Expiration Dates

Your death made Mother awful upset, Joanna.

You were her perfect baby, her angel, a rosy-cheeked cherub dripping with lace and affections. Your little body was flawless. You had these cherry-stained lips and bright eyes, reflecting what everyone knew to be wisdom. A beautiful baby girl, the nurse had said. Your hair fell like meteor showers, white-blonde streams that swirled atop your head. You looked around constantly (in that way that babies do) and drank everything in with awe, your wonder reflected and synchronized with the gazes around you.

The hospital tubes splayed from your rounded arms. A silvery needle was wedged and taped to your thigh, pushing in medication. You were put in a plastic box. I was there, Joanna, and it was a sad time. Mother hadn’t even been able to take you home.
Mother did have the nursery set up, of course. She had set it up before she even knew she was pregnant. Your room was saturated with luxury, stylish drapes and bedding that matched beautifully (in that sort of ‘not trying at all’ way.) The man who designed it had charged a heavy fee but it was nothing, really, for Daddy promised to take care of his Honey. At least that’s what he said over the phone on his business trip. I was only fifteen at the time and everyone knows fifteen is the most undesirable age. Why is it the most undesirable age, Joanna? It’s because I was awkward. I had ears that stuck out too much and spidery fingers that reminded me of tentacles (I don’t know why, so don’t ask). My lips were always chapped, my hair always knotted. There was forever a rock in my shoe, a B+ grade, snow that wouldn’t stick. Things that seemed irrevocably vexing and just beyond my reach.

When word reached me that my mother was pregnant (she had announced it at a dinner party, an affair I wasn’t allowed to join) I was surprised. Shocked, actually. The numerous Botox injections had made Mother’s face a carefully cultivated mask—every smile a painful endeavor. Her plastic resin of skin hid the fact that she was fifty. I had thought the conception of the child seemed near impossible, considering Daddy was even older then she was. Mother had just laughed about these trivial questions. She said modern science was fantastic, tipped back her wine glass, and told me the doctor promised to give her a blonde baby girl. The doctor had made sure of it.

I’m not bitter about Mother sending me to boarding school, Joanna. Honest. Mother said she couldn’t have multiple kids in the house because: “Christ, babes. I only have two hands.” The applications had swarmed the dining table, a papery ocean chocking our house. My throat always starting to feel heavy when I saw them. Covington, Darrow School, Knox, Stony Brook, North King and Addlesworth Prep. The black ink seemed to stare me down, piercing through my smiles. I tried to ameliorate myself for Mother. Her mascara-coated eyes never looked my way, never cared. She was done with me. I wasn’t the same little baby, the one who could be paraded about and glossed up to perfection. She needed a new plaything, and my expiration date had passed.

After she settled on Covington, I tried to keep an open mind. Mother threw me a going away party and it was all quite glamorous. She invited everyone at school. Even that blasphemous little Shelly Baker was there, her petulant brown eyes sending needles my way. I took one of the table knives and held the cool metal against my palm. Every time my Mother said ‘wonderful’ I pressed its edge to my thumb. The transparent peel of skin was punctured, orbs of crimson welling next to my manicured nails. Shelly later complained about the bloody chair. I moped about a nose bleed.

***

Covington was a terrifying experience.

I was too skinny and tall, the complete embodiment of gawky. I loathed the frilly edges of the uniforms that seemed like lacy tentacles (I’m not sure why I thought of this, though, so don’t ask.) Everyone was wealthy. Trust fund babies with platinum curls swept through the hallways—always laughing, always smiling. They swarmed like red blood corpuscles in clogged arteries, grouping together in lumps of lip-gloss and charm bracelets. I knew someone would find out I wasn’t one of them and throw me out. Mother always said I had social anxiety.

Regina was my only friend there. She was brilliant, lethal, and beautiful—all things I would never be. She was into gay activism and animal rights, a self-proclaimed bisexual vegetarian. Taking society by storm, leaving everyone in her wake. Regina’s eyes were always spotty with poison. She had these stormy irises that were electrically charged, transforming her into a black-nailed harpie. Regina was a violinist. A radical violinist, she pressed, not a classical one. We were good for each other, I think. She filled up all the holes in my life.

“These uniforms are total fascist bullshit,” Regina growled, picking at an uneaten
lunch.

“Totally.”

“I mean, we’re all not lemmings. I refuse to be pushed off the cliff every time. You know the true story behind lemmings, right Eveline?”

I didn’t have time to nod.

“You probably don’t. Basically, the Stalin-worshipping Disney Corporation was doing this blather filled documentary about the rodents. There was this myth about the lemmings. As the story goes, they willingly committed suicide. One of ‘em hopped off and the others just fallowed. Disney was really hoping to get that suicide shot for their documentary. I mean, it was kind of the whole point of the film.”

“They didn’t get the shot?”

“They got it,” Regina said, “but it wasn’t how anyone thought. The lemmings weren’t even in their normal habitat. The bastards imported them. Once they got fake migration footage, it was time for the big finale. The crew induced the lemmings to do it. How fucking sick is that? They made the little buggers jump to lure in the masses, and most people still think lemmings are suicidal. I guess when a lie is appealing enough we’ll believe it forever.”

I didn’t say anything, preoccupied with my own thoughts. There was still a little scar on my thumb from the dinner party. It reminded me of a sea creature.

“Eveline? Did you hear what I just said?”

“Oh yeah, Reggie. Sorry. I mean…It’s all total bullshit.”

She nodded appreciatively, her eyes still flickering like sparks from cut wire.

“Right on, Eveline. You’re one of those people who ‘gets it’, you know?”

I nodded and continued caressing my pale octopus scar. Its fleshy arms breached across my finger pad, a dull indentation of briny ocean life. It seemed to be fading rapidly. I needed to remind myself that once I got into my dorm room, I’d better make a fresh cut. Losing its cutaneous body would be a travesty. Regina continued picking at her lettuce, and a yellow-clad woman tapped on my shoulder.

***

Mother pulled me out of school for your birth, Joanna. I was taken from lunch by a dotty middle-aged woman who repeated numerous times, in a trilling voice, that my mother had been in labor for hours. She continued giving me these ecstatic smiles, heaving out hot breath on my face (which reeked of lentils, I swear.) She insisted on driving me to the hospital and Mother had apparently given consent. Her car was yellow. The entire ride she was telling me stories about the time her children had been born; about Emmalyn being a fighter and how Michael didn’t want to leave the womb. I tried to make my mouth twist into a smile at the appropriate times. Her eyes were frantic. She had mustard eye shadow caked into wrinkles, flecks of it like rogue condiments clinging to her crow’s feet. Her arms were saturated in glass beads. The bracelets shook with every turn of the wheel, a symphony of glitzy chinks and car horns.

The woman parked in front of the hospital and rushed around to open my car door, her jewelry and heels making an embarrassing amount of noise. I got out as quietly as possible and stared at the building. It all seemed so surreal. I had never seen my mother’s pregnant belly. I was put in Covington before her bulbous stomach became apparent, and now I was about to see the actual baby.

We entered the hospital, mechanical doors sliding open to reveal searing white walls. A blonde receptionist appeared bored in her hospital scrubs. A fish tank bubbled in the corner. In a peculiar event of happenstance Feliz Navidad was humming from the speakers in the middle of October, a cheery serenade to parallel against florescent lights. The woman rushed up to receptionist and they began speaking in adult tones, using adult mannerisms. It wasn’t an open conversation, Joanna. My quirky warden kept nodding furiously like she was about to be overcome by a bout of epilepsy. I sat on vinyl waiting chairs, the ones next to the fish tank. The room reeked of glue and window cleaner. Useful things, of course, but fatal if ingested. I stared at the schools of tropical fish whirling through the water. Two of them were belly-up.

“Eveline,” my warden sung out.

She flapped her hands furiously and I peeled my thighs from the vinyl, cultivating a smile. She immediately latched her sweaty palm onto mine. She began jogging on the waxy linoleum, directing me to different halls amidst a labyrinth of monochromatic walls. We had to take an elevator up two levels. The woman was shaking with excitement. She pushed me past closed doors, a delusionary ivory painted everywhere, and we ran like lab rats in a maze.

When we reached Mother’s room I was given too-large scrubs complete with a drooping mask. I wore them graciously. I liked feeling hidden. I was ushered in by a plain-faced doctor with glasses, curls erupting from a hospital hat. His hands seemed too intimate as he guided me. Mother’s frail body was limp in the bed, her forehead shiny and unsettlingly flawless.

“Eveline, darling, you have a baby sister,” she whispered, vapid from exhaustion.

My throat was frozen. None of this seemed real. I listened to her quietly explain what had happened. Mother tried desperately to glamorize it all, but even she couldn’t sugar-coat birth. Everything had gone swimmingly in the beginning (“simply marvelous,” she insisted) but in the last hour it got dicey. You had the umbilical cord stuck around your throat, a pathway to life turned noose. You were fretfully underweight, too, Joanna. These were all minor things according to Mother. She said the doctors weren’t worried. Not in the least.

When I asked to see you, Mother’s eyes got glassy. She bit her lip. One of the nurses led me to your plastic box, whispering that you were a beautiful baby girl.
I fell in love when I saw you. I don’t know exactly what love is, Joanna. I think I had felt it for Mother once but now I’m not sure. Love might be a chemical composition. Maybe it was the dopamine rattling through my veins, the Oxytocin and Endorphin pulling me towards you inexorably. Your infantile body was swathed in chords and wires. The plastic tubes reminded me so very much of hungry tentacles, catheters trying hard to consume your pulsating heartbeat. Your neck had spots of blue. It made me want to cry.

“Do you want to say anything to your sister?” the nurse said delicately, a hand on my shoulder.

At that moment I knew you weren’t going to make it. I wanted to push the nurse away, shriek in her face. Her highlights gleamed in the florescent lights, unrealistically white teeth sparkling. She just melted her face into a calm sort of expression. It was an expression doctored by injections. Everything seemed to be tumbling down on me so rapidly, phantasmagoric memories chocking me in nostalgia. My tentacle 12-year-old hands, the tentacle wires, an octopus scar, those watery school applications sinking me to their depths and drowning me. Waves of people crashing in front of lockers, in front of hospital beds, blood cells clogging and bringing heart beats to a halt.

Your monitors started beeping, Joanna. The nurse looked terrified. She pressed a small button several times, undoing the IV to whisk you away. She grabbed a shiny black pager and slammed her thumbs into it methodically, sheer panic in her eyes. A doctor ran up and furiously undid all the wires. It was the doctor with curly hair, the one who had fondled my arm as he led me to my mother. I was somewhere else, not at the hospital, not watching a stranger I loved die. Your wide eyes were fluttering shut. They pushed you away with frantic voices yelling out to their colleagues, a gaining crowd adherently sprinting to the ER. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak.

When I went back to Mother’s room, she was crying and applying lipstick. This suited her completely.

I called Regina in the waiting room, bawling. I felt completely broken. My eyelids were cherry-colored and swollen. School had ended an hour ago and she hung up to drive, breaking the speed limit in her beat-up Honda. Regina stormed into the building with intimidating purpose, a black typhoon, wearing far too much eyeliner. I told her this when she hugged me. She told me to shut up and held me tighter, ignoring the fact that my ribcage was rattling with sobs. Through a strange impossibility Feliz Navidad was playing yet again. I watched the fish waver and dance to the tune, exotic tails swishing through the murky depths of their fabricated world. They didn’t seem to notice their two dead kin floating on the water’s surface. If they did notice this fact, they certainly didn’t say a word.

***

Mother’s funeral party was her best yet, I believe. She wore a dazzling black gown and her friends gave heartfelt condolences, lusting after her Chanel dress. They loved the way her tears gently streaked across porcelain cheeks, a beautiful sort of grieving. They relished her highlights, her foxy new lips (collagen) and the way her plush breasts fit into that dress like volleyballs strapped to her torso (silicone gel implants, of course.) A somberly dressed quartet was playing by the pool. Mother drifted quietly, a waif dripping in sophistication and black, and thanked all the people for coming. She told them she planned on adopting a child from a poor country—you know, like Ghana or something. They gushed about her humanitarianism. Everyone there simply adored her.

Regina and I lingered by the hor d'oeuvre table. Regina was clutching her glass tightly, desperately trying to look posh, quickly getting drunk off champagne. Despite her zeal for anachronism, Reggie was just as anxious as I was in crowds. Her eyes didn’t seem so poisonous anymore.

I surveyed the party quietly, raising my eyebrows at some of the cleavage displayed. Most women were dancing with their husbands, clinging to them limply. The lady who had taken me to the hospital was there. She was wearing a churchy dress smothered in lint and cat hair. It did make sense, Joanna. She seemed like a cat person. Regina started looking even more anxious than usual, staring at the people with hopeless admiration. She discarded her bubbly. She simply had to mingle to avoid being an aberration, to avoid being ostracized. I watched with quiet disdain as Regina flirted with all the boys. And the girls.

I felt my eyes get wet. Mother was gossiping about her soon-to-be African child and Regina was necking with someone in the corner. I couldn’t tell what gender, but in the end I supposed it really didn’t matter. Everyone was dancing. A church dirge pulsed through the air, shaking from dark speakers. The people shone with plasticity. Fair-haired beauties frolicked around the pool, laughing in their Sunday best. Regina nipped her date’s ear. Mother nursed a cup of wine. I couldn’t help but think how the dancing girls looked just like desperate lemmings, all vying for attention in floods of people. How mother spoke of her next child (a foreign girl with curls, she was certain) and how your expiration date had passed too, Joanna.
There were octopus limbs on the appetite table, some sort of Japanese delicacy. They looked horrible. I took a bite and a fishy taste exploded on my tongue, coating my taste buds with the flavor of something long dead. I swallowed, trying hopelessly not to conjure up an image of your corpse. The dirge continued.

God loves thee!
God loves thee!
God loves thee!

I suddenly felt very sick, Joanna. The party whirled on anyway.