Damned (14 page)
Even as a telemarketer, it's best not to enjoy yourself too
much.
If you don't look miserable, the demons will reseat you next to someone who
whistles. Then next to someone who farts.
From the survey questions I've already asked, I know the old lady is
eighty-seven years old. She lives alone in a freestanding home. She has three
grown children who live more than five hundred miles distant from her. She
watches seven hours of television each day; and in the past month, she's read
fourteen romance novels.
Just so you know, before you decide to do telemarketing over doing
Internet porn, the sleazy Pervy Vanderpervs who text you with one hand while
they abuse themselves with their other—at least they're not going to break your
heart. Not like the pathologically lonely oldsters and cripples you quiz about
nonstreak glass cleaner.
Listening to this sad old lady, I want so much to reassure her that
death isn't so bad. Even if the Bible is correct, and it's easier to push
caramels through the eye of a needle than get to Heaven, well, Hell doesn't
totally suck. Sure, you're menaced by demons and the landscape is rather
appalling, but she'll meet new people. I can tell from her 410 area code that
she lives in Baltimore, so even if she dies and goes straight to Hell and gets
immediately dismembered and gobbled by Psezpolnica or Yum Cimil, it won't be a
huge culture shock. She might not even notice the difference. Not at first.
Too, I yearn to tell her that—if she loves reading books— she's going
to adore being dead. Reading most books feels exactly like you're a dead body.
It's all so... finished. True, Jane Eyre is an eternal, ageless character, but
no matter how many times you read that darned book, she always gets married to
gross, burn-victim Mr. Rochester. She never enrolls at the Sorbonne to earn her
master's degree in French ceramics, nor does she open a swanky bistro in New
York's Greenwich Village. Reread that Bronte book all you want, but Jane Eyre's
never going to get gender-reassignment surgery or train to become a kick-ass
ninja assassin. And it's pathetic that she believes she's real. Jane's just ink
stamped on a page, but she really, truly thinks she's a living-alive person.
She's convinced she has free will.
Listening to this eighty-seven-year-old voice weep about her aches and
pains, I yearn to encourage her to just give up and die. Kick the bucket.
Forget toothpicks. Forget chewing gum. It won't hurt, I swear. In fact, death
will make her feel way better. Look at me, I want to say, I'm only thirteen, and
being deceased constitutes about the best thing that's ever happened to me.
As a word to the wise, I'd advise her just to make sure she's wearing
some durable, low-heeled, dark-colored shoes before she croaks.
A voice says, "Here." And standing at my elbow is Babette
with her fake Coach bag and straight skirt and breasts. In one hand, Babette
holds a strappy pair of high heels. She says, "I got these from Diana
Vreeland. I hope they fit. And she drops them into my lap.
On the phone, the old lady in Baltimore continues to sob.
The high heels are silver-colored patent leather, with ankle straps and
rhinestone buckles across the toe, stilettos so tall I'll never have to wade
through cockroaches. These are shoes like I've never worn before because they'd
make me look too old, and thereby make my mom REALLY look too old. Ridiculous
shoes. These silly shoes are uncomfortable and impractical and too formal, and
way too grown-up.
With the old lady still yammering through my headset, I kick off my
Bass Weejuns and slip my feet into the strappy high heels.
And yes, I'm well aware of all the valid reasons why I should politely
but firmly refuse these shoes...But instead, I LOVE THEM. And they fit.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I hope this won't sound too confusing,
but I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on
giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with
no aspirations for the rest of eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on
a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday,
find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best
efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness.
Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess',
I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.
How come I click so well with Goran is that he's never been allowed to
be a child, and I'm strictly forbidden to grow any older. The day before my mom
was supposed to appear at the Oscars, she took me to a day spa on Wilshire for
a little industrial-strength pampering, mother-daughter style. While she and I
got our hair highlighted, belted in identical fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobes,
our faces caked with masks of Sonoran mud, my mom explained how Goran grew up
as a refugee in one of those Iron Curtain orphanages where the babies all lie
ignored and untouched in cavernous wards until they're old enough to vote for
the current regime. Or to be conscripted.
There in the day spa, even as Laotian masseuses knelt to buff the dead
skin from our feet, my mom told me that infants require a minimum amount of
physical touch in order to develop any sense of empathy and connection with
other human beings. Without such handling, a baby Would grow up to be a
sociopath, lacking any conscience or ability to love. More as a political
gesture—not merely for publicity's sake—we're having all of our acrylic finger-
and toenail overlays replaced. One of my mom's deepest political convictions is
that, if people want so desperately to come to the United States, wading across
the Rio Grande at great risk to their life and limb simply for the opportunity
to pick our lettuce and iron our hair, well, we should allow them. Entire
nations would enjoy nothing more than the opportunity to scrub our kitchen
floors, she says, and to prevent them from doing so would be a violation of
their most basic human rights.
My mom is adamant on the subject. At the moment, "We're surrounded
by various political and economic refugees as they crowd forward to scrape and
wax and pluck at °Ur imperfections.
After all the herbal high colonics I've endured, not to Mention the
electrolysis, the tortures of Hell hold little terror. It never fails to
impress me how so many of the huddled masses and wretched refuse can flee the
political oppression and torture of a foreign government, then arrive in
America ready and eager to inflict largely the same tortures on the ruling
classes here.
As my mom sees it, her dry, flaky skin is some immigrant's vocational
opportunity. Plus, hurting her offers immigrants a nifty cathartic therapy for
venting their rage.
Her chapped lips and split ends constitute
someone's rungs up the socioeconomic ladder to escape poverty. Sliding into her
middle age complete with cellulite and scaly elbows, my mother has become an
economic engine, generating millions of dollars which will be wired to feed
families and purchase cholera medicine in Ecuador. Should she ever decide to
"let herself go," no doubt tens of thousands would perish.
And no, I haven't overlooked the steadfast way in which my parents
blame Goran's failure to adore them on everyone except themselves. To them, if
Goran doesn't love them, that clearly indicates that Goran is damaged and
incapable of loving anyone.
In the spa, the stylists and artists hover around us, those minions as
dense as the worst Harpies of Hell, circling and offering the
information—always credited to a way-inside source—that while Dakota makes a
lovely girl, she was in fact born with superfluous male genitalia. My mom's
personal assistant: Cherry or Nadine or Ulrike or whoever, she brays that
Cameron is so dense that she bought the morning-after abortion pill and,
instead of swallowing, stuck one up inside her woo-woo.
According to my mom, national boundaries must be adequately porous, and
incomes must be redistributed to allow all people, regardless of race and
religion and circumstances of birth, to be able to purchase her films. Her
noble egalitarian philosophy holds that all human beings should be allowed to
buy tickets to her movies AND to vacuum her pores. She insists neither Africa
nor the Indian subcontinent will ever achieve technological and cultural parity
with the Western world until their density of DVD players makes them a major
consumer of her body of filmic work. And by that, she means her REAL work,
marketed in its actual studio-designed packaging, not merely some crappy
pirated, black-market unit which pays royalties to nobody except drug lords and
child sex slaves.
Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if
any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting,
that's only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed
by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her
films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah
or witch doctor.
Rallying the pedicurists and aestheticians around the white terry-cloth
hem of her robe, my mother speechifies that they're not just grooming an actor
in order to pimp a motion picture. In actuality, the team of us, my mom and her
stylists and masseuses and manicurists, we're engaged in raising awareness
around bold, cinematic narratives which model the possibility of truly equal
standards of blah, blah, blah...Instead of spending their lives as pregnant,
dirt-eating, genitally mutilated victims of some crushing theocracy... now,
third-world ladies can aspire to become cosmo-swilling, Jimmy Choo-wearing
sexual predators. By our deft use of acrylic fingernails and bleached-blond
hair extensions—here she flutters her outflung arms in an all-inclusive
gesture—we're empowering the downtrodden, exploited peoples of the world.
Yes, my mom lacks even the remotest sense of irony, but she's certain
that in a perfect world, any miserable little boy or girl should be able to
grow up and become nothing less than... her. Best left unsaid was the fact that
she and my
dad were already brandishing glossy,
gate-folded brochures for all-boys boarding schools in Nova Scotia. Military
schools in Iceland. It was clear: Goran wasn't a success, and some impending
dawn
I
'd find him packed
up and gone, replaced by a four-year-old Bhutanese leper.
If I wanted to practice my feminine wiles on Goran, my time was running
out.
As my mother would say, "You've got to strike while the flatiron
is hot." Meaning: I needed to get pretty and make my move soon. Ideally,
tomorrow night. Ideally, while my folks were onstage, doling out the Oscars.
The final straw that broke the camel's back was, this week, when Goran
sold five of my mom's Emmys over the Internet for ten dollars apiece. Before
that, apparently, he'd collected a bunch of her Palme d'Or awards from our
house in Cannes and sold them all for five bucks a pop. After a decade of my
parents insisting that movie-industry awards meant nothing, and amounted to
little more than a crass gold-plated embarrassment, my mom and dad went ape
shit.
The way my mom saw it, Goran's every transgression, his every
misanthropic misbehavior was simply a result of his not receiving adequate love
and cuddling.
"You must promise me, Maddy," my mom said, "that you'll
show your poor brother an extra-special amount of patience and affection."
His deprived infancy is how come, when my parents rented out a Six
Flags amusement park for his birthday, and trotted out a purebred Shetland pony
as his gift, Goran assumed the animal was lunch. For Halloween, they'd dressed
him up as Jean-Paul Sartre, with me as Simone de Beauvoir, trick-or-treating up
and down the hallways of the Ritz in Paris with copies of
La Nausee
and
The Second Sex,
and Goran didn't get the joke. More recently, Goran had
hacked into my mother's bathroom security camera and sold Web subscriptions.
Of course, my dad wanted to introduce the concept of discipline and
consequences into Goran s life, but a boy who's no doubt been tortured with
electroshocks and waterboarding and intravenous injections of liquid drain
cleaner, he's not going to be easily cowed by the threat of a spanking and a
one-hour time-out.
By now my pink blouse had arrived from Barcelona. I planned to wear it
with a skort and my cardigan sweater embroidered with the crest which represented
my boarding school in Switzerland. That, and basic low-heeled Bass Weejun penny
loafers. Soon enough Goran and I would settle ourselves in front of the
television in our hotel suite. Alone, just him and me, we'd watch my parents
arrive at the red carpet in the Prius arranged by the publicist. Frigid,
reclusive Goran would be mine alone as we watched my mom and dad preen for the
paparazzi. Once they were safely away, I planned to phone room service and
request dinner
pour deux,
lobster and oysters and onion rings. For
dessert, I'd procured five ounces of my parents' genetically enhanced Mexican
sinsemilla. No, it's not especially logical: My parents constantly railed in
opposition to irradiated, genetically spliced and engineered corn, but where marijuana
was concerned plant scientists could never monkey with it too much. No matter
how hybrid a Frankenstein skunkweed, they would pack the sticky resinous mess
into a pipe and torch it.
