Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [38]
“I am just trying to have a nice Christmas here, girls.”
Once Mom said these words, anything could happen.
I stared at the murals at Café des Artistes through dinner. Since when does my mother have a thing for nymphs? Suddenly our family can’t live without nymphs? Our father was probably having a burger alone at the Corner Bistro, talking up some bewildered Danish thirtyish nanny, most likely with a fair degree of success, and our mother’s fantastic bombalooed cuisine was now being prepared by some coke-addled’80s power chef. I drank red wine and scratched my pooter under the table. Why I was still itching after doing so many rounds of RID with Martin and then again with Julia was unclear. Maggie was an awfully big slut—perhaps she had given me the super-slut kind of crabs?
Back at Gissy Towers, Mom headed into her bedroom where she made a few failed attempts to reach Phil Sully at home. I hated Phil Sully—he had dopey ’50s-looking black hair that looked greased down, like Jim Lehrer. And he was boring like Jim Lehrer, but he wasn’t benevolent and kind like Jim Lehrer; he was underhanded and two-timing, a cheat and a fucker. Maybe that is what Jim Lehrer is like, too, but I just don’t get that feeling. Mom was sobbing in her bedroom, and you could hear her flipping pages in her address book, looking for someone to call in St. Louis, where it was an hour earlier, to cry to about her horrible life. I was sorry she didn’t manage to get Phil Sully on the horn.
“I’m itching like crazy,” Julia barked, pawing at the crotch of her charcoal wool skirt.
I started taking the pillows off the pull-out couch. “Yeah, well, maybe that stuff wasn’t fresh. That pharmacy’s kind of for old people. They probably don’t get crabs too much so maybe the medicine was expired.”
“We’ll sleep on the floor tonight.” She lit a cigarette as if she had just come up with a diabolical plan that couldn’t be more airtight. She sat in the big pastel striped chair smoking. Julia was a person who fanned her own cigarette, as if someone else’s smoking were bothering her. She alternately puffed and fanned in an exasperated manner.
“Jesus Christ, awful,” she said. I watched her nonsmoker and smoker battle it out for a minute and wondered whether any Darst had been diagnosed as having a split personality.
“What—” I said, reaching for Mom’s cigarettes on the coffee table. True Blue was a smoke you endured only if you were out of cigs or too drunk to care. I tore the plastic cylindrical filter off, making it a little less like smoking some old lady’s vagina. “—are you talking about?” I blew a couple of smoke rings, a skill I wished at that moment were somehow in demand, as I didn’t know what else I was good at or would do once college was over.
“We’ve still got these things, Jeanne. Don’t you see that sleeping on the pull-out—that’s just gonna keep infestating the pull-out. And then what the fuck are we gonna do?” I considered the word “infestating.” It didn’t sound right. But you couldn’t bring these matters up with Julia. She was too volatile for grammar talk. She’d get up and do something bonkers, like grab scissors and give you bangs in the back of your head. “We’ll get something stronger tomorrow but until then, we’re not infestating the pull-out.”
“Okay, fine.” I put out my cigarette. There was a plushy carpet to sleep on, so it could have been worse. I got the pillows, blankets and comforters out of the hall closet, resigned to slave mode for the remainder of the break. We got in our little homemade beds on the floor and said nothing. Mom’s room was now quiet as well. All through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a dual-diagnosis depressive-alcoholic. But nighttime was the busy time for the buggers living in my crotch.
The next morning Mom came out and found us in two rectangular piles on her living room floor.
“What are you girls doing?” She stood over me, a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other.
“Trying to sleep,” Julia snapped from under the covers.
I rustled my feet out from under