Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [40]
It was unclear whether Mom actually imagined a scene wherein all four of us would wear the black leather miniskirts at the same time, like a Robert Palmer video starring her DNA, but if there was one thing you didn’t do if you didn’t want Mom to turn into Princess Runningwater before your eyes, it was show anything less than hysterical gratitude over gifts.
The day after Christmas, Julia and I went to the drugstore on the corner of Eighty-sixth and York where Mom had an account and charged some more crab medicine. We also got some thick, black Hefty garbage bags that Julia decided would be good for storing our clothes in when they came back from the laundry place. Mom asked why no one was wearing their new black leather miniskirts.
“We can’t risk it, Mom. The adult crabs are now probably dead, after the last treatment, but the eggs, the larvae, can hatch up to seven days after the actual crabs are dead, so it’s really too risky,” I said.
“And dry-cleaning leather? Forget it. That’d be like fourteen bucks,” Julia added, taking off the big lid of the giant pasta pot on the stove to see if the water was boiling. Mom made her way into the small kitchen, scooching by Julia and reaching for the French press near the stove.
“Well, I was going to make some coffee in the French press. It’s the absolute best way to make coffee. Who’d like some?”
Julia was focused on slowly lowering hairbrushes like lobsters into a boiling cauldron. There were thin plastic round hairbrushes, like rolling pins with bristles, a wooden flat brush, a tortoiseshell comb and an oval brush. Then Julia began to lower a bunch of silver antique hairbrushes and combs on the end of a slotted spoon into the water. Mom slammed down the half-and-half and brought the tortoiseshell welding goggles that hung around her neck up to her eyes.
“What in God’s name are you doing? Those are antique sterling-silver brushes of my mother’s! Are you insane?”
“We’ve been way too lax,” Julia said, with no emotion.
“Take those out of there right now. I mean it, Julia. I have had it with this nonsense. You girls have been in this apartment for a week and you’re making me nuts. You haven’t even used those brushes. They’ve been sitting on my dresser for forty-five years.”
Julia began taking the silver brushes off the spoon.
“Get some plan together for today. Go to the Met or the Whitney. Something. I mean it. I am at my wit’s end here.”
Mom took her coffee and flew out of the kitchen.
Julia said we were “in the final phase,” and we needed one last push to get these things out of our lives forever. We decided to head down to Century 21 and bought some cheapo sheets and blankets we could throw out rather than have to schlep more laundry to the Chinese laundry place. As for our other clothes, we changed Laundromats, since the water obviously wasn’t hot enough at the old place to kill these things, bringing bags of clothes that had been washed thirty-one times in seven days to another place seven blocks down York Avenue.
We repoisoned ourselves with new prescription stuff containing lindane, which we got at a free clinic in Harlem, since the stuff from the German pharmacy clearly was defective. The person who examined us said it didn’t appear that we still had any crabs but Julia let her know that they were indeed still among us. Not really giving a shit either way, the clinic worker called in a prescription to the pharmacy, and we got “the good stuff” later that afternoon. The old Yorkville German at the pharmacy must have been half a Gugelhupf away from calling Doris and letting her know that her pubic lice medicine bill was astronomical this month. Walking up York Avenue, I told Julia this was the last time I was going to slather my poor vag with napalm.
“The lindane bottle instructions said that too many applications could cause intense itching even though the crabs were