Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Rita

Rita I had a girlfriend named Rita in graduate school-we met the summer after my first year there when I was twenty-three, and I think what attracted us were our mutual quirky sensibilities. During the first weeks ofour infatuation, we would write strange little cards to each other full of malapropisms and leave them anonymously in our respective mailboxes. She worked at a convalescent center that summer making salad for the residents, and somehow we came to call this job "Salad Control." "Are you going to Salad Control tonight?" Like me, she had grown up spoiled and had a lilting, kind ofdecadent laugh, a little like Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Rita had been adopted at the age offour and was doted on by her mother, tolerated, I think, by her stern father. "No, Robinito. Tonight, Salad Control must scrape by without me," and she laughed. "Tonight I am going to take a bath and luxuriate." She had been married already, for about ten days, and I'm sure I saw her as worldly. And she was an older woman, twenty-five at the time. This was my worldly phase, when I was trying on worldliness to see how it fit. After grad school we moved to Chicago. How much happiness we found those next few months in the city, I can't recall. I remember some ofthose moments, a street festival, going to movies, out to eat. But, everything, even our entertainments from that time, seem out of kilter, as though everything we did together was slightly insane: We had a barbecue one night on the tiny porch ofRita's apartment, and the smoke from it flooded into the hallway-an angry neighbor, invisible , but enraged apparently, stole the grill and our food from the porch when we went inside to fetch some water to douse the flames. A man in tattered clothes came to the window ofa restaurant where we ate one night and pressed his face to the glass and made grotesque chewing motions. The movies we saw: Woody Allen's Zelig, about a man without a personality, and Frances) the film with Jessica Lange about Frances Farmer, the actress with too much personality, driven 3I5 316 Nola mad, and then lobotomized. One day, we went to a Cubs game, and the Cubs weren't doing well. "You'd think in a city as large as Chicago they could find better players," Rita said. That made me laugh, that kind ofloopy comment. Rita had a friend named Stephanie, her only other friend in Chicago besides me for a while. Stephanie was a recent transplant, too, although she had grown up on the city's South Side. Rita and I met Stephanie on the same day-I remember her sitting on my apartment floor. She didn't say much, but she seemed gentle and smart, and she and Rita became friends, although Stephanie seemed to need Rita more than the other way around. Rita borrowed twenty-five dollars from Stephanie once, saw her once every couple ofweeks, sometimes avoided her. Stephanie called one day at work and asked ifshe could meet with Rita, but Rita was bored by her and made some excuse. The next day, Rita called me at work-she had stayed home. "Robin," she said in a stricken voice. "Stephanie killed herselfthis morning." I left work and went to Rita's apartment to be with her-she blamed herself for not meeting up with Stephanie. I tried to console her-a few days later, after the funeral, Stephanie's mother told Rita that she had been mentioned in Stephanie's suicide note, that she had asked her mother to collect the twenty-five dollars Rita owed her. The mother wasn't asking for the money, only wanted to call Rita because she thought Rita might be able to give her some clue to her daughter's unhappiness. Rita couldn't give her a clue, and that night wrote her a rambling apologetic letter with a check for her debt. After that, her behavior started to change-Rita was overcome with guilt, and nothing anyone said could help her through it. She told me one day that she thought Stephanie's mother blamed her for Stephanie's death, that Stephanie's mother was trying to have her killed. Although Rita had said some strange things before, she'd never said anything quite so bizarre, and I was silent a minute before I spoke. "You know...