Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [34]
After three days of lathering each other up angrily with antilouse shampoo we got from the campus nurse, I broke it off with Martin and was catching a train into the city for Christmas break. As I waited for my cab to the White Plains train station, he said, “I just don’t think this is over,” meaning us. I said I was pretty sure it was and tossed my little plastic lice comb into the garbage, and scratched my crotch one last time.
“Merry Christmas, Martin.”
I woke up one morning about three days into Christmas break and got up and made coffee. Julia continued to snooze on the pull-out we were sharing. If there was one person you didn’t want on your pull-out it was Julia; she might not ever get up and she needed only a few short hours to transform any room into a Hooverville.
I sat at a table near the pull-out with my coffee, absentmindedly itching my cooch, wondering how she passed anything at school. “Jules, are you ever getting up?”
She rolled over and looked at me. “Is something up your heinie?”
“No. I just thought we should get up. It’s eleven-thirty. Mom hates to come out and have there be pillows and bedding everywhere at noon.”
“Well, then she shouldn’t have gotten a one-bedroom.” Julia stayed at Mom’s on breaks even though she had a dorm room on University Place.
She rolled away from me and pulled the covers over her head. Getting up for another cup of coffee, I saw Julia’s hand come up out of the covers and rake her curly blond head a few times hard. Then she got off the pull-out and started toward the bathroom, all the way scratching at her crotch. In the kitchen I put my cup on the counter and froze. I realized that not only did I still have the dreaded pubic vermin but now my sister might have them as well. I scratched my crotch and tried to think. I heard the clinking sound of the chain on my mother’s bedside lamp hitting the porcelain base. She’d be lighting a cigarette momentarily and groping for her glasses. Mom, now that she lived alone, could indulge her most Plathian tendencies. Rather than waking up and opening the blinds in her bedroom, she now woke up and turned on lights. It seemed like the most hopeless thing to me. Day was something to get through, a stepping-stone to night, to drunkenness, sleep, and when she had had enough, death.
MY MOTHER HAD TIMED leaving my father so I could almost hear the curtain coming down on their marriage as I walked off the stage of the Bronxville High School auditorium with my temporary dummy diploma. When she moved from Bronxville into Manhattan after the divorce, she rented a two-bedroom for five women, which seemed rather shortsighted. We had just come from a five-bedroom house, so we knew something was up. Then Mom moved to a one-bedroom and shortsighted met statement.
The place was on Eighty-seventh Street, a half a block from the mayor’s mansion in Yorkville. It was called Garson Towers. Residential buildings with names, unless you were talking about the Ansonia or the Apthorp or somewhere swanky, were depressing to me. They seemed like the kinds of places lonely, defenseless elderly people got murdered. My mother’s maiden name was Gissy, and seeing that she seemed to be preparing to audition for any number of Tennessee Williams plays, retelling stories of her privileged youth over and over, we began calling the building “Gissy Towers.” If you were going to spend some people’s entire childhoods getting tanked on Dewar’s talking about your coming-out party at the Fleur-de-Lis Ball and crying about how Daddy never said he loved you, well, you were in for some shit, in our opinion. But in fact a Williams character like Blanche DuBois was a sharpeyed futurist, a trailblazing entrepreneur, she was Buckminster Fuller; Blanche DuBois was Steve Jobs compared to my mother.
Mom’s bedroom door opened and the smell of smoke wafted