You're Married to Her? (10 page)

I had never told that to anyone. Not Marge. Not one soul.

Marge looked at the ceiling.

At four-ten it was time for dinner and they were taking
us to the best restaurant in town. The parking lot of Bob's Muddy Rudder was mobbed to overflow. Pushing through the early-bird crowd to the hostess stand, Marge's mother announced our arrival and was told to wait in the lounge, a dark, low-ceilinged room throbbing with reggae, lit only by fish tanks. “But we have reservations,” her mother insisted. Then she turned to her husband. “Did you make the reservations?”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

“Mother, we could try another restaurant,” Marge suggested.

Crestfallen, she looked longingly at the potted palm trees on the outdoor deck and the view of the natural gas facility across the canal. “But I've always wanted to eat here.”

“How long?” I asked the hostess, who sized up the importance of Marge's parents. She was perfectly polite, running her fingers through the names in her reservation book, but I'd worked in the restaurant trade and her body language was clear enough: Why don't you nice folks go and try the Taco Bell on South Dixie Highway?

Marge's mother was near tears. “What did she say?”

“That they're booked solid.”

“You don't get along with your mother, do you?” she said.

We found a steak house in a nearby strip mall. The décor was tired, the crowd ancient, the waitresses overworked. “They have chicken, they have seafood. Look, Dad, ribs!” Marge, apparently sensing trouble, did her
best to settle us in for a pleasant meal. “It's a nice big menu, Mother, isn't it?”

In fact her mother had completely disappeared behind it, muttering a string of epithets. “It's shit, all shit,” her mother hissed. “A stinking shit menu.”

Marge ordered a bottle of wine.

“What would you like, Mother? Fresh tuna? They have very nice shrimp. Red grouper. And Mahi Mahi. . . .”

“Piss. Shit and molasses.”

Marge ordered broiled tuna for her mother, ribs for her dad, but no sooner had the waitress delivered the main courses than her mother's entree had disappeared, the plate empty except for a small serving of julienned carrots. “This is puke. Not eating puke,” Marge's mother muttered, folding a half-pound tuna steak in an oil-stained linen napkin and stuffing it into her purse. “I'm bringing it home to the cat.”

“Can I pour you another glass of wine?” I asked.

“Please,” Marge said.

“You drink too much.” Her mother fixed me with a cold stare. “And you better stop it with those drugs.”

I smiled weakly, as if to slough off a bad joke, but inside I was ice. Could she know about the cocaine, this little woman who lived twelve-hundred miles away? Marge didn't know about the cocaine. I believed it now. She was a mind reader, just as Marge had said. She was some kind of savant or a mutant out of the X-Men comics. I understood why Marge was overly secretive at times,
why she got angry if she ever came upon me searching for something, even a pencil, in her desk drawers, why she clammed up if I came near when she was on the telephone. It was pure self-defense.

A moment before, I had had the illusion of something flying past my eyes. An insect, I'd surmised, but just now something hit me in the neck. When I saw the waitress bring her hand to her ear, I realized it was Marge's mother. She was rolling tiny balls of rye bread and throwing them while her litany of curses got louder. “Fuck. Balls. Shit and molasses.”

“Mother, please, stop it.” Marge grabbed the breadbasket. “Mother what are you doing? Dad, what is she doing?”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

 

When we arrived at their house the following morning, Marge's mother was vibrant, wearing a black and white checkered dress and red lipstick, cheeks flushed with mischief. “He's not here.” She seemed years younger, giddy with relief. “He's playing pinochle.” She steered us to the couch. “He won't be back till eleven.”

As Marge and I sat in wait, her mother darted from room to room. Drawers flew open, boxes tumbled from closets, shoes were scattered, the freezer door slammed. Returning again and again to the couch she dropped wads of dollar bills in our laps. They were rolled tightly, crumpled, folded, bound with rubber bands. The pile grew too large for us to hold and toppled to the floor.
But she kept returning, out of breath, digging treasure out of sewing boxes, flower vases, old boots, jelly jars, the backs of stuffed chairs, anywhere she could hide it from her husband, years upon decades of one-dollar bills secretly hoarded and hidden out of sight.

“This is what she wanted to give us?” I asked Marge. We looked at the pile, maybe a thousand dollars in all. “But why did we have to drive down?”

“Come help me with this,” her mother called. We found her rooting through the back of a closet, pushing aside a card table, old rubber boots, winter coats they hadn't worn since they'd left Detroit. Upon locating an enormous cardboard box she had me haul it onto the bed. Dust blew up in a plume. The box flaps crumbled. “Careful!” She sounded afraid. “Please be careful.” As I prepared to dig out the contents she edged me aside, plunged her hands in the box and proceeded to remove Christmas ornaments wrapped in yellowed tissue paper, carousel horses, golden bells, rhinestone-studded eggs—all decades old, all purchased from dime-stores—sleighs, angels blown from glass, candy canes, ballerinas, a winking Cheshire cat.

“I collected them,” she whispered. “Every one.” Raised in an orthodox Jewish family and having married a Presbyterian, this was tantamount to sin. “It's all yours now.” She beamed at Marge and me. Here was her treasure to bequeath: too fragile to take on a plane and along with the mound of dollar bills too large for a suitcase; only a car was sufficient to carry it all away.

When the morning came to say our good-byes, I strolled to the curb with Marge's father. He had liked having another man around and had warmed to my presence even as he still seemed somewhat puzzled as to who I was. “Well, thank you for a terrific visit,” I said, pumping his thin and weightless hand.

But her mother had something more to say, something private, and I watched them as they tarried on the front steps, Marge trying to get away as she must have tried all her life and her mother clinging to her elbow, refusing to let go.

“I want to see you marry him,” her mother said. This from a true psychic, from a woman who had read me inside out, who had never met me before and never would again, but somehow knew my past, my character, my every rotten indiscretion. And still she insisted, “Marry him.”

“Mother, I've been married twice.”

“So what? So have I.”

“This is ridiculous. I just got divorced.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Do you know how much younger he is?”

All of this was repeated to me, of course. I could make out very little at the time. I could see Marge trying to avoid her mother's eyes and then submitting to a stronger will, looking deeply into them with the same skeptical skew of her lips that must have punctuated decades of mother daughter disagreements. What passed between them was as inexplicable to me as the bond
between a mother with a tenth-grade education and a daughter who was to write forty-five books, as improbable as a middle child in an immigrant family of nine children instructing her own daughter how to perform an abortion on herself and the terrified college freshman who had the strength to do it.

“I know he's a good man,” her mother insisted.

“Enough.” Marge kissed her mother's cheek. “Good bye. I'll call you.”

“Marry him,” were the last words her mother was to say to Marge in person.

And in spite of everything Marge knew about me, and everything she was about to discover, she did.

A
syllogism, you may recall from Logic 101, is an argument containing three propositions, two of which are premises and the third a conclusion, to wit: Drugs make you stupid. You do drugs all the time. Therefore, you are too stupid to know how stupid you are. I grasped this in my sophomore year of college, not in the classroom but on the day I sought out the secret address of a place to buy acid. Passed on to me in a whisper, the place was impossible to miss. Indeed, if I happened upon a complete stranger to the neighborhood and asked, “Where can I buy LSD?” he would probably shrug, “How am I supposed to know? Try that dump with the purple door.”

The purple door was never locked. If this didn't strike you as stupid enough, in lieu of a curtain in the front bay window there was a big red flag with a stencil cut of a marijuana plant. Entering for the first time I was blown back with the odor of cat urine so strong my eyes
swelled shut. The front room was dark, lit only by a bare blue light bulb swinging on a wire. A naked man, hairy and thin, stood in the middle of the floor on a mat of outspread newspapers. He was surrounded by an admiring circle of young women wearing long beaded earrings and gauze-thin halter tops. He turned in slow circles, arms pressed to his sides like the wings of a trussed turkey, and smiled beatifically as the women cooed encouragement. “Let it go,” their soft voices whispered. “Let it all go and be free.”

Cast in blue light his shriveled cock and balls were like robin eggs in a wire nest. His tongue flicked at his coarse black beard. “Let it go,” the chanting went on. Over and over the soft voices chanted, “Let it go, be free. . . .” The man squeezed his eyes in fierce concentration. One woman exhorted him, “There is no past. There is only now. Be here now... ,” she rocked forward and back as if in a trance, “. . . and be free.”

I couldn't see it from where I stood, but heard it hit the newspapers, like the smack of two cupped palms. The odor crossed the room as chanting gave way to applause. He raised his arms in victory each time he squeezed out another turd and shouted “Freedom! Freedom!” while turning in box steps on the sticky newspaper.

At the time I was smoking a lot of marijuana. I was paranoid about everything, perennially tired, late with my class work, depressed, anxious, and forgetful. One day at breakfast, my first joint of the day in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, I was complaining to a roommate
about the sorry state of my inexplicably miserable life. She said, “Maybe you should stop smoking dope.” This struck me as a revelation. In all the times I had pondered my problems, all the while smoking dope, I had never come to this conclusion. Remember the syllogism.

But there was one drug that seemed to make you smart. Cocaine made you smart. Cocaine was the opposite of marijuana. It sharpened the intellect and shattered the inner censor. Even better, cocaine felt like something I'd been waiting for all my life.

When I was a child I was clumsy and overweight, something of a laughing stock in school, and an embarrassment to my parents who felt, certainly with my best interests at heart, that I would have a much better chance in life if I became thin and wiry, an athletic American boy. The prevailing treatment at the time, routinely prescribed by pediatricians, was dextroamphetamine, administered in enormous black capsules. Commonly issued to combat troops and popular with cross-country truck drivers, these were known on the street as Black Beauties. The
Urban Dictionary
describes the effects as “a mild to moderate euphoria, increased hyperactivity, increased awareness of surroundings, increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities, decreased appetite, and decreased ability to sleep,” which just about nails the way I went through elementary school. When I got older and read the beat poets I discovered that speed was commonly used by hipsters in an era of stifling conformity, the experience enhanced by cigarettes, espresso,
jazz, and intense conversation. But I was ten years old. I had grandma, Hebrew school, and years of inexplicably sleepless nights filled with nothing but doo-wop and Jean Shepherd on the all-night radio. I have no idea of the medical repercussions of a childhood hooked on diet pills, only that I experienced life as a treadmill set at high, going nowhere very fast. I wondered why my friends didn't spend entire afternoons rereading the same paragraph in the World Book Encyclopedia, or watching in euphoric wonderment as an ant climbed the window jamb. Which is why, when I did coke for the first time, I experienced a fuzzy and romantic longing for the past. My childhood came back to me: the shakes, the grinding teeth, the dry mouth, and above all the sublime ability to focus, to shut out everything in this vast and complicated world except repetitive or normally boring activities. Like writing.

Coke gave you not only the concentrative facility to immerse yourself in any insignificant task whatsoever, but the conviction that whatever arse-backwards and pointless thing you were doing deserved the Nobel Prize. As a child I could make no use of this facility but now the adrenaline rush, the confidence, the exquisite ability to concentrate at last had a focus. I have read that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde
in six days. For some time he had been musing on the idea of the duality of good and evil coexisting in a man's nature. But while sick in bed, taking a medication suffused with a potent cocaine derivative
popular in Victorian times, he wrote the first draft in a kind of frenzy, running down the stairs in his bathrobe, reading drafts to Ms. Stevenson, tearing back upstairs with her encouragement to write more. If I can extrapolate from my own experience it was the confluence of idea and drug that enabled him to write so quickly. I seriously doubt it was just the cocaine. If it was the drug alone he would have run downstairs to beg Ms. Stevenson for a quickie and run back up to write nothing but drivel. Or so it went with me and Ms. Piercy.