A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 31
The bar’s dark interior and smoky air gave it the quality, even during the day, of the middle of the night. Its few inhabitants, and “inhabitant” was the appropriate term because these people appeared to live here, seemed to have occupied their positions at the bar for days if not several months. The pianist was an elderly black man, his short hair salted with patches of white, his height and stature saddled by years spent hunched over piano keys. His playing bore the unmistakable mark of boredom and yet revealed his expertise. His eyes, though obscured by the thick hair of a much younger man, betrayed a certain familiar distance. Despite the audience in the bar, he seemed to be playing for himself. Immediately, Latrell felt the familiar rush. He was finally standing before his father. This time, he was sure.
Latrell stood suddenly and crossed the room, anxious to circumvent his nerves. He stopped a few feet away from the piano, extended a hand to the man, and launched into his prepared speech.
“My name is Latrell,” he began.
The piano player looked up from the keys, offering a fraction of his full attention.
Latrell stood very still as though submitting to inspection.
Finally, the piano player registered an emotion. He lifted his hands from the keys, stiffened his back like an angry cat, and stared at Latrell as though he had just paid him an insult. “Who are you?” he barked.
Deflated, Latrell cleared his throat, and took a deep breath. “Latrell,” he repeated, then more softly, “Your son.”
“Are you Brandy’s son?” the man demanded.
Latrell regarded the piano player with mixed despair and confusion. “I don’t know my mother’s name, but I’m sure we’re related.”
The piano player said nothing, only continued to stare.
Refusing to accept defeat, Latrell held his gaze.
The two men remained at an impasse for several moments. Finally, the piano player took pity on Latrell, producing his hand to reveal, not the familiar birthmark but rather a scar that he claimed, with some pride, to have earned in a bar brawl.
Latrell did his best to remain stoic as he hurried out of the bar. For the hundredth time, he considered giving up his search. His family was surely worried by now and he missed Beryl an embarrassing amount. Still, as he headed up Neptune Avenue, he knew he could not turn back. Something told him he’d come very close this time. Indeed, he was only off by one generation.
20
Brittle Bones
Discouraged by a fruitless morning search, Bella returned to the apartment just after ten o’clock. Luckily, her hangover provided a certain advantage, a vague confused quality to her exchanges and minor feats of delusion. It also conspired to give her hope that Latrell might return on his own, that he would simply tire of wandering and, finally missing his mother too much, slip back into the building unnoticed to greet her when she opened the door. As Bella turned onto Fifth Avenue she harbored this very hope and elaborated on a fantasy in which Latrell was waiting in her apartment, completing the finishing touches on a “WELCOME” banner to weave through the banister of her spiral staircase by the time she reached the fourteenth floor. Sadly, Bella’s hopes were dashed as she entered the lobby. Bunny was on her way out, nearly obscured by an array of yellow pads and other miscellaneous, suspiciously litigious paraphernalia.
“Any luck?” Bunny asked. She furrowed her brow in an infuriating pantomime of concern.
“No, but he’ll come back,” Bella said. “He always does sooner or later.”
Bunny managed somehow to deepen her grimace from one of concern to pity. “It’s sad,” she said. “I suppose some kids are simply beyond parenting.” Her remark paired feigned empathy with an inappropriate amount of good cheer.
“He’s just being a boy,” Bella said, taking offense at Bunny’s implicit accusation.
“Yes,” said Bunny, “this is true. Men do love to wander.”
Finally, Bella’s temper surfaced, robbing her of composure. “At least he’s getting it out of his system. Better now than when he’s married.”
Satisfied with her retort, Bella pushed past into the elevator, comforting herself that it was only a matter of time before Barry cheated on Bunny. Sadly, Bella was so distracted by this delightful thought that it usurped her concentration and, already prone to sudden losses of balance, took two steps down her hall and, forgetting her renovations, fell into a two-foot hole in the floor, wresting the ligament from her knee, twisting her calf muscle into a braid, and breaking her ankle.
* * *
When Bell awoke late on Tuesday afternoon, she was cursed with a nocturnal animal’s sensitivity to light. She also suffered such oppressive nausea that she forgot she was pregnant for a moment and, remembering a comparable sensation, wrongly assumed that she had consumed an inordinate amount of vodka. As she stirred to consciousness, her surroundings pulsed as though to a musical beat, sporadically bursting into patches of darkness and blinding color. Desperate for refuge from this maddening disco-ball effect, she tried covering her head with a pillow but this taxed whole muscle groups she didn’t know she had and, deciding against a more radical move, she rolled from her right to her left side with the grace of a large sea mammal.
Unfortunately, this too proved an unwise decision. It only served to shift the pulsing light from her right to her left eye and somehow to bisect the bedroom into patches of neon colors. One such blurry patch of pink jogged her back to reality. She had spent the night with Blaine, she realized. Slowly, other fields of color transformed to reveal that they were articles of clothing: a navy blue square was her favorite pair of jeans, a lavender dot was the camisole she had chosen for its delicate straps, a brown circle was a leather clutch borrowed from Bridget, and a pink clump was the bra and underwear she had chosen specially for the occasion.
Bell’s vision gradually returned as she surveyed the room. The area resembled a crime scene, personal belongings scattered across the floor as though they had been ripped off during a terrible struggle. Once again, she made the mistake of rotating too quickly, causing the room to lurch yet again and realizing, for the first time since waking, that Blaine was inches away from her face, staring expectantly at her as though waiting for the answer to a question.
“Bell,” said Blaine. “Bell, wake up.”
Bell opened one eye cautiously.
“Your sister just called,” Blaine announced. “Your mother’s in the hospital.”
Finally, Bell sprung from the bed and rushed to collect her clothes, shoving herself into the nearest, largest garment in a desperate and nonsensical attempt to prevent Blaine from seeing her naked.
The sight of a woman rushing out of his room filled Blaine with uncharacteristic confusion, weakening him to courtship’s most powerful force whereby a man gains interest for a woman simply because he is being ignored. Bell’s hurried flight from the room was such a new experience for Blaine it managed somehow to twin itself with the sensation of longing, causing Blaine to demand another kiss and to secure Bell’s confirmation of their upcoming date to attend a Yankees game.
Bell returned to her apartment to find it uncharacteristically calm. Deducing that her sisters had already left for the hospital, she indulged in a quick detour to the kitchen to enjoy unlimited breakfast options. Unfortunately, the kitchen proved to be another hazardous zone. Benita sat in her usual spot, huddled over a project with such pointed focus that Bell could only assume Benita was trying to camouflage her presence. Benita had long since abandoned the construction of the cotton-ball beard. She was now huddled over a mixing bowl whose ingredients were strewn around the room, their peril a precise function of their ability to be confused for food. In one bowl, there appeared to be several mashed bananas, in another, an entire jar of sunflower seeds, and in the third, a mysterious substance that looked like tomatoes but smelled vaguely like hamburger meat. A lesser sister, Bell decided, would attempt to confiscate Benita’s project. A more paranoid person would conclude that Benita was trying to poison the family and thus eliminate the competition.
“I forget,” Benita said, assuming a contemplative look. “Do monkeys prefer their food mashed or all chopped up?”
Bell stared at Benita for a moment then continued toward the refrigerator, deciding again on apathy as a tactic. “Aren’t you going to visit Mom?” she asked.
“Nope, too busy,” Benita said. “Want to know what I’m doing?”
“No,” said Bell. Even Benita’s questions sounded like demands.
Benita answered anyway. “Making breakfast,” she said.
Bell relented and glanced at Benita’s mixing bowl, attempting for a brief, misguided moment to determine its contents.
“I just hope he likes it,” Benita continued. In one stroke, she mashed a banana with her hand.
Finally, Bell turned to Benita, offering her the attention she craved. Perhaps, Benita would evacuate soon for her weekly trip to the zoo. “Are you going to visit Harry today?”
“Nope. Don’t have to,” Benita said. “He’s already in my room.”
“Sure he is,” Bell sighed. She turned back to the refrigerator to examine a carton of Chinese food.
“It’s true,” Benita said, smiling. “Right back in his rightful home after all these years.”
For a split second, Bell considered the plausibility of her sister’s claim. But she was quickly distracted as she detected an alarming brown film on the top of the carton that brought its date of origin into question. So, dismissing Benita’s claim and her raid of the refrigerator, Bell closed the door and moved on to a thorough search of the cupboard.
“Want to see him?” Benita asked.
“No thanks,” Bell said. She strained to remove an inconveniently placed box of cereal from the top shelf.
Suddenly, Benita stopped stirring and assumed a grave look. “Promise not to tell Daddy. I want it to be a surprise.”
Bell nodded with mock seriousness. “My lips are sealed,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Benita. She resumed stirring. “Want to know how I’m going to win?”
“Not really,” said Bell. She managed finally to nudge the cereal box from its shelf, succeeding not in dislodging it but toppling it to the floor.
“As soon as they realize he’s missing, there will be a citywide search.” She shook her head with giddy wonder. “There’ll be news cameras and policemen everywhere. I bet it’s already started. Then, as soon as the whole city is really good and worked up, Harry and I will come out of hiding and it’ll be front-page news.”
“That won’t work,” Bell snapped, engaging in spite of herself.
“Why not?” asked Benita.
“Because,” said Bell. “You’ll be treated as a criminal.”
Benita paused to give this a moment of consideration. “Nah,” she said. “Not when I prove Harry was ours to begin with.”
“And how are you going to do that?” Bell demanded.
Benita rolled her eyes. “Because,” she sighed, “there’s no other monkey in the world who knows how to pray.”
“First of all,” Bell began, “any monkey can clasp his hands. That’s what monkeys do when they’re resting; it’s not some special trick. Second of all, there’s no way to prove what’s going through his head. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a monkey or a priest, when you’re praying, you’re usually thinking about what to have for dinner.”
Benita offered Bell a look of newfound compassion. “That’s just what you think,” she said, “because you have no spiritual center.”
Again, Bell paused, confused as to which of Benita’s errors she should correct first but, realizing it was already well after noon, she decided against wasting her breath and abandoned her search for breakfast food, resolving instead to grab something on the way to the hospital. Now doubly more unnerved than she was ten minutes ago, Bell hurried to her bedroom to change into clean clothes, bracing herself for what was sure to be a family gathering that matched Passover in chaos and volume.
* * *
As expected, Bella’s hospital room was a bizarre tableau. The whole scene was, in fact, so peculiar that Bell wondered, for a split second, if she had stumbled into the wrong room. The room was filled with a ludicrous amount of colorful flowers and balloons, transforming it into the perfect venue for a two-year-old’s birthday party. Bella appeared to be heavily medicated (at least, more so than usual) and was smiling at invisible things in the air. Barry and Bunny stood on either side of Bella’s bed like a pair of proud parents. Bell stood in the doorway for several moments, deciding whether to enter or slip away unnoticed.
For some reason, the sight of all three parents—if Bunny could be counted on that list—produced a strange effect in Bell, causing a noxious bubble to apply pressure on her eyes and throat. It was as though the eccentricity of these three people and their odd customs and rituals were suddenly apparent when viewed away from the apartment, as though the outside world had stripped off their clothes and now revealed them, shivering and naked. In an instant, Bell felt like a teenager, her nerve endings dangerously close to the surface. Suddenly, she was accosted by twenty-nine years of confusion. Of course, the relationship between parent and child is fraught with humiliation. Shame accompanies detachment just as anger facilitates separation. But in Bell’s case she felt the feeling was justified. Compared to the rest of the parents she knew, hers were objectively bizarre.
It had always been a struggle to know her place in between these two realms; the world of other parents and her own seemed aptly categorized as normalcy and madness. In some way, she had always been taught that normalcy was a compromise, that eccentricity was only individuality painted in a negative light by close-minded conformists. And so, she had tried to strike a balance, to find herself in the midst of this mess, the result of which had been a strange mixture of confidence and self-hatred. Either way, the pairing proved an unsettling state. And, finding the struggle suddenly too confusing, Bell burst into tears. She left the room without excusing herself and hurried down the hall, anxious to expel twenty-nine years of repressed emotion.
Thus overwhelmed, Bell was graced by an odd glimpse of clarity. It occurred to her that she’d made a mistake, that she had been living under a fallacy for several years of her life. For so long, she had bestowed her anger on her father and her pity on her mother, deeming anger too vital an emotion for Bella’s resignation, too respectful a response. But now Bell questioned whether she’d made a miscalculation, depriving her mother the emotion she was due. Was it possible the pity she felt for Bella was simply the most manageable response, a cover-up for her sense that her mother’s failures were a betrayal.
According to family lore, Bella had once been unstoppable. When faced with unacceptable delay, whether a red traffic light or Barry’s belated proposal, she simply charged ahead with her plans. According to the demands of the situation, she had either marched across a busy street or, in the case of Barry, presented him with a ring and forced his hand in marriage. Her grandmother’s ring, though far less formidable than the Finch heirloom, was beautiful in an endearing way, a small but fine diamond whose shine and color belied its modest setting. Considering the showy jewels Bella had amassed during her marriage to Barry, the engagement ring was a quaint reminder of a more humble time and a symbol of the prudence of her long-term investment. But in some sense, the ring itself was irrelevant. She would have been equally proud of a piece of tin, so long as it sealed her fate with the man she loved and secured his long-awaited commitment.
Bell did her best to imagine her parents objectively. She had only known her parents when they were at odds, had nearly forgotten that they had been young, not to mention in love. But she couldn’t help but wonder if the circumstances had been similar to hers. Had Bella forced the question because she was impatient to start her family or rather because, like Bell, her family was already in the works? Of course, her mother would never confess such intimate details. But Bell preferred one interpretation to the other. Despite her lack of information, she decided on her favorite one: Bella had not been pregnant, but simply impatient, so desperately in love with Barry at the time that she had taken him off the market.
It had been years since Bell considered her mother as a person, let alone a young woman. Bella was an emblem of authority, power, and discipline for a time and, more recently, despair and loneliness. But now, Bella seemed somehow separate from all of these concerns. She seemed a strong, arguably even formidable, woman who had once been an adorable, whimsical girl. Bella could be accused of many things; she was indulgent, grandiose, bullheaded. But it could never be said that she was complacent. Finally, Bell was graced with the gratitude her mother merited. Bella had been weakened by disappointment, finally crippled by mistreatment, and yet managed somehow to maintain throughout her pluck and compassion. Regardless of her shortcomings, Bella was an admirable fighter, the moral backbone of her six daughters, a lifeline to her adopted son and, in every way, the moral superior of her ex-husband. There was simply no disputing the fact that she had traded her own happiness for her children’s.
Of course, she had not always provided the perfect example of strength and independence, nor had she been done any favors by depression and alcoholism. But still, she had fought ferociously with every disadvantage, losing her husband to natural selection and maintaining her femininity in the face of so much sexism. Mothers and daughters fight a war of attrition that always ends in a draw, but by the time Bell reached the spiral staircase, the draw had resolved to a truce. Perhaps, Bell hoped, time would eventually restore her mother’s strength. She and Bella were alike in this way, both of them under scaffolding, hopeful for transformations.
In her mind, moving home had always been a temporary fix. But it had only created more problems, causing her to feel even more displaced than she had to begin with. Of course, spending the night with Blaine had been enjoyable, but the pleasure was less like rapture and more like vindication. And, even more troubling than her ambivalence toward Blaine was the fact that another, rather inappropriate boy had occupied her thoughts for most of the night. Now, thinking of Bridget, sadness turned to rage. How could someone so fortunate be so ungrateful? Of course, Bell loved her family. That wasn’t in question. It’s just that love had trouble thriving in such close quarters. Finally, though the thought terrified her, Bell knew the solution. She would move out by the end of the week. After the last seven days, loneliness would be a relief.
