Bastards: A Memoir (20 page)

When I opened the front door I expected to smell Mimi’s favorite potpourri of furniture polish and glass cleaner, but what I got was a nose full of dust. The curtains that should have been taken down and cleaned every thirty days were covered in a thin layer of grit. I could write my name in the film that had settled on top of the china presses. The deep shag carpet had lost its springy volume. Mimi’s dolls, her treasured creations high atop the cabinets, were shrouded in cobwebs.

The floorboards sighed and creaked as I walked in. I heard voices coming from the kitchen.

“No, I can
do
it.”

“Let me help.”

I parked my suitcase at the base of the stairs and followed the trail of tubing from Mimi’s oxygen tank to the back of the house. When I got to the kitchen I saw Mimi on the floor in a pair of pink pajamas, Granddad hovering over her like a nervous sheepdog. I tumbled in as Mimi gripped a chair and pulled herself up. She smiled at me and said, “Well, look what the cat drug in!”

I barely recognized her. She had gained twenty pounds, all in her cheeks and her stomach. But her limbs were still thin as toothpicks. “It’s the steroids they’ve got her on,” Granddad said. “They put meat on her bones and make her stubborn.”

Mimi had always been stubborn; she didn’t need steroids for that. Looking at her now, I realized that the times I had come home to visit she must have been putting on a show, acting strong and pretending to be fine. But she was weak, thin, and frail. Her voice had a crackling quality to it now, as if under her breath I could hear her lungs crunching like paper bags. She started coughing and didn’t stop for ten minutes.

“Sounds like you need your next breathing treatment,” Granddad said.

Mimi waved him off. “Oh, Charles, I’m fine.”

I clutched my purse tight under my arm and heard the letter crinkle.
Now’s not the time
, I thought. I’d wait to tell them that I didn’t plan to stay long. After Mimi lay down for a nap, I started to carry my suitcase up to my old bedroom and Granddad stopped me.

“It’s Mimi’s sewing room now,” he said shyly.

“But she can’t get up there, can she?” I asked in a whisper from the first set of stairs.

“No,” he said, “but it’s important that she thinks she will someday.” He looked wrung out. I wanted things to work easily and would go where I was pointed. There was no sense in being stung about the fact that my sanctuary had been overtaken; it was their house and I was the one who left.

“I’m fine with Becca’s room,” I said and dragged my things into the downstairs bedroom. There had been changes here, too. Gone was the queen-sized bed that Becca and I had slept in fifteen years ago. In its place were two twin beds with matching beige sheets and white blankets. This was a guest bedroom now, a place for visitors. But from the look of the place, with the same coating of dust that matched the rest of the house, no visitors had been by in quite some time. I left most of my things in boxes that I tucked under the beds. They could stay there for the next two years while I was across the world becoming someone more interesting, I figured. It wasn’t as if Mimi and Granddad were going anywhere.

I registered with a temp agency that afternoon. I needed to get a job quickly so I could fund my move. At the house I cooked dinner, did laundry, and attempted to clean the place up to Mimi’s standards. I learned how to prepare her twice-daily breathing treatments, helped her with her shoes, and clipped her toenails. I had grown familiar with her body by now, I knew the places where she needed her shoulder rubbed when she woke up in the morning, the weird way the toenails on her second toes curved when they were allowed to grow too long. I didn’t wonder then—as I would many years later—whether I did these things out of affection or guilt. At the time I was convinced that I did them because they needed to be done. And that was enough.

Jolene still came every Saturday to curl Mimi’s hair. She brought homemade fudge and little pink journals with notes in the front, cheerfully suggesting that Mimi record some of the stories she knew about her family. Mimi nodded when she leafed through the blank pages, but the books remained empty beside her recliner in Granddad’s den. I don’t know if she balked because she didn’t like that the suggestion implied that she was dying, or if she simply lacked the energy to write.

I’d been home for a week when I accompanied Mimi and Granddad to one of Mimi’s doctor visits. There was an escalator from the lobby of the building to the second floor. I strode confidently aboard with Mimi’s portable oxygen tank on my left shoulder, her left arm braced against my right arm. I turned back to ask Granddad the suite number and saw that he was two steps behind me, with his shoulder turned away as if to camouflage the look of abject terror on his face as he attempted to place his feet squarely on the moving steps. When had he gotten so old?

In the appointment, Mimi’s pulmonologist suggested that intravenous drugs would more effectively halt the scar tissue building up in her lungs. Mimi pursed her lips.
No hospitals
. Hospitals were where people went to die, and she was not dying. She was just sick. “It is possible to administer the drugs at home, if your family is up for it,” the doctor said, indicating Granddad and me. We nodded. Of course we were. Mimi hadn’t hesitated to do the million little things she’d done for me, and how hard could it be? The doctor inserted a port in Mimi’s left arm and sent us home with the assurance that he would complete the necessary arrangements.

The next day a gray apparatus the size of a cinder block arrived at the house along with bags of fluid and syringes with snub-nosed ends that fit snugly into the accompanying tubes. I devoured the diagrams with their yellow triangles screaming
CAUTION!
, determined not to make a mistake. After dinner we set Mimi up on one of the beds in my room, snapped the tubing into her arm port, and followed the diagrams. Granddad looked over my shoulder while I first flushed the line with one syringe of heparin (
CAUTION: Watch for air bubbles
), followed that with the tube of warfarin, (
CAUTION: double check labels! DO NOT double HEPARIN!
), then plopped the pouch of steroids into the gray plastic machine, rolled it around the squeegee (
CAUTION: Ensure the bag is placed snugly below the roller!
), snapped it closed, and waited for it to hum (
CAUTION: If the machine does not hum, no fluid is being dispensed!
).

Once the humming began, I lay on the other twin bed and watched the squeegee roll over the bag of fluid. The full dose was supposed to take an hour. But it didn’t look like the fluid was going up the tube. It was just getting squeezed, like a giant blister about to pop under the pressure. I stopped the apparatus, popped it open. Rewrapped, resnapped, waited for the hum. It wasn’t working. It took two more attempts and several phone calls to the Ask-a-Nurse help line to get the full dose administered that night. It was four o’clock in the morning by the time it finished, and a blood-colored bruise had developed on Mimi’s arm where the IV was inserted.

Looking at it made my eyes burn. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was failing, or because nothing I did could make this better. I was relieved when the doctor scheduled a real nurse to come every two days and deal with the IV.

I missed Becca. The house on Forty-fourth Street reverberated with echoes of her. The spindly tools that she had once used to pry popcorn hulls out of her braces were still in the medicine cabinet. Her VHS copies of
Titanic
and
Empire Records
sat on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the hall. I could only use half the hanging rods in my closet because her winter coats and prom dresses still hung there. They smelled like the patchouli oil that she had bought in the arts district. I always hated that swampy aroma. I still hated it, but because it was my sister’s scent I stuck my face in the ghostly silks and satins and breathed in until I gagged. Becca and I had become friends again the night we’d met Lisa. We’d shared a room that night and whispered back and forth about how surreal it was. I hadn’t expected to feel so drawn to our new sister, and neither had she.

After Becca dropped out of Oklahoma State a year and a half before, she’d moved from one small rural town to another, snaking her way down to the far southwest corner of the state. I’d been home for three weeks before I made the drive down to Lawton to see her in her new place. She’d started playing with a band, a punk-rock metal group of four girls, and she invited me to a Friday night show. My plan was to see her and then nudge her to come back to Oklahoma City with me.

All I knew about Becca’s new town was that it was home to a small Army base, Fort Sill, and more meth labs per capita than any other place in the state. There was also a tiny college where we were meant to think that Becca was taking classes so she could transfer back to Oklahoma State. I’d never been this far southwest in Oklahoma. I’d never intended to live in this state long enough to be considered “from” it, and figured the less I steeped myself in its history and culture, the better. There was a stark honesty in the bleak flatness of the place. What you saw was what you got. And, usually, what you got was a spot devoid of any place to hide.

For two hours down the desolate highway, I ran through my plan for the night. I’d hit the concert, then we’d pile onto Becca’s sofa and watch the PBS late-night movie over a bag of Becca’s favorite buttered popcorn that I had packed for the occasion. I’d stay in Becca’s apartment for the night, then talk her into coming back to OKC with me for a visit. Once I had her in Mimi and Granddad’s house, I’d show her the ropes for being around Mimi. How to administer medicines and help her with her exercises. Once she wasn’t so freaked out by Mimi’s illness, Becca could, I thought, be a better nurse than I was. More comfortable.

I pulled into the parking lot of the coffee shop hosting the concert. It was a quaint lavender building. As I walked toward the entrance I saw a pack of sunburned shirtless guys sitting in the bed of a beat-down Dodge pickup. They passed around a bottle of Mad Dog. They were in their twenties, but only had one full set of teeth between the four of them. They could tell from my white capri pants that I wasn’t from around here.

“Miss . . .” One shirtless guy tipped his head in a small salute as I passed. These guys might be blind drunk, but they could still act like gentlemen. “Ho-leee hell!” he said, taking a closer look at me. “You’re Becca’s sister, ain’t you? You want some Mad Dog?”

I shook my head. “I’ll get a coffee inside,” I said. “But thank you.”

When I walked in I couldn’t find my sister anywhere. I saw her bandmates, though, setting up equipment and tuning their instruments. Becca always made friends with everybody, especially the sort of individuals most people wouldn’t hurry to sit next to on the subway—pen-ink tattoos at the base of their necks, piercings on every available facial feature, grimy gums, and serpentine skin. The group gathering in the coffee shop was hitting all the usual marks.

At eight-thirty Becca ran in the front door in a pair of hip-hugging black pants covered all over in red plaid zippers, and a black spaghetti-strap tank top that showed a sliver of her belly all the way around her waistband. There wasn’t a stage at the coffee shop, and there was only one microphone. With the drum kit set up in the corner and the amps for the two guitars, the thirty people gathered in the shop came close enough to touch the band. They started to play. The venue was far too small for their full drum set; the percussion flattened the rest of the instruments and vocals into an unintelligible mess. I couldn’t hear my sister’s lead guitar at all, but I could see that she had lost twenty pounds since the last time I’d seen her and the teeth Granddad had spent so much money to straighten had spread back into disarray.

After the last song, the lead singer, a raven-haired sprite in a red dress, screeched, “Party at Zack and Eddie’s! Let’s go!” That got the loudest cheer of the night.

After the band carried amps and thick coils of cord to the parking lot, I found myself driving in a caravan headed to an apartment complex across town.

“Who are Zack and Eddie?” I asked Becca as I drove. I hoped they weren’t the Mad Dog guys.

“They’re cool, they’re in the Army; like Jay,” she said. Her eyes were glassy in the passing streetlights. I could see deep pits in the skin along her cheekbones.

“I thought we’d watch the late-night movie. It’s supposed to be
Casablanca
tonight,” I said.
Casablanca
had been our favorite vintage film. When we were in high school we’d take turns swanning around the living room saying,
Play it again, Sam
, while the other sister practiced piano.

“I forgot you were such a dork,” Becca snorted in the passenger seat.

“I came to see you,” I said as the paved road gave way to gravel and the proper buildings of the town disappeared behind us. “You, not a bunch of strangers . . .”

“It’s really important to me that you meet my friends,” Becca said. “They’re like my family.” As if we didn’t have enough family for numerous lifetimes. I parked behind a half-lit brick-crete building on the edge of town. In the center of the complex was a fenced-in pool, drained even in the summer heat.

“It’s awesome to skate in,” Becca marveled. “Better than if it even had water in it.”

She had a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were tracking a distant star. It was an expression I recognized from Michael’s face.

We walked through the weed-studded sidewalk to a dim, humid apartment. The smell was a combination of stale beer, vomit that was never fully cleaned out of the carpet, the musk of collective body odor, and the acid tang of waste seeping through old pipes. “You made it!” a scrawny shirtless boy—Zack or Eddie?—crowed when we walked in the door. He had more tattoos on his torso than he had furniture in his home. Every countertop was covered in foot-high layers of plastic cups and pizza boxes. He was hosting ecosystems in here.

Thirty or forty people were already crammed into the tiny space and everyone was covered in sweat. Half the girls wandered through the room in stained bras; the guys were all bare-chested. The doors and windows were all open. I was, it seemed, the only one here who was not fucked up. My craving for a drink was eclipsed by my desire to get the hell out of here.