Last Last Chance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  i

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  ii

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  A Conversation with Fiona Maazel

  Discussion Questions

  Copyright Page

  Mom, Paul, Ilann

  i

  One

  People I love know how to get on with their lives. In evidence: A girlfriend from elementary school was getting married. Day after tomorrow, Plaza Hotel. The invitation was piped in copper and rice, maybe because the bride was Indian. It promised a groom on horseback. This I’d like to see. I knew the groom, which made it tough to imagine horseback nothin’. A horse could make him cry. A horse could make me cry. How fortuitous. When the crying starts, blame horse.

  I was on break outside the crèche. The view was coops and farmland. Tractor here, reaper there, and, per usual, Wanda Deckman headed my way. She is the chief union steward. She likes to meddle. And, in my case, to paw for information apropos a strain of lethal plague vanished from my father’s lab a few months ago. I understood. Miasmic events storming the country were on everybody’s mind. There was reason to believe the strain had fallen into enemy hands. Enemies of freedom, the press was saying. I tried to look buoyant.

  “Lucy,” she said, and grabbed at the card. “Hand it over.” Never mind that I’d been fondling the invitation for weeks, it looked like news to her.

  I did as told. She studied it and blushed. Not word of the Miasma, just some girl’s wedding.

  I said it was my oldest friend, though we don’t talk.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I said I had regrets, more regrets than not.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I do like a good biryani,” I said. “Some of the curries, too.”

  She agreed. Could I have the day off? Sure, have fun.

  There was nothing left to say. Stanley Gensch, making for the john, came as a relief. He’d been the bellman and pluckhouse supervisor for twenty-three years, though his job was in peril. It always was. He drank. And, in drink, tended to forget the closing bell, which got Wanda cross and him grousing that double duty prefigured a screwup. No matter. Wanda could nail him with guilt. I’d even heard it myself, them squared off while she declaimed his past, social outcast inmate whose priors she chose to overlook when giving him what’s called a second chance, even though this was more like his third or fourth and certainly did not feel like a chance since this place, this abattoir, was hours away from life in any direction, a kosher chicken plant that had the remove and dyspepsia of rehab. I had been here two months, four days, nine minutes.

  First thing I noticed about the plant: hygiene was king. We wore latex gloves and surgical caps to repel disease. We sterilized our clothes. In canisters bolted to every wall: antibacterial mousse. Broadsides would come down from the office, stuff like, The chicken line cannot be exposed to unhealthful agents. That’s the phrase we used: unhealthful agents. Listeria monocytogenes was a threat. I would read this, and my heart would sink. Because I knew what was on deck. I knew about disease—my dad had worked for the CDC—so yeah, I knew, which made for an uneasy time on the line. I’d developed a clucking of the tongue that kept time with the action of my hands. Some of the other girls got annoyed. They said I was disruptive. And when the brass called me up, they had this to add: The serenity proffered by the line can be had so long as you try.

  It wasn’t so much the job. My colleagues were fine. The vistas were great. But the feeling was claustral. I’d been exiled, and though I could leave anytime, I felt I deserved this. And that’s the thing about exile, you tend to feel extra trapped if you know the comeuppance is just.

  In the city, I’d been in sales for high-end retail. Next, I’d dabbled in real estate and estate planning, which have less in common than you’d think. Then I had my fun and slept with Mother’s acupuncturist, whose practice foundered on the scandal. We were discovered by a client arrived too soon. Mother, who’d been footing my bills under aegis of Bridge Loan, decided to foot no more. And so, the chicken house. The house as holding tank until a bed opened up for me at a rehabilitation facility down South.

  Wanda had hair to the small of her back, sieved through a low ponytail. Mostly white and gray, fried at the ends. She wore glasses. Red plastic. I often found her lost to the occupation of wiping the lenses, which had the boon of redress for awkward moments such as this.

  She sat next to me on the step. I tried to stand and was successful at it.

  “Did you just swoon?” she said. “Because that is not right. Especially at a wedding. Heels and a bad inner ear, I’m going to call it a bad inner ear, can make for a spill on the dance floor, not to mention the disco ball and strobe lights.”

  Wanda, apparently, had not been to a wedding since 1977.

  She gloved herself and, once gloved, snapped the rubber cuffs like maybe she was about to engage in some ob-gyn activity. “Going to the pluckhouse,” she said. “Sleep it off. Drive safe—”

  I rolled up the invitation and brought it to my eye like maybe I could see something new in the prospect before me. Inner ear. Wanda’s will to believe was disheartening. But she was just doing her best. I’m sure Mother had begged her to take me in. And who knew, maybe the chicken house really could subtend the path I was on. Maybe it would get me out of rehab. Rehab cost a fortune, and Mother had a habit of her own to finance. Plus, I really, really didn’t want to go.

  I scoped the terrain and found Stanley across the yard, shouting and throwing up his arms. I thought he might be trying to pep my spirits coach style, so I gave him a thumbs-up, like play ball!, which seemed to satisfy him enough to continue walking to the salting plant. I liked Stanley. We both had death in our families, and the idea of sharing our grief seemed to improve on acquaintance.

  It was August. The wedding was on the thirtieth, which seemed odd because who gets married on a Friday? Less odd was that I had no date. I’d had weeks to prepare and yet: no date. Possibly it was because I knew the nuptials would be my last outing for a while, which meant having to find just the right escort, which meant being paralyzed by the onus of having to find Just the Right Escort. Possibly it was because I had no male friends. Most likely, though, it was because the pressure of having to front my well-being for at least five hours was so unsustainable, I’d been hoping the world would end before Friday. Showing up would certainly evidence progress of my own—is there anything more well adjusted than going to your oldest friend’s wedding?—but also, come on, what a nightmare.

  It was time to frisk the chickens. Alternately, there was my bed, which call
ed out to me with godlike authority. I was under the covers in seconds. Unlike the other staff, I slept on the premises, in more of a barn than house, whose open windows and cracks in the joists let in a breeze I enjoyed, except by morning spindrift was always up in my hair, which made me look more acclimated than I would have liked.

  I didn’t have many personal items, since I’d left the city in a rush, essentially shoved on a bus by Mother, who blew kisses as the driver pulled out of Port Authority. There was Farfle, my stuffed sweet potato, and tweezers because I cannot live without tweezers, and a cardholder that looked like a recipe box, in which I kept a log of the men I’ve dated. My last entry was before I came here, when I was participating in a study—pheromones, I think—that paid enough to get me the blast, which became the tryst with the acupuncturist.

  The good thing about the log is that it bedecks my heart with the lives I could have had if only. One of the entries was for a guy named Ben, Dirty Ben, who told me he had married a Venezuelan to help get her a Green Card, but that this was not in any way prohibitive of relations between us because she was gay. He could make for a good date at a Hindu wedding, being a free spirit and such. Plus he knew the bride from a Sierra Club summer when they had teamed up and gone door to door, guilting for money. As for me, we’d met last winter in Charleston, at a VA homeless shelter for narcotics recovery. It was absurd, my being there, because five seconds before I was at a department store, looking for sneakers—Chuck T’s—until the saleslady was like: Oh, I recognize you from the news, your pop done fouled it up, at which point I got mad, and suddenly there’s cops, rehab, and what? The worst I had on me was grass and a locket of smack around my neck. Ben was in for something retarded like Robitussin OD, though I found out later he was just there to get some crystal meth from one of the VA guys. His wife was not Venezuelan or gay, but I slept with him anyway. And since antibiotics are not cheap, and since Ben knew he was giving me more than his love, I figured he owed me. Plus he lived in New York.

  Next morning at breakfast, there was gossip. Me and the other girls were airing it out. Beyond the compulsory assemblage of lives in slaughter, these talks were the closest you got to feeling a part of things. Sharon Boozel, who oversees desalination and rinse, was saying, with pride, that Stanley had gotten into a fight with one of the rabbis. And just the thought of Stanley, who’s a bit of an oaf, sparring with a rabbi made me think that perhaps he wouldn’t be such a bad date, either. He was obviously not doing well, and it made me feel tender about him. Probably he didn’t own anything but Orthodox duds, but they could pass for a tux. Me, I could always buy something in town.

  I headed for the grain silo, which is where he tended to start the day. It was impressive, this steel proboscis of huge affront to the landscape. Alongside the pluckhouse, coops, and satellite facilities, it had a bunker quality you had to admire.

  He was not there. He was, instead, in the killing room, in the back, honing a cleaver. It’s true Stanley was awkward, oafish, but this was looking more Fatty Arbuckle than Of Mice and Men. Also, the cleaver was not our blade of choice. We’ve got ritual slaughter guys with their perfect knives, and a routine in which a cleaver had no place whatsoever.

  “Uh, Stanley, you’re looking like a crazy.”

  “Oh, so now you want to talk to me.”

  “I always want to talk to you,” I said, and flashed some teeth. I wasn’t so good with people, but I was trying.

  Stanley wore jeans and a T-shirt spattered with blood because when a chicken’s carotid, jugular, and windpipe are severed, it’s a bloody affair. Thing is, I could still read his shirt. It said: Stick Up for Chickens!

  Stanley, it seemed, was at the end of his rope.

  “You know, most of us around here aren’t even Jewish,” he said. “I’m not. Clearly you’re not.”

  I couldn’t decide if I should be taking offense, like I was so Waspy it showed on my face, but also I was thinking if Stanley wasn’t Jewish—forget Orthodox—he might not own suitable wedding attire.

  “Yom Kippur’s in two months,” he said. “If I have to watch those guys twirl the birds one more time—”

  He was referring to Kaparos—atonement—in which Jews take chickens by the feet and swirl them overhead, like a lasso, before the ritual killing. I’ve been told that since the Hebrew word for man and rooster is the same, the twirling projects your sins onto the bird. So there’s some chanting that accompanies the twirl, something like: This is my substitute, the bird dies, and I am atoned. Guilt figured hugely in Stanley’s life, so I decided he was experiencing an upsurge precipitated by the holiday just two months on.

  I asked if he was okay.

  He asked if a chicken has lips.

  I asked if he’d be my date for the wedding.

  He said sure.

  I said, “Be ready after work.”

  He said, “Yep.”

  I smiled, but it did not last. Stanley turned away. I’ve been told my face remits joy faster than anyone’s.

  The bride’s name was Kamini, which was meany in sixth grade, mini in high school, and Kam after that. When we were twelve, we auditioned for a strip show that played on late-night cable. They told us to come back with nipples. At fourteen, we did nitrous from balloons we got from a guy in the park who liked to say baaaallup, baaaallup, and rattle a snake tail. I’d been seeing this man ever since I was five. It got so I was certain he didn’t know any English besides baaaallup. Then one day his argot doubled so that he’d say baaaallup, special baaaallup, and then he had customers and then he had us, and with a combination of mime and mindset we got the picture and were fucked up for hours. Each take from the balloon made your brain pirouette. Kam and I finished ours and sprawled on the grass. Nothing is pastoral in a city, but when you’re high, every pony is Icarus, which might explain why when Baaaallup got arrested by cops on horseback, we thought he was going to heaven.

  Kam liked to call me Boothe Luce. She was there the day I first tried to use a tampon. Got it halfway in, then decided it was stuck and I was going to get toxic shock and die. Mother was out, which left Kam and my nana from Norway, whose English rivaled Baaaallup’s for diversity. I remember her fretting and me crying and Kam swaddling her fist in toilet paper, like a boxer before the fight, and grabbing the string until out it came. There was some oregano in the house we tried to smoke by way of celebration, but it burned like hell, and anyway, Nana Agneth was making lutefisk, so it was time to go. Cod soaked in lye is just not my idea of a party.

  We killed water bugs on Kam’s roof. For the baptismal ordeal known as the facial, I was in the next bed first time she went through it. She had a dog that could walk on its front legs. We went to the same high school and wrote notes to each other in class that I still have. At sixteen, she had her breasts augmented. Cited mental health on the insurance claim. At eighteen, we were leaving a loft party, us and this guy in a cab, when someone reached in through the window and stabbed our third in the knee. We once got so wrecked at an Irish bar that I agreed to let two old men shackle us to the gridiron in their van so we’d be safe in the back—it was more like a U-Haul than a van with seats—while they took us someplace more romantic. Kam demurred. Her drunken state said: I need to evacuate the contents of my stomach. Mine said: Let’s get molested. Hers won. On the walk home, she ralphed in a dumpster while I held back her hair. And I remember thinking this felt like love.

  While I was in teen rehab, she sent me letters sealed with turtle stickers. When I got out, she said she’d gotten into a college of repute. And that while I was gone, she’d joined the swim team. Turned out she was good, but her lung capacity sucked.

  We had not spoken in a year. Come birthday time, I wished her happiness in my head. I wondered if she was still athletic. The groom was a photographer. Kam, from what I’d heard, was a VP at Ralph Lauren, the youngest ever. I was surprised she had invited me to the wedding. No idea how she even found my address.

  It was almost time to go. I had gassed up the
car and made hotel reservations for two. Everything was in place, only Stanley was AWOL. No one had seen him since this morning. I was nervous enough, which meant if he was off drinking, I might have to join him.

  At five and without the bell, the line broke up. I was assisting the mashgichim, who are just guys looking for broken bones, holes, bruises, etc., when the conveyor shut down. I found this poignant, which helped nothing. Gloves were doffed and tossed. A few rabbis slipped out the back. It was like watching people scatter after a funeral because the person who’d kept them together was gone.

  Wanda was trying to record negligence as she saw it. The brass were ordering us back to our stations.

  I found Stanley in my car. He was smoking a joint I had put in the glove compartment for when the wedding got too hectic or too depressing. I got in the driver’s side and pulled out of the lot.

  In minutes, Stanley was asleep with mouth ajar. I noticed a fake tooth, but only because it was so much whiter than the others. Have I mentioned he was just over fifty? That he had angina and a cauliflower ear from when he was in a car wreck that killed his wife and dog ten years back? Not that Stanley told me any of this, but what is the chicken line if not a conveyor of story?

  “Hey, Stanley?” I said.

  He opened one eye.

  “It’s not mandatory, you know. The twirling and all that. You don’t have to go.”

  “Says you.”

  I worked into my seat, renowned for a lumbar support system that was just a leather bolus humping my spine.

  “You okay to drive?” he said.

  “Yeah. All I need is to get us to this wedding, in one piece, on time.”

  Last I saw Kam was in the Adirondacks, at a chalet nestled in fifty-four acres of forest. She had brought Miss Piggy Pez and a magazine that published articles by famous people about what shit their lives had been until they got clean. She stayed the afternoon. We played pool in the rec room. We watched a film noir in the rec room. We played croquet. I said it was like vacation, and she said but was it working? Was I trying?