Kamikaze Lust (16 page)

“Oh.” I giggled self-consciously, and he put his right hand to his cheek as if he were talking on a mobile phone. “Johnson, Silver here, the president is dead. His guts smeared all over my notebook, it’s fantastic.”

“Okay, I can start stereotyping porn stars any time now, Robbie Rod.” The truth was I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t involve his penis. Under no circumstance would I let this conversation become sexual.

“I told you Robbie Rod is no longer with us.” He crossed his arms in front of him as if he were the first person ever to perform the tired gesture. Funny thing was, it worked for him. He fit that tightly in his own skin.

“Right, I forgot, everyone’s dead with you. Whatever you say, RR.” I looked away. I didn’t want him to see how nervous he was making me. I started pushing my napkin shreds into a neat pile, then remembered Mom telling me not to play with objects on the dinner table. The moments when propriety struck her often amazed me. She could pretend to faint in the middle of a crowded airport, but I couldn’t touch the leftover food on my plate when we were home alone.

I looked up and RR was staring at me. I wondered if he too thought I had no class, playing with napkin shavings as I was. Alexis would never tear into a napkin.

“Listen, I mourned,” he said.

“You what?” I cocked my head, journalistically.

“It’s not easy losing a legend, but you move on. Sort of like how video killed the radio star.”

“I think you need to get out more.”

“I get out too much.” He tilted his head as if the cameras were rolling, and I thought, what a smug, arrogant slob. If only I could stop flirting with him.

I smiled despite myself. “You talk like a porn film.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” he said, and our eyes met, long enough for my neck to flush, long enough that I was sure he could see Silver Ray coming into her own.

She wanted me to break rules and destroy confidences, cross double yellow lines and talk generic porno talk as if I’d invented the words myself. But not here, with him, in a Korean restaurant. I peeked down at my pile of napkin strips, empty glasses greased with three sets of lip prints, the lazy glimmer of a wick buried to its head in liquified wax. You couldn’t get more postprandial, and this, for some reason, made me antsy. I stuck the tip of my index finger into the candle and felt the heat shoot up my arm. Shuddering, I pulled it away. He laughed, and we stared at my finger in its cloudy white thimble until Alexis returned, and I quickly hid my hand underneath the table. I spent the rest of the meal playing with the wax on my finger.

HOLIDAY ON ICE

Mom set down the holiday china and crystal as I followed with Grandma’s silverware. At the head of the table she stopped and twirled around to face me, a curious glint in her eyes. Hugging a couple of plates to her stomach, she burst into song: “
I’m as corny as Kansas in August…ya, da, da, ya, da, da, Fourth of July.
”

I dropped a few forks and stood frozen, afraid she might slip off to Bali-Hi. I wondered if Hy knew we could be dining in the South Pacific. But Mom simply pirouetted backwards and resumed her table setting, singing, “
I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love.…
”

It had been a while since I’d been ambushed by her off-key crooning. Growing up, she used to sing along with the albums and address us by characters’ names as if we were all part of the show. So many times we’d heard how before she met Dad she’d been headed for Broadway, yet as far as I knew the closest she’d come was once auditioning for a regional production of
Oklahoma.
And her knowledge of musicals curtailed in the mid-seventies, after she’d seen
A Chorus Line.
That was her show. She’d taken me to see it twice. Both times we stood for hours at the half-price ticket line and then stuffed ourselves silly with shrimp at Beefsteak Charlie’s. By the time we got to the theater I was so tired I slept through both performances, but remember once having to pee and opening my eyes to actors singing about breast implants. I leaned my body closer to Mom’s and whispered, “Ma, I have to—” “Uh, Rachel, your breath stinks.” She shooed me away without taking her eyes from the stage. I drifted back to sleep with my hand holding my crotch and dreams of mint chewing gum.

“Oh, I’m really in love again,” Mom said. She grabbed my upper arms and I shivered, forced a smile.

“I’m happy for you.”

“And Hy is a wonderful guy. So romantic.”

Her grip on my arms felt stifling, more like a choreographed move than a show of affection. Her fingers smelled like turkey guts. I had to pull away.

She followed me back into the kitchen and yanked open the oven. The candied scent of sweet potatoes sailed through the kitchen. One hand encased in an oven mitt, Mom slid out the tray and like a surgeon inspected the bird. “Rachel, give me that thingy, would you?”

I handed her the baster, watched her suck up the juices puddled alongside of the turkey and release the liquid over its crisp brown skin. “I was thinking this might be the last holiday, you know, with Aunt Lorraine,” I said.

“Yes, but we have Hy and his family now.” She brushed off my feelings faster than the juices trickled down the sides of that damn bird. It took all I had to overlook her selfishness. I thought of Aunt Lorraine, what she might wear today to cover her bald head.

“Don’t you see we’re gonna be a whole family again?” Mom said. “I even tried to get Neil and some woman, she sounded like a real you-know-what. She told me not to call so much, but we don’t know her, who is she?”

“He lives with her, I think it’s her house.” Neil had told me he was moving in with his girlfriend the last time he called me from Vegas. I was still living in Miami then. He asked me for five hundred dollars, which I sent to him, as I’d done sporadically over the years. I would do whatever I could to support his life away from mine.

“Neil’s a jerk, always was.”

“So he’s excused from seeing his mother?” she said, still basting. “Oh, by the way, there’s something for you there, in the little brown bag.” I opened it and pulled out a wooden pop-gun, painted with green and yellow leaves and a palm tree on each side of the handle. The word BERMUDA was scrawled in black letters on top. A piece of cork hung from a string attached to the handle.

“Mother, you bought me a weapon.” I slammed the handle forward and the cork went flying: pop! Just like a bottle of wine.

“Isn’t that the best?” Mom laughed. “We had such a time down there. One night we were out on the beach, you could see a million stars, it was so clear, like a painting.” I loaded up, cocked the handle of my toy gun back and forth like a saw, gearing up for another pop. “So Hy tells me all those stars are nothing compared to my eyes; my eyes sparkle like diamonds, he says. And he should know, he’s in jewels.”

“I thought his jewels were fake.” I popped the gun. The airy bang left me feeling satisfied, justified.

“Oh, you’re the big jewelry expert now,” Mom said. She stuck a fork in between the turkey’s legs to taste the stuffing, and I couldn’t help but think of the obligatory spread-eagled porn star. I had a vision of Mom with her legs spread and Hy wriggling on top of her, coming like a pop-gun…
isn’t that the best?

I put down the toy gun.

“I’m just saying how sweet a man he is,” Mom said. “And I’m getting on with things, that’s more than you can say.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

She pushed the turkey back into the oven, slamming the door behind it. “Just the other day I was telling Hy, I’m worried about Rachel…you’re turning into one of those snot-faced Manhattan girls.” Mom shook her head at me. “You think you’re so smart, but look, even Neil’s got a live-in. Before you know it you’ll be forty and then fifty and you’ll be too set in your ways. You’ll end up like Lorraine, a spinster. And look what happened to her.”

“You’re saying if I don’t get married I’ll get breast cancer?”

“Yes! There are studies, you write articles, but do you ever read them? They say women without children have more trouble because you’re supposed to have children. It unlocks your hormones.”

That Aunt Lorraine never married had always irked Mom; that I, having called off one wedding already, was headed in the same direction was her filial nightmare. Yet as Mom spoke, I realized that from the day Sam and I registered at Burdines, I knew we would never make it to the pulpit. But after a year of his proposals I was tired of him and everyone else asking, when are you getting married? I was also convinced I’d contracted a Yuppie disease. Worn down from workaday ailments, the diarrhea, the allergies, the half-moons under my eyes, I looked and felt a decade older than my twenty-nine years and started seeing myself in equations of security: Mrs. Anglo Saxon, Mrs. Miami Coop, Mrs. Gynecologist, a baby-maker for her babyman, who spent his days sticking his hands up women’s pussies and his nights coming home reeking of cunty rubber gloves. No surprise my vagina never worked anywhere near him. Even after he’d put me on the Kegel regimen: fifty a day, usually in my jeep driving to and from work. Sam was hopeful. Thinking it was about needing exercise. Thinking it was about needing therapy. Thinking it was about orgasms. The truth was that despite all the security in the world, I didn’t want to be his wife. Or anybody’s. I had a marriage disease. The day Sam and I broke up I felt as if I’d stepped outside for the first time after a three-year flu. I tossed out the skin pills, the snot pills, the shit pills, the nerve pills.

Mom had been afraid for me since I broke off my engagement. Her eyes blazed a history of fears: isolation, loneliness, displacement, homelessness. If only I could tell her I shared them, too. Just as I still believed in love, still longed for someone to whisper to me when insomnia swooped in, someone who knew touching was better than coming, but those desires seemed antithetical to finding myself on a beach with a know-it-all-man telling me my eyes were like diamonds, dialogue even too banal for a porn film. Dialogue that suited mother’s cant.

“You have to start facing reality,” she was saying, “haven’t you heard about the chances of finding a husband after thirty?”

I broke her mid-monologue. “Ma, enough already. Don’t you think I worry about this? I’m not a total flake.”

She tipped her head sideways as if the new angle might help her decipher whether I was lying or not. “Something is different,” she said.

“Everything’s different, even my toothpaste.”

“Don’t be smart.”

We stood eye-to-eye. She was breathing loudly, squeaking through her nose. A shylock nose with big pores, a gift I’d inherited as well. I wanted her to hug me, to touch me like a fantasy mother without an agenda. But neither one of us moved.

“And don’t you start with any of that porno stuff either, Hy is a nice man.”

“What do you think I am?” My anger rose with her amplified snorting. On occasion I remember wanting to plug up her nose with tissues. I could be as repulsed by her as she’d been by my adolescent breath.

“Finish the vegetables, would you?” she snorted and exited the kitchen.

I could hear her singing the Kansas in August song, which gnarled my stomach as I peeled and cut the carrots, then ran a couple of bell peppers under the tap. They looked as if they’d been tie-dyed in streaks of red and yellow and green: hippie vegetables. I held one in each hand, like breasts. Thoughts of Shade flooded in with the streaming water.

We’d been having coffee at The Movie House, watching as the coupled and contented tourists passed, when on impulse I asked her to come for Thanksgiving. She smiled. “Sure, why not?” My muscles tensed imagining myself telling Mom I was bringing a friend. The word friend had never felt so nuanced, as if it had fallen under the dominion of my tongue. I was afraid I couldn’t say it with the neutrality that being with my family demanded.

My feelings were at day’s end, moot. Shade called at eleven. “Actually, I don’t think I can deal with your racist, homophobic family.”

“Neither can I.” I laughed it off. But there I was left holding my crotch again, a rejection I could have surpassed had Shade not called back the next day to tell me she’d been up all night tossing it over, and she did want to come after all. Then, a few hours later, she’d changed her mind again, and for the next five days we played a game of bumper cars, slamming into each other and pulling away, until my stomach soured and my nerves were raw. I started looking to that jerk Robbie Rod for comic relief.

The tension of the last few days returned as I slid the knife through each of the psychedelic peppers, and with shaky fingers scooped out the white seeds and threw them in the garbage. By the time Shade had given me her final no, I was so enervated I wasn’t even relieved the indecision was finally over. Now, I wished she’d come. I wanted to let my knee bump up against hers underneath the dinner table, or feel her comfort me with a hand on my thigh so I could make it through this Thanksgiving, even if it was Aunt Lorraine’s last. The way we were going, though, Shade would probably pull back too soon, leaving me despondent and morose, isolated among my own people.

I sliced the peppers into narrow sections like arthritic fingers, divided them in two piles, then fit them in between the carrots, celery stalks, cucumber slices, and tiny cauliflower heads already on the lazy Susan. I lifted the tray and walked into the living room. Hy and his family were sitting with Rowdy.

“Hey, Ray!”

“Hi, Hy!” He was wearing suspenders with little turkeys on them. “Nice suspenders.”

“Thanks, got them in Singapore.”

“Tell me what the damn chinks know about turkeys,” Rowdy laughed. He was sitting on the windowsill, smiling at passing cars like a circus clown who’d lost his troop. “You don’t see no Turkey Chow Mein, Hy. Know what I’m saying? No Moo Shu Turkey.”

Hy ignored him in favor of introducing me to his son and daughter-in-law, Evan and Ellen. I went to shake their hands but had a tray full of vegetables and nowhere to put them, since the coffee table was filled with bowls of popcorn.

“What’s this?” I adopted Mom’s happy-go-lucky, musical theater posturing. In recent years I’d honed a friendly Q&A mode for the holidays, as if my family were part of an ongoing human interest story. Asking questions worked better than saying, for instance, Get these dirty Tupperware bowls off the coffee table, Rowdy, you freak.