Drinking Closer to Home Read online

  “I brought you lipstick,” Louise said, and she held her cigarette in her mouth as she opened the package, took out the tube and twisted until the waxy, red fin rose up. “Should I put it on you?”

  Maggie nodded, and so Louise nudged Portia off her lap, handed her the cigarette to hold, then leaned over and wiped lipstick on what Portia now saw were shredded, ripped lips. The lipstick caught in the nooks like plaster on lattice board. Louise tried to smooth it out with a second coat, then gave up, twisted the lipstick down into its tube, and put the lid on.

  “We’re moving to California,” Louise said, taking back her cigarette. It was the first Portia had ever heard of this. “Buzzy has a job at a big up-and-coming firm in Santa Barbara.”

  A tear ran down Maggie’s face.

  “You’ll be fine,” Louise said. “We’ll all be fine.”

  Maggie tried to speak but all that came out was a hoarse whispery bark.

  “California,” Louise said, with a puff of smoke, and Portia couldn’t stop smiling.

  Chapter 3

  Day Three

  There are six cats and two dogs at Casa del Viento Fuerte. Three of the cats live in the barn. The other cats and the dogs live in the house. Each animal is neurotic in some way. Emery suspects that his mother loves the animals more than she loves her children. Buzzy, who had allergies and asthma in his twenties and thirties, has apparently grown used to the animals Louise started bringing into the house once Emery left for college.

  Anna continually yells at the black lab, Jasmine. She is so extreme that Emery feels embarrassed by her in front of Alejandro. He thinks she sounds like an abusive mother from a straight-to-video movie. When Jasmine slinks over to a bowl of cat food in the laundry room, Anna snaps, “Jasmine, you sick fuck! Get your binge-and-purge ass out of here!” Emery feels somewhat sorry for Jasmine, with her slanted trot and mucousy eyes. But he can’t bring himself to touch her as each stroke lets loose weightless piles of black hair that smell like wet wool. Occasionally he’ll lift his leg and pet her on the ass with the bottom of his shoe, but that’s the best he can do. The yellow lab, Gumba, is completely ignored.

  Emery and Alejandro are both cat people. At home they have a tiger-striped cat named Little Ricky. Little Ricky is far sweeter than Louise’s cats, but Emery tries not to compare him to them so he can give whatever cat-love he has inside of himself to Louise’s cats. He tries to love the dwarfed black-and-white cat whose name is Little Carl White and who lives under the stairs and won’t let anyone pet him. And the slim gray barn cat, Fweddy, whose meow sounds like the word Ma, which Louise claims he’s saying. And the old bony gray cat, Lefty, who climbs on laps and shoulders uninvited. And even Maggie Bucks, the fat, cross-eyed Siamese, who hangs out in the food cupboard and sleeps above the kitchen ceiling in the rafters. Maggie Bucks is Louise’s favorite. Perhaps appropriately, she seems the most distressed by Louise’s absence and has taken to pissing on Louise’s bed, where Portia has been sleeping, and shitting on the couch, where Anna has been sleeping. Alejandro and Emery are staying in the modernized guest quarters on the second floor of the barn. They don’t let the barn cats up there and so have not had their lodgings pissed or shat on; the first floor of the barn, however, has cat shit scattered across it like land mines, while the litter box remains clean and the miles and miles of surrounding mountains contain nary a shit from the Casa del Viento Fuerte cats.

  It has occurred to Emery that maybe Maggie Bucks is tormenting his sisters because they torment her. Portia claims she hates Maggie Bucks because Maggie Bucks is a narcissistic brat. On the morning of Day Three, when Portia opens the cupboard and finds Maggie Bucks perched among the Grape-Nuts boxes and jars of gefilte fish and saltines that have been pushed back so as to give her a ledge to sit on, Portia begins speaking for the cat, saying what she believes Maggie Bucks is thinking. Emery, who is sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, assumes that Portia is giving her a cartoon-like Asian accent because the cat is Siamese.

  “What you do here, Connecticut Girl?! Smoker Lady no here! Smoker Lady in hospital! You go home now! You go back to Greenwich! I no want you here, Connecticut Girl!”

  Emery laughs.

  “Sorry, bitch,” Portia says, in her own voice, “I’m hanging around until Smoker Lady comes home.” Emery’s glad the cat can’t understand his sister, as bitch seems far too harsh a word for this fat, velvety cat.

  “No one want you here!” the voice of Maggie Bucks says. “I piss on you bed! I spray stinky piss-spray all over you pillow! Don’t you know what stinky-piss spray mean?! It mean go away, snotty Connecticut Girl! No one want you here!”

  Emery laughs again, then gets up and pets the cat in case the strength of his sister’s voice scares her.

  By the end of Day Three, Portia is so compulsive about speaking in Maggie Buck’s voice when she sees her that Emery barely notices she’s doing it.

  The term “Smoker Lady,” however, has caught on with the whole family, as a forty-year, two-pack-a-day habit is surely the single greatest factor in this heart attack. There are cigarettes, ashtrays, and cigarette butts everywhere in the house. There are burn holes like tiny craters scattered across the upholstery of Louise’s car. In Buzzy’s new car, a German luxury auto that he has finally given himself permission to buy (he always felt expensive cars were frivolous, and wouldn’t even drive this new car for a couple weeks because he found it embarrassing), there is a cigarette tip–sized divot on the front corner of the leather passenger seat. Emery was fingering it on the way to the hospital one day, the way one might finger an acne scar or a scab, and noticed Buzzy visibly wincing, although his father would never complain about such a thing. Buzzy has continually tolerated Louise’s smoking, just as he’s tolerated her bossiness and insistence that he be home for dinner each night by five-thirty. Emery’s always thought that Buzzy gives in to Louise too easily. Sometimes when he’s home, he wants to take a side in his parents’ arguments, and the side he always wants to take is his father’s.

  No one can figure out what to do about the cigarettes in the house.

  “Smoker Lady will be furious if you throw them away,” Buzzy says.

  They are at the kitchen table eating dinner: Greek salad, pita bread, hummus, and microwave gyros that Anna and Portia bought on the way home from the hospital.

  “But she can NEVER smoke again,” Anna says. She is using her right hand to pick out cucumber wedges from her salad. They are lined up in an arc along the rim of her plate. Emery watches Anna and wonders if she is going to eat the cucumbers or eat everything but the cucumbers. Portia is shoving cucumbers and tomatoes into the pita and making a sandwich.

  “She needs to decide that on her own,” Emery says. “We can’t make that decision for her.” Emery and Alejandro also smoke, although now that Louise is not in the house, Emery’s sisters insist that they go outside to do it. Emery is a grown person who owns his own apartment in New York, yet he listens to these women as if he’s their child. And sometimes he feels like he is their child.

  “Well,” Anna says to Alejandro. “What do you think?” When Anna stares at Alejandro for too long, Emery wonders if she has sexual feelings for him. His sister seems to have no filter when it comes to whom she finds attractive. And Alejandro’s exactly the type Anna has always fallen for: straight black hair, square face, a sexy, slim gap between his two front teeth.

  They all wait for Alejandro’s reply. He tilts his head, takes a deep breath.

  “You don’t have to throw the cigarettes away,” he says, pausing. “Emery and I will take them.”

  “You two have GOT to stop smoking!” Anna says. She starts eating the row of cucumbers one by one. Emery puts his cucumbers in some pita, like Portia did.

  “Jesus Christ,” Buzzy says. “Look at your mother! Do you really want to continue smoking?”

  “Actually,” Emery says, “we’re planning on stopping soon.” He stares at Alejandro, but says nothing. Emery is not sure if this is the
right to time to ask his sisters for their eggs. The woman who is going to carry the baby suggested he ask in the most matter-of-fact way possible, as if he were asking for the keys to a car. He trusts this woman; there is even a way in which he loves her, sort of like the way he loves his sisters. She is about Anna’s age and already has three kids with whom she stays home. Her name is Lynn, and she is sturdy, healthy, and smiles when she talks. She doesn’t drink or smoke and she doesn’t really exercise other than stepping in and out of her Subaru and walking down to the basement to do laundry. Lynn lives in New Jersey; Emery’s doctor introduced them. He and Alejandro are paying her fifteen thousand dollars to carry the baby. She says she’s doing it because she and her husband need the money, but she also claims that she’s doing it because it’s her way of creating something good for someone else. Lynn says she enjoys her own children so much she wants everyone to have the opportunity to be a parent.

  When Emery can’t sleep at night he worries about children who need to be adopted. But two agencies that he and Alejandro went to would not consider gay men. And the one agency that agreed to take them would keep them at the eternal end of the list—so it wouldn’t be until every straight couple had a baby that they would be in the running.

  The fertility doctor in New York has no problem helping them make a baby. Emery suspects that the doctor himself is gay, although he mentioned his wife at least four times in their two meetings. He’s handsome, a sandpapery beard on his face, forearms like bowling pins. The doctor said, “This is bigger than marriage.” And Emery believes him. He imagines it’s like getting his and Alejandro’s torsos sewn together into a version of Chang and Eng, the famous Siamese twins. Emery loves Alejandro, he loves him the way people love breathing, or sleeping—Alejandro is necessary to Emery’s life, and good for him. So Emery is not worried about the fact that they will soon be conjoined.

  Alejandro kicks Emery under the table to nudge him about the eggs. Emery opens his mouth to speak, but the words won’t come out. They are stuck in this throat like a lineup of golf balls.

  “Well, when the fuck are you planning on quitting?” Anna asks, and she gets up and clears her plate. Her moods come on so strongly and quickly that sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the trigger is. No one knows if Anna is upset right now because Emery smokes or because their mother has just had a heart attack.

  “About nine months from now. Maybe forty weeks.” Alejandro is dropping clues like a crumb trail and Emery is refusing to even look down and see that they’re there.

  “Nine months?” Buzzy asks. “Why nine months? Quit now! Quit tomorrow. Quit today.”

  “We definitely will, Dad,” Emery says. “The timing has to be right.” Emery drills his eyes into Alejandro. Now is not the time to ask for eggs. His oldest sister’s in a bitchy mood and the other one seems spaced out and dreamy.

  “Maybe the time will be right in about forty weeks.” Alejandro won’t give up. If they were alone, Emery would leap across the table and tackle him. Maybe he’d bite him on the neck. Just for fun. Sort of.

  “I hope Mom’s alive in forty weeks,” Portia says. Other than speaking for the cat, it’s the first thing she’s said tonight. Emery wishes she’d start talking like Maggie Bucks again. He rather laugh than consider his mother’s death.

  Chapter 4

  1969–1973

  Anna was profoundly disappointed when Portia started talking again. She had enjoyed the silence, the absence of stupid questions about freckles, people with missing limbs, blind people, dog dreams, why flowers smell, and was there a starting point to infinity. Portia first spoke the day they readied the long, blue station wagon for the drive to California.

  “I’m sitting behind Dad,” Anna had said. And then Portia announced, as if she’d been yakking for days, “Fine with me. I’m sitting behind Mom.”

  Emery’s playpen was put in the way-back, loaded with stacking blocks, books, and a fire truck that he liked to bang against the bars of the playpen and the windows of the car. At nine months old, he had started walking and was balanced enough to walk around the playpen even while the car was moving. Anna thought Emery looked like a turtle. It was not because he was slow; in fact, he was constantly in motion—rolling, climbing, jumping. But his face had a sweet turtle look to it: a smooth gap between his upper lip and his nose, big round eyes, and tufts of blond hair sticking up that looked more like the hair on a turtle (if a turtle ever were to have hair) than on a human.

  The girls had coloring books, crayons, drawing pads, colored pencils, books to read, and yarn sewing kits with big-holed mesh screens in which they could sew designs and patterns. Neither of them wore her seatbelt, and they slid around the bench seat freely, often flipping around completely to play with Emery in his cage.

  The few times Emery got carsick he was careful not to vomit in his playpen (like a dog who won’t soil his kennel) and instead leaned over the top bar and hurled onto one of his sisters. It seemed that no matter how much Louise scrubbed and rinsed the car and her daughters’ shoulders and hair, the smell of vomit remained, mixed with smell of cigarettes, indelibly staining the stale car air.

  They sang for hours each day during the week of driving. Buzzy taught the kids songs from camp when he was a boy: “The Cannibal King,” and “Dip, Dip, and Swing,” a canoeing song that he would croon as if it were a love song. Anna and Portia choreographed hand motions for “If I Had a Hammer,” and they were particularly fond of singing the theme from the Romeo and Juliet movie that had come out that year. But the song everyone liked best was “California Here I Come,” a song that at once delighted and intrigued Anna. She wondered about those “Golden Gates” that were begged to be opened in the closing lines. In her imagination, California was some walled principality that could be entered only through a pair of towering golden-grilled gates, manned, of course, by uniformed men with gold, fringed shoulder pads, and hats with fur and a chin strap.

  It was so sunny in Santa Barbara that it was hard to remember the dullness of an overcast sky. Everything looked fresh, clean, neatly outlined, brightly colored. It was as if the world in Ann Arbor had been viewed on a puny, grainy, black-and-white television, and now, in Santa Barbara, the world was broadcast in living color across a bright forty-two-inch screen.

  The new house was in a recently developed suburb with three-car-garage houses and sidewalks as white as teeth. Like many of their neighbors, they had a kidney-shaped pool whose blue-painted bottom was as bright as the endless blue sky. Louise claimed they had the best house in the tract because they were at the top of their cul-de-sac, at the top of a hill, perched above the lemon orchard that abutted the development and went on as far as you could see: acres and acres of uniform round trees. When the pickers came they’d sing in Spanish. Anna and Portia both slept with their bedroom windows open and often woke up to the sweet sounds of harmonized Mexican folk songs. Small propeller planes would fly overhead and spray the orchard for Mediterranean fruit flies. Louise always said Anna, Portia, and Emery weren’t allowed to swim in the pool for twenty-four hours after the planes had sprayed. That was an inconvenience, but other than that, no one complained about the spraying; they didn’t even come indoors while they did it.

  Buzzy and Louise had a bathroom off their bedroom with a double sink and vanity that were open to the room. With the plush, gold shag carpet leading all the way to the sink, the room looked luxurious to Anna, the kind of bedroom movie stars might have. The girls each had their own bedrooms on the second floor but shared a bathroom. They had walk-in closets that were deep enough to play in, and windows that slid sideways on a track, as opposed to the old, painted windows on the house in Ann Arbor, which only Buzzy had been strong enough to open. Emery had his own bedroom and bathroom on the first floor with a window that looked out to the long front porch framed with three stucco arches.

  The neighborhood was packed with kids. Between their cul-de-sac and the two streets below it, there were two girls Anna’s age and sev
en girls Portia’s age. Both of Anna’s friends had sparkling clean homes. No one had a mother or father who slept on the couch in the day, no one had gum or peanut butter in the living room carpet that would freak out her easily terrorized little sister. Anna quickly concluded that the people in Santa Barbara would never confuse a trash bag for a picnic basket.

  In fact, it wasn’t until they lived in California that Anna realized that Buzzy and Louise were unlike most people. Suddenly she saw her parents in sharp relief against the beautifully tanned, perfectly coiffed parents of her friends. Louise refused to go to coffee with the other mothers and talk about ironing (which she claimed was all they talked about), and she and Buzzy never showed up at neighborhood parties or ice cream socials at the elementary school. The walls in their living room were covered from floor to ceilings with bookshelves, whereas Anna’s friends’ living rooms had gold-framed paintings of ships, the ocean, and fields of flowers. None of her friends even had yogurt in the house, while Buzzy fermented his own yogurt using fresh fruit from the lemon trees, lime trees, guava tree, and banana tree in the backyard. (When their lemons weren’t ripe, and if they needed one, Anna or Emery—Portia was too fleshy and slow—would hop the backyard fence and snatch one from the orchard.) Buzzy also threw pots on the kick wheel that sat near the pool on the back patio; he often left the house with splatters of dry clay on his forehead and arms. Both Buzzy and Louise meditated, attended aura-reading parties, and went to the nude beach. And by the second year in California, Louise was enjoying homegrown marijuana, which Buzzy farmed with the passion and sensitivity of an orchid grower.

  In short, Anna thought her parents were total freaks.

  The year Anna was eleven, Portia was eight, and Emery was three, Louise decided she quit being a housewife. Anna was playing Parcheesi with her sister on the family room floor when Louise told them.