All American Horror of the 21st Century

Still Crazy After all these Years. Judi Rohrig-1

STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

by Judi Rohrig

“Do you love your father?”

I could never see his teeth when he asked me that question. Was it the beard and neatly trimmed mustache that looked as if he’d had gray hairs deliberately positioned here and there for a wiser look, or was it that he didn’t have teeth big enough to reach down below that know-it-all lip?

But standing, waiting for a table during the lunchtime rush, I was still trying to figure out what Dr. Jack’s question had to do with my problem.

“Smoking or non?”

“Non. Very non,” I told the hostess. “Totally non. I carry a squirt gun and start fights.” She gave me a queer look as she clutched the tall menus in her arms and turned to lead the way. The tight skirt made her hips sway as she ground her steps into the dull carpet. What a waste. I’m a woman, for Pete’s sake. Who cares whether she has a behind that fills out her skirt while my pancake-flat ass was being led to a corner table? Very corner. Totally away from everybody. Great. Service will be just great here.

“Is this okay?” she asked me, but her eyes had already fixed on somebody else across the room. She held out her hand just so. So, so. Like Vanna White turning letters when she did turn letters and not just press her magic finger. Boink!

“No,” I said.

It took her a minute—well, actually four and a half seconds—to turn back. Then the light bulb flashed inside her head. “I’m sorry, did you say ‘No’?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes skirred my skinny body, as if she hadn’t already checked out my baggy Kmart khaki pants and wrinkled T-shirt. My navy blue one. The one with Notre Dame and the funny looking little leprechaun with his fist poised high in the air. Mr. Fightin’Irish.

But she looked anyway.

Did I look like I liked tables where cobwebs probably formed easily and no waitress would pass by for minutes, and even if I got to order, something would be wrong, but I’d never be able to make it right because this was like a dream where nobody could hear you and everybody was really far away like in a desert?

“Kassie! Kassie!”

Hearing Delia call my name out loud in a nice restaurant distracted me from my expected verbal fray with the pert-butt hostess.

“Kassie! Over here. I already have a booth.”

Miss Pert-butt glanced at Delia then looked back at me as if I could help her make sense of the connection of somebody looking so businesslike in a navy businesswomen’s suit with white camisole underneath, and chestnut brown hair that flipped perfectly like Jennifer Aniston’s. What was this normal person doing knowing me and wanting to share a table with me and bringing it to the public’s attention?

“Go figure.” I shrugged.

She wouldn’t have understood the answer anyway. I might have used words that were too big. And I’m still not sure she was really even able to form that exact question. She was blonde. She might have been busy thinking about ... nothing.

Delia carried her disregard for what the other diners were thinking even further as she threw her welcoming arms around me and squeezed hard. “God, you look great!”

I looked like s**t warmed over, but Delia’s warm grin revealed her perfect teeth. Of course, she’d had the braces. I didn’t really want them anyway. Lou didn’t want them either, and now it wouldn’t do him any good even if he had gotten them.

She pushed me down in the booth and kept beaming at me, and I felt as though I’d done something wicked and gotten away with it. “What?” I asked.

“You just look so good.”

“You said that already.”

“I mean it!” She sat just like she used to when she was little with her arms spread wing-like, then bent at the elbow with her hands coming together and her fingers entwined in a dainty way. Somehow it seemed strange for her not to have “dang-delions” in her hands. With the way she used to bounce her chin on her fists, the yellow color would have reflected on her neck, and I could have told her she liked butter, and she would have giggled.

“I’m Tara, and I’m going to be your waitress.” This new young woman had a tightly drawn ponytail and a mole just above her lip. She was thinly disguising a snarl behind some stupid smile, but I could see the twisted edge of her mouth.

“Is that your real name, or do you just use ‘Tara’ for your day job?” I asked.

She shifted the smile affably at Delia, but shot me an Eskimo icicle. Cold, very cold. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah, why beg my pardon? I don’t usually give my pardon even to people who beg.” I offered out my best Irish Blarney grin which meant there should have been a twinkle in my eye, but the joke was lost on her. The punch line had no s****l innuendo. Maybe I should have told her how I had tried to grow a d**k once.

“She’s just pulling your leg,” Delia told her. “We both want tea. Extra lemon.”

On the outside, I smiled at Tara. Cheshire cat smile, not a full-toothed Goldie-Hawn-with-stardust-eyeballs’ smile. She could be a lesbian, and I didn’t want to give her false hope.

Inside I was Dr. Kathleen Caisson, psychiatrist. “Dr. K. Caisson” the tag would read on my white jacket, only doctors didn’t wear white jackets normally. Dr. Dave at the hospital never even wore a jacket. And the night we all watched the dirty movies and placed our hands on the naked and hairy-fuzzy knees of total strangers, he didn’t even wear a shirt. The hairs on his chest were brown with some graying ones blending in—was this a male mental health fashion statement?

“I’ll be back,” the waitress warned. She made a har-umphing sound that rose from her chest and thundered and rattled in her throat. Like I couldn’t hear it if she kept her mouth shut. Kinda like the internal belches Lou and Delia and I used to do on the back porch of Uncle Dill’s farmhouse.

“What brings you downtown?” Delia’s eyes did the smiling this time.

I wondered if she was just testing me, seeing if I’d remembered this time. “You called and invited me to lunch,” I said, enunciating each word carefully.

She laughed and looked toward the window. “That’s right. How forgetful of me.”

I nuzzled back against the cushioned seat. Better restaurants always gave better places for your ass to rest. Good thing. The service was usually so slow and snooty that sitting lasted longer than at Denny’s. And the portions were smaller. And they always gave me an uppity look when I asked for syrup for my fried potatoes. And they didn’t like coins left for tips.

A young man in a crisp, white jacket brought two long-stemmed glasses, each clanking with ice cubes. His eyes told me that Pert-butt and Mole-face had clued him in.

“Thank you, sir,” I said and smiled graciously, thankfully, sanely. I wanted to give them all more to talk about later as they spread their whispers in a tip bowl.

“Be careful of that one,” Pert-butt would hocker right smack dab in the middle of the odd change some i***t housewife left. “I could feel her watching my ass as I walked.”

“She wants my mole,” the waitress would spew. “After she eats the piece of raisin bread, I’ll go back and say, ‘Is there anything else?’ And the black dot just above my lip will be gone, and she’ll wonder if it fell off and is resting in the dungeon of her acidic stomach.”

“Hey, she was decent,” Mr. White-jacket would offer. He was a man of few words. I could see that right off. He was cute, and I wondered if he could walk across the room in front of me and let me watch his ass move. I’d like to put my hand on his bare leg and watch Bo Derek wrestle with the chimp at the end of that Tarzan film. In the dark.

Delia cleared her throat. “Lou’s coming in on Thursday, and I thought we could get together. You know... to talk. We could make a party of it with everybody staying over at my place. What do you say, Kassie?”

My heart stopped dead cold. “Lou?”

“Yeah, he’s between assignments, and he called. He wants to see you.” But she didn’t say those words with a smile. I saw the caution in her eyes. It dripped like the honey from the comb that Uncle Dill would lift from the huge container where he collected the puke from his bees. He’d drizzle it in little glass jars while he chewed Mail Pouch or Red Man. Then he’d screw on the lids and slap on some paper labels that said simply Honey. “Caution,” her look spoke.

Lou.

She leaned over the table and touched my fingers. The ones with the nails I’ve bitten for thirty-four years, even when Mama slathered them with a bitter paint. “He wants to see you, Kassie. It’s time.”

I wished I could begin breathing again.

“Do you love your father?”

Jack Miller seemed too ordinary a name for a doctor, so I imagined his real name was Dr. Jakob Sigmund Shimmueller. He was a Jew who’d escaped the Nazi terror, but the atrocities he’d witnessed never left his embattled soul, ghastly things too horrible to ever speak out loud. Never mind he had been born two years after the war ended. That was all part of the dread the Germans had foisted upon the world as they left their tattooed survivors to tell the tales.

“Kassie.”

Some days I couldn’t tell who was calling my name, or why, but I dressed anyway.

Each day was the same. Had to be the same. Alarm goes off at five-fifteen. Stumble in to take my pills. One white Mellaril and the B2 with milk. Can’t wait for breakfast. Need to be sure.

“Kassie?”

Then I shower. Water, water, everywhere. Not a drop to drink.

“He’s brought Olivia with him.” Delia’s eyes had passed the caution zone and blinked with large red lights hurling them and me into danger. I started to stand as I felt all the air being sucked out of room, but Delia held onto my hand tightly, squeezing it. “Remember where you are, Kassie. A restaurant. The Ivy Post. Get a grip.”

I sat back down. My legs had died, and my frenetic stomach was melting down them. Dripping, like Uncle Dill’s thick honey.

“She wants to see you. They both want to see you.” Delia’s eyebrows were nearly touching in the middle. When had her face grown lines that crossed her forehead? She was just a child. Just a little girl. My little sister. Yellow chin. Likes butter.

“Lou’s dead,” I exhaled. There, I said it. All public. I admitted my sin, so where was the absolution?

“Kassie.” Delia laughed. She laughed. The corners of her mouth bent up, and she looked at me with a sweet look, kind, like she was. Not bitchy, like me. Not hard. Not unfeeling. “Lou’s not dead. Your daughter’s not dead either. It’s time. It’s time to see them. Olivia’s a young girl now. She wants to see her mother.”

“I can’t.”

I watched my sister pick at the perfect nail polish at the ends of her perfectly thin fingers. “Can’t or won’t?”

The words darted around the room as though they were bees about to alert their brethren to the location of aromatic blossoms with breasts bursting with sweet nectar. Milk. The white pill four times a day with milk. I nursed her. Baby lips on my n*****s sucking life from me, and I was happy and tender.

“You were sick.” I felt Delia’s soft hand pat my dry and flaky one. Her nails were slender, pointed, shiny and red. Danger.

“I’m still sick.”

“You’re better.” Pat. Pat. “So much better.” Pat. Pat. “Dr. Jack said you could handle this.” Pat. Pat. Pat.

Dr. Jack? She’d talked with Shimmueller?

“Olivia needs you back in her life. And you need her.”

Sweet baby hair dangled loosely in soft, blonde curls that beckoned to be touched. To be wrapped around a finger and then dropped so they bounced. It made her giggle. Little girl giggles.

Little girls turn blue.

* * *

“My husband wants to see me again. He’s brought our daughter with him, and she wants to see me, too.”

“I know.”

I looked for Dr. Jack’s teeth, but he kept stroking his hand down his face, down his sideburns, beard, barely touching the hair above his lip. I looked but saw nothing white or yellow or even green. Maybe he never brushed his teeth. Used his hairy face to hide his sin. Or maybe the Nazis had torn them from his gums, and left him to either bleed or starve to death.