Fiction Ruined My Family (14 page)

“There's a social in the Humanities building and we're gonna get some wine coooolers! You wanna party?”

With three four-packs of Bartles & Jaymes? I think not. I don't want to be stuck with a case of alcoholic blue-balls when you ladies run out of wine coolers and pass out and I can't get anything else to drink. No way.

MY SECOND YEAR I was assigned a roommate in this on-campus apartment and it turned out I was going to be living with someone from an equally no-fun-to-drink-with category, a religious group called “the Believers.” I have no idea what church they were from but the Believers were always starting a very caring conversation with you. “Hi. How are you today?” and it would always end with “Well, you should come to a Bible study we're having this Friday!” which was so shocking to me. Here we are, having a gay old time while waiting for our horrible food, holding our horrible green plastic trays side by side at this horrible cafeteria at this horrible little college and you spring this shit on me? Bible study? I thought we were making a connection here! Do you have any idea how much you have fucked my shit up now?

My believing roommate was a four-foot black girl named Mindy. Mindy was unfailingly upbeat, smiley and energetic. I tried to be nice to Mindy even though she was unfailingly upbeat, smiley and energetic, snored disproportionately loudly to her body weight (my guess is eighty pounds) and took to calling me by a nickname that my father and only my father has called me for my entire life, Jean-Joe.

“Hey, Jean-Joe, what's shakin'?”

“You need anything from the grocery store, Jean-Joe?”

“You feel like praying before we turn out the light, Jean-Joe?”

Someone like this wouldn't last two minutes in my life now, but at that point I was convinced she'd see herself to the door, probably by failing out of school since she spent every second running around organizing ways to trick students into accidentally stumbling onto the Bible study on Friday nights instead of ever cracking a book. When she wasn't out “spreadin' it!” Mindy was on our couch watching a children's game show that featured a lot of pie-throwing and water-gun fights.

I was dating an actor, the pinnacle of the Purchase caste system, and after a lot of dry humping on couches it was time to put this show on its feet and see what was what. A long weekend was upon us and I planned on going away with Mike. Mindy was headed home to the Bronx. After she caught a ride into the city with another Believer, I packed a bag in the very quiet, now prayer-free room of ours. I noticed an envelope on my bed. I picked it up and it said “Jean-Joe” on the front. I expected some kind of uplifting weekend message. “God's on your team, kid!” or the classic “God loves you!” but it said none of these chirpy, miniature Mindyisms. It read, in very small print, in dark pencil: “You are about to sleep with the devil.” This was heavy even for Mindy.

Had Mindy slept with Mike? Did this mean Mike was good or bad in the sack? I had to think that in Mindy's world this meant neither. It meant that Mike was a devil and that sex was evil. Or maybe, more interestingly, sex with actors was evil? If that's what the cryptic warning meant I should have listened. The sex with Mike turned out to be a major nonevent. In the theater when a show is about to start and there's hardly anyone in the audience, the rule is: if the cast is larger than the audience, you can cancel the show. There should be some kind of similar rule for women who see a small penis. If my vagina is bigger than your cock, everybody's going home. Sorry folks. No show tonight. See you next time.

When I realized there would be no real drinking at this school I turned to the only thing I could think of doing with the hand that wasn't smoking: I wrote papers, read the assigned books, went to classes. I liked my journalism class a lot, which was a shock because I never considered doing the work that my grandmother and grandfather and my father and my cousin did. I retired from journalism quickly, however, and started to write short stories. While college was just a blackout-sex, alcohol-soaked free-for-all for most people I knew from Bronxville, I barely drank at college. Not that I didn't occasionally explode and drink my face off. I did. I just mean, for me, I hardly drank at all. For someone normal, I drank quite a bit.

 

 

 

 

AT MY CAMPUS JOB, I met Carmen. We hated each other from the top. I sometimes feel this is a barometer for how much I will care for someone: Do I hate your guts the first time I meet you? If yes, we're probably destined for a long and meaningful relationship. I was still working in the cage at the gym, handing out towels to horny businessmen from nearby PepsiCo, one of the school's major sponsors for the arts, when Carmen came in for her shift. She stormed in, her boyfriend, Sal, not far behind her. She was late (there was a “latemotif” to her life) and she was angry. Anger was really not an emotion in Carmen's life story. It was the plot. Sal followed her into the cage, the area we worked in, so well named. She then got in a fight with a PepsiCo executive who wanted the little arty freaks to smile when we handed him his towel. George, our boss, tried to put his managerial touch on the whole fiasco. But you didn't tell Carmen what to do, even if you employed her. She yelled at George, too, and was fired.

 

 

 

 

I HAD NEVER SEEN this kind of workaday theatricality. My mother's drama was a pity-pot, little-rich-girl version. Carmen was Hispanic and loud and ghetto and funny. In Westchester, and in whitey culture in general, there's a premium placed on manners, civility, pleasantries, particularly among women. Carmen didn't operate
comme ça.
I was impressed. She was not as taken with me. Someone down the hall had done my hair in cornrows the night before. I wasn't trying to be black or Bo, I was just stoned. Carmen took one look at me as she packed up her work things for good and said, “Who did your hair?”

“Karen, this girl down the hall.”

“Umm hmm. Where you live?”

“My mom lives on Eighty-seventh and York.”

“Umm hmm.”

“What about you?”

“Ninety-seventh and Amsterdam. The West Side, honey,” she said, and shot me a threatening look.

 

 

 

I thought that was probably it. There would be no halfway point where we'd meet between our two houses. After that day we'd never see each other again. But shortly after she was canned from the gym, I ran into her at the library where she was now working, and she needed a roommate desperately. I saw an opportunity to get away from the littlest Believer and I took it. A few weeks after living together I convinced Carmen to write a show of skits and stand-up comedy and improvisation.

Carmen was mad at me all the time. This was our schtick: passionate Latina and bumbling white lady, and like a lot of schticks it was our real life, too. She was mad at me because I drank too much, was impossibly white and suburban and rich (which I was, relative to her), fancy and carefree, which she saw as inane. I was messy, didn't clean a whole lot, prompting lots of “Just 'cause I'm dark don't mean I'm gonna scrub the bathroom!” routines. She didn't understand extreme drunkenness and blacking out. I tried to explain that this is what civilized people do, but she couldn't make the cultural leap. What I ate drove her crazy. “You just put a little tomato and mayonnaise and salt and pepper on a couple pieces of bread—it's delicious.”

“No. No, you can't! That's insane! You need some meat on there or it's not a sandwich!”

“Yes it is. It's called a tomato sandwich. I'm going to make you one.”

“I'm not gonna eat it.”

One night I got drunk and she was a little drunk and I suggested we go down on each other. She went berserk and told me to fuck off, but I kept pestering her. “It'll be fun! Come on! Let's just try it.” A “Take one big bite” kind of argument, like you'd have with a three-year-old about spinach.

Finally she got on board and we went in the bedroom. She went first, and I thought she did a good job, it wasn't really my thing but it was an experience. For someone who had to be convinced she certainly gave it a thorough go. Then it was my turn to do her. Well, the booze was starting to wear off and frankly the idea was losing its luster. Then I was confronted with the actual female anatomy, and man, I was not feeling good about this. I did my best and came up with some creative ways to get through it, when Carmen stopped me and said, “What are you doing?”

“I'm, um, you know, eating you out.”

“No you're not. What is that, is that the blanket? Are you using the blanket on my pussy instead of your mouth?”

“No! No. I just had to—”

“You're not even doing it. You're pretending. You're pretending to eat me out. I did you! I swear to God, Jeanne!”

“I'm sorry. It's just, it's really gross and I can't do it. I was doing it, though. I was.”

Carmen threw me out of our room for the next few nights. I guess it was a classic case of unrequited cunnilingus, and we never talked about it again. I felt the same way about writing our show together. She would pretend to be writing but I was doing most of it, I was the one doing all the work. And most of the time I was perfectly happy doing all the work. Writing our show, writing, seemed like something I might want to do with myself.

After living with Dad for twenty-three years, my mother certainly wasn't going to jump for joy that I wanted to write; my sisters didn't care, as long as I didn't TALK about writing.

I had always had my heart set on doing nothing, but playwriting came along and I thought, Why not? I'd like to take a few precautions not to go insane and die broke, chatting with wallpaper like my grandmother did and whatnot, but other than that, could it be so bad? When Dad found out that I was doing some playwriting and poetry and short stories he called me at my mother's apartment one weekend and said he was driving to Rye to a dinner party and “why don't I give you a ride back to Purchase and we'll talk about whether you should try and get a job at a small paper somewhere, à la Hemingway, it's the best way to get used to writing every day.”

I accepted the ride back to school. I spotted his little red Dodge Omni coming toward me up York Avenue and saw there were other people in the car. I hopped in and was introduced to some (“very interesting gal, hell of a nice guy, used to write for
The Nation
. . . ”) people. I don't know why I thought there wouldn't be a couple of “terrific-looking” Austrian novelists in the car with my dad. It started to rain right around the curve of the Willis Avenue Bridge but Dad remained focused on something he was saying rather than something he was driving. I barely noticed but the Austrian in the backseat with me was clearly terrified. It was a stormy, curvy, windows-up, oxygen-deprived, harrowing monologue of a ride with no say whatsoever in your own safety or wellbeing or the topic of conversation so yeah, I was utterly at home. They dropped me off and drove off in the storm.

The next day my mother called. “I suppose you've heard what happened with your father.”

“No.”

“Apparently after he dropped you off he drove down some stairs and couldn't get back up the stairs. I'm not sure. There were some Austrian writers who were coming out of the library. Sounds like the blind leading the blind, if you ask me.”

“The Austrians were
in
the car. What steps?” I realized the only steps my mother could be talking about were the library steps. My father had driven down this long set of stairs that is not wide, really, just a regular person staircase, not like the steps up the Jefferson Memorial or anything, and he would have had to have driven from my apartment onto the mall, a brick esplanade kind of thing meant, again, for pedestrians to get around, not cars. I had never seen a car on the mall ever. So he drove onto the mall like someone in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and then went down this narrow staircase where he landed in front of the library. Again, a place where cars didn't go because there was no way for them to get there. I called him up.

“God damn it, Jean-Joe, I know it's a state school and all, but do you think they might have a little something in the budget for a few signs here and there?”

“Signs? Dad, there's a road and then the road ends. What kind of sign do you want?”

“Well, I'll tell ya, some damn nice kids helped me push my car back up those stairs but it must've made the Austrians a little nervous. They took the train back to the city, which I thought was a little unnecessary.”

I wasn't looking forward to hearing around campus about the lunatic who had driven down the library steps, but at the same time I was glad to have avoided a conversation with him about writing. The last time we'd talked I'd told him I might major in African-American literature, and his reaction was calm, measured, as if trying to get me to move a knife away from my own throat.

“Now, Jeanne, hold on a minute, hold on here. I can see your attraction, particularly to James Baldwin and so forth, there's no doubt Maya Angelou is terrific, God, and Zora Neale Hurston, really terrific. But at some point the black experience is just one experience, while majoring in, let's say, European literature, opens up so many other experiences, the big ones, ones you can tackle right now, with the benefit of good professors and your peers. You may never get that chance again. That's all I'm saying. Think it over. Give it a day or two and we'll talk.” His reaction to my wanting to write could turn into a real box set. It would start with what books I should read on writing (“Gardner's terrific, of course, but no one can top Frank O'Connor's
The Lonely Voice
on the short story, now let's see, I assume you've read Cather's book on writing already? Updike's essays are in themselves lessons in writing, have you ever tried John Middleton Murry on style? You can't forget F. R. Leavis on the novel. I'm going to photocopy some Keats for ya, because you just can't get better lessons than from just reading Keats. You'll learn more from the poets simply because there's more critical writing on poetry. Prose has only been taken seriously since about 1850 . . .”) and go on and on and on from there.