The Comedown Page 11
“It’s for you,” he said. “It’s for the boys, and for your birthday. It belonged to Reggie. I can’t keep it anymore. I’m leaving.”
She made to open it but saw that it had been soldered shut. The anger started in the back of her throat. She shoved it away with her naked shin—it was heavy, with what she didn’t care to know. “I don’t want your garbage,” she said.
“But did you hear what I said? I’m leaving.”
She lit a cigarette. “And I don’t want your garbage.”
He swallowed; his tumorous Adam’s apple bobbed. “Natasha, I’m leaving because Cleveland is no longer safe for me, not with knowing the things I know. I’m going south, to Florida.”
She sighed. It had been almost ten years since Reggie had disappeared and still Leland was talking this way. “Why Florida?”
“I saw an ad for it in a travel magazine. For Orlando.” She grunted, and he persisted. “The beauty of this country is you can go anywhere and remake yourself completely. I’ve been speaking a lot to my rabbi, been speaking to him about God, and I really think that you could try to speak with him, too, we could look into getting married and living in Florida, where we’d be safe, where the boys would be safe, I really do think of them as my own—”
She hit him. She didn’t realize she’d done it until after she’d done it. He doubled over, swearing, both hands at his cheek, the knobs of his spine visible above his head.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, no, you were right. You were very right. The boys aren’t mine, they’re Reggie’s. Spiritually they are mine, maybe, or will be after you take this money from me.”
“It’s not money in there,” she said, tired of him, ready to be alone.
He looked at her as if she’d just informed him he’d eaten poison. He lifted the briefcase, shook it, slapped it. “There’s money in here, just sealed up for safety. You don’t know what I’ve been through, Natasha. If you won’t come with me, then take the money. If you will come with me, then you can also take the money in a way, it’ll be our money to have, just safer in Florida, but you’ll absolutely have to let me know either way, I’m leaving forever this week. I can’t be with this briefcase alone anymore.”
Now, despite herself, she’d begun to question her own disbelief. Beneath the delirium and mania there shone in his eyes a recognition of some external threat. Or was she just losing her mind? How much time had she spent with him in this bed, smoking while he told her his theories, denying his requests to be loved back?
She clucked her tongue.
“I’ll take the money, Leland. How about that?”
There was a beeping noise, a loud one. Leland stood up, exposing his hairy thighs and wormlike dick, his whole shrunken body. “What’s that?” he demanded. “What’s making the noise?”
She had no idea. It was coming from the nightstand where she’d put her earrings. Then she saw the Casio, its screen flashing 3:30 3:30 3:30.
“This damn thing my son got me,” she said, pressing at random the buttons on its face. She looked up at Leland, then out the window, then again out the window. She screamed, pulled the covers to her chest. It was Aaron, face and hands pressed to the glass pane. Through the sheer curtain she saw he wore a black shirt with the words You’re just a sucker M.C. printed in white, a shirt she’d never seen him wear before, could see his hands tighten and rise as fists from the glass. Leland looked out the window and flinched away, sat down naked in the corner.
Tasha’s throat went dry. Her vision blurred. “I’m sorry, baby!” she shouted at the window, but Aaron’s face was set in a tight rictus of anger. She never imagined he’d look this old this young, be this capable of a grown man’s outrage and grief, and she feared for him. She looked down at the bedspread, rubbing her eyes. When she looked up again he was gone.
PART II
DIEDRE BLOOM-MITTWOCH, NÉE MIFKIN
(1962–)
Orlando
What had been happening in Diedre’s life prior to the summer of 1985, the month of July, when he drove up to the Shell where she worked in his 1976 green Ford Pinto, dressed in resort-owner pants and a guayabera, pupils massive behind a pair of expensive-looking Ray-Bans? She had been living with her girlfriend Trish in an efficiency above Sol’s Delicatessen in Orlando. Trish who worked at the same Shell as Diedre but who earned more money because she also waitressed three days a week. Trish who played drums in a hardcore band called Damocles Anthem that was moderately famous in the Orlando underground scene, playing places like Club Space Fish and D.I.Y. Records. Trish who confirmed the stereotypes about girl drummers dining at the Y: all of them had something to do with rhythm and persistence, and Trish had both.
When she met Trish, Diedre had been eighteen, the frizzy-headed child of southern Jews with an Irish obsession so strong they’d decided to name their only child after a mythological Celtic queen known for her misery. Diedre found the name embarrassing, especially since they couldn’t even be bothered to spell it right: in all the books it was “Deirdre,” and all her schoolteachers automatically wrote it that way, apologizing when she corrected them.
Her mother was a stenographer, the tight-lipped, brittle-boned daughter of a Jacksonville cantor, a woman who’d grown up wearing wigs and swimming in mikvehs and thinking she was inferior to men until she disobeyed the cantor by attending the ice cream social where she met Diedre’s father. Her father was a bow-legged, thick-chested frummie-turned-semiapostate who could maybe be seen as handsome in the same way the movie gangster Jimmy Cagney could be seen as handsome if he also drove a produce truck. They lived in a one-and-a-half-story ranch in a row of identical one-and-a-half-story ranches, the three of them bonded by their unusual last name and their weekly trek to Congregation Ohev Shalom and divided by nearly everything else.
Diedre’s mother had decided to spend the Reform second half of her life working furiously to make up for what she’d missed in the Orthodox first. She bought herself two nice dresses, one twill and the other houndstooth. Every Thursday after work, she changed into the twill and drove back out to the Denmark Café, where she hobnobbed with a gaggle of wealthy goy housewives who’d been there since noon, drinking coffee with nonfat milk and sharing a single scone among the four of them. Diedre’s mother had been given Semitic blood but non-Semitic features: an ovoid, olive-complected face with heavy lashes and a small nose, a Mediterranean beauty that Aryans didn’t seem disturbed by. Although she rarely understood what they were talking about, she was always polite, laughing at the appropriate times and learning to correctly use their expressions: “weekday window-washer” and “all the bread, none of the butter.” As a consequence, she became a member of two or three “prominent” book clubs and a sewing club. When the clubs hosted their socials, she wore the houndstooth and a necklace of Bakelite pearls.
Diedre’s father, disinvited from all club socials after making what he thought was a joke among friends about one goy’s curtains maybe not matching her drapes, had decided to spend the second half of his life retreating inward. He was a small, hairy man who perspired through his shirt at the underarms and nipples and had a gap between his front teeth that Diedre had inherited. He was lovable, and his lovability was in large part due to his smiling unawareness of his own self: his odd-smelling produce truck, his hairline receding in the shape of a bird in flight, his arcane jokes that came poorly translated from their original Russian. Whereas Diedre’s mother proved a social asset at school, Diedre’s father was her Achilles’ heel. This was difficult for Diedre, because she had known from an early age that she was one of those girls who would always worship her father, who would look for a boyfriend with his same self-assured brawn, his same sense of humor.
* * *
After school Diedre was typically shut in her room, forcing herself to at least stare at her homework before she swept it off her desk and set to work cutting up and resewing her jeans, tearing pictures out of magazines, and listening to t
he Buzzcocks. It was while spinning “I Don’t Mind” that she pierced her ears with a sewing needle and a rubber eraser. Pete Shelley’s voice brought her back to earth; he of all people wouldn’t care if her piercings weren’t perfectly symmetrical. At school she wasn’t a person but a deadly combination of traits—a freak who was also stupid, averaging Cs and Ds in most classes except English, which was a C-plus. She was saved from complete ostracization only by her mother’s prominence. She had no friends, just people who acted friendly toward her: a tight-knit pack of burnouts, a few proto-goths, the occasional skinny lone wolf who entered her orbit for a few weeks only to drift away after she acknowledged him. She wasn’t beautiful: her hair grew in crimped and uneven patches of frizz, there was the gap between her teeth, her feet were splayed, her chest flat. In a restaurant on her sixteenth birthday, a waiter had called her “sir.” In those years, she was painfully aware she had no obvious talent, no way to legitimize her existence. She bought pain pills and weed off the burnouts. She smoked the weed at night and ate the pain pills in the morning so at school she always had the distant, heavy-headed feeling that her eyes were tunneling into her skull.
By her senior year, it was clear to everyone in the Mifkin household that Diedre would not be the first among them to go to college. Her mother was disappointed and her father was pleasantly indifferent. She got an after-school job at a diner called Mayman’s with the understanding that she’d work there until she could afford secretarial school. She was a “pre-server,” cleaning tables, mopping the floor, and hastily delivering customers their plastic tumblers of water before the real waitress (it was usually Shirley or Dayna during Diedre’s shift, both chain-smokers, both happily married) came over and sweetly inquired after people’s orders. Pre-serving, with its dirty mop water, its crumbs in the cracked linoleum, its hair balls and shit stains in the bathroom, was good enough for her. The few times she needed to fill in for a missing server, she found herself gagging at the smell of the twice-baked, Crisco-thick food; she hated acting polite to kids who spat their straw wrappers at her; she hated the way people began eating the minute she set their plates on the table, the way they couldn’t afford anything more than a grunt when she came by five minutes later to ask if everything had been lard-slathered to their satisfaction. She got reedier in those early months working at the diner, subsisting mostly on Popsicles and stalks of celery, declining her father’s creamy blintzes in favor of sticks of chewing gum. Soon her clothes hung from her body and she felt as though she’d finally accomplished something.
One day she returned from her ten-minute break having burned a fifteen-minute jay, her eyes star-clouded, and saw a pale brown girl with premature crow’s-feet, tight black ringlets, and tiny teeth sitting at the counter and drinking a cup of coffee. She smiled out from under her frummie-looking fedora, making obvious the chip in her right front tooth. “Can I get some service?” she asked.
Diedre nodded and tied her apron around her waist. She took out her notepad. She noticed the girl didn’t have a menu, so she got her one. The girl smiled, showing her unnatural teeth. She took the menu, opened it, skimmed it, and closed it. She looked at Diedre.
“I’m Trish,” she said.
Diedre nodded and began to write that down, then stopped. Trish laughed.
“Do you like it here?”
Diedre hesitated before answering. “They work us hard.”
Trish glanced at the menu, then back at Diedre.
“But we all need to eat,” Diedre said. “We all need to put food on the table.”
Trish laughed again.
“What kind of food can I put on your table?” Diedre said, trying to say it like a joke.
“What kind of food can you put on my table?” Trish asked, and Diedre nodded briskly, trying not to laugh because the way she’d said it, it sounded like it could’ve meant something else. She was like her father trying to make conversation with a pretty woman. Would you like your Korall melted? Your roll buttered? Trish bit her lower lip.
At the end of Diedre’s shift, they were kissing in the stockroom. Trish’s plump lips and tiny teeth made hard little pills of Diedre’s nipples. She stuck her head under Diedre’s shirt. Diedre made gasping noises without meaning to. She had only been kissed once before, by a lone wolf named Benny Hopgood in a science classroom after the final bell had rung. The kiss—chaste, brief, lips on lips—was nothing compared to what Trish was doing. If Trish noticed that Diedre couldn’t exactly follow along, she never let on.
After that they saw each other all the time. Trish had been kicked out of her Catholic parents’ house for what she called “being a trashdyke,” so she lived with four other kids in a trailer down a swampy road at the edge of town. Two were the Doherty brothers, speed-metal freaks from the Everglades who were missing teeth from a combo of drugs and semi-pro boxing. Another was a girl named Sophie Lin who sat on a bean bag behind a massive curtain of hair and smoked purplish kush from a hookah whenever she wasn’t working at Hollywood Video Rental. And the fourth was a guy who said his first name was Raymond and claimed to have no last name. Raymond’s uncle was in the Hells Angels, which meant the trailer got an infusion of tina every couple of months.
Trish’s bed was a cot in a room she shared with the Dohertys. When they were gone—and they almost always were—Trish and Diedre snorted tina and fooled around, doing things Diedre had previously read about in magazines but now understood perfectly under the ecstatic influence, every part of her body magnetized to Trish’s touch, her crotch slobbering the minute the tina unfurled its glittery petals in her brain. Trish had blindfolds, eighteen-inch toys, boundless energy, no past. All she revealed about her parents was their religion and their willingness to kick a sixteen-year-old kid out of their house. Diedre didn’t even know if Trish was from Florida or not, if she had siblings, if she’d graduated high school. In the glorious early days of their relationship, none of it mattered. Not in the smoke-dense world they inhabited together, where Sophie was always asking them to guess the title of the song she was humming (it was usually unguessable) and all six of them piled onto the couch to watch Dallas after heating their respective frozen dinners in the Dohertys’ sauce-spattered microwave. Diedre could see herself spending the rest of her life with Trish, which was pleasantly shocking considering she’d always imagined herself eventually settling into a version of her parents’ tired routine with some hairy-backed guy from their congregation. That was the beauty of Trish: she was completely left field. If Diedre’s mother even met Trish, which Diedre hoped she never would, she wouldn’t even think, I bet this lesbian’s sleeping with my daughter. Diedre’s father might pull Diedre closer to him if they saw Trish on the street, urging Diedre to stay employed so she wouldn’t have to resort to “turning tricks like that one.” (Anyone poorer-looking than him was a “that one.”) It wasn’t so much her parents’ hypothetical disapproval she was getting off on—it was their very real dumbness.
Diedre moved out of her childhood bedroom and into the trailer, sleeping splayed across Trish on the cot. Eventually Diedre’s mother started agitating for a visit, so Diedre and Trish hatched a plan to find some real estate of their own—the Dohertys’ boxing practices and Raymond’s one-man jam sessions were proving to be too much, anyway. They moved into an apartment above a delicatessen, a dusty efficiency owned by a one-eyed landlord who claimed to have acquired his condition in Vietnam. When Diedre’s mother finally made good on her threat to visit, they hid all of Trish’s toiletries in the cabinet under the sink, praying Diedre’s mother wouldn’t start rummaging around. Bewilderingly, she seemed pleased with what she saw.
“Well, it’s cozy,” she said, pulling a checkered dress of Trish’s out of the closet. She swatted dust from it, frowning. “You’ve got some interesting new clothes.”
“And all this without a college degree,” Diedre said, which her mother ignored, floating across the room to inspect the curtains.
After two years with Trish, Diedre fin
ally got beautiful. She kept on trying to starve herself but her body revolted, sending her to the fridge in the middle of the night after a Popsicle-only day, insisting she gorge on cheese and peanut butter and chocolate. Her breasts filled and so did her hips. At first she was embarrassed about it, cinching her jeans in hopes that making an equilateral triangle of her butt would prevent anyone from noticing. But Trish noticed—for a while, it was all she talked about. “Something to hold on to!” she said, grabbing a cheek in relief. “I loved you then as much as I do now, but it was harder to show it.” Soon Diedre understood what she meant. Even on tina Trish had been delicate, using only the tip of her tongue, holding Diedre at the hips as though she were teaching her to float on her back in the shallow end of a pool. Now she pulled and squeezed every item of skin that wasn’t flush with Diedre’s bones. They were louder and wetter and finished quicker. Diedre realized her tooth gap was sexy instead of embarrassing. She grew her hair out long, bathed it in tea tree oil, and knotted the silky strands in a bun at the top of her head. She abandoned the triangle and wore tight leggings and tank tops that showed everything. She switched from black lipstick to mauve, and she pierced the cartilage of her right ear from the point nearest her head to her earlobe. She began to get stares from men, all types of them: college football players, office workers, panhandlers, grocers. Trish put her hand around Diedre’s waist as they walked down the street. Sometimes Trish cleaned up, too, zipped herself into a strapless cocktail dress and sprayed her hair and wore a black plastic choker. Then all the creeps on the street would start cheering for the two of them to kiss. And instead of flipping them off, they did. They kissed in front of the creeps, on the bus, in the stockroom at the diner. When Dayna caught them in the back hallway, Diedre was fired and they both got jobs at the Shell. Trish had said they’d have to work double shifts if they wanted to save up for their wedding. It was hard to tell if she was joking.