A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (19 page)

“Sorry.”

“I'm tired,” her mother said. “Let me rest now, Georgie.”

“One more thing ,” she tried.

“Can't it wait? Don't you have some homework to do? Isn't that what you left at the table?”

Georgia looked at the table, then back at her mother. “But—” she began.

“Please, sweetie,” her mother said, “give me just an hour of quiet time.”

8.

“There's the kind of girl you fuck and the kind of girl you marry,” Kevin said. He was standing at the refrigerator door in his fluorescent surfing shorts and socks, his body tilted forward so that his face and bare chest were nearly inside. Georgia stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a caddy filled with nail clippers and files, a half dozen bottles of her mother's nail polish. She stared at her brother's back, which was broad, with freckles and a million red pimples. Some of the pimples were white and ready.

“Where's the milk?” he said. “I can't find the goddamn milk.” He was moving things around. “Shit,” he said, taking ketchup, a bag of red cherries, and defrosted hamburger meat from a shelf and placing them on the counter. “Have you seen the milk?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “Maybe Dad—”

“Dad's been weird lately,” Kevin interrupted. “Have you noticed?” He looked at her.

Georgia shook her head no.

“He's forgetting shit. He asks me a question, I answer it, and ten minutes later he's asking me the same damn thing.”

“I haven't noticed,” Georgia said, realizing she hadn't spent much time with her dad lately.

“I don't think they love each other anymore,” Kevin said.

“Of course they love each other,” Georgia said.

“I can't wait until I move out. No more running out of milk, chicks on the couch, music as loud as I want it.”

“You're only sixteen,” she reminded him.

“I'm older than you.”

“So?”

“I swear, when I'm on my own, I'm having one big party—day and fucking night.”

Georgia moved from the doorway to the kitchen table and sat down. She started looking through the bottles of polish. She picked one up, shook it, and held up the shiny red for her brother to see. “What do you think of this?” she asked him.

“I don't think about it,” he said. “Guys don't think about those things—a chick's nails, come on, Georgie.”

“What about our voices or our faces?”

“Huh?” he said, not really listening.

“If you move out, how do you plan to pay rent?” she asked, changing the subject, not wanting him to realize she'd been standing outside his bedroom with Rebecca at the door, eavesdropping.

“The Fish Joint pays me.” He turned and glared at his sister. “It's just a matter of time. I'm saving money—or I'm going to start saving. This week, you watch, I'm going to put something away. You'll see,” he said.

She looked at Kevin, doubtful.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.” Georgia opened the bottle and began painting her nails. It was useless, really, because there was very little nail to paint. She bit them, her cuticles even, until they were raw and sore. She was hoping that if she painted them red, every time she lifted a finger to her mouth, she'd see a stop sign, that tiny red nail coming toward her. “So tell me about that theory of yours,” she said.

“What theory?”

“There's the kind of girl you fuck and the kind of girl you marry, Kevin, huh?”

“That's right.” He pulled the milk carton from the fridge.

“Don't you have sex with the girl you marry?”

“Yeah, you fuck her, but it's about love and having babies. Procreation. You'll understand when you like someone or when someone likes you—or when you do it.” He opened the cupboard, took a glass from the shelf, and placed it on the counter. He held the carton closed and shook it, then poured the milk. He set the carton in front of Georgia, sat down at the table, and stared at his sister. “You haven't done it, have you?” he said.

“No,” she lied, not looking up from her nails.

“You telling me the truth?” he said, leaning toward her.

“Yes,” she said. “Don't be stupid,” she told him.

“Because I'll kill the guy. You wait until you're married—or at least in high school,” he said.

“I know, I know,” she said.

“Even then, in high school, if I find out, he's dead meat. You wait until college. College is good.”

“College is a long time away,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“You'll be gone by then, living in that party house of yours. How are you going to know what I do if you don't live here?”

“I'll know.” He was full of bravado. “I mean it, Georgie— I'll rip his legs off or his head,” he said, grabbing, ripping at the air in front of him, pretending to do just that to Georgia's imaginary guy.

The two of them sat there, across from each other, and Georgia blew on her little nails.

“Just don't get fat,” he warned. “Guys hate fat girls.” She stared at the white ring the milk had left above his top lip, and thought about his ugly girl who was
not
fat, his penis shoved in her nipple.

“Kevin,” Georgia said, surprising herself, “does titty fucking hurt?”

“None of it hurts
us,”
he said, “which is way cool.”

“Way cool,” she said, sarcastically.

“It's true,” he said. “It's you guys who scream when you lose it.”

“Yeah,” Georgia said.

“What?”
he said.

“I mean, I've heard that it hurts.”

“You've heard, huh?”

“Yes.”

“It's nothing you've done, right?”

“Of course not.”

“I'm just saying, Georgie—”

She interrupted her brother. “Girls talk, you know. It's not like I don't have friends.”

“Your friends shouldn't be doing it either.”

She rolled her eyes at her brother, who was leaning back, balancing the chair on two legs. “What's the story with Rebecca?” he said.

“The story?”

“Yeah, what's with her?”

“She's seeing the guy from 27 Flavors.”

“Zit face?”

She nodded.

“She's getting big anyways,” he said, setting the chair upright. “Big girls are gross,” he said, getting up from the chair and walking away from Georgia, whistling, down the hall.

She sat for several minutes, staring at her hands, trying not to move. Her mother told her that you needed to wait at least thirty minutes for your nails to dry. Georgia tried to stay still, but the more she thought about not moving, the more she had to do just that. She tapped her foot on the kitchen tile. She waved her hands in the air in an effort to speed the process. She blew once more on her nails. Finally, she lightly touched a thumbnail with a fingertip. It smeared a bit, but she couldn't help herself.

Georgia got up and put the milk away. On the counter, the hamburger meat was bleeding through the plastic. It was fatty—twenty percent, which meant her mother was planning tacos or spaghetti. She stared at the white chunks of fat nestled in the red meat and felt her stomach flip. A line of blood trailed the counter. Georgia wiped it up with a dishrag, then tossed the rag into the sink.

On her bed, she listened to Kevin still whistling in the next room and stared down at her nails, the polish smeared around her cuticles, a red and bright mess.

9.

At dinner Georgia's mother carried a roasted chicken on a silver platter. She wore a pale yellow blouse with an apron over it, her hair up in a shiny bun. “Who left the hamburger meat on the counter?” she asked. “I woke up from my nap and the whole kitchen smelled terrible.”

Kevin was talking to his father about school, ignoring her. “I'm doing great in biology,” he said. “It's cool when we dissect things.”

“My boy,” his father said, “smart, like his old man. Maybe you'll be a doctor. I could've been a doctor, you know.”

Georgia wondered how her father went from “could've been a doctor” to a high school math teacher, but didn't say anything.

“Who left the meat on the counter?” her mother asked again, placing the platter in the middle of the table. “You know there's a window right there,” she said, pointing to the kitchen. “And when that curtain is open, the sun comes in and cooks whatever's sitting there. Imagine the bacteria,” she said, wiping her hands on the apron, looking at her family.

Georgia pointed at Kevin, who was busy demonstrating how Dr. Evans opened the cat and lifted out its organs.

“Not now, Kevin. Not at the dinner table,” his mother said. “Eat up,” she told Georgia. “You look skinny. Have you lost weight? You don't look right.”

Georgia moved the chicken leg around on her plate with a fork. “Does Craig take biology?” she asked Kevin.

“Craig? No way. He's in the easy classes. He's even in home economics because he says there's free food and girls there. He'll do anything to get a chick.”

“You should take more math classes is what you boys should do. And you too, Georgie. Math is fixed—it's made up its mind. No recipes with math, just calculation and answers,” his father said.

“Eat something, Georgia ,” her mother said again. She took off her apron, went into the kitchen and left it there. When she came back, she carried a sauté pan with oily mushrooms and a serving spoon. She scooped generous servings onto their plates, stopping by Georgia, pausing, looking at her daughter. “I want you to eat,” she said again.

“Okay,” Georgia said.

Her mother pulled out a chair and sat down. She held a fork poised over her plate of food. “Go on, Georgie,” she said, “take a bite.”

“How are you doing in biology class?” Georgia's father asked her brother.

“I just told you,” he said.

“Your father doesn't listen,” her mother said. “I talk and talk and he doesn't hear a thing. It's getting worse, too.”

“Biology class is okay, then?” her father continued, lifting up a chicken leg and taking a bite. Georgia watched his mouth and thought about her secrets—all of them. She held on to the table with clenched hands, not picking up her fork, and wondered what her father saw when he saw her. His chin and lips glistened, and she wondered what he'd think and remember of the girl she was becoming …

2000

1.

It's Friday night, hours before my abortion, and I'm sitting in my mother's bedroom watching television—an old show called
Hazel.
It's set in the 1950s and every night about midnight, whether I've been sleeping earlier or not, I hear the TV click on, and I hear Hazel's grating voice coming from behind my mother's bedroom door. Hazel is a maid who watches over a doctor's family. The doctor and Hazel are good friends. She sacrifices herself to get him out of trouble. I know this because for the last two nights, despite my strong feelings about Hazel, and the doctor, too, I've sat in the big chair across from my mother's bed, eating crackers, drinking club soda, and watching the show with her.

I'm not eating or drinking anything now, though. No food, no water, nothing past midnight. I wonder if those orders mean I can't brush my teeth in the morning, and decide right now to do just that; when I wake up I'll rebel, break their rules. I had sex without a condom once, one damn time, and look at the result.

I feel my mother's suspicion. Every now and then she looks up from the set and twists her eyes my way, but only for a second; the look is a glance, as much as she can take of me right now. “People get in trouble all the time,” she says, staring hard at the television.

“Yes,” I say, staring hard at the idiot Hazel myself.

“What's that mean, yes?”

“Just that.” I pull the blanket up over my bare feet, covering my toes and soles, the painted nails which seem garish in this light.

“I heard you throwing up earlier,” my mother continues, still not looking at me.

“Yes.”

“That's all you're going to say?”

“Yes,” I say again.

“It's not the flu, I know that,” she says.

“Isn't there enough in this room to think about? Don't we have enough to worry about?”

She turns around and readjusts her pillows, patting them, smoothing out the cases, and then propping them against the headboard once again. “You get sick in the late afternoon and evening—not like me, not like I was with you, and not like the rest of them.”

“The rest of them?”

“Other women.”

“Stop it,” I say, and I say it in a low voice, a serious voice, which surprises even me. “You hear me, Mom?”

“Yes,” she says.

“What's that mean, yes?” I say, and I am mocking her. She is dying and I am pregnant, and I am mocking her. “What's that mean, yes?” I say again.

2.

Weeks ago, my mother and I were at The Moroccan Inn on Second Street, sitting at a table outside, eating falafel, hummus, and pita, and I was wishing my period would start. I was four days late. I was thinking about Rex on his Hampshire farm with his redhead. I was imagining Rex milking one of those cows he loved. I saw him sitting on a short stool, bent over, hands pulling on udders, filling a bucket with thick milk.

“You okay?” my mother asked.

“Fine,” I said, trying to look it.

“You listening?” she wanted to know.

I was nodding, tearing a piece of pita, and trying to look interested.

“You seem distracted,” she said.

“No, no—I'm fine,” I insisted.

My mother had recently met Gilbert Wolff, a six-year lung cancer survivor at the radiation clinic, and was giddy, eager to talk. His recurrence was aggressive, but his sense of humor was sharp. He was a tree surgeon, an educated man, a sick man with a healthy attitude, she told me.

It was a Sunday afternoon, warm and breezy, in Belmont Shore. The street was crowded with shoppers, couples, and families. A single man pushing a stroller stopped at the newspaper stand in front of us, and when he turned around with the paper under his arm, my mother smiled at him. “Can I see the baby?” she said.

He came closer to the table, stopped, and pulled the blanket from the baby's chin so that we could get a better look. The baby's cheeks were so fat that you couldn't be certain the child had eyes.

“What's his name?” my mother asked.

“Bruce—we call him Brucey,” the man answered.

Brucey's cheeks were striped with a fine, downy hair that came down from both sides of his head. I thought of pork chops. I thought of rockabilly men in plaid shirts and cuffed jeans. Brucey didn't like being stared at or maybe he didn't like his blanket being messed with because he let out a fierce screech. “Adorable,” my mother said.

“Thank you,” the man said, smiling proudly. He covered screeching Brucey back up before strolling away.

“He was
not
adorable,” I said.

“He will be,” she said. “The hair will fall off that boy's cheeks and he'll be just as sweet as can be.” My mother had on the Cher wig. Her nails and lips were a pretty pale red, and she wore one of her dresses—a blue-and-yellow floral print. I was looking at my mother's face, admiring her skin—where were the telltale signs, the dark circles and sunken cheeks?

“Tell me about Gilbert,” I said.

“Tan, sixtyish, full head of gray hair, and a lump in his neck.” She offered this last detail like it was just one more physical characteristic. Then added, “I want to love him.”

“You want to
love
him?” I said, surprised.

“Well, I want to
know
him.”

“That's better.”

“Whatever time I have left, I want to spend some of it with him.”

I picked up my sandwich and took a bite. I'd been ravenous the last few days and my breasts were swollen, both sure signs that my period was on its way, I reassured myself.

“I feel like a girl,” she said. “I'll see him five times a week for the next two weeks.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “I got the receptionist to schedule the two of us together.”

“That mean one?”

“She's not so mean.”

“She's nasty” I said. “Remember how she barked at us when we were late?”

“We
were
late,” my mother said, defending her.

“Five minutes.” I picked the napkin up from my lap and wiped my mouth.

“Belinda gets impatient sometimes, but she's not so bad. She's much sweeter since I made her a couple of dresses.”

“You made her two?” I said. “I thought you were going to make her one.”

“One's a very pretty aqua. She wanted a darker color for evening.”

“That was nice of you.”

“People soften up when you give them a chance, Rachel. The hair falls off their cheeks,” she told me.

“Or when you give them things,” I said.

She stared at the small bowl in the center of the table. “Do you want the last of that hummus?”

I shook my head. “What else about Gilbert Wolff?”

She picked up a piece of pita bread and rubbed the side of the bowl with it. “He likes my legs,” she said, chewing and talking at once. “I saw him looking at them. He thought his eyes were hidden behind the magazine, but I saw them.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Mostly I listened to him talk to the man next to him.”

“Better hurry.”

“No kidding,” she said, laughing.

“I didn't mean it like that.”

Her voice was serious. “I should hurry—and you should too. Everyone should hurry.”

The waiter came up to the table then and refilled my iced tea. “You two doing okay here?”

“More hummus?” she asked me.

I nodded.

He smiled, turned away from us, and my mother picked up where she'd left off. “A lot of people at the clinic want to travel—see the world, they say. They sit there waiting for treatment with these glossy travel magazines across their laps, talking about their trips. They've touched the sands of Egypt. They've eaten
real
Italian food. Before they die, they'll see this or that cave, some mountain they can't wait to climb. I don't want to waste time schlepping up some mountain.”

“I might,” I said.

She shook her head. “One woman postponed therapy to sail around the world and dropped dead at sea.”

“I understand that.”

“You do?”

“She was thinking about quality, not quantity—about experience.”

“I think she was giving up,” my mother said. “She was floating around the world waiting to die. She was in a cramped cabin, I'm sure. It was probably a lot like a coffin itself.”

“I don't think so,” I said.

The waiter put the second order of hummus between the two of us and picked up the empty bowl. “Enjoy,” he said, turning back to the other customers.

My mom picked up the lone olive in the middle of the hummus and popped in into her mouth. “You seem to like traveling, too. Not for yourself, though, but for the men you meet. Where's that Rex now?” she asked me.

“Let's just eat,” I said.

3.

She was standing at the sink, washing green onions. Next to her sat lettuce leaves piled high, drying on a paper towel, a glass jar of chopped garlic, dark mustard, and honey in a container shaped like a bear. She was planning a sweet salad dressing, which normally I would have refused, but today I wanted to return to her, agree with each final thing she said and did, so from the dining room table I said, “Sweet's fine with me.”

And it
was
fine. I'd had cravings lately for sugar and salt and yellow cheese, but the smell of coffee and meat bothered me. I'd been throwing up in secret, kneeling in the bathroom, my mouth pressed against an old towel, the radio on. When I appeared in the hallway, my mother asked why my face was flushed and I shrugged. “When you're ready, you'll talk,” she said, sounding like a cop.

Earlier she'd limped into the kitchen, touching my cheek on the way, smiling and cheerful. Now, I sat at the dining room table, watching her, wondering how she could smile when the gray chunk was pushy, persistent, having returned for the third time to that spot in her hip.

Her first recurrence was in that hip, in that very spot, and I remembered her businesslike demeanor the morning after it was confirmed. She had carried the phone and phone book outside to the balcony. She sat there for hours, calling her stores and shops, her dry cleaner and favorite restaurants, her shoemaker, the bakery, and drugstore. She asked to speak to owners and managers all over town by their first names.
May I speak to Bob? May I speak to Dennis? Will you please put Katy on the phone?
She explained her metastasis, assuring Bob and Dennis and Katy that she was theirs to the very end—a loyal patron through all of it. She'd deliberately start coughing just before it was time to ask the favor, the reason behind her call. Would he or she mind responding to her horn? Would it be okay if she just pulled up in the alley or at the curb? Would someone come out and bring her what she needed?

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.