Damage Control: Stories - Softcover

LYNDON


My father died because our house was infested with ladybugs. Our French neighbors, the Heroux, had imported a hearty species of the insect to combat aphids in their garden. The ladybugs bred and migrated. Hundreds upon hundreds were living in our curtains, our cabinets, the ventilation system. At first, we thought it was hilarious and fitting for us to be plagued by something so cute and benign. But these weren’t nursery rhyme ladybugs. Not the adorable, shiny red-and-black beetles. These ladybugs were orange. They had uneven brown splotches. When I squished their shells between my thumb and forefinger, they left a rust-colored stain on my skin and an acrid smell that wouldn’t wash off. Dad used a vacuum hose to suck up the little arched creatures, but they quickly replaced themselves. The numbers never dwindled. Dad must have smoked a lot of pot before he climbed the ladder to our roof. My guess is that he wanted to cover the opening of the chimney. He’d suspected that the flue wasn’t closed all the way. Our house was three stories high. When he fell, he landed on the Heroux’ cement patio, his skull fractured, his neck broken.
For months after his death, I kept finding the ladybugs everywhere. When I stripped my bed, I’d find them in the sheets. When I did laundry, I’d find their dead carapaces in the dryer. When I woke up in the morning, I’d find a pair scuffling along my freshly laundered pillowcases. Then just like that, they were gone.
* * *
Long after the last ladybugs’ departure, I pulled a pair of sunglasses from Mom’s purse on the car seat, fogged the lenses with my breath, rubbed the plastic eyes against my chest, and said to her, “You missed the scenic overlook.”
Mom swiped her sunglasses away from me. “There will be other stops, Elise,” she said.
We were driving through the Texas Hill Country in an upgraded rental car, cruising a roadway called the Devil’s Backbone. Our destination: LBJ. His ranch. His reconstructed birth site. The rental car guy had flashed a brilliant smile when he bumped us up from a white Taurus to a green monster SUV. Mom couldn’t resist bullying the skinny clerk. “No one screws me on gas mileage. I’m not paying extra to fuel that obscenity. Knock ten dollars off the daily fee.” As the car clerk hammered his keyboard and readjusted the price, Mom winked at me.
My mother the investment banker. Every morning, well before dawn, she would maneuver her own Ford Explorer across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, cell-phoning her underlings while cutting off other commuters. Mom called her first-year analysts “Meat” and bragged that she, in turn, was known as “the Lion.” Mom always wore her long, straightened red hair loose and down her back. She’d sport short skirts and sleeveless dresses, showing off her sculpted calves and biceps. Mom specialized in M&As, corporate restructuring, and bankruptcy. She traveled a lot. Dad had brainstormed our presidential sightseeing tours as a way for him to keep me entertained while Mom flew off to Chicago and Denver, dismantling pharmaceutical corporations along the way.
“I really think we were supposed to stop at that overlook.” We coasted past juniper trees, live oaks, limestone cliffs. As far as I could tell, the whole point of driving the Devil’s Backbone was to stop at that particular overlook and view the span of gently sloping hills from the highest vantage point. “Dad would have turned back,” I said.
Mom just kept driving. I passed the time by reading snippets from the Lonely Planet Guide to Texas and rattling off the names of local towns: Wimberley, Comfort, and Boerne. I flipped down the sun visor, replaited my French braids in the vanity mirror. I’d worn my favorite outfit: red high-top sneakers, baggy khaki shorts, and a T-shirt I’d special-ordered at a mall in Teaneck. For twenty-eight dollars, a man from Weehawken had ironed black velvet letters onto the front of a tiny green jersey. The letters spelled out VICTIM. When my mother asked how I got off being so self-pitying, I told her it was the name of my favorite underground band.
The Devil’s Backbone reminded me of the shingles sore tormenting my lower torso. The giant scab resembled a hard red shell. The family doctor had explained how sometimes the chicken pox virus remains dormant in a nerve ending, waiting for the immune system to weaken before reemerging. He was concerned because he’d never seen shingles in anyone my age. Usually he treated it in older patients, or in cases occurring with cancer or AIDS. People closing in on death. I told Mom the shingles were proof I was special. The agony wasn’t limited to the blisters on my back. My whole body felt inflamed, as if a rabid wolf were hunting rabid squirrels inside my chest. The doctor recommended ibuprofen for the pain. He gave me pamphlets describing stress-reducing breathing exercises. The first few nights Mom slipped me half a Vicodin and a nip of Bénédictine. As I tried to sleep, I heard her roaming from living room to bedroom to family room. I listened. My mother the widow did not weep, did not cry out for her dead husband.
* * *
A year after my father died, my mother’s breasts began to grow. She developed a deep, embarrassing plunge of cleavage, a pendulous swinging bosom that attacked my own flat body each time she hugged me good night. Mom’s belly had pouted. Ballooned. I could detect the domed button of her navel pressing out against the soft silk of her blouses. Her ankles swelled and I became suspicious. Mom was maybe six months into her pregnancy. I did the math. Dad had been pushing dead too long to be the father. I was about to enter my sophomore year at the Academy of Holy Angels. Before school started, I wanted the shingles on my back to disappear, I wanted to tour the reconstructed birthplace of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I wanted my mother to admit to me that she was pregnant.
* * *
With Dad gone, I’d insisted on upholding our family’s tradition of visiting presidential landmarks. Dad and I had been doing them in chronological order. We’d sightseen the big ones: Mount Vernon, Monticello, the Hermitage, Sagamore Hill. Weeks before Dad broke his neck, we’d spent a lively afternoon in the gift shop of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, rubbing our faces in the soft velour of JFK commemorative golf towels. The less popular the sites, the more obscure the leader of our country, the more Dad got excited: “Elise, can you imagine? John Tyler actually sat in this breakfast nook and ate soft-boiled eggs from those eggcups.” In Columbia, Tennessee, I tore white azalea petals from James K. Polk’s ancestral garden while Dad rambled on about the Mexican War, the “dark horse,” and “Fifty-four Forty or Fight.” At the Albany Rural Cemetery, Dad and I knelt solemnly before the grave of Chester Alan Arthur. A giant marble angel with voluminous wings towered over us. We prayed to our favorite forgotten leader, the father of civil service reform. One year, we spent Christmas on Cape Cod at a beachside inn that had been a secret getaway for Grover Cleveland and his mistress. Mom couldn’t make that trip, so Dad and I tramped by ourselves on the snow-covered sand dunes, plotting my own future run for the presidency. “You need a catchphrase. And a trademark hairdo so the cartoonists can immortalize you.”
* * *
All day we’d been driving in various stages of silence and radio static. Mom asked whether I’d like to stop for sundaes. I considered patting her belly and making a joke about cravings for ice cream and pickles. I had expected Mom to nix my...