Cleopatra and Frankenstein(47)

“Soft-boiled, that’s funny,” he says. “What would that make me?”

He starts to laugh. “A deviled egg,” he says.

*

I’m still in the office when I see an email from Frank pop up on my screen.

I forgot to ask how it’s going over there with Myke.

Oh, just fyne, I reply.

I can hear Frank laughing from my desk.

*

Everything about this tasteful Botanical Gardens gift shop makes me want to spend money. Would I ever use a pair of pruning shears in the shape of a pelican? Who’s to say?

I find a tea towel that reads “You don’t stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening.” This seems apt for my green-fingered and aphoristically inclined mother, so I buy it for her.

I’m making my way to the exit when I notice a Frisbee that says “You don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.” Then I pass a mannequin wearing an apron embroidered with “You don’t stop baking because you get old, you get old because you stop baking.” Then I notice the sign by the bookshelf. “You don’t stop reading because …”

When I tell my mother this on the drive home, she laughs so hard she upends the potted daffodils on her knee.

“You don’t stop bullshitting because you get old,” she says.

“You get old because life’s bullshit,” I say.

*

I’ve started seeing dead animals out of the corner of my eye. Some incidents of this are understandable, I think. A flattened leaf on the sidewalk does look like a dead mouse. An abandoned black sneaker trailing its laces is pretty much the same size as a rat. But it’s the cow heads in trash cans and raccoon’s bodies hanging stiff from trees that I’m having a harder time explaining. I google early signs of schizophrenia, mania, and psychosis.

“I think you need to wear your glasses more,” says my mother. “At the bank the other day you read ‘Free Checking’ as ‘Free Chicken.’”

*

I get assigned the copy for a new real estate development on the Upper East Side. It’s designed to be a mini-metropolis. The brief says things like “This paragon of luxury living is a progressive mix of corporate and cutting-edge creative—everything a professional urbanite could need.”

Frank is working on it with me. Since we’re both vegetarian, we walk to the falafel place down the street together. We’re meant to be talking about the 5.8 million square feet of commercial office space, but he’s telling me about his childhood pets instead.

“My mom’s cat Mooshi, now she was an asshole,” he says. “Brigitte was a beautiful angel, a Persian, but they didn’t get along. I was always calling family meetings to get them to figure it out, but eventually Brigitte disappeared.”

“My first pet was a severed raven’s wing,” I tell him. “My mom let me keep it in the garden shed. I was only allowed to pet it if I wore latex gloves from my dad’s practice.”

“Your dad’s a doctor?” asks Frank.

“Was,” I say. “Anyway, when the wing fell apart I had a white feather called Spider that I kept in a matchbox filled with dead leaves.’

“He doesn’t practice anymore?” asks Frank.

“Nope,” I say. “One day I opened the matchbox and the feather was gone, just like that. I cried every day for a week.”

“You should meet my wife,” says Frank. “She does that too. Anthropomorphize.”

*

For some reason, we have a stack of Rorschach test cards lying around the office. I am trying to psychoanalyze myself by keeping them facedown and turning them quickly over to judge my reaction when Frank walks past and laughs.

“Fourteen butterflies and a vagina,” he says. “All you need to know.”

*

I agree to go on a date with my mother’s friend’s broker’s son. I’ve just poked myself in the eye with my mascara brush when my mother calls. She’s spending the evening at That Home with my father. I can hear Sing Your Heart Out in the background.

“Don’t do that thing you do tonight,” says my mother.

“What thing?”

“You know.”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

“And remember to suck in.”

“Bye, Ma.”

“One last thing,” she says. “You! Could! Fall! In! Love! Today!”

*

When I ask the broker’s son what he does, he runs his palms down the shiny front of his shirt and says, “I make money.”

In fact, he’s in real estate. He tells me about a new building complex being built on Randall’s Island. In what sounds like a win for the underdog to me, the mayor has sided with the current residents in a dispute over land rights.

“We’re building the future,” the broker’s son says between mouthfuls of crab cake. “And they want to cling to their rent-stabilized pasts.”

I tell the broker’s son that if I was mayor of New York, I’d implement a policy of public dismemberment for convicted rapists. It would be a penis guillotine built on the Brooklyn Bridge. I originally thought the severed penises would be nailed along the bridge next to their owner’s mug shots, but now I think they should just be thrown to the crowd to be torn apart by angry hands. I’d be willing to guarantee that within a year the rate of violent sex crimes would drop by half, at least.