THIRTEEN WAS HUGE for me. I finally got to see a grown man naked, and I fell in love—although not with the same person. The naked man was my stepfather, and seeing his fruit bowl only increased my aversion to him.
It was late at night and I’d been up reading Forever Amber. Ravenous from all that wanton behavior, I decided to make some toast and slather it with butter, Restoration London style. My room was adjacent to the kitchen, which was extremely convenient for nocturnal refreshment, and at night the kitchen became an integral part of my bedroom suite. So you can imagine my irritation when I opened up the door to see my stepfather bare-assed in front of the refrigerator.
I had to stuff my hand in my mouth to keep from screaming. Apart from my two brothers, the David was the only male anatomy I was familiar with, and his was the aesthetic penis of high art—a tidy marble package crowned with a pyramid of tastefully coiled tendrils. On backlit view in front of the Tupperware and cottage cheese and orange juice was a limp sea cucumber, one of those nasty, squirting, shell-less things that untalented fisher-persons like myself are forever pulling out of the ocean in a clump of dark, stringy kelp. No wonder my mother hit the Bacardi.
My stepfather was busy chugging a bottle of milk so I knew he hadn’t seen me, even though his wandering left eye seemed to stare out from beneath the Adolfian thatch of hair. I watched until he drank to the end of the bottle. He replaced the foil top, leaving an inch of spittle-laced backwash for someone’s cereal in the morning (my brother’s, because I wouldn’t tell him), farted robustly, and exited the kitchen. I closed my bedroom door on feathered hinges, leapt into bed, and yanked the covers up over my head. My appetite had vanished, probably for life.
One week, sixteen hours, and twenty minutes after my conception of idealized manhood was shattered (teenaged diaries are all about detail), I sat at the kitchen table slogging through a government-issued copy of The Merchant of Venice—in German, which made it even more gripping, if possible. My mother leaned against the sink in the late afternoon sunlight, reverentially bathing a head of jet-lagged iceberg lettuce like it was the Christ child. Her recent discovery of the Food Halls at Harrods—and, consequently, other long lost friends from departed shores: Tab, Rice- A-Roni, Chef Boyardee, Chun King, and Carnation Instant Breakfast—had so appeased her, she’d cut back on her dosage of Miltown by 200mgs.
A mound of raw chopped beef lay on a piece of butcher paper beside the sink. From time to time my mother would pinch off some of the meat and dunk it into what looked like floor sweepings.
“How the bejesus have I survived for two years without Lip-ton onion soup mix? And dreamy iceberg,” she said, smiling beatifically down at the puny lettuce on the drain board. Slicing a minuscule wedge, she spooned some gelatinous dressing over it and, shuddering with pleasure, took a bite. I flinched from habit as her teeth rang annoyingly on the tines of the fork.
My mother always changed for dinner before her husband came home from work. Tonight she was wearing one of their all-time favorites, the crocheted brown micromini dress. As usual, she skipped the underwear. The dress must have been made with the largest hook on the market, because there were more spaces than yarn, and my mother’s nipples poked through them like pencil erasers.
On cue, the rumble of a 3.0-liter V-12 engine could be heard turning onto our street. It revved to a wail as it streaked past the four Victorian row houses before our hideous detached modern brick. The Ferrari 250 GT spun through the gate and squealed to a halt in front of the only noncommercial six-car garage within forty miles. Out sprang Herr Peter Beer, as immaculately groomed as when he had left the house ten hours earlier. His gray flannels were still sharply creased, his shirt tautly tucked in, his custom John Lobb side-buckled shoes as glossy as when they’d come out of the box, and the black Hermès briefcase he gripped had barely sustained a scratch in ten years of service. The Ferrari gleamed as well, but he had me to thank for that: punishment in our house was dispensed in the form of a tin of simonize wax and an afternoon of flunky labor.
It was lucky I still didn’t have much of a social life. Given my propensity for screwing up, waxing my stepfather’s sports cars took up a fair amount of my time. There were six of them: a Porsche, three Ferraris, a Mercedes-Benz Gullwing, and its 300 SL roadster counterpart. Each perfectly maintained specimen was painted with about a million coats of silver lacquer that my stepfather insisted be buffed, burnished, stroked, and rubbed in a particularly exhaustive (and punitive) fashion.
My mother waved to her husband out the kitchen window, then returned to the stove to dump a cylinder of frozen orange juice over the pale carcass of a duck. She shoved the pan into the oven, licked her hair into place, and took a suck from her 7UP can that could have drained a wading pool.
“To—ré—a—dor, en gar—dé! To—ré—a—dor!” the Antichrist belted as he fussed about the Ferrari, flicking the road dust off with a feather duster, unrolling the fabric car cover, and enfolding his baby in it for the evening. He fancied himself a misunderstood tenor and sang opera far more than was necessary. He sang it all with theatrical gusto, in the seven languages he was fluent in.
The garage door ground shut. Smooth leather heels sounded on the front path. And then, “WAA HOO!” hailed the Tenor. The front door sprang open with a rush of 4711 cologne.
“HOO WAA!” returned my mother, whipping off her apron.
“Where are you, little one?”
“Coming, my Lord and Master!”
That was always my cue to exit stage right so I wouldn’t have to watch him suck out her tonsils and make bread out of her butt.
Beneath the stairs in the core of our house was a triad of tiny gun rooms. These were referred to as the outer, the middle, and the (high-caliber) inner sanctums. Within were samples of what was represented in the tens of thousands at my stepfather’s arms factory: Soviet AK-47s and Dragunovs, Israeli submachine Uzis, German Walther PPK pistols, Belgian Brownings, Italian Berettas, French Chatelleraults, Chinese and Dutch hand grenades, American M-79 grenade launchers; you get the picture.
My stepfather was all for sharing his enthusiasm for the weapons industry.
“Look at this beauty,” he said one evening after dinner, placing a rifle in my seven-year-old brother’s lap. Edward sat on the floor, still in his gray flannel uniform shorts, his shirt untucked and spotted with spaghetti sauce, his tie askew. He’d been playing with his Matchbox cars and was justifiably uneasy at having been singled out for enlightenment. My mother glanced over from where she was slunk in a black butterfly chair (in a leather mini and fishnets) working on her thesis. She was in her second year of graduate school at Oxford.
“Some jokers think this is an AK-47,” said my stepfather. “Ha! It is not!”
Edward stared dolefully at the weapon. Inspired, the Lord and Master leapt up and exited the living room to return a moment later with another hulking assault rifle.
“This is an AK-47.” He leveled the gun and peered with his non-roving eye down the sight at Inky, our recently acquired pound dog, who exhibited her hallmark stupidity by yawning back at him.
Taking up the original rifle from my brother, he stroked it lovingly from its slotted forearm to its cutout skeleton stock. “And this,” he crooned, “this is an SVD: a Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova—the first rifle specifically designed for sniping!”
“Blimey,” said Edward, dutifully, and looked toward his mother. But she had given up trying to shield him from these stepfather-stepson moments. Her hands tightened on her notebook, but she said nothing.
“That old Dragunov, now he knew how to design a rifle! The magazine alone took eleven months and twenty-three days to design!” My stepfather said this in an awestruck, Russian-accented whisper, as if he could hardly fathom such a feat of creation.
“They may look the same, but the likeness is strictly cosmetic.” He was trying to transfer some of his zeal to this pathetic child. “The critical difference is the gas system. The Dragunov has a short-stroke gas piston, do you understand?” Edward’s lip trembled and a tear rolled down his cheek. He knew he was failing in the role of stepson, but he was powerless to act any differently. Like all of us, he was terrified of the man.
“Ach!” said the Lord and Master, sitting back on his heels in disgust. “Leslie, your son is a coward.”
“Waaahhh!” cried Edward.
My mother remained in her chair, conjugating Greek verbs, and sucking hard on her 7UP can. She’d make up for Edward later, in bed.
Puberty had not been going too well for me.
After school one day my mother had marched me into the underwear department of the local Marks & Spencer.
“Listen,” I’d hissed to her as, one after another, she snapped through the racks of gargantuan brassieres, “I don’t even want a bra! Everyone at school will laugh at me—even more than they do already.”
“Oh, poppycock.” She had signaled to the saleslady, a steel-haired matron with a proud, two-acre chest, as I slumped in my mortification.
“I can’t believe you don’t carry a 32AA.” I clutched the glass counter at my mother’s pronunciation of “can’t” as cawn’t. Her fake accent was a constant source of public humiliation.
“I am most dreadfully sorry, madam,” the woman clipped back, her metal spectacles disdainfully down her nose, her hands in prayer over her balcon.
“Just what do you expect girls this age to do?”
“Why, we expect them to grow, madam. I shouldn’t worry, time will take care of her.” She turned with dismissal to the next customer, a spotty girl with double Ds who stood arm in arm with her quadruple-E mum.
My suddenly American mother had grabbed the saleslady’s pink arm. “Well we don’t have time. My daughter needs some boobs now.” With her free hand she continued to rifle through the bras. “Just find me four of the smallest goddamn bras you’ve got, already.”
In the end, her Yankee ingenuity overpowered my modesty. In front of The Avengers that evening, my mother stitched me a set of breasts. She cut the padded cup of a generic brassiere along the seam, brought the bottom half up over the top, and sewed it back into place.
“The sooner we get you into one of these, the better,” my mother had said through the pins in her mouth.
The result was a spongy but credible B-cup bustline.
I wore my new chest out shopping the following weekend, and imagined the admiration of every boy along the high street. I came home and actually hugged my mother. This was a mistake—it convinced her she was making headway.
On the morning of my fourteenth birthday, while I was inhaling a celebratory stack of toast drenched in butter, my mother presented me with a small, carefully wrapped present. Wiping my hands on my school uniform, I took it from her.
She beamed. “Go on, open it up.”
I did, and sat frowning at a round plastic container. “What is it?”
“It’s the Pill, nitwit. Do you love it?”
“The Pill? I don’t need birth control.”
“Bullshit,” she laughed, unwrapping the cellophane from her own breakfast, a caramel-flavored Ayds candy, and popping it in her mouth. “Maybe you don’t now, but you will soon. Trust me.”
“Did you send Will a six-pack of rubbers when he turned fourteen?”
“Are you kidding? He’s just like his father. He’s so sexless he wouldn’t know what to do with ’em.”
I stashed the thing in my bathroom with all the unopened boxes of Tampax she continued to buy me every month.
Within hours of becoming friends with Josephine Doran, I had adopted her family. All that was lacking was the paperwork. In their compassion, the Dorans allowed me to live at their house pretty much full-time without actually residing there, which greatly improved my view of humanity. It amused me no end to think of my grandparents coming to visit me there, my grandfather having to use the Doran household bathroom, or my grandmother being offered Nescafé in the mug with the fornicating dwarves as she perched on the edge of the sprung mohair sofa in a pink shantung Mainbocher with Dino the stegosaurus salivating freely against her side.
Despite her imperfect features and pockmarked skin, Josephine was pure jailbait. There was something minxish about the way she hiked her pleated brown kilt high up on her thighs and slunk her kneesocks down around her ankles before trotting past boys, men, and grandfathers even.
In her wake I began to make progress. After I left the house on school mornings, I would emulate the master by stuffing my brown felt boater in my book bag and rolling my kilt up at the waist so that the hem barely reached the bottom of my regulation brown wool knickers. We timed it so that Josephine and I caught the same bus to school. I’d get on five stops earlier and wait for her in the front seat at the top of the double-decker bus. When we reached our stop near school, we’d flounce down the twisty stairs and hop off in front of the butcher shop. With our noses in the air, we’d traipse past the lab-coated apprentices as they staggered from truck to shop under enormous, stiff carcasses. Swiveling around to gawk, they’d bang into one another like stooges, tripping over the sides of beef and mutton hind ends. It was a revelation that all I had to do for attention was wear falsies and show my underpants.
Naturally my mother endorsed this new trend.
“Hey, Toots,” she said to me one afternoon. “I passed you on the high street today when you and that Doran girl were walking to school. I like the new look. You know, the skirt-up-to-your-ass look. Just don’t let your teachers catch you.”
I folded my arms and sunk my chin into my fiber-assisted chest, and stared mutinously at the floor.
“But you know,” she went on, “your legs would look a lot better if you’d lay off dairy products for a while.”
“But do YOU know,” I spat, “if you were normal, you’d be mad—like Josephine’s mother would be, if she caught her.”
My mother whirled around from the stove.
“Maybe you’d prefer I was one of those sagging old bats that hang around the house, porking out on the stuff they cook for their fat families.” She shook a wooden spoon at me, making her huge Diver Dan self-winding Rolex go whirrrrrrrr.
Sulkily, I shook my head.
Emma Peel (M-an-A-p-PEAL) was the fashion icon my mother lionized. Accordingly, today she was all in black in an Avengers-style stretchy faux leather catsuit and stack-heeled patent leather knee-high boots. She had on her favorite lipstick, Fabergé Nude Pink, which made her look like she’d been eating pink marshmallows. My mother probably had a couple more good years to carry on this Bond girl stuff, but she was thirty-nine and looked like a J-O-K-E in my opinion. I, on the other hand, was ever so slightly pudgy, and wore glasses, and was understandably resentful as hell. When not in my shit brown school uniform, I tended to cover my body up in floor-length hippie skirts or patch-adorned, bell-bottomed jeans; when my mother wasn’t Mrs. Peel, or the Girl from U.N.C.L.E., she was the Girl from Chelsea in Mary Quant shiny plastic raincoats with upturned collars, and wet-look microminis, and skinny-rib sweaters. I tramped around in Roman-style lace-up-to-the-knee leather sandals, or short, fringed suede booties; my mother was into thigh-high white patent leather boots. My drawers were stuffed with shapeless, long-sleeved T-shirts. She had a closet full of YSL see-through blouses.
Poor thing, she must have really thought I’d had a breakthrough when she spotted me on the high street.
What she should have appreciated even more was that summer’s Herculean efforts to make peace with the Lord and Master. Naturally, there was a motive: I needed the surveillance equipment from the middle sanctum to track the movements of the deity whose family had just moved in across the canal from us. His name was George, and I was throbbingly in love with him. He was the quintessence of summer, androgynous youth, and exquisite pathos. He was tall, nicotine-stained, and consumptively slender, and had straight, straw blond hair to his shoulders. His beautiful open face was sunburned, and his wide-spaced eyes were the color of his faded Levi’s. A study through a pair of German Zeiss military eight-by-sixty binoculars revealed fingernails bitten to the quick, a gold St. Christopher medal, and an appendicitis scar I wanted to lick.
Most evenings, when it began to get dark, George would wander down to the canal, untie the blue dinghy that lay moored there, and set himself adrift. The canal was maybe thirty feet wide, running the length of the two streets whose houses backed up on it, and it flowed westward into the Thames. George never followed it though; he just allowed the dinghy to swing gently about in serpentine patterns, as if it were stuck on a Disneyland ride, unable to stray from an underwater track.
An elderly beagle always accompanied him, and the two sat in silence, the dog’s nose stretched toward the twilight scents, George chain-smoking. I’d watch him until the night grew solid and the boat fused with the dark water, and the only discernible details became the glow of George’s cigarette and the woofling nostrils of the beagle opening and closing.
You’re wondering how on earth I could see those nostrils in the pitch dark. That’s where a night vision device—an NVD—comes in mighty handy. My stepfather kept one in the middle sanctum, and, once I’d sighted George, I began to barter Ferrari waxing time against the use of it.
The first time I used the night vision goggles to spy on George I just about threw up—not from guilt, but from motion sickness. I hadn’t read the label on the inside of the head strap that said, “Proper Scanning Critical to NVG Operations.” Looking through the goggles was sort of like looking down a tunnel to a green television screen. There was no peripheral vision, so you had to swing your head from side to side, which, if you’re bumbling about in a dark place with a weird thing strapped over your eyes, can make you feel pretty ill. I couldn’t see much farther than four hundred feet, but that was far enough. George looked heavenly in pistachio green.
He didn’t seem to mind it when I got the nerve to insinuate myself into his conspicuously ample downtime. I began to sit with him in his dinghy in the evenings, and on Sunday afternoons he’d allow me to accompany him to the pub down the street, the beagle in perpetual tow. We’d sit out back in the grassy garden that fronted on the slow-moving Thames of summer, a couple in my mind. George would order room-temperature bitter, which he drank silently, in deep drafts, while I had to settle for shandy, a lager-and-lemonade mixture invented to placate the meek and underage. We’d share a Ploughman’s Lunch—two slabs of bread with a hunk of dry, aromatic cheddar cheese in between. “Share” isn’t the right word really. George would have one bite and chain-smoke while I nervously demolished the sandwich, wallowing in the hazy nimbus of his sweet pollution. On the rare occasions he spoke, I’d give him the consideration of an oracle, gazing at him with more reverence and veneration than any god has ever been afforded. As he stared out at the river, or at a cloud, or at the beagle, I’d venture shamelessly love-struck glances. When I’d look at his mouth, an unfamiliar worm would flip around in my future uterus, and when the golden hairs of his forearm accidentally brushed against mine, I’d envision our dogs mating.
When George finally invited me chez lui for dinner, it wasn’t the formal, hand-delivered note and forest of roses that I’d fantasized about, but rather a casual offering from his embankment as I drifted downstream in a kayak.
“It won’t be much,” he said, studying the path of a bumblebee on the gunwale of his dinghy. “My parents are out.”
How terribly disappointing.
I would have long since petitioned George to come over to my house, but for the obvious deterrent: my mother. I knew from experience that she would attire herself in one of her favorite slutfits—like the chrome yellow leather micromini and matching zip-up vest (no shirt, no bra)—and would ambush George as he made his way up from the water. Or, as she had done on my only two previous dates, she might appear in her après-dinner togs, a filmy leopard print negligee left open to reveal a crotch-length, see-through baby-doll. There was always a reason to bend over, to offer some beer, which she kept conveniently on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator even though no one in our house drank the stuff, or to myopically check the dog’s water bowl. Whoops! Why, she forgot to put on any panties! (Again!)
The problem with my mother was her looks were peaking—big-time. Her beauty was the kind that is not only strictly physical, but of an era. Once she took her glasses off, she’d looked great in the fifties, and fantastic in the sixties. Now it was the early seventies and she was still hot, but definitely on the downside. To get a sense of the evolution of my mother’s looks think Brigitte Bardot then (minus the boobs) and Brigitte Bardot now (minus the hairpieces).
In preparation for the big night I bathed slowly, with extreme care. “This is the last time I’ll lie in this bath as a virgin,” I said aloud. “This is the last time I’ll shampoo my hair as a virgin. This is the last time I’ll pluck the hairs out of my mole as a virgin . . . step into these underpants as a virgin . . . brush my virgin hair with the hairbrush belonging to a virgin.” I had high expectations for the evening.
At the appointed hour I traipsed beguilingly down to the water’s edge in a tail-dragging multicolored paisley skirt, a gauzy Mexican embroidered blouse, and cork-soled platform sandals. My hair was nearly waist-length, and I wore it loose in cool-hippie style with two little braids at the sides. I concealed my glasses in a fringed shoulder bag, along with a hairbrush, three pots of No. 19 lip gloss, and a tube of spermicidal jelly I was forced to shoplift from Boots the Chemist because I was too embarrassed to buy it.
George appeared thirty minutes later and punted languidly across to my side. The beagle grudgingly moved over, and I settled my voluminous ensemble, posing and composing myself for the ninety-second passage to the other side.
From my side of the canal it had been difficult to observe much of George’s house through its protective screen of shrubbery and vines, but now I saw that it was disappointingly middle-class, and thoroughly devoid of all previously imagined topiary, turrets, and cupolas. We entered through graceless French doors that led to a back hallway papered in an enthusiastic, if faded, chintz. A gray-haired wedge-shaped woman wearing an apron emblazoned with a psychedelic map of the London underground transportation system came forward to greet us. She turned out not to be the serving maid or tenured housekeeper but George’s mother. I suppressed a cry of dismay. What the hell was she doing here?
Cooking dinner, it turned out.
“You two go on up to Georgie’s room,” she said, waving her hand toward the rear of the house. And I thought my household was loose. I followed George up the narrow staircase to the third floor, the beagle struggling behind. At last, I was able to look out instead of in through the large garden-facing windows of George’s bedroom, and I did so with smug ownership. The room might have belonged to a six-year-old; there were no posters on the walls like in other boys’ rooms that I’d seen, and the shelves held only juvenile literature—picture books, Enid Blyton stories, and the graphic tales of Tintin. The only concession to the maturity of the occupant was the double bed and a pair of enormous sneakers in the corner.
In his own domain George became uncharacteristically chatty. He walked about, showing me his things like a kid with a new friend over; memorabilia like a Jerusalem hotel ashtray; his original front teeth, which had been knocked clear out of his head when he’d slammed his Triumph motorbike into a wall; and his collection of hash pipes, which I obligingly gawked at. (He does drugs. How cool.)
“And this is the pistol I had to carry when I worked on a kibbutz in Israel.” He indicated something that looked like a prop and laughed a bit sheepishly. “I’m afraid I kept it.”
I was thinking, You call that a gun? Come over to my house and I’ll show you a gun. Still, I followed him around, hyperventilating in what I hoped was an adorable fashion, trying to tell him through an admittedly beginner level of body language that it was quite okay for him to ravish me whenever he felt like it.
There was a tap at the door. “Hullo!” called the motherservant as she staggered in under the weight of an enormous dinner tray. I pushed the sudden image of Selma, my grandparents’ octogenarian maid, out of my head. George rushed forward and took the tray from his mother, setting it down on the bed. On it were two plates heaped with roast chicken and potatoes, a bowl of salad, a lemon tart, and a straw covered bottle of Chianti. I half expected George’s mother to wink as she backed out the door. George inserted a Ravi Shankar cassette into the tape deck, then uncorked the Chianti and poured some into a pair of heavy pewter goblets. “Cheers,” he said, raising his wine and lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of his old one.
We ate, the beagle between us on the bed, periodically rolling his tongue out for the master to place bits of food on. The newly loquacious George yakked on about the last three years he’d spent on the kibbutz, and I lay back on one elbow, trying to look like a sexpot while I frantically channeled Julie Christie and Marianne Faithfull.
When the meal was finished, meaning I had stuffed myself and George had rolled and smoked at least five cigarettes, he yawned and gave a long, slow stretch that was mind-blowing. I actually left my body as I imagined George taking me roughly into his arms to ply me with his manhood. But instead of ripping off my clothes, he picked up the dinner tray and headed for the kitchen. The beagle fired a salvo of farts and flopped over on its side, whereupon it fell instantly asleep and began to snore. I got up and checked my teeth in the mirror above George’s bureau. I ran my fingers through my hair and under my mascara-smudged eyes and then returned to the bed, where I shoved the beagle to the floor and arranged myself in what I hoped was an irresistibly salacious pose.
George was taking his sweet time. Was he doing the dishes? Was his mother giving him advice? I checked my teeth again, then re-coiled myself on the pillows, hiking my skirt casually up one thigh. Had he run out for condoms? Was he washing himself? That would be good; I could deal with a clean unknown better than a smelly one. I was worried about my lack of experience. Really, when faced with the business end of a penis, how could a first-timer possibly know what to do? The wine had made me sleepy, and I closed my eyes (for the last time as a virgin) and drifted.
George plopped suddenly down beside me. I caught my breath. This was it. I slid my eyes toward his with what I hoped was an encouraging gaze. George smiled down at me—and then he reached under the bed and pulled out a colossal textbook. He opened it up across his lap. I sat up to examine the title: Skin Diseases of Sub-Equatorial Peoples.
“One of my father’s medical books,” George said, giving me a conspiratorial grin.
With a yellow fingertip he directed my attention to a close-up of some poor native’s skinny foot, and its huge, ulcerated wound filled to the bubbling brim with a zillion wriggling maggots. I fished my very unsexy glasses out of my bag. It looked like raw hamburger left in the garbage for a month.
“Poor sod,” said George, shaking his head. “Severe myiasis.”
“What?”
“Myiasis—the invasion of tissue by dipterous larvae. Flies. Disgusting, really.” He skimmed to another page. Slavic children wearing diapery undergarments lay in cots. Crusted, cracking lesions covered their sunken little stomachs, their hands and feet encased in scar-tissue mittens and gigantic blister bubbles.
“Recessive dystrophice epidermolysis bullosa,” George said, pointing at a whimpering toddler holding out stumpy arms with paper basketballs for hands. “Kid’s a goner.”
My stomach put dinner on blend.
George tapped his cigarette on the face of a dark-haired woman who would have been beautiful if her left eyeball and nose hadn’t been rotting away. “Funny that the principle chronic infections—you know, tuberculosis, syphilis, leprosy, and leishmaniasis—all have rather a fondness for the nose.” Flipping to DNA mutations, he said, “Check it out,” indicating a picture of an infant’s head. It looked like a Mayan frog. “Anencephaly. Absence of the cranial vault.”
“Anencephaly?” I looked fearfully at the blob.
“No brain.” He turned the page, humming along with the sitar on the tape deck. God, I loved him for that. We were talking about a baby with NO TOP TO ITS SKULL and he was like, ho hum.
He stopped at a picture of a little blond girl with a charming Dutch girl hairdo, and eyes that were fried eggs running off on either side of her face.
“Treacher Collins syndrome,” stated George. “Bloody sad, really.”
We were straying way too far from the task at hand. “You know,” I interjected, as George turned to a page of African men with elephantiasis, one proudly displaying his scrotum in a wheelbarrow, “I used to want to be a mortician.”
“Did you now,” said George politely.
“Yeah,” I said, warming to the task of impressing him. “I wanted to concentrate on preparing the bodies of children.” I was completely bullshitting, of course. What idiot would want to embalm kids?
“Did you think that would be easier?”
“No. I just wanted to make them beautiful, preserve them really well, so that the grieving parents could sort of, you know, keep them around?”
George finally put the book aside. Gathering his papers and his bag of tobacco, he began to roll the next ten cigarettes he would smoke in nearly as many minutes. I felt my face and neck flush with embarrassment. I knew he knew I was lying.
But he was a gentleman. “For one thing,” he said, running the tip of his tongue along the gummed edge of a rolling paper, making my armpits gush in the sweat of desire, “that would only prolong the grief. For another, it would be highly unsanitary.”
“What do you mean?” I was appalled he thought I’d do a bad job on the embalming.
George struck a match against the zipper of his jeans and put it to his cigarette. He sucked on the burning taper, squinting his eyes against the little cinders that flew up as the tobacco caught. Inhaling deeply, he turned back to me and said, “With a dead body there’s no immune system functioning to keep all the disease organisms in check. Microorganisms, bacteria and germs, all kinds of shit proliferate after the death of the host. Within twenty-four hours autolysis has gone mad—”
“Autolysis?” I squeaked.
“Yeah. When we shove off, the enzymes produced by the cells in our bodies break down the very cells that make them. Although embalming reduces the bacterium in a corpse by ninety-nine percent, rotting is unavoidable. Embalming is basically just for the funeral, so everyone can have a look-see.”
“I knew that.”
“Course you could use a greater concentration of formaldehyde in your solution when you embalm the kiddiewinks.” George looked out the window and smoked contemplatively, as if picturing pickled dead children.
“Medical colleges can keep cadavers around for donkey’s years,” he said, turning back to me, “but they don’t look very appealing, I’m afraid.”
He was a miracle. “I can’t believe you’re not in medical school.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Seriously, why aren’t you studying to be a doctor?”
“My dad’s dead keen on that,” he said, shaking the hair back from his glorious face and looking up at the ceiling. “He would love me to be a doctor like him. Go into practice with him. Father and son.” He gave a little laugh.
“So why don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, blowing a breath out. “Truth is, I’ve got a photographic memory.” He delivered this extraordinary talent like it was a freckle on his arm.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Bloody fuckin’ wow. Here, I’ll show you. Find me something to read.” He handed one of the medical books over.
“Okay,” I said, and started paging through Syndromes—Hurler, Prune Belly, Sirenomelia (lower legs disconcertingly fused at birth)—I stopped at Cri du Chat syndrome because the name was catchy and the text long-winded.
“Try this one,” I said, folding my arms and leaning back against the headboard to watch.
George read silently. When he was finished he got up and paced around the room for a while, excused himself to go to the bathroom, returned, and then, standing in front of his bureau, he recited the page and a half worth of deletion of the short arm of chromosome 5, verbatim. It was unreal.
“It’s all very well to know the stuff,” he said. “I could pass the exams; that’s not the issue. Anyway, I’ve pretty much fried my brain on psychotropics. Nothing like a steady diet of acid, opium, and mushrooms.”
I wanted to say, That’s okay, I intend to love you forever—even if you’re a completely brainless tape recorder. But couldn’t you please just kiss me?
“Hey, you want to see a book on ophthalmic surgery?” said George.
With that, all the seduc flooded out of the seductress.
“Could I, um, take a rain check?”
We descended through the silent house, and he and the beagle ferried me back across the water. George helped me out politely, but when I turned to thank him for a lovely evening, he had already climbed back into the dinghy and was languidly feathering his way home, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old and searching up at the sky.
My mother was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She was wearing a hideous terry-cloth robe. The hood was pulled up over her head and she had on her glasses instead of her contact lenses. This was always a sign of trouble; the only time my mother was not clad for coition was when the Lord and Master was away buying hardware in Beirut, or she was having a very bad day.
The rum bottle was at her elbow, and the roast beef pan from dinner, with its congealed drippings, in front of her. She was alternating spoonfuls of beef fat with slugs from her 7UP can. The diet notes on the fridge shivered as I entered. I steeled myself for a scathing comment on my outfit, or maybe my shutout with George, which I knew she could smell on me. However, it wasn’t my sex life that was on her mind.
“The shin of Shodom is upon us,” she said by way of greeting. She squinted down at the grease-caked pan. “The shin of Shodom is upon thish house.”
It appeared she was in a ruminative mood.
“Whatever you say,” I said, leaning against the fridge to cover the notes. It was the least I could do to help her.
My mother took a pull on her drink and fixed her Coke bottle lenses upon me. “Here’sh a word for you,” she said. “Analingush.”
Here we go again.
I sat down beside her. She did look terrible. “Hey, guess what famous psychiatrist was embalmed at Harrods.” Anything Harrods usually cheered her up.
She shook her head and spooned up some more fat.
“Algolagnia,” she said.
“I’ll give you a hint—his first name is Sigmund.”
She sucked at the soda can, tilting her head so far back the hood fell to her shoulders with a thwop. “I’m gonna shell my ITT and my Guf ’n Western shtock and buy a place of my own.”
“That’s right,” I said, patting her hand. “Freud.”
“An my Kodak too.” She shook my hand off, and took another hit of suet.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know you could buy a baby elephant at Harrods.” It killed me to see her beaten down like this. We certainly had our issues, but when the shit hit the fan my mother was there for me. On a recent overnight school trip, I had stayed innocently out past curfew, but the school had responded with a barrage of letters to my mother about my very American disregard for authority. My mother, in turn, had launched a campaign against the teacher who’d outed me, one that only the daughter of a colonel steeped in Revolutionary history could wage. She was brilliant. I just had to learn how to be there for her too. It sure wasn’t easy.
My mother belched, and then fixed me with a surprisingly sober stare. “No, I did not—and frankly, Tootsh, all I care ish that I can get my hair colored on the fifth floor, buy a toplessh bathing shuit on the fourth, and a shix-pack of Tab on my way outta the door.” She sloshed a few more fingers of Bacardi into her 7UP can.
“You are so fucking selfish!”
“Up yours,” said my mother through a mouthful of rum and beef fat.
I took that as a good night.
Lucky I’m an optimist. I rationalized that George was shy, that he was the type that waited until the fourth or fifth date to get physical. Hey, I could wait, I had all summer. All my life in fact.
But this power thing, the notion of control through one’s sexuality, I was starting to figure it out. I had power over the butcher boys with the raising of my hemline. I had power over my brothers, because they were dyslexic, Type B non-survivors. My stepfather had tyrannical and financial power over my mother, but she was able to manipulate him with what she wore, or whether she put out, and whether she even stayed with him. And with my father, she may have wielded the ultimate power—if the rumors spread by my father’s shattered parents were to be believed.
A couple of weeks later I was at my usual position, at the window on the second-floor landing, with a high-powered telescope trained on George’s window. My transistor radio was tuned to Radio Luxembourg, the volume so low you could barely hear the bleat of the American disc jockeys. Stakeout provisions included two packets of salt-and-vinegar crisps, a Mars bar, and a copy of Candy, the filthiest book I had ever come across. Every three pages or so, I checked the window. Evening was coming on, and out of the goodness of her heart, Candy was having sex with her father’s brother when suddenly the lights flicked on in George’s bedroom.
I palpitated when I saw a figure enter behind him. I relaxed when I saw it was a guy. Must be one of his mates, I thought. But then the mate put his hands on George’s shoulders. And then the mate pulled George’s shirt over his head. And then he pulled off his own Led Zeppelin T-shirt. (That’s how good that telescope was.) George just stood there, arms and hands at his sides. That’s when the little shit leaned forward and put his lips on my George’s tender smoky mouth. And that’s when I went berserk and must have screamed, because my stepfather came running up the stairs, Herald Tribune still in hand. He snatched the binoculars from me. “Ha ha!” he snorted. “You are in luff with a pansy!” Shaking his head, he sauntered back to his armchair in the living room.
I got a bead on George’s window again. They were still standing. That was good news. But now the interloper was leaning down to unfasten the buttons on George’s Levi’s. He knelt to do it. That was very bad news. His head dipped below the sash of the window, so it was hard to rate his performance, or pick up tips for future reference. George remained upright, arms by his sides, like he hadn’t asked for this, but as long as it was happening and he didn’t have to contribute, it was bloody all right with him.
My mother suddenly appeared and pushed me aside. She watched for a moment in silence. “Well that’s just ducky,” she said. Straightening up, she patted me awkwardly on my drooping shoulders. I let down my guard and clung to her for a good three seconds. After my sobbing had subsided, she detached herself and began to dismantle the telescope, clucking sympathetically, and telling me how many handsome men were in my future, and how George wasn’t good enough for me, although she had rather liked the beagle.
Being young and resilient, I immediately transferred my affections to the reptile keeper at the zoo where I had a summer job.
A week before school started up again, I was road testing a new pair of Zeiss eight-by-sixty field glasses. I trained them on George’s window, sort of for old time’s sake. Lo and behold if he wasn’t in pretty much the same spot I’d left him: arms by his sides, gazing at whatever—only this time the hands unbuckling his belt and the mouth addressing his southern hemisphere belonged to a girl.
It didn’t take me too many years past puberty to figure out that it had been nothing personal; I’d just been too slow on the uptake.
I never saw George after that summer. His parents moved away and a professional race car driver and his bouncy-breasted girlfriend bought the house. I did hear from him once, though. A flimsy envelope the same color as his damn faded Levi’s arrived in the post a year or so later. It was the sort of old-fashioned airmail stationery that makes you think of the time when overnight transatlantic flights were full of adventure and promise. The stamp and postmark were from somewhere that echoed that notion. Anyway, he’d forgotten to put the letter inside, so that was that.