Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [36]
“I’m going home to take a shower. I’m totally grimy and . . . itchy,” she said.
After Mom split that night, Julia and I ordered in burritos and called VideoRoom, Mom’s video place on Third Avenue that delivered as well as picked up your videos. Despite this free service, we never managed to get a single video back on time. Delivery was an important feature of our new postsuburban lives. Delivery and twenty-four-hour Korean delis. We thought these urban amenities were symbols of Manhattan, they represented the new “Mom” and, by default, the new “us.” We were city people now, kids of divorce, and as such we didn’t cook, we ordered in or went out. When the VideoRoom guy buzzed I begged Julia to get the door because they always sent this guy from Purchase who worked there on school breaks who had a crush on me, but Julia had a sort of no-bullshitting policy that forbade her to fake anything. She thought you should just be completely forthright all the time. Anything else was phony.
The burritos were good. We had seen the movie before, the butter-meets-girl romantic comedy Last Tango in Paris, and it held up as a pleasant way to pass an evening. While we were eating and watching the movie I periodically asked Julia to pass the butter. She fell for it the first time.
In Last Tango in Paris, Marlon Brando forbids his young French lover to tell him her name, not her last name, like in an AA kind of way, but her first name. The thing is a steamfest, not the kind of movie best savored with your sullen, monosyllabic sister. I polished off my burrito, drained my Corona with lime, fluffed my pillow against the bed, itched my rowdy pubes as discreetly as I could manage with Julia sitting a foot away from me in a pastel chintz chair that looked like Baskin-Robbins had gotten into the upholstery business, and settled in for some fat-old-man-fucking-hot-young-girl fuckfest. At one point, the French girl—NO CHARACTER NAMES!—is stroking Brando’s chest as he pretends to be the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” She says, “Oh, what a lot of fur you have,” and he replies, “The better for you to hide your crabs in.” I coughed loudly as soon as I heard this, hoping a loud, distracting sound going in Julia’s earlobes would prevent the word “crabs” from entering her ear. Julia itched her crotch, but there was something new in her itching, a sense of her hand being connected to her brain. I tried to douse this hand-mind connection and quick by lighting one of Mom’s True Blues and blowing smoke around madly. Julia looked right at me.
“What the fuck—”
“What-what, what the fuck?”
“You gave me crabs.”
Julia had been developing some kind of paranoid personality disorder over the last few years, but mathematically paranoiacs will hit the truth every few hundred accusations.
“I gave you what?”
“I have been trying to figure out how I got these things, but I should have known, it’s you, isn’t it?”
“Look, Jules, I like you, but we never fucked.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Julia got up and went into the bathroom. The bathroom light flicked on and she was cursing, stream-of-consciousness style.
I puffed on my True Blue and knew that Christmas was ruined, by someone other than my mother for a change. There was little point in trying to calm Julia once she had gone bananas. I blew a couple smoke rings and thought about how there wasn’t all that much smoking in Tango for a film shot in Paris. I thought the scene in the bathroom where he says he wants her to fuck a pig and then have the pig vomit in her face and her eat it might be coming up. “You’re going to miss the part with the ‘dying farts of the pig,’ Jules. Julia!” I yelled.
“Get in here!” she screamed from the bathroom. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “Bugs! Look at them! Come here,