Doomed (15 page)

I wanted to impress upon Nana the social stigma of secondhand smoke and littering, but decided to swallow my gripe. This chore-haggard woman was about to become a widow. No doubt the melodramatic reveal would take place in front of a crowd of strangers in the autopsy suite of some medical examiner. Probably she would collapse into a dead faint still wearing her calico apron getup paired with a faded gingham housedress, a smoldering butt pinched between her careworn lips.

Farm fields lined either side of the highway, and our headlights skimmed over an occasional soiled upstate cow garbed in distressed, low-quality leather.

For our midnight foray I chose to wear flannel pajamas, pink flannel, under my junior-size, stroller-length chinchilla coat. The feeling was glamorous, like posing as a Miss Hooky von Hooker, with my bare feet in bedroom slippers made of pink fuzz sewn to look like floppy-eared bunnies with black button eyes. My nana hadn’t given my snazzy ensemble a second glance. Her attention had a ten-mile head start and was waiting impatiently at the emergency room for the rest of her to catch up.

Our route skirted one side of the infamous freeway traffic isle, and as we passed I saw police cars nosed up close to the cinder-block bathrooms, all their spotlights aligned to bathe the squat, ugly building like a stage. The uniformed officers who stood in that glare looked like actors drinking coffee out of paper cups and underplaying the drama of their scene. Papadaddy’s pickup truck with its cracked windshield and patched taillight still sat in the parking lot, but now it was roped off with sawhorses and twisting swags of police tape. People stood outside those barricades and stared at the truck like it was the Mona Lisa.

As we drove past I pretended not to look. My feet didn’t reach the car’s floor. I bounced my pink bunny slippers and tried to resolve the toilet wiener flasher with the Papadaddy who’d taught me how to paint a birdhouse yellow. My memory tried to keep the poopie finger a poopie finger, but keeping a lie alive in my head was wearing me out. It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth. It didn’t help that this was two in the morning.

That holiday in tedious upstate, everyone kept a secret: I’d killed someone. My papadaddy was a restroom lurker.
My nana had cancer the size of a cherry, a lemon, a grapefruit, growing inside her like a garden, but I didn’t know that as yet.

Just in case the police found a witness, I planned not to look like myself for a while. That’s one reason I got truly obese: camouflage. Becoming a fatso turned out to be a very clever disguise.

Otherwise it was only my nana and me and drunk drivers on the late-night highway. She motored past the traffic island without a glance. A cigarette puff later, after a couple hacking coughs, she asked, “How are you liking the book?”

I choked back the memory of a squashed, dead wiener outlined in people blood between two pages. That
Beagle
book, squirted full of some juice I told myself wasn’t sperm. “It’s fine,” I said. “That book is a literary tour de force.” God only knew what she was rambling on about. I reached to turn on the radio, and my nana slapped my hand away from the knob. Just that tiny smack reminded my stomach of the Darwin tome thwacking that wrinkled menacing … whatever.

Now I’d never know how evolution ends.

The way my nana talked, with her lips clamped onto the brown part of a cigarette, the white paper burning part bobbed in front of her face like a blind man’s cane. Red-tipped, even. She was feeling her way along, asking, “Have you got to where the collie dog helps stick up a bank?”

Of course, she meant that
The Call of the Wild
book. The saga of some animal implanted with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula. If I’d chosen that Jack London book we’d all still be alive. Even with my eyes shut
I’d picked the wrong option. I told her, “Bank robbery?” I said, “I loved that chapter.”

Nana Minnie’s chin tilted up a little, lifting her eyes off the road a smidge. She stared in the rearview mirror, watching the bright toilet crime scene shrinking from a real place, smaller and smaller, until it was just another night star. She said, “How about the part where the dog sees the crazy person murder the old fella in cold blood?” She asked, “Have you got that far?”

Our headlights zoomed ahead, skimming over a stretch of upstate highway, and I watched the steady horizon without giving her any answer. Instead, I imagined peaches, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, beans, even watermelon pickles preserved in clear glass bottles. Sapphire pink and ruby red and emerald green juices. A treasury of food, this bounty steeped in too much sugar or too much salt, to keep bacteria from setting up shop. My Nana Minnie had blanched, boiled, and canned a long future of meals for her and Papadaddy, and now it was only her. The best way to support her would be to help her eat. Maybe between the pair of us we could justify all those years of peeling and coring.

My nana asked, “You know, I always felt sorry for that collie dog.” She said, “If that dog could’ve just told the truth, you know, folks would’ve still loved it.”

Whatever she was talking about, it was no book I’d been reading. Instead of answering her with more lies I sagged my head to one side on a limp neck. My hands snuggled in my chinchilla pockets. My eyes drifted shut and I made a fast snore like I was asleep, only it sounded more like I was just reading the word
snore
off a thousand cue cards.

Nana Minnie said, “Everybody knew that collie dog was just defending herself,” but then she had to take a break from talking in order to catch up on her coughing. For my part, the car was jam-packed with everything I didn’t want to say. If my nana was going to be hurt, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.

I couldn’t spit out my secret any easier than she could cough up her tumor.

At the hospital she pretended to wake me, and I pretended to be groggy, mostly blinking my eyes and acting out yawns. One unintended outcome was that we’d no doubt have to hold a funeral, and my parents would have to come. They’d have to collect me and take me away with them, and that rescue seemed almost worth killing someone for. We walked, me and my nana holding hands, up a hospital sidewalk and into bright light behind sliding glass doors. The linoleum floor was waxed so shiny it seemed as bright as the fluorescent ceiling, and the waiting room seemed sandwiched between these two forms of light. There, she left me to sit with the magazines, in a hard-plastic chair that would’ve been avocado-chic in Oslo but in upstate read as just plain shabby. Among the magazines were three old issues of
Cat Fancy
with me cuddling my kitten, Tigerstripe, on the cover. Poor Tigerstripe. Beginning with
People, Vogue
, and
Time
, I began to leaf through every copy in search of scenes from my other life. My real life.

Suddenly, I worried my papadaddy might be alive in a bed nearby, tubed to a saggy, hanging-down bag of secondhand blood, laughing and eating Jell-O as he told the nursing staff how his roly-poly, spoiled-rotten grandbaby had tried to hack off his wiener when all he’d been doing was
playing her a practical joke. Then I heard a police officer walk past saying the words “hate crime” to a doctor, and I guessed I was in the clear.

Within my earshot the officer said how my grandpa’s wallet, watch, and wedding ring were missing, and I fumed that someone would rob an old man lying dead on a toilet floor. It’s true I’d killed him. That goes without saying. But I was his Baby Bean Sprout. That made it different. From their talk it was clear the police didn’t have anything right. It irked me to let their theories stay so totally wrong, but there was no pressing reason my nana had to be a widow
and
know she’d outlived a sex pervert.

No one said anything about finding my dropped euros and rubles soaked in blood, or about finding my busted eyeglasses or the dagger of shattered glass from the tea jar. The policeman said, “Insane thrill killer.”

The doctor said, “Ritual mutilation.” Suggesting space aliens, I hoped.

The policeman let slip with, “Satanic cult.”

All along I thought they were bad-mouthing my Papadaddy Ben, but then I realized they meant me. At best they were referring to some crazed, at-large killer, but that was still me, sitting here in my bunny slippers and fur coat. Just by being a dead body with no wallet or blood, his wiener half torn off, that made my grandpa the innocent injured party. It didn’t seem fair. Yes, it hurt to have authority figures call me a “sadistic bastard,” but if I tried to defend myself I’d wind up in the electric chair, and that wasn’t going to improve the situation for my nana. Or help my already unruly, flyaway hair.

Gentle Tweeter,

It was at papadaddy’s funeral that I noticed my nana started to cough in a new, more intrusive way. Among infants, one might cry, but another will cough to attract loving attention. Other babies will drink vodka and gobble down illicit drugs. Other babies will date abusive men. Or overeat. Even negative attention beats ending up some Baltic orphan ignored in a crib, warehoused in a forgotten ward filled with castoff urchins. Coughing through Papadaddy Ben’s funeral, coughing and hacking at the graveside, this was my nana’s bid for sympathy. I never dreamed she’d escalate her emotional neediness all the way to cancer.

Despite my pleadings, my parents didn’t come upstate for the memorial service. They contracted for a video crew with a satellite truck that narrowcast the event in real time to their home in Tenerife. The paparazzi, however, flocked to attend. The
New York Post
ran the headline “Dad of Star Found Dead in Toilet Torture.”

In lieu of flowers or sympathy cards, my mother sent my nana and me lavish gift baskets of Xanax.

Each time the telephone rang I expected the police to call me in for death by lethal injection. For the funeral, I wore a black Gucci veil over black Foster Grants. I wore a stroller-length vintage Blackglama junior mink and black
gloves, just in case some crafty sleuth would attempt to acquire my fingerprints from the communion rail. To answer CanuckAIDSemily, little Emily, the actual church was a rustic clapboard structure where a dead body did not seem out of place, juxtaposed as it was with paper plates of peanut-butter cookies. The congregants seemed genuinely distressed by Papadaddy’s tragic demise, and they displayed their aboriginal upstate empathy by presenting me with a gift: a book. Unlike the
Beagle
book or the
Call of the Wild
book, this tome was freshly printed, a new title, bound in handsome almost-leather. It seemed to be this summer’s beach read, for everyone present also carried a copy. Here was the moment’s mega–best seller, the
Angela’s Ashes
or
Da Vinci Code
du jour. A quick perusal suggested a postmodern work told from multiple viewpoints—very Kurosawa in structure—plot-driven, a sword-and-sandal epic filled with magic and dragons, sex and violence. I accepted it, their rustic offering of condolence, as graciously as my mother would an Oscar.

Printed in gold leaf along the spine was the title:
The Bible
.

As fanciful as anything penned by Tolkien or Anne Rice, this new tome presented an elaborate yarn about creation. In my heart, it would easily displace the
Beagle
book, with Mr. Darwin’s somewhat didactic nineteenth-century flavor. His saga depicted existence as a one-shot endeavor, a desperate struggle to endure and procreate. It’s no comfort when confronted by death to be assured that you’re merely some flawed variation of life reaching the end of its evolutionary blind alley. Whereas the
Beagle
book depicted a narrative of death after death, endless adaptation and
failure—all history literally glued together with sperm and blood—the Bible book promised a happy life everlasting.

Survival of the fittest versus survival of the
nicest
.

Which author, Gentle Tweeter, would you choose to read at bedtime?

This homespun church even held a weekly book club to discuss their newest literary sensation. To present the book, these simple upstate denizens coaxed forward a young boy child. As I was leaving the church with my nana, this darling towhead stumbled forth from their patchwork ranks. In both hands before him he carried this Bible book, and to my world-weary, eleven-year-old eyes he appeared an earnest sort, clad in his freshly laundered rags, a minor player destined to milk cows and sire similar agrarian laborers and ultimately die in not-undeserved obscurity, the probable victim of some future combine mishap. He, a rural David Copperfield, and I, a glamorous globetrotting fashion plate, we appeared to both be the same tender age. Some brutish farmwife pushed him toward me with her calloused hand, saying, “Give it to the poor girly, Festus.”

That was his name, Festus. He placed the book in my black-gloved palms.

While I was not immediately smitten, Festus did pique my romantic curiosity. A spark, most likely statically electric in nature, jumped between his person and mine, so strong that I felt the tiny shock through my elegant hand-wear. I accepted his gift with a simple nod and a murmur of gratitude. Feigning emotional distress, I pretended to collapse against him, and his sturdy farm urchin’s arms caught my fall. In our clinch, Festus’s prepubescent hands seized
me bodily; only the Bible book lay between the full contact of our sensitive groin areas.

Festus, holding me an instant, whispered, “The Good Book will sustain you, Miss Madison.”

And, yes, Gentle Tweeter, Festus was an uncouth primitive, fragrant with the poultry manure lodged beneath his fingernails, but he did use the word
sustain
.

Ye gods. I was thrilled. “
Au revoir
,” I breathlessly bade my hardy swain. “Until we meet in …” I covertly checked the book’s title. “… in ‘Bible’ study.”

His ardent child’s lips whispered, “Fierce wristwatch …”

And from that moment forward I was putty in the young farm laborer’s hands. My fertile mind immediately began to spin romantic scenarios set in his world of subsistence agriculture. Together, we would scratch our daily bread from the hardscrabble upstate landscape, and our love would be the unvarnished stuff of a Robert Frost poem.