The Comedown Page 12

  A few months later, Trish made another announcement: they were giving up tina because they needed to “get serious about life.” Diedre had no idea why this was happening, and spent days exhausted by her own cravings. Noodle-kneed, she asked Trish what the fuck she meant by getting serious about life. Trish—who didn’t seem to miss tina—responded patiently that they weren’t kids anymore, they’d barely used that much anyway, they needed to schedule their time on earth better. Diedre couldn’t take it; she never got it out of her system completely. She woke up and went to sleep with splitting headaches, grinding her teeth, sick to her stomach. Trish started going back to the trailer to fool around on Raymond’s drum set, Sophie on bass, Raymond on guitar, one of the Dohertys singing vocals. At first they just played Black Flag covers, but then she started to write songs. Most of them were about what it felt like to be on drugs. A few of them were about a “lizard-eyed girl” Diedre assumed was her. She watched Orlando’s weirdos crawl out of their basements to headbang to Trish’s songs. She was always stoned in the front row, trying to make eye contact with her girlfriend to confirm whether a particular song was about her, getting jostled by the sweaty, muscled moshing behind her. The shows got more frequent. Trish wound through the crowd in search of talent scouts or small-time record producers, shaking hands. They’d wind up at the Florida Hospital cafeteria afterward, gorging themselves on veggie burgers (Trish no longer believed in eating meat), making conversation with all the pale-faced straightedge kids about whether Morrissey and Johnny Marr were fucking.

  Diedre began to spend more time home alone. She thought maybe she was being punished for getting hot. She was getting hetero attention—the kind of attention they’d both vowed to disavow. Maybe it was because Trish didn’t like being in competition with a bunch of muscular assholes who probably wanted to drive her girlfriend around in their beaten-up cars and take her to shitty concerts. When they went out to eat after work, Trish began to do things like peel bills from the roll in her pocket, insisting that Diedre didn’t have enough. When Diedre complained about the blender being fritzy, the broom’s bristles being frayed, the radio’s antenna being bent, Trish replaced them all, happy to play the part of breadwinner. She left Diedre gifts on the kitchen table: a gram of weed, a turquoise necklace, a shubunkin goldfish. Diedre named the goldfish Patti and watched her swim around in her glass bowl, her belly scraping the rainbowed pebble stuff at the bottom. Two weeks later, Patti sprouted knobby growths on her forehead and her swimming became confused, one fin paddling frantically while the other remained flush with her side.

  “There’s no such thing as a fish doctor,” Trish said, stooping to see through the murk in Patti’s bowl. “Maybe there’s some food we can give her to get it to go away.”

  “Vets look at fish.”

  “Vets don’t.”

  Diedre pulled the tendrils curling at her hairline, a habit she thought she’d kicked in high school. “How do you know?”

  Trish smirkingly kissed the top of her head. Patti swam into the side of her bowl and bounced backward like a piece of flotsam, blinking slowly.

  “I think she’s going blind,” Diedre said. “I’m gonna change the water.”

  “You think fish years go faster than human years?” Trish asked. “How fast do you think a fish year goes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Diedre changed the water, plucking gnarled Patti from her habitat and letting her flop and gasp for a few seconds in the sink. Two days later, Patti was floating on her side at the top of the bowl. Diedre poked her and watched her fins twitch, her nut-sized brain sending the remainder of its electricity through her dying body.

  She stepped back. Tears were gumming up her mascara. What was she, five years old? Would she hold a funeral in the toilet bowl, ask Trish if there was a fishy heaven? Sirens mewled in the street, sending an unwelcome burst of noise through the apartment’s single window, reminding Diedre that she was—she always was—completely alone. Back in the day she would’ve occupied this time with tina or coke or Trish’s body. Trish could be out there fucking someone else right now, a groupie from a concert. She had plenty of groupies, guys and girls, but the girls were more attractive: tan, toned, multiple piercings, straying from their boring, ponytailed boyfriends to thrash their heads in the front row. But maybe Trish was trying to really mess with her, which meant she’d probably be fucking one of her rangy, tattooed guy groupies. Maybe she’d fuck him and come back smelling like Coors and his hand-rolled cigarettes. Maybe she’d come back with gonorrhea or HIV. Or worst of all: maybe she’d come back with a record deal.

  Diedre turned on the TV—60 Minutes—and maneuvered to sit on their bed, her eyes never leaving the screen. Her father would say she was letting the situation get the “bladder” of her and that she needed to relax, take deep breaths, “let it all out.” Downstairs, someone was arguing with someone else over an unpaid bill; she turned up the volume on Mike Wallace, who was talking about a nationwide increase in child kidnappings. There was nothing satisfying to listen to, but she was too tired to get up and spin an LP. Once upon a time, Trish would’ve done that for her. Now she was spending her time on earth better.

  Diedre picked at a patch of scaling skin on her shoulder. She cupped her left boob, then her right. She looked over at Patti, kneaded her shoulders in embarrassment, looked away. She could just as easily go out and fuck someone, too.

  The door clicked open and in walked Trish, eyes distant, jeans rolled up at her ankles in a way that made her look like an alt-farmer. She set down her drumsticks, took off her coat, lit a cigarette, took an initial puff, looked over at Diedre, took a second puff.

  “Hi, babe,” she intoned around the cigarette. Diedre hugged her knees. “What did you do today?”

  “I had today off.”

  Trish ignored the answer, pulling pieces of paper from her backpack, arranging them on the kitchen table and shuffling them around as though she were within inches of breaking some Soviet code.

  “What’s that?” Diedre asked.

  “Hm?”

  “What’s the papers?”

  Trish made what sounded like a noise of acknowledgment, but sleepier.

  “What’s the papers?” Diedre asked again.

  “Something for the band.”

  “What for the band?”

  “We’re going on tour.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “Just Florida.”

  “Like where in Florida?”

  Silence, paper shuffling, tar-thickened air. “Daytona Beach.”

  “Patti died today.”

  Trish looked up. “How?”

  “I feel pretty bad about it.”

  “How?”

  Diedre hadn’t anticipated needing to provide a backstory. She stood, got the bowl from the dresser, and brought it to Trish, who looked into it and then back up at Diedre.

  “The water’s clean,” Trish said.

  “I mean, yeah.”

  “It was dirty like the day before yesterday.”

  “Yeah, but I changed it.”

  “Maybe you changed it too late.”

  “You think that’s why it happened?”

  Trish shrugged, poked at Patti, then took the bowl from Diedre and set it down on the kitchen table. She stank of the Dohertys’ hand-rolled cigarettes and her own unwashed smell, a mustardy, rubbery perfume that clouded at the nape of her neck and under her arms. She cupped Diedre’s chin in her hand and pulled her in for a kiss, landing on her lips in a way that bruised, and then shook Diedre’s head no, no, no.

  “You don’t want to be kissed?” she asked.

  Diedre pried herself from Trish and stumbled away, rubbing her cheeks.

  “That’s maybe the one thing that could make you cuter,” Trish said. “If you didn’t want to be kissed all the time.”

  Diedre slept poorly that night, her limbs freezing, her head hot, folding herself into a fetal ball to accommodate Trish’s snoring and sprawling. Sh
e rose at dawn and watched the sun creep upward, stretching by pressing her hands into the tense small of her back. She was almost four years deep into a life with a woman who her mother (now attending Christmas luncheons and fantasizing about a rhinoplasty, according to her father’s latest update) and her father (still driving the produce truck, still making his fatty blintzes in a time and place where people would kill to be thin) thought was her roommate. She imagined waking up four years from now—she’d be twenty-seven!—and listening to Trish’s throaty snores, smelling the mustard under her arms, heating up frozen dinners, and wondering where in this great state of Florida Damocles Anthem would play next, but mostly thinking about how expensive the vodka would be at the after-party.

  It was June or July and she was sweating in her Shell jumpsuit, her sleeves rolled up, her hair a bandannaed mess of knots and flyaways, her cheeks a livid red from overwork. It was a Sunday, she knew that much, because Trish wasn’t there: Sundays Trish worked at Denny’s until four o’clock. Sundays Diedre could unzip her jumpsuit and roll it down, drink a glass of water from the cooler outside the convenience store like this without Trish constantly reminding her to zip up.

  She was doing exactly that when the Ford Pinto pulled up, her supervisor barking at her to get on that pump because she was pretty and he looked like a good tipper. She chugged the last of her water, pulled down her sunglasses, and made her way to him, the sleeves of her jumpsuit flopping at her sides. The driver of the Pinto watched her approach, the familiar widening of the grin and arching of the neck. She could see behind his sunglasses a pair of thick-lidded eyes. They darted vertically (the length of her body), then horizontally (between her and the convenience store). He looked at her over his frames and she saw immediately that he was a little old. Not the frightening, elderly kind—the interesting, adult kind.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She pulled the nozzle from the pump, tightened the main valve, and unscrewed the cap on his gas tank. “Diedre.”

  “Pretty name,” he said. “You certainly took your sweet time saying it.”

  Annoyed, she kept working in silence. Then she remembered the tip. “It’s an Irish name,” she said. “I don’t know why my parents chose it.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Mifkin.”

  “So you’re a Jewess?” He hissed the last syllable.

  “Russian, yeah.”

  She could feel him watching her work. As his tank filled, she made her own assessment of his body: average height, hair graying and receding, the skin behind his unbuttoned collar rooster-colored, his forearms pale.

  “You’re a northerner,” she said.

  “On the money.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “I have two,” he said. “Bloom-Mittwoch. My mother was too much of a fighter to give hers up.”

  She nodded.

  “Mittwoch means ‘Wednesday’ in German,” he offered.

  “Oh,” she said. “I took Spanish in high school, but I can’t really speak it.”

  He sniffed and rubbed his nose, and it occurred to her that maybe he partook. He looked both rangy enough to know where drugs were and rich enough to be able to afford them. She hadn’t been properly high in months.

  “My girlfriend’s gone for the weekend,” she said.

  This had the effect she’d intended: he took off his sunglasses and looked her up and down again. “You’ve got girlfriend trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask what’s wrong?”

  The pin on the nozzle clicked. She took it out and screwed the cap back on his gas tank. “I dunno,” she said, unaware that her life’s course was about to change again. “I guess I’m just not in love with her anymore.”

  May 16, 1999

  The day of Leland’s funeral was brutally humid, which she didn’t know if he would have liked or not. He was the type to be totally indifferent to the weather: he could’ve smiled through a hurricane and broken china on a sunny day. Maybe that had been part of what was “wrong” with him, what the doctors and Rabbi Kamzin had recently been warning her about, but she hadn’t seen it that way. He’d been reacting reasonably to an unreasonable world, was how she saw it. Her father used to say the same thing about her way back when she had refused for three weeks straight to go to school. So Leland wasn’t bothered by the goddamn weather. One less thing to worry about, in her opinion.

  Kamzin had already called the house twice that morning. She had ignored both calls. She didn’t want to wake up into her widowed reality again. Lee was sleeping at the other edge of the king bed she’d once shared with his father, snoring softly after a fitful night. She’d rolled across the sheets—stained by now with her food, the ash from the many squares she’d smoked, her spilled beers—to comfort him, to whisper in his ear that he always had her, and that she planned to stay around for a very, very long time. She couldn’t remember what she’d been doing when Leland jumped. Probably she’d just been getting home from the bank, unlocking the screen door and walking in on Lee sitting cross-legged in front of his cartoons, surrounded as he usually was by empty cans of orange Fanta. That was wrong, though, because they were saying he’d jumped early in the morning. She’d been asleep, or going to sleep. She’d probably been buzzed, but not as buzzed as he’d been. She laughed, and Lee shifted in his sleep. At least he’d gone out high.

  She had been in love with him, or maybe she’d been in respect with him. They had a mutually respectful arrangement: he’d been through what he’d been through, she’d been through what she’d been through, their pasts didn’t count and their future seemed manageable, if not bright. They’d gotten married impulsively, after a night together in his Orlando hotel room with two bottles of grain liquor and a bag of cocaine. He gave and gave instead of giving and withholding as Trish had; she’d missed being high so much that when she was finally high again she felt like she was soaring. He seemed bent upon satisfying her cravings, delivering to her whatever it was she wanted. They’d talked about everything, every moment of their lives prior to that night in the hotel room—she’d told him about losing her virginity, trying to get high from an empty whipped cream can, an evening during her freshman year of high school when out of boredom she stuck sewing needles into each of the fingers on her left hand. She’d told him about Trish locking herself in the bathroom, about how her parents didn’t know she’d been a lesbian. He told her about his ex-wife, Melinda, who’d insisted he was a lunatic, and his son, a boy he’d named after himself who didn’t take after him at all, and their sad little apartment in Cleveland, a city he called the Mistake by the Lake. He told her that he’d been raised a Jew and had neglected Judaism to his extreme disadvantage. She said she felt the same—she didn’t know if she really did, but she knew she’d been wrong the whole time to pretend she was meant for anything else—and after they got their photo taken at the Elegant Enchantment Wedding Chapel she vowed never to do anything churchy ever again.

  They went to Kamzin’s congregation every Saturday after that, this incredibly frummie place called Chaim Sheltok where she had to sit with the other women behind a cheesecloth and where she would often stare up at the flaking picture of Jerusalem on the domed ceiling. She could see the outline of Leland’s head a few benches in front of her, could see him bow forward in prayer, adjusting his kippah and tallit. As a little girl she’d been disciplined at Ohev Shalom for trying to wear one of the kippahs she’d taken from the wicker basket at the front. Trish would’ve thought something like that was funny and stupid. But when she told Leland he got a tight-lipped look on his face and said, “Well, it’s Halakha.” Trish was pure anarchy, but looking back at it now, she saw that Leland had been anarchy with a Jew’s sense of purpose.

  He’d turned Diedre on to the idea that her life could be an arc instead of a series of jagged happenings. With Leland she could grow up to be someone who actually impacted other people instead of being impacted by them. Before she’d be
en a gap-toothed kid who shrank at the sight of authority and relied on the louder, powerful, more impressive people to make decisions for her. Now she was the loud, powerful, more impressive person. She’d gotten married, gotten a job as a bank teller, bought a bungalow with her husband in a swampy town twenty miles outside Orlando called Heimsheim, gotten (sort of) clean, gotten pregnant. Sure, she drank a little bit, smoked a little bit, did a bump or two on special occasions, but Lee came out fine, came out kicking actually, proof she was capable of producing life. She knew this was the family Leland had always wanted, a good Jewish family full of love and tenderness and mutual support. And he’d found a matriarch in Diedre, a Sarah to his wandering Abraham. If she thought about it, she felt flattered that he’d traveled so long and far in search of her. When he first held Lee, Leland said, “Now here’s my son.” The family in Cleveland had been a dry run, preparation for his real family. Now Lee was the gap-toothed kid too skinny to defend himself and Diedre was alone in the world with him.

  She smoked a cigarette, then rolled and smoked a blunt, watched her exhalations break apart as they reached the ceiling fan. The phone rang, and Lee turned onto his back and mewled. She thought how funny it would be to call Trish and tell her everything that had happened. If she had Trish’s number still, which she didn’t. Last she’d seen of her was a lengthy profile in an issue of Maximumrocknroll, which Diedre got delivered to the house. It was Trish, Sophie Lin, and two guys Trish had used to replace Raymond and the Dohertys, all arranged so Trish was standing with her legs apart and smirking, holding her drumsticks in one hand and a cigarette in the other, the rest of them behind her. She looked bonier than Diedre remembered her, her clavicles sticking out and the muscles in her neck stringy. The headline was: “Damocles Anthem Is Changing How We Think About Hardcore.” Diedre couldn’t read the whole article—not because she was jealous, which she knew for sure she wasn’t—but she did get to the part where Trish was described as “a woman drummer-vocalist whose Mexican background hasn’t gone unnoticed in the white-as-milk hardcore scene.” They’d signed a record deal, had a debut album called Baby Bottle or Baby’s Bottle, Diedre hadn’t read very closely—she had to cancel her subscription after that. But that’d been almost five years ago. She was sure Trish was famous, but not like Rage Against the Machine famous, not even Botch famous. She was in that sweet spot where all the money was on its way but had not yet arrived, where talking to Diedre would still be reasonable. They used to prank call bars asking for someone named Tits Lavender, a joke they loved so much they’d sometimes answer the phone with “Tits Lavender speaking, may I ask who’s calling?” She imagined calling Trish wherever she lived now—New York, probably—and asking for Tits Lavender. Maybe she’d get an agent or a producer or a lover on the other end, someone who’d pull away from the receiver and go, “This girl’s asking for a Tits Lavender?” If they knew Trish, they’d know better than to hang up right away. It was funny, Diedre thought, how two very similar people could start out in the same shitty place and one could end up so much better than the other. Trish had at least tried to make sense of the world, make the things she’d done in it meaningful. Diedre just hated the world, and that motherfucker hated her right back.