Dead End Gene Pool (20 page)

Home was suddenly a low-ceilinged, split-level ranch made entirely of brick—both real and faux, but mostly faux. The floors were brick, the walls were brick, the shelving and the alcoves, the stairs and the basement, they were all brick. There was a brick patio off a living room that had a brick fireplace, and the brick kitchen had plastic brick counters and brick-colored Kenmore appliances and a linoleum brick floor. Even the cupboards had brick-patterned contact paper. It was like living in a kiln that had been air-dropped onto the middle of an eight-acre field. Over the summer, my mother and her new husband, whom she addressed as “my Lord and Master,” had put up ten linear miles of raw wood fencing and erected a barn, into which they had moved four horses: hers, a big gray named Puck; his, a palomino killer named Mighty Mo; Will’s once coveted but now bratty and loathsome pony; and an obese bovine piebald named Beethoven. It was like the Instant Grow version of
Green Acres,
minus the pigs.

My stepfather was an arms dealer. He and my mother had not been brought together by serendipity alone; he had been my father’s closest friend, their initial bond having been an obsession with all
objets de guerre
. As manager of an American organization called Interarms, he bought and sold surplus weaponry to governments and civilians all over the world. The founder of Interarms wasn’t picky about who was pushing the shopping cart—Castro, Batista, or Nixon—because he claimed neutrality, and thus was able to equip home guards, national reserves, civil wars, revolutions, defense wars, and insurgencies alike. My stepfather was paid very well, and then some, for his hazardous line of work, and he put the money into his stable of cars, as well as the vault full of gold bricks that he kept in Zurich.

Applying the managerial skills of his business to the home front, the Lord and Master’s first official act had indeed been the brutal firing of my beloved Dewar’s-slugging, Winston-puffing Henrietta, whom he detested. (In a double whammy, Cassie Diggins felt compelled to quit in protest.) My mother had been aghast, but her new husband had bullied her into going it alone. I was bereft. I’d been looking forward to taking care of Henrietta in her demented years, after she had hand-reared my own children. That’s what Scottish nannies were supposed to do—stay on till death. The other side of my family, the happy, well-adjusted Uncle Shirley side I dreamed of belonging to, had one. Her name was Magoo (or something like that), and she was about a hundred and fifty. Her adoptive family had built her a little apartment in their gargantuan house in New Canaan, Connecticut, a place I would have given my heart and lungs to have lived in. Magoo toddled down for meals and babbled in atmospheric Scottish gibberish in her designated corner throughout. Since three, I’d been planning to build Henrietta a wing on my English country estate, complete with her own tap-room and cigarette and candy vending machines.

On the hot September day we arrived at the new house, Will and I stood in the kitchen and gaped at the chores chart the Lord and Master had bolted to the wall. We had never been assigned chores before.

“I changed my mind,” I said, turning to my mother in total neurogenic shock. “I do want to go to boarding school. I do. In fact, I
insist
.”

“Too late,” my mother said, swinging six-packs of Tab onto the pantry shelves. She was organizing her supplies, something she did on a weekly basis. My mother stocked up like the Russians were scheduled to drop the Big One at 0800. There was a spare for the spare for the spare that was the spare for the item in use, be it salt or Bacardi or Comet. Her personal staples, Lip-ton Iced Tea Mix, strawberry Carnation Instant Breakfast, Metracal shakes and cookies, Sweet’N Low, and Tab, she bought by the case. There was a measurable blast of carcinogens whenever you opened the cabinet doors.

My mother stood back to admire her work. She frowned, and then switched the five jars of Bac-Os with the five boxes of Rice-A-Roni. Still not satisfied, she transferred the Rice-A-Roni to the shelf above, and put the seven bottles of Good Seasons Lo Calorie dressing in their place. Obadiah was rooting for crumbs beneath her, and she kept tripping over him and sliding on his slobber as she struggled to place the Rice-A-Roni far enough back to accommodate six tins of roast beef hash and five of deviled ham on the front of the shelf.

“There!” she said, emerging from the tiny pantry, which was really a cupboard stashed under the back (brick) stairs. “Anyway, Toots, school starts in a week, and you’ll make lots of new friends, just like you always do. Some of them might even be boys.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively as she unscrewed a jar of powdered iced tea. I caught a whiff of the nuclear fallout from ten feet away. She spooned some into a glass, added water from the tap, and pulled a tray of ice cubes out of the freezer. Slamming it on the counter, she gave the frosty handle a yank, which sent most of the cubes thumping across the counter and onto the floor. Obadiah dove after them in a commendable burst of energy. My mother wiped her hands on her bikini bottoms. “So you might consider laying off the potato chips for a while.” Inspired, she wrote out
DIET!!
on a piece of paper and Scotch taped it to the fridge, where a dozen similar notes were already displayed. She claimed these motivational reminders were for herself, but she made a point of being reminded by them whenever I was around.

Will leaned against the screened back door, smirking. He left for school in a couple of days.

“Shut up, jerk,” I hissed, turning on him. “I wouldn’t want to go to your
re
-tard school anyway!”

“Ah, ah, ah!” cautioned my mother. “Now, that’s a little unfair. Glayden is for kids with dyslexia too.” She smiled at Will as she sipped from her glass. If this affirmation of my brother’s school really being for retards insulted him, he didn’t show it.

“At least I don’t have to live here and shovel shit and wax cars,” he said snidely, and slammed out the door into the stifling humidity.

I went back to staring at the Lord and Master’s work detail. Jeez. The guy had no clue how to go about doing this. He had never been married before, plus he was old. Like forty-something. There wasn’t enough time in the day for all the tasks I was supposed to perform. Spoiled? You bet I was. But this was hardly a case of not wanting to take out the garbage or feed the dogs. This was about mucking out the horses in the dark before school, whitewashing all that fencing in the middle of a heat wave, picking up every Monday after school the shit three dogs had broadcast over eight acres, and waxing one of my stepfather’s stupid sports cars every other Wednesday.

That afternoon found my brother and me doing time with buckets and brushes, working on our own little chain gang. As soon as you applied the paint, the thirsty wood instantly slurped it up like a sponge. After a couple of hours, we felt like we were getting nowhere.

Our mother came out with some Kool-Aid, and her two tortoises, Mr. Turt and Miss Tort. Obadiah greeted her by rolling onto his back and flapping his dinner-plate paws. Will and I collapsed beside him in the long buggy grass and feigned heatstroke.

“Honestly, you two,” she said, setting the tortoises down gently in the deep jungle, whereupon they instantly slammed all four doors shut. “You’d think you were being worked like darkies down on the old plantation.” With her face turned to the sun, she managed to locate and remove a tick the size of a baseball from Obadiah’s neck. She flicked it into the grass, sparing its evil little life so it could live to suck the blood of basset hounds again.

I glowered at her from under my paint-streaked bangs.

For the first time since bearing them, our mother actually had to take care of her children. Will was mostly away, either at school or camp, or at our grandparents’, but Edward made up for Will’s absence by being an omnipresent toddler. Without Cassie Diggins we were suddenly, horribly, at the mercy of our mother’s cooking: Early New England Regional Cuisine as Interpreted by an Alcoholic with an Eating Disorder.

Everything went into the Teflon frying pan: Spam, hot dogs, “grilled” Velveeta cheese sandwiches, steak, spaghetti, hearts of palm, fish sticks, and any and all leftovers, which, with an addition of onion, were then relabeled “hash.” Meanwhile, my mother rarely deviated from her own regime of cottage cheese, diet soda, Ayds candies, and raw hamburger meat dipped in Lip-ton onion soup mix—except when she was loaded. Then she sucked up drippings from the roast or frying pan with a straw.

The cook soon became
fed up to here
with cooking. In the nick of time someone invented Shake ’N Bake, Birds Eye boil-in-the-bag frozen vegetables, and a coffee cake mix in a plastic bag that you added an egg to before squirting it out into its own little baking pan. Those technological advances, along with Chun King sukiyaki in a box, helped my mother evolve.

The Lord and Master left for work at dawn, so it was relatively peaceful in the mornings. Edward would watch cartoons in the living room, while I’d sit at the kitchen counter before school and watch my mother fry eggs in bacon grease. On certain Fridays, I went to visit my grandparents for the weekend. I hated flying, especially alone. I was torn between my fear and wanting a breather from my stepfather’s autocratic domain, not to mention babysitting my little brother, a drudgery that was hardly worth its twenty-five-cents-an-hour compensation.

“I hate flying more than
anything,
” I grumbled, and refolded my paper napkin so the corners were more perfectly aligned.

“Poppycock,” said my mother, sliding a couple of eggs that looked like brown lace onto my plate. The toaster popped, and she scraped the tiniest amount of margarine imaginable over an English muffin before handing it to me. I glared at her. She herself was so terrified of flying someone had to crowbar her out of the airport bar in order to get her on the plane.

“And just think,” she added, “you get to be waited on hand and foot by those Irish biddies
and
pork up on butter, and drink Coke until your teeth rot.” She had a knack for making the things you looked forward to sound terrible.

“Yeah, well at least I’ll be away from Adolf,” I said through a mouthful of toast. My mother whipped around from the sink, a bottle of dish soap in one hand, a sponge in the other. She narrowed her eyes at me, like smoke was heading her way. Whether my sobriquet for him insulted her, or whether it hurt her feelings, I couldn’t tell, but clearly she was pissed. Not that I cared. Now that we were at last spending quality time together—something I couldn’t believe I used to wish for—my mother was becoming less of an enigma and more of a liability. The bottle of Dawn slipped from her grasp, beaning the new dog, Dropout, on his massive head. Blue soap leached out like gore as we stared at each other. The arty metal cutouts of turtles and otters and porcupines on the kitchen walls looked down accusingly at me until I lowered my eyes, and my mother bent to clean up the soapy mess, apologizing profusely to Dropout, who squirmed and thrashed his tail like a delighted sea serpent.

(Greta, to no one’s regret but my mother’s, was history. Upon her arrival in rural Virginia, she had adopted the mind-set of a homicidal psychotic. One minute she would be all heroic and Rin Tin Tin-like, posing with her keen eye upon the horizon, looking out for the 101st Cavalry, and the next she’d be enacting the canine version of
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
. After she’d redecorated the neighbor’s henhouse with the blood of its residents, my mother was forced to ship Greta to the nearest active war zone. On her way home from the cargo terminal of National Airport she picked up a replacement. Dropout, as the name suggested, had failed attack school. He was the world’s largest German shepherd. He was entirely black, sweetly complacent, and lazy—and would eventually get mistaken for a bear and shot to death—an event from which my mother would never fully recover.)

“Yes, yes, yes!” she now said to the behemoth creature. He clicked around her with joy, crashing into Obadiah, who fell over, and Piddle, who snapped at him before retreating under my stool. I gave Piddle my bacon and then put my plate on the floor for Obadiah, who was forbidden to have fried eggs because he liked to drag his ears through them, and then all over the house.

Lightbulb: “Why can’t I just stay with Gaga and Granddaddy, and go to school in New York?”

My mother took a swallow of her morning Tab and sighed, considering this wonderful possibility. “Fine by me,” she said, “but your grandfather would never go for it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you ain’t a boy, Toots, that’s why.” She scooped a handful of butterscotch Ayds from an economy-sized box and put them in a Baggie. “Better pack these,” she said, handing them to me. “I don’t want to have to go buying you new clothes before spring. Speaking of which, you better hurry up and get dressed for school, and pack your suitcase too. We still have the horses to do before the bus comes.”

Weather took all the fun out of owning animals. It was barely December, but there was already a foot of snow on the ground.