Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [35]
She entered the kitchen in some ridiculous silken Natori number, a robe that screamed, “I’m sleeping with my divorce lawyer,” to conjure up a cup of coffee for herself. I straightened myself to make my thoughts disappear, to make my crabaddled mind impossible to read.
“Morning,” I said. “I made coffee.”
“Morning, dolly. Did you use the Illy?” she said, passing me with her cigarette. My mother was like a bat with her lit cigarettes. She came impossibly close to you, you were convinced you were going to have to drop and roll any second, but somehow she always just missed you. I resisted the impulse to say anything about her cigarette, as we lived in a world, since selling our house, that was no longer ours but hers.
“Yeah, I did. It’s delish.”
“It’s Italian.”
Mom glided over and sat at the table. “Where’s Julia?”
“In the bathroom,” I said, sipping guiltily.
“What are you girls up to today?”
“Christmas shopping I guess.”
“I’m going out with Mr. Sully tonight so you girls will have to get some dinner for yourselves.” Her divorce lawyer who was taking her for a huge ride, the kind of ride where someone leads you to believe they will leave their wife for you when the time is right, was Mr. Sully. “I’ll leave you some money. You can get a pizza or go to Melon’s and get a burger if you want.”
Julia came out of the bathroom.
“Good morning, Julia,” Mom said. With her deep voice she might have been Lauren Bacall greeting Bogie after a wild night.
“Hunfh shew naggeh,” Julia mumbled, and kept going.
“Honestly,” Mom said, widening her eyes.
Chitchat had never been Julia’s bag.
Doris was forty-four. This was when forty-four was forty-four, before it was the new thirty-four and sixty-four was the new fifty-four and eighty-four was the new seventy-four and twenty-four was the new fourteen, but even so, she looked fantastic, had some dough in the bank after selling the house, and she might have gone off and done all kinds of things: opened a bike shop in Costa Rica, started an adoption agency for American gay men in places where communism has fallen, waited tables in a pub in Britain’s seaside town of Cornwall. But this was back when forty-four was the age when women aged, fell apart—although according to my father, the “decline,” as he called it, actually started when she was a straight-A student at Manhattanville College embarking on her maiden breakdown, an event that was interrupted when she married and had four kids.
My mother’s rehab years began when her four daughters went off to college. It was as if rehabs were her way of going back to college with all of us kids, eating bad food and being homesick. This seemed like a misguided attempt at youth, getting out of the house, enriching the mind. Had my mother not heard of postgraduate work?
I had gone to the pharmacy the day I got in from Purchase, and charged a couple bottles of RID to Mom’s account, but the apartment was so small there never seemed to be a good time to exterminate myself. My plan was to chemical myself silly at night when everybody had gone to bed. Problem was, I kept falling asleep before Mom and Julia. To stay up past Julia one really had to have street drugs of some kind.
I began monitoring Julia for signs of crab life. I told myself the initial itching I witnessed during my first seven cups of coffee might have been nothing more than the traditional crotch-scratching one does as a guest in another’s home while people are having breakfast. I was disabused of this notion when I caught sight of Julia scratching herself in the elevator and then later while we were Christmas shopping at Orva on Eighty-sixth Street. The girl had crabs. I had given crabs to my sister. What would Emily Post say? My mind raced to the inevitable thought: Had I also given crabs to my mother? While I shivered at this concept I did get a kick realizing that if I had given them to my mother I had probably also given them to her sleazy cheat-face divorce attorney, which then led me to realize