Victoria May Collett
Razor Blade Chaser
From
the kitchen, Rita can hear her daughter sobbing upstairs. Full,
forlorn racking sobs. No cure sobs. Sobs where the inhalation is
snot, mucus, and a broken heart is trapped in the throat making the
person snort, groan and grunt in noisy bursts. She cannot tend her
own daughter today. Not today. Ordinarily, she would go upstairs—oh
yes, she would, she’d go upstairs, hug the sobbing
teenager—like the loving, thoughtful, mother, wife, lover,
short-order cook, chauffeur and gardener she is. There, there,
honey, don’t cry, don’t cry, it will all come out in the
wash, you’ll be just fine, just you wait and see—but
today, if she did that, she’d be more inclined to snag a
straight razor from the bathroom cabinet and—slit her own
wrists longitudinally up the radial arteries. She’d lean over
the tub so the blood would spurt out into the pristine white
porcelain and wend its cheery way down the drain. Not a drop would
stain her favorite orchid/green floor-tiling—not a single red
blood cell would splatter the spectacular lavender bath-mat with the
little puppies painted onto it, given to her by her daughter for
Mother’s Day six years ago. Neatness counts.
Conversely, the razor-blade chaser is such a complicated scenario—to
do all that. There is far too much thought involved. If her husband,
Phillip, even has a straight razor or one of those fancy razors with
built-in blade packs not shaped for killing oneself, she can’t
remember. Right now, Rita’s head is spinning. She’s much
too busy for these thoughts to focus even slightly on the sobbing
girl. Along with her daughter, all over her house, people she hasn’t
seen or heard from in years, are sobbing. As if the house itself is
heaving with excess sobs. If she moves even slightly she might trip
over a mushrooming sob sprouting out of the kitchen floor. She is
glad she is compos mentis enough to recognize she is not alone in her
house—although she’d sincerely prefer to be alone.
Perhaps if she stands at the sink long enough she will simply die
from sob suffocation, thus rendering the razor-blade chaser option
null and void.
Rita is grafted to the sink washing a glass. One of her good wine
glasses. A Kosta Boda, hand-painted and signed by the artist.
Her collection of six Kosta Bodas have been with her as well
as in the family since she was single and rash with her money—a
good twenty-five years. She brings them out on grand occasions—her
wedding anniversary (that is, if she’s not pissed at her
husband, Phillip)—Phillip’s medical school graduation
(actually the second he set foot back on American soil)—when
the dog knocked her mother-in-law’s photo right off the piano
and promptly peed on it (it was a beautiful thing)—her sister’s
birthday—her son’s high school graduation—when her
best friend visits (her single best friend she’s known since
they were young enough to buy Jamaican weed from seedy head shops on
Church Avenue in Brooklyn)—when the baby robins successfully
fledge out of their nest in her cherry tree each July—when her
twenty-foot high lilac hedge blooms fragrantly and briefly each May.
And too, she allows her husband to sip his vintage Port from her
stock of Kosta Boda. Each time she watches him vigilantly, in
case he flinches and God-forbid snaps the stem or drops the glass and
shatters it. Each time, he winks at her. He knows how she is loathe
to use her precious wine glasses unless the occasion is fitting so he
buys super expensive bottles of Graham’s vintage Port and
implores her generosity which of course she gives. After all, she’s
not a harridan of a wife. She pretends not to be staring intently at
him as he lifts the glass to his lips, sniffs the aromatic liquid,
sips, sighs, oohs and ahs and (a little too forcefully for her
liking) places the Kosta Boda glass back on the polished
mahogany surface of the dining-room table. She allows him to drink
from her Kosta Boda glass at the dining-room table—in
her presence. Only in the dining room. Well, not exactly, Rita does
remember a single occasion on a spring evening when she allowed
Phillip to take his glass of Port outside on the deck. They toasted
trivia whilst the heady perfume of the lilacs wafted up their noses.
In fact, that occasion was last week. Last Sunday. Very recent. The
lure of lilac-contaminated air through the kitchen window had drawn
them outside like a drug.
“Honey?” She’d smiled across the kitchen at him
(they’d had sex the night before and she was feeling fine about
herself no matter she really had not wanted sex and her breasts could
not pass the pencil test any more). “Let’s go toast those
lilac twigs you planted ten years ago.”
Phillip had known immediately she was suggesting they use the Kosta
Boda glasses and he responded in his usual laid-back style. “Muy
caliente senora, I’d go toast a dandelion with you if that’s
what would make you happy.”
What exactly had he meant by that? Wasn’t she normally happy?
Did he think she was some kind of a bitterness freak? Was she so
difficult to please? Did he consider her simply a drama queen—with
no real major issues? Was he simply pacifying her as he would one of
his patients? Yikes. No. She left those questions to fend for
themselves way back deep in her storeroom of menopausal vagaries.
Menopause dredges up its capricious head at the most inopportune of
moments. Not of late though. Lately she’s been feeling much
better. No mood swings. Her weight has evened out on the thin side.
She can sleep the entire night without hot flashes drenching her body
like tropical rain storms. She hasn’t wanted to rip off all her
clothes in the middle of the produce aisle at her local supermarket
for the longest while. And she’s not been feeling like slashing
Phillip’s carotid arteries with her fingernail—just for
sport.
Today, now, here in her own kitchen, she’s been at the sink
washing one of her artsy glasses for fifteen or twenty minutes
already. It’s clean. She knows that. She can’t stop. She
has to get it so clean that there is no memory of the orange juice left.
Someone dared to drink orange juice out of it. No clue who. Perhaps
if she knew the offender, she could explain how precious this glass
is. Like gold. Like platinum. Like diamonds. Like her goddamn soul.
Everyone except Phillip needs written permission to use this
glassware.
Once, before she married Phillip, her mother had come to her
apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn and turned the place upside-down
power-cleaning.
!ay! Marguerita, your apartment—a dirty nest, her mother
had told her in staccato English and in no uncertain terms. Which led
to the place being turned upsidedown with a bevy of cleaning agents.
Doting mother had been so fatigued by her efforts, she elected to
stay the night with Rita—and she came prepared. Despite her
exhaustion, from her pocketbook, Rita’s mother unearthed a
pharmacy. Quicker than the eye, she had used one of the Kosta Boda
glasses to swill and swallow that poison Nyquil along with her
sleeping pill.
“!ay! Que lindos vasos, hija,” chimed her mother as she
admired the glass.
Rita almost had a coronary.
The very next day, (after she’d driven her mother home) Rita
called Phillip in Tampico, Mexico where he was in medical school. He
called her back because she had to leave a message with one of his
boozy house-sharing buddies. She told him, that’s it, no one
but me is ever drinking out of my Kosta Boda glasses
again—ever. She made the “ever” sound like an
exceptionally long time. She breathed Espanole fire into the phone.
Being of Spanish heritage she could do that with impunity. Although,
these years, as a mother, she never speaks Spanish to her daughter.
But back then Spanish oozed out of Rita thicker than molasses through
brown sugar. Phillip, white-bread, Irish-Catholic, knew how to handle
his little senorita. No matter he’d been burned out on his
anatomy and physiology class in Spanish and feeling about as
sympathetic to Rita’s plight as he was to the cadaver he
dissected that morning, he managed to assuage her ire (perfectly) by
popping the question.
“Muy caliente senorita, would you not allow the man of your
dreams—me that is—to drink vintage Port out of your Kosta
Boda glasses after I graduate medical school and become a
fully-fledged MD with a hefty bank account? I’ll put a rock the
size of Texas on your left ring finger, have untold mutual funds and
we’ll have a couple of rug-rats. Naturally, we’ll have
two dogs and you can keep your cat, Squirt, to keep the dogs on their
toes. We’ll have two cars in our attached garage, a house with
one capacious back deck on five bucolic acres where deer and bear and
birds drift in and out of our immortal lives. How does that sound,
chiquita?”
Jeeze Louise, what could she say? He dazzled her. She’d been
dating him two years at that point and two years is plenty time
enough to know if you want to have sex with the guy for the rest of
your life. Plenty time to take his nighttime flatulence with a grain
of salt or a drop of lavender on the bed sheets as the case may be.
This conversation about her Kosta Boda glasses, she believed
was divine providence. What if her mother had not pissed her off?
Should she perhaps be nicer to her totally irrational mother? After
all, the indignation she inspired in Rita did cause Phillip to voice
the big question. Rita married Phillip the minute he came home from
Mexico on a summer break. My God, you could not let such a man slip
through your fingers. And what if what he said turned out to be
true—that they did live together—happily (well, he might
be happy)—forever? Rita could think of no more palatable state
of being—especially for elevating her social status in this
dog-eat-dog world.
Henceforth, Phillip got to drink his vintage Port in total artsy
style. Rita got to be a doctor’s wife and the social circle
that went with it.
Occasionally, Rita wondered if that particular telephone call had
been the clincher that really made her agree to marry him. Certainly,
there were other men in her life. She was (is) a looker—no
doubt about it. She had (and still does, mind you) a body that keeps
on keeping on and legs that keep right on going all the way to her
tonsils. Phillip calls her legs, “pillars of American
democracy”. Her “pillars” turned many a man’s
head. She is not excessively tall. Phillip loves her height.
Absolutely perfect fit for spooning with his six foot three he is
fond of telling her. Rita has always sported short wavy hair the
color of expensive dark chocolate. Her eyes are glorious green and at
times, due to optical advances, she has had blue, brown, violet and
hazel ones. To top off of the package, Rita is and always has been
educated—MBA. Hasn’t worked at it for years but that’s
beside the point. Finally, she did bring into the
relationship, a collection of remarkably fine Kosta Boda wine
glasses and a bad-boy cat named, Squirt. So, it wasn’t as if
Phillip was getting the raw end of the bargain. In fact, he scored
big-time now that she comes to think about it.
Look at this wine glass now. If she scrubs it any cleaner she’ll
start wearing away glass. Rita lifts the crystal to her nose. Sniffs
deeply trying to detect any residual of Tropicana OJ. Nada. Not a
trace. Although, something is amiss. Rita puts her nose closer. Yes,
she certainly can detect something—a hint of an odor. Something
she can’t quite put her finger on. She holds the glass almost
up her nostril sniffing as if she’s snorting a line of coke—not
that she ever did that. The snort is so loud though. On the other
hand, Rita doesn’t give a rat’s ass who hears her. Who
would hear her anyway? She feels as if every part of her is rapidly
disappearing—like she’s on a old Twilight Zone
episode—a invisible, menopausal woman wandering a scorched
landscape strewn with trillions of Kosta Boda
artist-collection wine glasses. She has to carefully wade through,
pick up, sniff and clean each one—to locate her own. Which
would be the one that smells like vintage Port.
My god, that’s it. That’s precisely what she caught a
whiff of. Vintage Port. Now, where is Phillip? He must have drunk
from her glasses without telling her. Which he could do. It was not
as if he’d been banned from using them the way her mother
was—along with the entire population of the western world. She
does not mind Phillip drinking from her glasses. He is her husband
after all and now she will locate him in this mess of people
wandering in and out and about her house. Why the hell does Phillip
have to be so goddamn social? Why did he always have to invite five
thousand people, only a small percentage of whom she knows in any
capacity, to party at her house when all she feels like doing is
doing herself in?
Oh, and there is Jeremy (Father Jeremy)—looking positively
beaten down—as if the Pope has excommunicated him—which
he probably would if he knew about this priest’s proclivities.
Jeremy is Phillip’s friend from high school who became a
naughty, naughty priest. And no little boys for him either. He’s
definitely not a pedophile. He’d been with his same-gender
partner for over twenty years now. Mind you, it isn’t every
priest who picks up a hitch-hiking stranger on the Belt Parkway just
past the Coney Island exit, gives him a blow job and ends up sharing
a house with him for twenty plus years. That relationship has really
lasted, she has to admit. Except where “the Church” is
concerned, they are quite openly married. Rita remembers the first
time she clapped eyes on Phillip. At a karate class. Not quite as in
your face as a blow job and Phillip seemed much more enamored with
her than she with him. She told her best friend, my god, he kisses
like a wet sponge and he can’t get it up. If he can’t get
it up next time, I’m outta there. She can’t remember
now, but he must have got it up.
Must be, some people are simply destined to be together—like
her and Phillip. Two peas in a pod. Like white on rice. Soul-mates.
Forever together. All that soppy stuff which she usually does not
like to think about. Rita is pragmatic—practical. Rita is her
own person as well as being all those other goddamn things that go
with marriage, children, pets and so-called happiness.
“Phillip!” she turns from the sink and calls again.
“Phillip?” Rita’s green eyes slide along ribbons of
gauzy air through the archway into her dining room. The crowd of
constant sobbing and talking suddenly ceases. Vaguely, she notices
someone staring pointedly at her. Rude. Just so rude. It’s
Jeremy, she knows that. He’s been to their house many times
over the years. He drinks everything in sight and shocks her children
with his stories. He has never—never—laid a finger on her
Kosta Boda glasses. She’d castrate him if he tried. Rita
believes, for a priest, he’s a bit too familiar. Ignore Jeremy.
“Phillip, are you in there, honey?”
Jeremy
touches her shoulder. “Do you want to see Phillip, Rita?”
“Of
course,” she snaps and glares at him—take your goddamn
hand off my shoulder. “He’s around here somewhere.”
She clutches the Kosta Boda glass so tightly she can feel in
indentation of the artist’s etched signature across the skin on
her fingers.
“He’s
not here, Rita,” says Jeremy with sadness burgeoning out of his
mouth. “Phillip is with God. Do you remember we just came back
from the cemetery?”
What
nonsense is this man speaking?
All the same, at that precise moment, she has a vision of being in a
dark wood-paneled room impregnated with the cloying stench of unknown
flowers. The funeral home. Followed by the church and then cemetery.
Four hours ago. In her vision, there is Phillip. Phillip is shot full
of formalin, plumped out to resemble a full-size human model, in his
favorite suit—or rather, the jacket and shirt of his favorite
suit. God knows what he’s wearing under the closed section of
the cherry-wood coffin. Probably he’s “going commando”
as the men say. Phillip is reposing stiffly with two thousand dollars
of chilly, white roses draped all over him. Cool to the touch. Very
cold to the touch. She has to touch him. Her Phillip.
Rita reaches out with her hand and says, “Come on, Phillip, you
can stop playing the fool now.” When she gets no response, she
adds somberly, “I’ll let you drink out of my Kosta
Boda wine glasses. Wouldn’t you like that?”
This
hallucination hovers in front of her dry eyes, develops heat lines
and makes her feel decidedly dizzy—queasy—as if she’s
on a boat feeling green as the waves. She wants very badly to throw
up. Embarrass herself and raucously puke on the kitchen floor.
“Oh,” she says to Jeremy. “No, I don’t want
to see Phillip. Not like that. What did they do to him—my poor
baby?”
“That
is not the real Phillip, Rita. Phillip has . . . passed on,”
whispers Jeremy as if whispering can cure the situation.
Rita
is speechless. Passed on? What does that mean? Some sort of religious
twaddle? Where the hell is Phillip? She bows her head, puts her hands
in prayer around her wine glass and jams the pads of her thumbs into
the flesh between her eyes. She feels her throat close off. She will
not cry. She can’t even do herself in because she has two kids,
fifteen and eighteen years old and two dogs all of whom need her for
their immediate survival.
She
shuffles awkwardly to the bar where she pours a healthy amount of
vintage Port into the glass she has not let go of. The hardwood floor
is shifting beneath her. Suddenly, out of the blue she hears the
robins singing outside in the window. They are definitely calling her
to go outside so she does. The cerulean sky greets her. Just
gorgeous. Phillip should see this. He’d definitely want to eat
dinner outside today.
She sits on the grass under the cherry tree and rocks back and forth.
Rita lifts her glass to her mouth and misses her lips. The crystal
chinks melodically, albeit soundly, against her front teeth. Her teeth
are in top condition. She has an outstanding dentist whom she’d
never give up come hell or high-water, or both. Nothing breaks or
chips or cracks. The Kosta Boda glass is fine too. The ideal
glass to last for an eternity. She’d drink it even if the glass
splintered. What’s a sliver of glass in the overall scheme of
things? She pours the Port down her throat. A lot of the tawny liquid
still misses her mouth, runs down her chin, down her neck and
saturates her black La Perla bra and the Ann Klein,
little black dress she’s been wearing for three days now.
Phillip loved that dress. Fuck, she has always hated it, especially
now. Of course, she would never say “fuck” openly in
front of Phillip. He’d read her the riot act about women who
cursed not being feminine. Hey, the times they are a’changin’.
Isn’t that what Bobby Dylan sang—way back in the
sixties? There she was, a little Spanish girl, listening to a
scrawny white boy sing in a voice like a wildfire on sandpaper. The
thought of Bob Dylan causes Rita to momentarily forget what’s
going on, and a smile curls the edges of her lip as the Port runs
rampant down her chin on its way to her dress.
Rita wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Phillip would have a
heart attack if he saw her make that social gaff. Now, she thinks,
she can do what she wants. She has time. Years. And she will get
there hour by hour. Perhaps when her kids are big, able to fend for
themselves, when they’re married and the dogs have died, she
will opt for one last splurge of vintage Port in her Kosta Boda
artists’ collection wine glass. Perhaps she will take a CD of
Bobby Dylan’s into the bathroom with her—for old time’s
sake. And she will drink the Port in a warm, drawn bath, where
she will have a razor-blade chaser.
©2005 by Victoria May Collett
