Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (8 page)

They should call it Admiral Tso's,
joked Claudio.
Or President Tso's.

How do you eat that much and stay so thin?
asked Mathilde. She knew Jane was nutty, with no prudence to her deeds, but Mathilde was so eager to please Jane that she felt like her soul had stepped out of her body and was kneeling at Jane's feet, kissing her itsy-bitsy tattoos.

I'm lucky, I guess,
said Jane.

What's your favorite thing to eat?

Feelings?

- Finding refuge in eating must run in their family, -
Mathilde thought. While food was never something Mathilde felt fearful over, she'd detected Claudio's strangeness around it almost immediately. Claudio had told her she was one of the lucky ones.
I'm always thinking about it,
he'd said.
It's not so easy for me to only eat when I'm hungry.

Claudio asked after dinner if they wanted to go out for a drink, and Jane said she wasn't feeling up to it.
I'm tired,
she told them. She looked out their window.
New York,
she whispered,
I'm in you.

Okay . . .in that case I think I'm going to practice some guitar,
said Claudio.
Do you mind?

Whatever,
said Jane. The air conditioner belched. Jane wanted to hurt her brother because he knew how to do something that she didn't.

A serious lightning that night spasmed, split the sky, woke Mathilde up. She poked her head out of the bedroom. Jane had disappeared.

Mathilde listened closely, between the thunder's half-life. Somebody was talking. Jane's voice, insipid. Directly outside Claudio and Mathilde's apartment was a pay phone. How long had Jane been out there? She overheard Jane say,
if you can't come get me tonight, maybe you can come tomorrow,
and later,
you can't choose for the both of us.

-
The boyfriend
, - Mathilde guessed.

Jane told her brother at the end of the weekend that she was needed back home.
Work needs me,
she explained flimsily.

What do you do?
Claudio hated when people asked him that at bars and parties. His second least favorite conversational segue, next to the one he dreaded most,
where do you come from?

I help Otis out. He's a salesman. He sells sunglasses. Business time, baby.

Is that right? Where does he sell these sunglasses?

He has a store. Otis the businessman gets things done. Bada bing, bada boom!

Whereabouts? Does he have a vendor's license?
Claudio was the wrong person to lie to about owning a small business.

I didn't say that. I said he goes door-to-door,
Jane corrected herself.

Claudio asked if he could speak to Otis on the phone.
No,
said Jane.
I'm not a kid.

I never said you were.

What? You want Otis to beat the shit out of you? He has brass knuckles.
More and more, Jane talked like she was arguing with somebody who wasn't there. Claudio had heard her that morning in the shower yelling nonsensical phrases like
lord, I'm all cervix and blue eyes.

Claudio was careful not to scare his sister.
You can stay here, Jane. Stay with us. We'll help you go to school. You can work from home. You can make dinner with Mathilde. Mathilde makes good tacos. Do you like to cook?
Claudio knew nothing of his sister's adult life.

Buy me a ticket home,
said Jane.
You tricked me.

For fuck's sake,
said Claudio,
won't you consider it?

If you don't buy me a ride home,
threatened Jane,
you will never hear from me again.

So Claudio bought her a one-way ticket home with his honeymoon savings and blew the rest on checks to her whenever she called and asked.
I'm starving,
Jane would say, every few months.
I will die if I don't have money.

- What about Otis? What about his business? -
Claudio felt like asking. He didn't know what his sister was spending his money on. Food? Booze and drugs? Knickknacks? But there was nothing in him that could resist sending her money.

When he told Mathilde, she said she understood.
Family is family, and family comes first.
This was the only thing Claudio
could think of that contained some dim, labyrinthine potential of helping her.

Europe can wait,
said Mathilde.
We're in New York, so we can get anything from another culture here anyway.
She didn't mention how
anything
would likely arrive adulterated, like all-you-can-eat sushi.

- god bless, god love, god help, America, -
she thought.
- And god especially help 1989 New York. -

W
hat a surprise, but it's wonderful news,
Claudio said.

I hope the baby has your voice and your ass,
said Mathilde.

And your everything else,
said Claudio.

Family's family, and family comes first,
Mathilde repeated to herself. Her unborn child would be as much family as Jane was. She thought about Jane. Jane's cracked hands, Jane's filthy hair. She thought, -
my sister, Jane. -
She shivered and disliked herself.

Illness is hereditary,
the obstetrician told Mathilde after she'd asked.
Including schizophrenia. If that's what you're worried about. Typically the symptoms don't surface until adolescence.

There's still no cure yet, right?
asked Mathilde, for a blue, rhetorical laugh.

No cure exists,
confirmed the obstetrician, with the saddest smile Mathilde had ever seen.

J
ane put herself up for sale only once, as she visited Claudio in New York for the first time, detouring before she arrived at his apartment. The man had approached her on the 6 train, so it wasn't like she was seeking it out. He wasn't so bad looking and said he'd give her three hundred dollars, which was splendid money. Much more than what she earned within weeks odd-jobbing and street-singing in New Orleans. She couldn't figure out what was wrong about what she was doing. They did it in a Burger King bathroom, so it wasn't like she felt unsafe or anything. In fact, the way he kissed her neck and eyelids, he was one of those guys who could really make a girl feel cherished, even if it was just for the night or, in their case, the half hour.

He slipped fifteen twenties into her hand the stealth way traveling businessmen did to bellboys, exhibiting his art to tipping subtly. Jane could learn it too, maybe. Maybe some other time somebody else could teach her.
Wham, bam, thank you, Jane!
What if she did this all the time? Fucked her way back to her sanity, or an identity. At least she would experience some short prosperity. (Regardless, anything she'd earn
could only be
for the time being.) After her gig, Jane stopped at the Strand Bookstore near Union Square and used some of her cash to buy a book of poetry. One of the poems was called
Normal
. It went like this:

Normal

Based on a true story.

I asked him if what we did

was normal. I was naked, taking out

my contacts, my finger in my eye. He was tying

his shoes, ready

to count miles from here

to far-away with his feet.

He kissed my cheeks and told me
, Normal.

Fun, and all very normal.
^I

Jane didn't know much about poetry. It was too bad she didn't have the tools to deconstruct the poem, which tore her apart from the inside out with what it did not say. All she knew was that she didn't like the word
fun
in that poem. The whole time in New York, and then when she went back to New Orleans, Jane kept thinking, -
what is normal? -
And did it count as cheating on Otis if it was for work? And was it validated as work even if she didn't have a boss?

How did people work? How could so many people find the strength for full-time jobs? To have cubicles and their own phone numbers and the scariest kind of success. To risk making the wrong decision by making decisions. There must have been honorable ways to earn a living, but Jane didn't know how to earn it or live it.

After throwing the book in a public garbage can, Jane entered a deli. She ordered a glass of water.
How much?
she asked.

It's free,
said the cashier.

What does
free
mean?
asked Jane.

It means what you think it means,
said the cashier, no time to wax economic. Jane took her water and sat on the curb, which was spackled with gum. She sipped her free water like it was a spirit. She thought. She thought, -
help. -

The taste of the book slept on her palate. Jane wished now that she hadn't thrown it out. There had been another poem about a person who fell in love with every other person who passed by. How beautiful and awful was that? There was a story in the book, but it was less than one page, about a barn owl eating a mouse. The owl threw the mouse up, and the mouse came back, but everything had changed. The body was in thirds, still all mouse. This could not have been a good sign, but he was living, wasn't he? He was nobody to have gripes about existence. He was even still alive enough to ask the owl,
so, how was I?

Jane lifted her body from the curb. What would her brother say if he were with her? He'd want her to be sane, like the rest of them, which was impossible. He'd also want her to be happy. Perhaps he secretly wanted her out of his life, to make it easier. What would he say? He'd probably say,
go home, Jane.

I
. Language is a thing in which humans can rhyme
whore
with
floor
and off-rhyme
sheep
with
weak.
Language is a thing I fear in which people can explain why they cry or write poems and sometimes even still other people do not understand why this is so.

O
n a night Claudio went to Zane's house, he and Mathilde had learned that week that the baby inside Mathilde was a girl, and they had named her Natasha Maude Simone.
Promise me you'll be sober when you come home,
said Mathilde.

All of Zane's parties were the same. Soaked nights. At first, kindling a high before lunch would seem Dionysian. But after her first drink or smoke or pill, Mathilde would begin to feel like a meta-version of herself—the usual way people were smashed, a little bit more of themselves. And sometimes she felt like she became too much of herself: an excess of Mathilde filling up the room, dancing, yelling non sequiturs, emitting an unsanitary mixture of crying and laughing. The next morning, she'd always regret at least one thing that her yesterday-self did. Drunken Mathilde was the opposite of a character. Drunken Mathilde wasn't slipping into somebody else's skin, she was magnifying her own—a reckless kind of privilege.

Mathilde remembered the times she and Claudio went out and argued drunk, passing out and dreaming drunk. The nights when Claudio would sweat through the sheets. When they'd wake up, and everything would smell skunky, like wet felt. That myriad of nights when she'd let him pass out in his clothes and his shoes, to teach him the same lesson. The night after her last
birthday, when she'd thrown up twice in her sleep and asked him if she would end up like Jimi Hendrix.

I'll just say hi.
Zane never married and kept throwing parties like nobody was getting older. He made new friends every few years, and the new friends always happened to be in their twenties.
To be honest, there's a reason why we stopped hanging out. But I'm interested in how he's doing.

Just promise,
Mathilde lingered.

Of course I'll be sober,
said Claudio.
I'm going to be a father now.

They'd relocated to a two-bedroom on Seventy-second and Central Park West (Mathilde's family money funding the rent) but were thinking of moving to Long Island, close to the beach. Last week, for the first time, they'd heard Natasha's Heart beat through the sonogram, sounding like a pen tapping against teeth. These were the things they already knew about the fetal Natasha: she was a girl, she had a meatball-shaped skull, and she felt like a turned-on blow-dryer. Claudio predicted
she's going to be brilliant, and never lonely. Never, ever lonely.

These days Claudio barely drank and had given up drugs. He told Mathilde that it was fine when they were younger, when they could afford to be selfish.
I trust you,
said Mathilde.

Mathilde spent her night catering to herself—crocheting a scarf and reading
Curious George
out loud. She enjoyed picture books for their simple tensions and ebbing pace. She pretended that Natasha Maude Simone could understand. She boiled a pot of herbal tea, drank the whole thing, and went to the bathroom twelve times. Her cat, Penelope, piled on her lap, pupils broad and open with moonlight.

She called Zane's apartment only once, asking to speak to Claudio and saying
hi, Kiwi,
and Claudio said
hi, Tulip,
and Mathilde heard party noises in the background, and then they kept calling each other by nicknames until she asked,
when are you coming home?
and he said,
oh, soon.