Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (24 page)

There was a gray cardboard box in the corner, overflowing with Edison's toys. I imagined him straightening up his little boy's mess for me while I was out in my car struggling to survive long enough to see him.

Delilah smiled. She was shorter than I, with big eyes and freckles across her copper-and-gold face. She was a few pounds over her perfect weight and lovely to me.

“Hi,” she said with a smile that added intention to the greeting.

“Hey.”

“Come on, Mama,” Edison said. “We got pizza in the kitchen.”

It was hard for me to fit into that evening with my son and stepsister. Edison showed me his room and his toys, his books and secret treasures. I paid attention like a forensic accountant gauging the worth of my little boy's life.

Delilah loved him and cared for him in ways that I might never be able to. He could read at least a dozen words and he could count. He said
please
and
thank you
without reminder, and he was healthy and unafraid.

In other words—he didn't need me. Delilah had brought him up into childhood with no scars or frowns on his face.

He loved me but he needed what my father's adopted daughter had to offer. And she loved him; I could see that love in each gesture and in every corner of her home.

We watched a cartoon movie about a little beaver named Barney who had been driven out of the forest by a fire and who had to make a life for himself in the city. There he met cats and dogs, humans and other displaced forest denizens, struggled to survive, and finally found a natural paradise where the waters were clear and there was need for a dam.

By the end Edison and Delilah were both sound asleep. My hands felt huge, like baseball mitts. My head ached and my legs were numb but ambulatory.

I put Edison to bed and then woke up Deihl.

She gave me a sleepy smile and kissed me.

“You wanna stay the night?” she asked.

“I think I better. I really don't feel like drivin'.”

She got me sheets and a blanket and fitted them to the cushions of the blue sofa.

“Me and Eddie are off early in the morning,” she said.

“Not early as me.”

There are states other than wakefulness and sleep. There is, for instance, the kind of unrest when you are so close to consciousness that you are not really out. You're still there in the world—just separated by a thin barrier of black tissue.

I lay there on the couch thinking about dreams and dreaming of ideas. Theon was there with me trying to distract my train of thought. He was grumbling that I wasn't
paying attention. My hands and feet were swollen and I said, “Give me a break, man. I'm trying to let you go.”

There were debt collectors sitting across from the sofa, each with a briefcase full of bills that they wanted me to pay; each hiding an erection in his pants, as interest—these two words,
erection
and
interest
, hung in the air unrealized and definite.

I was lying there in the darkness but I could see everything quite clearly. I was attempting to trace my steps backward from the parking lot just south of Hollywood Boulevard where I gave blow jobs for fifteen dollars and was just about to meet Theon. I was trying to back into the life with my mother and brothers, my stepsister and long-ago friends Maxine, Oura, Maryanne, and Juan.

I was walking backward, away from the smelly john's car, down La Cienega Boulevard, past the vice squad police cars headed up toward the avenue. I was going backward in time but everything else was going forward. It was very awkward, moving in reverse through life, but I kept it up because I couldn't live on the path I'd already traveled. I got all the way back to my mother's house, my childhood home.

I walked backward through the front door. In the entranceway Cornell had a baseball in his hand but decided not to throw it at me. He looked confused and I smiled at him, moving past him in time and space, avoiding his tortures.

I made it all the way to the living room. There I stopped and found myself once again on the sleeping sofa in Delilah's
house almost twenty years later. The front door banged open and my father staggered in, bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest. The debt collectors scattered. Theon stopped complaining.

“Daddy!” I screamed, and he fell on me, bleeding and choking on the blood.

I came awake in the dark room no longer able to see through the gloom. I was panting, a prayer fragment in my mind. “…  and protect Mama and Daddy from harm.”

My red phone showed me that it was four twenty-six in the morning. I stood up, feeling dizzy and weak. I sat down and thirty minutes passed in what felt like an instant. I stood up again and dressed.

It was six-oh-one when I got to Anna Karin's gray door that morning. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been late for an appointment.

Anna smiled when she opened the door and moved her body in such a way as to invite me in.

I went to the brown leather seat as she sat in the straight-backed maple chair.

“I've been thinking of suicide every other minute since I left yesterday morning,” I said.

“Really? Are you seriously considering it?”

“No,” I lied, “not really. It's just in my mind after we talked about it. Why do you think that is?”

“What do you think?”

“I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.”

“Do you feel that people are trying to control you?”

“Dead people,” I agreed. “Theon and my father mainly. They have a hold on my heart. I can't seem to get away from them no matter what I do.”

“Maybe you shouldn't try to pull away,” Anna said. “Maybe you should face their deaths and come to terms with the reality.”

“The reality is that I'm more a part of them than I am a part of anything in this world. I went to see my son, Edison, last night. He was so happy. He wants to be with me, but I know that he'd be better off with Delilah.”

“But you're his mother.”

“And what do I say to him when he sees me doing a gangbang scene with three guys inside me at the same time? What can I do for him when his friends laugh and call his mother a whore?”

“You love him and tell him that you made mistakes. You tell him the truth and he will understand. Maybe not at first. But a boy will love his mother no matter what.”

“I just don't feel like I belong,” I said. “I thought when I had that orgasm on the set that that was the moment I could let go. I mean, I felt what it was like to be just a regular girl even through all that I'd done. But then I got home and Theon was dead and all our money was gone. I tried to go home but even there I didn't really fit. My mother feels guilty and even my brother Newland made me feel like some kind of alien.”

“But I thought you two got along so well,” Anna said.

“Yeah. He loves me but the life he's living has nothing to do with where I come from. We don't have anything in common.

“It's really only my brother Cornell whom I have any sympathy with. I understand why he hates me. I know in my heart that he'd feel better if I were dead. You can see it in the way he looks at me and in the way I look at myself in the mirror.

“I'm just fucked-up and there's no way I can undo it. There's no going back and I can't move ahead.

“You know how people say, ‘He doesn't know what he's missing'?”

“Yes.”

“The few friends I have would miss me if I was gone but they don't know me. They look at me and see something they need or want. They see somebody that they would rather be but I'm not even that woman. They'd miss me but they don't know who I am.”

With that I had finished my truth telling for that morning.

While Anna was digesting the words I noticed a huge vulturelike bird perched on the roof of the office building across the street. At first I thought that it might be a statue, some kind of public art piece, but then it shifted.

I worried that maybe the bird was a hallucination, that if I pointed it out it might give Anna reason to have me committed. I couldn't allow that—not when I was so close to understanding.

I glanced at the kind woman. She gave me a quizzical look. She realized that I was looking out the window. The bird, whatever it was (or wasn't), decided at that moment to spread its great wings and leap from the rooftop. It seemed to bounce on an invisible current of air. Anna turned to look but before she could the creature lifted up beyond our line of sight.

It was gone.

“What were you looking at?” the therapist asked.

“Nothing,” I said, “just the empty roof.”

“Were you thinking of jumping off?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“A big bird,” I said, “might be on its way somewhere. It could have stopped there to rest and then gone on. That building wasn't put there for birds to rest on. It's civilized and humanized but the bird doesn't know any of that. She just knew she was tired and had to rest for a little while before going on to where her instincts told her.”

“I'm worried about you, Sandra.”

“You shouldn't be, Anna. I'm on my way. I've been places I don't belong and now I'm just moving on.”

“I'd like to prescribe an antidepressant for you,” she replied.

“If you think I need it—sure.”

My acquiescence seemed to soothe her worry. From there we talked about my father again and how bereft my whole family was at his death.

“It was like a bomb went off in the living room,” I
said, “and we were all suffering from shell shock from then on.”

“Does Theon's death bring up these memories of your father?”

This question was simple and seemingly unobtrusive—at first. I considered it. Theon was an outlaw too, in his own way. I had loved him as women love men in the beginning.

But did his death compare to my father's? Was his stupid demise an echo of Aldo Peel's reckless existence?

My father was a warrior, I thought, while Theon was a pimp and a whore. I was that real or imagined bird on the roof across the street from the woman pretending to be me. And Anna was everybody else, recording the complex interrelationships of men and women out there beyond the definitions of who and what and how we should be.

Theon was what Dickens would have called a swollen boy with an engorged member as his cross to bear. Daddy was a street fighter searching for and finding his manhood in back alleys and barroom fights.

“Sandra?” Anna said.

I looked up and out the window expecting to see a whole flock of condors waiting for me to join them or feed them. But the rooftop was empty.

“I have to go,” I said.

“What were you thinking?”

“I don't have any answers, Anna. You can call in the prescription to Beacher's Pharmacy in Pasadena. I'll pick it up when I get home.”

Anna tried to continue our unwieldy conversation but I
needed to leave. I stood up and waded through her questions to the door. Before I left I told her about the funeral and said that it would be good for her to come.

Driving back toward my home I got a call.

“Yes?”

“Sandra?”

“Hey, Rash. Are you coming to the funeral?”

“I am.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“I told Annabella about you.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“She's pretty mad. It kinda surprised me. I mean, for the last year or so she's been totally distracted and kept on telling me how things weren't working. Now it's like we were married and I was cheating on her.”

“If you can't come I'll understand,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I want to be there with you, I mean for you. I need to be there.”

“What if you lose Annabella?”

“Then I won't have to leave her.”

Maybe I should have said something then. It seemed clear that Rash was using me as the element of change in his life. Rather than just telling Annabella that he wanted to leave he was presenting me as the reason. Maybe I should have said for him to go figure out his relationship with her before coming to me.

But I felt so far away from anything except the actions
I had to take that I wasn't worried about my hapless suitor. Maybe I even felt a little complimented that a man working in the real world would leave a pretty UCLA grad student for me.

Anyway, I'd be dead soon and then Rash could use me as a memory.

“Okay,” I said. “If you get there early we can talk before the ceremony.”

I drove out to LeRoy's Chicken and Waffle House and ordered two full meals. I ate at an outside table, scanning the skies for that big bird. I didn't see it but, I thought, that didn't mean it wasn't there.

After eating I went to a big toy store in Santa Monica and bought Edison a boy's computer that had learning games and a place to keep his diary.