The Queen Gene (26 page)

As the three were looking at Maxime’s new work, Randy came outside in his bare feet and cotton shorts. As I reflected on the last three weeks at the house, I realized that Randy hadn’t broken a single glass object since the day Effie visited.

The time had come to admit the truth. The bizarre reality was that my house had been haunted by Aunt Rita and Uncle Arnold. Though completely illogical, it was the only explanation. As wonderful as it was to have a house filled with laughter, art, and peace, I couldn’t help feel a bit guilty about evicting my aunt’s and uncle’s spirits. As a child, when I visited their home, they never sent me back to Anjoli’s when I misbehaved. Rita had offered to change her ways. Maybe I should have given her a second chance. Where would they go? What would they do?
Is
tomorrow another day for the dead?

As Adam and I drove to Renee’s house to swim, my cell phone rang. After I answered, I didn’t hear anything. “Mancha, is that you?” I asked. I heard nothing, not even Anjoli talking in the background. “Mother!” I shouted. “Anjoli, are you there?!”

“Hello, darling,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

What can she do for me? Who was this impostor?

“Mancha just called me,” I said. “I guess he was calling to say hello.”

“Darling, I have some very exciting news about the baby,” she began. “Are you sitting down?”

“I’m driving,” I told her. “What baby? Do you mean Mancha?”

“It is about, well, the dog formerly known as Mancha,” Anjoli said.

“Mother, what are you talking about?”

“Darling, don’t get all wound up. I have only good news to share,” she said. Then nothing.

“Okay, what is it?”

“First, J.Lo has been completely healed of her hair-pulling disorder.”

“Jennifer Lopez has a hair-pulling disorder?”

“That’s the second piece of news, darling. When I saw that J.Lo had finally stopped chewing on her paws, I took her to the vet immediately, and he said that she was a girl all along! Isn’t that a hoot?! Naturally I went out and bought the cutest pink rhinestone collar to go with her new gender. When the KAT girls saw it, they told me about this pop star, Jennifer Lopez, who goes by the nickname J.Lo, who once wore an engagement ring with a pink stone. So I figured it was a sign that the baby’s true name was J.Lo.”

“Okay, back up a minute here, Mother. The dog stopped pulling his fur out of his paws, so you decided to take him to a vet?”

“The only time to see a traditional doctor is when you’re well, darling.”

“And he told you Mancha is a female?”

“J.Lo, darling. Her name is J.Lo.”

“You didn’t notice that she was female before? I mean, wasn’t the absence of a penis your first clue?”

“Oh no, darling. J.Lo was fixed, so when I thought he was a boy, I figured they had simply cut his penis off during the procedure.”

“They don’t cut the —” I sighed, exasperated. “Never mind. Well, it’s a good thing he, um, she stopped the fur-pulling.”

“Now I can start thinking about dog shows again, darling! It’s funny. I think J.Lo is happy that we know she’s a girl now. She holds herself a little different now. She’s got a little more attitude.”

“So it sounds like you’re getting along better with your neighbors,” I said.

“They are the sweetest,” Anjoli returned.

“I thought that was the problem.”

“They’ve grown on me. I’m giving a talk on skin care at the house on Thursday night. They say I’m an inspiration. You know how I am. If I can inspire just one person, I have to do what I’m called to.”

“Skin care is your calling?”

“Don’t be ludicrous, darling. I’m not so one-dimensional. My calling is total beauty. Skin, hair, clothing, make-up — the full package. Darling, that reminds me of something I need to discuss with you. It’s a bit heavy. Are you sitting down?”

“Still driving, Mother.”

“I went to see Kendra last night and it was devastating.” Kendra is one of my mother’s oldest friends. They shared their first apartment together in Greenwich Village in the late fifties, before my parents met. They went to poetry readings, dance performances, and lectures together. They were inseparable. Kendra was Anjoli’s maid of honor, and when Kendra’s husband came on to Anjoli, she turned him down flatly. She told me that Jim was not her type, but she couldn’t fool me. Even at twelve years old, I could see that Jim was an extremely handsome and successful guy. That was exactly Anjoli’s type. The part of her that declined the invitation was the teaspoon of decency that kept her from screwing her best friend’s husband. Kendra now had cancer. Not the kind of cancer where you go in for surgery and chemotherapy, then fight your way back to health. The kind of cancer where you’re in a hospital bed at home, waiting to die. “She wasn’t even conscious,” Anjoli sniffed. “And tubes in the nose, a needle in her arm. She looked horrible.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know how you love Kendra.” They were the sort of friends who could go years without seeing each other, but when they caught up, they picked up right where they left off. After Kendra and her family moved to Westchester, she and my mother didn’t see each other as often as they did when they both lived in the city, but she always held the top spot in my mother’s heart.

“It got me thinking about my own mortality,” Anjoli said.
Of course it did. We couldn’t have another person dying without somehow making you think about yourself.
“So I’ve prepared a living will of sorts so you’ll know how I want things handled should I ever become incapacitated.” As I pulled into Renee’s driveway, I checked my rear-view mirror to check on Adam. He had fallen asleep. I stayed in the car and continued with Anjoli.

“So, do you want to be kept on life support?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know about that, darling,” she said. “Those things are so complicated. It depends on the situation. There are times when it’s completely appropriate and others when it’s totally hopeless. I’m sure you’ll make the right decision based on the circumstances. What I do know is that if you let me grow chin hairs, I will haunt you so bad I’ll make your Aunt Rita look like an amateur.”

“What?”

“I’m not finished, darling. I’m setting up a Schwab account that will cover the cost for weekly manicures and pedicures, leg waxing, and hair coloring. You should have seen Kendra’s roots! I know my Kendra and as soon as she comes to, she’s going to ask for a hand mirror, then promptly drop dead. And that daughter of hers is so damned self-righteous she isn’t even considering what her mother would want. Kendra was an extremely vain woman. I was only trying to do what Kendra would want when Little Miss Know-It-All burst into the room and started yelling at me to leave Kendra be! The nerve, darling.”

“Wait, I’m missing something here,” I said. “Why did her daughter yell at you? What were you doing?” I asked, bracing myself for anything.

“Plucking her chin hairs,” Anjoli said. “I know Kendra, and cancer or no cancer, she would be mortified to see herself looking that way.”

“Mother, you’re a piece of work.”

“And so was Kendra. Don’t be so judgmental. I used tweezers it’s not like I was yanking them out with my bare hands. For Christ’s sake, the woman had a three-inch hair coming from her chin. She looked like a Chinese chef!”

“Okay, so what you’re telling me is that you’re leaving behind a living beauty will?” I asked. “And if you should ever become seriously injured or sick, I should just wing it on the medical decisions as long as I make sure your toenails are polished?”

“Exactly, darling. It’s in the file cabinet in my office. It’s clearly marked ‘For Lucy.’”

Most people have emotional baggage from their parents. I am lucky enough to have a mother who puts it in file folders and labels it for me.

“Mother, I’m in Renee’s driveway. I’ve got to go.”

“How lovely. Be sure to say hello to her for me. Tell her I’ve been thinking of her.”

Most parents encourage their children not to lie. Like absolutely everything else in life, my mother does the opposite.

Chapter Thirty-One

After a day of splashing in Renee’s pool, we returned to the house to look at applications for next year’s resident artists. When I told Renee about last year’s lot — including stages of orgasm in paint — she insisted that she come over and sift through the applicants with Jack and me this year. On more than one occasion, she confided that the bizarre amusements of our household were her only entertainment as her marriage was imploding. In other words, we were good for a laugh. I knew to take her remark as a compliment, as I felt similarly toward her. I loved hanging out with her because she dared to pull off sophomoric pranks I never had the courage to. Once when we were pulling into the supermarket parking lot together, she saw an able-bodied young woman park in a handicapped spot. “Look at her!” Renee said in disgust. “Who the hell does this little bitch think she is?” I had to admit, as the niece of a legitimately disabled woman, I did find the young woman’s arrogance off-putting, but Renee hopped out of my minivan and started surrounding the car with shopping carts. “You go inside and tell me when she gets in the checkout line,” Renee said to me before darting off. By the time Renee was done, she had surrounded the car with more than forty carts. As we slouched in the front seat of my van, Renee and I giggled like teens as we watched the navel-pierced twit wobble in her platform shoes as she exasperatedly returned the carts.

On that August evening that Jack and I set aside to review artist applications, we had already arranged for Jenna to babysit. We knew from last year’s experience that reading essays, looking at slides, and listening to CDs was an all-night affair. As soon as we finished dinner, the three of us went down to Jack’s studio, where he had been collecting applicant packages. I loved the rich scent of jasmine and honeysuckle that surrounded the property in the summer. It reminded me of the tall wall of bushes I had to pass on my way to the playground in summer camp.

The first application contained a CD from a guy who combined his ethnic heritage into a musical genre all its own — Celtic salsa. We loved his music, but since he needed housing for a five-man band, we had to decline.

A woman named Grace from Amsterdam sent us slides of a room where she glued three million clear plastic straws to the walls. She placed them perpendicular to the wall surface, one beside the next, creating the look of a foam mattress. When we looked at the first slide, I couldn’t see the straws at all, but they were clear in the close-ups. The shots taken straight-on looked like a honeycomb, while the pictures taken from the sides looked like crystallized ice. Grace’s essay explained that she enjoyed experimenting with texture, which explained why her next slides were of pieces made from sewing pins, nails. and broken glass. I almost accepted her on the spot so she could put to use all of Randy’s fumbles.

Laura Jackson from the Bronx sent slides of sculptures she made from a collection of wire hangers that would make Joan Crawford freak out beyond anything seen in
Mommie Dearest
. She explained that she used nothing more than a set of pliers and hangers to create pieces ranging from simple, elegant figures to perfect reproductions of bridges. She did use orange paint to accent the Golden Gate. The Brooklyn Bridge was painstakingly well-detailed. She made sure we could appreciate this by enclosing a photo of the actual bridge.

Clint Treadwell of Munich sent slides of sculptures he made from shredded newspaper. It was actually pretty cool. I would never think to create balls from old newspaper, but he demonstrated his ability to do so best with a sculpture of a poodle. “Doesn’t anyone paint anymore?” Jack asked.

“I was thinking the exact same thing,” Renee added. Before opening a package from an Austrian minimalist, we opened another bottle of wine and compared our stack of “definitely nots” to our “maybes.” So far we had thirty-two rejects and seven contenders. As we checked again for the contents of the minimalist’s package, we realized that he had actually enclosed nothing, taking minimalism to the extreme of stupidity. We had to wonder if this was his idea of a goof on us, or if he thought he was being clever.

One guy sent us a DVD of something so strange it defied description. Men’s clothing was stuffed with pillows. The figure was lying on the ground with a white pillow head coming from the collar. On top of the man’s head was a safe that had fallen on it and kept him from getting up. Projected onto the white pillow was film of a man’s face who was muttering obscenities. “Stop looking at me, motherfucker!” he said. So we did, and put freaky boy’s application in the reject pile.

By midnight we had agreed on Grace the straw sculptor and Laura the hanger artist, but could not come to a consensus on the third artist. I liked the newspaper shredder, but Renee said that his essay gave her the creeps. Jack and I desperately wanted a harmonious second season, so we eliminated anyone Renee thought might be mentally unstable. Since we had another few weeks to decide on our third pick, Jack and I decided to call it a night and send our invitations to Grace and Laura in the morning. Rather, later that morning.

* * *

As the sun pierced through our bedroom curtains, I groped for the telephone receiver as it rang persistently. “I didn’t wake you did I, darling?” Anjoli asked urgently. I looked at the blurry digits on my clock. As my eyes began to focus, I could see it was just after seven. “You know how I detest mornings, but I’ve been waiting all night to tell you the news.” Before I could ask, Anjoli continued. “Kimmy and Nick set a date and it is right around the corner.” I wondered why this was such big news. “The wedding will be over Labor Day weekend, so we have little over three weeks to prepare, darling.”

“Labor Day?!” I shrieked, sitting up in bed. Glancing toward Jack’s side of the bed, I was grateful to see he had already risen and started his day. Otherwise, he would have had the shrillest alarm clock. “Mother, does she realize that Labor Day is our open house? I can’t miss it. This is a huge deal for Jack and me. It’ll be the first time we open our artist colony up to the community. It’s already in the local calendar section of the paper, and stores are hanging flyers about it in their windows. Did you both forget that this is the biggest weekend of my life?!”