by Shannon Hale
Unfulfilled and too often rejected, Melissa abandoned live theater for film production. Now, here was Becky making friends with a film star—that should be Melissa’s territory. Again, it wasn’t fair. Becky agreed, but she wasn’t going to give up her famous friend to placate Melissa’s jealousy.
Still the tension got exhausting, so Becky tried to work out the resentment from another angle, engaging Melissa in the “why” discussions.
“I don’t understand why he wants to be my friend.”
“Pheromones,” said Melissa.
“No. No! No way. No chance Felix is attracted to me. Not all men are shallow about physical appearance, but I would bet my dishwasher Felix is. He doesn’t even think of me as a woman—more as some kind of large, humanoid insect.”
“What do you guys talk about anyway?” Melissa was sitting on Becky’s counter, sorting through a bowl of popcorn for the half-popped kernels.
“Nothing.” Becky smeared peanut butter on toast for Hyrum. “That’s the thing. It’s not like we’re unloading deep secrets and purging our souls onto each other. We just . . . laugh, I guess.”
“So there you go—you make him laugh.”
“But he could hang out with the likes of Chris Farley and Lily Tomlin if he wanted.”
“Maybe there’s some novelty about a guy like him having a random Utah housewife for a friend.”
“Sure, he’s the reverse of me in L.A. In Utah he’s the anthropologist, taking notes home to Celeste Bodine to make her laugh. ‘Four children she has,’ he’ll say, ‘and no help! She actually cleans her own house and makes her own dinner!’ ”
“ ‘And she dresses like a circus tent,’ ” Melissa said in strained, lower tones, as if imitating Felix’s tenor.
It was true. Becky was in a red and white striped shirt, a choice made even more regrettable by the fact that it was three sizes too large, as her body was still pulled and stretched in so many directions as to make her pre-pregnancy wardrobe look like doll clothes.
“Send in the clowns.” Becky smoothed her hair around her face. “But at least I have a rockin’ hairdo, thanks to my best friend.”
Melissa leaned forward and gave Becky an uncharacteristic hug. A heavily hair-sprayed lock of Melissa’s purple-streaked hair stabbed Becky in the eye, but other than the pain, it was a tender moment.
“Melissa’s okay with it now, I think,” Becky told Felix on the phone a few days later. “But if Celeste doesn’t work out, she says she’d like to buy you a plate of cheese fries and discuss your future together. Or just skip to the making out.”
“Excellent.”
“Yeah, I think it’d be best to avoid Melissa next time you’re in town.”
“Oh, will I be in town?”
“Friends should visit each other. Haven’t you seen Beaches?”
“It’s my all-time favorite film.”
“Really?”
There was such absolute silence Becky imagined Felix didn’t breathe, blink, or swallow.
“That’s what I thought,” Becky said. “Anyway, if we don’t get to see each other, it won’t make sense for me to take care of you someday when you die slowly of a terrible illness. Besides, it’s logical for you to come here. Salt Lake is between London and L.A., and my family of six won’t be making a trip to En gland anytime soon. Even if we had the cash, imagine entertaining an infant and a four-year-old on a transatlantic flight.”
“I lack the imagination, Zeus be praised.” He paused. “I’d pay for your airfares, you know.”
“Please. That is never going to happen, Mr. I’m-So-Wealthy. Don’t run up your platinum card on me—go save some endangered species.”
“It wouldn’t be a—”
“Never.”
“It’s not as though—”
“Not gonna happen.”
“It would be—”
“In your dreams.”
After one phone call that broached the subject of religion, Becky sent Felix a copy of The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Before it had even reached him, Becky received a package from Felix—The Invention of Religion: How the Powerful Few Made Fools Out of the Ignorant Many.
She tried to read it for Felix’s sake, and to prove mightily to him and everyone else that she was open-minded, thank you very much! So what that she belonged to the same church as her parents had before her—it wasn’t blind following or laziness; she’d made a choice! Every night she tackled a chapter, even going so far as to make notes in the margins. But she found the book so boring and irrelevant to her life that she soon relegated it to some lower shelf. She gathered that her gift to him had embraced a similar fate. They didn’t bother about spiritually enlightening the other again, except for the occasional jabs.
“Hello, this is your liver speaking,” Becky said when he answered the phone. “Lay off the booze, bozo, or I’m shutting down and cutting you off from all that sweet, sweet bile.”
“I’ll climb aboard the hideously dull temperance wagon when you confess that god is a scam and we’re merely the off spring of evolved apes.”
“You are hysterical! Anyone ever tell you that you could be in show business? I mean it, baby. You’ve got potential.”
When weeks sloughed off since the last phone call, Becky thought about Felix in a distant, dreamlike way. Were they really friends? It couldn’t be. She changed Sam’s poopy diaper and thought, what on earth does such a man have to do with my mothering, house keeping day-after-day life? She glimpsed his face on a magazine cover and thought, what on earth do I have to do with his glitzy fast-lane highbrow life?
So she determined not to bother him anymore, and really believed, in the exquisite way she had of innocently playing the martyr, that he would never call again.
Then a few days later . . . “Hallo, you loon. What passes as news?”
His voice was cozy against her ear, his conversation like play, and she ran loose with it, happy as a toddler in a room full of balls.
“Yo ho ho!” she said, holding the phone on her ear while unloading groceries.
“Repeat that?”
“It’s National Talk like a Pirate Day. Didn’t you know?”
“Somehow I missed the memo.”
“You mean, ‘Somehow I missed the memo, arrr!’ ”
“Precisely. Arr. So, Mrs. Jack . . . er, is that still your name? Or, I tremble to ask, have you adopted a pirate identity?”
“Arr, matey, of course I have! It’s . . .” She pulled an eggplant from the grocery bag. “. . . Captain Eggplantier.” She needed to stop speaking the first words that popped into her mind.
“Captain Eggplantier.” He sounded very doubtful.
“That’s right. A family name. It’s Belgian.”
“You don’t say. I didn’t realize there was a Belgian language.”
“Most definitely.”
“And what is this language called?”
“Waffle.”
“Ah-ha.”
“And this brings me to today’s burning question, Mr. Callahan. Why on earth are you calling me? Why haven’t you run for your life?”
“No one crosses Captain Eggplantier and lives! Arrr!”
“Ooh, that was good!” She was sincerely impressed. It had been a superb pirate accent.
Felix sighed as if getting serious. “Lord knows I have tried to run, Mrs. . . . er, Captain Jack. I’ve gone to every doctor in England, but you have no antidote.”
“Don’t say ‘Lord’ unless you mean it.”
“Oh, but I do mean it. Good Lord, but I mean it.”
“Please flick yourself in the forehead for me.”
“Ouch.”
“Good boy. Now each time you take the Lord’s name in vain, flick yourself again.”
“Why would calling on the Lord’s name ever be in vain if he were really there to listen?”
“Also you should flick yourself each time you’re obnoxious.”
“Now you’ve gone too far. I’d be too bruis
ed to show my face on camera.”
“You’re right. Besides, all the books say we should focus on positive reinforcement. Call me each time you had the opportunity to be obnoxious but stopped yourself, and I’ll put a sticker on your sticker chart. When you fill it up, you get a lollipop!”
“Mmm, lollipop. You’ve got my number, darling, indeed you do.”
It took Felix a year to fill up the chart. Becky sent him a package—a single Dum Dum wrapped in a yard of cellophane with a note that said, “We’re so proud of you!” signed by all six of the Jacks (Becky signing on behalf of eighteen-month-old Sam—she had his permission).
Mike sighed as he signed. “I don’t even want to know what it means. I have a feeling I couldn’t comprehend it.”
It had been a year and a half since the Valentine’s Ball. Felix was busy—in France with Celeste, at home in London, working in Los Angeles, shooting on location in New York or Australia or Toronto. Becky suggested driving the family out to California, but twelve hours with a one-year-old (and five-, eight-, and eleven-year-olds) intimidated Becky so much she consumed half a bag of Oreos just at the thought.
“If we’re going to take a trip,” Mike said, “why don’t we go visit my brother in Vernal? We haven’t gone to Dinosaurland since Fiona was five, and that’s a heck of a lot closer and less expensive than L.A.”
“But Felix isn’t in Vernal.”
“The kids don’t care about seeing Felix.”
He had a point. So Becky let the idea slide away.
Now let’s not give the impression that Becky’s life revolved around Felix’s calls and visits. They were brilliant little distractions; they were the occasional breezy lifts to Becky’s wings (pretend nonchalance as she might, Becky loved Beaches). If we were going to examine Becky’s life in earnest, we’d tell the story of how Hyrum broke his arm, and the mini-crisis that created in Becky’s marriage when in a moment of frustration Mike blamed her for negligence. We’d tell about that weekend trip Becky and Mike took to St. George, how their car broke down and the motorist who stopped to “help” stole Becky’s suitcase. What about Polly’s first piano recital, when she was so terrified, she refused to play unless she was sitting on her dad’s lap? And Hyrum’s angry refusal to try to read? The disastrous bake sale when Becky had been distracted by Sam’s rash of diarrhea and forgot to add sugar to the apple pie. Fiona’s birthday party, when Becky nearly threw her bratty little “friend” Cassie out on her rear end. Sam’s first step, first animal noise, word, sentence, leap, joke . . . everything!
Time ticks on and too much happens to tell it all. So let’s focus.
“I miss you,” Becky said.
Felix paused. “You really do?”
“I know it makes no sense.”
“That’s it. How can I put a mother of four through so much torture? By the way, you’re not pregnant again, are you?”
“Nope. We’re going to hold steady at four.”
“Thank the fertility goddess. I feared you might be preparing to form your own colony off in the Rocky Mountains.”
“Well, of course we still plan to do that. Won’t you reconsider and join us? I make a lovely fruit punch.”
Felix would have the chance to sample some punch (or a green and chunky substance claiming to be such) very soon.
In which Becky doesn’t lock her front door and someone walks in
Becky was in the front room lying on her back and flying Sam above her, aiming to get some sort of arms workout while still playing with the toddler. It was Hyrum’s second week in afternoon kindergarten. Mike was at work. Fiona in fourth grade. Polly in second. Leaving Becky and Sam home. Alone.
The first week of school had been awesome. In the mornings, she and the two boys ran errands and took trips to the park. In the afternoons, Sam napped as soon as Hyrum left for school, giving Becky time to clean corners of the house previously untouched by human hands and sort drawers cleverly masquerading as temporary holding bins, but actually harboring expired coupons and receipts dated 1989.
When Sam woke from his nap, they read and drew and chased, and she showered on the kind of attention she hadn’t been able to give a child since Fiona was an only. It was great. It really was.
It was just that when she spoke to Sam, the house had a weird echo to it, her voice bouncing off the empty walls. And Sam didn’t have much to say in response. The sunlight seemed to shuffle in unwillingly through the windows, and the floors groaned more than usual, the house apparently aware of its unforgiving bulk.
Sam giggled as she lowered him to her face and pushed him back up again. Her pectorals burned.
“You’re my cute guy, yes you are!”
“Haaaa! Mama-mama. Bababa zooo zoo!”
She glanced at the door to the basement, where the television awaited, offering its own kind of comfort. No, she would not resort to daytime television and that greasy, stomach-sick hangover. But the truth was, Becky thrived on some well-managed chaos. Noise was good. And hullabaloo even better. Heck, cacophony wasn’t out of line. Give her pandemonium and she’d wrestle it into four bathed and pajama’ed children, a clear kitchen counter, and three casseroles—one for dinner, one for freezing, and one for a sick neighbor. She was not the type to invent drama for drama’s sake. Happiness was good, and she’d take it in hearty slices, thank you. But blissful quiet calm also meant . . . nothing for her to do.“
do.“ Yes, you’re a cutie. Yes, you’re clever!”
“Mmmfff,” said Sam. He could only take so much adoring, and puttered away, enchanted by an empty cracker box. Becky stayed prostrate, watching him flick the tabs, breathe into the box, then growl at it menacingly. She was so proud.
Becky sighed at the ceiling. She had precisely twenty-seven items on her to-do list, but the silent house was enervating. Maybe if she called someone, she’d perk up and get productive. She’d already bothered Mike at work that morning, keeping him on the phone for twenty minutes to talk over her grocery list. Melissa was on location in southern Utah. Her neighbor-friend Jessie had started working half days while her own kids were in school. Fridays were her sister Diana’s errand day. Maybe she’d phone her mom; or Laurie, her favorite sister-in-law; or her cousin Tina . . . There was a knock at the front door.
Ooh, she thought, company! And called, “Come in!”
She wasn’t expecting a repairman, she rarely got packages, and her family and neighbors all knew she kept the door unlocked and would walk in without the knock. So, who? The suspense was positively exciting! It never occurred to Becky that it might be some unsavory character who meant harm. That sort of thing didn’t occur in her cleaned and folded life. Besides, if robbery was afoot, then good luck—the most expensive item in the house was her standing mixer.
The door squeaked as it opened. Becky craned her head to see around the corner. Felix peeked back.
“No way,” she said in a slightly garbled voice, forgetting until that moment that she was sucking on a pacifier.
An explanation: From infancy Sam was a very giving sort of fellow, and having two pacifiers, liked to share. Whenever he had one in his mouth, he was determined his mother should have the same luxury, and was continually trying to shove the spare “paci” between her lips. She’d long ago given up resisting, habitually holding the paci with her teeth while she spoke or unconsciously sucking away. So it was that as Felix peered around the door, he happened to catch her lying on the floor and nursing a bright blue teddy bear pacifier.
She blew it out of her mouth, sending it arcing into the air, and careful not glance at it plop on the carpet, she said again (this time the words less muffled), “No way.”
He shut the door and in seconds was on his back beside her, staring at the ceiling. He looked boyish and seventeen, and yet still debonair. His mere scent (no cologne today, but even his laundry soap smelled swanky) wafted ideas of faraway places and lavish things, a home full of shelves with precious objects that gleamed in the chandelier light.
&
nbsp; “Hi,” he said.
“Hey there.”
“Were you . . . I could have sworn . . . did you spit a dummy out of your mouth?”
“How could I? You were all the way over there by the door.”
He blinked at her. “I’m not following.”
She blinked back. “Neither am I. Dummy?”
“Oh,” he said slowly, “you were making a joke, implying that I am a dummy. Yes, exquisitely clever.”
“And you were being British, and since I don’t speak British, I can pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about and never admit to what you think you saw.” She squinted as she examined his face. “You look pale. Have you been checked for anemia?”
Sam crawled over his mother to land smack on Felix’s stomach.
“Oof. He’s bigger than I expected.”
“Hundred and tenth percentile,” she said proudly. “So, you were in the neighborhood?”
“I just don’t get to Utah enough.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I mean, who does?”
“Sometimes you need the mountain air and a few million Mormons to perk up your spirits.”
“As I’ve always said.”
“Precisely.” He turned his face to her. She adjusted onto her side to see him better. His voice became a little uncertain. “Can I stay a few days?”
She smiled. “Please do.”
“You cut a fringe,” he said, indicating her bangs. “You shouldn’t have a fringe, not with your face. You really need to consult me before doing anything semipermanent to yourself—hairstyles, plastic surgery, tattoos, shoes . . .”
“What percent gay are you, do you think?”
He considered. “I max out at fifteen.”
“I’m going to go with thirty.”
“You’ve never seen me bench-press Marlon Brando.”
She patted his hand. “You are a shining specimen of raw masculinity. But while you’re here, I’m going to set you up a blood test. Really, you look awful.”