Future Home of the Living God(6)

“You know, the news? The big news?”

She doesn’t react at all and I am desperate to make some sort of impression now.

“You look like . . . ,” she says.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Who? Really?”

“Well, me.”

“I do not,” I say instantly, without thinking, just a gut reaction. She looks down, at her feet. Then she turns with a little shake of her topknot and walks away, which makes me notice that she’s got a perfect heart-shaped butt. As it is packed tightly into those black capri jeans, she moves with an oiled rhythm that I can’t help but wish, for a moment, I’d inherited. I’m tall and big-boned, thin, and my butt is flat. When I do not follow her—I am actually just watching her ass, as lots of people probably do—she looks over her shoulder, jerks her head at the house. I walk behind her, up the wheelchair ramp, through the little porch, in the front door. The house is almost bearable, there is an air conditioner somewhere, I think. The living room is thickly carpeted and smells of wild stuff—bark, maybe, or bird seed, or boiling berries—and cigarette smoke.

“You wanna smoke,” she says, “I got a coffee can of sand outside for butts. I don’t smoke in here, though.”

Somebody does, I think.

I put my backpack and my laptop by the door—I wasn’t going to leave them in the car. Mary Almost Senior rumble-walks into the kitchen. I follow her and decide to sit down at the table—speckled Formica. I watch while in silence my BM (having trouble with what to call my birth mother, can’t call her that) makes a strong pot of tea. She gives me a mug of the tea, sugared, and sits down across from me.

“You turned out nice,” she says, then yells into the next room. “She turned out nice!”

“Who’s in there?”

“Your grandma. She’s old. She had me when she was fifty-three, no lie, remember that. Use condoms until you’re sixty, ha!”

“Hundred and twenty-eight,” says a reedy little voice from around the corner. A tiny, brown, hunched-up little lady then wheels herself incrementally—she’s wheeling herself on carpet—around the corner.

“Here,” says my birth mom, “Mary Potts the Very Senior.”

The ancient woman gives a breathy, whispery cackle.

“Pleazzzzzz,” she actually buzzes, or hisses, inching closer. I jump up and push her to the table.

“She really might be over a hundred,” says my birth mother. “She’s not kidding you.” She tells me about some other relatives with endless lives.

“Mary Bodacia,” says the grandma, nodding wisely. “Hundred and eleven.”

“Bodacia. Very funny. Everybody’s driving me crazy,” says my birth mother, to nobody. “And her”—she gestures at me —“she calls me Mary Potts Almost Senior. She thinks that’s funny.”

“Well, it’s almost funny,” I say. “I don’t know what to call you. You’re not Sweetie to me.”

“Hehhehheh.” The grandma laughs, nodding at the cup of tea that Mary Almost Senior is pushing carefully across the table. I can’t bear this and decide to get it over with. I lean forward and address my birth mom.

“Two things. First, why did you give me up? Second thing. I want to know about genetic illnesses.”

Both of the woman are quiet, now, sipping hot tea in the warm room and looking at the top of the table. My birth mom studies the freckles in the Formica like she is divining the future from their pattern. At last, she gives one of her sighs—I’m getting to know her sighs—and then she starts to cough. She’s getting wound up to speak. After several false starts, with the kind of helpless lack of verbal skill that came upon her when she tried to give me directions, finally, she begins.

“It wasn’t because I was that young,” she says, “though I was young.” Big sigh again. Restart. “It was because I was stupid. Not one day has gone by, since then, when I have not thought about how stupid I was.”

She looks right at me, frowning, puzzled.

“Stupid,” she says again, and nods. She curls and uncurls her fingers from the handle of the cup. “Took drugs. Not while I was pregnant. After. Fucked every jackass in sight. Just dumbass stupid,” she whispers. “Til I found Eddy. Not one day has gone by, though, when I have not thought about you.”

Forget about the practical issues. I’ll get those later. Right now I’m struggling. Thinking. Not one day? How about not one hour? I want to cry. I wanted you. I needed you.

“Well, you thought about me more than I thought about you,” I say, shrugging.

Nobody talks after that. Her tears dry up and we sit there in silence.

“You got a good family, yeah, rich as hell,” she says, shaking herself up straight. “They sent me pictures the first year. Then I wrote and said no more, I can’t take it.”

“You couldn’t take it?” I feel my eyes narrow, and this thing builds up in me, this thing I know well and which I say rosaries to avoid, this anger. It fizzes up like shook pop. “You couldn’t take it?”

There’s the sound of a motor roaring off outside and footsteps, fast clunking footsteps, the door behind me slams, and I turn around to witness the dramatic entry of the Queen of the Damned—Little Mary. She stalks into the room on five-inch-heeled black boots, in ripped fishnets, too many piercings to list and long hair with short bits spiked purple, though limp from the humidity, not sticking up except for a wisp of bangs. Her eyes are surrounded neatly with red and black paint. Magic Marker? Sharpie? Her pupils are black and luminous. She sways in the doorway, obviously high.