Unkiss Me (8 page)

We have run out of things for him to show me this evening, so we’ll either make out on the couch like dry-humping teen-agers, or we’ll start an argument.
I look at my watch-free wrist, “Guess I’ll go get that ice cream.”

In his voice is his own measure of regret. “These things are not marriage-busters.”

But he’s not really speaking to me. That’s the thing that’s different this time. We are putting asunder, just like that caution in the vows. Each of us finding in ourselves, a willing partner.

Around the table sit Morris, Hester, Yolanda, Wellfleet, and Bob. Their mom, Irene, is in the kitchen, dishing out chili. It’s their first meal in the new apartment, and chili is a ritual. Not the sort of chili you’re used to having. This is stuff made from chunks of pork. The beans have been soaked in rusty, orange water. The peppers, they’re from two apartments ago, those little plants on the west-facing balcony. The onions came from Safeway’s produce dumpster. Everyone loves this chili except Yolanda, who just last week turned into a vegan.

Yolanda is having nothing.
Irene told her she could just fucking starve. This isn’t the kind of family, Irene told her, where the mom caters to every little whim of the kids. Yolanda said she’d just move in with her father, then. Go ahead, said Irene, go down to the public library and try to look him up in the Las Vegas phone book. According to Irene, Yolanda’s dad is the biggest miscreant of all the kids’ dads. He’s the one that got busted for hiring Mexicans to dig the foundation of an apartment complex and then called the INS on payday. Actually, he didn’t get busted, he got beat up. Really bad. Supposedly, only one of his eyes works now.

Yolanda has shaved one side of her head, and the other side, she dyed the hair of it teal.
This would be okay with Irene, who believes in self-expression, except that Yolanda paid to have it done instead of doing it herself. The money Yolanda used was supposed to go toward a deposit on the phone for the new apartment. It was money Irene had put in an envelope under the mat and now it’s gone. Irene’s damned if she’s going to make a side dish of vegan chili for her thieving little rebel of a daughter.

Yolanda is really the only bad one of the kids.
Hester is slightly brain damaged, and very sweet. Wellfleet, as you might have guessed, is a nerd. Morris is fat. And Bob, well, he’s too little to figure out yet. Of all Irene’s kids, Bob is the palest, and most snot-nosed. He has the sort of skin that is mapped in blue lines all winter. His skull resembles a gourd, somewhat. He wets his pants every other day. Irene probably loves him the most. Bob is her tubal ligation baby. The end of the line. And Bob’s father, a married man from Boston, is the only one of the dads who sends her any money.

This kitchen is much smaller than the last kitchen.
The only counter space is two warped swaths of linoleum on either side of the stained enamel sink. No place for Irene’s segmented box of Lithium. No place for the economy-sized containers of oatmeal and Cheerios. Who designed this place, Irene thinks, and why does the refrigerator sound like a nest of bees?

Irene brings the bowls out, two at a time.
Morris, the steadiest and most careful of the offspring, pours the pitcher of reconstituted milk into colorful Tupperware cups. Yolanda was okay with ovo-lacto-vegetarianism just last week, but now, no deal. She places a hand over the rim of her orange cup. Irene puts an empty bowl in front of her daughter. This is what you can get used to, she says to Yolanda. And there’s lots more where that came from. Yolanda sits at the far end of the pale yellow Formica and aluminum table. There is a box of Zestas in the center of the table. The kids all grab for a plastic tube of them, but Irene is prepared for this and she slaps at their hands. She tells them they must open one tube at a time. She’ll be damned if she’s going to fill the cabinets of another apartment with boxes and boxes of stale crackers.

Yolanda pulls the Zesta box
to her in order to read the ingredients. What do you think you’re doing? Asks Irene. Only people who eat chili get crackers. Yolanda pushes the box back to the center of the table, knocking over her empty cup. She flings her chair back with her butt and stomps off to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Irene jumps up from the table and strides off to the bathroom, pounding on the cheap, hollow door with the fleshy part of her fist. Don’t think you’re going to stay in here all evening young lady. I’ll take the door off its hinges, I mean it!

Morris is snickering.
He never liked Yolanda anyway. Want me to get the screwdriver, Mom? He says. He knows where it is, which box, and where the box is. I’ll deal with it, Morris, Irene tells him. If she were forced to admit it, she has about 600 times more respect for Yolanda than she has for her tub-of-lard son. If there’s one thing she hates more than a willful child, it’s a suck-up, tattletale.

Bob starts to cry.
The tears leaking out of his eyes make a trail through the grime on his cheeks.

Hester hands Bob a piece of paper towel, and tells him it’s all right, Bobby.
Eat your supper, Bobby. But Hester herself isn’t eating her chili. She’s chewing her cuticles.

The fitz-fitz sound of a shower that hasn’t been turned on in a while comes from inside the bathroom.
God damn it, says Irene, giving one last pound on the door.

Wellfleet has separated all the components of his chili, giving a sort of pie chart look to his meal.
He crumbles two saltines over the top, rearranging the crumbs until equal proportions exist over each quadrant. Wellfleet’s dad was a sperm donation. Irene, who wanted at least one of her offspring to provide for her in old age, chose to combine her DNA with that of a nuclear physicist. Wellfleet is the only one of her children in the TAG program. He volunteers at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry once a week, in the physical science room. Irene herself is no dummy. She’s figured out how to keep five kids alive. Feed them. Negotiate the red tape of the Oregon Health Plan so Hester can get her anti-seizure medicine, Morris, his asthma inhaler, and her own meds, the bi-polar stuff, even her tubal—though, in hindsight, pregnancy was much better than Lithium as a mood stabilizer.

Irene sits back down and spoons chili into her mouth without looking up.
Instead of a cup of powdered milk, Irene has a tumbler of Gewürztraminer. Irene works at a discount gourmet store and frequently brings home bottles of wine. Sometimes, she brings the kids European cookies dipped in Swiss chocolate and hazelnuts. On payday, she brings them bags of jellybeans flavored like buttered popcorn and enchiladas. Tonight she’s pretty stressed out though. This is the fourth time in a year they’ve had to move, each time a reduction in size and rent. This time, thanks to Yolanda’s documented rebelliousness, they even had to change school districts.

Bob is still sniffling and rubbing his eyes.
Each sob cuts into Irene like an episiotomy. What’s wrong Robert? Irene says, not looking up from her chili shoveling. Bob says something unintelligible so Irene punishes him by not responding. The logical consequence for inarticulateness, Irene believes, is being ignored. She’s trained all her children this way. Finally, after three or four tries, Bob’s yearning for the previous apartment is made clear. Perhaps Bob is over-tired, due to the fact that they’d had to make the break at two in the morning because they owed back utilities and had three cracked windows, and the bathroom door to explain. Six people and one bathroom wasn’t a reasonable excuse, of course, not for the deformity they’d delivered. The door was actually missing an entire corner, where a particularly angry foot had broken through. A good part of the door back at the old apartment now resembles splintered kindling. The carpet had been ruined, what with the kitties Hester kept bringing home. Not to mention regular stuff, like Sharpie penned drawings on the walls and bent aluminum blinds. Irene had talked the landlord into accepting the initial damage deposit in monthly installments, but when it’s feeding your kids versus handing over money to some fat fuck who once called Morris, whose father is black, a nigger kid? Well.

Bob continues to snivel.
Something about a neighbor girl who’d promised to let him play with her Barbies. Mommy explained all that, Robert, Irene says as unemotionally as possible. We needed a fresh start. You know what a fresh start is, right Bobby? It’s when you pee your pants and mommy doesn’t get mad, she just puts new ones on you and you try and do better next time?

Bob is nodding, but still red-eyed and sunken.
The shower turns off. All the kids yank their heads up. Take in a quick breath. Only Hester, dear, sweet Hester, seems not to notice their mother’s exit from the table. Hester is doing the hand motions for itsy-bitsy spider, which is one of her affects.

Irene waits, arms folded, outside the bathroom door.
Yolanda comes out, her green-blue hair combed over the bald side, as though she were an embarrassed forty-year-old man. She has her mother’s eyes, Yolanda does. Her cheeks are pink from steam. Sometimes, her kids? They look as perfect as the day she gave birth to them. Irene unfolds her arms. Fuck it, she tells the freakish cherub before her. I’ve got some rice. There’s still peppers and onions.

A fresh start, Irene says, walking into the kitchen.
Can I have some wine? Yolanda asks.

It was the Friday before their weekend off, and Rachel moved swiftly along the edge of the wash. Abraham, as usual, lagged behind. Getting to work early today was Rachel’s thing; it wasn’t Abraham who’d agreed to buy the crank from Doctor Rudy. But still, his wife’s leggy stride, her girlish enthusiasm as the slightly belled cuffs of her deep rust uniform pants shimmied and glimmered in the rising sun, jolted him forth. Crank was Rachel’s latest craze, replacing kickboxing, which had replaced the roller blades, which she’d taken up upon quitting smoking.

Abraham worked in Soiled Process, and his w
ife’s job was Diet Technician, at Mesa Samaritan, a loaf-shaped adobe hospital plopped down between a shopping center and a suburban desert drainage system. Rachel currently worked on the ninth and tenth floors—renal and oncology, respectively—where she altered the menus and trays of patients on restricted diets. Abraham worked mostly beneath the loaf, in the basement, scraping unwanted matter from medical waste bins. They were part of a team, is how Abraham often put it: the team of deletion. They were the nameless elves of support, those nearly invisible employees charged with upholding the antiseptic construct of an acute care facility, paving the way for good health—or, in some cases, seamless death—beneath the surface of a high-profile healthcare system.

Abraham stumbled along behind Rachel admiring her economy of movement, the result of years of ballet training, the way she’d mastered rushing so it appeared to be gliding.
Abraham tried to imitate his wife, and in so doing, tripped over the rounded toe of his shoe. Rachel adjusted her handbag as they neared Mesa Samaritan’s vacuous visitor parking lot. She spit-pat stray wisps of hair. Rachel was going to meet Doctor Rudy before their shifts. Abraham had been instructed to wait in the cafeteria.

Doctor Rudy was an oncologist who procured marijuana for his cancer patients and thus had slipped into a world, which indulged his two biggest weaknesses: the craving for altered consciousness and the acquisition of money.
Doctor Rudy thought himself alternative; he ignored the dress code and padded about in Birkenstocks and torn Levis. He called the support staff, Babe, and wore his hair in a fashionable temple-shaved ponytail. It was rumored that his supplier lived in South Phoenix, in one of the rentals Rudy owned, cooking methamphetamine as a side job to running shrimp up from the Gulf. In addition to crank, Doctor Rudy could get you first class camarones grande, Abraham’s favorite indulgence. Indeed, Abraham once bought a ten-pound box of the shrimp from the cargo hold of Doctor Rudy’s four-by-four, back when the oncologist had been a mere resident. “Medical school,” he’d explained while tucking a Phoenix Suns t-shirt into his scrubs. “That, and two ex-wives.”

Rachel had arranged to meet Doctor Rudy near the cancer coffee urn, across from her office in Pod C.
Abraham did not remain, as instructed, in the cafeteria, and he followed his wife from the distance of at least a dozen gurneys. Though a bumbling idiot at graceful rushing, Abraham was a decent enough spy.

The transaction, as always, involved a bo
gus diet sheet—orders for the patient in room such-and-such: high-protein, no fresh fruits or vegetables, (it was Rachel’s job to pull garnish from the trays of the mask-wearing leukemia patients). The sealed baggie of contraband was stapled between two such instructional papers. Rachel handed the rubber-banded roll of cash to the doctor in an empty can of strawberry Ensure.

From his position behind a portable ultrasound machine Abraham watched Doctor Rudy walk duck-footed away from his wife.
He was whistling some tune (could it have been “Born Free?”), the turd of a ponytail still glistening from his morning shower. The guy was a salesman, Abraham thought. So he had M.D. after his name, big deal. Shrimp or speed or chemo, what’s the difference? Abraham watched Rachel cradle the package, her hands slipped in between the diet instructions, as though delivering a baby.