Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [37]
I took a drag of my cigarette and went into the bathroom. I tossed my cigarette in the toilet. She had placed a pube on the edge of the sink.
“Look at it.” She yanked our mother’s magnifying mirror, which was attached to the wall, downward and held it over the pube. “Look at it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Pubic louse. Real nasty fuckers.”
“You’re a real dick, Jeanne.”
“I thought I had gotten rid of them. I used RID like seven times before I left Purchase.”
“I had sex with Mark last night, Jeanne. I probably gave him these things.”
“I know. And tonight he’s probably giving them to someone else. I’m sorry, Jules. I gave them to Martin, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Who’d you get them from?”
“Maggie. She’s kind of the root carrier here, the Typhoid Mary of crabs.”
I busted out my RID like champagne on a ski trip and we lathered ourselves up. I checked the clock in the kitchen to time ten minutes. I went back to Mom’s bedroom where Julia stood in a gray T-shirt with her crotch all soapy with chemicals. When I walked in she angrily lit one of Mom’s cigarettes and smoked without acknowledging me. For the next ten minutes we stood, half naked, in Mom’s bedroom, finally getting to the scene where the really very lovely French girl sticks two fingers up Brando’s ass, an ass I couldn’t help feeling might accommodate more than just two digits, while she says she will fuck pigs for him and smell their pig farts. I finally understood what all the film majors at Purchase meant when they touted European filmmakers higher aesthetic and artistic sensibility. At nine forty-four I announced our ten minutes were up. The woman I had spoken with earlier at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had said that unhatched eggs can hatch seven to ten days after the actual crab is killed. I probably needed to do the RID treatment again, since the whole life cycle had started over now that Julia had them. I had now ruined two relationships on account of these wingless bloodsuckers. As I threw the towel in the hamper I realized it was not one of my towels from school, it was one of my mother’s and I realized I had used it the day before as well. Big whoops. I grabbed all the towels and threw them in the hamper, vowing to get up early the next day and do laundry.
I didn’t even want to think about what Mom would say if she got wind of this whole crab thing, not to mention if we actually gave them to her. I could practically hear her calling Aunt Carol in St. Louis at two in the morning: she would start off crying about the divorce she wanted, which was now a reality. My mom dumped my dad and then wanted people to feel sorry for her. A look-what-I’ve-done-to-me kind of logic that few people appreciated. Then she’d move on to how her sister Ruth was mean to her on the horse circuit, how there was never enough money, how she was no longer twenty-one, how no one helped her with the housework, how she had had to listen to my father talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald for twenty years. “And now the girls have given me crabs, Carol. I mean, honestly.”
And then I overslept the next morning and forgot about the towels. I rushed around finishing my Christmas shopping and then it was time to go out for Christmas Eve dinner, which was our first holiday dinner at a restaurant, with Kitty and a friend of my mother’s from Lenox Hill detox, an idea everyone thought was depressing except my mother. Katharine and Eleanor, who were living close by on the Upper East Side since graduating from college, were in the apartment when I got back.
“Why are we going to some dumb restaurant on Christmas Eve?” Katharine asked as Mom strolled around her bedroom in her black stockings, black bra and heels, smoking.
“Dumb? Café des Artistes is hardly dumb. Wait until you see the murals of nymphs on the walls. And the food is fabulous. It’s very elegant, Katharine. We’re hardly roughing it tonight.”
“But we always open up one present on Christmas Eve, after dinner.”
“Well, then, Kate, we can open one present at the restaurant.”
“What if someone gives you something