While on the subject of meat, I wonder how the raft of the Medusa would be treated if, perhaps, it had been painted by Goya. Would Goya have created fantastic creatures instead of recycling corpses? Would his creatures have managed the flesh-tearing accuracy of Saturn Devouring His Children?
One Halloween (which my mother revered, much as hat-wearing Episcopalians love Easter) my mother decided that I should go as an Algerian. I didn’t know what an Algerian was, but it looked much like a genie and I liked my belly bare (despite the autumn chill) and that my face was obscured with a silk veil. The veil was deep red, one of my mother’s favorites, and smelled of Arpège perfume. To dress me, my mother had opened up one of the art books in the house and studied a painting by Delacroix. In the painting, the women’s faces were bare, but my mother assured me that this was the choice of the artist who wanted to catch all their beauty, not just their eyes. I remember this Halloween in particular because I didn’t go trick-or-treating. My father had arranged for some parent to pick me up at five and supervise my door-to-door collections, but my mother sensed a hesitancy on my part—the other children liked to make fun of me—and called them up and said I had a cold.
“What will I do?” I asked, relieved.
“Well,” she said, “we’ll just have to wait for the children to come here.”
“We don’t have any candy.”
“That’s true,” said my mother.
“We could go buy some,” I suggested.
“We could,” she smiled and I felt the hair on my arms stand up, “but that would be boring.”
She opened the kitchen cupboard and pulled out a box of brownie mix. She nodded to herself.
“Why don’t we just get candy?” I said again.
“Shut up, Katherine,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
She took her bottle of pills off the refrigerator (she’d been depressed, sleeping a lot for the last month, and I think the pills were meant to counteract that behavior) and shook it festively. I was only nine at the time and hadn’t really developed as a person, but I did have that unquestioning morality, which is the way of children. I said, “We can’t give the children pills.”
“Haven’t they been making fun of you?”
“They make fun of everyone,” I argued. “Besides, Miss Wood-house says it’s only because I’m smarter than they are.”
“What a lovely woman,” my mother said genuinely, but she had already dumped the contents of the brownie mix into the bowl and I knew the neighborhood children were doomed.
The first child to show up was Parker Burnham from across the street.
Parker—who must have been six—was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh outfit with the hood pushed off his head. He rang the doorbell just as the last of the brownies was being placed on the plate. Parker had perpetual allergies. His eyes were runny and his nostrils red-rimmed. He breathed through his open mouth and looked so pathetic that for a moment I thought I would do the noble thing and knock the brownies off the plate.
My mother opened the door.
“Drick or dreat,” said Parker Burnham.
“Trick,” said my mother, and offered him the plate. Parker didn’t know what to make of this and looked down the path at his mother, who was chatting with some other parent and not really paying attention. “Go on,” said my mother, “have one.”
“But it’s not wrapped.”
“Which is why you should eat it now, before your mother sees.”
And Parker gobbled it down.
By the end of the next hour, my mother’s dosed brownies had been ingested by a significant amount of children, who were exhibiting some bizarre behavior—specifically, the hyperactivity and hallucinating warned of on the bottle of pills. Randy Gertstein leaped off the roof of his front porch, forgetting that—even on TV—Batman didn’t fly. There was some candy dumping and a lot of mask-inspired hysteria. My mother was a dangerous woman.
When all the children had finally been rounded up and brought home, my mother made popcorn and we put on the TV, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde with Spencer Tracy. I found it hysterically funny, especially the way he showed his evil transformation by swinging his eyeballs and pulling his lips off his teeth. After that, we watched The Wolf Man. It must have been close to eleven when it ended (my father showed up in the last fifteen minutes) and I remember weeping at Lon Chaney Jr.’s demise as my father listened to the messages on the answering machine, mother after uncomprehending mother, wanting to speak with him as soon as possible.
12
I left for New Mexico the day after the Intravenous gig. I knew the drive would probably push the old VW Rabbit to its very limit, but I needed a long drive. Roads were the best thing about America—how it was possible to go and go for impossibly long periods of time without ever getting anywhere.
Arthur hugged me by the car. “This is your last chance,” he said.
“My last chance for what?”
“To take me with you,” he said.
I kissed him in a friendly way. “I have a couple of personal issues. I think a road trip will be good for me. And that will be good for us.”
Arthur nodded. He gave me fifty dollars so I wouldn’t have to rely solely on Boris’s credit card. I hoped Boris wouldn’t get the bill until I was already in New York. But the thought of Boris getting so pissed off that he dumped me really wasn’t that frightening, particularly not when tempered with the possibility of a mortgage-free property sale. This was not much of a plan and if I’d stayed around to think about it, I might have talked myself into something better. But I didn’t. Escape was too inviting, although all that time alone with a broken cassette player left me far too much time to think.
I thought of my mother’s pale hands and the expert way she could twist her unruly hair into one perfect, symmetrical bun. I thought of the soles of her shoes upturned as she gardened, the calculated way she must walk to wear such even treads. When she prepared vegetables, she held the knife lightly in her hand, her movements so fast that they were indistinguishable, and the rinds and peels fell away in perfect coils and petals. Her slices and juliennes were miraculously exact, products not of nature, but of my mother’s exquisite workmanship. My mother showed me how to apply makeup, how base was not a uniform mask, but rather stippled over dark spots, swept lightly across the smooth forehead and cheeks, how unevenness in application resulted in a regular, unblemished complexion. How was this woman, so capable of controlling nature, at the mercy of her body? Was there no way to save her?
I pulled into a truck stop some time after six. That day I had consumed two packs of Camel Lights, a dusty box of Oreos, and some Funyuns, which had blown out the window somewhere in Pennsylvania and were probably poisoning birds. I think I was in Indiana at that point, although I’m not sure if I’d managed to drive that far. All truck stops are the same to me. In the waning light, the land spread beyond the building and gas pumps in promising flatness. Even the sunset-lit clouds were strewn in horizontal shreds. I saw some low trees crouching beneath the weight of the sky. Against this, a blinding “Stuckey’s” sign outshone the sun, which—despite its gorgeous hot yellow—was slipping into the land with the hopelessness of an egg yolk flung against a glass pane.