The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (21 page)

“You mean for a living?” Lisa ransacked her head. There was hardly anything in the “Current Amanda” section to ransack. “Aren’t you still doing the delivery thing?”

“Close,” she said. “I only quit that three years ago. I manage a band. I work at a warehouse on the dock, too, one of those they-need-to-hire-a-woman jobs. I check in loads of produce. It’s complicated but not interesting, although the people are good to me. Six months ago I started managing this band. I write some of their songs.”

“Have I ever heard of them?”

“Have you heard of any decent band of the last five years?”

The old bile surged, but Lisa didn’t feel up to it.

“Let’s don’t,” she said.

Amanda put her hands to her head, as if it were about to fall off. She nodded. Lisa drove through the quiet neighborhood, one house like another, boxy and dull. If not for their father’s legacy, they would have grown up in a house like one of these. Which one would their young mother and young father have chosen? How much different would they be, Lisa and Amanda, if they’d been raised in one of these stucco cartons? Timmy’s home looked like a toy house, square with an overhanging roof, as if it were built of plastic connecting bricks.

Lisa opened the car door on her side, but her sister wasn’t moving.

“What?”

“It’s like this,” Amanda said. “I needed to do some kind of art. I could see what it was I wanted to show. It was in my head, and in there it was beautiful. I just couldn’t find a way to get at it. I tried photography and painting and sculpture, but I’m no good with anything but words and acting—or sort of acting. I tried writing poetry, which sucked, and a long, boring memoir. Finally, I got the courage up to be a monologist.”

“Is that like a comic?” Lisa said, grateful to find a decent question to ask. She leaned lower to see her sister in the car. “A stand-up comedian?”

“Performance stuff,” Amanda said. “I had a show about people and animals. I’d tell stories about my, you know,
life.
And then I had these facts about animals that I invented. One thing played off the other. It ended with me stripping while I talked, and when I had nothing on but a skirt, I’d pull its string, and they’d see the swarm of ants where they expected to see my cunt.”

She sniffed the air, or it might have been that she was upset. Lisa couldn’t tell. What was she supposed to do with this information?

She said, “I could tell you were faking today.”

“That act. I did it in maybe a dozen clubs. It was the closest I ever came to getting at it. You know? I was good, I had an effect on people, but I couldn’t get it quite right. It wasn’t enough. Finally, I couldn’t stand it and cut myself up. Ernie, I think, heard me, really heard me, but there were a lot of people who didn’t. It was so frustrating. I kept pushing it, thinking someone out there must see what I’m after, someone understands. But no matter what I tried, none of it was
it,
none of it matched what I saw in my head. You understand what I mean? Please can you figure out what I’m talking about?”

Lisa had listened to every syllable, but she remained unsure what she had heard. She said, “I guess I do. I mean, I have this idea of the kind of man I want to have, but the clowns I meet are never anywhere close.”

Amanda was out of the car and down the walk before Lisa could stop her.

Electricity is actually a living thing. A fungus. Microscopic and endemic, its ideal environment is the alkaline battery, which it seeks out the way its cousin jock itch seeks out the sweating genitals of young men. Humans, such as these young scratching men, are viral in nature. All mammalian life can be traced back to the River Ebo in equatorial Africa where, millions of years ago, a virus developed in the stew of murky water. Evolution and mutations led to the development of an enormous variety of creatures, but most died out before reproducing. Reproduction didn’t interest beasts until, through a freak of nature, an animal was born with her vagina directly adjacent to her anus. Everybody wanted a piece of her. Sex is no fun unless it’s dirty.

Max met her return flight bearing yellow, vinelike flowers molded by invisible wire into the shape of a horseshoe. He spread his arms wide upon spotting her.

“Flicka,” he called tenderly. “You managed to show.”

The horseshoe fit over Lisa’s neck nicely.

Too drunk to follow the racing jokes that Max had practiced all week, she laughed whenever there was a syntactical gap in his gab—quips about jockeys, being in the running versus getting scratched, needing to place, betting the house.

“We’re trying to change your image after the dress fiasco,” he explained.

The flowers’ lurid odor nauseated her.

“Stop in the bar?” she said.

“Love to,” Max said. “Roberto just happens to be meeting us there. Neither of us can wait to hear about your hideous family.”

“I love airport bars,” she said. “Just one sec.” She floundered about in her purse and withdrew her cell phone. The first message was from Max. “You look ridiculous in that stupid horseshoe,” the recorded voice said. She pivoted and gave him a look, mouthing, “Very funny.” He mouthed, “I’m hysterical” back to her. Except for the smell, she liked the horseshoe. It gave support to her neck, which made it easier to keep her head upright. It was like a life jacket. The second message was from her employer, some crap about this and that—good news, basically, as it meant she had not been fired. The third message began with Amanda saying, “This won’t be short. If you’re in a hurry, save it for later.” Lisa punched the number three, and a mechanical voice informed her that the message would be saved.

“Why don’t I get interesting calls?” she demanded.

Max slipped his arm around her waist to improve her equilibrium.

“My message was fascinating, you nasty, ungrateful pony. There’s Roberto.”

He had saved them a table in a corner. The booth appeared to be made of real wood that had once been part of an actual tree. This struck Lisa as remarkable. Drinks sweated on the table, making their obligatory rings.
Work, work, work,
she thought.

“Had to park in the remote lot,” Roberto said. “It’s slightly closer than our house.”

“Couldn’t one of you give me a big, sloppy kiss?” she said.

“Roberto ordered a big drink for you,” Max said, dusting her forehead with his lips. “Feel free to be sloppy with it.”

“She may not have a choice,” Roberto said. “Aren’t you going to take that off now?” He gestured to the horseshoe.

Lisa shook her head while drinking, the cool gin doing sweet things to her throat.

“Is there anything sadder,” Max asked, “than embracing as art that which was offered as a joke?”

“I can think of a few things,” Roberto said. “How about mistaking for crapola that which is offered as art?” To Lisa he added, “Inhaling gin is bad for the lungs.”

She set the glass on the table harder than she intended. “I had the absolute worst time without you guys.”

“Oh, good,” Max said. “Regale us with the sorrow of being without us.”

“My sister,” she began, “and my mom—not to mention fucking Sydney.” She shook her head, as if she had explained something.

“We may need to assist in the narrative,” Roberto said.

Max agreed. “Let’s begin optimistically. Any arrests?”

“I yam an optimist,” she said. “Good stuff’s supposed to be right around the dealy.”

“She means dealy-bob,” Max explained.

“But no such luck. It only brings me heartache.” In her drunken state, she didn’t pronounce the
h.
It came out “artache,” which reminded her. “My sister says art ruined her life.” She nodded in agreement with herself. “We did a nasty thing to each other.”

“Finally!” Max said, but Lisa had already begun her characteristic lid drooping that meant she would soon pass out.

Roberto said, “I think we’re going to need a cart.”

Timmy ordered two pizzas to be certain there was something the sisters would eat.

“Not that I expect you to eat much,” he said. “I understand the grueling demands of staying thin, although I don’t participate in them myself.”

Lisa thought of the scrawny woman he loved. She probably talked about nothing but food. Made him eat things for her.

“Thinness is genetic,” she said. “Like baldness.”

“That’s what keeps me thin,” Amanda agreed. “That and starving myself.” She ran her hand over Timmy’s bare head. “You look okay like this, despite what she says.”

She bent his head down and planted a kiss on it, leaving lipstick marks, more an O than the traditional ellipse, as if she had kissed him open mouthed, tonguing his pate.

Timmy’s living room had a nostalgic look about it. The coarse weave of the material covering the couch, along with its green and orange colors, seemed an embodiment of the nonhippie sixties. Shades-of-yellow shag carpet went wall-to-wall in the room, and a reclining chair—brown like a bear—faced a console model television. Timmy set the pizza boxes on a coffee table with a clear glass top.

“How’s Feather Lick?” he said to Amanda.

Feather Lick?
What the hell was Feather Lick? Was her sister a lesbian?

“It’s Big Longing now,” Amanda said. “I got them a gig in Jersey.”

“You know about the band?” Lisa said, catching up, indignant, and embarrassed at the same time.

“We talk,” Timmy said. “Keep in touch.”

“He visited me last year, and I even got him laid, didn’t I?”

Timmy bit into his anchovy-and-onion slice, nodding and smiling.
A smiling bite,
Lisa thought.

“I hate anchovies,” she said. “Do you have any drinking beverages here?”

“We used to eat anchovy-and-onion all the time,” Timmy said.

“She’s just being a bitch,” Amanda told him. “Be entertained by it or she’ll drive you crazy.”

“A person’s tastes can change,” Lisa said.

“I’ll say,” Timmy said. “There’s a whole bar in the kitchen.”

Lisa headed for the kitchen to avoid punching someone. The “whole bar” turned out to be a freestanding black-lacquer-and-chrome thing holding a dozen bottles, each with a green plastic nozzle poked in its opening. A relic from a previous generation, Lisa thought, a gift from his girlfriend.
His old lady,
she thought cruelly. She made a gin and tonic while perusing the refrigerator. Dill pickle spears became her dinner. She might be a complete bitch, for all she knew, but Timmy had been her boyfriend first. Amanda had hardly dated him, just screwed him. She wondered if she had gotten him laid by spreading her own legs.

Her next thought: if Amanda had gotten Timmy laid, did it mean that she could get Lisa laid? She hated that kind of thinking, but she was losing every sense of her sexual self. Her eyes had begun to linger over those glossy ads for boob jobs. She didn’t like all this fretting about it. She was not so bad looking—
almost not beautiful,
Max had said. She needed a man she could take for granted. Music started up in the other room, the Eagles, “Take It Easy.” It would be no challenge to take Timmy for granted. She had already done it.
Taken him for a ride, too,
she thought with some nasty pleasure.

Two G&Ts later, she returned to find her sister performing, reciting something about bees. When she finished, she and Timmy both looked expectantly at Lisa.

“What?” Lisa said.

Amanda took a deep breath. “I’ll do it again.” She asked Timmy to make her a drink. Then she undid her skirt and stepped out of it. She pulled off her blouse.

In panties and bra, a sparkling alcoholic beverage in hand, Amanda started in again without the music. Lisa was determined to listen.

“My sister and I used to be like those famous monkeys of the St. Louis Zoo who shared a tail,” Amanda began.

She thinks of me as a monkey,
Lisa thought. Then,
What famous monkeys?

“Hard to tell where one of us ended and the other began,” Amanda continued. She lifted her skirt from the floor and whipped it around in her hands to roll it up like a rope. She asked Timmy for his shoestrings.

It all reminded Lisa of a magician’s routine.
Nude magic,
she thought. This was definitely
not
what Amanda had done minutes earlier.

Amanda tied the skirt at either end, and let the skirt-rope rock back and forth in her hand like the ticker in a clock. A near-naked body was a distraction, Lisa thought. How could anyone argue otherwise? Was this swinging rope meant to be a giant cock?

Amanda whipped the rope behind her, bent forward, and tucked it in her underpants. When she removed her hands, it stayed there—a tail.

Lisa made a face. Was Amanda going to wear that skirt home now? What was she thinking?

“Here’s my tale,” Amanda said.

She launched into a story about monkeys in a cage who would let no one cut the tail they shared. “Tail” and “tale” were interchangeable. Lisa got it. Sharing a tail, sharing a tale. This proved she was paying attention, didn’t it? Her sister’s body showed no signs of inching past its prime. Lisa’s own body was still just fine, more or less, slender but with a curve or two, her admittedly small breasts riding nice and high. But her sister’s thinness was softer, less tense. Lisa understood that being the older sister was, for the first time, a disadvantage. And it would remain one.

Timmy had set his cheap bottle of gin on the coffee table. Lisa covered the ice in her glass with more gin. To hell with tonic.

The monkey story involved some steeple talk, and Amanda imitated a man counting his cock, her hand in an imaginary pocket rubbing an imaginary penis. Her routine revolved around bits of their old code—the hand signal that indicated someone was lying, the nostril flare that meant they were dealing with a loser, the hiccup that said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Lisa had forgotten that there were so many signs. Her sister’s body dimpled with goose flesh, which changed its color, adding a silver hue. Could that be part of the act?

When Amanda began marking the scars on her wrists and arms with yellow highlighter, Lisa said she had to pee. Amanda just kept on tracing the scars. By this time, the monkeys had been surgically separated and a bunch of other stuff had transpired. “I’ll hold it,” Lisa announced, hoping she’d get some credit for staying, afraid she would be asked to do something. That was like a magic show, too, she realized. She had never enjoyed them, even as a child, for fear she would be singled out and made to do something—to step into a box and vanish, or lie on a gurney and be sawed in half. She remembered sitting beside Amanda in an auditorium watching a magician in a silver cape. When he sent his short-skirted assistant out into the crowd, Lisa made herself hiccup. Without a word, Amanda gathered up her things and they left.