Rooms(8)

“He’s sensitive.” Minna waves a hand. “Besides, he hardly remembers Dad. He can’t be expected to know what an * he was.”

“Don’t talk about your father that way,” Caroline says mildly.

“He was an *,” Minna insists.

“I’m hungry,” Caroline says. “Are you hungry?”

“Not really,” Minna says.

“Amy must be hungry.” Caroline begins opening cabinets: these, too, are overflowing, although Richard Walker hardly ever cooked. There are boxes of pancake mix and half-eaten bags of chips; a half-dozen cereals, cans of beans and tuna, two jars of honey, cemented to the shelf by a sticky, golden ring of overspill; sardines and pasta and bags of rice in which mites have started to nest.

“What are you doing?” Minna asks.

“I’m looking for something to have for dinner,” Caroline says. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Minna leans over the kitchen island and slams the cupboard shut. “We can’t eat his food,” she says, as though Caroline has just suggested she eat an insect.

Caroline tries to open the cupboard again; Minna keeps her hand on it firmly. “Minna, please. You’re as bad as Trenton. He won’t miss it, will he?”

“No, I mean—” For a second, Minna looks ashamed. “I mean it’s disgusting. I mean, it’s been sitting here just—just absorbing his germs.”

Caroline widens her pale blue eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Minna. The last time I checked, death isn’t contagious. It isn’t an infection, you know.”

Minna wrenches her hand away from the cupboard. “I won’t eat it. And I won’t let Amy eat it, either.”

“Oh, Minna.” Caroline sighs dramatically, but she removes her hand from the cupboard and instead picks up her wineglass and drains it.





SANDRA

I’m not afraid to say that what you’ve heard so far is a big honking load of bullshit. And no, I won’t mind my language. Jesus Christ, it’s practically the only thing I have left.

I bet she didn’t even tell you this: my death was no accident.

I’m not saying Alice lies, per se. Her problem is she’s a prude, straight out of the wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap generation, and secretive as anything.

Take Minna. Alice is always going on about how beautiful she is. Yeah, if you like that look—a great big pair of fake tits screwed on like a lid, and eyes that always look like they’re trying to see through your pants to how much money you’ve got in your wallet.

No thank you.

I know Minna had a rough start. All those years in that crusty basement practicing piano until her fingers ached and God knows what else. But listen, we all get served a deck with some cards missing. Get up and get on with it, is what I say. I’ve done my reading about all of it: neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, and compulsions, blah, blah. I used to work for the Dr. Howard Rivers, of the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, for God’s sake. And I’ve seen my fair share of churches and twelve steps.

It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?

For example: I didn’t exactly have it easy growing up. We were in Silverlake, Georgia: land of shotgun houses and trailer parks, an all-white county park, peach trees with fruit like drooping tits, and summers that slapped you in the face like a dog’s tongue. Dad had a mouth like a closed-up zipper, and when he looked at me at all, it was usually to ask how come I couldn’t play nice like the other girls and stop getting into brawls on the playground and why can’t you ever learn to listen.

I don’t think I ever once saw him kiss my mother or even hold her hand. He spent all his time with his friends at the Rotary Club, especially his friend Alan Briggs, and my mom used to go into hysterics on the phone with her sister, wondering where he was and whether he was cheating on her and what she would do if he left her for some young tramp. And then one day when I was seven, she came home early from her once-a-month steak-and-lobster buffet dinner with the girls in Dixie Union and found my dad and Alan in bed, buck naked. At least, that’s the way my mom told it to me later.

My dad and mom divorced, and Mom and I had to move to a small one-bedroom in what was still called the colored part of town. It was 1960 in the South, which was like 1940 anywhere else in the world, and at school whispers went around that my dad was a queer and I was a nigger lover besides. Those aren’t my words. Silverlake, Georgia, was a pretty place, full of ugly people. I remember houses set up in a row like dominoes, yellow in the morning sun, explosions of bright red trumpet creeper, and picket fences dusty with pollen; and I remember “Whites Only,” and fields crawling with chiggers, and cockroaches the size of a child’s palm wriggling out of the drain.

Colored, black, white, yellow, queer, straight—from the beginning, it never mattered to me, maybe because even though my dad hardly ever said a word to me, and liked to diddle his male friends behind my mother’s back, and wore the same bowling shirt every Saturday and Sunday, I still loved him. Who knows why or how. Maybe only because he brought me candy buttons, or let me sit on his lap while he cruised down Main Street in his sky-blue El Dorado, big as a boat, shark finned and smooth.

Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don’t get to choose it.