chairs, where Sid was anxiously waiting. I nursed him and told Jason that I wanted to hold off on seeing a doctor. The plan instead was to head over to the hotel and ask for a pair of crutches.

Jason changed Sid's clothes and then obligingly changed mine.

“Chop-chop, Jen!” my mom called out from her personal golf cart, urgent, like an ambulance driver with a half-dead passenger in the backseat.

“I had the governor ripped out of this thing while we were in San Diego last month,” she confessed as she peeled down the road toward the hotel.

“What's a governor?”

“You know, the brake that keeps you from hauling ass? Fuck that!”

She gunned it over a pothole just to prove her point. Sometimes I would look at her and wish I could be as cool. At her core she would always be that recalcitrant sixteen-year-old girl. The one who endured belt beatings from a brutal mother for sneaking out to see Led Zeppelin. The one who rode topless on the back of a Harley, protesting the war. For as much as she'd hurt me, my deepest desire was still to merge with her, to fully gain her acceptance and finally be let in. But like all the pretty, popular girls of grade schools past, she was always two steps ahead of me, with blonder hair and newer shoes, forever evading my grasp.

My mom parked her golf cart directly in front of the valet and told him not to touch it. She assured him she'd be right back; he naively believed her.

I sat in the cart with one leg propped up, staring at the sun-kissed surfer kid in his wrinkled polo shirt as my mom scampered into the lobby, looking for the hotel manager. I was used to my mom doing as she pleased, regardless of rules. One of the Moc's most notable quotes was “Rules don't apply to me,” and for the most part, they seemed not to. She parked overnight in twenty-minute loading zones, cut airport security lines, and scored me a fake ID at fifteen so I could, as she put it, “continue hanging out with me.” There was something so thrilling about being a part of her capers—being in on the con, even if it was just jockeying to get the best table at Nobu. Watching her in action was like watching James Bond walk into a party, tango his way into a backroom safe, steal a top-secret device, down three glasses of champagne, and then slip into an escape submarine off a nearby dock.

Fifteen minutes later, my mom popped back out of the lobby carrying a pair of crutches and a plate of pineapple that she'd probably taken straight off someone's table in the dining room. She offered the valet a piece that she expected him to eat out of her fingers (which he did), then got back in the cart and took off.

“All right, Choppy! We have crutches. They belong to Allen the Bartender, but he claims his ACL is pretty much healed, so you can borrow them for the week.”

Bartenders loved my mom. She could drink like a Scotsman and was always able to persuade the table next to her to do a shot out of her navel. As long as you kept her fed and didn't pour tequila on her after midnight, she kept her clothes on and was a gift the whole family could enjoy.

When we got back to the condo I used Allen the Bartender's crutches to hop inside. I guessed that Allen was six feet tall, because every time I leaned on the crutches, my feet left the ground and I was suspended in the air like a gymnast on the parallel bars. I found a chair and Jason handed me Sid. He was smiling and warm from lounging in the sun.

“Do we think he's hungry again?” I said, searching for something I could offer him that Jason couldn't.

“I don't think so.”

“Maybe he wants to take a nap?”

“No, he just woke up.”

Sid started fussing and reaching for his toys on the floor. I placed him on the ground and propped up his back with a pillow.

“Choppy! Not that pillow, that's Rocky's.”