They Is Us. Tama Janowitz
Vaguely a memory of a bill. Eight thousand and ninety-five dollars? From who? And where is it? There is no use in looking, she knows that by now. It was due, when, a couple of days ago? She had meant to search for it the night before, now she had to get to work and make sure the kids got on the bus, there is no time to look; nevertheless she begins rummaging through a heap.
“Everybody at school has them, Ma. Jommy Wakowski had one last week that started coming out of his nose and he got the whole thing but the teacher actually threw up! What the hell are they, Ma?”
She hasn’t been paying attention. “I don’t know. Some kind of worm, a tapeworm, I guess, that’s vermicide-resistant. If you’d wash your hands… Is this something of yours, Julie?”
Julie grabs the paper. “Oh, great! My homework! I was looking for that. See, I told you – Sue Ellen takes stuff, all the time, and hides it!”
Draw a map of the United States
– Name the relevant details
– Outline the former landmasses in a different color.
“Why can’t you get organized the night before?” Murielle looks at the homework.
“Julie, did you do this?”
“Yeah, why, what’s wrong?”
“Um, nothing… What’s the wall of burning clothes?”
“Oh, that’s to keep out the Mexicans, you know, where all the clothes get sent and formed into a wall that they soak in dirty oil and stuff, it’s on fire?”
“I didn’t even know about that! You really did this all by yourself? You didn’t copy?”
“No.”
“I’m surprised, that’s all.”
Her mother always thinks she is stupid! But Julie doesn’t say this, she knows it would only make her mother mad. “Can I have fifty dollars for lunch? Hurry up, Ma.”
“Oh God. Hang on just a second,” Murielle says.
“Ma, I’m gonna miss the bus. What?”
“It’s, you know, the worm thing. What the hell is it with these things, why can’t the doctor give you some kind of medicine that works?”
“The bus is coming! Are you going to drive me?” Julie involuntarily sticks her little finger in her nostril.
“No, don’t, don’t touch or it’ll retreat.” Murielle takes some tweezers and grabs the worm head. The face with dark eyes and no chin is unpleasant. Then with the head of the worm in the tweezers she begins to pull, slowly winding the thin white body around the nearest thing to hand, a broomstick, which she twirls. When she has wound almost twelve feet of worm, the end breaks off and falls to the floor where, though missing the head, twitches across the room toward the gap under the cabinets. Being snapped in two doesn’t seem to have killed the worm.
“I’ve definitely missed the bus.”
“That’s all I could get,” Murielle says. She carries the broomstick and the tweezers over to the sink. The two of them look at the partial worm. As soon as Murielle releases the tweezers the other half of the worm uncoils itself from the broomstick and slithers down the drain, turning around once to look at them – or so it seems – with a contemptuous sneer. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”
“Gross,” says Julie. “Turn the hot water on or something. Boil it. You should have flushed it down the toilet. I’m now officially late! How could it live when I could feel it snapped in two?” She sticks her finger in her nose. “I can’t feel any of it in there, but I know you didn’t get the whole thing.”
Intelligent Design – Short Version
Somewhere in the universe a child is crying, “Maaaa! I’m bored!”
“Well, Adam,” says his mother who is very tired and trying to get something accomplished. “Why don’t you go play with your chemistry set?”
“Look, Ma!” yells Adam, a short time later. “You gotta see what I made!”
“Not right this minute.”
“Come now!”
Adam’s mother wearily goes to look. “Oh, Adam, that’s terrific! What is it?”
“Can’t you tell? Maaa, it’s a new planet!” says the child with a satisfied smile. “And now I’m gonna give it the spark of life.”
“No, no,” shouts his mother. “Not the spark of life, honey! Remember what happened the last time! I don’t want to have to clean up another of your messes!”
6
(Regular version)
The girls are open-mouthed, watching the President’s boyfriend on HGMTV and eating biodegradable baked crunch poklets. “Gee, Scott, you look fabulous!” a reporter is saying. “Who designed your outfit?”
Scott is dressed in high black boots and jodhpurs, and carries a little crop. Under his other arm is a Cunard saddle, a birthday gift from Cunard – which, says the caption on hologramovision, has been given to Scott in return for promotional considerations. “It’s all Cunard,” Scott says. “Couture by Steve McQueen for the Cunard luxury line; do you know what the saddle alone would cost if I had to buy it retail?” He looks around. “Where is that stable boy? Manuel!”
Manuel is Argentinean, a shock of black hair, gumboots, short but blackly handsome. He takes the saddle from Scott.
The two men pose for the hologramovision cameras momentarily as they stare at the horse. “Christ, Manuel, he’s just too darn long in the back for this saddle,” Scott says at last. “You were the one who took the measurements, it’s a custom-made fuckin’ saddle, now what am I supposed to do?”
Manuel turns to the camera. “Let’s find out, after this quick break for an important commercial announcement!”
“Come on, this guy’s really starting to bug me,” Tahnee says finally. “I’m bored, what do ya wanna do?”
“I dunno, what do you wanna do?”
“I wanna go to the shack.”
“By ourselves or ya meeting someone?”
“Just us.”
Julie is happy. Just them, this is a relief, to be alone with her sister – and even better not to have to wait outside the shack, standing guard, while Tahnee and Locu did whatever it was they did inside.
“Where’s Locu?” Julie says.
“Dunno,” says Tahnee. “Don’t care.” Julie is surprised. Tahnee loves Locu so much. She can spend hours with him, doing nothing but sleeping or half-sleeping, limbs entwined. She is happy. His brown skin, soft and hairless, his amber eyes thickly fringed with long black lashes. How Tahnee loves the smell of Locu, a mix of cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, turmeric. She knows these are the names of the smells because she has gone next door, often, to watch Locu’s mother cook. Rima still does things the old-fashioned way. She opens different packets and cans and cooks them on the stove. Tahnee could almost lick him up, his warm, sweet-scented sweat. Even if he takes showers and doesn’t eat Indian food for days, it is still embedded, somehow, in his skin.
Mostly they don’t talk, they don’t need to, it is enough to simply lie this way, felines in the sun, stroking the skin on the inside of each other’s elbows or necks or