by Cathy Lamb
From there she started writing books, all of them honest, frank, and often funny, all of them best sellers. The goal: better, hotter sex. Although she promotes wild and creative sex, she always, always harps that the best sex is had with a person you love and are committed to. She actively preaches that no teenager should be having sex.
She loves her job, but way beyond that she loves Lacey, Tory, and me. She loves her mother, too, although she refers to her as “The whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking devil’s assistant.” My grandma refers to my mother as the “dildo-promoting, craft-obsessed sex queen.”
When my sisters and I were children, I don’t remember my mother having any boyfriends. When we were teenagers there were a few men, though they didn’t last long, and she never introduced us. There have been a few other men since, but not for a while. She is extremely private about that part of her life, and we know we don’t know the half of it.
Her legions of fans would be shocked to know how utterly domesticated my mother is. I believe this is in direct response to my grandma being a hard-core career woman, when most women did not have careers. My mother bakes, sews, embroiders, knits, quilts, and loves doing crafts.
In fact, her way of rebelling in high school was to have a knitting club, a quilting club, and a cooking club. The girls would meet at Grandma’s house once a week to chat, knit, quilt, and cook. Sometimes they even went to quilting and craft conventions.
As my mother tells it, this enflamed my grandma. She wanted her daughter out there protesting this or that, rebelling, finding herself, writing editorials in the paper, filleting the establishment, or, her most ardent hope, working with her at Lace, Satin, and Baubles to promote the company.
She wanted a hard-core businesswoman daughter who had loud opinions and a flaming mouth to share them. But no.
Knit, quilt, cook.
The funny thing is, my mother is still meeting with these women whenever she’s in town. The women have the following jobs: federal judge, owner of a cosmetics company, social worker, teacher, biologist, medical researcher, car wash owner, and then there’s Judy who owns a strip joint.
She loves being home in her Snow White cottage-style house, with her chintz, stripes, and flowers. You can almost see the dwarves, evil witch, and friendly animals around the corners. She loves cooking and listening to country music with the three of us, and Grandma, if she can “behave like a woman instead of a battle-ax-throwing, temperamental bra goddess.”
She has a practice in Portland and writes her columns and books from an upstairs office in her home, which is about ten minutes from mine, Grandma’s, Lacey’s, and currently Tory’s downtown condo.
Although she dresses drop-dead seductive, even inflammatory, when she’s on tour, at home she often wears pink crew neck sweaters and beige slacks. Another favorite? A white cable-knit sweater and blue slacks. She wears flats instead of four-inch heels. She pulls her hair back in a bun and wears her glasses and no makeup.
She meets her girlfriends, and they sew and craft and embroider all day long.
It’s blunt, kittenish sex therapist and Betty Crocker mixed.
Drives my grandma straight up the wall.
“Hello, darling,” my mother said when she called that night. “I’m so upset that you’re home and I’m out on this darn tour! My mothering instincts have gone over a cliff! I feel anxious. Tell me how you are.”
I told her about being back at the company. I danced around talking about the past, she noticed. She gently pried. I deflected. She respected the deflection.
“I’m concerned that you’re working too much,” she said.
I had worked fifteen hours that day. “Don’t be.”
“Do you still have your poor eating habits?”
I was eating bacon and a vanilla milkshake. “No. I’m eating healthy.”
“Are you getting enough sleep . . .”
Three hours last night. Insomnia. “Sleeping like a baby on a cloud.”
“I’m sewing you an apron. I saw a pattern for one the other day. The picture on the pattern package was bright purple with ruffles, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Meggie!’ I hope you like it. I thought we could make a blueberry cobbler while you wear it. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
I hate cooking and baking. “It would be delightful.”
“We could do some oil painting after that.”
I hate painting. “Lovely.”
“Then we’ll watch a cooking show.”
Must we? “I’d like that.”
“Can’t wait, honey!”
I love her.
Lacey poured me some healthy green concoction with berries, spinach, and vitamins and set it on my desk. I noticed she looked pale. “What is this yuck?”
“Drink it, Meggie, it’ll clean you out. Help your bowels.”
“Sure it will. Looking at it and thinking about it going down my throat is enough to clean me out. No. I’m not drinking it.” I stood up, opened my small refrigerator and pulled out a beer, then grabbed licorice out of my drawer. I don’t know why I like a beer for breakfast. Maybe it calms my nerves. I rarely drink alcohol at any other time.
“Fine. I’ll drink it,” Lacey said. “So let’s talk business. I’ve tried to keep us afloat. I’m about to kill Tory. I can’t blame her, though, for all our problems. The company’s sinking and I feel like hell about it.”
“Don’t blame yourself. The economy tanked. People do not need fifty-dollar bras at any point in their lives, and they especially don’t need them when they don’t have a job and their home is in foreclosure. How much longer do we have?”
“Six months. Tops.”
I was good at numbers, but Lacey was genius. She could look at any balance sheet and sum it up in seconds. She has a bizarre adoration for numbers.
“We’re selling, Meggie, we’re selling quality lingerie, but it’s not enough. We have to be selling huge. The competition out there is killer. We need to do something drastic, immediately.”
“I know. I’m thinking.”
“Think hard.”
“What’s our debt level?”
She sighed. “High.” She told me the number.
I choked on my beer, and it splattered across my desk. “That’s a disaster.”
“No question.”
I swore. “Why? Why did Grandma, why did you, let it get that high?”
“We went through our savings after the economy collapsed. The debt racked up only this year. I warned her. I showed her the numbers. She gets them, Meggie, but Grandma believes in the company. She believes we’ll turn it around. She didn’t want to lay anyone off, which is what I told her we needed to do. It’s a scary time, and she knew she’d be throwing our people to the wolves.”
I hate debt. Hate it. When times are tough, the debt is a dead weight against success.
I stood up and looked through the window overlooking the floor below, where our employees worked at desks and at sewing machines, some with both, and gnawed on red licorice. A few of our employees have been with us since before I was born.
Take the Petrelli sisters, Edith, Edna, and Estelle. They’re all in their seventies, but they come to work every day, where they run the sales department, even though they have generous retirement programs.
“We need money to travel during the summers and meet men,” Edna Petrelli told me.
“Yes. On cruises. That’s where we meet ’em and that’s where we leave ’em,” Edith said.
“Who wants a man for more than the length of a cruise?” Estelle asked. “Especially when they’re old? All those farts, the horrible breath, like they ate a possum for lunch.”
“And they’re babies. All men are babies. Whining about their hemorrhoids, their gas, their bones creaking. Who wants to listen to that?”
“Do I look like I want to be a caretaker to an old man? Do I look like I want to spend my golden years waiting hand and foot on an old coot, hearing about his bladder and weak prostate? No, I don’t!”
&
nbsp; “We want amusement for a while and then we send ’em home.”
The ladies took several cruises a year, but not to normal places like the Bahamas. No, they went to Alaska to see the glaciers. They went to Antarctica. They went to Vietnam, China, and Hong Kong. They were adventurous and fun.
Maritza, Juanita, and Valeria are also sisters, from Mexico. We have two women, a mother-daughter team from Ethiopia; their names are Lele and Tinsu, and they wear head scarves and bring dessert every other Friday. No one is absent on Dessert Friday.
We have five African American women, all sisters, maiden name Latrouelle: Delia, Gloria, Sharon, Toni, and Beatrice. When there’s a family reunion, wedding, or anniversary, we lose all five at once.
We also have six women working here who were, tragically, former prostitutes. I know who they are, and so does my grandma, but no one else. You would never guess which ones they are. Never. One leads our toy drive at Christmas, the other is head of her church’s women’s ministry program.
I watched our employees, most working so hard, except for an ex-employee, Mrs. Wolff, who was wandering around with a pink hat, smiling vacantly. She is a friend of Grandma’s and she has early onset Alzheimer’s. Her daughter brings her in now and then and stays with her while she visits with people she can no longer remember. It’s safe. She likes being here. When Mrs. Wolff ran out of money, Grandma started paying for her care.
I watched Lance Turner. He had worked for us as a manager, one of our only male managers, before his unit was called up and he went to hang out in the hell of Afghanistan. He came back with part of his head dented in from an IED. He only works two-thirds time. When he first came back he was a mess, physically, mentally and emotionally, but month by month we see improvement. We pay him for full-time work.
Lance, Tory, Lacey, and I went to high school together. He is a kind and gentle soul. He was homeless for part of high school because his father was in and out of jail and his mother was nonexistent. He lived with Grandma for a long time.
He has the kindest wife, Marina, and four kids. The oldest is seven. As Grandma said, “I will not abandon that man ever. Meggie, you are to see to this. See to it that Lance is taken care of.” Like all of her longtime employees whom she loves, Lance gets money from her personal estate when she dies, enough to pay off his house, although he doesn’t know it.
The employees fifty and older were the ones I worried most about if we closed. I’m sure that was my grandma’s worry, too. They know the business inside and out. They’re loyal. They’re of a generation that believes in production and working hard. But ageism discrimination is alive and well in America, and if we went out of business, they would be in a world of hurt quick.
“I have one more thing to tell you, and you are not going to believe this, Meggie.” Lacey finished off the green yuck.
“What is it?” I returned to my desk and drank my beer.
“I’m knocked up.”
Dang, but I choked again. “You’re pregnant?”
“Yes. That’s what knocked up means, doesn’t it? Hello?” She threw her hands up. “One time, one time! Matt and I went for dual massages at a spa, then we hung out in the hot tub and he got all frisky. He drove us to our favorite place overlooking the city, the place we always went to mess around when we were in college—”
“On the hill with the view.”
“Yep. And he invited me to crawl in the back of our minivan! Our minivan! What was I thinking? And I said yes. It was like we were twenty again.” She rocked back and forth, hands to her red curls. “So I did it! I’m too old to mess around without birth control! I have three kids already, one is a hellion, one likes pink too much, and the third isn’t too bright. My stomach pooches and my butt hangs and my boobs aren’t in the place they should be, but Matt is smiling at me and there I am, bouncing on him in the dark in the back of our minivan, which I use to haul our kids’ asses around to play rehearsals and football and cheerleading and crap like that.”
“So, amidst the cleats and pom-poms, you indulged?”
“Duh. That’s how a baby is made, isn’t it?” She patted her red cheeks.
“Usually. Not always. In the future, we’ll probably be able to swallow a pill and women who don’t want to get pregnant the normal way won’t. It’ll be the sperm-and-egg pill and it’ll attach to the side of your uterus and—”
“Oh, stop, did you not hear me, Meggie? I am knocked up!” She threw herself back in her chair like an octopus, arms and legs out. “What am I going to do?”
“Looks like you’re going to have a baby. Congratulations.” I laughed. This was excellent news. “Do your kids know about the baby?”
“They will by tonight. They think I’m getting fat. They’ll be absolutely disgusted.”
“This is proof that you and their father engage in intercourse.”
“I’ll leave the part about parking with their father in the minivan out. They’d never get in the van again.”
“What did Matt say?” Matt’s a popular college math professor. They met during college. He’s two years older, she graduated early, and they got married. She had Cassidy when she was twenty-one.
“What did that horny toad say?” She opened up her dark brown eyes wide, feigning fury. “He laughed. Laughed! He said, ‘That’s great, honey, good job!’ I can’t believe it, Meggie. Four kids! And I have morning sickness like the devil.”
“Oh, Lacey, I’m sorry.” Her morning sickness was legendary. It was not limited to morning.
As if the word set her off, she rolled her eyes, then went pale, put a hand to her mouth, and flew out of the room.
I took another sip of beer, had another licorice.
I felt tears burn my eyes, as if they were on fire.
I remembered.
At two in the morning, unable to sleep because my flashbacks to a time of broken black feathers were keeping me awake, I headed down the steps of my tree house in my ratty pink robe, the maple leaves rustling above, whispering a soft message.
I sat on an iron bench in the garden under a willow tree and watched the city lights twinkle in the distance.
I closed my eyes, trying to unwind in the wind.
I jumped when I heard his voice, when he called my name. I knew it couldn’t be him, I knew it, he wasn’t here, but I still whipped around, scanning the grass, the maple trees, and the pine trees before moving to the tree house, my hands out and up, as if I could defend myself. My heart pounded, a dull thud echoing throughout my tense body.
There was no one. I was still all alone. I put my hand to my constricted throat.
The maple trees rustled, they whispered.
I sank back onto the bench and tried to listen to them, to the wind, not him.
“I want to have some adventures before I die, become a stiff corpse, and rot in a steel coffin.”
“Lovely vision.” I nodded at my grandma. It was Saturday noon, and we were at her white Queen Anne home. She was dressed in a dark green silky dress with a square neckline and bone-colored heels. The baubles: emeralds. “I’ll come with you on the adventure.”
“Me too,” Tory said, winding all that black hair into a ponytail. “Let’s start in Vegas. High-stakes poker. Give me a date and I’ll check all of our horoscopes to see if we’ll have good luck. Leo for Meggie. Scorpio for Lacey. Virgo for Grandma.”
“I’m in,” Lacey said. “Only don’t ask me to do anything that causes me to feel dizzy. I hate morning sickness.” She swayed, put her hand over her mouth.
“You’re having a girl,” Grandma said.
“How do you know?” Lacey asked through her fingers.
Grandma waved her hand. “Because I know.”
Grandma’s formal table was polished, the china laid, the crystal glasses sparkling. Her home is exquisitely decorated and refined. While Lacey tried to battle down morning sickness, the rest of us nibbled on tiny, crustless sandwiches that Grandma had ordered in: tomato, cheddar, and watercress or ham, brie, and apple.
Cream puffs, miniature cakes, chocolate fudge, tarts, and pink meringue cookies sat on doilies on a three-layered silver tray. I ate dessert first, as per my usual. If I died by a freak accident before the meal ended, I didn’t want to miss out.
“What do you want to do, Grandma?” I asked her, sipping my beer. It went well with the tarts.
“I want to do something dangerous.” She tapped her manicured fingernails, her hair up in a chignon. “I want to dance on a bar. I want to bungee jump. I want to go on a trip with you girls and your mother, if she doesn’t make a complete fool out of herself on her book tour.”
Lacey, Tory, and I laughed. On another talk show our mother had given graphic directions on how to give a blow job using an ice-cream cone. It made headlines because that part of the show had to be blacked out.
“I’ve worked all my life and now I want to have some fun. You three are going to have fun with me. We’ll call it the Bust Out and Shake It Adventure Club.”
“You want to bust out and shake it?” Lacey asked.
“Yes. We are going to take off and live life dangerously together.” She poured tea out of a silver teapot, passing each fragile, flowered teacup and saucer to us. “You three are going to bond and become friends if I have to knock your knotted brains together.”
Her expression suddenly changed to one of pain. She put the teapot down, reached back, and rubbed her shoulders. I had asked her about these sudden spasms when I was a little girl. “Does your back hurt, Grandma?”
And she would say, her Irish brogue soft, “I’m patting the fairies.”
When I was in my teens she would say, “I’m squishing all my brilliance up to my brain.”
And when I was in my twenties she would say, “Quit asking. I don’t want to talk about it.”
I know the pain is because the whippings somehow caused back problems.