Uncle Janice (11 page)

But she woke up in plenty of time for
Wheel of Fortune
. Janice sat next to her on the couch with their shoulders touching while Pat Sajak did his heroic best to conceal his boredom. Like Bananagrams, oily fish, pumpkin seeds, and folic acid, television game shows were supposed to fortify Vita’s brain, and so Janice was forbidden to solve any of the puzzles out loud or make sarcastic comments about Vanna’s plunge line or really say anything at all until the commercials, when Vita muted the television with the remote, which lately she’d been calling the picture-stick. At the first commercial break they debated whether the middle contestant came across as cocky. (He totally did.) At the second break, Janice asked her if she wanted to go to the Salvation Army that weekend to pick out crackhead clothes.

“By the way,” Vita said. “I talked to your sister earlier. Supposedly”—because anything Judith-related needed to be spoken of conditionally—“she’s coming to visit tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Seriously? And you’re just telling me this now?”

Her red shining lipstick cracked when she smiled. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I got … what’s the word?
Distracted
. I guess I got distracted.”

Janice knew that Judith’s cell phone would ring the instant she walked through the back door. Her ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, her former coworkers at White Castle, the friends she used to tag lampposts with, the overpierced sixty-year-old she’d met at the Shambhala Meditation Center, they would call her one after the other, as if they could smell her organic perfume—was there such a thing?—floating in the air above
Queens. And then she’d be gone. Carved into skinny wedges and doled out. K.I.T. See you next Christmas.

“How long is she staying?” Janice asked.

Less sad than bewildered, Vita explained that supposedly Judith could get enough time off only for the weekend—she sold soap at an alternative supermarket in Scranton, Pennsylvania—and supposedly she intended to split her visit between the parents. Vita’s phrasing, which must’ve been Judith’s phrasing:
the parents
. From when she’d get in late Thursday night to mid-morning on Saturday, she’d stay in Richmond Hill. After that—and this was unprecedented—she’d take the LIRR out to her father’s house, where he was supposedly throwing himself a fiftieth-birthday bash, even though everyone in his first life knew he was really turning fifty-one.
Wheel of Fortune
came back on before Janice could ask how Judith had even heard about the party. It was possible, she guessed, that they sometimes talked on the phone. Or were maybe Facebook friends. The cocky middle contestant, who’d reached the bonus round, received gratis five consonants and one vowel, but they didn’t help him any because of course the game was rigged. Against protocol, Janice announced that she’d solved the puzzle, even though she hadn’t yet figured out the final word. Add it to her list of lies. Her mother told her to shush.

Later, unable to sleep, Janice looked through the stacks of mail in the kitchen for an invitation to her father’s birthday. She didn’t find it—she would’ve torn it up anyway—but she did find a slim Amazon package with
Sway: The Art of Gentle Persuasion
. She also found February’s mortgage bill. And the Con Ed and Time Warner bills. AmEx, Visa, and neurologist bills. The March of Dimes sent her an actual dime, which they asked her to send back to them along with a donation. It was effectively guilt-making, but not so guilt-making that it made her reach for her checkbook. Instead she took the dime—and the two pennies the universe had gifted her earlier—up to her bedroom to toss the
I Ching
. Forget about Nostradamus. Forget about Miss Cleo, Mayan calendars, tarot cards, palm-readers, and psychics who advertise their services on pay phone stickers. From the recesses of Janice’s closet she pulled out her only patrimony, her father’s beat-up copy of the
I Ching
,
its pages fattened by long-ago drained bathwater. Duct tape kept the spine intact. With its cover missing, the first page was a blank page, stained the color of tea. Unable to provide a generalized vision of her future, the book instead needed her to ask a particular question, the more specific the better. Will I make three more buys before the end of the month? She tossed the coins onto her bedspread six times in a row. The ratio of heads to tails corresponded to either a broken Yin line (— —) or an unbroken Yang (———). Theoretically she should’ve used only pennies, the humblest of all coins, but whatever, nobody was watching. Her coin tosses made a hexagram that looked like this:

Which the
I Ching
said meant this:

THE JUDGMENT

Which made Janice wish she had asked a Magic 8 Ball.
Reply hazy, try again
, she at least could’ve understood. In its defense, the
I Ching
always rolled ambiguous, with a DIY-approach to fortune-telling, but this wounding of the bright business seemed particularly coy. She didn’t know if she was the man of dark nature or the wise and able man or both or neither. And she didn’t know if persevere meant she should sit around doing nothing, waiting for the three buys to come to her. Yeah right. Fat chance. She tossed the book onto the floor, swept the coins off her bedspread.

The next day at work Janice sat around and did nothing. Not her fault. She couldn’t make any buys because her team didn’t go out to make buys. It was a rumpus day. So she could read at her desk without the Big Bosses knowing, she photocopied chapters out of
Sway: The Art of Gentle Persuasion
. From the back of the lounge, she watched the
Rubí
finale, a humdinger of an episode in which the recently scarred heroine mentors her niece in the wicked ways of seduction. Afterward, Richie the Receptionist, who hadn’t even seen the show, but perhaps looking for a mentor of his own, solicited the uncles’ advice on how to finagle a threesome between himself, his girlfriend who worked in Payroll, and his girlfriend’s lesbian roommate. Janice’s sarcastic suggestion: alcohol. Richie thanked her without apparent irony, but again: you can never tell with these guys. At shift’s end, Sergeant Hart told the team to report back to the rumpus in a whopping eleven hours. Tevis muttered on over to A.R.’s Tavern for the Thursday Amstel Light Special, but Janice sped home, giddy to see her sister despite Judith’s historical tendency to bruise her feelings. Janice parked in the garage. As she hurried down the alleyway, she looked for Judith’s size-six footprints in the pavement’s alien-fruit splatters. She didn’t find any tracks, but it was sort of hard to see anything. For the first time since Janice had become a cop, Vita had neglected to leave the porch and kitchen lights burning for her after a late shift. Darkness pressed its sad face against all the
windows. Everyone was asleep. Of course everyone was asleep. It was almost one thirty in the morning. Janice wanted to accidentally ring the doorbell—whoops!—and accidentally wake up the house, but when she came into the kitchen she heard Indian music already thundering out of the living room. Sitars and drums, outrageously loud. And correction: there was one light still burning, the refrigerator’s, its motor groaning with disbelief, its door left open for God knows how long. She closed it, quietly moving through her own kitchen like a burglar. She wanted to make a grand entrance into the living room and see her sister’s surprised face at the instant of recognition, before they both armed themselves with how’s work, how was the bus ride, so nice to see you, you look great. Although Janice could have probably banged some pots together out here and still not be heard. Actually, maybe she should make some noise, just in case a strange man or woman or both had their icy hands on Judith’s big boobs.

“Hello?” Janice said.

The music stopped, and their mother, who should’ve been asleep, said, “Uh-oh.”

Alone, just the two of them, they sat next to each other on the couch, Vita in an unfamiliar gray T-shirt that said
DUNDER-MIFFLIN
across the chest, a reference to a Scranton-based television show that she had most likely never seen before. Tonight it was
their
shoulders touching. Lazy, relaxed, neither one of them standing up to greet her, they had their legs propped up on a coffee table that was even more cluttered than usual, with Vita’s lipstick-stained water glasses, of course, but also a pair of St. John’s alumni mugs, a perfect apple core tipped over onto its side, and a laptop, presumably Judith’s, presumably the source of all that sitar-and-drums Indian music. The computer cast enough of a glow for Janice to see their faces, but she flicked on the overhead light anyway. She expected them to squint against the glare, or raise their arms across their eyes like creatures from the lagoon, but they giggled instead.

Even though Judith was nineteen months older than Janice, people frequently mistook them for twins, especially when they were kids and sharing a secret language. Until she was three years old—and this
seemed almost impossible to imagine now—Janice refused to speak except in babbling asides to her sister, who then translated on her behalf. What had happened to them? Now Janice left her ace voice mails that went unreturned. They still looked alike, though, still had the same gray eyes that turned brown at night, the same plump mouth that reposed itself most comfortably in a smirk. But despite her employee discount on organic beauty products, Judith had much worse skin, with pimples pitting her jawline from the constant friction of a cell phone. And having always had the bigger boobs and butt, she seemed to have lost all the weight that Janice had gained since joining Narcotics. Plus some. Judith looked skinny as a bird, with bones apparently just as hollow, because when she at last stood up for a proper greeting she crumpled to the floor.

“Oh my God,” she said, laughing. “My fucking legs fell asleep.”

Janice rushed to help her. Judith kept protesting, kept saying,
I’m fine, really, I’m fine
, but even after she’d been seated back on the couch she kept a grip on Janice’s hand. The nails were an abomination, her annual New Year’s resolution unresolved so Judith gave her a mini-manicure, pushing down all the cuticles. It stung terribly, even drew small trembles of blood, but Janice let her big sister go through every finger.

“Am I hurting you?” Judith said.

“No,” Janice lied.

For her own secret reasons, Vita started laughing. She scooted down the couch, up against the armrest, to watch both her girls at once.

“You should get a proper one of these,” Judith said. “From a real-life Asian lady.”

“We can go tomorrow morning,” Janice said.

Judith reached for the other hand. “A friend of mine wears a hair tie around her wrist,” she said. “Like a rubber band? And she snaps it whenever she feels like biting her nails.”

“I usually don’t even know when I’m doing it.”

That Janice stood over them, still wearing her heavy coat, made her seem, she knew, like a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant in the insular land of Good Times. So had flicking on the overhead. So did reaching now for an alumni mug to sniff its contents. Given Vita’s alcohol
prejudices—forged in the coal-black smithy of an eighteen-year marriage to an abusive drunk—Janice felt sure they weren’t actually drinking, but she wanted some way to acknowledge their cozy late-night goofiness in the hopes that they’d order her to change into pajamas and come join them on the couch’s middle cushion. Unfortunately, as she quickly realized, her mug-sniffing came across as schoolmarmish and disapproving, the exact opposite of her intentions. With all the cuticles pushed back into the skin, Judith let go of Janice’s hand. On the laptop screen a shirtless Indian man on pause looked ready to take a bite out of a fluorescent light tube.

“What are you guys watching?”

“Only the craziest video ever,” Judith told her.

“It’s apparently a religious thing,” Vita said, and this time they both giggled.

Janice closed her eyes now that she understood. She should’ve sniffed the air above their heads, not the tea and honey in their mugs. “Really?” she asked Judith. “In the house?”

“What?” Judith said.

“I can
smell
it, okay?” Not true: the living room smelled only of living room, but that didn’t mean anything. Pot smoke would’ve dissipated quickly. “In the fucking house, Judith? With
Mom
?”

“First of all?” Judith said. “Hypothetically? I’m pretty sure Mom’s a grown-up who can do whatever she wants.”

“Girls,” Vita said.

“It’s really great for your memory,” Janice told her.