Boobs

Max Black would bring me closer to God than anyone ever did. Eventually.

Up until then, no one had ever convinced me that there was a real God. Not the priest who buried my mother when I was four years old, not my aunt Amy, who tried to school me in Catholicism after Darla died.

Because no god would make my mother put her head in the oven.

Not with me in the house.

Not on Letter N Day.

No god would let my dad suffer so much that he ended up resembling a hairy hot-air balloon. No god would make him ride one of those Jazzy carts at the supermarket like old people do because his knees hurt too much to walk.

He was only forty-three years old.

I was seventeen when I drank the bat with Ellie. Seventeen is the average age of one’s first sexual encounter in America. I’m not sure what the average age of bat ingestion is.

The average age of childbearing in America is about twenty-five, which is when Dad and Darla had me. But nothing else about Darla and Dad was average.

Darla was a nearly famous photographer. Dad, before his present incarnation as the man on the Jazzy in the freezer aisle, was a painter. They built this house with the money Darla inherited from her mother after she died from non-microwave-oven cancer in 1990. Darla inherited $860,000, which was a lot of money. Her sister, Amy, inherited the same amount and blew it all on frivolous things. A tanning bed. Trips to Mexico. Bigger boobs. Shoes. A lot of shoes.

As sisters go, they were as opposite as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. Sadly, the immortal one in this case was too distracted by sales at Macy’s to start the Trojan War or launch a thousand ships.

After Darla died, Aunt Amy tried for years to con me into having a First Communion in a pretty white dress. She would try to teach me about confession and sin and the Virgin Mary, but all I could see when she told me about Catholicism were her weird, round, wobbly silicone boobs.

She always wore low-cut tops.

Even when she dressed to sell God to little motherless girls.

Amy didn’t come around anymore. I didn’t expect a graduation card or any sort of present from her, though she did still send birthday cards—usually with overly girly motifs that made me want to puke. Amy always had a way of going over the top because I told her I was a feminist when I was twelve, and she told Dad he’d brainwashed me into being some sort of half-boy.

Which was bullshit. I was not a half-boy. I was still totally myself. I just wanted Aunt Amy to get paid as much as a man if ever she got off her lazy ass and got a job.

Why did everyone mix up that word so much?

My dad didn’t brainwash me; I was simply aware. And from the looks of things around my high school, I was in the minority.

Ellie told me once that the feminist years were over.

“What the hell does that mean?” I’d asked.

“It means that’s so 1970s or something. Twentieth-century.”

I looked her up and down. “And hippie communes are twenty-first-century? Seriously?”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “It’s over. We got what we needed. We don’t have to fight anymore.”

I remember exactly what I said that day when she said that. I said, “Homeschooling is making you stupid.”

But it wasn’t homeschooling.

She’d said what most people really think.