The Good Luck of Right Now(56)

I wasn’t trying to be funny, so I felt ashamed. And then I could feel the little man in my stomach laughing at me, rolling around in my belly, crying tears of merriment even, because I was failing so horrifically.

We walked on for a block or so.

Then she said, “My rabbits’ names were Pooky and Moo Moo. They loved lettuce more than carrots. You’d think rabbits would love carrots best, but not these two. Maybe they were strange rabbits.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Max, he loves cats,” she said.

Somehow I found my voice and said, “Yes, he does. Was Alice a good cat?”

“She was a doll. But she was Max’s cat, not mine. Pooky and Moo Moo were mine. There will never be another Pooky or another Moo Moo.”

“Mom was mine,” I said before I could really think about what I meant. “There will never be another Mom for me either. She was one of a kind.”

“You really loved your mother?”

“Yes. Did you love yours?”

“I hated her. I used to fantasize about killing her in her sleep. Slitting her throat with a steak knife—sometimes I’d imagine dragging the blade across her entire neck, making a huge red smile. And other times I’d just stab her jugular repeatedly. Sorry. I know that’s pretty sick. But, oh, how I wanted to kill my mother when I was a little girl!”

“Why?”

“A million reasons. Infinite reasons.”

We walked for a few more blocks, gloved hands in pockets.

“My mother killed Pooky and Moo Moo and fed them to me when I was just a child.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“She told me what I was eating only after I had finished. Like she was delivering the punch line to a joke, she told me with a grin on her face. You cannot imagine the guilt. I felt Pooky and Moo Moo inside me, trying to hop out of my stomach, for months. She made keychains out of the feet and gave me one as a present the following Christmas. I screamed when I opened it and began to cry. She called me peculiar and ungrateful and spoiled and weak and silly. Then she laughed at me and told Max his sister was sentimental. She actually used that word. Sentimental. As if it were a character flaw. Like it was horrible to feel. To admit that you missed things. To care. To love even.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven.”

“Why did she kill your rabbits?”

“We were poor. Had no food. We couldn’t really afford to feed them. My mother was a psychopath. I am prone to horrific luck. All of those things.”

“Father McNamee didn’t know that—”

“How could he?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Elizabeth said.

I felt as though I had failed horribly in the romance department, as all we had managed to talk about were Elizabeth’s childhood traumas and her adolescent thoughts of matricide.

Hardly romantic banter.

“Tell me something nice,” she said. Elizabeth stopped walking, faced me, and looked up into my eyes with frightening desperation. “Please! Anything. Tell me one nice thing. Something that makes me feel as though the world is not a terrible place. I’m at the end, Bartholomew. I don’t care anymore. Tell me something that will make me care. Come on. Just tell me something good. One good and true thing. If you can do that, then maybe, just maybe . . .”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but sighed, and I wondered what she was going to say.

Elizabeth kept searching my eyes, but I didn’t have a clue as to what I was supposed to say here in response, and I hoped that you, Richard Gere, would show up to help me, because you always know what to say to women in these situations, in all of your movies, but you didn’t materialize.

“Like what?” I said, stalling for time.

“Something nice about your mother maybe.” She was choking up here, her eyes brimming with tears. “Something that will make me forget I just ate rabbit—that I have no place to live. That my life has been a cruel, sadistic joke—that everything is going to end shortly.”

“End?” I said.

I hated to see her so sad, but wasn’t sure what to do.

“Tell me something about your mother. Something nice,” Elizabeth said, ignoring my question. “Really sweet. You seem like a sweet sort of man, Bartholomew. So please, please, please. Something sweet.”

I thought about it—there were a million nice things to choose from when it came to memories of Mom.

“The first sweet thing that pops up in your head,” she said. “Don’t think about it. Just talk. Please. You must have nice memories of your mother if you love her so much. It should be easy for you! I need to hear something sweet—something sentimental even.”

Suddenly I was talking without thinking—the words were flowing out of me like air—and I was utterly surprised to be saying so much. It was like she had found my hot and cold knobs and now words were suddenly gushing out of my spigot.

“When I was a little boy, my mother told me that if I wrote a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia—Mayor Frank Rizzo at first, and then it was Mayor William Green—asking for special permission to go to the top of City Hall, he might let me look out over Philadelphia from under the high dome atop of which William Penn stands. So I’d write a letter, and I’d take days to think up a persuasive argument justifying why I should be admitted. I’d write about how hard I was trying in school, what a good son I was, always completing all of my chores on time, doing what Mom told me to do, how I promised to vote in all of the elections when I was old enough—a promise I have religiously kept, as Mom taught me it was my patriotic duty as an American—and how I went to Mass every week and tried to be a good Catholic.