Cleopatra and Frankenstein(50)

“His apartment,” he whispers, “is a place we’d never want to go.”

*

“Hair looks great,” says the lady in line for coffee ahead of me into her phone. “But generally, I’m falling apart.”

*

That Home has attempted to decorate. Drooping foil turkeys and pilgrim’s hats line the walls. We find my father in the dining room, sitting alone at one of the tables by the window. He’s wearing a thick woolen sweater with his hair combed back in two gentle curves around his ears. The collar of his shirt sticks up unevenly like a scruffy schoolboy’s. He’s staring ahead with that fearful-hopeful expression children get when their parents are late to pick them up.

“Hi, Pa,” I say, leaning over to hug him.

His large hands roll around in his lap. He smiles down at them apologetically.

“We brought pie,” says my mother, sliding it onto the table. “Pecan pie for our sweetie pie.” She reaches down to untuck his collar. He tries to gently bat her away, then submits to this handling with a mournful look at the ceiling.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say. “Remember how you used to cut the turkey wearing your lab coat?”

His face flares with recognition, then goes out like a match.

*

I pretend to have forgotten my phone in the car, then stand in the parking lot smoking the joint Frank rolled for me. After the first choking toke I get the hang of it and manage to get a few good hits, holding the smoke in my lungs and exhaling slowly. It tastes disgusting, like eating a tea bag. I spit onto the gravel and plow on.

*

Everything on my plate is beige except for a rosy streak of cranberry jelly. It is, however, delicious. No food has ever satisfied me so. If I could unhinge my jaw like a snake and eat the whole plate, I would. When I look up, my father is staring ahead of him, fork suspended, a silver streak of drool running down his chin.

“Dr. Rosenthal, are you finished?” A smiling nurse in peach scrubs leans over his tray. The fact she still calls him Doctor makes me want to clutch her hands and kiss her pink fingertips.

“You were certainly hungry,” says my mother to me. “Didn’t you eat breakfast?”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” says the nurse, taking my tray.

I am trying to think of the right thing to say. It is on the tip of my tongue. The kind nurse has already turned away and is heading back to the kitchen when it comes to me. Just what the doctor ordered.

*

My mother and I walk to the car in silence.

“Well, I’m glad we went,” she says as we pull out of the parking lot. “He seems good, don’t you think?”

“Real good,” I say, fumbling to plug in my seat belt. “Real, real good.”

She narrows her eyes at me in the rearview mirror. I blink at her.

“Eleanor Louise Rosenthal,” she says. “Are you high right now?”

I can’t help it, I start to laugh.

“One percent question mark?” I say.

“What in God’s name,” she says. “Is this Myke’s influence? Is Myke a marijuana smoker?”

I roll down the window and laugh until I cry.

*

On Black Friday my mother drags me to the mall to shop the sales. She is specifically looking for a new towel rack, since our current one collapses if taxed with anything larger than a face flannel. We’re wandering down the bathroom aisle of the home goods store.

“It has low self-esteem,” says my mother, referring to the towel rack. “It doesn’t believe in itself.”

“Maybe it’s just lazy?” I say.

I feel hungover from the weed and also all the beige food I consumed. Ahead of us, I watch a man carrying a boxed TV set over his head like a tiny coffin.

“You will learn, when you have your own children, not to use that word. When I was teaching, we were told that laziness in students is a self-esteem issue.”

“I’m not going to have children, Ma.”

“Mm, we’ll see,” she says. “You know who doesn’t have esteem issues? Our dishwasher. It never shuts up! Have you noticed how it keeps making that whirring sound even after the cycle’s over?”

“I’m not having children. And it’s your dishwasher, Ma.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s your dishwasher. I didn’t pay for it. Everything in that house is yours.”

“Well, what’s mine is yours, baby doll.”

“No, Ma. What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours. That’s the appropriate boundary between an adult woman and her mother.”

“What are you getting so upset about?”

A girl wearing pajama pants under her long puffy jacket barges between us to snatch up a bath mat in the shape of a smiley face.

“I’m not going to live with you forever,” I say. “I’m almost forty. It’s pathetic. I should have my own household appliances with their own self-esteem issues.”

“You’re nowhere near forty, Eleanor, stop exaggerating. And I never said you were going to live with me forever. But since you are living with me right now, I thought you might enjoy being treated as a member of this household.”

“This household? What household! It’s just us, Ma. Levi doesn’t even come visit. Pa might as well be a towel rack. It’s just you and me, and then it’s going to go back to being just you and just me.”