Good Riddance

by Elinor Lipman

  23

  Hit Play Again

  “Imposter?” Jeremy asked. “Is that what you’re thinking?” We were back in his apartment, in bed, listening to The Yearbook—an inevitability after my obsessing over dinner about episode three.

  “I knew all my mother’s faculty buddies,” I said for the second or third or hundredth time. “They came to dinner. They slept at our house after a bad breakup. I babysat their kids.”

  “And you don’t think it’s possible that your mother had a close friend on the down low? Before you were in high school or after you graduated?”

  I was forced to admit that, yes, okay, my mother surely had lots of secrets and, yes, this woman might have been a confidante.

  After listening hard, diagnostically, eyes narrowed, he asked, “The woman’s voice . . . is that a New Hampshire accent?”

  “No, but she could’ve come from somewhere else.”

  “She sounds . . . modulated.”

  “I noticed that, too. But toward the end, you’ll hear her say that she taught public speaking and drama.”

  With that, he went from looking merely thoughtful to forensic.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “I’m remembering something she asked me.”

  “Geneva?”

  “It’s probably nothing . . .”

  “Out with it,” I said.

  “Okay. We passed in the hall . . . maybe a month ago? Then she called, ‘You’re an actor, right?’”

  I waited.

  “Her follow-up question was did I have any actor friends who might want a gig—not for scale. Off the books. I said no—”

  “Did you ask for what?”

  “I must’ve, because she said it was for those wedding videos she makes, her sideline—sometimes she needs voice-overs.”

  “And that sounded right?”

  “I was in a hurry. I just said no, sorry. Everyone I know is either Screen Actors Guild or Equity. In other words, ‘I’m not going to help you stiff my friends.’”

  “A voice-over in a wedding video? Whoever heard of that?” I reached for my phone. “I’m calling her!”

  “Hold on. You think she’ll tell you the truth? Or even answer her phone?”

  “So I do nothing and let her get away with it?”

  “She won’t. Besides, is anyone even listening?”

  “I’ll tell you who’s listening! Every single person in Pickering, New Hampshire, who knows what a podcast is! This is a really juicy scandal by their standards. New Hampshire isn’t big on adultery. They went blue last election because they didn’t like Donald Trump grabbing anyone’s pussy! Are you too young to remember Peyton Place? Because that was set in New Hampshire!”

  “Really? That’s where this took you? To Donald Trump?”

  “And Peyton Place, which is not irrelevant! Some idiot is going to call my father, and say, ‘Wow, Tom. I guess Pickering High School is the new Peyton Place.”

  “I think you have to chill over this. It’s one person, an actress saying, ‘All the boys had crushes on June Maritch.’ Hardly what you’d call a scandal.”

  “One person? This could be the rest of the podcast—all fiction, all actors playing BFFs.”

  “Wait. Just because she asked if I knew any cheap actors doesn’t mean it was for the podcast.”

  “Yes, it does! Boom! It explains why I didn’t know this dame and why Geneva wouldn’t give me her name or her email.”

  “How many episodes have you listened to?”

  “All three.”

  Jeremy touched the screen of his iPad, which took him to The Yearbook feed. “No, there’s a new one. It was posted yesterday.”

  “Play it,” I said.

  He tilted the screen away from me, gave something a quick read, then said, “I’d skip this one.”

  “Is the imposter back? Or worse?”

  “What would be worse?”

  I hadn’t actually given this any thought, but it was easy enough to answer. “Some actress pretending to be my sister. Or—wait, no—Armstrong!”

  Was Jeremy looking even unhappier? “Why did I tell you?” he groaned.

  It was easy enough, with a quick grab, to see what he was looking at. Episode four was titled “The Men in Her Life.” I said, “Tell me it’s not my father.”

  He said, “It’s not your father.”

  I waited until I was in my own bed, which Jeremy recommended so he wouldn’t have to witness my meltdown. After having taken a homeopathic tranquilizer, I opened my podcast app. First there was music, the same song that opened every episode so far, Elvis crooning, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—surely its rights not paid for. Next there was Geneva saying that The Yearbook was brought to you by Gal Friday Films, memorializing “your weddings and commitment ceremonies so sensitively that you’ll cry every time you watch them.”

  Then a male voice, seemingly borrowed from the introduction of every audiobook I’d ever listened to, intoned, “Actor Robert Jaffe will be speaking the lines of the graduate we’re calling John Doe.”

  I waited before panicking, since half the graduating class were males. It could be the funeral director or class president Duddy McKean or the guy at our table who served on the food committee.

  But then there was the introduction. Geneva claimed that the following conversation was a reenactment of an interview with a prominent member of Pickering High School’s Class of 1968. The actor was reading from a transcript, we were told. Geneva would play herself, asking the questions.

  Could I bear it? I decided to listen first, get worked up second if warranted.

  “Yes, I graduated in 1968 from Pickering High School. Yes, I knew Mrs. Maritch, who was Miss Winter when she was our yearbook advisor.” Geneva interjects, speaking to an alleged audience, “You’ll note I started with baseline yes-or-no questions, like the warm-ups in a lie detector test.”

  But then this one: “Several sources have confirmed that you and Miss Winter had a personal relationship. Could you comment on that?”

  Well, of course, the publicly respectable member of the New Hampshire bar I knew would never answer that question, would never have agreed to sit down with Geneva. But this faker said, “When you work on a yearbook, especially as the deadline approaches, you’re there all hours. And sometimes, when the custodial staff knocks on the door, and says, ‘You have to wrap it up. I’m locking up the school,’ then you move to someone’s house.”

  “Whose house?”

  The actor read aloud what must have been a bracketed stage direction. “Long pause.” Then reluctantly, “Miss Winter’s. Her apartment.”

  Apartment! What apartment? More evidence of this as a put-up job.

  Next, Geneva asked if anything physical had taken place between student and teacher on that visit.

  “That visit? No.”

  “But that wasn’t the last time you and Miss Winter met privately at her apartment, was it?”

  “Inaudible,” read the actor.

  “Mr. Doe? It wasn’t the last time was it?” Geneva the prosecutor repeated.

  The actor emitted a guilty no.

  “How old was Miss Winter at this time?”

  “Young.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “I was. I still am.”

  Okay. This was now officially and blatantly false. Still in love with her?

  “You didn’t even go to her funeral,” I yelled at my phone, then reminded myself that this was not—nor had it ever been—the actual Peter Armstrong.

  “How long did the physical relationship last?”

  “Just till graduation. I went off to college and she got married.”

  “Today, you realize, even in New Hampshire . . . this would not only have gotten Miss Winter fired but also prosecuted and no doubt jailed?”

  Insult to injury: even in New Hampshire? That backwater where we chew tobacco and intermarry?

  “I was eighteen,” he said. “Maybe she’d be fired, but she wou
ldn’t have gone to jail.”

  Okay, this was complete garbage. But what nerve! What unmitigated gall to make up a story about a real, named person even if not named. Peter Armstrong would never have admitted to an affair, nor would he have agreed to talk to the obnoxious woman he was barely civil to at the reunion.

  I texted Jeremy. I’M GOING TO KILL HER.

  My phone rang. “No, you’re not. You’re going to let nature take its course.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someone such as myself will give her a no-star rating and write under comments, ‘This is total bullshit.’”

  “I’m trying to think of the best way to tell John Doe Armstrong that Geneva the sociopath has made up a story about him and my mother having sex in the yearbook office.”

  “Made up? Isn’t it the truth that he and your mother—”

  “Later! He was already a lawyer, remember? It was thirty-one years and nine months ago! The school crush never got acted on. I mean, in its own way, it’s almost honorable. Well, no, it’s horrible because my mother was married to my father when it happened.”

  He asked if I wanted to come over. Though I had never turned down that invitation, I did tonight. I said I’d be railing nonstop. “I mean, who was next? My father?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer, which was entirely uncharacteristic. I found out soon enough that it was delicacy that made him go silent because when I hit play, the fakester after John Doe was indeed Tom Maritch, cuckolded husband, referred to on this sickening project not by name but by “Husband.”

  I called Jeremy back. “My father! You should’ve warned me! How can I sleep now? I want her to end up in jail for . . . human trafficking! Wouldn’t that fit in some bizarre way?”

  “You need to be a little zen about this,” he said.

  How? And, for God’s sake, why? Even my scalp and hair follicles felt overheated. Could blood actually boil? Is wanting to bankrupt, sue, and murder Geneva zenlike enough?

  24

  It’s Nothing

  I was never someone to let things go, and I wasn’t going to start now. Besides being furious and impatient, I was worried that word would have gotten around Pickering. What if some bigmouth wrote to my father with misguided congratulations about how his late wife’s yearbook had made the big time?

  I gnashed my teeth for a few days as I watched the little ones at their tasks—polishing silver, pouring water from vessel to vessel, folding mats, raking sand, cutting, serving. Which path to take? Didn’t I value what I tried to teach daily, to have my students think critically, work collaboratively, and act boldly?

  I emailed Cousin Julian after he hadn’t taken an earlier phone call. Could he send a letter asking Geneva Wisenkorn, producer and director of a podcast lame-named The Yearbook, which was filled with falsehoods, to cease, desist, and retract?

  Attorney Cousin Julian wrote back somewhat formally, reminding me that he was a tax lawyer and didn’t practice the various kinds of law that my branch of the family often needed. It wasn’t very cousinly; between the lines, I thought I was reading Note that the pro bono work I do is for the indigent and underserved who need help with tax preparation.

  Had Geneva picked up some vitriolic vibe emanating through my front door, inspiring her to knock one evening? No, it was not sensitivity or emotional intelligence that made her come calling. Her visit was inspired by a casual, fair answer by Jeremy when she’d asked him in the elevator one morning if he’d seen me lately—off-base again as to what Jeremy and I constituted—and if I still lived in the building.

  “I said of course you were still living here and that you’d gotten that teaching job.”

  “Did she ask anything about how I liked the podcast—as in ‘Is Daphne consulting a lawyer?’”

  “Nope. I wasn’t going there.” He then asked if I’d listened to the entire alleged-dad interview.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  That caused a new shrinkage to the heart and stomach. I asked why; what was left?

  “Because it’s so ridiculous that it’s nothing. I mean it’s terrible writing. Oh, and you’ll love this—I’m positive that the guy who played John Doe also played your dad.”

  Did that count? Hadn’t she announced at the beginning that an actor would be portraying the men?

  I had to ask, despite my revulsion, “What did she have the fake husband say?”

  “Here’s the part you’ll love—the deal breaker: He talks about his three daughters.”

  “Three?” I repeated. “You’re sure?”

  “Three daughters,” said Jeremy. “It’s over. Good-bye, crappy podcast. Farewell, Gal Friday Films and heartbreaking wedding videos.”

  “How do you know that? When I tell her there’s no Samantha, no such third sister, she’ll say ‘So what? It’s art. It’s the way Hollywood takes a real life and does whatever it wants with it! They make it up! And win Academy Awards!’ She’ll be proud of it. She’s impossible to humiliate.”

  I called my sister—finally the time difference was on my side. Holly hadn’t known about the podcast but promised to get off the phone and find all four episodes. I said, “This has become my personal nightmare, so if you’re going to yell at me, please don’t.”

  I waited in bed. I tried to read. On my new TV, I watched an episode of Law & Order I’d seen at least once before. When the phone rang, I’d dozed off. It was Holly, the logical, dry-eyed younger sister who’d done one year of law school before switching to motherhood. “I’m on it,” she said.

  “You’re on the podcast? Where? I didn’t hear—”

  “No, I meant I’m going to fix this.”

  “How?”

  “I’m suing on behalf of the family. Doug and I will take that on. He listened to the podcast with me. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this before!”

  Too much Law & Order maybe, because what I was hearing, her “We’ll take care of it,” had a hit-man flavor to it. I said that sounded ominous.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I meant we’d hire and pay for a lawyer. And we know someone who won a libel case against the National Enquirer.”

  “Is this thing libel? Because she’ll call it an adaptation. A work of fiction. Poetic license.”

  “He’ll send a letter, that’s it, and believe me, she’ll recognize his name. It’ll threaten that we’re going to sue her for a couple of million if she doesn’t cease and desist. Doug?” she called. “You have the lawyer’s cell, right?”

  Doug apparently said yes, he’d call him early tomorrow.

  “But the damage is done. It’s been up for weeks. No lawyer can turn back the clock. Plus, it’ll only generate publicity for the podcast.”

  “But someone in this family has to show some muscle.”

  I pointed out that I’d been showing plenty of muscle. “I never cooperated with her. I never told her one word about Mom or Dad or the class of 1968—”

  “You may not have told her things about Mom and Dad, but you effectively put the stupid yearbook in her hands. And I know from her blog—”

  “Blog?” I coughed out.

  “You didn’t know she had a companion blog to the podcast? She announces it at the end of every episode.”

  I could’ve hung up and found the blog myself, but I didn’t have the stomach to read one word of it. “Does it mention me?”

  “She said you took her to a reunion and you introduced her all around to members of the class, which was her way in.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “You didn’t take her to Pickering?” Holly asked. “Did she make that all up? Because there were several selfies of her with mom’s ex-students. Maybe she photoshopped them.”

  “I did go. She dragged me.” I couldn’t confess that at that point, in the earliest planning stages, after she’d thrown around the executive producer title but before I’d come face-to-face with Peter Armstrong, I might’ve considered myself to have been . . . on board.


  Holly asked, “You don’t think there’s a chance that Dad really did have a third daughter with someone else? Is it possible that Geneva hired a private detective and found someone for real?”

  I began uttering no, no, no as soon as I heard “third daughter.” At least that much I could take credit for, the big fib about Samantha the imaginary sister.

  “One more thing,” Holly said. “Dad needs to know. Should I tell him or will you?”

  Just like that: Dad needs to know. I stuttered, “I can’t. You do it. No, let me. No . . . he’s the last person I can discuss this with . . . It might do terrible damage to our relationship. He’ll withdraw. He might never speak to me again.”

  She didn’t jump in to say anything to dispel that fear. It could have been a distraction at her end or the favorite-daughter contest—that she could live with my father’s alienation of affection as long as it was directed toward me.

  “I’m sure that could never happen,” she finally said. “By the way, Doug and I thought the episodes stunk.”

  And then, as easy as you please: “You know who I heard from?”

  “Who?”

  “Remember Sheila McDonough? She babysat us a few times and lived over on Sullivan Terrace? We’re friends on Facebook. She heard the podcast and wanted to say hey.”

  “And you’re telling me this . . . why?”

  “No, just an update. She’s living in Mendocino, and her house is an Airbnb.”

  Okay, now I’d officially lost faith in anything my sister and her husband advised, friends or not with a famously badass lawyer. I thanked her for listening to the episodes and wanting to help. Now I had lots to think about. “Don’t do anything until we talk again, okay?” I said.

  I hung up. I’d sleep on it. Maybe tomorrow I’d figure out how to tell our dad that his dirty laundry was being aired. Or maybe I’d punt. Must I announce to a man who didn’t even own earbuds that an obnoxious podcast was awaiting his subscription?