She laughs that ironic kind of laugh people do when they don’t believe what they just said and closes her eyes. “You kicked really hard. Hard enough so that I yelped. Like you were already wearing your Doc Martens. It was just so obvious you were pissed off at me.” She laughs again. “I spit the pills out onto the floor. Then I slept.”
If I have feet, I don’t feel them. Or shins or knees. Even my hands and face feel like feathers. Still, I don’t move my eyes off of the mirror. Even though they’ve gone all watery blur, I don’t blink. I got no words for this. What sentence do you make when your mother just told you she tried to off herself with you waiting inside her belly for your ticket out?
“Dora, I want to tell you something important.”
Really. Great timing.
“You aren’t going to like it, but it will be true anyway.”
Awesome.
“Dora, you’re gonna have to learn to choose your battles. You have to stop fighting everything, and learn when to fight something that matters.”
Part of me wants to punch her straight in the kisser. You’ve been NUMBO for seventeen years and NOW you want to deliver some sage advice? Like we’re a mother and daughter? I clench my jaw and unclench it and clench it and unclench it. Wish I could put something in my mouth and bite the fuck out of it.
“S’that it?” I ask.
“Oh fuck it,” she says. She stands up, turns away from me toward the shower curtain, then turns back. It’s just that,” and she reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. “This is for you,” she says, holding the piece of paper out to me. “It’s why I went to Vienna. Somebody died. Somebody you never knew, but I did. At least for a while. My … my mother.”
For about thirty seconds I just let her hand and the piece of paper sit suspended in the air between us. A mother, a daughter, a piece of paper. It’s the most large thing that’s passed between us in a very long time. Maybe ever. On the other side of the wall Ave Maria is trying to match television commercial jingles with her voice. Finally I take the piece of paper.
You know what? It’s not a piece of paper. It’s a big bank check. Powder blue. A check for $1.7 million. You heard me. Made out to Ida Bauer. My birth name. Whoever she is.
Money. Again. Sig. Silverfuck. Now her. Is everything there is about being a girl in this world about money or genitals? Is life just a giant series of transactions?
My breathing goes weird. The check looks like a forgery. A cartoon. A graphic art project. A Xerox. A reproduction.
Anything but real. I quickly crumple it up hard in my hand and pop it in my mouth. My mother doesn’t flinch. I stare at her staring at me in the mirror. Inside my mouth the crumpled up fortune tastes like wood pulp and ink. It fills my mouth and jabs at the flesh of my cheeks. I turn and look at my mother head on.
She tilts her head and crosses her arms over her boobs. She sighs. She has the hint of a smile. “She wanted you to have the silver set as well,” my mother says, “but I suspect you’d just bend all the heads over or something equally … imaginative.”
I can’t help it. It makes me laugh. All those spoons with their heads bowed like dutiful fucked up silver nuns. I reach down into my kneesock and pull out the spoon I nearly always have with me. Against my skin. I hold it up between us. On the convex side is my elongated spooky looking head. On the concave side is hers. We both smile. Alike almost. Only my smile has paper where teeth should be, like when you put an orange peel there. I bend the head of the spoon over and hand it to her.
“I’ll treasure it,” she says, maybe kidding.
I turn back to the mirror. I spit the crumpled up $1.7 mil out of my mouth into the bathroom sink. I uncrumple it. I stare at it in the sink. It’s damp, but salvageable. I don’t mean the check just. I mean my life.
“Happy birthday, Dora,” my mother says, as she almost seems to move toward me kinda like we might embrace.
Epiloguish Thingee
HOSPITALS. FUCK’EM. I’VE HAD MY FILL, I CAN TELL YOU.
Same creepy fluorescent lighting, same odd assortment of losers waiting in earth-toned little hell rooms, same bizzaro industrial floor cleaner smell mixed with sweat and blood. Flocks of fucky doctors and nurses milling about. Ave Maria is sitting across from me in a — you guessed it, Naugahyde chair — swinging her legs up and down. Little Teena is thumbing through an issue of American Sailing. I’m making my signature fingernail patterns in a Styrofoam coffee cup.
We’re waiting for Marlene to come out of surgery. They won’t let us anywhere closer because we’re not family.
There’s a lot I could tell you about that word family.
A month after the Holiday Inn episode me, Ave Maria, and Little Teena ate lunch in the restaurant on top of the Space Needle. Courtesy of Ave Maria’s mom. All three of us high as kites, higher even than the Space Needle. Ave Maria pitched bites of food with a fork over her tipsy mother’s head, Little Teena wore a fez, Obsidian ordered some dessert on fire and for the first time I noticed that the view up there? It’s kind of awesome. If you walk around the thing in a circle, and you can avoid the freaky vertigo because of the slightly-slanted walkway and the ever-so-slowly-spinning disk, it’s downright gorgeous. The sound. The mountains. The city. All the neighborhoods and sigh and bulge of life.
I ordered lamb for lunch. I’ve never eaten lamb. I feel bad for eating baby sheep but FUCK it’s good. Like melt-in-your-mouth good. And after two martinis, who gives a shit about PETA? It was kind of a going away party. Ave Maria is going to Yale. You heard me. What? I told you they were rich. I do wish I could plant a nanny cam in her room just to see how the snooty snoots react to her. Little Teena got a paid gig down in San Francisco to tickle the ivories at a gay jazz club. I know! Life is good.
About our … teen drama, well, I already told you: wigs, work. No one ever had any idea who we were. Or are. There is not surveillance camera footage. No evidence we were ever there. Except some cockamamie story the three men who were arrested told.
The three stooges, A.K.A. the publicity agent and his goons, were arrested for attempted kidnapping. Turns out Marlene was in the trunk of their car. When they ran out that night to chase us and discovered the Obsidian-slashed tires, Smiley called the cops from inside the halfway house and enunciated perfectly into the phone that three perpetrators who had killed the intake guy at the halfway house also had some big black tranny in the trunk of their car and they were trying to escape. “Murderous perverts,” Ted kept saying into the phone. “Preying on helpless trapped children!” But when the cops arrived, Smiley just went back to his tard shtick.
There was no record of Obsidian ever having existed.
Someone in the hospital waiting room farts. I look at Little Teena. He nods his head up and down in the universal yup,’twas I gesture, then says, “Why does everything about sailing sound like gay sex?” He looks up from his magazine. “Check it: able bodied seaman. Aft bow spring line. Anchor ball. Anchor chocks. Barrelman. Back and fill. Bimini top. I mean Christ, it sounds like some kind of SM play party.”
Ave Maria laughs like a shy little girl and covers her face. Then she goes, “Whoa,” solemnly. She holds her arms out in front of her. Her wrists have brown and yellow and blue bruises on them. Faint, but there. From me. “Aren’t those the coolest bracelets in ever?”
I love her I love her I love her.
I look down at my dirt water coffee cup. In spite of myself, I’ve carved a fingernail heart.