like my hiney

I dropped by Miles's house to pick him up for the funeral, He didn't want to drive his car into Clifton; he's funny like that. I've known Miles since high school and we both went to Rutgers. He didn't even have a car then; I liked it that he stayed friends with me even after I dropped out and started having mental problems and he started making all kinds of money doing his hobby computer games, even before he graduated. Now he had an expensive, if staid, Buick, and he kept it washed and waxed and never subjected it to stress. It's not like Clifton is exactly the South Bronx, but that's Miles for you.

I got there early and he was still working. I sat down and reveled in the air-conditioning of his living room. Outside, it was scorching.

'I'm just tweaking a few things with the graphics,’ he said. He showed me the screen of his Apple. It was covered with letters and numbers and symbols in short rows going down the screen in a long column.

'I don't see any graphics.'

'This is the code.'

'But how do you get the pictures out of those symbols? Spazmonia! moves, it looks like a cartoon. Where are the actual pictures?'

He showed me again and tried to explain, but I stil didn't get how a code could be a picture. Much less a whole actual action game.

'Looks like magic to me,’ I said.

'It isn't,’ sighed Miles with his usual air of faint condescension. 'It's just a collection of rules. Nothing supernatural about it.'

Then he showed me his test game. It was about a spider spinning a web. I looked at it for a few seconds an felt a migraine coming on.

'I can't look at it, Miles. Sorry.'

'It's a shame,’ Miles said. 'I was going to give you a trial copy. I thought you might like some kind of. . . diversion. You know.'

I looked away. 'I would. And I wish I could escape into a game. But I don't know how to use a computer, anyway.'

He rubbed his nose and pushed his glasses back.

'I could lend you my old Apple IIe. I'll bring it over and set it up. I'll give you some text games.  Those shouldn't  trigger your problem and they shouldn't bother your eyes, either. You ever hear of Quark?'

I shook my head.

'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?'

'Heard of the book.'

'They're both pretty cool games. Quark is kinda like D&D on   another planet, but with a humor element. Hitchhiker's Guide is really funny. They don't have any pictures. Playing is like interacting with a story.'

'I don't know. I'll think about it.'

D&D on another planet sounded a little too close to what I was already doing at Dataplex. Not exactly recreation.

The funeral service didn't take very long. Mom had wanted to be cremated and her ashes laid to earth in Bear Mountain State Park, where my dad had proposed to her. I felt sorry for my dad. He had taken off work to come up from N.C. He was even more biceps and shoulders than I remembered. He was wearing a gold chain.

'Hi, Mr. T' I said when I saw him.

My father is not the world's most emotionally articulate person, and I think it was hard on him to watch me put my mom's ashes under some ferns near the summit of the mountain where he'd given her a ring with a speck of diamond in it some twenty-seven years ago. I don't know if he had any romantic memories about this place, or if he thought my mother had specified it just to get his goat. The latter I doubted. She wasn't spiteful like that, and besides she had always maintained that he would predecease her, gunned down in the line of duty – even after he left the force to start his own security business. He'd laughed at her predictions.

Another wedge in the relationship, I guess. How he and Mom ever got it together long enough to have me and Darren is the biggest mystery. Talk about hard-headed. My dad has about as much imagination as a railroad car full of cinder blocks. He's good with people, though, in his own way. He's got a kind of instinct about people where he can guess what they're up to not by what they say, but just by looking at them from a distance. It must be that he's got an eye for detail. When Miles got me reading Arthur Conan Doyle, I kept being reminded of my dad because he is socially bizarre in the same way as Holmes is. Once he spotted a pickpocket at a hot-dog stand in Central Park and made a citizen's arrest. At the time he was chaperoning us on our junior high field trip to the Natural History Museum and for the rest of the day I was cool and everybody wanted to hang out with me, because of my dad. Afterwards, he tried to rationalize it like Holmes. ('Oh, I was watching him. It was obvious he was up to something because his breath smelled of falafel.' Like, huh?) But you know it's really all about my dad having a nose, even if he doesn't want to admit it.

We don't talk very often. He doesn't like it that I don't listen to him. He told me to go to college and I dropped out. He told me to go on a diet and get a boyfriend and I went to work at Dataplex and got fatter. He told me not to buy a Rabbit because they're death traps. He thinks he knows everything and I guess he's worldly-wise about some things. He's very successful in his security business.

My parents had an ongoing dispute about how much reality I should be exposed to, as if life were radiation. My dad wanted to toughen me up, put me on my guard. My mom wanted to protect me from nightmares and cosmic negativity. She kicked him out of the house when I was twelve because he left crime-scene photos from a homicide on the kitchen table. 'You ain't doing that kid no favors,' he yelled at her through the double-bolted door. 'I didn't think, I'm sorry, I was careless, but I could talk to her about it, explain . . .'

'Nothing is an accident, Thalo,’ she sobbed at the inside of the door. 'On some level in your mind you did it on purpose and you'll do it again and she's too fragile, I'm telling you because I know.'

'Let me in and we'll talk about it.'

She didn't let him in. They divorced. I started reading Stephen King, just to spite my mother. I covered up Carrie with the dust jacket of a fairy-tale anthology (which was actually scarier). Was I fragile? I didn't know if I wanted to be fragile or not.

My mother swore blind they didn't split up because of me, and I guess I believed her. They were totally incompatible and hardly a day went by where they didn't argue about pretty much everything from politics to laundry duty to what to call the cat.

'If anything, we stayed together as long as we did because of you and your brother,' she told me once when we were making Toll House Cookies and eating all the batter before we baked it. After the break-up, we'd both gotten into food at a semi-professional level.

Well, whatever he might have been feeling deep inside on Bear Mountain, my father looked like he wanted to get a beer and go to a ball game. It was a gorgeous summer day, and the park was full of picnickers and cyclists and kids on summer vacation. All my mother's weird friends were there, burning incense and chanting over their crystals. I liked them. Their presence made me feel like she was still around somehow, and I began to wish this wasn't going to be the last time I ever saw most of them.

I didn't want it to end. As long as we were all here, talking about her, remembering her, it didn't seem so bad.

Everybody went back to her apartment afterward. The furniture was still there, but I'd taken out most of her effects and so the appearance of the party was more like a house-warming. There were cardboard boxes lying around, and I'd taken the contents of the liquor cabinet and piled them in and around the kitchen sink, which was full of ice. I stuck to sparkling water. It had been fun drinking with Miles the other night, but I couldn't take any more throwing up. I was afraid my teeth would rot from all the acid.

The Psychic Friends were in full cry. They smoked weed. After a while, they got the munchies, and then they got gossipy. Several of them left to bring back pizza. Agnes and Lorna, an astrologer and a Kirlian Energy Therapist, respectively, hung out in the kitchen talking about my mother. I was waiting to use the bathroom and I could overhear them, whether I wanted to or not.

'—Scheduled to give a workshop on the African Celestial Tarot after the annual Psychic Pancake Breakfast in White Plains. She drew a huge crowd last year. Maybe we should have a special service this year.'

'It depends on what Ayeisha's spirit wants. We should meditate on it. Does the daughter . . .?'

I didn't look over. I sipped my sparkling water and pretended to be interested in the bathroom door. The voices grew hushed, as if they were afraid I'd overhear.

'. . . Darker forces . . .' I heard. Then: '. . . She told . . . after the police . . . Woodcliff Lake.'

Yep. They were talking about me. I walked over there, feeling threatened for some reason I couldn't pinpoint.

'Cookie!' cried Agnes. 'We were just talking about you. Honey, is there anything I can do for you?'

I shook my head.

'You know, I'm just so glad that at least your mother signed that deal last week. Her African Celestial Deck will be her legacy to the tarot community, and a nice little nest egg for you.'

I blinked. 'She sold her deck?'

Agnes nodded triumphantly. 'To Renaissance Hower for exclusive distribution. She was going to surprise you. She made a real nice chunk of change.'

My lip quivered. Mom could have quit her job at Macy's. She might never have been on that bus. Why didn't she tell me?

'The money was for you, anyway,' Agnes said. 'She wouldn't have spent it on herself.'

'Maybe one new dress,' said Lorna.

'Oh, yeah, well, you gotta live.'

Lorna added, 'It's a funny old universe. Just when you think you're getting somewhere, the Powers That Be come along and change your direction.'

'Maybe they needed her elsewhere.'

'Excuse me,’ I said. I wanted to get away, but people seemed to be making it their mission to talk to me. Brenda kept giving me puppy-eyes and offering to wash dishes, which I let her do because the smell of food made me feel sick. Someone I'd never met wanted to know if there was more guacamole, and two kids were throwing pot holders out the window. I started to wish I could vanish, cut the nex, wake up somewhere else . . .

I spotted my father popping Maalox in the corner and looking at my mother's friends like he was thinking about busting them for possession. The air had gotten a little rich after the pastor left. I waded over to him.

'How's the Rabbit?' he grunted.

'Thinking about getting a Honda next year.'

He nodded. 'Good car. Nice suspension. You need any money?'

I shook my head. Didn't I just say I was getting a Honda?

'Job pays good,’ I added.

'That's OK, then. You. . . uh . . .' He cleared his throat a couple of times. 'You ever want to come down, you know, stay with me. We could go out to the Barriers for a few days, rent a beach house.'

I nodded. 'Maybe in the fall.'

He shifted his weight from foot to foot. Something was coming. Dread crept through me. I hoped he wasn't going to get all emotional and start talking about making up for lost time or how beautiful my mother was when they first met, or how much he regretted—

'So what's with the forearms, Cook?'

'Huh?'

He pointed with his beer can. 'You got muscles.'

Trust him to notice.

'Oh,’ I said shyly. 'I lift weights now.'

'Yeah?'

'Uh-huh. I do karate, too.'

'Karate's for wusses. But I guess it's OK for a girl. You any good?'

'I will be.'

He smiled and rocked back on his heels.

'This reefer smoke's making me sick,' he said. 'Think the Yankees got a shot at the pennant this year?'

I snorted. 'Like my hiney they do,' I said.

My dad left at midnight, just after Gunther and Brenda. Agnes and Lorna seemed determined to stay to the bitter end, but I shook them off by attaching myself to the Ever-Elusive One, who had cornered a pained-looking Gloria.

'My mission is simple,’ said Miles. 'To deliver computer gaming from the mindless button-pressing of the arcade to the inner realm of the arcane.' He gestured theatrically. 'To bring the inner world to your home computer.'

'I don't have a home computer,’ said Gloria in her depths-of-Bayone twang

'To your Atari, then.'

She seemed to weigh this up. 'The kids have Atari. That Haunted House gives Tony nightmares. Cookie, do you have it?' I shook my head. 'Atari makes me hallucinate seagulls.' Miles gave me an annoyed look.

'Well, most people do. And you probably will have a home computer by the year 2000.'

'Miles knows about these things,’ I told Gloria.

Gloria shuddered. 'The year 2000? I'll be 48! Please! Don't wish my life away!'

'I do know about these things,’ said Miles, ignoring her. 'You see, I may appear to be just a regular guy in a Mad magazine T-shirt and Wrangler jeans, but I have another identity. In my own world, I'm a hero.'

'Aren't we all,’ deadpanned Gloria.

'Miles,’ I said out of the side of my mouth. 'Isn't the Pimpernel supposed to keep his identity secret?'

'Sink me,’ said Miles. He bowed to me. 'My lady you are correct. Guacamole, anyone?'