Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

Now there’s a loud pounding from inside the other box. Momma pulls back, her fangs disappear back into her mouth, and she looks as close to normal as she is going to since stepping out of that coffin. She is Momma again and she’s giving orders.

“Marsha, let your father out. We need to have a family discussion. Max, you help her.”

So we let him out, carefully removing six more valuable-looking silver nails, which Momma cringes from and won’t even look at. Soon the coffin lid creaks open and there’s my father, dressed in black cape and black pants, white shirt, vest, medallion, and one of those bat-shaped ties I know Momma has always hated-it doesn’t go with the outfit-and his eyes are red and gleaming and he makes a claw out of one hand as if he’s trying to hypnotize me, and says in a thick, thick accent, “I vant to drink your blllooodd!!”

Then he trips over his cape and stumbles out onto the rug amid an avalanche of dirt that will be impossible to clean up. Somehow he twists around and lands on his butt, and there he is sitting in the dirt, staring up at me while his mechanical bat-tie flaps pathetically, only one of its wings working.

“Marsha?”

“Hello, Poppa.”

I help him up, taking him by the hand.

“Brrr! Poppa, you’re cold !”

“There’s a lot to explain.”

At our family conference, a lot that needs to be explained is explained. Max is there, holding on nervously to his hammer and screwdriver, as if that would do him any good. After all, he might become family, or at least Momma wants to allow for the possibility. Besides, he knows too much now.

“After all I’ve given up for you,” she moans, meaning me, not Max. She doesn’t care a rat’s ass about Max.

And I break in, saying that I had to give up a whole semester at Bryn Mawr to be here minding the house just in case she and Poppa should somehow reappear out of nowhere, and I did take care of Elvira and Vlad just fine, and I can’t help it if they hiss and run and hide when Momma comes near them. (They hide from Poppa, too; he’s really unhappy about that.) And she has the nerve (I almost say noive but stop myself) to tell me to stop kvetching when she, my mother, is the world’s greatest kvetch, a Niagara Falls of guilt poured out, a woman put on Earth by God to complain about how things aren’t right and make people feel guilty about them. I think the only reason she doesn’t want me kvetching is she’s afraid I may have inherited some of her talent for it and she wants to make sure that if anybody in this house is going to kvetch, it’s going to be her , no competition allowed.

And she says, “Besides, you’re not going back to that snooty school, anyway.”

And when I say, “What?” she explains that there have been some, uh, changes, like she and Poppa are technically dead now, but not in any sense that really matters; they’ll just have to keep different hours. Then she tells the whole story about how Poppa dragged her on this Children of the Night Special tour of Transylvania, and after days of wandering into one crypt after another, something happened and now they’re both vampires, which did not, I gather, change her disposition much, or stop her kvetching. Although she’s vague on the details, I gather that after some months of bouncing around in crummy coffins listening to Gypsy jokes, and reaching people’s necks, not with a stepladder, but by getting people to bend over to look at a map of Bucharest when she asked them for directions (even if she was in some other city), and realizing she was still being her old self, not svelte like the vampire women in movies, she kvetched all the way up the chain of command until Dracula himself couldn’t stand her anymore and had her and Poppa nailed up in special coffins with silver nails so they couldn’t get out. But even then she kvetched so much (he could still hear her; vampires have very good hearing), he finally gave up and shipped the two of them home.

She finishes deciding, “So the best thing for all of us, will be that I should bite you, and, ugh, your father can bite Max, and then we’ll all be a vampire family together.”

Max raises his hammer and his screwdriver and crosses them. When Momma glares at him, he drops them to the floor: clunk, clunk.

I put my hand to my throat. “Momma, gee, you’ll never get any grandkids that way.”

Then Poppa pipes up, which is amazing, since he never interrupts when Momma’s Decided and Made Up Her Mind About What Is Best. Now he says, “Wait a minute, Honey Love”-a name he calls Momma when he’s trying to wheedle something out of her-“sometimes it’s useful for our kind to be cared for by mortals, like that nice Mr. Renfield we met-”

And Momma rears up, eyes blazing, fangs gleaming, and she says, “No daughter of mine is going to eat bugs!!”

“That may not be necessary, Honey Love-”

She nods to Max. “Now he can eat all the bugs he wants, but not Marsha Leibowitz.”

So the family conference ends and I get to stay among the living, and so does Max, although Momma puts the whammy on him and before long he does eat bugs, insisting that they’re organic and all-natural and taste like roasted peanuts, rather than simply disgusting. I can’t imagine what I ever saw in him.

But he is really helpful around the house, once you get used to his gibbering, drooling, and constantly looking around for insectile snacks. The place seems to be overrun with bugs now and Momma will not allow me to call an exterminator. So, bugs and all, Max and I have to break up the basement floor with jackhammers-and I will kill anybody who asks if it ruined my nails-and dig a pit for the two coffins to rest side by side in their “native” New Jersey earth (with all the Transylvanian earth I could vacuum off the carpet thrown in for good measure), and, by day, that’s where my parents sleep.

Yes, I know that vampires are evil and totally given over to Satan and a menace to be destroyed, yadda yadda yadda, but she’s still my mother, and if you know my mother, you don’t worry about such things as going to Hell. Hell on Earth is having to listen to her kvetching, which she can keep up until Hell freezes over unless she gets her own way.

Poppa has Max fix up a flat-screen TV on the inside of his coffin lid and hook up the VCR to it so he can watch tapes during the daytime.

I never return to Bryn Mawr, but after some whining I get to transfer to Columbia, which is in Manhattan, to which I commute as a day student. But I’m under strict instructions to get home every evening by dusk, so I can help her and Poppa out of their coffins and “see them off” for their “evening rounds,” as Momma calls it. “Terrorizing the countryside” is what Poppa calls it, as he swirls out the door in that ridiculous outfit with the cape. If he doesn’t turn into a bat and fly away, he’d like me and Max to think he does. I’m past caring.

Can you imagine what this does to my social life? Max has moved in. I can watch him eat bugs, or watch TV, or do my homework. I become very studious. I get straight A’s. But believe me, romance is not on the roster.

The scary part of all this is that sometimes I am not sure I really am living with my parents anymore, or with two all-devouring things , who will gobble up even me at the end. When your parents are undead, you can never be certain they love you. It causes anxiety, believe me.