“Yeah.” Elliot looks around. “Empty.”
“Cool. I’ve got some killer weed. I’ll bring it over and we can get really wasted before dinner.” This is why Rhett can’t finish a semester in one place.
“Cool,” Elliot says.
While he waits for Rhett to show up, Elliot wanders back through the house, opening the two closed doors as he goes. They were probably Mindy’s and Randi’s rooms, but now they too are empty—stripped beds, gaping closets. The refrigerator is acting up again, so he goes back to the kitchen and gives it a kick. Those dead flowers are bugging him. Elliot takes them out of the vase and throws them in the trash compactor. How could Mr. Rickey give his wife an anniversary bouquet while he was fucking Elliot’s mother? Elliot imagines Mrs. Rickey, with her pale blond hair and round reddish cheeks, arranging the flowers in her good crystal vase. He imagines her smiling, humming even, thinking she’s still his babushka, that he still loves her.
The refrigerator won’t shut up this time, no matter how hard Elliot kicks. When he opens the door to give it a good hard slam, he sees the freezer is lined in neat rows with milk cartons that have bottles of vodka stuck in them, frozen into blocks. There are maybe a dozen in there. It takes three trips to the master bedroom to carry them all. Unlike Mrs. Rickey, Elliot doesn’t cut off the milk cartons. He just screws off the caps and pours all the vodka into Gorbachev’s head.
By the time Rhett shows up, Elliot has consumed quite a bit. It’s icy and smooth and tastes like water.
“Whoa,” Rhett says when he sees Elliot drinking from Gorbachev’s head. “That is totally fucking weird.”
“I don’t know,” Elliot says. “I think they were spies or something. This is all Russian vodka.” His hands sweep dramatically, the way they do when he’s well on his way to being good and drunk, pointing out all the empty bottles sticking out of those milk cartons.
“Who is that anyway?” Rhett asks, pointing to the head with the joint he’s brought. “Stalin or somebody?”
“No, no,” Elliot tells him. “See the birthmark.”
Rhett looks at it upside down, twisting his own head. “Whoa,” he says again, and lights up.
The joint and the vodka loosen Elliot’s tongue. He wants to say things out loud, but instead he closes his eyes and imagines Georgia naked. Once, briefly, Elliot saw his own mother naked. He opened the bathroom door and there she was, standing in front of the mirror, her arms stretched up over her head, staring at herself. Her flesh was pink from a hot shower, her stomach bulged slightly, like a pouch. She turned toward him as if she were expecting someone. Elliot closed the door, fast, and ran down the hall to his own room, nauseated. But Georgia naked in his mind takes on the body of the girls his age, the ones he’s seen. And he knows, watching her there, swimming in his spinning brain, that if he touched Georgia, she would be smooth like them, taut.
“What are you doing? Jerking off?” Rhett says, nudging Elliot with his foot. “You’re moaning, man.”
Elliot opens his eyes and watches the ceiling spin. He is one of the few people he knows who like having the spins.
Rhett’s eyes are bloodshot, the lids drooping. “Fucking Thanksgiving,” he mutters.
THEY STUMBLE BACK across the Rickeys’ old yard, toward home. But instead of going in, they go to the dining room window and watch. Mindy and Randi Rickey are seated side by side, dressed in black mini-dresses, looking funereal. Elliot can actually see the steam rising from the bouillabaisse. He’s hungry, but unable to propel himself inside.
“They look like a family,” Elliot says.
“This is when I’m glad I’m adopted,” Rhett whispers. “I feel no familial obligation.”
Elliot’s already dry throat turns drier. “Adopted?” he croaks.
Rhett shrugs and keeps watching. Elliot sees that his usual chair is empty and sad.
“Do you know who your mother is?” Elliot asks, noticing the reflection of his frown over the tureen. Georgia made that tureen for his mother one Christmas. It is lumpy, ugly, misshapen, and his mother hates it.
“Who cares?” Rhett answers. He is watching Elliot’s mother, too.
Between them sits Gorbachev’s head, vodka sloshing around inside it.
“All I know is the adoption was in New York. Private,” Rhett says.
In that moment Elliot is certain that Rhett’s mother is Georgia. He has the same springy black hair, the same “fuck it” attitude. He keeps watching his own mother, raising a glass in a toast. Is she even missing me? Elliot wonders. He feels invisible, erased. There are the Rickeys in his dining room, a new Rickey in his mother’s stomach, and him nowhere, unmissed.
“What if I told you I might know who your real mother is?” Elliot whispers.