Every other day, there was her mother going at her, how she dressed, how she was acting, what was she learning, what did she want to be? Deaf, Mother, for starters. Going on about how she could be anything she wanted to be. Okay, I want to be a rock star, she yelled, playing air guitar. I mean something real, Suzanne went. Nothing about her satisfied Suzanne. Well, she didn’t like Suzanne either. What do you want to be? An orphan.
Sometimes when she was high, it felt okay. Sometimes when she was making out or fucking, she felt real, she felt there. When Chad or Evan looked at her, she felt as if she really existed and she was something each of them wanted. Sometimes lost in the pounding roar of the music, carried on its tornado of sound and whirled through the night, she felt alive. She felt for a moment as if it mattered, and then she wanted to die right then while it was fierce and good. Once they had gone off on a day trip with Evan’s parents to Mount Monadnock, and the three of them had managed to get away. It was fall and the ground was red as blood with maple leaves and golden under them. They got high sitting on rocks way off the trail where the cliff tumbled down before them. The colors seemed to sing in her eyes. They had taken off their clothes and they were all lying on a rock that the sun had heated and it felt as if they were melting together. She could not tell where she ended and they began. She felt as if her heart was bursting in her, swelling through her whole body and pulsating like the colors of the red, red leaves.
Her mother was always on her back about grades, as if they meant a fucking thing. It was so boring, so mundane. Her mother never had any fun, she just worked all the time and fussed. Always running out with her briefcase under the arm and rushing, rushing, wearing stupid gray suits and running on high heels down to the car or even the T. It was a joke. Her mother’s idea of a great evening was to make supper, which Elena was entirely indifferent to, lie in a hot bath for half an hour and read a book with her feet up, wearing her old bathrobe. Her mother had been born boring. Some people were, like Rachel. Her mother was the most impatient woman alive. Suzanne was always asking if she hadn’t done something yet. Elena would be doing the dishes, like she was fucking supposed to, when everybody else in the world had a dishwasher, and her mother would come zooming in saying, Aren’t you done yet? Did you wash your sweater? Did you make your bed? Do your homework? When are you planning to get it done? Didn’t you do that yet? Did you forget to take out the garbage again? How could you lose your shoes? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. She sure didn’t, that was for absolute real.
Elena felt at war with everyone. Her mother was trying to keep her in. She simply agreed and then did what she pleased. Rachel told on her twice. The second time, she took a knife from the kitchen and laid it against Rachel’s throat, holding her down on her bed. “If you rat on me again, I’m going to slit your throat. Don’t think I’m bluffing. Don’t ever think I’m bluffing. It’d be a pleasure. I wouldn’t mind knowing what it feels like to cut my little pesky sister’s throat.”
That scared Rachel. She stopped carrying tales to Mother. Elena looked at herself in the mirror, posing squint-eyed and nasty. She could look pretty bad. She liked the way she looked. She was tall now, and she liked being taller than a number of the boys. She was lean and mean and tough. The three of them were their own family. They were together whenever they could be. It was what they all wanted. It was what she wanted more than life itself. When she was with Evan and Chad, she felt surrounded, protected, enclosed, loved. They got wasted a lot, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t care about anybody else, anybody outside their tight circle. They were everything to one another. If one of them even thought about anybody else for five minutes, the other two set them straight. They were a unit. As soon as they were old enough, as soon as they had wheels of their own, as soon as they had enough money to run away, they were going to live together. They would sleep as long as they wanted to and stay up until they wanted to go to bed. They would eat when they felt like it, pizza or nothing or greasy hamburgers instead of the tofu and broiled chicken and smelly fish her mother tried to get down her. They would play their music as loud as they felt like and they would fuck whenever they chose to and never worry again about getting caught. They would be happy. They would be in pig heaven.
In their first day’s class (they tried to take all their classes together, although they couldn’t manage it by half), Chad came in late. He passed her a note as soon as he could. “Old man found my stash. Shit! He says he’s going to send me to military school.”
At lunch he explained. “He found out somehow I see Mom when I’m not supposed to. I don’t know how he found out. I don’t think it’s past him to hire some seedy private eye. Who knows? Anyhow, after he found that out, he went through my room. He ransacked it. He found my stash of dope and downers.”
“So you tell him you’re holding it for a friend,” Evan said.
“Ha. You think he’s that stupid? He called his lawyer and he’s trying to get my mom in trouble for seeing me.”
“What kind of trouble can your mom get in?” Elena asked. She wasn’t eating. She hated to eat at the school. She wasn’t about to walk in with a tacky brown-bag lunch and she wasn’t about to eat that shit either. Food was overrated. She’d rather just have a cigarette and a Coke.
“He can get his lawyer after her, like he did before. He can get the judge to rule I can’t see her even as much as I do.” Chad slammed his fist on the table. “I hate him. I never wanted to get her in trouble. I just wanted to see her.” Waves of intense emotion beat off him.
It was exciting to feel all that raw emotion discharging. It was like an electrical storm at the table. Elena had always loved thunder and lightning. Rachel would stop up her ears, but Elena would run to the window, almost hoping the lightning would strike near, would electrify her. It was so beautiful. Chad felt like that. She wanted to feel that emotion consuming her. She put her hand over his on the table, but he didn’t notice. He pounded the table again. He looked as if his face would break open and molten tears pour out, but of course he could not cry here. He could only beat on the table.
A monitor came over. “Don’t pound on the table, weirdo.”
Elena said, “Let him be. He’s got problems today.”
“He’s my problem right now. Lay off the table or I’ll send you to the principal.”
“Get lost, dick-face,” Evan said. “Or you’ll have a problem.”
But Chad stopped. They got through the rest of the day. After school, they went to Elena’s. Chad didn’t want to go home. Rachel was at swimming class. Another mother took her, and then their mother picked her up at six. They shut themselves in Elena’s bedroom. She opened the windows before they lit up. Saved airing it out later. Chad wasn’t about to be chilled by dope or anything else.
“She explained it all to me before she left, how he was just too cruel to live with. How he was always putting her down, just the way he does with me. He likes to stick pins in you just to see you flinch.”
Elena frowned, focusing with difficulty. “Why didn’t she take you with her?”
“She didn’t have any money. She didn’t even have a place to stay. Then she wanted me to come, but he got the court to give him custody. He had like four lawyers and she had this cheap jerk who hardly bothered.” He scrubbed at his eyes, dry and bloodshot. “She should’ve taken me with her anyhow. She should have!”
That woke Evan up. “You don’t know that your father and his lawyers would have let her take you,” he said gently. Evan hated it when people blamed others too much.
“He’s killing me. He won’t let me see my mother. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. I’m just a piece of property. I’m just a club to beat her over the head. I’m nothing to him. He doesn’t care how much I hurt. He doesn’t care what I feel. All he wants to do is win.”
“Maybe we could run away,” Elena said tentatively. Both guys stared at her. “We could go away together.”
“Where would we go?” Evan asked.
>
Chad stood. “What does that matter, so long as it’s away from here? I hate him. I hate my life. He’s going to send me to military school.”
“He’s just threatening you,” Evan said, trying to cool everybody down.
“No. He had his secretary send for all these applications and brochures. He’s threatened before, but this time he’s been on the phone to some place in Virginia. He’s going to send me to some damned military prison school. I’d rather die.”
“How could we get a car?” Elena poked him, to get his attention back.
“I can take one of my father’s cars. He has three. I know where he keeps the keys.”
“Just don’t take the Porsche,” Evan said. “That’s too conspicuous and too small for three of us.” He was in. He could not resist the idea.
Suddenly Chad was up again, ready for anything. “California. I love that place. Northern California—north of San Francisco. I have friends there who have a house where it’s like you’re walking in a pasture with their two horses and suddenly the world drops away and you see you’re on top of this cliff. Bam, down below there’s these breakers crashing in on the rocks. You just want to step off. Step off into that blue air.”
“I want to go for real,” Elena said, putting her hands on both their shoulders. “Not just bullshit around, like talking about robbing a Brinks truck. I want to do this.”
“For real,” Chad said.
“We’re always real,” Evan said. “That’s what we are together. Brute reality. Let’s go to bed.”
The next day, Chad took his father’s BMW, to show them how easy it was. They went off to Rhode Island and each got tattooed—it was illegal in Massachusetts. Chad got a winged skull, Evan an eagle, and she chose a red rose with a thorn dripping blood. The guys put theirs on their arms, but she chose to have hers on her hip. They were not big tattoos—Chad was charging them on his credit card—but they were perfect. She wouldn’t say a thing to Suzanne, but at some point, her mother would see it—probably the first time she wore a bathing suit. Suzanne would go ballistic. Elena loved her tattoo. That night she kept looking at it with a flashlight under the covers, the way she used to read comic books when she was a kid.
Suzanne had had it easy. She had gone to high school when things were upside down and the kids felt powerful. Kids seemed like this great force, all of a piece, what they called youth culture and hippies and yippies. They were so sure they were right that they scared the shit out of teachers, principals, parents, bosses. They just took over the streets and the parks. Suzanne had a lot of practice feeling right and justified by the time she was going off to college.
But Elena knew she was just a burnout. There was nowhere to go and no one to turn to except her little family of Evan and Chad. The good kids didn’t smoke. They stayed on the other side of the smoking line outside school. Passing beyond that line as Elena did every day was to brand yourself a slut. She knew what made her feel good, but everybody around her with any power over her told her that sex and heavy metal and whatever they could get their hands on to get them high, all were bad and dirty—and so was she.
15
Beverly
Beverly dreaded going into the rehab center because it sounded like a nursing home, someplace to park her. Someplace to stash her where she wouldn’t be in Suzanne’s way. However, by the time Suzanne drove her there, she was so exhausted she only wanted to be in a quiet room away from all of them. It was just too hard, too much. Everyone talked at once and they didn’t understand she could not follow multiple threads. It was unbearably noisy. Music pounding. Everyone talking at her and each other, their voices a mad loud jumble in her ears. It was all so complicated, things in the way, furniture sticking out. The toilet wasn’t within her reach. She could not hobble toward it with the walker she hated, for it caught on every piece of furniture, and there was too much furniture, stuff everyplace she tried to pass. Things kept falling down as she went by. They shouted at her, as if she were deaf. They thought if they yelled at her, she would understand them, when she only wanted them to speak slowly and pause while she caught up with them.
She could talk some now, she knew she could, but no one there gave her a chance to mouth the syllables she could manage. She could do all the vowels. That cute man with the mismatched clothes, Dr. Fish, back in New York had taught her she could make those sounds perfectly well. Shah, shay, she, sheh, shy, shih, show, shoi, shau, shew, shuh. Wonderful sounds. And “m.” She could say perfectly good things like “show me,” if they would only wait long enough and give her a chance. But Suzanne had always been impatient. She remembered she herself had been impatient, back when she had been a full and real person. Yes, she too had always been in a hurry, but now everything took time. Just getting dressed required at least half an hour, and another fifteen minutes getting to the toilet, getting up and back. Every little excursion and every little activity, like eating ice cream, wore her out till she needed to rest. But in Suzanne’s house, there was little rest. All those people milling around shouting at one another, doors slamming, water running, the phone burring, the fax beeping, people thundering up and down to the flat upstairs. All those faces she did not know or could not remember.
She would miss Mao. He had been overjoyed to see her. He was the one who loved her as she was. He got into bed with her and purred and purred. He kneaded his paws against her arm, and she felt as if she could almost feel him vibrating, as if the arm had a little sensation. The other cats, the orange ones, came to examine her, and they too were friendly, but Mao ran them off, hissing with his black fur on end. She was his. She wished she could take him with her to the rehab center. He still loved her, when nobody else could. Even her favorite, Elena, kept away from her. Spoke to her from a distance and fled. Everyone wanted to turn away from the ruin she had become.
Therefore, although she had not wanted to come and had tried to object to being parked here, as she lay in the hospital bed in the pale green room, she was relieved. It was manageable here. Ten steps to the bathroom and rails in place. A stool in the tub and railings. Railings on the walls. Wide doors her walker could pass smoothly through. Ramps. The remote for her TV was within reach. A tray swung over the bed on a balance spring so that she could easily swing it down or send it away. She could print notes on it, could prop up a large-print book. She was expected to make her way to meals, although she would much rather have had them in her quiet safe room.
Meals were depressing. Most of the patients or inmates, those stored here, did not try to communicate with one another. The right-brain-damaged ones could be talkative, but that didn’t mean they made sense. The white-haired lady across from her, fragile and rosy as a porcelain shepherdess, sat there swearing, “Goddamned motherfucker son of a bitch bastard.” Some switch in her brain had frozen into curse mode. A middle-aged man with a twisted face was singing to himself as he stabbed at his food. Their food had a tendency to get away. Eating took every bit of concentration she could muster, a fierce battle not to get food into her lap or her hair or on her sweater, but carefully, avoiding choking, she spooned a little at a time into her mouth. Meals were very slow because they were difficult. None of them ate easily.
The rhythms of the day were different here than they had been in the New York hospital but just as repetitive and marked. Bathe and get dressed, rest. Eat breakfast, rest, go to physical therapy, rest, go to speech therapy, rest, lunch, rest, go to occupational therapy, rest, be parked by the TV, rest, supper, be parked by the TV, go to bed, and start again. Yet she did not mind the routine, because the chaos at Suzanne’s had tired her to desperation.
All around her were people with various degrees of stroke, various stages of recovery. When she thought “recovery” she put mental quotes around it. She heard from her various therapists about people who had regained use of their legs, their arms, their hands, their speech apparatus, their ability to live a normal life, but all around her, she saw the broken and the blasted. Like herself. If they
did not often reach out to one another, it was partly because it was so much work to make contact with another person who was not a therapist assigned to you, and partly because looking at another person with a similar problem was depressing. She began to notice, to realize, that often a stroke was only a first stroke, and that others minor or major might readily follow.
She no longer fought her therapists but tried, stolidly, in a daily routine of attempts and frequent failure. The one therapist she approached with passion was her speech therapist. This one was a woman, Nancy Wright. I WANT TO WRITE, NANCY WRIGHT, she printed painstakingly on a piece of paper. Suzanne brought her steno pads and marking pens. “First we’ll work on your speech, Mrs. Blume.”
A speech pathologist had examined her for a good part of an afternoon until she wept with frustration and fatigue. The verdict was that there was no injury to her vocal cords or her pharynx. It was all in the brain, that gray globular organ she increasingly resented. She imagined a hole in it where the speech machine had once effortlessly worked, spitting out words, sewing together sentences. She had been such a talker. Her mother had called her The Mouth when she was angry with Beverly.
“A bayzeh tsung iz erger fun a schlechter hant.” A wicked tongue does more harm than a wicked hand. That was her mother talking. Suddenly she was at the table in their Lower East Side apartment on Twelfth Street next to the Jewish old folks’ home. They lived on the third floor back. The table was actually two tables stuck together when the whole family was home for a meal. She had three older brothers and of course her sister, Karla. Al went down in the Pacific on a destroyer. Davey died of pneumonia in the hospital after he was mugged outside his record store. Gene perished of a heart attack just five years ago, playing golf outside Las Vegas. They had never had much to do with one another, except Gene, who had been her favorite. They had little in common. Different paths. But she could see them around the two tables stuck together along with her Aunt Hannah, who was some obscure cousin brought over to save her life, and also their Zeydeh, who seemed to her even then ancient and weird, who spoke almost no English. They were all crammed around those two shoved-together tables singing the blessings and then digging into the good and plentiful food of Shabbat. She could smell the soup her mother made with eggs from inside the chicken, the eggs without shells.