LITMIR.BIZ

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and the rooms smell of garbage and dust and Shalimar. I step over my largest suitcase and fumble for the light switch.

      “Holy shit,” Seth says.

      I am speechless. Everything—the furniture, the walls, the art, everything—is white. The last time I stepped foot in this flat eight years ago, it was still kitted out like some retro Asian bordello, with red and velvet and rich dark wood. Now it’s streamlined, sleek, spare and calm—so unlike my mother.

      I head immediately for what was once my bedroom expecting to find a workout room with all-white equipment or a weird meditation room or a library where all of the books have white spines and blank pages.

      “Holy shit,” Seth says. His vocabulary is limited by booze, though his words do accurately sum things up. Everything in the room—all of it—is exactly how I remember: my bed, my desk, my books, the three-hundred-dollar-a-roll Italian wallpaper with the black bats. I open the closet and it’s full of my clothes circa nineteen-ninety-something, when I was twenty and walked out with nothing. I’ve only been here once since—maybe for an hour or two—after my mother lured me here under some false pretense I can’t remember. That was eight years ago. I left for good after that. I never imagined I’d be back.

      Even through the numbing layers of martinis I feel a twinge of—something—as I look around. It stabs me again when I pick up a framed photograph off the bureau: me, Seth, Janet, that guy I was dating at the time who turned out to be a total prick snob. I think his name was Davis. I squint my left eye and Davis’s face blurs. That’s better. It’s one of the only photographs of myself that I like.

      Seth dives onto my king-size bed. “Ow!”

      “What?” I place the picture back on the bureau and turn to Seth, who sits up and pulls a book out from under him.

      “Ooh, the Secret Diaries of Mason McDonald,” he says as he flips through the pages.

      I recognize the book’s cover immediately—it’s a journal collaged with Bryan Ferry pictures I snipped from a stash of old British music magazines I found at a rummage sale. I would have been fifteen or sixteen. “Give me that!” I lunge at Seth, but he darts and I fall face-first into my goose down comforter. It’s red and Egyptian cotton and hand silk-screened with black-and-grey geometric shapes.

      “My mother (aka Satan) is acting like more of an evil bitch than usual. She had a dinner party tonight and of course everyone got drunk on wine and one of her retarded friends (the one who wears too much perfume and has bad breath) starts talking about her twelve-year-old daughter and puberty and blah, blah, and it’s totally disgusting and I swear I just about puked. But then my mother starts going, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. I remember when Mason started to develop, blah, blah.’ And she’s being awful and telling these stories and all of her retarded friends are laughing like, ‘heh, heh, heh,’ and the guys (who are completely gross) are looking at me in this dirty way, so I tell her to shut up and fuck off (seriously), and she just laughs and says something about ‘teenagers’ so I go to my room and smoke a joint with Seth (at least he was here). I even left the door open and didn’t smoke out the window. I don’t care if she knows. She’s such a bitch.

      “Wow—that’s fucking awesome, Mason. You should publish this—it’s hilarious!” Seth leans over and kisses my cheek. “And thanks for the shout-out.” Seth lays the journal in his lap and I grab it. “Aw, come on, Mason—it’s funny. Let’s read some more!”

      “Fuck off.”

      “Pleeeease …”

      “No.” I’m so pissed off I’m shaking. Not so much at Seth, but at my mother. She’s been—what?—sitting on my bed and reading my teenage journals. I decide that this is an all-new low and pull Seth up off the bed and charge out of my room, dragging him behind me.

      “Where are we goooing? Your bed is commmfy.” Seth can be such a whiny drunk.

      “I think we should read her journals,” I say as we traipse through the living room and march into her den.

      I’m not sure my mother ever kept a journal, but if she did and it’s here, I’m determined to find it—or at least something personal and embarrassing that she wouldn’t want me to see. It’s not like she knew she was going to die and had time to destroy or hide anything, which is what I vow to do first thing tomorrow. I’ll burn my journals and any other incriminating evidence of embarrassing youth.

      “What do they looook like?” Seth really needs to stop using the whiny voice.

      “I don’t know.”

      “This is boring.”

      “Go find some wine and bring it back here,” I say.

      Seth claps his hands, suddenly chipper, and heads for the door.

      I’m sitting on the floor and my back hurts, a sure sign that I’m getting old and decrepit. There are papers all over the floor: stacks of yellow legal pads filled with nearly illegible column notes, receipts for lunches and charity donations, pre-release galley copies of self-help books she’d get at the paper, but no diaries.

      An unexpected blast of music jolts me out of my head. I look up and see a white speaker discreetly embedded in the white wall, Whitney Houston or Celine Dion blasting out of it. “Seth!” I crawl to the doorway and shout down the hall. “What the fuck!” The music cuts out and I lay back on the floor, but quickly sit up—not so much because the room starts spinning, but because whenever I am flat on my back it’s yet another reminder of my age as I feel my squishy breasts sink into my armpits.

      The music starts up again, but this time there’s no top-40 power ballads. Seth has obviously been rooting through my mother’s extensive collection of kitschy midcentury lounge music and I can tell from the full sound and occasional static blips that it’s the original vinyl. I don’t want to smile, but I do. My mother’s records—the Xavier Cugats and the Esquivels, not the Celine Dions and Whitney Houstons—are pretty much the only things of hers I could ever possibly want.

      Seth appears in the doorway with a glass in each hand, a box of crackers under his chin and a bottle under each arm. “Red or white?” he asks.

      I stand up and grab the box of crackers. I should have white. It’s lighter and the hangover isn’t as bad. But I’ve had all of those martinis, which means I probably shouldn’t have anything but water. I take a bite of salty goodness. Fuck it. “Red,” I say.

      Seth pours us each a glass and we toast. I almost say, “To my mother,” because that’s what a good daughter would do, but Seth beats me to it.

      “To Britt,” he says, so I don’t have to.

      “It could have been worse,” Seth says. He’s moved out of his drunk-whiny stage into his drunk-wise-man stage. I don’t know which is more annoying.

      “What?” I ask, and I drink two gulps of wine.

      “Your mom,” he says. “I know you think she was this raging bitch, but seriously, Mason, it could have been way worse. It’s not like she hit you or let her boyfriends fuck you.”

      “Jesus, Seth!”

      “See? She doesn’t seem so bad when you think about it that way.”

      I can’t believe Seth is defending her. No, actually, I can. He liked her. Janet liked her; she kept it to herself, but I could always tell. Men loved her. People—some of them, anyway—must have liked her because they read her column and wrote her letters saying so. She’d show them to me, and later, after I moved to Canada, she’d send copies in the post or scan them and e-mail them to me.

      I never did understand those people who wrote the letters: were they losers with no lives of their own? Did they think she was amusing or insightful? Who would want to read every little thing about someone else’s life unless they were someone famous or smart or interesting? Did they wonder about the effect those columns had on the people in them? Did they ever stop to think about me?

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