Читать книгу They Is Us - Tama Janowitz - Страница 8

Murielle stands at the window staring at Slawa with hatred. How long has she been standing there? She has no idea. Sometimes, glancing at her watch, she finds ten hours have elapsed, when it seems twenty minutes; conversely, it feels like ninety minutes have passed but the reality is only a quarter of an hour has gone by. She sees now she should have been taking out her anger on Slawa, not on poor Julie, even though the kid does drive her nuts.

Tahnee switches stations from the kitchen keyboard. She has been using the computer. There is no way to switch off the big screen entirely, or they would have to call the company to be reconnected. It’s easier just to leave it on all the time. “Ma, can I go look for my dad this weekend?” she says. “I think I might have a clue.”

“You can just forget that,” Murielle says bitterly and then adds, in a gentler tone, “I don’t know why you would ever want to find your father, he’s never sent a dime for you. Anyway, I already told you, we have to go to Grandpa’s, I need your help.”

Tahnee shrugs. “But Mommy dear, you have Julie to help. Besides, this time it’s a genuine lead.”

Another time she might have been more lenient, but right now everything is irritating Murielle. “So what do you think will happen if you do find Terry? He’ll probably try and convince you to sell his Diamond-C dust to your schoolmates. I know him. He’s no good, Tahnee. I told you, forget it, you can go look maybe when you’re older.”

“I don’t want to go to Grandpa’s, Mom. It is so boring. Can I at least stay here?”

“Alone? Yeah, right. Forget it.” Now Tahnee is looking sullen, Murielle feels a bit frightened. “If you come with me to help at Grandpa’s, I’ll take you shopping after. If you stay for the day.”

A car pulls up at the end of the driveway – the mother of Julie’s rinky-dink girlfriend, who is going to take the two girls and her own kids to the public pool for the day.

“Moommm! Mom!” A shriek the pitch of which must date to early hominid: “Maaaa!” Tahnee yells, a sour Acadian howl. “Mom! I can’t find my merkin – and I need it for the pool!”

Julie comes up from the basement. She hopes her mother won’t go down while she is gone. Her mother doesn’t know just how many pets she has there. She has been fussing with her pets, trying to move them to different cages, but she is running out of space. All summer all her animals have been reproducing.

Even during her days off, all she does is clean cages and it is her own fault, kind of. The pink rabbit she brought home from work mated with the blue rabbit she already owned and now there are six feathered babies, cute, though one has three ears, only two of which are normal size.

Finally the lost merkin is found, or another substituted, and the kids depart. “Bye-bye, Mom!” says Tahnee, grabbing her towel.

“Byeeee!” says Julie, swathed head to toe in her thick ultra-protective V-ray-stopper swimming costume. “See ya later!”

“Bye!” Murielle yells back. She is just about to step on a cockroach when she realizes it has a red dot. “Oh, hi, Greg,” she says. “Sorry about that.” She doesn’t know if the roach waves one leg at her, or just in general. Either way, it’s hard to care! Murielle can’t imagine why Tahnee is still anxious to find her father. She has told her older daughter for years how miserable Terry was to her. Terry is not Julie’s father. Just after Tahnee was born, Terry left and it wasn’t long before she met Slawa.

When Slawa and Murielle first met, Slawa was a limo driver – car service, actually – exotic, kind, of a spiritual nature – who gave her a ride from Newark. It turned out that Slawa’s wife Alga, who was much older than he and suffered from reeTVO.9, was a resident of the nursing home that Murielle managed.

The coincidence seemed remarkable: fate. After Alga died, they married. But somewhere along the line Slawa had changed from a man who rescued her, a single woman with a kid, into a fat Russian slob who worked in a shoe repair shop.

Murielle slams the screen door. When she was married to Terry, Tahnee’s father, and Terry wanted to make Diamond-C dust in the bathroom to sell, she wouldn’t let him, which was one reason why they split up; now in retrospect she thinks, but at least he didn’t drink.

Of course, if Terry had been caught by the law for selling Diamond-C dust, all of their property would have been confiscated, even the things that were in her name. Tahnee would have been sent into foster care. Murielle’s struggles to survive, her desertion by Terry just after Tahnee was born; it means nothing to Tahnee. Tahnee would end up doing what she wanted. There has to be a way, some way, to keep Tahnee with her for a while longer. She loves that kid so much. Who would have thought her own daughter would have ended up being the love of her life?

Even so, Murielle knows there is something wrong with Tahnee. Her dead, pale eyes, white hair, white skin; but that isn’t it. Other people are mesmerized by her, but not really in a positive way. They become nervous, upset. Frightened? Murielle has never figured out what it is, exactly. Tahnee has a certain cat-like indifference to people and things.

Despite this, she loves Tahnee much more than Julie, whom she almost always wants to slap. It takes major control not to. Julie’s eager, earnest face, plain and scared – how is she going to get through the rest of her life unless she toughens up?

“Make sure you put on plenty of sunscreen!” she calls, hoping the girls can still hear. “Otherwise you’re going to fry!” It isn’t that the sun is particularly bright – there is a reddish haze in the sky – but Tahnee is so fair, virtually albino and at fourteen years old almost five eleven, all endless insect leg-and-arm stalks which only burn. Julie has brown hair, more normal color, but prone to prickly heat, rashes, asthma. The kids have never been all that healthy but it is probably from growing up around this polluted marshland.

From the window where she stands, Murielle can see the bald spot on Slawa’s head. He is still painting the drive. How long could it take? And, how stupid to wear a swirly yellow MUU-MUU. Yellow has never been his colour, he looks sallow.

Murielle has taken to making him sleep in a tent in the yard, the flies around him are so constant and offensive. When she goes after them with a fly swatter, he shouts at her, saying to leave them alone. That is so warped. If she ignores him, and actually smashes one, it is so huge that fly intestines – or whatever it is inside them – splatter everywhere and are almost impossible to wipe off, more like paint than guts.

Now Slawa is on his knees, facing the house and looks as if he’s about to topple over. It is a hot, airless day and the smell of car exhaust, burnt rubber, an ashiness that might be from the power plant – sour uranium? Bug poison? The crematorium? – blows over the marsh and through the screen door next to Murielle.

Beyond Slawa, across the road, is another house just like theirs: a white one and a half story ranch house with attached garage, a plate glass window next to the front door.

In this neighborhood no one ever uses their front doors, even though each house has a concrete walkway leading to two or three steps, planted on either side with plastic trees. What is the point of the front entrance, as if – someday – someone grand and important will arrive, who must enter through the main door and not the servant’s entryway?

It’s ridiculous, the development is nearly sixty years old but no one important has ever come to pay a visit, there are no front parlors, there is no life inside or out.

Two or three blocks down is the marsh, what is left of it. The chemical seepage can be smelled – more or less – round the clock. It stings the eyes. Slawa has an empty beer bottle next to the metal pail of driveway blacking, or whatever the stuff is. In a minute he will be in to get a fresh bottle. He is stout, with a big gut. He looks older than his years, although she’s not quite sure how old he is; he has never bothered with the skin treatments and injections even little kids know about from school. How could he let himself go like this? He used to be cute! He comes up the stairs holding his empty beer bottle. “Any more?” he says.

“How should I know? Look in the fridge.”

“All the time like this, Murielle. Why you so angry all the time?”

“Go,” she says. “I think you should go before the girls get back.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’ve had it. I want you to move out.”

“But… I don’t understand.”

“What is there not to understand? I can’t stay married to you any more! We’re over! Finished! D-I-V-O-R –”

“What will you tell the girls?” he says. “Anyway, at least I want to finish the driveway first.”

“Just forget the driveway. The way this dump looks, that’s the least of it. I’ll tell them… you had to go away for a while, on business. Shoe business. You can call them tonight if you want.”

“Hey,” he says. He is breathing heavily now and for a second she thinks he is going to hit her with the bottle. The big gut swings heavily. He’s practically pregnant. His legs and arms are scrawny, though. He has an alcoholic’s jug belly, under that flowing MUU-MUU. He must think the MUU-MUU hides his tummy. “Do you mind if I shower and change first?”

She guesses he is trying to sound sarcastic. “Can’t you do that when you check into a motel?”

“I’m paying the fucking mortgage on this place, I can sleep here if I want. Why don’t you get out and take Tahnee with you and I’ll stay here with Julie?”

“We’ve been through this a million times, Slawa. Let’s not have another scene. Take a shower if you must. Just don’t leave your towels on the floor.”

He goes muttering up the stairs. “I’m supposed to paint the driveway and then move out covered with tar to check into a Motel 99.” He curses in Russian. Once she might have found this sexy. Now she knows he is saying that he wants to kill her. When his murderous rages strike, Slawa is like an elephant in musth, blood-eyed, uncontrollable. Then, in English, he adds, “Stupid cow, what makes you think I have to go to a motel? There are other places I can go. You think you are the only woman out there? Many womens say to me, Slawa, you are handsome, you are so kind.”

She doesn’t bother to answer. It is true that to some he might still be attractive, if you are into tiger-eyed, slap-you-around, rough-trade, peasant-type Slavs.

There is only one bathroom in the house. Good luck to him, thinks Murielle. There hasn’t been any real water, any decent water, in months. It is all that instant sanitizer glop coming out of the showerhead these days, stuff that leaves you stickier than when you went in. Even so, it will be nice to have one less person using the bathroom. The girls’ rooms are across the hall from the bigger bedroom, one on the side of the house looking out to the neighbors and the other facing the street, neither of them large enough to hold much more than a bed: pink for Julie, pale lilac for Tahnee.

When she first moved in – Tahnee was little more than a year, Julie just about to be born – Slawa had been living alone for some time. The place was a mess. In his enthusiasm at her arrival, Slawa attempted to do some re-decorating. He bought floor-to-ceiling hologramovisions at a nearby discount supply house so each room could have hologramovisions on each wall.

But the sets were of such inferior quality that half the time the color was lousy, and then some of them stopped working; when the men came to bring in new ones, Slawa didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees for removal of the old, so he simply had the new ones installed on top. And then when those broke, he did the same thing. Now each room, in terms of square footage, is diminished by half.

With much delight he installed new light fixtures, ceiling fans, a garbage dehydrator, MereTwelve-operated self-generating devices, top of the line Siebmosh communicators – but half the time touching the light switch gave you a shock, or caused a fuse to blow. Clapping on or off worked sometimes, but often things would go on or off in the middle of the night. And no amount of scrubbing could clean the vintage vinyl flooring, which, a realtor had once told them, could make the house more valuable to the right buyer, if they were to someday sell.

When Terry had left, right after Tahnee was born, saying he was sick of being around someone who was so cheerful all the time, she hadn’t thought of herself as cheerful, though it was true she was taking Chamionalus, but it did stop her hirsutism; that made her cheerful. Terry had grown up in the same neighborhood as she, though she hadn’t known him; he was a fireman and just about the only guy she had ever met who wasn’t working in a factory of one kind or another.

After they were married they moved in with her father. She worked at La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart, in Administration. It was a job with a future, especially compared to what others their age had found for jobs, working in the meat products factories; it was amazing, that two kids from their area hadn’t ended up like everyone else.

Until she got pregnant when they realized both their salaries combined weren’t going to be enough to enable them to buy their own place, or even rent; Terry was obsessed with making the Diamond-C dust in the bathroom, and she began to realize… that pervasive smell of an addict: violet soap, Brussels sprouts and bleach. He already had a dust problem, a problem big enough that they made him take an unpaid leave-of-absence at work. Then he decided he wanted to go to the West Coast and write screenplays, although as far as she could see he had shown no ability to stick to anything at all.

What skills did Terry have? He couldn’t even write, he could only use a dictation program on the computer so what came out was pages of, “Um, so Joe goes, like fuck, um what um kind of um shit is um this.” She had to admit that making Diamond-C dust was not easy, the few times he had made it before she put a stop to him the quality had been amazing, and what he didn’t do himself he was able to sell for thousands of dollars a gram; of course the ingredients were expensive, the special lights needed, the hydroponics equipment, growing the crystals, inseminating the blossoms, harvesting and so on.

She had been too stupid to know, at first, that was how innocently she had been brought up! She thought he was just growing some kind of mineralized food-product for them, gorgeously fragrant; as if Terry would ever have been the kind of guy who had a nice little hobby.

Thinking of living at home reminds her she has to call her father to let him know they are coming the next day. She dials and the phone rings and rings but there is no answer… He is such a strange old man, he refuses to move into the house with them, he insists he wants to go to a nursing home. Now that she is Managing Administrative Director, he says, she could get him a discount, and she would be able to see him every day, if she wanted! It doesn’t seem to matter that she has told him, over and over, the Senior Mall is the last place she would put him in.

If she doesn’t remind him about their visit he will booby-trap the place; once Julie knocked on the door only to have a carton of F’eggs fall on her head, or when they went up the front path and all the sprinklers came on, spewing them with that water-substitute. Each time he denies doing anything deliberately.

Why can’t he admit he’s no longer up to functioning on his own? He is so antiquated he insists on using a rotary phone. The last person on the planet who really can say he has “dialed” a number. He won’t have an answering machine – let alone voice mail, or a mobile unit to take with him, so she can’t even leave a message.

No wonder she is such a freak. Her upbringing had been like someone from a hundred and fifty years ago! Her father with his obsessive collecting of paper goods and his letter writing – letter writing when there wasn’t even a postal system any more, it all had to go Docu-Express or something!

She dials again. Where could he have gone? Maybe just out for a walk around the block, she’ll try back later.

Her father never liked Slawa; Dad griped all the time how Slawa was a foreigner, and kept muttering Slawa was an old man, older than himself. At the time she just thought he was crazy, Slawa was older than Terry, and he was foreign, but he was so different from that cocky braggart, her first husband; he was so good with Tahnee, he never treated her differently after his own, Julie, was born. She thought her father was angry, perhaps, that Slawa had a nice house for them to live in, she wasn’t dependent on Dad any more.

Now she is beginning to wonder if her father hadn’t been right. Just how old is Slawa, actually? And how could she have ever found him attractive? True he wasn’t handsome the way Terry was; Terry was gorgeous, blond, a tight firm bottom and sassy grin. But Slawa had seemed appealing in a comforting kind of way, solid. Authentic. Now Slawa smells, she guesses because he drinks. Or maybe it is just some strange biochemistry. How stupid could he have been putting all his money into buying that shoe repair business – which is a major failure.

And his stories change all the time, she has long since given up believing anything he said. Slawa claimed to have a degree in science, a Ph.D. from Russia. But he couldn’t get a science job; no one around would hire him, he said, doing the kind of work that he did, which was something – very limited, an obscure area – only in practice over there. Did that make any sense?

He couldn’t even tell the truth about his age! Sometimes he had a memory of things that had taken place when he was a kid, things that she later realized, when she checked out the details, would have had to occur a hundred and twenty years ago. Stuff that had happened in Soviet, Communist times; if she pressed him, he would say something had happened and he was sent to some kind of Moscow long-term-care facility.

And when he was finally allowed to leave, all the old people had disappeared. He came home, his grandmother was gone… Nobody noticed, nobody cared, they said, yes, the old people were taken on a vacation, they all went quite happily… No more babushkas! There were shops and restaurants and bars, which hadn’t been there before.

Why has it taken her so long to wonder if he really has a graduate degree? Now she is realizing, maybe nothing at all is the truth.