Spent (13 page)

“Fred. It's our turn to watch. You and Kay make love now. It turns us on. Please?” Bunny piped up. She was gentle, soft, and non-confrontational. Bunny was the pro. Grateful the world was Bunny's petting zoo, I winked and crawled in her direction.

“That sounds fun. I'd love to see you fuck Kay,” I told Fred. Bunny disappeared into the bathroom, I figured she had to pee or pop another pill, and that's when Fred slipped me his number, which I hid under the heel of my red spike-heeled shoe. Bunny emerged later with a clean cotton candy-pink dong that she held up proudly like she'd won it at the County Fair by popping balloons with darts. She aimed to please.

“Ready to play with the kitty?” She grinned rabidly and approached me. Good girl. Pink was my favorite color. I leaned back and licked my lips.

“Let's watch them fuck while we fuck.” Kay was tipsy, and her blonde extensions were nappy, wet, and in her face. Bunny plunged pinky inside of me with a blue-collar sensibility: not too rough, but earnest about getting the job done. I didn't mind it, but it was nothing close to sex for me. It was like gyrating on a piece of furniture for an audience's benefit. It's not mutual, just meaningless and numb. I writhed on the floor, then pretended to come violently after a few minutes, which seemed like hours. I even called out Bunny's name. Fred straddled Kay right next to us on the floor and humped her silly, like a dog. She seemed to have the same sort of empty theatrical orgasm that I did, with long, sonorous moans.
Good girl
, I thought.

I sensed the clock ticking. Time is money, and it was time to go. I got up, and Bunny followed me. One shower later and a coat of vanilla flavored lip gloss and we were squeaky clean. We gathered Bunny's dildo collection, and Fred walked us down the miles of stairs. He handed Bunny a wad of money. She handed me half. Four hundred each.

The second we were in her car, Bunny lit a menthol. We were silent on the drive back to the clinic. I felt Fred's number digging into my heel and knew that I'd call him a week later. I reached in my purse for the small white oval pill and felt white chalk. Valium? I rolled down the window, tossed it out, then held my face to the breeze. The smell of horses reminded me of Mom.

29

“I
can't do this anymore,”
Ian said to the computer screen. I stood in the kitchen, five feet away, washing dishes. We'd been having our Epic Fight. Our electricity was about to be turned off. He didn't care. I did.

“I'm leaving,” I said. It slipped out of my mouth, and my feet followed. I walked out of our apartment onto Curson Street in the pissing rain and drove around the block three times. No going back now—a horrible, yet strangely arousing feeling. I sat in the parking lot of Von's grocery store trying to figure out where to go when the phone rang. A friend needed a cat sitter while she did yoga for two weeks in Hawaii.

I asked if I could move some boxes into her apartment, and she said yes. I packed up another U-Haul, filled it with my remaining stuff and Ian's cat, Screech. We both wailed all the way to Silver Lake. Screech took a shit on the rug every time I left for work. It always made me chuckle, a little cat shit seemed a small price to pay for the gift he'd given me. A couple weeks later, she called to tell me she decided to move in with her yoga girlfriend and grandfathered me into the lease. No matter how much I loved someone, I always had to pick up and leave. I have started over a hundred times. Sometimes, that's the most loving act there is.

30

A
friend got me a
job working at a law firm answering phones and filing bills, and I kept Fred's number but never called it. I listened to my phone messages on my hour-plus commute while staring at peppy joggers running in the opposite direction towards the reservoir. Mom's voice squealed through the phone, “I got tickets to see Céline Dion!” I despised Céline Dion, but after the breakup, I didn't care what I'd have to endure to see my mom. I wanted to park my car, leap into the pale morning sun, sprint after the joggers, and yell “Mom's coming!” Instead, I rolled down Beverly to Wilshire Boulevard to answer phones for eight hours under fluorescent lights and schedule appointments for Dave Navarro and Pearl Jam.

According to the clock on the microwave, I was ten minutes late by the time I turned on the lights and walked into the office to make coffee. I tore open the individual plastic packets of grounds and tucked a few unopened ones into my purse. As the coffee pot gurgled, I walked over to my desk where there were stacks of client bills to file, depositions to schedule, and a birthday card to sign for one of the attorneys. The little square eyeballs on the phone twinkled with messages, but I didn't check them. I called Mom from my desk. “Fly into Burbank and I'll drive you to Vegas. Let's go together.” I sent an email asking for the time off work.

A couple weeks later, I picked Mom up in a rented silver truck and brought her back to my empty apartment. I didn't even have a couch for her to sit on. I took her to Netties, a locally-owned dinner spot near my house. Ordinarily, Mom was sharp and opinionated, but tonight she seemed to drift, lost. On the way to Vegas the next morning, she seemed tense and disoriented. “You are driving too fast” and “I don't remember it being this far away from L.A.”

“Yeah. It's just further than I thought.”

When we arrived at Harrah's to meet her girlfriends, she got lost in the parking lot and threw her hands in the air, exasperated.

“Where is the entrance?” She yelled.

“Mom, look, it's right down there. See?” I pointed to the escalator.

“How do we get down?” It was a weird thing for her to say. Her world was alphabetized, organized, and meticulous; she was fanatical about paper clips and files.

Something was strange. The air was all wrong. Miss Dion canceled the show last minute, due to bronchitis, so we met up with Mom's girlfriends for dinner instead and played slot machines. Mom wasn't herself. At least, not her usual Mom self. Her skin looked puffy, bloated. Her body had shifted in a way I couldn't decipher. She acted agitated and spaced out.

When I moved a lamp in our hotel room, she screamed at me. “Don't break it!” she yelled and kicked the bathroom door.

“What's gotten into you, Mom?”

“I don't know.” She started to cry.

“Why are you so forgetful?” This was our code for Alzheimer's, Mom's biggest fear. Her mother, grandma Ruby, got sick in her early sixties. The thought of losing her sharp mind terrified her.

“I'm not forgetting, I just can't focus.” She was quiet on the way back to Burbank airport. I chitchatted about what a shame it was that C
é
line Dion canceled the show. I made sure she was at the correct airline, then watched her disappear through the sliding glass doors and hoped she would find her way to the right gate.

31

A
month after Vegas, Mom
turned yellow. Her husband didn't notice. Charlene—the neighbor with the chickens—did. I found out when I checked my answering machine. My car keys still jangled in my palm while I listened to her nasal, small-town twang, chattering about a Thai soup recipe, the peppers she bought at the Farmer's Market, and the co-worker she hated. Then—

“You won't believe this. Charlene says I'm ba-na-na yellow. Anyways, we're driving to UCSF Medical Center for–”

My answering machine cut her off. My keys dropped to the floor.

I called back, but she didn't pick up. It was late so I climbed in my car and sped off to work. In the office kitchen, I watched the coffee pot gurgle, ignoring the ringing phone. I smeared pink lipstick on my lips and pictured my mom's angry liver attacking her golden skin.

Had her drinking escalated? Was it cirrhosis? Would her liver have to be removed? Could I give her mine?
I checked the mirror for hidden pockets of yellow pallor. I'm my mom's daughter, after all. My skin was hers.

I walked back to my desk, and my manager was waiting for me.

“Can you come in here?” she asked.

I walked through the dark hallway to her cramped office. Billing issue, I figured.

“Close the door.” She lifted her Bugs Bunny mug to her mouth, realized it was empty, and set it back down on her desk. Jan's hair was thinning prematurely, causing paralegals to snicker “Here comes the bald eagle” whenever she approached. She was wearing her favorite faded black jeans, which meant it was casual Friday. I glanced at my wrinkled skirt and T-shirt, realizing that I forgot to cover my tattoos and forgot all about casual Friday. She nibbled at a cheese Danish and wiped her mouth.

“I just made fresh coffee,” my voice was higher than I expected. Her head wobbled slightly towards the photo she kept on her desk of her husband, a hiker with a beard. He looked ten years younger than Jan.

“So,” she said, looking straight at the computer in front of her, “We're letting you go.” She shuffled papers on her desk, then opened and closed a drawer. A new shame warmed my neck. Tori Amos must've complained when I forgot to cancel her meeting with her lawyer. She'd politely flipped through a magazine for a half hour before I noticed my mistake.

Jan swiveled in her chair and sneezed spraying the papers she'd set down in front of me with her spit. It was my employment contract. Panic made me queasy.

“It's at will.” Jan sniffled, but it came out like a snort.

“Is it because I'm late?” I asked.

“Your general performance,” she said.
Had she read my story on the computer at my desk about my job with the couple
? “We need you to clear out your desk and go.” It sounded like a question, but it wasn't.

This was my first real office job. I'd never been officially fired by a management-type person. Strippers don't get fired; we wander off until we come back hungry, full of mangy need. I sent an email to my co-workers, saying goodbye, and slithered out of the office. Then, I hauled ass to the UC San Francisco Medical Center to see about my mom's liver.

I drove the 382
miles on the 5 North, listening to PJ Harvey and pushing ninety most of the way.
There's been a mistake
. My mom was healthier than the horses that had knocked out her teeth when she was eighteen. She told us she had gotten stitches on her bruised and yellow lips, which meant the blood was already rushing to the damaged cells to restore them. Yellow meant healing, right? Yellow was good.

When I arrived at the hospital, she grinned at me and put down her
Woman's Day
magazine. Her face and arms were the color of spaghetti squash, puffy and bloated. She'd ripped recipes and scattered them on her lap like confetti.

“Do the doctors know what's wrong?” I asked her.

My step-dad grumbled, “Too much whiskey in her belly.” Disgust was leaking out of him.

“That's not it. See? I'm not shaking.” She held her steady hands in the air as proof. She was no alcoholic. Sure, she drank. By age seven, I was making her tea: Lipton with one small teaspoon of white sugar. A splash of low fat milk. By eleven, I made her Jack and Coke. Three ice cubes. She guzzled so many liquids her liver could swim laps in her abdomen. These San Francisco doctors underestimated my mom, a tough one who could always get back in the saddle.

“Let's get out of here. I'm starving,” she said.

“Me too.” My step-dad left us to go find food alone. Mom casually pulled on some pants and a brown jacket with two shell buttons. Her legs were more spindly and puckered than I remembered. And she was jaundiced. We walked out an emergency exit down some stairs, like a team.

On Fillmore Street, the sun was bright and the wind was chilly. We strolled into a bookstore. My mom, a speed-reader who typed sixty words per minute, grabbed
The Easter Parade
. We sat on a bench inside a bagel shop with a big window and watched shoppers stroll up and down Fillmore as the fog wrapped around the tops of Victorians like foam. We sipped tomato soup from paper bowls. Our elbows touched.

“It's not as good as mine,” she said.

“No, of course not.”

“Too salty. And it needs some of my delicious basil.” Her greenhouse exploded with orange and red heirlooms year round. I loved to get tangled in their wiry vines, dust off the ripe ones on my T-shirt, and pop them in my mouth. I would fill my arms and shirt with the rest to slice and drizzle with her signature vinaigrette. She grew zucchini big as baseball bats and green apples cluttered her lawn. The ones she didn't bake in crisps and cobblers were fed to her horses. Neighbors came with empty arms and left with Ziploc bags full of Mom's fruit.

I told her about the migration habits of cicadas, how they molted their old skin, became new again. She looked at me, puzzled.

“I got fired from the law firm,” I said.

“It's okay, honey. You'll get another job.”

“I'm stripping again,” I said, even though it wasn't exactly true yet. I knew it soon would be. She stroked my back, like I was a cat.

We walked through the
thick fog back to the hospital, where she got undressed and climbed back into bed. A nurse folded her arms in front on her chest.

“This isn't a hotel,” she said sternly. Mom chuckled. “I'm fine. Go back home.” I hugged her close, shuffled out the exit and stepped into the moist San Francisco night.

On the drive back
to L.A., tension pressed down on my ribcage.
She's fine
.

I went jogging like the runners I'd envied every morning on my commute. I had to breathe when I jogged. I couldn't cry and run at the same time. I refused music and shunned podcasts. Silence allowed me to count: three minutes of warm up at a pace of 3.9. I was aware of every muscle in my back. My knee clicked.
Give up later
. Five minutes in, I forced my legs to speed up to a pace of 5.7. I trotted. Eighteen minutes in, drop your shoulders, relax your neck. Forty minutes later, weightless and calm; I could run for hours. Worry poured out of me like radio waves. Pools of sunlight glittered on the surface of the reservoir. Three minutes of cool down.

When the phone rang, I raced to get it.

“It's not my liver,” Mom said.

“Oh?” I laughed.

“I have a cancer so rare, it's like getting struck by lightning,” she said. “It's pretty early stage. An-eee-ways, they're doing Whipple surgery.”

“Should I come?”

“In a couple weeks, when I'm home.” She was logical, reasonable, and organized. She didn't want to inconvenience me.

I asked, “What kind of cancer?” But she'd already hung up.

Whipple sounded like pie topping, but, according to Ask.com, it was a surgery performed for patients with bile duct cancer. It involved cutting open Mom's stomach, removing her intestines, spreading them out on the table like a ribbon, scraping the cancer off and stuffing them back inside. After Whipple surgery, eating solid food would be a novelty. Chances of heart or liver failure were high.
She'll be fine
, I thought, defiantly, but I held my belly tightly as the tension weighed down on my body.

Her chemo and radiation treatments started. Her phone messages stopped. She mailed me recipes she'd found in magazines with handwritten notes in her perfect, paralegal script: “Great and Easy!” I cooked only her yellow dishes. I perfected lemon bars with shortbread crust and labored over whipped egg whites for banana soufflé. I peeled off her Post-it notes and tacked them onto my kitchen cupboards for inspiration while I sifted flour and squeezed juice from lemons. My floor was sticky with powdered sugar. I crammed my kitchen counters with trays of her dessert then watched it all spoil.