Rick Moody - The Diviners

“My mother was a shrew. My mother didn’t listen to anyone and was constantly pestering everyone around her with her demands. Maybe that’s why he left. My dad. My mother drives people off. I don’t know. It was his birthday, and it was this time of year, by coincidence. Mom had just taught me, you know, that I was supposed to get people presents, for their birthdays, for the holidays. So I bought my father a clip-on bow tie. I was so excited. A bow tie. I think I got it on Orchard Street. Wrapped it up in some purple tissue paper. We already had an artificial tree up for the holidays, even though it was kind of early. My mother insisted on the flame-retardant tree. I knocked on the door and I said, ‘Daddy, I got you a present.’”

She’s begun the third doughnut. Autonomous reflexes have come into play, the grasping motion has taken place, and she has reached into the bag, and the doughnut has been placed in her mouth, and it has gummed up the fine muscle coordination required for the pronunciation of certain words. A gap in the narrative of some duration. They pass the club called Westworld, on the West Side Highway, where she once went with a gay friend. Across Fourteenth, a run of synchronous green traffic lights, toward Twenty-third.

“I’m pounding on the door and I don’t hear anything at first. I know he’s in there, but I don’t hear anything, and I try the doorknob and peek my head in, and he says, ‘Vanessa, I’m still sleeping; I’ll be out in a little bit.’ So I wait outside in the living room, and an hour passes, or at least it seems like an hour. He still hasn’t come out to the living room. That’s when I get this irrational fear, you know, that Dad is dead or something. I don’t know why I get this thought, but I do. Even though he’s in there, even though I hear his voice, I get this idea that maybe Dad is dead, you know what I mean? I was thinking about death before any kid should be thinking about death, and I’d start eating stuff. So I started eating some of that cereal, uh. You remember that cereal? There was Quake and there was Quisp. You had to vote for one or the other. I was eating Quisp. Maybe a whole morning passed that way, with me just eating Quisp and thinking about television or something, but I decided, and this was a mistake, you know, I decided that the thing to do was to put on the clip-on bow tie, myself. Just wear it in there, I said to myself, where my dad will see it on me, and he will be impressed with this bow tie. Kids throw good love after bad love. So I open up the tissue paper, I take out the bow tie. I was wearing some kind of blouse that my mother had made for me, a blouse that I hated because I liked to wear boys’ clothes, and I put on the bow tie, which was gold or silver, something synthetic, and I knocked on the door again, and then I turned the knob, and I go in there, and, of course, well, you know what my parents were up to, right? I just remember the general posture.”

The car pulls up at the franchise on Twenty-third Street. Vanessa leaves her raincoat in the car and, just before slamming the door, she asks the driver if he wants anything. Maple glazed? He doesn’t respond. The meter is still running. She goes in. Krispy Kreme is empty except for the two actresses in the back, talking on their cell phones. They’re drinking in the Krispy Kreme ambience, but they aren’t actually eating any of the product. They’re calling their agents. Vanessa goes straight to the front of the store and demands hot doughnuts. But a young woman behind the counter, wearing a barrette that matches her uniform, tells Vanessa that the supply has been consumed.

“What do you mean you don’t have any hot doughnuts? I just had some hot doughnuts down at your, at the, I just had some. You must have —”

“I’m afraid not.” Her accent has a Caribbean lilt. Maybe her ancestors worked on the cane, in the fields. It doesn’t change the situation. “I just have what you see here.”

“Here’s what I want. You still have some of those pumpkin spice ones? I’ll have two of those, and then I’ll take two of the glazed sour cream. And two cinnamon twists. I have to get these back for a birthday party for my assistant. Right away. I promised her hot doughnuts. She’s going to be really disappointed.”

The sales technician has heard it all before. She has heard the fabrications of the beat cops, back for their fourth bag, worn down by the scofflaws of the city. She has heard the lies of the balding guys from the car dealership over on Tenth Avenue. The doughnuts are for the service department! Vanessa knows well that the employees of Krispy Kreme have many stories to tell, stories of doughnut abusers. In an effort to avoid regret herself, she stops on the way out by the table of actresses on cell phones.

“You guys look so great,” Vanessa says. “You’re really beautiful. I’m getting doughnuts today for a casting call. This movie’s going to be fabulous, a costume drama, you know, epic scope. You should definitely come read for us.”

One of the blondes freezes at the table. Her face a jumble of skepticism and that intoxicant, hope. Who is this film world angel who has graced them at the Krispy Kreme?

“Really,” Vanessa says. “The movie is called, uh, it’s called The Tempest of Sahara, right, and you should call Stan Gneiss, the casting director. Do you know him? Tell him Naomi sent you. Naomi Power.”

She puts a hip into the door of Krispy Kreme and hits the street, with a pumpkin spice doughnut in her mouth, the old-fashioned cake-style doughnut. Now another interval of nothingness. It’s seconds before a thought occurs to her again. And that thought is: shortage. Which is when the Sikh guy in the turban, who has double-parked his car directly behind the taxi, calls out, “Ms. Meandro, please, just a moment of your time!”

She bolts for her taxi, almost drops the bag of doughnuts on the way. She tells the Hispanic driver that they absolutely have to stay ahead of the Sikh guy, they have to lose him. She tells the driver to take some impossible route, with lots of doubling back, to Pennsylvania Station. Lose him by Macy’s at that big Broadway merge.

“My parents were making love, and I was interrupting them in my silver bow tie. You get the picture. My mother had figured out a way to put herself between me and my father. You know? That’s what the therapist is always saying. I don’t experience any kind of intimacy because it has to be in a triangular shape. I’m always thinking about triangular constructs. Anyway, my mother rolls off my dad and tells me to get the hell out, go make myself breakfast. So I do. I go out, I make myself another breakfast, I take it out on the patio, more Quisp. On the patio I hear shouting. Not that shouting is anything new. But when I come back in, my dad is not there. That’s not new, either, except that this was the last time I saw him. A moment like this, most of it is submerged, you know. Only a tiny little bit of it protrudes above the surface. Just the tip, really.”

Glazed sour cream is preposterously good. But by the time she gets to the second one, she’s already had enough doughnuts for the day. And yet how long does a feeling like that last? It doesn’t last very long. She wants another, though the thought nauseates her. If the taxi driver could just swerve right, here in the flower district, drive through a storefront, glass and exotic tropical plants scattered everywhere. Then she’d stop eating doughnuts.

“I don’t even remember that much about it. I know he was there and then he wasn’t there, and my mother has her version. In her version, I drove him off. But I didn’t drive anyone off, because I was, what? I was seven.”

She leans close to the perforated spot in the bulletproof divider.