A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Page 16

  But the radiation worked, at least temporarily. Within weeks the limp was gone, but still my mother pulled up to those curbs, honked the horn in those alleys or parking lots. Salesclerks and waiters, Bob and Dennis and Katy, too, came running outside with things: her clean clothes, shish kebabs and rice, a fresh baguette, a little white bag full of Demerol or Ativan or some new steroid.

  “It’s amazing, Rachel,” she told me, smiling mischievously. “I’ve turned all of Belmont Shore into one big Jack in the Box. Everything’s a drive-through,” she said, beaming.

  Now, chopping those onions, she was humming. I listened to her, felt the nausea coming on, and thought about Rex thousands of miles away in his studio, painting or sculpting, making something new.

  When the phone rang, I answered it with a dull hello, a thud from my throat that made Claire laugh. “Rachel,” she said, “come on. You act like she’s gone already.”

  I looked at my mother, whose hum had turned into quiet song lyrics. She was tapping her foot on the tile. I watched her hands, the green onions flowering from them, and wished my friend hadn’t called or that I hadn’t answered the phone.

  “I’ve got good news,” Claire said.

  “Tell me,” I said, though I knew that any news she had wouldn’t be good enough. I wondered how I was going to muster up the enthusiasm to respond to her news. I thought of stopping Claire mid-sentence but understood that it was impossible to slow people down—their lives moving right ahead, jobs, new friends, spouses and homes—while my life, even when I appeared to be outside in the world living it, was right here, watching her.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you today. You’ve got your own things to deal with,” she said, wavering.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s selfish that I called.”

  “Come on,” I said, growing impatient.

  “I know Angela’s taking you to the clinic this weekend to take care of it.” Claire whispered the last five words.

  “An abortion, Claire. You can say what it is. Taking care of it would be letting it go full term, giving birth, and sticking a bottle in his or her mouth.”

  My mother swung around from the sink. “What?” she said, taking a step toward me. She flapped those onions in my direction, then turned around. “Oh dear,” she said.

  I put my palm over the receiver and looked at my mother. “It’s not about me,” I lied, getting up from the table, taking the phone with me into my bedroom. I sat on the bed, then kicked the door closed. “An abortion, Claire,” I said again. “I’m not taking care of anything but myself here.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I didn’t support those clinics, escort those girls inside, so I could be ashamed of myself.”

  “Of course, Rachel.”

  “You were an escort too, and now you can’t even say the word.”

  “Abortion,” she said quietly.

  I laughed, hostile and irritated. “You don’t really believe in anything,” I said meanly.

  “I believe in things. I’m a liberal, a vegetarian,” she protested.

  “You’re not a vegetarian if you eat tacos—even if you only eat them in Mexico.”

  “I eat them twice a year.”

  “Okay, even if you eat tacos in Mexico twice a year, you’re not a vegetarian. You shouldn’t call yourself one. You should just say ‘I’m a person who doesn’t eat chicken or fish, but I eat red meat in Mexico twice a year. I’m a woman who can’t refuse a taco.’” My voice cracked into the phone.

  “I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Vegetarians don’t eat meat—that’s all I’m saying. They don’t give a man a dollar, then watch him carve something from a bone,” I said, starting to cry.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Don’t cry, Rachel. Please. I’m sorry,” she said.

  I lifted a pillow from my bed and held it over my mouth to stifle the sobs. I gripped the phone. Neither of us said a word.

  “Rachel,” she said finally. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” I said, weakly.

  “Are you okay?” she asked again.

  “I’m so damn sorry, Claire,” I said, sniffling.

  “It’s okay.”

  “My mom’s dying. She’s making a salad I don’t want to eat. I’m so damn sorry” I said again. “Please tell me your good news.”

  “No, Rachel. Another time.” Her voice was soft.

  “Talk to me, Claire. I need good news right now.”

  “Lora and I are moving in together,” she said.

  4.

  My mother had been on seven dates with Gilbert Wolff. He was dapper, she said, witty, and as optimistic about his lumps and limitations as she was about her own. They’d been out for Cuban and Ethiopian cuisine. They’d been to a Russian ballet. They’d seen a Chinese film with subtitles. “See that, no need to travel, Rachel,” my mother said. “He’s taking me around the world right here in our city—right where we are now.”

  “It’s not really the same thing,” I said.

  “It’s better,” she said. “There’s no picking out a week’s worth of clothes, no packing and unpacking, no taxis, no bellhops or unknown streets, there’s no getting lost, no waiting.”

  “No strange beds,” I added.

  “Well,” she said, smiling.

  Because Gilbert was a tree doctor—a surgeon, he insisted—lately my mother had been peppering her conversations with tree tidbits, trivia about redwoods and pines and sycamores and palms. Did you know that when a palm gets sick its fronds might come down unexpectedly and kill a sunbather? Did you know that a young woman died just last year in Laguna Beach? Sitting out there in a string bikini and then bam, dead on the sandy just like that. Did you know a sick tree dies so slowly that it can take forty years for it to go?

  I knew nothing about trees, their trunks and saps, but I knew about her, my mother—how soon we could expect her eyes and the palms of her hands to turn yellow, which would mean that the tiny tumor they found on her liver was growing, affecting things.

  The cancer was in three spots that we knew of. In addition to the recurrence in her hip, which was making her limp, there was a cherry-size lymph node in her neck, and the spot on her liver. Lesions, the doctor called them. “A couple zaps of radiation and she’ll be okay,” he said.

  I doubted him, and the expression on my face told him so.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “For how long?”

  “That’s not a question I can answer.”

  “Can you answer questions about the limp?”

  “The limp will go away,” he said.

  The trees that took forty years to die were plenty sick; they peeled away bit by bit for four whole decades. I thought about that. I drank a cup of coffee at a bookstore in downtown Seal Beach and thought about how long an afflicted tree sits there dying. I went to the mall and shopped for shoes, wondering what the soles were made of. I tapped the soles with my finger and smiled at the puzzled shoe guy. “Can I help you?” he wanted to know.

  “No,” I said.

  “Let me know if you want to try those on. They’re very popular,” he said. His shirt and tie were the exact same color, light blue, and if it wasn’t for the dark stain on the tie I might not have been able to tell where one piece of clothing stopped and the other began.

  “You’ve got something on your tie,” I said.

  He looked down. “Damn,” he said. “Chocolate. I can’t seem to eat it fast enough in this heat. It just melts all over the place.” He was unknotting the tie as he spoke to me, pulling it over his head. He looked across the way at Yates’ Yogurt as if the store itself were to blame.

  “The mall’s air-conditioned,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know—I ate it outside.” He held the tie in his fist. “About the shoes,” he said. “Girls say they’re comfortable.”

  “They don’t look comfortable,” I said, still tapping.

  “How about trying on
a pair and telling me otherwise?” He was smiling, flirting or just selling shoes.

  I shook my head.

  “Come on,” he said, pushing. “What size?”

  “You should put the tie away,” I said, looking down at his fist. “And I’m a seven.”

  He walked away then and when he returned, he had three boxes stacked in his arms.

  I bought the shoes because I thought he deserved a sale, dealing with a woman like me.

  I carried my bag of shoes to the car. I drove down Main Street and up First. I stopped and got out at the ocean, stood there for a couple of minutes, but decided against sitting on the sand. I ended up in the park, where I sat down under a tree that looked healthy, but what did I know? I didn’t even know what kind of tree it was. And whatever it was, sycamore or pine, it might have been very sick. It might have had a killer fungus. It might have been sick for thirty-five years, ill before I was even born, dying there in that very park while my mother got morning sickness in the morning, like the rest of them.

  5.

  I was standing in front of my poetry workshop reading Anne Sexton, reading from All My Pretty Ones, going backwards in the book and finishing up with “The Truth the Dead Know.” No one said anything when I was through, when I asked for comments. “’When we touch we enter touch entirely,’” I said. “What do you think Sexton meant?”

  Molly, the girl with maroon hair and gold studs in her nose and tongue who hadn’t responded to me in weeks, finally opened her mouth. “Isn’t Anne Sexton the one who tried to have sex with her daughter?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “She did. She tried to sleep with her daughter. She had a creepy crush on her own kid. My friend Edna read the daughter’s autobiography,” the girl said, looking around the classroom at the other students.

  “Maybe so, but that part about trying to sleep with Linda is untrue or at least undocumented,” I said.

  “Who’s Linda?”

  “The daughter you’re talking about.”

  Molly shrugged. “Edna read the book,” she said to the girl next to her. “You know Edna, right?”

  The girl nodded.

  “She didn’t try to have sex with her daughter,” I said again.

  “Well, she masturbated with the kid in the same bed, didn’t she?”

  I was silent, looking around the room for an ally. Daniel looked up at me from the front row, shaking his head.

  “Tell the truth,” the girl said. “Didn’t Sexton masturbate in her daughter’s bed?”

  I nodded.

  “And wasn’t her daughter in the bed right next to her?”

  “Something like that.” I sighed. I looked at the tree outside the classroom window and decided its fronds didn’t look well. They were yellow and dry where they should have been green. A couple was sitting under the tree eating lunch, obviously unconcerned about the tree’s health. The young woman’s head rested in the young man’s lap. She lifted her head and sipped something from a straw. The young man took a bite of his sandwich. Perhaps I’d get Gilbert to check the tree out. Perhaps I’d drive him back here at dusk, when the couple would certainly be finished with their lunch, when surely they’d be gone, and ask him just what he thought of that tree outside my classroom.

  “I don’t want to read that pervert’s poetry,” Molly said, smacking the book shut.

  And it seemed that all of the students in the room were nodding their heads, agreeing with her, except for Daniel, who was shuffling the papers on his desk as though he was looking for something important.

  “Stop it,” I said, maybe to the whole damn class.

  “Something’s wrong with you lately, Rachel,” Molly said, and she gathered up her books and stood up. She bent her hip, balancing the books there, and looked at me. She shook her head, a strand of that purple hair falling over her face, directly in the middle, cutting her in half. She was two girls then, and I didn’t like either one of them.

  “You’re probably right,” I said, sitting down at my desk.

  “It’s three,” she said, staring at the clock above my head. And it seemed everyone stood up at exactly the same moment. It seemed everyone followed Molly, the girl who was cut in half, the girl who was two girls. Or maybe they left because it was time to go—I wasn’t sure. Either way, my feelings were hurt. I was being abandoned; they were walking out on me. They were gathering up their books and pens, pulling jackets from the backs of chairs, straightening their jeans and skirts, and hurting my feelings. They followed the girl out the door as though she was in charge of something, as though she was a general or officer, and maybe she was, maybe she was in charge of everything, the goddamn President, and maybe I should have listened to her too, should have gathered up my own things and joined those students in the hall. That’s what I was thinking about when I felt his fingers in my hair.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, but I didn’t move, just sat right there with the boy’s hand in my hair.

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said, taking his hand away and putting it in his jacket pocket.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly.

  “It’s anything but okay,” I told him.

  “You’re going to be okay, Rachel—that’s what I mean.” Daniel crouched down in front of my desk so that we were eye level.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said again, looking right into the boy’s eyes.

  “Do you love him?” he wanted to know.

  “He’s far away. On a farm.”

  “I don’t picture you with a farmer.”

  “I’m not with him. He’s not coming back and I don’t even think I want him to.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m getting an abortion,” I said flatly.

  “Can I help?”

  I shook my head.

  “I want to help you,” he said again. “I’ll drive you where you need to go. I’ll wait for you.”

  “Please, Daniel.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You can’t be.”

  He paused, then continued. “Afterwards, you’ll come back to my place and I’ll take care of you. I’ll make you soup.”

  “Soup, huh? What kind of soup?”

  “Chicken or vegetable. I make tomato, too,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “I want to help you,” he said again.

  “Are you a doctor? Because that’s what I need,” I said.

  “I’m not a doctor,” he said weakly.

  “Then you should just go.” I looked around the room at the empty desks. I looked at the floor, what the students left behind: an empty Coke can on its side, a cupcake wrapper, and three balls of rolled-up yellow paper. I thought about the trees that made the paper and the students who couldn’t find the trash can.

  “I won’t tell anyone, Rachel. It’s just between us,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  Daniel stood up. He took a blank piece of paper off my desk and wrote his phone number down. “Here,” he said. “Call if you need me. It’s not the worst thing in the world, Rachel, to need someone.”

  “Just go,” I said again.

  “Okay,” he said, gathering up his books, stuffing the books in his backpack, tossing his backpack over his shoulder, and leaving the room.

  6.

  The night before Rex went back to London we’d met up at a diner on Second Street. It was ten P.M. but he was eating breakfast. He’d found a place with bangers and eggs, his favorite. He was telling me his ideas about art and what he planned to work on when he returned home. “Chickens rotting behind Plexiglas, a hamburger on an exceptional plate—anything can be art,” he said.

  I smiled, but in my head I was thinking that art like that isn’t art at all. “Interesting,” I said.

  “Ah, ‘interesting,’ that’s the word reserved for pieces that are not interesting at all.” With noticeable skill and help from his fork, he fit a whole banger into his mo
uth. He chewed and chewed. He looked at me. The grease was visible on his lips and I smelled the banger from where I sat. Maybe it was fine that he was leaving in the morning.

  I drummed my nails against the side of my coffee cup. I tried to smile and said, “Where do you get the chicken?”

  “The grocery store, Rachel. I wouldn’t kill a bird for a project. I hope you know that. What sort of a man do you think I am?” He lifted his cup of tea to his mouth, held it there, but didn’t take a sip. He was waiting for an answer.

  “A fine one,” I said.

  He didn’t believe me; I could tell. “Maybe this is separation anxiety—how we’re getting along now,” he said.

  I wanted to change the subject. “What do you do with the chicken’s legs?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How’s the bird sitting or standing? What do you do with it?”

  “The legs are pinned back,” he said, and then he leaned over the table and held one of my arms, pinned it back so that it touched the plastic booth. He was gentle, playful, whispering sweet things about my mind, which he said was sharp. “Going to miss you.”

  “I hate it when people don’t use pronouns,” I said, pulling away from him. “’Going to miss you’ isn’t the same as ‘I’m going to miss you.’”

  “I disagree.”

  “It’s insincere,” I said, knowing that I shouldn’t go too far with my theory, but unable to stop myself.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “I’m telling you, it’s the pronoun that makes the difference. Ever notice how people who don’t quite love you, at least not yet, they might like you a lot, they might really, really like you, but they don’t love you, they’re the ones more likely to say ‘love you’ or worse yet ‘love ya’?”

  “I hate ‘love ya’ too,” he said. “But it’s the ya I hate—I’m not so sure it’s the missing pronoun.”

  “It’s important, identifying yourself in a declaration.”