Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (18 page)

She felt like screaming; and so she screamed. She heard the sound, shrill and ragged, bouncing off the houses in the neighorhood, like a cue ball off the bumpers of a billiard table, ricocheting away from her till it was somewhere else, its strength reduced but its anguish undiminished.

A few blocks farther on, she turned on her headlights.

C
URTIS CALLED ON
Thursday. “You gotta return the equipment, girl,” he said. “Hearing’s only two months away and Luigi’s getting scared the lawyers are gonna wanna check the evidence again.”

“Okay,” she said. She rolled off the couch and turned off the TV; she’d fallen asleep while watching a movie whose title and plot she couldn’t remember now. As she got to her feet, a half-eaten bag of potato chips fell from her lap and spilled onto the floor. The other half had been her dinner.

She let the chips lie and made her way through similar debris to her kitchen, which was piled high with dirty dishes and overfilled trash bags. At the sight of her, a cockroach fled into a drawer.

“It ain’t gonna be a problem for you?” Curtis asked.

“Uh-uh,” she mumbled, taking a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and popping it open. “Anytime you want, you can come get it.” It had been days since she’d even bothered to tune in to Peter and Lloyd’s bedroom conversations. Her spirits had withered; she’d given up.

“Sometime this weekend?”

She took a quick revivifying swallow of soda and said, “Sure. Saturday’s fine. Saturday night, Sunday…whatever.”

“You’re around Saturday night?” he asked incredulously.
“You?”

“Mm-hm.” She went back to the living room and dropped onto the couch again. She cherry-picked a few potato chips off the floor and ate them.

Curtis whistled. “You okay, Natalie?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right, then.” He sounded unconvinced. “See you Saturday. Should I call first?”

“If you want.” She turned off the phone.

Well, that would work out fine. She had put the van in a garage because, with its back window missing, she couldn’t very well leave it on the street anymore; she was taking a chance even leaving it in a garage. But she’d backed it into a stall until its bumper had touched the wall, so she was pretty sure no one was going to be getting through that window, unless he had a trained monkey as an accomplice. And there she’d left it, for days now.

But she had to take it out on Saturday, to drive to her mother’s party in the suburbs; so she’d get the receiver and tape deck out when she returned, and bring them to her apartment for Curtis to retrieve.

She finished off the Diet Coke and all the chips she could rescue from the broadloom, then lay on the couch and wondered who had previously owned her bug and what he or she had done with it. A drug lord, maybe, monitoring rivals? A white-collar criminal, spying on a client? A Mafioso, testing an underling’s fealty? She felt a strange kinship with whoever it was. Maybe she’d even attend the hearing…

She slept for another five hours. When she got up, she felt weak. She didn’t know what day it was. She went to the bathroom and threw up all the potato chips. They looked up at her, almost gloatingly.

“I’ve got to get some decent food in me,” she said aloud, looking at her chalky, emaciated reflection with alarm. But the thought of eating anything substantial repelled her.

She sat on the toilet and tried to make her bowels move, but they wouldn’t. So she rested her elbows on her knees and attempted to figure out what to do with her life. She’d memorized the notebooks of transcriptions of Peter and Lloyd’s private conversations, and she still couldn’t conceive of a way of taking her revenge on them. Curtis has been right—there was virtually nothing in their lives she could use against them. Just that tension between them on the matter of Lloyd’s shop; Peter was so disturbed by the idea that someone might commit some terrible act with a gun that had been purchased from Lloyd. If that were to happen, there’d be trouble in paradise, for sure. But what could she do—stand outside Lloyd’s store and beg each customer who came out to become a rooftop sniper or assassinate the mayor?

Eventually she stood and pulled up her panties. The toilet was empty but she flushed it anyway, out of force of habit. Then she got on the bathroom scale, held her hair away from her eyes as she peered down between her toes, and saw that she was down to a hundred-and-fifty-four. She was wasting away to nothing. Peter wouldn’t recognize her; he hadn’t set eyes on her in months.

“I have
got
to get some decent food,” she told herself again. She got off the scale and went back to the couch for another nap.

O
N SATURDAY SHE
put on her favorite old Perry Ellis cocktail dress; it practically fell off her, but it was the only clean party frock she had. She tried to run a brush through her hair but gave up. She threw water on her face and took a cab to the Lincoln Park garage where she’d left the van all this time. She had to pay almost a hundred dollars to get it out again.

On the drive to Oak Park, she had a dizzy spell and ran into an ancient Cadillac Fleetwood, denting its passenger door. She had no proof of insurance with her, and the old Italian who drove the Fleetwood was rapidly becoming apoplectic. “Girls on drugs!” he cried, actually pulling at his hair. “Why is everywhere I go there are girls on drugs?” She couldn’t imagine what he meant by that, but she gave him two hundred dollars in cash and he smiled and said she reminded him of his daughters.

When Natalie slipped the key into her mother’s front door and entered the house, she was amazed at how clean the place was; it virtually sparkled. “Mom?” she called.

Sandy appeared from around the corner, looking fine in a cinnamon jacket and skirt that Natalie knew to be at least twenty-five years old. “It’s back in style again,” she explained, when Natalie pointed this out.

But she took no pleasure in Natalie recognizing her outfit; in fact, she came up to her with a look of grave concern and hugged her. “Honey, aren’t you feeling well?”

“I’m fine,” she said, pushing her away. “Just tired, is all.”

Sandy held her at arm’s length, looking her over, and shook her head. “No, no, this isn’t right.” She felt Natalie’s forehead and said, “No fever. Are you eating?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“I’m sure you aren’t. You look even thinner than before, and you were like an ad in a Catholic missionary magazine then. You come in right now and have a little sandwich.” She pulled her into the dining room, which was set up with a lavish buffet. A whole roast sat at its center, with slices flopping off one end. There was a pewter champagne bucket holding a bottle of nonalcoholic cider, a silver tray of poached mushrooms, a spread of shrimp, Carr’s crackers, and more.

“Mom, Jesus,” said Natalie, impressed.

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful? Some of these things haven’t been used in
years.
Darnita dug them out. With my permission, of course. Darnita!” she called. “A guest has arrived!”

The tiny girl appeared from the adjoining room; she was wearing one of Natalie’s frilly old party dresses. It was a less-than-perfect fit.

“Hi, Darnita,” said Natalie brightly.

“Hi,” the girl replied, her eyes wild with excitement. “Thank you for coming.”

She nearly laughed aloud, but stopped herself; she could see that this was very serious business for the child.

“May I get you a drink?” Darnita asked.

“Yes, please, glass of cider would be lovely.” When the girl turned and skipped back to the table, Natalie leaned into Sandy and whispered, “Why are we all talking like the queen of England?”

“Darnita insists on it,” Sandy muttered. “Everything proper.” Then she left Natalie to help Darnita, who was struggling to retrieve the cider bottle from the bucket.

“I’m going to fix Natalie a sandwich, honey, Sandy said once the bottle had been wrenched free. She placed a few slices of beef on a thick wedge of French bread.

Darnita nearly exploded. “No! No! No! Gramma, the other guests aren’t here!” She jumped up and down and stamped one tiny foot.

“Manners, honey!” said Sandy, wagging a finger. “Natalie isn’t feeling well, and the needs of our guests always come first, don’t they?”

Darnita whipped her arms across her chest, threw a murderous glance at Natalie, and stormed to the other side of the table to sulk.

Sandy brought the sandwich to Natalie and said, “This is my wedding china. From when I married your father, not Max.”

Natalie took a nibble from the crust; she didn’t really want it. “That girl has ferocious ambition,” she whispered, nodding her head in Darnita’s direction.

Sandy grinned. “Yes, isn’t it thrilling?”

A few minutes later they heard a terrible, congested roar from the street. They went to the window and saw a horribly rusted-out Olds Cutlass Supreme pull up in front of the house. The noise died with the engine. Then a young black couple got out.

“It’s Quentin and Lawanda,” said Sandy, her hand cupped over her mouth in alarm. “That’s not the car he usually borrows to come out here. Thank God they left the baby behind—that thing looks like a death trap! I hope the police don’t tow it.”

Lawanda was dressed nicely in a skirt and sweater, but Quentin, who had more earrings than Natalie, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with aggressive looking hieroglyphs, a pair of Nike Air sneakers almost as big as breadboxes, and gold-mirrored sunglasses that he declined to remove once he was inside the house.

Natalie was introduced, and although Lawanda was the very picture of politeness, Quentin shook her hand without a word and then stood off by himself in a corner, gobbling up slices of beef with his bare hands.

“Don’t mind him, it’s his way,” said Sandy when Natalie followed her into the kitchen to voice her concern. “He feels uncomfortable and awkward here, so he’s trying to make it look like he doesn’t care.”

The party was something of a disaster; Quentin wouldn’t speak, Lawanda was clearly intimidated by Natalie (even in Natalie’s present derelict state), Sandy repeatedly begged Natalie to eat, and Darnita kept laying down the law on etiquette as if she had invented it.

“Shrimp fork,
shrimp fork,”
the child had shrieked when Natalie ventured to sample some seafood with her fingers. The sheer moral outrage the child managed to summon forth on this issue positively jolted Natalie, who reached at once for a shrimp fork.

As for Natalie herself, her thoughts kept drifting from reality into morbid fantasy. In the middle of her mother’s heartfelt tirade (totally lost on Quentin and Lawanda) about how catering was a lost art and had been for at least thirty years and probably longer, Natalie found herself picturing Peter and Lloyd in bed together, their arms and legs entwined, kissing each other with wide, wet mouths. During one of Lawanda’s feeble attempts to get Quentin to join the conversation (“Tell Mrs. Stathis ‘bout how you lifts weights, Quen.” “I lifts weights.” “Tell that joke you tol’ me yesterday, Quen.” “Forgot it.’), Natalie’s mind wandered to the unlined, untroubled face of Lloyd Hood, its features set in a perpetual attitude of implacable calm, and she found herself wondering where the skin in his forehead and chin would fold if his face were suddenly to contort in excruciating agony.

And when Darnita turned to her and said, as would any hostess worth her salt, “May I get you anyfing else, Natalie?,” Natalie started at the sound of her own name and said, “What? I’m sorry; I wasn’t paying attention,” and Darnita dashed into the kitchen and spent about ninety seconds weeping and shrieking in frustration. Sandy followed her to calm her down, during which time Natalie looked at Quentin and Lawanda and, smiling, shrugged her shoulders as if to say, Kids! But the young couple just stared at her as though she might bite them if they made any sudden moves.

An hour later, everyone was dying to leave. Darnita, however, was bubbly with success; despite a few rocky patches, she had co-hosted a party for grown-ups, and now they were all professing how much they’d enjoyed it. (She hadn’t yet learned about the useful adult art of social fibbing.)

Lawanda and Quentin said their goodbyes and left, and now Natalie stood in the doorway. “Thanks so much, Mom. It was a trip. Oh, look, Darnita’s cleaning up. More than I ever learned.”

Sandy wouldn’t banter back. She knit her brow and said, “I’m worried about you, young lady.”

“Don’t be.”

“You can’t tell a mother not to worry. You’ve lost too much weight in too short a time, and your eyes are dull. Something’s wrong. It’s not still Peter, is it?”

“I haven’t seen Peter in months.”

“Then wh—” She was interrupted by the third, and loudest, dying groan from Quentin’s borrowed Cutlass. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid he can’t get that decrepit thing started.”

Quentin clearly didn’t want to give up; he sat in the street trying, and trying, and trying, and the car kept groaning, and groaning, and groaning. Natalie could see that Lawanda was near tears. Some of Sandy’s neighbors were out on their lawns now, watching.

Sandy bit a fingernail. “What can I do?”

Natalie patted her arm, then went to the driver’s side of the car and motioned Quentin to roll down the window.

“Yeah?” he asked, his tone surly.

“I think I’d better give you a ride home,” she said.

“I don’t need no fuckin’ charity, man.

“Quen!” Lawanda snapped.

“What you need is a ride home,” Natalie insisted. “This heap isn’t going anywhere. You can come back for it later.” She stood her ground, her eyes boring into his. “Come on. Get in my van.”

T
HE DRIVE WAS
uncomfortable at first. It was impossible to heat the interior because of the broken window, and Lawanda’s lips were turning blue; she hugged herself and shivered. Quentin kept eyeing the receiver and tape deck in the back as if he were considering stealing them.

But the closer they came to the city, the more animated the group became. “Fuckin’ Trey gon’ try’n’ make me pay for his piece-o’-shit wheels when it’re him that’ve drive it down to nothin’,” he said. “I cain’t pay shit. I ain’t got no paper, man. What I s’posed to do? Roll somebody?”