Rachel’s mom appears with coffee cake on a plate.
She has long jet-black hair;
wears loose, colorful, fringy clothes and
dangly earrings; and has eyes bigger even than her daughter’s.
They’re direct and clear.
Her graceful fingers have lots of silver rings,
and her skin is peachy and smooth.
A smile hovers over her face,
which makes me wonder—
what’s she so happy about?
I realize she’s finishing up a story about Mykonos.
“Of course we were all a little drunk at the time,”
Kiki laughs.
Rachel shrugs.
“You know us Greeks!” says Kiki.
“Always loving to have fun!”
Am I really inside a world where a grown-up talks to me
as if I’m actually a person
and not the bubonic plague?
NO SUBTITLES
Paintings are everywhere;
large, small, abstract, and colorful.
Rachel’s house pulses with life:
jazz music plays on the stereo,
hanging beads separate the rooms and hallways,
lentil soup cooks on the stove,
and tie-dye languishes in the sink.
Very bohemian!
It makes me think
I’ve been living inside a sad black-and-white
Polish film with no subtitles,
no musical soundtrack.
“I love everything here,” I gush.
“I love the art.”
“Some are my paintings, some are Rache’s,
and some are from our friends,”
says Kiki,
her eyes coated with emerald-green eye shadow.
“Are you an artist?”
“I scribble stuff,” I say.
“She’s good,” brags Rachel.
At the kitchen table,
we eat off hand-painted plates.
Kiki asks me tough questions
like a private detective.
Rachel laughs, says, “Don’t worry, Maisie,
Kiki always does this;
she worries that I’m going to bring
a criminal home.
I guess she doesn’t trust me.”
“Of course I trust you!” says Kiki.
“I’m just doing my job.”
RICH HUSBANDS
“She’s studying to be a shrink,”
Rachel explains.
“She never used to be like this
when she was a full-time painter.”
“I was always like this,”
Rachel’s mother objects,
“but being a full-time painter
is for ladies with rich husbands.
That’s not Ken, at least not lately.
So now I’m aiming for a marketable career.”
“Dr. Freud, move over,”
snaps Rachel, and she winks at me.
“Dr. Freud would love me,” challenges Kiki,
not even a little bit annoyed.
“He’d appreciate me,
unlike some people I know…”
She tosses a sly look at Rachel.
Then she grins.
“You must think we’re nutty, Maisie!”
That’s the last thing I think.
NO SENSE TO ME
Somehow, I’m speaking quickly,
my words tumbling over one another.
I’m telling them both that I love to draw.
That in my family, art
is about handmade cocktail dresses
and needlepoint pillows.
Which somehow gets me going about Judith.
Then I’m saying that my mother’s a complete bitch,
that my brother is more secretive than the FBI,
that my father keeps taking mysterious business trips
and travels on jet planes with movie stars
and refers to Mayor Wagner
by his first name, Robert!
That our house always reeks
of the most recent perfume he’s developing.
That he’s planning to leave us.
Sentences stream out of me,
maybe because Rache and Kiki seem to want to hear
what I have to say.
“In my master’s program,” says Kiki,
“I’m learning that all families have warts and dings,
slings and arrows. People are taught they have to hide the truth.”
“My family’s practically a combat unit,”
I blurt.
Kiki mumbles that sometimes trouble
can become alchemized
so that it turns into something valuable.
I think trouble is trouble, isn’t it?
Kiki pauses, says, “Combat unit? Explain.”
“The other night my mother told me
I belong in a mental hospital!
I said right to her face,
‘After you, Mom.
You’re turning me into a horrible person.
And I don’t want to be a horrible person.’”
GLUB, GLUB
Rachel’s and her mom’s faces go blank.
“I’m sorry. I’m talking too much.
I sound like a pathetic loser.”
Kiki says, “It’s okay!
It’s good to get stuff off your chest.”
She turns to Rachel and says,
“This is a good one.”
How could such a mess of a girl
be a “good one”?
What if they knew;
if they only knew that most days
I only feel like one quarter of a human being,
three quarters longing,
drowning in emptiness,
like one of those Magritte paintings
where you see clouds
right through the middle of the person.
If they knew that my heart is broken,
that I wish I could stick a pin in my head
like a homemade lobotomy,
to make certain feelings disappear,
that a part of myself is underwater,
glub, glub,
that I wish I was a member of another species,
a dolphin, maybe,
so I could swim or play a little.
Or an orangutan (they seem to enjoy themselves).
Rachel and her mom would change their minds about me,
and I’d be finished in their cool, artsy house
with the glass rainbows
and the dark-blue wall
forever.
DINNER
Jake and Jonathan, Rachel and I
set the table for dinner
like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Rachel whispers, “Sleepover?
My parents will forget to bother me if you’re around.
Please?”
Kiki brings in a huge platter.
“Greeks make the best lamb,”
says Rachel proudly.
Kiki and Ken toast each other
with a glass of Mavrodaphne.
“I wish my parents would drink wine,”
I say. “But they’re dead set against relaxing.”
“A glass, maybe,” mutters Rachel,
“but not an entire bottle!
Do you see them?
Lushes! That’s why I don’t drink.
I never will.”
THE DAMN ROAST
“At least your parents
don’t hide anything, Rachel.”
I watch them tease each other
in a friendly way, as if it’s a game,
not a blood sport.