Drinking Closer to Home Read online

  Buzzy’s suits, shirts, and ties were next. They slicked over the wardrobe, making a blue-and-gray ribbon that led to the crowded entrance hall. Louise must have been aiming when she tossed down Buzzy’s shoes, as each one seemed to nail the door with a quick, solid thump before falling to the ground.

  Then there was a brief respite of silence. Anna stood crying while trying to figure out how many weeks they had until Louise died. The silence was cut open by a tinkering of Buzzy remnants: a shaving brush, razor, toothbrush, and a shoehorn.

  “Our mother is permanently crazy,” Anna wept.

  “She’s just angry,” Portia said, and she put her hand on her sister’s shoulder.

  Anna shrugged Portia away. Portia never believed anything Anna said; she was stubbornly stuck in her glowing, happy vision of their world where no one was having affairs, and the family wasn’t a bunch of backwoods, slovenly freaks.

  “It’s contagious,” Anna said. “If you kissed Mom when she had that sore on her mouth a few weeks ago, you could have it, too. That sore was syphilis, you know.”

  “That was a cold sore,” Portia said. “And Mom’s not crazy. She’s mad at Dad because he had another late dinner with one of the Gorgons and Mom had asked him to only have business lunches.”

  “There’s no way she’s this mad about the Gorgons!” Anna said. “Dad didn’t make such a big fuss over her one-fuck deal!” Anna wiped her nose with the base of her palm. “She needs to get to a doctor! She’s probably going to die of this!”

  “Mom didn’t do that one-time deal,” Portia said. “She just flirted.”

  “You are SO stupid!” Anna’s voice screeched like the brakes on a speeding car. “You don’t know anything about medicine and venereal diseases and affairs! Dad is probably having sex with the Gorgons now and he’s probably giving them syphilis, too! Don’t you understand? Our parents are out of control and the affairs aren’t even the worst of it! The worst of it is that that Dad’s going crazy next and eventually they’ll both die!”

  “He’s not having sex with the Gorgons!” Portia actually started to giggle. Anna wondered if Portia even heard what she had said about both their parents dying soon. It was as if those words hadn’t even entered her sister’s daisy chain of a brain.

  “Mom told me he’s sleeping with them.” Anna peeked her head up toward the stairway to see if anything else was coming down. She heard the fast clicking of Louise’s clogs against the wooden floor.

  “Coming down!” came from the top of the stairs, followed by a flying lamp that used to be on Buzzy’s nightstand. The lamp ricocheted off a couple of suits and the wooden drawer before landing on some scattered papers with a hollow thunk sound.

  The barricaded front door rattled. “Portia,” Emery called, “let me in!”

  “GO AROUND!” Anna yelled. “IT’S DANGEROUS!”

  “Mom couldn’t have been serious if she told you Dad’s having an affair,” Portia said. “She’s just jealous. It’s stupid. That’s why she sometimes laughs when I bring it up.”

  “She laughs because you’re her favorite,” Anna said. “And because of the brain damage.” Anna was smoldering with rage; the tears in her eyes magnified and distorted everything she saw. She turned toward her sister and could see in Portia’s pale worried face that she was more afraid of Anna’s rage than of the furniture heaped in the entrance hall, their father’s having sex with the Gorgons, and venereal disease running rampant in the family.

  “I’m getting Emery,” Portia said, and she turned away from Anna.

  “I’ll get Emery!” Anna said, and she pushed Portia aside and rushed toward the family room.

  “I shampooed my hair!” Emery said when his sisters walked in the room. His blond head was covered in mucky gravel; streaks of mud ran in lines down his face. His striped Charlie Brown–looking shirt was black with dirt.

  “Where’d you shampoo your hair?” Portia asked, and she picked him up. Anna shivered; she wouldn’t touch anyone that dirty even if she were going into anaphylactic shock and they were handing her the epinephrine pen.

  “In the street!” Emery said. “Mr. Kluck was washing his car and the shampoo was going down the gutter, so I washed my hair!”

  “He’s so proud of himself!” Portia said, and she laughed and pulled her brother against her chest.

  “Wash him. He’s revolting,” Anna went to the sink and began loading the dinner prep dishes and the lunch dishes into the dishwasher to clear a space in the big basin sink where Portia could plant her brother. Emery’s bathroom, which was downstairs, had only a shower, and there was no way, save climbing a ladder and crawling in a window, to get upstairs to the bathtub.

  Emery was barefoot, as usual; Portia simply slipped off his T-shirt and elastic waist shorts (he had outgrown his underwear a year earlier and no one had bought him new underwear to replace the old stuff) and dropped him into the sink.

  “Let’s pretend this is a boat,” Emery said, “and you’re a mermaid named Willomina Portia Ernie Bert Oscar Stein.”

  “Willomina Ernie Bert—”

  “Willomina PORTIA Ernie Bert Oscar Stein!” Emery said.

  “That’s me,” Portia said, “you know who I am.”

  Portia turned on the water, pulled out the extendable faucet, and rinsed Emery’s face, laughing as he lapped at the water like a dog at a hose.

  Anna leaned against the counter and watched. She hated them both even more than she hated her syphilitic-adulterating parents. Why did she have to be the only child in the family not blessed with an idiot’s ignorance?

  Chapter 5

  Day Four

  The morning of the heart attack, as they were en route to the hospital, Louise had choked out a single sentence: “If you tell the kids, I’ll kill you.” Had she died that night, those would have been her last words. Buzzy put off calling his children for a day, but finally he broke down and sheepishly phoned: “You know, I promised your mother I wouldn’t tell you, but, well, she had a little heart attack, and . . .”

  When “the kids” showed up on Buzzy’s birthday, Louise was too bleary to know they were there. Today, Day Four after the heart attack, she is alert enough to speak, and she’s pissed.

  “I told your father not to tell you.” Louise speaks uncharacteristically slowly and slurs her words, as if her lips are numb. Anna sees this as a bonus to being hospitalized (and drugged): the blurriness of time, being taken out of the overly needy world, your only job to lie around in a pool of smeary consciousness.

  “He couldn’t not tell us,” Portia says.

  “I’m fine,” Louise says. “Go home.”

  “Mom,” Anna says, “you had a massive heart attack.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says everyone!” Anna shouts. “They thought you were going to die.”

  “Well if that’s dying,” Louise mumbles, “dying’s not so bad.”

  No one tells her that she’s still in critical condition. The doctor comes in and confirms the story. “Your husband saved your life,” he says. “Twenty minutes later and you would have died.”

  “If he saved my life, what do I need you for?” Louise’s eyes are closed as she speaks, as if she doesn’t have the energy to see and talk at the same time.

  “It was a joint effort,” the doctor says.

  “Thank you,” she says, and she rolls her eyes under closed lids. Anna thinks they look like marbles under folds of ashy tissue paper.

  Louise is fifty-four years old. Anna thinks that at this moment she looks eighty-four. Her face is as gray as her hair, and her eyes are puffy flesh donuts. She has melted somehow.

  “How do I look?” she asks. It is late afternoon and she has finally forgiven her children for flocking to her in this time of crisis.

  “Like you just woke up from a nap,” Anna says. She has no intention of telling her the truth. Anna wouldn’t leave the house if she ever woke up looking that bad.

  “You look beautiful,” Buzzy says.


  “Yeah, yeah,” Louise groans. “I’m so beautiful, Arabs are going to burst in here any second and kidnap—” Louise appears to fall asleep midsentence.

  “What?” Alejandro straightens in his chair.

  “Dad’s always been worried that Mom would be kidnapped by Arabs,” Anna says, and she flips the page of the New Yorker she’s reading. Or barely reading, as she finds herself focusing on who the writers are of each article rather than what they’ve written.

  “Arabs?” Alejandro laughs. Anna is glad that Alejandro finds everything in this family funny. Her own husband seems confounded by her parents and siblings. “Why not Asians, or Aryans, or Jews?”

  “Fuck the Jews . . .” Louise is suddenly awake. Before they were married, Louise converted to Judaism. In her older age, however, Louise claims she hates the Jews. She refuses to see Woody Allen movies or read Philip Roth books. She has even said that if Buzzy insists on being buried in a Jewish cemetery, she’ll never visit his grave. Her Jewish children know this is Louise’s way of doing battle with Buzzy (the super-Jew) for crimes none of them care to know.

  “Jews wouldn’t kidnap her!” Buzzy says. “But Arabs . . .” Buzzy shrugs as if it’s a real possibility.

  “You two need to travel more,” Emery says. He is the least tolerant of his parents’ eccentricities. Once, Emery told Anna that he thinks their parents are borderline crazy. Anna pointed out to him that they are no crazier than she, and her brother didn’t disagree.

  “Arabs are sexy,” Anna says. “I love Arabs.” The article she is reading is written by a guy with an Arab-sounding name. Anna has a fantasy that this guy is some smarty-pants New Yorker with a cool apartment somewhere in the Village. She imagines herself going to chic parties with him where lots of famous and semi-famous writers show up. Anna and her Arab writer would come home from the party and fuck like mad after being inspired by all the women who flirted with him and all the men who wanted her.

  Anna looks up from the magazine; everyone, except Louise, is looking at her. She assumes they’re waiting for her to confess to an affair with an Arab lover.

  “What?” Anna asks.

  “What sexy Arabs do you know?” Portia asks. Her face is wooden.

  “Random ones,” Anna says. “Strangers I’ve seen.” Anna won’t tell them (although maybe she’ll tell Portia later, if she remembers), but in fact she has had one Arab lover, a coke dealer in Jackson, Wyoming, who was astonishingly sexy.

  “Your not having another affair, are you?” Portia’s eyes are shiny now.

  “Fucking relax,” Anna says. “I’m not having another affair!” Anna hates that Portia’s unfaithful husband has given her seismographic sensitivity to the world’s transgressions.

  Anna’s marriage has survived two affairs that her family and even her husband know of. She has had three other affairs that, as far she is aware, only she and her lovers know of. Her husband is as faithful and immoveable as boulder. He is also profoundly forgiving. Anna looks back down at the magazine and reenters her fantasy about the New Yorker writer.

  “I had a Persian boyfriend in college for a while,” Portia says. “Maybe I should have married him instead of Patrick.”

  “Good thing he never met your mother,” Buzzy says. “He might have kidnapped her!”

  “Persians aren’t Arabs.” Emery’s voice is stiff.

  “They’re not,” Portia says. “They’re Persian. But I would have dated an Arab if I had met one I was attracted to.”

  “I fucking love Arab men,” Anna says, and she can feel everyone staring at her again.

  “How do I look?” Louise groans, as if she has just woken up for the first time and hasn’t already asked how she looks.

  “I think you look awful,” Portia says. “You don’t look like yourself.” She is the most direct with their mother and this usually makes Louise laugh. Sometimes Anna wishes she could be like that with Louise, but it never comes naturally.

  For years Anna was angry at Louise for what Anna believes was a chaotic and messy childhood. But recently Anna realized she is no longer angry; in fact, she has not been angry since she was in her early twenties. She was just in the habit of being mad. Sometimes when Anna is talking to Louise she sees words coming out of her mouth like fistfuls of stones. But she doesn’t intend to spew stones; it’s simply the only way Anna knows how to talk to her mother.

  “She doesn’t look awful,” Emery says. “She looks like she just woke up.” Anna completely disagrees, but won’t let Louise know. She is holding the stones in her mouth.

  “Give me a mirror,” Louise says.

  “No way,” Portia says. “It would be too depressing.”

  Louise gives a breathy, weak laugh, and the nurse—there is usually one in the room—looks at Portia askance.

  In addition to The New Yorker, they have brought the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and three books that were sitting on Louise’s bedside table at home. Louise cannot hold her head up or keep her eyes open long enough to read. And it doesn’t feel right to read this stuff aloud—it requires a strength of concentration that no one (including Anna, who can’t even silently get through a paragraph of the maybe-Arab-authored New Yorker article) currently possesses. Anna goes to the gift shop and returns with the National Enquirer and Star magazine. They pass the tabloids around, reading out headlines and the captions under pictures.

  “Hillary hired a private detective to follow Bill,” Anna says, “and found that he has been having affairs with a string of women . . . all kinds of women.” Anna imagines that Bill Clinton would be a fabulous lover. She wonders how she can get herself to Washington to meet Bill Clinton. What could be sexier than a man who’s running an entire country?

  “Good thing Bill Clinton never met you,” Buzzy says to Louise. “He would have been all over you.”

  Louise is too weak to open her eyes at the moment, but she rolls them anyway. This time, the roving eyes remind Anna of bodies tumbling beneath a sheet.

  “Tell me how I look,” Louise says, for the third time today. She bats her eyes open, then lets her lids drop shut. She is so silent and still that Anna thinks her mother may have died. She studies her closely, is relieved to see that she’s breathing.

  Louise has wrinkles that radiate out, framing her mouth like a drawing of a radio signal. Her skin is like lumpy gray papier-mâché. Below her chin is a small shawl of fat. Her lips are like two desiccated slugs. Anna hopes she dies before she ever looks this bad. She is far more fearful of a withered face than of the possible side effects of plastic surgery.

  Buzzy is holding Louise’s hand, lifting it to his mouth every few minutes and kissing her knuckles. If Anna were to have a heart attack, her husband would be like Buzzy, Anna thinks, sitting by her side like a Seeing Eye dog. Poor Portia. It is doubtful that her husband would sit by her for anything.

  The end started coming three years ago; Anna saw it in Patrick’s muddy-clay eyes when Portia was swooning over their new baby. Anna figures that if Portia hadn’t walked into Patrick’s office when he was working late one night and caught him in flagrante delicto, she never would have noticed how distant and dispassionate her husband was. Her sister was too far gone with baby-love.

  On the last day of her last visit before Patrick moved out, Anna looked at Portia with the bull’s-eye milk stains on the nipple-points of her old T-shirt, and five extra pounds rolled like a sweatshirt around her hips, and knew that Portia wasn’t in the marriage she thought she was in. Patrick was trim, lime-smelling; he was wearing a crisp pressed shirt that was whiter than the flash on a Polaroid camera. Two weeks later, when Portia told Anna about finding her husband, pants pooling at his ankles, ass machining in and out of a slim woman whose skin was as unmarred as a brand-new bedsheet, all Anna could think about was the shimmering fish of a caesarean scar that sat under Portia’s belly fold, or her unshaven legs that were the texture of an old, half-bald dog.

  Nothing is fair in love and romance. Anna knows this for s
ure, as she has exploited her own husband’s devotion many times. But it wasn’t until she heard her sister on the phone wailing over her loss that Anna realized how cruel these things can be: how vicious and shallow-minded it is to discount a woman battered by child-bearing; how cunning and slippery it is to use a sleek female body to seduce a man. Anna hated herself for being a person on the winning side of lust and affairs. But that’s exactly where she was. Just like Patrick.

  Chapter 6

  1975

  Portia decided that Emery had to scrape the hardened cloak of bird shit off the TV room couch. The bird, Ace, who liked to perch on the iron curtain rod above the couch, was Emery’s, after all. They were cleaning the house for the annual December visit of their grandparents, Harry and Yetta Stein, whom they called Zeyde and Bubbe. Even Buzzy and Louise were helping out—a fact that made the chores seem festive, like the Friday after Thanksgiving at Portia’s friend Denise’s house where the whole family decorated for Christmas. At Denise’s, they tacked thick layers of cotton to the porch rails and called that snow. It occurred to Portia that if her family suddenly were transformed into people who decorated for Christmas, they could leave the bird shit on the couch and pretend it was snow.

  Portia handed Emery the paint scraper. He was seven now, had skipped second grade, and seemed old enough to do some cleaning. Anna helped Portia chase Ace around the house, trying to catch him with a metal trash can and a cookie sheet. When he was finally captured, they locked him in his cage, where he silently batted against the bars with a painful persistence that drove Louise to put him on top of the washing machine in the garage.

  After banning the bird, Louise took on the kitchen floor with a wire brush and bucket whose water Portia changed for her every five minutes. The revelation of the white linoleum under the putty-gray of the kitchen floor was like a magic act, or the miracle of finding a Picasso under the amateur painting of a silo one has bought at a garage sale.