Orange Julius Tastes Like Satan’s Ass

by Alyssa Beatty

Sean waits for me under an awning so violently yellow even the pouring rain can’t mute it. It’s representative of the whole vibe of this place: forced bonheur, as if potted geraniums and brightly colored curtains can distract from the main business of the building. I hate it.

I pull the car just past the awning to annoy Sean. By the time he crams his rusted bike into the trunk, and slides into the passenger seat, he’s drenched.

He glares at me. Water drips off the tip of his nose, its small upturn an exact mirror to mine. His normally voluminous blond curls—not an exact mirror to mine because he unfairly got the good hair—have gone limp. I grin back at him.

“You are such a fucking bitch,” he says.

“I love you, too,” I say, and drive away from the hospice where our mother is waiting to die.

“She asked about you,” Sean says. “She always asks about you.”

“I thought you were getting a new bike. That thing’s a deathtrap.”

“I haven’t had time. One more visit wouldn’t kill you, Syd. She’s only got a few weeks left.”

“If you had a better bike, you wouldn’t be afraid to ride it in the rain, and then you wouldn’t drag your sister away from what was shaping up to be a very productive day to pick your sorry ass up.”

“If I had a better sister, I wouldn’t have to lend her my car all the time and need to take the bike,” Sean says. “And I didn’t know we were calling sitting on the couch eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and watching cartoons ‘productive’ now. You’ll regret it if you don’t see her one last time.”

“It’s not like you can’t afford a new bike.”

That trope of twins living parallel lives—marrying people with the same name, getting identical jobs—doesn’t apply to me and Sean. He’s very successful at something involving securities that I don’t fully understand and don’t care to have explained to me; I’m chronically unemployed and just had my car repossessed.

“Would you stop ignoring me and talk about Mom?” Sean asks.

“No.”

“You just missed the turnoff to the highway.”

“We’re getting you a new bike.”

“I don’t feel like shopping right now.”

“Then stay in the car and give me your credit card.”

“As if. You’d max it out on…girl stuff.”

I pinch one of his sopping curls between my fingers. “Olaplex says what? You spend more on hair product than I do on rent.”

“Haircare is selfcare. You suck at both.”

The side of the mall still has the faded outline of Xanadu traced across it in over-stylized cursive. The building was derelict for years when some tech bros tried to capitalize on the roller-skating renaissance and opened a rink in the old Macy’s space. It didn’t take; I think because the rest of the mall was still empty it made the place feel slightly haunted. Although maybe that was just me. Sean and I spent a lot of afternoons at the mall in our teens, drifting aimlessly from food court to arcade, sneaking out to smoke in the weed-filled gravel employee parking lot, putting off going home for as long as possible. Now a different set of tech bros has taken it back to its roots as a mall again.

The parking lot is jam packed. I cruise up and down the aisles looking for a space close enough to keep me from getting drenched between the car and the entrance.

“You brought me to the mall?” Sean asks.

“Why’d you say it like I’m taking you to visit a leper colony?”

“Malls are tacky. That’s why they died out. What happened to Xanadu?”

“It went bankrupt.”

A woman exits the mall with a kid on either side of her, a boy and a girl in matching yellow raincoats, both hugging bags from Build-a-Bear. I slow the car to a crawl so I can follow them back to their parking space.

“Don’t stalk them. You’re freaking them out,” Sean says.

“They’re fine.”

The mother shoots a look over her shoulder and extends her arms protectively to pull the kids closer. They subtly lean into her like plants to the sun, following an instinctual pull to safety. My heart clenches painfully the way it always does lately when I witness this kind of maternal display. I place my palm flat against my sternum and take a deep breath.

“What’s wrong?” Sean says. He’s hyper aware of any sign of chest pain since he came home on summer break from college and found our dad sprawled on the kitchen floor.

“Just heartburn,” I say. I turn my blinker on to claim the family’s space while they load their haul into a Subaru.

“Too many Cheetos,” Sean says.

Inside I poke at the digital map.

“If you tell me when you’re going to visit Mom, I’ll make sure all the wine’s put away first,” Sean says.

I’m six months sober. Sean wheels his liquor trolley into the closet when I come over; it’s meant to be a show of support, but it makes me feel like a teenager that can’t be trusted. He’s right that seeing the wine bottles in her room is an issue for me. But he’s willfully obtuse about the reason why.

I swipe the map to enlarge the upper level. “Look, they have an Ulta, a Sephora and a Blue Mercury. They should make them duke it out. There can only be one.”

“I know it’s triggering to see her drinking again. But honestly, Syd, at this point, what’s the harm?”

“Seriously, Sean? You know what the harm is.”

“You need to get past all that.”

‍ ‍All that being our entire childhood.

“The REI’s upstairs,” I say.

“REI has crappy bikes,” he grumbles, but I’m already weaving my way through the crowd toward the escalator.

I hadn’t spoken to our mother in nearly eight years when she was diagnosed. She called Sean to tell him; he keeps her at a distance but can never quite cut ties. We went to see her in the hospice together. Sean sat by her bed and held her hand and cried. I stood with my back against the door and tried not to look at her bedside table, crowded with bottles of Sutter Home cabernet, her drink of choice. Her mouth was stained red, her hand around the paper cup made clawlike by the cancer that was eating away at her. I counted my breaths and stared at the floor until she slipped into a morphine haze. That night when I got home, I poured all my tequila down the sink and went to my first AA meeting.

They’ve made the mall as nineties as possible—stripes of hideous Lisa Frank pink and electric blue on the walls, NSYNC blaring through speakers hidden in the fake plants—so it feels like a nostalgia theme park. It makes my head spin with a feeling that’s not quite déjà vu; more like past and present are stacked on top of each other, edges blurring. For a moment I feel fifteen again: the pressure in my chest, the frantic need for distraction, sex or booze or drugs, anything to make me feel not like myself anymore.

Sean catches up and kicks the back of my heel to trip me. Whenever we’re together, we revert to being twelve. I pretend to hate it, but I secretly find it comforting. I breathe out and force my shoulders to relax.

“How much does a bike cost anyway?” I ask.

“A good one is about five thousand.”

My steps stutter and make my sneakers squeak on the linoleum. “Five thousand dollars?”

“No, yen. Yes, dollars. Quality costs money, Syd.”

“And yet you ride around on a piece of shit Huffy.”

“It’s not a Huffy.”

We both know the reason Sean won’t let the bike go. Even if I convince him to get a new one, he’ll probably keep riding the piece of crap until it dissolves beneath him like a fairytale wish at midnight.

“You’re a grown ass adult who rides around on a Huffy. I’m going to get you handlebar tassels and a little bell for Christmas,” I say.

“Yeah, well you’re a grown ass adult who can’t keep a job.”

He must be off-balance from visiting our mother to hit that low. I got fired from the State Farm call center last month. I’d let myself hope this job would stick; it survived multiple instances of me stumbling in reeking of tequila and throwing up in the staff bathroom. My life was supposed to get better when I got sober. Everyone at AA talks about having more energy, improved sleep, magical weight loss. I ate my feelings, gained fifteen pounds, and got replaced by AI. At least now I remember what happened the night before. Not that there’s much to forget when I’m too broke to go out.

Sean’s never had a drink in his life. Children of alcoholics go either way—full teetotaler or full disaster. Sometimes I think he got all the good chromosomes in our genetic paddling pool. It’s not just the hair and his ability to walk away from a drink; he’s never been fired, is friends with all his exes, and can bear the weight of our childhood without being broken by it. It’s like we’re the embodiment of some Greek myth about one person split into two, and when we separated, he took all the stability, and I was left with all the damage.

I cover the sting of his remark with a strained smile. “Do you want pink or blue tassels?”

He rolls his eyes at me. “Can you just please go visit Mom one time, so she’ll stop asking me where you are?”

“Why does she even want to see me? What’s the point after all this time?”

“I think she wants to apologize.”

My laugh has razor edges. There was a time when all I wanted was to hear our mother say she was sorry. Wanted it so much it made a gaping hole in my heart that I poured alcohol into, never letting it heal. I finally feel like that wound is beginning to scab over. Hearing those words from her now might rip it wide open again. “Ooh! Orange Julius! I thought they all closed.”

“We have to talk about this sometime, Syd.”

“You’re buying, Mr. Five K Bike.”

He sighs as I cross to the food court, an exasperated puff of air that is the exact sound our father made when he was about to get really angry. I’d hear our dad sigh like that just outside my bedroom door and freeze like a seal hearing a killer whale surface behind it. My bedroom opened into the living room where our mother danced when she got drunk, lights off, music blaring, red wine sloshing out of her glass onto the carpet. That huff was the first note in an orchestra of recrimination they fell into like a needle into the groove of a record, going round and round, never deviating. I’d usually climb out my window, go around the house, and climb back into Sean’s room, where we’d blast his Clash records and pretend not to hear them. But sometimes I couldn’t stand it and would storm out screaming at our dad to leave her alone. Sean and I always chose our mom over our dad when they fought. It made it awkward when they got a divorce two days after our thirteenth birthday, and she gave up custody of us. She told us her new apartment was too small for us, but Sean found the divorce papers where she signed us away like we were a used car. Then she moved across an ocean to get away from us.

When she came back, a decade later, she blamed it all on alcohol. Sean forgave her. I did too, that first time. I even let her stay with me in my tiny apartment. She said she wanted to get a job, settle where Sean and I were, make up for lost time. Two weeks in, I came home to find an empty bottle of Sutter’s Home in the sink and the jar where I kept the tips from my waitressing job gone.

“You don’t even like Orange Julius,” Sean says as we wait for our order. “You said it tastes, and I quote, like Satan’s ass.”

“That was when we were fifteen. My palate has matured.”

“It absolutely has not.” He hands me a waxy paper cup and takes a long sip from his own. “This is awful.”

“Oh my God. It’s so bad.”

“Who thought milk and orange juice was a good combo? It does taste like Satan’s ass.” He grabs my cup and chucks it into the orange metal trash can after his. “Just let her apologize. It’s like her last wish.”

“Why should I care whether she gets her last wish?”

“She’s our mom.”

“Biologically, maybe.”

“You hold grudges like it’s an Olympic sport. Give her a chance.”

“I gave her plenty of chances. And I’m not talking about this anymore.”

“You can’t keep blaming your drinking on her, Syd. Take responsibility for your own shit.”

We both freeze like he’s dropped a grenade at our feet. He never referenced my drinking as a problem until I stopped. Even now, when we broach the subject, it’s couched in his support of me, not in terms of how much and how long I fucked up my life with it. We never talk about why I drank. We never talk about our mother dancing in the dark living room or our father calling her a drunken bitch or me standing between them defending her. We don’t talk about how I cried until I threw up when we went to her apartment for the weekend only for the manager to tell us she’d moved to France; or how we begged him to let us in, sure she’d left a note, or the pity in his eyes when he saw us come out empty handed. Or how afterwards we went to the parking lot behind the mall and Sean got his friend to bring us a bottle of tequila and that was the first drink I ever had.

“Fuck you, Sean.”

I flee to the escalator. My eyes blur with tears and I accidentally shoulder check a guy in a Hawaiian shirt carrying a tray piled with Sbarro. I hear the tray clatter to the floor and the guy cursing and Sean apologizing, but it’s muted by the dull roaring in my ears.

Sean finds me on the top level, sitting on a molded plastic bench inexplicably surrounded by mannequins dressed in Benetton.

“You’re an asshole,” I say.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m all off-kilter from seeing Mom in that place.”

“You were an asshole before she started dying.”

“Well, Syd, maybe listening to her talk exclusively about how much she wants to see you when I’m the one visiting her every week and cleaning out her shitty apartment and arranging her funeral is making me a bit more of an asshole.”

Sean found the rusty old bike he’s been riding around chained to the back steps of her apartment when he went to clean it out. It’s the exact make of the bike she gave him the Christmas before she left. He’s convinced she bought it when she came back to the States as some kind of peace offering and has been carting it around from place to place since, just waiting to give it to him. He thinks it’s a sign that she knows how badly she hurt us, that it’s some kind of penance. I think he probably stole her upstairs neighbor’s bike, but I’ll never say that to him.

“You don’t have to do all that stuff for her, Sean. You don’t even have to visit her.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll feel like shit if she dies alone in a place like that. I’m not asking you to visit her for her. I’m asking you to do it for me.”

I sigh and lean my head against his shoulder. “I don’t know if I can take hearing her say she’s sorry with a cup of wine in her hand. She’s apologizing for fucking us up while still doing the thing that fucked us up.”

“I told you I’d hide all the bottles before.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Of course it does, Syd. But…we’re doing okay. Right? Yeah, we had a crap childhood, but we got through it, and now we’re adults, and we’re both doing okay. So, it doesn’t really matter whether she drinks now or not. She can’t hurt us anymore.”

“Are you using some law of averages to come to that conclusion? You’re doing great, and I’m a disaster, so together we even out to okay?”

“You’re not a disaster. You’re just…recalibrating. You stopped drinking, which is huge. I’m so proud of you for that. I know I don’t say it enough.”

“How many times did Mom stop?”

“She didn’t have what you have,” he says.

“If you say a brother who loves me, I’m going to puke on you. And it’s going to smell like Satan’s ass.”

“I was going to say a bunch of creepy-ass mannequins staring at you.”

“They are seriously so creepy. Did one just blink? I think I saw it blink.”

“Move slowly so we don’t draw their attention.”

On the way to the escalator, I punch his deltoid to give him a dead arm.

“I hate you so much,” he says.

“Can we go get you a new bike now?”

“REI has crappy bikes.”

“Not as crappy as your Huffy.”

“It’s not a fucking Huffy.”

“I’ll get you a basket for Christmas. With little flowers on it.”

Sean waits for me under the awning, which is even more violently yellow in the sun. I pull the car into a parking spot under a mulberry tree to annoy him. He always complains about the roof getting stained by the berries.

“You are such a fucking bitch,” he says when I meet him at the door.

“I love you, too,” I say.