Authors: Francine Prose
For one brief moment, Vera feels that all her questions have been answered, wants to change places with the owlish boys and follow Karen Karl to L.A. and beyond. Barely audible music seems to be piping under her skull. She wants everything to stop so she can sort it all out, but the owlish boy’s being paid to make sure it doesn’t. She takes the book he offers her.
What registers first is that she’s got the wrong book. The inscription reads, “To Virginia, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Don’t stop wishing on your lucky star! Love, Karen Karl.” The old woman and her three sons are beside her. Vera knows it’s theirs.
Without understanding precisely why, she feels that the naming of these boys is the very epitome of everything that most depresses her about human life, everything she most hates and secretly fears about the kind of people who read
This Week
. Of course their mother couldn’t have known how they’d turn out. Clearly she’d had something cuter, less swollen, more baby-duckling-like in mind. And if they’re saying, “Way to go, Mom!”, they must not hold her accountable. Still, how could she
do
it?
What Vera’s feeling is the opposite of that honeyish, sentimental glow that had her seeing these people inching toward Karen Karl as pilgrims. Perhaps if she tried hard enough she might recapture it, might see it as funny and tender and really rather sweet to name your kids after Donald Duck’s nephews. But she can’t. Instead she’s losing patience, much as she used to at the end of a long day with Rosalie, when she’d turn on her, shrieking and chattering like a monkey. That’s what she’d like to do to the old lady as they trade books and apologetic smiles. Vera hates her smeary mouth, her tiny, sharp teeth, her pleasure in having her own book at last. Vera’s copy says, “To Vera, Don’t stop wishing on your lucky star! Love, Karen Karl.”
Vera reels out of the bookstore and into the street, where now
everyone
has cartoon-character names. Mr. Naturals, Olive Oyls, Daddy Warbuckses, Little Nemos, Betty Boops—Eighth Street on a Sunday afternoon is crawling with them. Seeing people as cartoons is one of Vera’s personal horrors and one that, she fears, is yet another occupational hazard of working at
This Week
. Sometimes it even happens in Vera’s dreams: people turn into Looney Tunes. It’s why she’s never enjoyed movies that switch between live action and animation, finds them nightmarish. Why? Because when it happens in her nightmares, she knows something terrible is hiding and waiting to pounce as she rounds the next corner of her dream.
I
T’S A SHORT SUBWAY RIDE
to Kirsty’s, but long enough for Vera to envision a dozen horrendous scenarios of carnage and gore she’ll find upon arriving. It’s nothing she hasn’t imagined before, only this time the maniac killers have the cartoon faces and sadistic m.o.’s of Dick Tracy’s archenemies: Fly Face, Flat Top, Prune Face, 88 Keys.
But when Kirsty’s mother, Lynda, answers the door, it’s clear nothing terrible’s happened. Not yet. At worst, Vera feels as she always does with Lynda—interested and uncomfortable.
Lynda works at a trendy Soho beauty salon called Skank. She’s wearing black vinyl toreadors, leopard scuffs, neon pink plastic earrings, a sweatshirt big enough for three: yet another style begun as a way of offending the middle classes, who’ve taken to it so fanatically that women like Lynda have to wear it to keep their jobs. Lynda’s bangs are peacock blue. The rest of her hair is a reddish fox color, cut against the grain so it stands straight up and looks so like an animal pelt that Vera wants to pet it. Why doesn’t she? Lynda often makes free with
her
hair, hefting it in a pony tail, appraising it with that cool hairdresser’s eye that always makes Vera expect the worst:
ENDS SPLIT TO ROOTS—CANCER OF THE HAIR.
“Come on in,” says Lynda, whose breathless, slightly charged-up voice evokes the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. She turns till she’s shoulder to shoulder with Vera; it’s as if they’re arriving together. And in a way it’s true; it’s not exactly Lynda’s apartment. Thanks to an imaginative custody arrangement, Kirsty stays here, and her parents move in with her for alternate weeks. Kirsty’s Dad is named Richard, but Vera has never heard Lynda call him anything but El Creepo. The way Lynda talks, Vera imagines El Creepo as a masked bandit who leaves picked-over chicken bones in the refrigerator, full garbage bags in the pantry, whiskers in the sink. No one, probably not even the judge, expected this setup to last; but though the apartment has the dulled, dusty look of a child being used as a go-between by two warring parents, Kirsty seems to be thriving.
“Guess what happened to me Friday,” says Lynda. “I ran into four flashers. Four exhibitionists in one day. They couldn’t whip it out fast enough. One right up against the shop window, one down the counter from me at lunch, one on the subway each way.”
“Ugh,” says Vera. “Give me a screamer any day. The thing I hate about flashers is the surprise. I mean, you’re not looking crotch level, so you’ve been staring at their silly faces for hours before you look down and notice. By then it’s like they’re your
friends
, like obscene phone callers always sounding at first like some guy you know. Then they’ve
really
got you—”
“Christ,” says Lynda. “You know what the guy in the window said? The shop was pretty crowded, I figured I couldn’t get into too much trouble, so I told him to get lost. And he said, ‘Don’t be offended, Missus. Me and Henry, we’re just takin’ the breeze.’”
“Me and Henry?” Vera shudders. “Once my friend Louise was walking through Central Park and a guy came up to her jerking off. ‘Please hep me,’ he kept saying. And she looked him right in the eye and said, ‘God heps them what hep themselves.’”
“Sure,” says Lynda. “You always hear stories like that. But no one ever does it.”
“The worst are the ones in bookstores,” says Vera, recalling how when she’d first walked into Belmontbooks she’d thought everyone was a flasher. Now that she thinks about it, it’s a wonder she didn’t encounter one. She’s noticed that thinking of flashers seems to attract them. Which isn’t to say she believes that stuff about rape victims secretly wanting it. That’s simply untrue, and anyway, desire—even secret desire—isn’t the issue. It’s something subtler, more mysterious. In which case, what does Lynda’s four-in-one-day imply about
her
mental processes? Well, plenty. Lynda and her friends inhabit a world where men named El Creepo want nothing more than to leave whiskers in the sink or leap out from behind the nearest subway pillar waving their penises in women’s faces.
Which is to say: the real world. Or their corner of it. All Lynda’s friends seem to be divorced from men who might as well be named El Creepo, and what they do when they get together is complain about their ex-husbands. In other words, romantics. None of them has stopped believing in true love; they all want to remarry. Often in their company Vera imagines she’s among women on torturous diets: the one food they crave is the only one they can’t have.
Beyond that, they make her miss Louise the way boring men at parties make her miss Lowell. Their talk makes her long for the common language she shares with Louise and just can’t seem to speak with Lynda and her friends. One problem is: when they’re telling their horror stories, Vera can never manage to come across with a suitable contribution. And it’s not that she doesn’t have stories to tell. Let them beat the one about Lowell spending their last peso on cashews! Still, she’s never told it, partly out of some vestigial loyalty to Lowell, but more out of loyalty to herself. If she presents Lowell as an idiot, what does that make her for marrying him?
One night, bravely keeping up her end of the conversation, she told them about the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, in which Valerie Solanis, the one who shot Andy Warhol, claims the only way men can rehabilitate themselves is to sit around repeating, “I am a lowly, abject turd.” Just saying it cracked Vera up, but no one else thought it was funny. Did they think she was making fun of them? She wasn’t. Perhaps she was just taking it too far.
Now she asks Lynda, “Are you coming or going?”, meaning the apartment. Traditionally, the changing of the guard takes place on Sunday nights.
“Leaving,” Lynda says. “Can’t you tell? When El Creepo’s been here, the place is a total disaster.”
If this isn’t a disaster, Vera would like to see one. But who is she to pass judgment on anyone’s housekeeping? Changing the subject, she asks Lynda if El Creepo’s coming to the recital.
“Let’s hope not,” says Lynda. “I don’t know if he knows about it, and
I’m
not going to tell him. When he does go, all he does is stare at Madame Svenskaya’s ass.”
“Madame?” says Vera. “She’s eighty!”
“Don’t kid yourself,” says Lynda. “She’s got terrific muscle tone. Madame’s got a cuter ass than we do.”
Strangely, Vera’s a little hurt by this; pride alone prevents her from reaching back and patting her behind reassuringly. Lynda seems to know what she’s thinking; it’s the kind of thing she’s instinctively sensitive to.
“You?” she says. “You’re doing great. Me, I’m getting to the point where the highway patrol wants me to put a sign on my skirt, ‘Caution. Wide Load.’”
Vera laughs and asks where the girls are. “Listen,” says Lynda. Vera hears a scratchy version of “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” coming from down the hall and follows Lynda toward it. The girls don’t hear them come in. They’re twirling round the cramped bedroom, each holding one hand in the air like show-off waiters balancing trays. At the recital there will be trays, and on them lit candles. Vera’s never approved; the girls’ long hair whips back and forth at tray level. One night she asked Rosie if they were planning to dance in asbestos tutus: another mistake. Rosie can’t stand any questioning of Madame’s authority and taste.
“Mom,”
she said. “It’s
the St. Lucia dance.”
Vera knows for a fact that St. Lucia has something to do with Christmas in Sweden, with fresh-braided cardamom loaves glazed with sugar and raisins. But then, ten-year-olds waltzing with open flames in mid-August fits right in with Madame’s vague Mittel Europa origins, her trailing Isadora Duncan scarves and Isak Dinesen makeup job. What sympathy Vera has comes from knowing that all this, accent included, is Madame’s uniform, as much a part of her job as Lynda’s blue hair. In five years, Rosie’s had three ballet teachers, all of them called Madame.
As soon as the music ends, Vera says, “Okay, Anna Pavlova,” and immediately regrets it. She hopes Rosie’s never seen the same film clip she did. Thrashing and flopping about, the great Pavlova looked more like the victim of some scabrous poultry disease than a gracefully dying swan. Wondrously, Rosie seems pleased and graces her mother with a smile. Vera almost tells her about the photo Solomon brought her, but no; admitting she even
saw
Solomon is perilous. “Let’s hit the road,” she says.
Before they can leave, the girls go through an elaborate hand-slapping ritual Vera hasn’t seen the likes of since 1968. Soul-sister ballerinas. Vera notices rings under Rosie’s eyes. But when she asks if she’s sleepy, Rosie ignores her, says nothing all the way to the subway and then, as if no time’s elapsed, replies that she and Kirsty were up till one
A.M.
watching a horror movie. Running on Sunday schedule, the train takes so long coming that Rosie has time to tell the entire plot:
“It’s about a guy who buys this windup doll for his girlfriend. He takes it home and—oh, yeah, he has this real nosy landlord—one day when he’s not there, the landlord comes snooping around and suddenly the doll starts gnashing its razory little teeth”—Rosie demonstrates—“and eats up the landlord. Then a detective comes to investigate and the same thing happens to him. By now the guy knows the doll’s pretty weird, and he can’t decide whether he should still give it to his girlfriend, but he does. Except the doll’s jealous of the girlfriend and the last thing you see is the girlfriend pinned against the wall screaming and the doll taking little nibbles from her leg. Really gross.”
“Gee,” Vera says. “I wonder where we could get one.”
Rosie’s delighted. “Who would we sic it on?” she asks.
Vera can’t think of anyone she’d like to see digested by a mechanical doll. Maybe life isn’t so bad. Finally she says, “What about Carl?”
“Mom,” whines Rosie. “Why are you so hung up on Carl?” When the train comes, she sits across the aisle. And that’s it for conversation.
They’re home in no time, or anyway before Vera remembers she’s forgotten to buy food for Mavis’s dinner. She so hates the idea of going out again, she actually considers recycling last night’s chicken salad. Perhaps it could be salvaged, every shred of offending celery hunted down and removed. What restores her to sanity is remembering that Mavis has problems with her teeth. She’s even given up meat—for dental reasons. To invite someone for dinner and serve food that causes them physical pain seems like something Genghis Khan would do. She’ll make the pasta primavera she should have made last night—a resolution that gives her heart to throw out the leftover chicken salad.
Scraping the nearly full bowl into the garbage, Vera tenses. If there’s any time lightning seems likely to strike, this is it. Her mother will eat anything—hard rice, stiff gravy—rather than throw it out. Long before Vera had ever heard of Marx, she believed her parents were working toward some ideal world in which all leftovers were divided in neat little packets and distributed evenly among the nation’s poor. Before she knew anything about Judaism, she intuited the presence of that angel with the flaming sword guarding the garbage to make sure nothing marginally edible got thrown out. She thinks,
TERROR IN THE TRASH: HOW LEFTOVERS CAN KILL
, and to go with it, a story about a woman who makes the mistake of cleaning her refrigerator and taking her metal garbage can out during an electrical storm. All afternoon, shopping and cooking, she rewrites it in her head and is just putting the finishing touches on pasta and story when it’s time to leave.
T
HE ACADEMY OF CLASSICAL
Dance meets in a loft on a bombed-out block of Flatbush Avenue Extension. In the year Rosie’s gone there, three different furniture stores have opened and failed in the storefront below. For what Vera pays, the Academy could own the whole building; but in fact they share space with the Ken-Do Karate Dojo, the Kings County Country Dance Society, and several other physical-culture groups. One drawback of this is the smell. Even with the windows open, the loft seems to have trapped a whole weekend’s worth of heat and humidity and revved-up martial-arts sweat, sharper and sourer than little-ballerina sweat or even that subway-commuter smell that Vera sort of likes.