I took the two Benadryl, sat back down on the sofa and turned on the television.
“In a sweeping vote of one hundred to zero, the Senate has confirmed Mitch Daniels as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for the freshly minted Bush administration. Fifty-one-year-old Daniels has been a senior vice president for Eli Lilly and Company, the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant.”
I turned the channel.
“Negotiations began this week between Hollywood’s screenwriters and production executives, trying to head off a possible strike that could result in a TV-film shutdown and in thousands of writers having no business in show business. The tremendous impact of such a strike would be felt most profoundly in television, where viewers could be left watching virtually nothing with a script.”
That didn’t sound so bad. Was the Benadryl working?
Then I noticed that there was another Post-it note affixed to the top of the broken VCR. The horror of that thing! Probably another trite message from Reva encouraging me to “live life to the fullest,” I expected. I got up and plucked it off. Trite it was: “Everything you can imagine is real.—Pablo Picasso.” But it was not Reva’s handwriting. It took me a moment to place it. It was Ping Xi’s.
I ran to the toilet.
My puke came up as sour, milk-flavored syrup. A little splashed up into my face. I saw a swirl of neon pink as the two Benadryl I’d swallowed plunked down into the water. A few days earlier, I might have tried to fish them out, but they had mostly dissolved anyway. Let them go, I told myself. Besides, two Benadryl were a joke. Like blowing a snot rocket at a forest fire. Like trying to tame a lion by sending it a postcard. I flushed and sat down on the cold tile. The room spun for a moment, the floor bobbed up and down like the deck of a ship rising in a swell. I felt sick. I needed something. Without it, I’d go crazy. I’d die, I believed. I turned up the ringer on my phone so it would be as loud as possible when Reva called. I stood up slowly. I brushed my teeth. My face in the mirror was red and wet with sweat. This was anger. This was bitter fear.
I sat back down on the sofa and stared at the TV screen and put my feet up on the coffee table. I crumpled the idiotic Post-it Ping Xi had left me. Then I put it on my tongue and let it dissolve slowly as my mouth filled with spit. Sybil was playing on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I was determined to remain calm. I chewed and swallowed the soggy paper bit by bit. “Sally Field is bulimic,” Reva would have told me had she been in the room. “She’s been candid about it. Jane Fonda, too. But everybody knows that. Remember her thighs in those exercise videos? They were not natural.”
“Oh, shut up, Reva.”
“I love you.”
Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.
I wondered, would my mother have been better off if I had stolen all her pills, as Reva had stolen all of mine? Reva was lucky to be plagued only by the image of her mother’s burning body. “Individual pans.” At least her mother’s body was ruined. It didn’t exist anymore. My dead mother was lying in a coffin, a shriveled skeleton. I still felt like she was up to something down there, bitter and suffering as the flesh on her body withered and sank away from her bones. Did she blame me? We buried her in a carnation pink Thierry Mugler suit. Her hair was perfect. Her lipstick was perfect, blood red, Christian Dior 999. If I unearthed her now, would the lipstick have faded? Either way, she’d be a stiff husk, like the sloughed-off exoskeleton of a huge insect. That was what my mother was. What if I’d flushed away all those prescriptions before I went back to school, poured all her alcohol down the sink? Did she secretly want me to do that? Would that have made her happy for once? Or would it have pushed her further away? “My own daughter!” I sensed a bit of remorse in me. It smelled like pennies in the room, I thought. The air tasted like when you test a battery with your tongue. Cold and electric. “I’m not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.” Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I was having a stroke. I wanted Xanax. I wanted Klonopin. Reva had even taken my empty bottle of chewable peppermint melatonin. How could she?
In my mind, I made a list of pills I wanted to take and then I imagined taking them. I cupped my hand and plucked the invisible pills out of my palm. I swallowed them one by one. It didn’t work. I started sweating. I went back to the kitchen and drank water from the tap, then stuck my head in the freezer and found a bottle of Jose Cuervo wrapped in a crinkly white plastic bag. I was glad it wasn’t a human head. I drank the tequila and glared at Reva’s Polaroid picture. Then I remembered that I had a set of keys to her apartment.