The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (20 page)

“It’s not a stupid car,” Max said.

“Are you dry? I’m not dry. What good is a car that won’t even keep you dry?” She reached between her legs for her huge dung-colored purse and pulled out a bottle of beer. “I don’t suppose you have an opener.”

“In my pocket, but there’s a law against open containers in automobiles,” Max said. “Even if you don’t respect my car, we must respect the law.”

“There’s a law against sodomy, but I don’t see you calling the cops to your house every morning.”

She opened the glove box, put the points of the bottle cap against the glove box door, and hammered down against the bottle.

“You are
breaking
my car,” said Max. “Please stop.”

She hammered again and the top popped off, landing on the dash.

“Flying makes me nervous. Seeing my family makes me nervous. I
need
to drink. It’s what we do in my family. I’ll have more to drink this weekend than I’ve had in the past six months.”

“I’m not certain that’s humanly possible.” Max gave her a droll look.

“A person gets carried to a couch one time and suddenly she’s a lush.” She took a long slug of beer, then leaned over and kissed Max on the cheek. “You know I’m just being a twat. I don’t hate you, but at times I’m compelled to act like I do.”

He shrugged. “I hate
you.
A significant percentage of adorable men waste their lives on women like you.”

“I wish one would waste his on me,” she said.

“That has a country-and-western flavor to it.”

She took another drink, emptying the bottle. Was it possible that she had drunk an entire beer in two gulps?

“It would be a lot easier going home if I could take someone with me as a shield.” She had pleaded with Max to accompany her. “Did I mention how I’d pay the shield’s airfare? Buy the shield’s meals and shield wax?”

He rolled his eyes and signaled their turn.

Lisa lowered her window, the rain pelting her face, and tossed the bottle into the bushes that lined the road. She raised the window and took another beer from her purse.

Max grabbed her arm to stop her. He lifted his butt from the seat, worked his hand into his pocket, and produced a pocketknife.

“I don’t want the door to my glove box to be tilty,” he said. “Better we should both go to prison.”

“Am I really so not pretty anymore that no one will ever want me?” Lisa asked.

“You’re hardly not pretty at all,” Max said. “You’re almost not beautiful.”

“I haven’t had sex in seven months.” She popped the bottle cap for emphasis. “And then it was Captain Mike. Remember him?”

“You pick the worst losers to screw,” he said. Even the car swerved a bit.

She took a drink of cold, delicious beer.

“I was lonely. Drunk, one might say. The moon was full. Mist was in the gutter. A lonesome dog yowled in the distance.”

“I get the picture,” he said. “Where did you do it? The bathroom of some bar?”

“Please, Max.” She tried to think of an exotic place. She hated to say it was absolutely dull sex on Captain Mike’s underfilled water bed. She hadn’t come, and he had made waves all night. Why did she even want a man? “Let’s change the subject entirely.”

“Drink up,” Max said. “In moments you will fly.”

She lifted the beer, the rim of the bottle’s mouth touching her bottom lip as she spoke, as if she were addressing it.

“Shield me,” she pleaded.

It took all three of them to get Amanda across the bathroom tile. Ants tumbled from her body like the fabled bread crumbs, making a trail behind them. Lisa spun the tub faucet, insisting that Sydney and their mother leave.

“I’ll get her in,” she said. “Just go.”

Her sister’s head bounced against the tile while Lisa pulled off the satin dress. Ants swarmed her hands when she removed the panties, and her anxious flicking pinched the skin on Amanda’s thighs. When she discovered Amanda’s bra was wet, she instinctively jerked her fingers away, snapping the bra against her sister’s back, which elicited a moan. The bra had wicked up a load of gin. Could one get loaded from simply bathing in liquor? Was drinking even required? She should have known that getting her naked sister, all dead weight, into the high old-fashioned tub, complete with lion paws for feet, would be all but impossible.

She lifted her sister’s legs over the tub’s ledge, then hefted her by the elbows, the top of Amanda’s head knocking lightly against the floor, but Lisa would have to be seven feet tall to get her in that way. She lowered her grip and lifted, but one leg slipped free of the tub. Ultimately she had to get on her knees to wrestle her sister’s ass into the water, shoving up against the fleshy cheeks until they pressed against her own facial cheeks.

Her sister tumbled in face-first and came up spitting. She became instantly alert and sober, reaching for the shampoo bottle as if she had stepped into the tub on her own. The recovery was too fast. Lisa understood that her sister had been acting. But there was no way to call her bluff. Lisa’s heart started to do strange things inside her chest. Ants floated up to the water’s surface. Some were alive. Most had been killed by the heat of the water or they’d drowned or been crushed, or maybe they, too, were pretending.

She gathered up Amanda’s clothing, on which living ants still roamed.

“I’m going to toss these in the washer,” she said.

Amanda was rubbing up a big lather in an armpit and did not reply, the water coloring with mud and stippled with the bodies of ants.

Lisa did not examine her sister’s panties until she was in the laundry room. They were covered with honey. She tossed them into the washer. The satin dress she took outside. When she shook it, ants flew up into the air, vanishing before they hit the ground.

The honeybee has nearly one thousand minuscule eyes and an equal number of brain stems. To think of it as a single organism is akin to thinking of quadruplets as a single entity. The thousand brains send out their thousand signals in response to the thousand visions of the thousand eyes, and the single body responds in rapid and consecutive order, which accounts for the bee’s famed circuitry of flight. Contrary to popular belief, the bee does not die after losing its stinger; however, other bees do not care to associate with it. The stingerless bee becomes an outcast and must leave the hive. It has to make its way in the world alone. Stripped of its stinger, a bee is nothing more than a raisin with wings.

No one was at the airport to pick her up and her cell got no signal. Lisa waited at baggage for twenty minutes before going to a pay phone. On impulse she got out her phone card and dialed long distance to retrieve messages. The first was from Max.

“I’m back from dropping you off, and as I’m sure you’ll be calling yourself soon, I thought I’d provide you with a happy voice. You’ve only been a teeny shit. We all still think of you with moderate affection. What’s that? Roberto wants his two cents. Not merely ‘moderate affection,’ he says, but a ‘somewhat more than temperate fondness.’ Now go face your family. Quit hiding.”

The second message began with her mother’s cough. “We won’t be able to meet you at the airport, sweetheart. I have a beauty appointment, and your sister has made herself unable to drive.” The time stamp indicated that the message had arrived while Lisa was somewhere high over the Midwest sipping on a weensy bottle of vodka.

It might have been a passing overweight, badly dressed tourist that inspired her to call her high school boyfriend and ask for a ride. She had dumped him years ago just before leaving for college. While she had gone on to earn a monetarily useless degree and to utterly flunk out in the romance department, he had skipped college and taken several major emotional strides. He had two divorces under his belt, a daughter living in another state, and monthly alimony obligations. He’d had it all, while she had accumulated nothing but a history of semicasual sex with incompetents, short-term affairs with fools, earnest-like confessions from married men, and one bad case of the clap.

“It’s me,” she said, the first of several tests she planned to give him.

“Lisa!” Timmy said. “You in town?”

Recognition of voice after two words:
A+

“Just barely. I’m at the airport and I don’t want to take a taxi.”

“I’m not doing anything important. I’ll come get you.”

Ability to take a hint:
A+

“It’s great to hear your voice,” she said. “You sound great.”

“Is Amanda in town, too?”

Repartee:
F

Lisa and Timmy had been a couple for three years by the time she evaluated herself “ready for something/one new.” Why go to college among a sea of men and have a boy back home you would eventually have to betray anyway? True, she hadn’t wanted to spoil the summer and had waited until the very end to break up. Actually, she hadn’t given him a clue until her suitcase and stereo were packed in the family car. Her mother began honking the horn during her dismissal of him.

Tacky, she admitted, but ancient history.

Within a week of her departure for college, Amanda seduced him. This became what Amanda called “a boner of contention” between them. Amanda argued that she had done nothing wrong, but Lisa refused to speak to her for two years. After an even longer period of snubbing Timmy, she sent him a congratulations card when he got married the second time, and then another when he racked up his second divorce. He had called after that one, and they became phone friends.

Timmy had not aged well and his car stank. He had zero hair on the top of his head, a roll of lard about his waist, and he had taken to wearing loafers. His car—red, boxy, dirty—smelled of stickiness, like a lollipop left in the sun. He drove well, though, signaling before turns, slowing when lights turned yellow, and he was happy to see her.

“You look wonderful,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all.”

She thanked him.

“I’ve put on a few pounds,” he acknowledged with a shake of his head. “You still seeing that guy Colonel Mike?”

“
Captain
Mike, and god no. I don’t remember telling you about him.”

She crossed her arms, ready to be annoyed. A hard rain had ended minutes before Timmy picked her up, and the buildings shone wet and clean, but the city looked very little like the one she had abandoned years before. Instead, it looked like every other damn place in the country.

“I hate water beds, too,” Timmy said.

“Let’s forget whatever details I may have told you in a moment or several moments of weakness.”

“Oh,
that,
” he said and laughed.

She didn’t dare ask. The steeple of the Infant Jesus Baptist Church was the first marker that indicated this really was her hometown. She had never set foot in it, but the steeple had been the metaphor of choice for “penis” with Amanda, which had led to an elaborate symbology used to baffle adults and strangers. Her sister might say, “That guy Craig is about as Baptist as you get,” and Lisa would agree. “Church boy” took on a whole new meaning in Amanda’s mouth. Timmy, alas, had lost much of his steeple appeal.

“How about you?” she asked him. “Seeing anyone?”

“Kind of,” he said.

“How can you ‘kind of’ see someone? You make love with your eyes shut?”

“She’s married.” He ran a hand over his neck. “Really very extremely married.”

His lover, he revealed, had taken her first breath eighteen years before he took his, had been married twenty-three years now, had two children at Ivy League schools, and was friends with Lisa’s mother.

“
Her?”
Lisa said. “You’re fucking
her?
” The woman had the scrawny good looks that screamed of the labor it took to achieve it—her body thin but dimpled with exertion and age.

Timmy shrugged. “Weird, no? I would have told you earlier, but I thought you’d react exactly as you have.”

“
Her?”

“I’d marry her if I could.” He offered a sad smile. “But no can do.”

She could see that he was in love, and the love was a multiply forbidden one. He had probably told no one else in the world of this secret love. She took a deep breath, but it did no good.

“I can’t believe you’re seeing
her.
”

Amanda said this: “The best time in my life was when I got out of the cage the second time, and I had a job with that shrink scheduling the weirdest kind of nimrods, and I was in love with Ernie, who you never met but who was really sweet, and I had a little place with yellow curtains on the window above the kitchen sink, and I could see the tops of the trees in the park when I parted the curtains.” She had spoken to the windshield, but now she turned to Lisa. “You know what ruined it?”

Lisa couldn’t remember ever hearing of any Ernie. They idled in the car on a city street, escaping their mother and Sydney. They had decided to see Timmy, but Amanda made Lisa pull over right on the darkest stretch of road. She wanted to explain something.

“What ruined it, whatever
it
is—peace, sanity, ordifuckinary life. What ruined it was
art.
” She stopped and studied Lisa, as if she should somehow respond.

Lisa nodded self-consciously and said, “Art.”

This seemed to satisfy Amanda. “I started reading novels again and going to museums. Ernie encouraged me. He was a big art guy. Not that he did any himself, but he was into it. Liked to gawk at paintings, et cetera. He read a lot. You never heard of these guys he liked to read.”

“Have you ever noticed that this town has no streetlights that work?” Lisa said. “I’m sorry. It just bugs me that it’s so dark here.”

“Drive the fucking car somewhere else then,” Amanda said. She had changed into jeans and a T-shirt that advertised a performance artist who called herself “Slippery Whenever.” She crossed her arms over the ad and said nothing more.

“Go on,” Lisa said. “You were talking about art fucking up your life.”

“You don’t give a shit. Let’s just go see Timmy.”

“I do. I care. I’m sorry. I just can’t concentrate on this dark street.” She shifted the car into drive and headed in the direction of Timmy’s house.

Amanda sighed. “I wish I had a cigarette. And a bottle of gin. Do you even know what I’m doing anymore?”