The Queen Gene (11 page)

My mother let out a shriek that sounded as though she may have spilled hot water on herself. All of her guests were laughing, which meant Anjoli was fine. Or she had the sickest group of friends in Manhattan. “It’s true!” Anjoli screamed dramatically. “Kimmy, you mustn’t do this to me, darling. I beg of you. I had to visit Lucy in that godforsaken state for four years before she had the good sense to move to the Berkshires. I can see the handwriting on the wall. You’re going to marry this guy and live with him in, in — Jesus, God give me strength —
New Jersey
.” She cackled as her friends laughed. “I’m going to have to come visit you and this baby of yours in
New Jersey.”
I imagined Anjoli with her hand on her forehead dancing across the dining room for dramatic effect. As she swayed back and forth, I imagined little Mancha squealing under her stiletto heel.

“You must have some past-life issues to resolve that can only be addressed in New Jersey,” Kiki offered. I waited for the laughter, but no one so much as chuckled. Was this woman serious?

“Darling, you think I have bad New Jersey karma?” Anjoli said with terror.

“Not karma, per se, but perhaps this is the universe’s way of pulling you toward a spiritual polar point for your healing,” Kiki said.

It can never just be that some people choose to live in New Jersey because they like the suburbs. With my mother and her friends, there’s always some sort of crazy theory that focuses around them and their spiritual healing. The fact that a Princeton professor lived in New Jersey had absolutely nothing to do with him and his housing needs. It was all about my mother and her unresolved issues from a past life.

“You know what I’d love to see?” Alfie asked the group. “I hope this professor’s home is right across the street from the Kappa Kappa Cutie house, so everywhere Anjoli goes it’ll be Girlstown!”

“Bitch!” Anjoli said, laughing. “I simply don’t want to be bothered by their vile giggling at all hours of the morning.”

* * *

On April Fools’ Day, two wonderful events happened at the house. First, Jack finished his painting of Adam. It was magnificently colorful with thick swirls of yellow and red and orange defining his face. The painting wasn’t the cubist piece that Jack had originally intended, but it was even better than what he’d envisioned. There was a bright, modern quality about the texture and color that captured the spirit of our two-year-old. “You’re not going to sell it, are you?” I asked. “I want to hang it in the living room.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Jack said. “I’m going to do another and use that scattered concept we talked about.” He seemed so happy when he was painting. I wish I knew what Maxime was like when he was creating, but no one had seen that side of him yet.

The second joy of the first day of April was the arrival of Randy, the glass sculptor. Maybe it was the fact that the clouds literally parted and the sun began shining within an hour of his arrival, but I seriously thought Randy was a gift from heaven. He was about thirty with a body chiseled from stone. He had short dirty-blond hair and squinty brown eyes. There was no other word but yummy to describe Randy. Maxime was indeed handsome, but these days he looked like a castaway. Randy looked like the rescue boat.

Robin thought so, too. When she and Tom stopped by the house, she whispered into my ear that she may have actually had an orgasm through her eyeballs. We felt guilty watching our husbands help Randy unload his duffel bag and boxes of supplies as we silently envied the glass he touched.

Chantrell tried to act disinterested, but there was no looking past this man. As she passed her dead vegetable garden, she tried to sneak a glimpse at Randy and stepped on a gardening hoe. I found this more than a tad ironic considering she’d been carrying on with Maxime for weeks. Meanwhile, Jacquie terrorized store owners up and down the East Coast. She disappeared for days at a time, returning with shopping bags from as far as New York and Boston. This was fine with Maxime and Chantrell, who seemingly gave up their respective arts for a career in screwing each other.

“Ouch!” Chantrell shouted as she hopped around holding her bare foot. “It’s bleeding! My foot is bleeding!”

Randy dropped his bag and ran to her aid. Robin and I looked at each other in disbelief. If we’d known all it would take is slicing our feet open with gardening tools, we’d have done it first. “Did he
not
see my cast?” pouted Robin.

“I’m limping around like Quasimodo with this ankle,” I added. “You think I’d get a little first aid?”

I had mixed feelings when Chantrell contracted tetanus despite having gotten a precautionary shot at Urgent Care. On the one hand, she was screwing someone else’s husband. On the other hand, I couldn’t stand to see people suffer. And she was definitely suffering.

The next week, I saw her try to replant her vegetable garden and begin playing cello to her zucchini. She did not visit Maxime for three days. I kept an eagle eye on Randy’s place and, thankfully, Chantrell hadn’t ventured there either.

“Jack, take Adam to preschool with me this morning,” I requested.

“Do we need to talk to his teacher?” Jack asked.

“Nope.”

“What then?” he asked.

“I just want to hang out with you a bit,” I said, hiding my real agenda.

After we dropped Adam at school, I drove to an area I’d scoped out a few days earlier. As I slowed the car near a grove of trees, Jack looked at me knowingly. “You either brought me here to kill me, or to —” His voice trailed off, but his eyebrows rose hopefully.

“When was the last time we fooled around outside of the bedroom?” I asked.

“Or at eight-thirty in the morning?” he added.

As our bodies met, Jack’s elbow sounded the horn. We laughed and continued kissing like teens on prom night. “Let’s go in the back,” Jack said.

My heart raced. “Okay.” I may have actually giggled.

Minutes later our clothing was strewn across the minivan, and Jack was lowering himself into me. His head turned quickly as his face changed from lustful to terrified within a second as he looked out the back window.

“Luce, get dressed, quick!” Jack said hurriedly as he jumped back into the driver’s seat. I looked up to see a police car with its lights flashing driving toward our car.

“Shit!” I said as a layer of sweat covered my naked body.

“We’ve got to move,” Jack said, starting the car.

“Jack, I’m naked!”

“So am I, Luce!” he said as the car engine began. “Grab my pants. They’re right there by your side.” The car began moving quickly, and the police car began to follow. I reached into the back seat and started grabbing our clothing and putting on whatever I could find. “You’re dressing yourself?! I can’t believe you’re dressing yourself! Grab my pants over there!”

“Give me a sec!”

“You’re buttoning your blouse?! Just throw the thing on and get my pants. We’re on the main road in about thirty seconds and my dick is hanging out.”

“Well, technically it’s not hanging
out
because there’s nothing for it to be hanging from,” I said.

“Luce, I’ve got a cop behind me and I’m fucking naked! Grab my pants!”

I held Jack’s pants out for him so he could slip into them. As soon as he was covered, Jack stepped on the gas and began to outrun the police car. The officer turned on his siren and demanded that we pull over. “I can take him,” Jack said.

“Stop the car!” I shouted. “Jack, you’re talking crazy. We’re not getting into a police car chase over this. Pull over.”

“Pull over?!” he asked incredulously. “Pull over and say what?”

“Don’t say anything. Zip up your pants and let me do the talking.”

“Luce, you’ve got no pants on!” he reminded me.

“Pull over and hand me my underwear. They’re right down there next to the gas pedal.”

“I can take this guy, Luce!”

“Jack!” I shouted. “Snap out of it. We are not Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We are never going to outrun this guy. He can see our license plate. Even if you can outrun him, he’ll be at our house in twenty minutes. Now pull over and hand me my panties!”

Thankfully, Jack knew to reverse the order of my demand. As I was pulling the elastic waist band over my hips, the officer looked in our driver’s side window and gestured for Jack to roll down his window.

“Don’t say a word, Jack. Let me handle this.” The window rolled down. The officer looked at my bare legs and blouse unevenly buttoned, then glanced at shirtless Jack.”

“Is there a problem, officer?” I said sheepishly.

“I expected you to be kids,” he said.

“Nope, just a boring old married couple trying to reignite some passion into our relationship,” I said, giggling nervously. “I was going to tell you a whole big story about losing my contact lens, but frankly you seem like the kind of guy who would understand our predicament. I mean, not that you seem like a guy whose marriage is boring or anything, but well, you know. Are you married?” I asked, glancing at his left hand.

“Thirty years,” he said, flatly.

“Wow, congratulations! That’s amazing. You and your wife must really have something special.” He said nothing. “This was my idea, officer. I thought maybe if we, you know, park, my husband and I could, you know, spark the flame. You can understand, can’t you? I mean, don’t you and your wife ever do crazy stuff like this?”

“No,” he said.

“Couldn’t you just give us a warning?”

“You didn’t know that you’re not supposed to have sex in public?” he asked.

“We were not having sex! We were
about to
have sex, but nothing had been, um, finalized yet. Officer, I beg of you, we have a child who would find his parents’ criminal record incredibly embarrassing. Couldn’t we just pretend this never happened?”

“Lady, I saw your bare ass scurrying around throwing clothes around. How can I pretend that never happened? Look, you seem like nice enough people, but I gotta take you in.”

We saw a judge that afternoon who scolded us for our reckless behavior, ordered us to go to traffic school, and told us we were lucky he wasn’t pressing public indecency charges against us. Jack and I straightened ourselves out, grabbed some lunch, then picked up Adam at preschool. “That was fun,” Jack said.

I blushed, then peeked at Adam strapped into his car seat, playing with his Whoozit toy. “I know. Kind of exhilarating. I’ve never been wanted in the state of Massachusetts before.”

“I beg to differ,” Jack winked.

Chapter Thirteen

The following week, Aunt Bernice called. For the first time in months, she didn’t provide an update on her pubic hair. Instead, she sniffed that she missed her sister, Rita. “You spend eighty yeyahs with someone, and you know exactly how they would have reacted to something, and when theyah not theyah to do it, you miss it,” she explained.

“Did something happen today?” I asked.

“Something happens every day,” Bernice said.

“Why so blue today?”

I knew something had to have happened. After all, this was a woman who described the woman who mugged her in the Publix parking lot as wearing a very elegant hat. Bernice said, “I got this flyah — everyone in the building got it — that said six dollahs a room for carpet cleaning, three-room minimum. So I figyad for eighteen dollahs I’ll do both bedrooms and the living room.”

“And?” I urged her to continue.

“These burly men got to the apartment, and they said it’s going to be a hundred-twenty cawse I needed a deep cleaning. I said, ‘Who needs a deep cleaning?’ It’s not like I’m such a big shot. I don’t really know what happened next, but I paid them fifty dollahs and they cleaned my foyah.”

“Your foyer?!” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“They cleaned your foyer for fifty dollars?”

“Yes,” Bernice replied.

“What happened to the six dollars per room?”

“That’s what I want to know!”

“I don’t understand what happened, Aunt Bernice. You paid them?”

“Yes.”

“Why?!”

“I’m not shaw. They did a very nice job on the carpet. The foyah nevah looked so good. I thought they would get angry if I told them to go away. They were very big men.”

I boiled with rage and heartbreak. My elderly aunt was baited and switched, then paid two thugs not to beat her up. I was beyond infuriated with this carpet mafia.

“How did you pay?” I asked.

“Check,” she said.

“Did you sign anything?” I asked.

“They made me sign a form when they were finished,” she said. “I don’t know what it said. I didn’t have my reading glasses on, but they were pretty pushy about me needing to sign it before they would leave.” She sighed. “If Rita were heyah, she would know exactly how to handle those kids.”

“They were kids?!”

“They were young. Fordy, no more than fifdy.”

“Do you still have the flyer?” I asked my aunt.

“Oh, Lucy, I don’t think they have service in yaw area.”

“Aunt Bernice!” I exclaimed. “I don’t want to hire them. I want to call and demand your money back. They’re preying on the elderly. I’m going to report them.”

“Report them?” she asked.

“To the Better Business Bureau, the Elder Abuse people, and whoever else handles this sort of thing.”

“Lucy, you’re such an Erin Abramowitz.”

My aunt is gifted in managing to convert anyone she likes to Judaism.

“It’s Erin Brockovich, Auntie.”

“Now there was a goil with celluloid breasts,” she said, “but the way she saved those people from the dirty warter.…” She sighed. “A lovely, lovely goil. I wonda if she shaved her vaginer.” I knew it couldn’t last.

A few minutes later, I called Greg, the manager of the carpet cleaning service, who abruptly told me that if Aunt Bernice signed the release form and paid his workers, she must have been satisfied with the work. I assured him that she wasn’t. “Look, she’s eighty-four years old, and you sent two giants to her house who wouldn’t leave until they were paid fifty dollars to clean a foyer.”

“She could’ve said no,” he replied rudely.

“Do you advertise exclusively in senior citizen residences?” I asked. “Because this sounds a whole lot like preying on the elderly.”