Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

IT WAS NEARLY DAWN. THE TRAFFIC LIGHT'S REDS, YELLOWS AND greens were magic in the blue half light. We left Habee's and walked through Chinatown. Madison stopped to chat with the live chickens in the cage of the poultry store, then pointed at a jade display of lovers in a variety of sexual positions. We were headed for a diner in the Tenderloin that Madison said had the best marmalade toast in San Francisco. My body felt light and the littlest details were miraculous: the store window with a row of old man's hats, the elegant way Madison flung her cigarette. The lightening sky reminded me of when I was young, before I knew the difference between living things and dead ones.

The diner was classic, white tile with Art Deco aluminum details. A sign written in longhand advertised the breakfast specials. Madison pulled the door open. Her exhaustion manifested itself as speedy strength. We took a booth near the front windows. There were a couple of drag queens at the counter eating pie and a black man two booths down with a little white mutt on his lap. I'd seen him around on his bike carrying the dog in the front basket. The waitress slapped down the plastic-covered menus, stood with her pen poised over her pad. She was thin like a boy, her netted hair resting on her head like a crown.

“Two breakfast specials,” Madison said, lighting another cigarette, “with extra jam.”

“How do you want your eggs?” the waitress asked.

“Over easy,” she said and the drag queens laughed.

She drank one cup of coffee after another, looking out the window at the steam rising from a manhole cover. I inhaled her smoke, watched the shoulders of the Mexican fry-cook stooping over the grill. She was like a man in her insistence on quiet camaraderie. Madison sipped her coffee, opened another small plastic container of cream, three more packets of sugar. There was pain in her face, but it was hard to tell if it was for her mother. It was horrible to imagine her mother, vulnerable in a flimsy flowered housedress, dragged behind the grocery store. Madison arranged her life so she'd be close to her mother, close to death. The waitress set the plates down roughly. My eggs were runny. The yokes reminded me of body fluids and the bacon scent was nauseating. I pushed my plate away. Madison cut her egg whites with her fork into splinters, then reached one up tentatively to her mouth. She concentrated entirely on eating, swallowing firmly. She sniffed her toast, emptied two containers of marmalade on the slices and took a bite. The sun was there now, pink on the flesh-tone buildings across the street. A bald man came in with a lunch bag and a newspaper.

“Is that story about your mother true?” My nerves were wasted and it upset me so much to ask that my hand trembled on the coffee cup. She seemed angry.

“I used to be like you. I went around sticking my nose in everyone's business, thinking I was a garbage pail for everyone's misery. Everything seemed so sad, too sad to bear.”

“You think compassion is a malady?”

“Everybody does,” Madison said. “Now I just try to forget myself by forcing my body into extreme situations. You may think I'm a fool, but it's the way I saved myself.”

“Did you ever ask someone for help?” I hated myself, I sounded like a goddamn television commercial.

“You mean God?” She laughed. “I know I should make peace with my past, but I can't. Therapy is for people like you, who have little problems, like divorced parents or husbands who can't get it up.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I think people can help each other.”

“Well, you probably believe in democracy too.” She lifted her yolk onto her toast.

The coffee was hitting my nerves hard. I wanted her to stay with me. I suddenly felt horribly lonely. “What I meant was, I want to help you.”

“I can't stomach this,” she said, throwing down her fork. “Why can't you just sit there quietly and watch me eat?”

* * *

I HURRIED BACK TO THE APARTMENT, LAY DOWN ON THE BED and pretended to be dead. I fell off quickly, had dreams of the dead, vivid and horrible. I opened my mouth and lizards came out. I dreamt I was walking naked in the Tenderloin with a baby made of cheese and another the size of a matchstick. To make the small one grow, I put it in warm water, but it turned blue. I tried to breast-feed it, and at first, it was amazing: the milk, the baby's adorable little mouth, but then it turned into a thick black catfish with long insect antennae. A man spoke Spanish in the next room, his voice rose until he was screaming and I opened my eyes and realized it was the phone ringing.

“Finally,” my mother said, when I picked up. “Where have you been?”

“I started a new job last night.”

“Waitressing?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I lied.

“Make lots of money?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Maybe you can get yourself some new clothes.” I cradled the phone to my shoulder and shut the curtain against the growing morning light. “I called you because of these incredible stories I heard at a party last night. Remember Timmy Rollins? He dropped out of college and started working as night janitor at the big insurance building on the highway? Last week when he found his girlfriend with another man, he broke her jaw and pulled out half the hair on her head.”

“Jesus!” I said.

“And do you remember June?”

“The one with the fluffy sweaters?”

“That's right. Well, she was cleaning up her VCR unit and noticed an unfamiliar tape, so she popped it in, and there was her husband having sex with a young woman.”

“No way,” I said, imagining the wife in her robe watching her husband with a woman much like herself, only ten years younger. The TV screen buzzing.

“I'll tell you,” my mother went on, “someone should write a book on man's true character.”

“Is that girl Timmy beat up O.K.?” I asked.

“You only get one chance in life, and for women that chance comes early. Before you know it, the million-dollar-baby thing is gone.” I didn't answer. It made me angry that she hated men yet sometimes sided with them. She wanted to believe, even though Dad had left her, that the patriarchy would care for her.

I was thinking of Madison, realizing she was similar to my mother, both believed that hate was sustaining. They each had a well-developed sense of doom and were convinced it was unresolvable, convinced the only way to lessen their pain was to pass it on to others.

“Do you ever pretend that you're dead?” I asked her.

“Jesse, why would you ask me something so morbid?”

“Because I'm exhausted,” I said.

She harrumphed. “You only have one mother.”

“And I only have one life.”

“You call playing house a life?”

“I'll call you,” I said.

“Do you have to go?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said and hung up.

When I thought of the expensive tailored clothes she'd worn as a teenager, still kept in plastic in her dresser, or of the TV show about a career woman she'd watched faithfully when we were little kids, I felt a searing empathy. But on the phone her semiotic stories always carried a curse for me and it was all I could do to protect myself. Too, I felt responsible, still, that Dad had dumped her, mostly because it was hard to pretend that she, or anyone really, was easy to love.

I rolled over on my stomach, moved my arms just under my hip bones, and cupped my palms over my pussy — it was a position I had used since I was a baby. Through the bed I heard the voice of a Chinese woman below and, above, the footfalls of the lovers rising, the woman's fluttering feet in the kitchen, the man in the shower. I imagined my mother coming to me. She layover me, and started to pulse her pelvis. There was something so familiar about giving her pleasure, something I'd been trying to do all of my life.