What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer by Ames Jonathan

Author:Ames, Jonathan [Ames, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

My Great-Aunt Pearl

IT WAS AROUND NOON and my fiber supplement, ingested at nine, was doing its job and I was sitting on the toilet. Next to my toilet is a mirror. I looked in the mirror and I noticed how tight the skin was on my forehead. I could really see the outline of my cranium and then I imagined my skull without its skin. I saw some Hamlet-like person picking it up out of a grave. Oh, God, I’m going to die someday, I thought. My body, my life will have no significance. I’ll be an empty skull.

It was all too depressing, and I flushed and got the hell off that toilet before it sucked me down to my grave. It’s so rare for me to actually be pierced by my mortality. I’m too busy being nervous and afraid about being alive to worry about dying.

I sat at my kitchen table, and to keep my life force going, I ate a banana; in these lean financial times I survive on bananas, oatmeal, peanut butter, carrots, and apples. I never thought of it before, but I practically have the diet of a horse. Halfway through the banana the phone rang. It was a woman and she asked, “Are you Jonathan Ames, Pearl’s nephew?”

“Yes,” I said, concerned. She was talking about my eighty-four-year-old great-aunt who lives in Queens.

“I’m with Meals-on-Wheels and Pearl didn’t come to the door today and she didn’t call to cancel. And she isn’t answering her phone. I’ve tried reaching her for an hour. You’re on our list to call in case of an emergency.”

This was terrible. My great-aunt always cancels her meals-on-wheels if she’s going to be out. “Should I call the police?” I asked.

“Don’t panic. . . . I’m just supposed to call you. Maybe try calling her for a little while. Let me know what you find out.”

I’m the relative who lives closest to my great-aunt, so I keep an eye on her. She never had any children of her own and she saw my mother as her daughter, and me and my sister as her grandchildren. She is very dear to me.

So first I called my great-aunt, but there was no answer, and she doesn’t have an answering machine. Then I called her neighbor Phyllis, but she wasn’t in. Then I called my great-aunt’s doctor— perhaps she had an appointment. The receptionist said she did have an appointment but that she had canceled that morning. This frightened me. For my great-aunt to cancel a doctor’s appointment would mean that she was actually sick and couldn’t get out of her apartment, because she lives for her doctor’s appointments—it’s her social life, her amusement. It’s where she gets attention, attention from men. She’s especially in love with her primary caregiver, Doctor Schwartz. And it was her appointment with Schwartz that she had canceled. I envisioned her passed out on her floor. Of late she had been complaining of pain on the left side of her head. I tried calling her again, but no answer.

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