1990
BROADMOOR
“Oh my God, it’s a cockroach,” Gaby yelled, jumping up to stand on the kitchen chair she had been sitting on.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, not entirely sure, since I had seen plenty of roaches in our house, especially in the summer now that we had switched to ceiling fans to cut down on our electricity bill.
“It was. It went under the garbage can, I swear to God, Rosemary, I cannot deal with roaches.” She was wearing a T-shirt a cousin had brought back for her from a trip and it said See Canada in wavy rainbow-colored script. I was very jealous of that shirt.
I picked up an old TV Guide just in case. “It wasn’t.” Ida jumped around my feet excitedly, yapping at the commotion and wagging her tail supportively as I slowly approached the garbage can. I knew how Gaby felt about roaches. She had once put on a sneaker and found a roach inside and never recovered from it. She told me the story every summer in gross detail, always ending with a shiver and an emphatic and that’s why I cannot deal with roaches.
“Just hold on,” I said. And then I shoved the garbage aside in one quick motion and I saw it was a roach, a big disgusting palmetto bug swirling its antennas around.
“That’s the kind that can fly, get it!” Gaby yelled from the chair.
I screamed and threw the TV Guide at it and then stomped on the TV Guide for good measure and thought I heard a crunch but it was hard to tell because we were both screaming and Ida was barking, but I figured it was close enough and Gaby and I both ran into the living room and jumped on the couch, still screaming and holding each other’s hands. Ida tried to jump up with us but missed and ran around in circles barking under the coffee table instead.
Once our panic had subsided, we sprawled, recovering. “Do you think you got it?” she asked, lifting up a couch cushion and checking underneath.
“Definitely,” I lied. I was half listening to see if all the noise had woken my mom up but the door to her bedroom stayed shut. I was pretty sure she and her boyfriend Tommy had broken up last night. There was a shattered wineglass still on the kitchen counter and it smelled kind of like rum in the house. The yelling and shouting had lasted almost until morning. Mom usually took breakups pretty hard. “Will you stop that? There’s no bugs in our sofa.”
“I’m just checking. You never know. He might have friends around.”
“Oh my God, stop it.” I gave her a shove.
She squealed and shoved me back. “Don’t do that, I’m all jumpy now.”
Then we hit each other with the sofa pillows for a while until we were really tired, and I slid onto the floor so Ida could lick my nose. I didn’t want her to feel left out. “Come on, let’s finish.”
“I don’t know if I have an appetite after all that.”
I stood up and went to retrieve the tube of cinnamon buns she had dropped in the excitement. I wasn’t going to give up so easily. I had just had them for the first time at her house the other week and I was still amazed that anything could be so delicious. We had walked all the way to the store to buy them and I was determined we would make them. “Are you sure it has to be a baking sheet?” I asked. “I didn’t see one anywhere.”
She followed me tentatively, staying near the doorway of the kitchen. “That’s what we use and that’s what the instructions say. Can’t you ask your mom if y’all have one?”
I didn’t really want to, but I also really didn’t want to go digging around in the dark kitchen cabinets near that roach. “Mom, do we have a baking sheet?” I yelled and we waited for a response. I did this a couple more times until I started to get annoyed. There was no way she couldn’t hear me; our house was too small and now she was just being lazy, because she didn’t want to get up and help me look.
“Hold on,” I told Gaby. “I’ll find out.” I walked to her room and knocked. There was no answer. Ida came to help by scratching one small paw at the closed door impatiently. There were a whole bunch of little marks on the wood where she had done that before. “Mom?” I asked again. There was still no answer, so I opened the door.
The room was dark, the afternoon barely filtered through the closed purple curtains, but I could see a big lump where she was lying on the floor. The room was filled with a sour smell, bile and pineapple juice. I stood there for a while. I didn’t want to go in. I squeezed the canister of dough in my hand. It was comforting the way it yielded, strangely taut under the cardboard like a living creature, and I waited, unsure.
After a minute, Gaby came up behind me and looked over my shoulder. Then she reached over and turned on the hall light. We could now both clearly see the puddle of vomit under my mom’s head. “Is she alive?” she whispered.
“Her hair is moving,” I said. I pointed at a strand of hair across her mouth that was fluttering with her breath.
“Should we call 911? Should I call my mom?” Gaby asked.
“No.” I pushed Ida back. She was desperately trying to get around my legs and into the bedroom. I closed the door. At some point I must have squeezed the cinnamon buns hard enough to unseal the top of the canister because it popped suddenly in my hand, dough leaking out thick and flabby through the diagonal slashes in the unraveling tube of cardboard. “It’s okay, it’s happened before.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.” I didn’t want the cinnamon buns anymore. I wasn’t hungry. Gaby followed as I put them back in the kitchen. “Let’s go watch TV,” I said.
“Okay,” she answered, accepting the situation, and I was so glad she didn’t ask anything else.
We went into the living room and sat next to each other. “Hey,” she said after a minute, “do you want to switch?” She indicated her shirt.
I nodded. I did. I pulled off my ugly white shirt and soon was wearing the coveted See Canada rainbow. It was still warm from her body and it smelled like her. I pulled it over my knees like a tent. “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Afternoon turned into night as we watched show after syndicated show—Amen, 227, The Facts of Life, Three’s Company—the shows marking time in bursts of recorded laughter. When we turned on the lights, Gaby called her mom to ask if she could stay longer. I poured food into Ida’s bowl. And we sat back down on my ugly orange corduroy couch, sharing a box of Wheat Thins for dinner, both of us careful to avoid looking in the direction of the hallway or at the closed door behind it.