Party Doll

Silently I tried to calculate words so severe, so cruel, so true, that they would pierce right through the fat over his heart. Then I said quietly, “She’s drinking.”

The Thanksgiving table held the smallest turkey I’ve ever seen, a bowl of bananas, and some dry-roasted nuts. There was also a vegetable salad made from baby carrots, new potatoes about as big as the ball of your thumb, weeny onions, and embryonic beans.

“Oh,” said Bernard, “tiny food.” His fingers played with a goblet which held a prudent sufficiency of ice water. Shirleen was drinking orange juice. We did not look at each other, but privately, I shrieked with malicious glee.

For holidays, my mother would provide a sort of pig-out for Renaissance kings. She liked to roast game to a crackling dark gold, and surround it with spiced fruits and nuts. She never bothered with vegetables, Bernard didn’t like them. In front of her would be a great tart, like a wheel, the sweet purple bellies of the plums drifted with cream. Here and there were squat witch’s bottles of wine she’d made, and close to my father, a field of cheeses, from the tender brick, whose crumbs a baby might enjoy, to the unspeakable schmierkase, his favorite, removed from the others, reeking happily away under its glass hood. (Bernard sighed, and I knew he was thinking of the stink cheese.) My mother’s goal for holiday meals was simply to provide your heart’s desire. She was shy and mostly silent, but she understood how to make life sweet. In her own métier, she was queen of the court of pleasure.

“Pardon me if I’m wrong,” Bernard said now, “but I thought it was Thanksgiving, not Ash Wednesday.”

Shirleen carved the turkey. I had to admit she did it neatly. My father told a joke, only fifteen years out of date (“Did you hear that Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart are making a movie? It’s called Children of a Looser God”), and began to cheer up. Shirleen bent over him, spooning green beans and onions onto his plate. My father watched her, his nostrils flaring to the force field of jasmine and tuberose which surrounded her. Suddenly his face looked less like an angry spud. He put his arms around her hips.

I got up, stalked to the sideboard, and filled a big wine glass. I drank most of it on the spot then brought the bottle back to the table. Shirleen and my father watched me, but said nothing. I lifted my glass to them. “It’s because of your newlywed antics,” I said. “I have to drink, or puke.”

Shirleen opened her mouth to say something, but my father put his hand on her arm. It was then I knew for sure, I knew how guilty he felt about Josephine. I gloated over the knowledge, tasting it as though it were the fattest pink peach in the world. The old man wanted me to approve of Shirleen, of the marriage. He wanted my blessing. Dream on, I thought.

I finished my wine with a flourish, smacking my lips, and poured more, and just then we heard a knock. Bernard and I both jumped in our chairs. The pearl onions on his lips suddenly looked like bubbles from a death gasp.

“Your mother?” He looked so afraid I almost felt sorry for him.

“She wouldn’t knock at her own front door,” I said. “It’s got to be Edward. You know he always comes to Thanksgiving dinner.”

“She didn’t tell him—”

“He’s been in England for eight months. She must not have been in touch—”

As my father cursed softly I stood up, walked to the door and threw it open. “Come in, Edward!” I said brightly. “We’re having gobs of fun!”

My mother’s second cousin walked in. Westons are short, but they are built with a powerful compactness. Edward’s presence was added to by the thick and flowing tweed coat he wore from September to May.

Edward looked at Shirleen with bewilderment.

“Where’s Joey?” he said.

Explanations were awkward. Edward said nothing while they were going on, although the quality of his silence changed. I think he really didn’t understand what I was saying at first, and when he did, he immediately turned and looked at Shirleen, from head to foot, with intense astonishment. Somehow his naked incredulity was more insulting than if he’d flung banknotes in her face and shouted “Floozy!” But no matter how bleak his glare, or mine, there she stood, planted on her big spike heels.

I seated Edward at the table by pressing down hard on his shoulders. Dinner proceeded. Bernard sensed a little social awkwardness at table and smoothed it over in his usual way, asking his guests why the midget was thrown out of the nudist colony, and what the blind man said when he passed the fish shop. Shirleen heroically laughed very hard and was moved to bring up her own favorite, an ancient subversive one-liner that probably went back to Mrs. Noah—“‘This is going to be great,’ said the jackrabbit to his girl, ‘wasn’t it?’ ”—at which I too laughed very hard, Bernard and Edward somewhat less.

I sloshed wine in Edward’s and my glasses. “I helped her bottle this,” he said. “Let’s see how it turned out.” He took a mouthful of the purplish-red plum, and looked up with somber pleasure. “A wine with shoulders,” he said, using one of Josephine’s favorite expressions.

I turned to address Shirleen’s expression of stupefied boredom. “He knows everything about wine,” I said. “And everything about books. He’s a professor of comparative literature. He speaks several languages.”

“Yeah,” my father whispered hoarsely to Shirleen, “he’s trilingual, he speaks French, German, and Bullshit.”

Edward turned to me and said quietly, “Where is she?”

“With her sisters.”

“But she’s always hated them.”

There was nothing to say to this. I drank. Gradually I was overcome by a mad secret hilarity. I could have shrieked with laughter at the oddity of these three brought together around the Thanksgiving table. There was Shirleen, with her burly bronze hairdo, a gelled surfer’s wave cresting high over her brow. She wore a red star dress, as smooth and tight as the head of a drum. Edward wore his “good” suit, a bombproof woolen imported from England. He and my mother had been raised together by her Anglophile parents on a Westchester estate. They’d been trained to be passionate readers, gardeners, wine-tasters, and dead shots. Mother said they’d been raised according to the English country code: “If it doesn’t move, prune it. If it does move, shoot it.”

Bernard’s big high features were flushed red, although he’d been drinking only water. He was wearing a silk dressing gown, a sultan’s robe, stunning and gorgeous. Shirleen had given it to him. Every color you could want was in that robe, and as I looked at all those shades of sweet fruit and soft wine, I felt my forehead too turn purple and my blood turn black. I couldn’t stand to see my father packaged in her silk. The very sight of the two of them together made me sweat with detestation. Josephine had probably spent the day sitting alone, finishing her own bottle of the wine with shoulders by herself, and that thought from one moment to the next became intolerable. Just at that instant, the front door opened and my mother walked in.

On this freezing day, Josephine wore for a coat only her gardening jacket. Tears of cold stood in her eyes, and her hands were mottled red. “Rochelle,” she said, and stumbled around the table to hug me. She smelled of the winter day, her ferny soap, and wine. Edward was already on his feet. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then she turned to face Bernard. Although she held on to a chair back to steady herself, her voice and diction were clear.

“There’s this problem of what to do with old women,” she said. “Some of them live happily with their old husbands until they die. But some of them are like me.” She shook her head, and continued in a tone of astonished protest. “Did you know, did you know that some women are so desperate they even hire surgeons to cut and rearrange their old bodies?”

My father began to stand up. Edward said, “Sit down.” To my surprise Bernard did sit down. He listened, poker-faced, as my mother continued.

“Those who don’t want to be anatomized while they’re still alive will at least look for magic body-fluffing cream. They search and search. They don’t eat what they want, they wear undergarments that cut them in half. I did. They just want their old man to still like them. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, but Bernard thought it was.” She looked at me. “You remember, Rochelle, when we talked about mercy killing? You said you were against anything a man might do to a woman that made it necessary to identify her by her dental records. I wonder how Bernard would identify me now?” She opened her purse, took out a handgun, and calmly sighted along it. Then everything happened in an instant, Shirleen scrambling over the table to throw her body in front of my father, Edward hurtling toward my mother and Bernard rising and facing her without one word and I had just time to think he always was a gutty old bastard and close my eyes when I heard a WHOMP and then a SPLAT and then the strangest sound of all, Edward’s laugh. I opened my eyes. Josephine stood quietly with the gun in her hand. The little turkey carcass had been blasted against the wall and was now sliding to the floor, leaving a smear of grease and dressing.


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