Eating With the Angels (20 page)

‘Aren’t you going to get up off your ass and start doing something?’ Emmet said to me the next day when he came in to swap one dirty bunch of sweats for another. ‘I don’t feel right being the most active member of the family. Besides, I’d quite like my room back so if you could just move home with your boyfriend … The old man does nothing but watch the History Channel all day out there. I’m learning way too much stuff. I need to come back and spend some quality time with Anna Kournikova.’

‘How long has Pop been sitting around watching TV all day?’ I’d been thinking about this all night in between swirly black dreams and thrashing wakefulness.

‘Hey, don’t knock it,’ Emmet said, sniffing a pair of socks. ‘He spent 40 years repairing shoes. He should be able to put his feet up if he wants to.’

He had worked hard, our father, for Joe Rivera’s shoe repair shop over on Lexington, going off to work at eight every morning and
coming back at six at night. He’d hardly made a fortune but we had never wanted for anything, other than vacations, which was Mom’s fault. She said she had only once left the island of Manhattan, the ocean was dangerous, and nowhere else was any better, so why the fuss? Plus, we’d had pretty good shoes considering our income. The store had a policy that any shoes repaired but not picked up within six months reverted to whichever family member fitted them. Joe had four tiny little daughters whose feet never got bigger than a size four while I was the only bigfoot who fitted a perfect size nine. As a result I was probably the only girl in junior high who wore thrift-store jeans and $300 loafers.

‘But what kind of life is that, Emmet, fixing shoes and watching the History Channel?’

‘I dunno.’ Emmet looked in the mirror on top of the dresser and spiked up his hair. ‘Looks okay to me. He’s been a pretty good dad, hasn’t he? Never got loaded and spent the rent money or ran off with his secretary.’ He turned around to look at me and to my surprise he was nervous.

‘Hey, sis, we need to talk,’ he said. ‘And I know now is probably not the best time to be asking you about this, but we had an arrangement after all so I need to know how soon you think I can get the 20 grand.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Come on, Connie, the $20,000 you said you’d loan me. I really need it now. I’ve waited a whole month already, remember, while you were in the coma but the situation is getting urgent.’

My spirits were already so low that I could not even rustle up incredulity. I had known that Emmet was capable of stooping extremely low, but this was positively subterranean. My own brother exploiting my memory loss for his personal financial gain: how much did that suck?

‘You know they didn’t take out my brain when they operated, Emmet,’ I said coldly.

‘But, sis,’ he whined, ‘you promised me. And my guy needs the
money by the end of the week otherwise, man, I’m going to miss out on the investment of a lifetime.’

‘Emmet, buying drugs cannot be described as an investment. It is money down the toilet the same as it always has been. Jesus, what is the matter with you?’

‘Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Connie, but I’m not scoring. I told you, before the, you know, thing with Woody Allen. My buddy Ron needs some capital to get his hot towel dispenser business off the ground. If I don’t get my share to him soon I’m out and it’s going to be a winner, I know it is.’

‘Well, you know what Emmet,’ I’d had it with him by then, ‘I don’t even know if I have $20,000 but if I did I am pretty sure that the last person on earth I would give it to would be you. How much do you owe me already? I’ve only bailed you out like 150 times before. Well, maybe I am the one who needs bailing out this time. Did you ever think of that? And by the way, next time you try to fleece me out of my hard-earned cash, can you at least do me the honour of thinking up a better story than some phoney crap about hot towel dispensers? It’s insulting.’

‘I see what Mom meant,’ he said, ‘about the coming back mean.’ He slammed the door on his way out.

I thought a lot about what he said about our dad that morning, though. He was right. He’d been a good father and there were no signs at all that he was anything other than content with his life. And that was being married to my mom. Later that day I went and watched the History Channel with him for a while. Frankie eyed me lasciviously from the sofa, his tongue hanging out, drool sliding off of it. I tried to ignore the excited pant of his breathing and concentrate on the
Mystery of Stonehenge
but it wasn’t easy.

When Mom came back from the market she fed Pop and, begrudgingly, me fried bologna sandwiches. Despite the fact I could still feel the fat swilling in my stomach way after I’d finished eating, she hadn’t done too badly. Nothing was rotten or walking off the
plate and the whole combination was an acceptable colour and temperature.

‘Nice sandwich, Mom,’ I told her when I brought our plates out to the kitchen.

‘Finally, I get something right,’ she said, taking the plates without even looking at me. ‘Saints be praised. Whatever did I do to deserve such a thing?’

Wordlessly, I slunk back into the living room where Frankie licked his lips and looked ready to pounce. Then I went back to bed.

In the night, my swirly dream woke me up again and I lay in bed in a cold sweat, my head pounding, my heart thumping. I was fighting an overwhelming dread that this was how I was going to feel for the rest of my life and it was unbearable. I just could not face a future that wretched. Something had to change, something had to shift, to improve. A person could not be expected to live with that level of despair. Panic fluttered inside me as I tossed and turned until sometime in the early hours I heard the front door open noisily, and the unsteady stagger of Emmet’s feet across the living-room floor. But instead of collapsing on the sofa as I had expected him to do — it’s where he’d been sleeping while I was at home — he burst into my room, flicking the light on and shrieking with surprise at the sight of me sitting upright in his bed.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

He looked terrible. His eyes were unfocussed, his hair was plastered to his head and he was sweating profusely.

‘Fuck,’ he said, looking at me, then down at himself. ‘Jesus.’ He staggered and fell against the dressing table, knocking MC’s collection of lotions and potions so that some fell over like ten pins and others rocked noisily on the surface.

I jumped out of bed and went over to help right him. ‘Be quiet, Emmet, you’ll wake Mom and Pop,’ I hissed, but it was too late. Frankie’s overgrown sausage of a body came bustling into the room and behind it, a vision in yellow quilted satin: Mom.

‘Oh man, I’m going to throw up,’ Emmet burbled, lurching past the both of us and into the bathroom where we heard the sound of him bringing up the contents of his stomach. It was not pretty.

‘Are you happy now?’ my mother said, looking at me with features so pinched they all wound up in the middle of her face. ‘Is this what you wanted? Is it? You know, we were doing just fine until you came back.’

I felt a physical pain in my heart then. An actual searing pain. I didn’t know how I had hardened myself against her in the past but I couldn’t do it any more. The outer shell I had obviously built up to deflect her cruelty was simply not there. I couldn’t turn my back and pretend she hadn’t hurt me, I couldn’t laugh off her words or seek refuge from them in the arms of someone else. There was no one else. I was on my own. I was at rock bottom and she was right there on top of me. But why?

‘You weren’t fine,’ I said to her. ‘You were never fine.’

The look of shock on her face almost stopped me in my tracks. I was scared of my mom the way you are always scared of the people with the most ammunition against you, the ones who can inflict the most pain. But as I stood there in my old bedroom next to a larger-than-life poster of Venus Williams, my brother retching noisily in the bathroom down the hall, my mother blaming me for I don’t know what, I realised that she could not hurt me more than she already had. It was time to stop doing anything for an easy life. It was time to change, to shift, to improve.

‘And of course I’m not happy,’ I said to her. ‘How could I be happy? There’s only one person in this family who seems happy and he spends most of his time visiting the castles of England.’

‘Don’t you dare talk about our family like that,’ my mother rasped, pulling her dressing gown closer to her body, her knuckles white as she strangled every last synthetic fibre to death. Frankie sat at her feet, ears pricked up, one eye shut, the other fixed on me. ‘There’s nothing wrong with our family.’

‘Nothing wrong? Jesus, Mom, have you never heard of the word “dysfunctional”?’

‘Don’t you dare take the Lord’s name in vain in my house!’

‘I’m not talking about the christing jesusing Lord, Mom, I’m talking about us!’ My voice was getting louder and louder, my unhappiness fighting to get out of me.

‘You do that one more time and I will throw you out in the street on your head, Mary-Constance, and so help me God maybe this time you will get some sense knocked into you.’

She turned and swept out of the bedroom toward the kitchen, but instead of swallowing my emotion and going to bed with a pillow over my face I followed her. She slammed the cupboards open and closed looking for a water glass; her hands trembling with rage as she turned on the tap and filled it, then slugged it back, her tiny shoulders hunched up and quivering.

Who was this woman? I thought to myself. And why was she so angry? Why was she always so angry? We stayed there for a few moments, her radiating rage and me staring at her stiffened back as I dissected our plight, felt the heat of her fury. I hadn’t done anything. I knew I hadn’t. So she wasn’t really angry that I’d left my husband or been half-killed by a pretzel or made my brother come home and puke his head off. She was just angry, period.

‘What made you like this?’ I asked, my voice soft with genuine wonder. ‘Who did this to you?’

The question must have taken her by surprise. Her shoulders relaxed a little as a surprised breath escaped and I could see the muscles in her face fighting for control in the rippled reflection of the kitchen window.

‘You can’t be this mad at me, Mom. I’m a good person, a good daughter. I’m sorry I stole Woody’s pretzel and ended up in a coma and can’t remember half the stupid things I’ve done in the last while but …’

Actually, I wasn’t being honest with her. In truth, I was sick to death of making apologies that were never accepted for things I had not done. ‘No,’ I said, changing tack so loudly I gave myself a fright. ‘You know what? I am
not
sorry. It is horrible what has happened to
me, Mom. I nearly died, I’ve lost my memory, I can’t taste anything, which means the only part of my life I really cared anything for is meaningless. I should not have to feel guilt just because you expect me to. For God’s sake, your son is a good-for-nothing pot-smoking who-knows-what-shooting bum who has spent his lifetime sponging off of you; your husband is probably going to spend the next 20 years watching medieval sword-making documentaries; even your dog is a sex pervert. Why should I get all your disappointment?’

This thought riled me, big-time, once it was out there in the open. Why
should
I get all the disappointment?

‘Has it ever occurred to you that in this family I might actually be your best bet? Have you ever considered that? Me. I may only have half a brain and no job or husband or fiancé or best friend or taste; I may have given up the biggest walk-in closet and floor-
to-ceiling
matching lingerie — but I am still your best bet. So why do you always dump on me, Mom? Why not dump on Emmet? Or, better still, nobody? You’re always so mad with me and I never know why. I’ve always been too busy just trying to get on with it, get around it, get over it but I am sick of it. I am so fucking sick of it.’ I was crying, of course. ‘Jesus, you heard me,
Jesus
! What is the matter with you?’

Her back to me still, she turned and opened the refrigerator, pulling out the remains of her heinous mac and cheese, the sight of which only fuelled my anger.

‘Put that back, it’s disgusting,’ I wept. ‘Your cooking sucks. It’s inedible. You shouldn’t do it. It’s a crime against produce. Are you listening to me, Mom? Are you even listening to me?’

I could hardly believe the words as they spewed out of my mouth. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure it was me saying them. Instead I felt as though I was somewhere up above us, looking down, just watching the whole scene unfold. This is quite common among those who have suffered head injuries, this looking-down-on-yourself sensation, although I didn’t know it then. All part of that now-it’s-a-
dream-now-it’s-not stuff. Anyway, while I was up there floating around I suspended my fury and noticed, first of all, how many flies had died and were buried in the light fitting in the ceiling and then how small my mother was. In my anger I had moved closer to her and I was enormous, despite the thin thighs. I loomed threateningly over her, my fists clenched at my own sides, my chin jutting out in my own anger, my face puce with fury. I didn’t look one little bit like the embattled broken hard-done-by figure I imagined myself to be. But you know what I did look like? A bully.

The wind left my sails at that moment and I returned to my body, which buckled and deflated with me back in it.

‘Mom,’ I whispered, choked and panicked. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.’

But if I had deflated, she had caved in. She had collapsed against the refrigerator, her body curved around the leftovers like a tiny comma, her rage evaporated.

‘Mom?’ My own fury had turned back into fear. ‘Please. I said I’m sorry.’

She did not move a muscle and when she started to speak, her voice was almost unrecognisable without its trademark anger. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, Mary-Constance,’ she said. ‘You’ve never known how lucky you are. I never hurt you. I never raised my hand to you. I never punished you. Not once.’

‘Never punished me? Mom, you’ve spent my whole life punishing me.’

‘Oh, you don’t know the meaning of the word,’ she said. She put the leftovers on the counter but didn’t let go of them, didn’t move away. ‘The things I could tell you.’