5
Jolly Time
The mid’ 80s in Boston meant cheap bands and cheaper alcohol, dance moves that were all elbows and knees, done in stirrup pants and acid-colored dresses, in rubber bracelets and in lace. It meant hairstyles that required sticky handfuls of “product.” It meant plates of sushi, new to American palates, bright slabs of pastel fish and the strange protocol of sitting obeisant on your knees at tables atop tatami mats. It meant leaving bars at two A.M., because Boston has never shed its puritanical past. (Boston is, parenthetically, the least sexy city I’ve ever known. I suspect Bostonians drink to make them think they might want to have sex, and the city closes its bars early to ensure that they still can.) It also meant knowing many, many gay men, many of whom would not live to grow older than thirty.
The mid’ 80s in Boston meant going home with men to discover they wore bikini underwear the same exact purple as grape Bubble Yum, and it meant not being certain if this was attractive or repellant.
Living in Boston, as a woman between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, meant fucking men mired in their post-college morass of cartoons, bong hits, piles of laundry, and towers of takeout containers. These men held maturity at arm’s length, deferring it with a slouch-pelvised, shrugging commitment to slacking. So many hopeless, hapless Bostonian men. The best thing about sleeping around in Boston was that I could focus on my work and didn’t have to spend much time researching first; the city is big enough to find numerous partners, none of whom knew anyone else in my life.
That’s not to say I didn’t do research on them; it’s merely to say that I didn’t have to. It was optional, not obligatory, and any dirt I
discovered I saved for myself. Sometimes it’s just nice to know what you can know. Other times it’s nice to use what you know. In any case, though I didn’t necessarily need to add to my files, I often did.
Almost out of nostalgia’s sake—almost, but not quite.
Being in Boston in the ’80s also meant sleeping with women.
Maybe it’s being six feet tall, maybe it’s my forthright air, but I’ve been hit on by women for almost as long as I’ve been hit on by men.
However, apart from that slender waist of time in Boston, I never looked twice at girls. I gave it a go; you know, when in Rome and all that—Boston was positively seething with lesbians—I don’t like to be left free of a fad. For a time, I took up with a lovely little alabaster- skinned redhead. We seduced each other in this nautical-themed bar with netting hung from timbers, ships’ buoys on the wall, and tables shaped like captains’ wheels. We had sex to Sade’s Diamond Life because it was 1985, and it seemed like the thing to do. In 69, all red bushes and red locks, we looked like a strawberry-swirl ice cream. It was worth it for the visual alone. But both of us were dabbling Sapphics, and we dilettante-drifted, she with her freckles and bud- like nipples, and I with my unquenched yen for men.
Next, I dallied with a buxom bottle blonde who lived in Allston and went by the name Trashette. She was clued into the Boston arts scene—I think I met her through Emma, but I could be wrong.
Trashette lived in a collective in an old firehouse that they were interminably renovating. Trashette, whose real name was Marie, played the ’50s housewife to the group. She loved to make retro dishes like bacon-wrapped water chestnuts and tuna casserole with a cream-soup base and those little dehydrated onions sprinkled on top. Her space in the collective was assertively atomic kitsch; every item could have leapt out of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show or Father Knows Best. It was a kind of tyranny, Trashette’s fierce adherence to her girdle-and-bouffant aesthetic, but she did make a dynamite pineapple upside-down cake.
The last woman I dabble-diddled was a Latina microbiologist from Harvard. She was very efficient, almost curt, all tight hospital corners and pressed jeans. Elena had kissed a man, but from the moment I laid eyes on her compact, neat body, I knew she was a lesbian.
Elena was, in fact, the first and only woman I ever mindfully pursued.
There’s a perverse pleasure in bringing someone to a truth about herself that she has long repressed. We met at a ski lodge in Vermont, separately on vacation in the same location. The first night, I drew her away from her friends, and she sat beside me, the length of her thigh pressed against mine, heat passing like some shining flame between our limbs. The second night, I kissed her goodbye in front of her inn room’s door. The third, I didn’t have to. She spent the night tangled in my bed, enjoying the first orgasms she’d ever experienced with another person. Raised a strict Catholic, she’d never known man nor woman, until I ruptured her hymen with my fingers and licked them clean.
Elena and I returned to Boston, and I took great pride in making her swerve from her regimented schedule that had afforded Elena her perfect academic record. Worn-out from fucking, she began calling in late into her lab job and sleeping through classes; we fucked so much, so long, and so often, we passed a yeast infection back and forth like a joint. We fell wildly, passionately in love for a number of weeks, and then, in a snap, it was gone—for me, at least.
Elena had some trouble letting go, but I helped her relinquish her white-knuckled hold by moving to a new apartment with no forwarding address.
These four Boston years, working and playing hard in a go-go ’80s style, I was no gourmand. I subsisted primarily on a diet of Diet Coke and microwave popcorn. I was busy and the Phoenix didn’t pay. I lived hand to mouth, and neither my pay nor my free time allowed much space for the thoughtful purchase and careful preparation of food. I had too much to do—and too many to do—to think about cooking.
The first time my mother stepped into my Kenmore apartment, she opened the door to my refrigerator. In the fridge’s white glow sat two six-packs of Diet Coke and an impressive array of condiments.
There might have been a few stalks of wilted celery.
“Dorothy,” she said, pressing her lips into a fine crimson line, “where is your food?” I smiled and waved my hand at the shelves of Jolly Time popcorn, boxes blaring yellow and red, the bright colors of lipids and blood. My mother sighed, and before she left for Connecticut, she filled my fridge with produce and meats, and my
shelves with dried beans, jars of tomatoes, and boxes of rice. The former rotted, for the most part, while the latter accumulated a layer of dust.
Boston was, in short, a twentysomething’s idyll. However, my time in Beantown was not perfect. My apartment was small and dark and given to sudden infestations of pests in the summer and clanking noises in the winter. It always smelled faintly of lobster pot, no matter which incense I burned or how often I rubbed the countertops with lemon. But it was thrilling to pay for my own life with money I made myself, even if I made that money by informing the good people of Boston that their lives were not as fabulous as those of Steven Tyler, Cyrinda Foxe, or Aimee Mann.
But then I got a phone call, and things changed, as they inevitably do.
It was, I think, April of 1988. The air had begun to warm with the scent of flowers and dirt. The birds were chattering. The leaves misted the skyline with green. I was in the midst of taking my summer clothes out of boxes and putting my winter clothes away when the phone rang.
“Dorothy, it’s your mother.” As if I didn’t recognize her voice.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Dorothy, your father and I are wondering whether you’ve plans for next weekend. We were hoping to have you and your sister and brother to the house.” My sister, eighteen months younger, had graduated from Duke the year before; she chose to stay in North Carolina, where she was slogging away at a nonprofit. I couldn’t understand why you’d go to Duke to be philanthropic, but that’s my sister. My brother was still in college, a junior at Brown; he hadn’t come out yet, but we all knew it was just a matter of time. Or maybe just I knew. More than once, I considered just letting that gay cat out of the rainbow bag, but even a psychopath like me has some compunction when it comes to the mental health of her baby brother.
Besides, it wasn’t as if I’d take any pleasure in telling his news.
My family was not the kind of family given to spontaneous acts of unity. Calling the three of us offspring to Connecticut signaled a major upheaval. I wondered if my mother had gotten her fill of my father’s understated philandering. This felt unlikely. My mother didn’t
like to admit defeat. I wondered whether my father had decided that, now that my siblings and I were tottering toward adulthood, he could divorce my mother with propriety, if not elegance. This was not outside the realm of possibility.
I had, of course, investigated my father. I’d begun while I was still in high school. Over time, I unearthed the names and addresses of three of his paramours, all women he seemed to have met through work connections. (I’d unearthed other women he’d enjoyed, but these scraps of skirt didn’t warrant full files.) The first I’d found was an executive assistant to a marketing honcho at a large German car corporation; their dalliance had lasted some time—throughout my last two years of high school and my first year of college. At first, it seemed as if it were a happy situation. As the months wore on, I realized that, rather than enjoying a peaceable fling, my father was feasting on melodrama. He seemed to mistake passion for love, and insanity for passion. This is never a good thing to learn about one’s father.
As I saw my father’s mistress grow more and more needy, making outrageous demands and late-night phone calls, I recognized something fundamental about my parents’ relationship. I realized that had my mother never given rein to her rare but scarlet- tipped flights of rage, he’d have left her long ago. Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love. Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen. My parents, I learned, were precisely this kind of symbiotic organism.
Eventually, I put an end to the relationship between my father and his marketing assistant mistress. Don’t get me wrong—she still lives and breathes, as far as I know. A sternly worded, uncomfortably specific letter written in my mother’s hand on her monogrammed stationery landed on the desk of the assistant’s boss. This missive made very short work of that affair—and the assistant’s job.
My father didn’t wait long to acquire a new lover. Unlike the executive assistant, this new woman was independent, candid, busy, and, judging from the subtext of some of her notes, more than a little kinky. From afar, I admired her, and if my father hadn’t been so enthralled by her—he called her “feline,” a tribute to her up-tipped
eyes and disdainful spirit—I would have been entirely fine with their affair. Alas, he lost his head. It was alarming.
I didn’t want my mother to lose my father to another woman, particularly one that I knew would drop him like a dirty stocking the moment he was single. Her independence made it difficult for me to find any information wedge for leverage. It also made me admire her a little. I like to think of this woman, whom I watched through a telephoto lens, as a distant role model. She seemed to be that rare woman who had it all, or at least everything that I wanted: financial success, personal freedom, the slavish adoration of a man, and unshakeable self-esteem. Then, struck by the emotional epiphany that he held a losing hand in this relationship, my father called it off.
It was a Pyrrhic victory for unhappy marriages everywhere.
My father’s final mistress, and from what I could tell still his current amour, is a freelance stop-motion animator. This animator sits in the sweet spot. She is neither too crazy nor too sane. She is neither too independent nor too attached, neither too successful nor too ambitious. Not too hot and not too cold, not too soft and not too hard; not too big and not too small, she is the baby bear’s chair, porridge, and bed. My father snuggles in her mediocrity, and I feel fine about it.
I also tried to dig up dirt on my mother. Either her life was as boring as her Burpee seed catalog, or she was superb at burying the bodies. In any case, I found nothing on her. I was bitterly disappointed, though I’m not sure in whom.
So it was April 1988 when, after my mother called her family meeting, we convened in our living room. My mother sat in her chair, rigid as a bold lie. My dad stood behind his big leather club chair, leaning on it nervously, his fingers spidering on its surface. My sister, my brother, and I ranged along the overstuffed couch, its down cushions holding us like a hug. To a one, our bodies were taut scribbles of dread. My father seemed to quiver, running at a higher frequency than usual. My mother thrummed a low bass-line. My sister, empathetic soul that she is, oscillated with nerves. My brother, who clearly had smoked a hit or two off a joint in the barn before
joining us, looked at once jittery and calm, but he had his own secrets to keep.
My father looked at us and cleared his throat. “Kids,” my dad said, “you probably wonder why we asked you to join us—”
“Are you getting divorced?” my sister asked, her voice tense.
“Good gracious, no,” my mother said. “Nothing like that.” Her hand made a spasmodic move toward her purse, but stopped short, as if she’d touched something hot.
“Your mother and I have always loved each other very much,” my father said. “We’d never—”
“—Don’t be silly,” my mother interrupted, her objection knitting with my father’s. His fingers twitched. Her hand lurched. Their eyes met; their speech stopped. “I’d never allow a divorce. I love your father.”
A pause wedged itself between them, uncomfortable as a sweaty stranger on a bus. They made eye contact. Almost in sync, they took a breath. My father’s fingers spasmed toward the bare end table,
and stopped short.
“I get it,” I said. “Which one of you?”
“Which one of us what, Dorothy?” My father asked, his voice
frayed like a knot.
“Which one of you has cancer?”
My brother looked at me; my sister blurted a short chain of vowels, sucking up the air in the room.
“I do,” my mother said. “Lung. It’s stage 4. Inoperable. C’est la vie.” She pressed her crimson lips together and raised a perfect eyebrow. “I really would enjoy a Gauloises, but I suppose I’ve already enjoyed enough for a lifetime.” She exhaled sharply, and her face softened, my mother accepting her mortality in a single breath.
And that was the beginning of her end. The spring turned to summer; the days grew hot and languid. At first my mother tried to garden and to cook, but it was no good. She’d begin to knead her bread and lose energy before the dough grew elastic. She touched her berries and she felt no future. She stopped going outside, she grew still, she flattened. She removed herself from the world, and the world moved on.
Beyond my mother’s bedroom window, her garden went slowly to seed. The asparagus blew to big, filigreed flowers. The birds ate her berries, the cutworms decapitated her broccoli, the deer nibbled her roses to nubbins. Forgotten tomatoes ruptured on the vine, eggplant and zucchini engorged to the size of small groundhogs, corn wizened on the cornstalk. It was a slow erosion, an anti-Eden, and though the rest of us did the best we could to slow the deterioration, the truth was that we were paralyzed by not caring very much. We simply didn’t have green thumbs, and even if we did, our mother was dying. How could we care when the green beans grew large and furry as miners’ mustaches. Every day the garden ran more to riot; every day my mother diminished. Run to its inevitable end, fecundity will always turn to decay.
My sister was the first to move home, returning from Greensboro in June. She came to cook for my father; she came trying to please my mother, who as she edged closer to death grew no more human, which is, if I think about it, perhaps the most logical response. My brother rejoined the family in July. By the end of the summer, my mother had given up hope, and my father had no choice but to hold her hand as she let go her life, a little bit day by day. She briefly went into the hospital, but she refused to stay. She didn’t want more pain; she didn’t want to prolong her days or forestall the inevitable black.
Back in my apartment in Kenmore, I imagined her looking at her X- rays, tracing with her elegant crimson nail the great black roses of cancer blooming in her lungs. I suspect she moved home to grant them room to flourish, to nurse them into spectacular arrangement, to turn her body into the fallow ground for her cancer, the last thing she could cultivate like a blue-ribbon expert.
When my mom moved home to hospice care, I too returned, quitting my job and packing up my Kenmore apartment. The Phoenix told me they wanted me back, but I’d had my fill of Boston and its early nights, its Brooks Brothers boys, its New Wave dudes, and its semeny chowder. My family expected me to return home to Connecticut and watch my mother die. I would fulfill their expectations. I can’t say I wasn’t curious about death.
What can be said about cancer that hasn’t already been said. It’s a rotting death, and it reduces people with wants and drives and
desires and thoughts and quirks to puling, puking, pained animals.
There is no grace in cancer. Slowly, one by one, my mother’s habits fell away. Confined to her bed, she was unable to cook, to garden, to harass farmers for their finest milks and thickest creams, to jar her preserves or bury her fists in the fragrant warm flesh of bread dough; she let go of one bit of living, and then she let go of another. First, she stopped dressing. She would do it tomorrow, she said, when she felt better. Clothes, she said, were too weighty a burden for her skin to bear. She’d spend her days in her bed, at first sitting up and reading but then mostly dozing, her nurses rotating like sandwiches at the automat, each one seamlessly able to take the place of the other, tending to my mother’s meds and smells and effluvium. She’d look out at the garden, and we knew she was having a good day when she had the energy to castigate us for not weeding it, for not picking berries and putting up the gem-colored jams. She wore endless pajamas and bed jackets, frilly quilted bits of fluff that tied like a baby’s bib underneath her chin.
Then she stopped putting on makeup, doing away with her daily application of foundation, concealer, blush, eyeliner, mascara, and lip liner. She kept just her Dior Rouge 999 lipstick, because she was not herself, she’d always said, without it. My mother’s greyhound body became skeletal under the bedclothes. The skin on her hands looked almost translucent in the morning light, and her hair, previously lustrous, black, and thick—she was only fifty-two, after all; she’d not even finished menopause before the diagnosis—looked like an orange eraser had tried to rub her locks off her head, leaving a halo of gray, wispy tufts. One morning she refused her lipstick, and my sister and I looked at each other, knowing the end was visible in our mother’s pale lips. They were the color of earthworms, her lips.
By the time the frost came, my mother had ceased sitting up in bed. She lay flat as postage, inert and breathy voiced. She slept a lot, while my father paced in soft-soled shoes. Always a kinetic man, he couldn’t sit still and watch his wife die. He wore a circle in the floor of her room with his quiet shuffling. I felt more for him than for her; she had morphine. He only had scotch and guilt—and plenty of both.
My mother died on the day before Halloween. In Connecticut, we call this day All Saints’ Eve, but it goes by other names in other places. It doesn’t matter; language always fails, especially in death.
Days before she died, my mother called me to her side. Her eyes were bright, and she took my hand in hers. It felt like paper wrapped around sticks.
“Dorothy,” she said and patted my hand. “You were never my favorite.” You’d expect that to hurt, but it didn’t. She wasn’t my favorite either. She closed her eyes. I kissed her forehead. She hadn’t given up her perfume; she smelled like Chanel No. 5 and necrosis. A couple of days later, she was dead.
The days after my mother died passed in a rush. So much to do, so little will to do it, so many people and so many caring casseroles, one more florid than the next. I sat through the funeral in a miasma of disconnect. I didn’t care. It was over. I wanted to be anywhere but there.
I remember when I was a very little girl, my mother sat me down at her vanity. She showed me her cosmetics: concealer, foundation, blush, liquid eyeliner, eyebrow color, eye shadow, mascara, powder, lip liner and lipstick. Magic golden tubes, magic glass vials, each smelling of bosoms, fragranced with adult possibility. One by one, she showed the little metal or glass containers to me, held them under my nose, dabbed a little of each on my cheek, my eyelid, my lips.
“This,” she said, “is what a woman wears instead of armor. You put on the right makeup, and you look invincible. You feel like a warrior. You will still be a woman, but you will wear this on the outside so that on the inside, you will stand tall as a man. Do you
understand?”
I told her I did.
“Your place is wherever you want it to be, Dorothy. You can work at home, like Mommy, or you can work outside, like Daddy. No matter what you do, be excellent at it, and always look your best.”
She paused. “That way the bastards won’t ever get you down.” She looked at herself in the mirror, and our eyes met in her reflection.
“No bastards,” I said.
“That’s right, my darling.” Her lips red, eternally red, infinitely red, an everlasting crimson circle. “No bastards.”
From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.
After my mother died, my father sold the Connecticut house and he moved to the city, buying an apartment on the Upper West Side. I also moved to New York City, landing in the East Village, where, in 1989, twenty-seven-year-olds with aspirations to coolness chose to pay too much money for their apartments. On East 7th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, I found a tiny railroad one-bedroom apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up, and I was delighted. My bathroom window looked out on a small courtyard, and I had a loft-bed perched above my closet, a futon couch in the living room, an exposed brick wall, and a wee Juliet balcony.
My mother’s death put around $60,000 in my bank account, giving me the freedom to find work without worry, to indulge in dinners at Odeon and fifteen-dollar margaritas at El Teddy’s, to take cabs home from Tunnel at four in the morning, to buy short, tight dresses from Patricia Field, to fly to Florence and to fuck Marco in a ridiculous rococo Florence hotel room, and, for a limited time, to be as generally fabulous as I wanted. There’s much to be said for being young, beautiful, and independently wealthy, however ephemeral these qualities may be.
By early summer of 1989, I landed at Gotham Ace, a weekly that was trying to wedge itself into the niche between The Village Voice and New York Magazine. I wrote the same kind of pieces I’d been writing for the Phoenix, lifestyle fluff and star profiles, but I got to do it in a real city with real food, real dirt, real nightlife, and real men.
New York City may have a commercial skin, but it’s built on a skeleton of sex and magic. The bridges hang like jewels around the throat of the night, and the rivers unspool in endless runners of oily gray silk charmeuse. In the soulless corporate canyons of Midtown, the buildings point accusatory fingers at the uncaring sky. The streets flow with an endless human wash, so many people running like dumbstruck salmon, looking for love, looking for money, looking
for a place to eat, wanting for fame, hoping for a place to sleep, hoping for a person to sleep with, praying for meaning in the dark before dawn. It’s easy to get lost in the magic that is Manhattan, not only because you’re one in a million but also because the city pulls you tight in its steely embrace. Expletives fly like art, traffic blares loud and comforting, bodegas welcome you with anonymous yellow light and the salt-vinegar-and-sugar smell of steam tables.
Everywhere you go there is something wonderful, if only you open your heart, your mind, your wallet, or your thighs.
Like Venice, New York City is an improbable bunch of rivaling islands, held together by historic bridges, a common language, and a well-earned understanding of superiority. Rome may dwell in the land of cock—and it does, the phallus dominates that city’s skyline; Roman men strut with unquestioned self-confidence, their limbs decked in crimson, in mustard, in peacock blues and greens, each demanding your gaze—but as much as the long penile lines of the skyscraper may define New York City, it’s a place that doesn’t care who fucks whom, as long as you do it. Fucking, metaphorical or literal, is New York City’s soul. Fucking with, fucking up, fucking over, fucking around, fucking right: New York Fucking City has earned its name. It makes perfect sense that I felt at home on its streets. The catcalls of its men were a comfort.
The year I moved to New York, I pried Emma from Boston to spend New Year’s Eve in Manhattan. “You need to meet a proper city,” I told her, “one whose bars don’t close until four.” We scaled the wrought-iron gates to the Central Park Zoo, and wandering the somnolent grounds in the dusky chill, we swigged Krug from the bottle and toasted to Gus the Neurotic Polar Bear (what other kind would live on Fifth Avenue?) until two security guards made us leave. We hopped the subway and took the train to Houston Street.
Passing the Duck Man, the SoHo fixture who nightly pushed a shopping cart of plush Donald Duck knockoffs, we waved, and we weaved our way to I Tre Merli, a very loud and rather awful but terribly chic restaurant on West Broadway. Emma wore a long black vintage tutu over fishnets and John Fluevog boots; I had on a black Lycra catsuit. We made a spectacle of ourselves, drunk and young and gleaming with promise and promiscuity. A table of older men
next to us chatted us up, plying us with the lemon vodka shots that were all the rage.
Midnight came and went; the men paid for our meal and swept us up in a limo that vomited us out on Mulberry Street. We entered a nondescript door and found ourselves in a seedy wood-paneled room bedecked with pictures of the Pope and burly men in bad suits, a Mafia club. We drank brown liquor and snorted cocaine; we mercilessly teased these connected men to their great joy and greater discomfort; and a couple of hours later, we stumbled out into the fractal Manhattan dawn.
In the cab back to my apartment, Emma and I raised phantom glasses to the buildings blurring in our taxi’s windows, bright in the whitened night, like the lights of a sinking luxury liner. We toasted to love, we toasted to friendship, we toasted to cock, we toasted to my dead mother, and we toasted to our lives, shiny and slick and feral in the sleepless city.
It took Emma nine years to join me in my glorious New York City, but I was glad when she did. I found it pleasing to have a friend.
