Paint Me a Monster (22 page)

“Rinnie,” Liz nudges me. “Stand up.” It’s time to lower the casket into the ground.

A cemetery employee turns a lever and slowly the bronze casket, with my mother inside, disappears.

The kitchen is overrunning with family and friends. People mingle in the living room, the den, and on the oriental carpet in the front hall. Coat racks fill the butler’s pantry. I make a quick list in my head of familiar faces.

“I’m sorry about your mother, Rinnie.”

It’s not your fault, I think, but I smile and say, “Thank you. It means a great deal that you’re here.”

Violet, my grandmother’s friend, is in the kitchen directing. “Desserts go on the dining room buffet. Flowers in the den—make sure they have water. The kugel goes in the microwave, put the extra one in the fridge. No, no, it’s full, put it on top of the spinach casserole. They’ll keep each other warm. The fruit platter goes on the table—the main table with the garden salad and the Jell-O molds. Keep the brisket hot. We’ll bring it in when the family is seated.”

I paint a landscape in my head—a deep valley buttresses a mountain range. Colors merge yet the forms are clear: a roast chicken hill, a flat field of brisket, a kugel pasture crowned with thistles of sepia.

Violet sees me squeeze through the butler’s pantry.

“Rinnie, your mother was such a dear,” she says holding my hands. “She went so fast. No one knew Rose was sick. Poor Eva, to lose her only daughter. Thank goodness she has you three grandchildren.”

“How are you doing?” she says. “You know when Eva was in the hospital giving birth to Rose, I was in the next room giving birth to my daughter. I never saw two cuter babies. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. It means a great deal that you’re here,” I say.

Violet continues. “Find a seat with your brother and sister at the dining table. Your grandma, uncle, and the rabbi will join you.”

I count six chairs and nod. Mom would approve. The commotion and conversation is all about her.

“Come look at the sweets table,” Mrs. Peck says, grabbing my arm. “Do I have enough of a selection? Maybe I should put out lemon bars and the apple strudel?”

One more dessert platter and the table will collapse, I think.

“This is a work of art,” I say. For me, they may as well be garish cakes and pastries painted by a pop artist, something I won’t eat. The desserts go against my rule: no sugar and no carbohydrates, nothing with more than three ingredients. It’s too hard to keep track of what I eat if something has more than three ingredients. For more than two years, I’ve leaned on the rule. It’s more than solid. It’s immovable.

I look for Liz and Evan, so we can sit next to each other.

Aunt Millie is sitting at the dining table, smiling, greeting people like an usher at the theater.

“With Millie at the table there isn’t room for the three of us,” Liz says, looking at me.

“If there isn’t room for all of us, there isn’t room for any of us,” Evan says.

“Why is Aunt Millie there anyway? We’re the children, not her,” I say. “Mom would be appalled.”

“It’s not right that on Mom’s funeral day, we aren’t sitting with Gaga, and Aunt Millie is,” Liz says.

Evan cocks his head and says, “It figures.”

I try to make sense of the arrangement in my head. Millie is Gaga’s younger sister by sixteen years, and it might give Gaga comfort to have her nearby. On the other hand, Mom and Millie were like fire and ice. Gaga knows they competed for her attention like spoiled children. It’s an insult to Mom for Millie to sit by Gaga. It’s our time,
my
time, to be important in Mom’s death, if not in her life, and Millie interferes. How does it happen that my time with Mom is always interrupted?

If Pop Pop were here, he’d be by his beloved Gaga, hand on her shoulder, a burly tree staked to its source of strength and reason. Gaga’s slumped stance cries despair; her raised chin, courage.

The rabbi says a prayer, and food is passed in a flurry of hands as we watch. Liz, Evan, and I leave to sit in the breakfast room with our cousins. The painted figures on the walls of Chinese men pulling rickshaws and women dressed in robes, fluttering fans, close the space around the rectangular table. It’s crowded in a nice way; we haven’t gathered in a long time.

The morning’s drizzle blisters into a thunderstorm. Raindrops pop against the windows. Green pine needles and charcoal-colored sky flow wet into wet, behind the rippled glass.

“Remember the day Mom drove us to the club? It rained like this . . . lightning split a tree.” A movie rolls in my head of us bug-eyed kids, holding hands in the back seat of the car, terrified. My fingers drum the wooden table in answer to the rap, rap, rapping of the rain.

“I remember that!” Liz says. “Mom couldn’t see the road and stopped under a tree. Scarrrry! Evan, you slept through the whole thing, as usual.” Liz smiles big. “Mom turned the storm into a game. ‘Who can guess what God’s doing to make so much noise?’ We sang wet weather songs.”

Liz glances outside, humming, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.”

The calendar rolls backward in my thoughts. That day, I decided God is playing crack the whip when I see lightning and hear thunder. My arm circles my head, snaps forward, and retracts. “Did you hear my thunder, Jef-fie?” I wring the name out and turn toward my same-age cousin Jeff.

“I wasn’t scared in the car. I covered my head because I hated the song,” he says.

“You peed in your bathing suit,” his brother, Joey, adds.

“You weren’t Captain Courageous, Joey. My hand looked albino after you crunched it,” Jeff says.

“Mom was cool that day,” Liz cuts them off. “She kept us calm. She kept us safe.”

“Yea,” I acknowledge. “She did.” I loved Mom that day.

“Did Aunt Rose really chase your neighbor and wash his mouth out with soap?” Cousin Jodi’s question breaks my reverie.

“Oh, you mean Eddie Kahn,” Evan says. “Mom chased him through the house for saying
hell
. No swears allowed, unless they were hers.” He zips his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.

“Hell,” Joey says. “Washing his mouth out took chutzpah! Your mom. . . .” He shakes his head.

“She washed all our mouths out with soap, and all I did was call Evan stupid,” I stick out my tongue at Evan.

“All I said was shut up,” Liz says.

“She never caught me.” Evan blows a kiss in my direction.

As the only boy, youngest child, and part-time resident of our house, Evan was immune to Mom’s temper.

“Mom did some nutty things. Maybe to show she was in charge.” Liz’s remark stirs a dollop of bittersweet into the conversation.

We all know, from the day Mom and Dad divorced, Pop Pop controlled Mom’s life with his tongue and his checkbook. Even after his death, she remained his puppet, his voice a part of her own.

“I need money,” she’d say.

“You spend too much,” Pop Pop would respond.

“I need money.”

“I’m cutting off funds.”

“Let me do it.”

“You’re irresponsible.”

A blow to the ego. A left hook to the heart. They’re down for the count. The untimely bell of silence.

“Pop Pop wouldn’t let her grow up,” I sigh.

A little whirlpool of pain spins behind my eyes. Pop Pop’s voice is like distant thunder in my ear.
Why didn’t you consult me before making a decision. . . . Hi, Mr. Blah-dee-dah. You remember Eva and my two morons, Liz and Rinnie. . . . Rose, stop with the beauty parlor. Do your hair yourself, like the morons. So you think you know as much as I do? Then why have you had two husbands?

Evan leans away and balances his chair on their two back legs. “For all his smarts, financial ability, and philanthropy, he was a great businessman and a terrible parent and grandfather. He didn’t talk to me for a year after I moved in with Dad. It was his way or no way. He gave me no way.” Evan clunks the chair down on all four feet. It’s the sound of finality.

Violet is still in the kitchen sorting food. She hands a platter of pastry-wrapped hot dogs to my cousin Shelly, who passes them to everyone in the breakfast room. We’re swapping family stories. I pick up a hot dog, peel away the soft layers of dough, and nudge Liz with my shoulder.

“Do you remember the time you invited Theo for lunch and wanted to make hot dogs and salad? You asked me how to cook the dogs and wash lettuce.” I muffle a laugh.

“You were such a twerp,” Liz says, taking over the conversation. “I invited my boyfriend, Theo, over for his favorite lunch—hot dogs and salad. Rinnie cooks, I don’t. I asked her to help me, and she kindly gave me a cooking lesson.”

“Did you see Theo at the funeral?” I interrupt. “He sat behind Uncle Matt.”

“I saw him. He’ll be here later,” Liz says.

“That’s nice of him,” Shelly says.

“Oh, Mom loved Theo. They used to hang out even when I wasn’t home,” Liz says.

“But she didn’t make hot dogs for him,” I say.

“You twerpette,” Liz starts the story, “Rinnie told me I had to wash the lettuce with soap and make sure it was absolutely clean because lettuce spiders bury their eggs in the leaves.”

I interrupt, “And you did.”

“Of course I did. I trusted you.”

“Liz was brilliant the way she separated and gently buttered each leaf with a dip of detergent and her fingertips,” I say. “I told Liz to cook the hot dogs for half an hour and turn them the whole time so they wouldn’t burn. When I told Theo what Liz was doing, he rolled his eyes and paid me back with a knuckle rub to my head. That hurt.”

“You deserved it,” Liz says.

“Did Theo eat the hot dogs?” Sandy, Aunt Millie’s oldest daughter, asks.

“He did.” I say and add, “With a lot of mustard.” A gurgle escapes my lips.

“Cuz, you have some ‘naughties’ in you,” Sandy says. She thumps her hand on my back and knocks the hot dogs from my thoughts.

“It’s amazing you and Liz never had any animosity between you,” she says. “My sister and brothers would have destroyed me.”

I reach for another hot dog, smile, and peel off the dough. Nah. We needed to stick together.

The high-pitched buzz of Gaga’s doorbell sends Mrs. Peck scurrying.

“Hi. Are Rinnie and Liz here?” It’s a familiar voice.

“In the breakfast room, dear,” Mrs. Peck says. “You might want to wipe your feet on the mat before you come in.”

It’s my stepsister Alana. I wonder if Dad told her to stop by. Mom never got to know her very well. Sometimes I think I haven’t either. In the beginning, our friendship bolted through the starting gate spurred by novelty for us both—new stepsisters, a new stepbrother, a new house—for them. It was exciting. Now, three years later, when I think of Alana, I think,
she has my dad
.

I nod and shake my head, empty out the past and replace “failure to bond” with a smile. It’s time to say hello to Alana. It is nice of her to stop by.

The friction of Gaga’s rubber-soled shoes against the linoleum floor and the scent of bath powder announce her entrance. “Dears, why didn’t you sit with us at the dining table?” she looks at the three of us.

Because your sister, Millie, stole our place, I want to say, but Gaga wouldn’t hear me. She’s dedicated herself to ignoring the ugly.

“The table was full,” I say.

“Well, I’m glad you all got to sit together.”

Something green is stuck between her teeth. The sincerity of her blue eyes combined with the green between her teeth is reassuring. Some things
are
constant: Food nestled in Gaga’s teeth proves it. She’s still beautiful, I think. Gaga’s beauty grows from the inside out. The warmth of her smile, like the smell of cookies hot out of the oven, engulfs friends and strangers.

“Family is the most important thing of all. Stick together,” she says, looking at each of us. “You each have a gift to give the world.”

Gaga’s lipstick is the same color as a scarlet rose, her favorite flower. Gaga’s focus on beauty shielded her from the thorns on her favorite rose, my mother. I know Gaga will miss Mom. I wonder if she misses Pop Pop.

“Sorry kids. I’m taking your Gaga with me.” One of the ladies from Gaga’s investment group puts her hand on Gaga’s shoulder and steers her into the foyer.

I follow them, not ready to let go of the warmth Gaga offers. The dwindling crowd follows, and I detour to the dining room.

In the dining room, I look at the place where Mom sat every Monday night when we came for dinner, always by her mother, her protector. I look at the table with the pop art desserts. I’m in my Garden of Eden, and it’s blooming with temptation. Mom’s death has something to do with biting into forbidden fruit. Could her end be my beginning? She’s gone. She can’t call me whore or fat ass anymore or try to fatten me up because she thinks I am too thin. Never again will she scream, “You are the bad seed,” even if I am.

The round cake with the hole in the center looks like I feel.

“I’m waiting for you,” it says.

“I am here for you too,” the apple strudel says.

I slice a thin piece of the round cake. A swirl of cinnamon weaves a wavy line across the spongy yellow slice. It dazzles like gold. My eyes are closed so I won’t see my hand put the cake on my tongue.

The impulse drenches my mouth with desire. Lips, teeth, tongue, surge forward. The cake disappears. One bite is too many. A chunk of strudel tumbles down my throat, bits of apple fall from my lips. I reach for the lemon bars, a profiterole, brownies.
Come to me. Hug me.

I’m grateful these are not imaginary pastries. I’ve starved a long time. There has been no sweetness. I’m caught in an avalanche and can’t stop somersaulting.

“I’m glad the house is filled with people who care about Gaga,” I say. The variety of black outfits is astonishing. “But I want to be alone with you guys,” I say, putting my arms around Liz and Evan. My gaze flirts with the figures in the painting above the wing chair. Three well-groomed, buck-toothed children stare back. Dark-eyed Evan, curly-haired Liz, and fair-skinned me—before visits to Dr. Johnson for braces.