They Is Us. Tama Janowitz
the magic number on the remote! The studio audience – or maybe it’s just a soundtrack – goes wild and even the President grabs his guitar to play along, “Got Dree? Take Harmony. Dree: it’s twice as good with Harmony.” And then Scott, the President’s fiancé, says, “President Wesley, I have to add something at this point if you don’t mind. For all you sufferers out there – and I am one of them – when your Drena won’t quit, take Dora. It comes with its own inserter!”
“That’s right, Scott,” says the President, “You know, we’ve been together a long time and I had no idea what it meant to be a Drena sufferer. Since you’ve been on Dora, tension in our relationship has been greatly eased. And I must say, I’ve enjoyed helping you by using the inserter!”
“Oh, I know, Mister President,” Scott says coyly. “But I should add, do not take Dora if you have or ever plan to have children. Be prepared to perform an emergency tracheotomy. If you are unable to keep both feet in a bowl of ice water for an hour or stand on one leg, Dora may not be right for you. Side effects may include enlarged heart, liver failure, constipation, dandruff, ortlan and pillbox. For those of you with remaining eyelashes or a significant other, Dora may not be recommended. See your doctor if…”
Could she stand on one leg, Murielle wonders, for one hour? No, definitely not. She would have to go to the bathroom, or the dog would want to go out. She’s about to make a cup of coffee when she sees she has already done so. It’s evening, how can that be? The days roil out from under her, a nest of snakes gliding quickly from beneath a rock and disappearing into… where? If only it were possible to put her foot down fast, trap one underfoot, she might be able to remember Real Time.
Lifting the mug with the tepid coffee to her lips she is startled, momentarily, to find, there on the bottom, a large eye, unblinking. Then realizing it is her own, pale green, the color of an unripe olive, staring back at her reflected off the ceramic. She dials her father again. Still no answer. “Slawa!” she shouts, hearing him get out of the shower. “I am not kidding! I want you out tonight!”
“I am a little bit tired of being constantly picked on!” says Slawa. “All the time I am working and you sit there watching that stupid President, my God how can you stand it, the man is lousy idiot!”
Murielle goes past him and slams the bedroom door. Three days, four, who knows how long she will be in there sulking, it is impossible to say; brief forays to use the toilet or take some crust of food back to their room, attracting even more bugs and the bed always with crumbs.
In the meantime he is supposed to sleep on the sofa, baffled, bewildered and then, slowly, irritated, at having to beg her forgiveness for… for what? Even she would not be able to remember. This time, Slawa thinks, it is going to be different. He actually will leave, he can live in the shoe repair shop. The only person left who is important to him here is Julie, and he can arrange to visit her. His cats are scattered all over the house and even though they are responsive, they can do tricks, he works with them daily, it still takes an age to round them up and coax them into their cages. Breakfast, the dog, stands watching by the door. “You go?” he says in a plaintive voice. Slawa nods. “When back?”
Breakfast
“I don’t know,” Slawa says. He is full of sorrow. “You want to come with me?”
The dog shakes his head. “No,” he says. Slawa knows the dog is scared of anything new. Breakfast likes his routine. “When you come back, Poppy?”
“I don’t know.” There are six cages of cats; he carries them out two at a time. They are heavier than he remembers. How much could a cat weigh, twenty pounds? They resemble small mountain lions, or bobcats. He doesn’t remember ever having cats like these before. Each trip he makes, Breakfast follows him to the car and back in again.
“Why you leave, Poppy?” Breakfast asks. “Where you going?”
“I don’t know, Breakfast. I don’t know.” But still the dog asks, “Why?” again and again.
Murielle hears Slawa’s car. Is he really gone? For the moment the house is peaceful, apart from the scream of the dysfunctional air-conditioning unit and the thump of the Patel boys next door playing Flosh Express in their driveway. She has begged them not to because the ball keeps hitting her wall; they continue.
At a distance the ceaseless surf pounds, not waves but cars on the thirty-lane highway that has recently opened alongside the abandoned twenty-lane highway.
She will go crazy if she doesn’t get out of here, she thinks. But where can she go? Anyway, the girls will be back soon, she will have to give them something for dinner and it is too hot to move. Maybe a cold shower will make her less irritable. There is always a chance the faucets will gush real water instead of Sanitizing Gelatin.
Sure enough Slawa has left three towels, wet, on the floor – who needed to use up three towels, just for one wash? – and hasn’t opened the window afterward so the whole place is still steamy, which he has been told not to do one million times. Half the tiles are coming off the walls and the plaster moldering, the floor is crooked, too. Slawa was right about the place; soon the whole foundation is going to collapse.
Last night had been the last straw, to hear him crashing around and wake up to find he had pissed again in the hall, so drunk he thought he was in the toilet. What if one of the girls saw him? And in the morning the urine stank so bad, even a dog knew better than to piss in the house!
Once she had been fond of him, he had seemed to come out of nowhere like a gentle… not a giant, he wasn’t that tall… but a gentle something, maybe one of the seven dwarves, which had always seemed a bit kinky to her, what was that virgin princess Snow White doing with the seven filthy little men – not that dwarves in general were filthy, but at least in the movie Snow White had to go in there and clean the whole place – the dwarves weren’t infants, they had beards, though that one – Sleepy? Dopey? – seemed microcephalic, with a tiny pointed head and huge ears –
Slawa had rescued her from that horrible apartment, one room with the two of them, she and Tahnee who was only one at the time – it was part of her salary as night-manager, but to live in the old-age home was relentlessly depressing, the smell of the old people and overheated, steamy smell of bland food; it had never seemed like a place to bring up a kid, and besides, how would she ever meet anybody there, everyone was sick and dying and/or a hundred and ten years old.
Somehow, she wasn’t certain, she kept buying stuff, probably out of depression, from catalogs, or would go to the mall which you could practically walk to, when she had free time – and the debts mounting up month after month so the leased furniture was taken away; night after night of boxed macaroni and cheese dinner and canned peas and soda that wasn’t even Coca-Cola but the store brand; she would never get out from the mess, and every damn box or bottle had its own singing or talking microchip and some were light-sensitive and others were activated on vibration so that each time opening the cabinet a whole Disneyworld chorus, though atonal, would burst out in conflagration: “Yankee-Doodle went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it Kraft-Ebbing Macaroni!” at the same time as “All around the kitchenette, come and get your Peases, we are good – and good for you! – Pop! Goes a Zippety pea!” And then the deeper bass voice, “A product of Zippety Doo-Dah Corporation, a registered trademark. Zippety – Mom’s best friend for over a generation!”
Terry’s mother lived nearby then and helped out, babysitting, though she couldn’t stand it; Lorraine smoked, even though it was illegal, and had once burned Tahnee when she was holding her, as an infant, and couldn’t even put down the cigarette for long enough to hold the baby.
So when she met Slawa – and he was so kind, seemingly, he wasn’t drinking so much then, or hardly at all, and he visited his wife, Alga, almost every day and then would come by to say hi to her, and play with Tahnee, and take her out to dinner – she was grateful, more than grateful and his house