by M. E. Kerr
“Do you know what I mean?”
“Sort of.”
“I mean between ‘Accept me as I am,’ and ‘so I may learn what I can become.’ Right after ‘am,’ you should have looked up wistfully, beat, beat, another beat, and then, as though you were getting it all together in your head, into ‘so I may learn what I can become.’ See what I mean, sweetheart?”
“I see.”
“Three beats, and then finish.”
“Okay,” I said, “I see.”
“It was peachy the way it was—don’t get me wrong, but it could have been just a little better.”
I sighed, unintentionally, and Mama looked across at me with this concerned expression. “Why the sigh?”
“Oh Mama, it just seems silly now to worry about it.”
“Who’s worried about it? I said it was peachy.”
“I know you did.”
“I’m just your silly mother, The Perfectionist, don’t pay any attention to me.”
“Mama,” I said, “have you told Fedora what Dr. Baird said?”
“I wrote her a long letter, honey. I don’t want you to worry about anything. From now on we concentrate on getting you better.”
“If that’s possible,” I said. “Sam, Sam, Superman’s ulcers never did get better.”
“You know, sweetheart,” Mama said, “I wish you wouldn’t call your stepfather that.”
“You called him that.”
“But that was different,” Mama said. “I meant it affectionately.”
“You must have felt a lot of affection for him while you were loading up the dishwasher every morning, knowing you could have been in front of a camera instead.”
“It was my own idea to give up my career,” Mama said. “Sam never asked me to give up my career. Your stepfather was a wonderful man, honey.”
“Except he gambled away every cent we ever had,” I said. “May he rest in peace.”
“He didn’t always have good judgment,” said Mama, “but Sam would give you the shirt off his back.”
“To iron for him,” I said.
“Oh, honey, don’t be bitter,” said Mama. “We came out okay. Look at us!” Mama said, waving her hands around the room. “This isn’t exactly chopped liver, baby!”
I saw her starting to reach for her pack of Mores again, then stopping herself. She’d gone half an hour already without a cigarette. I’d gone a week, with a few sneak smokes when I was out of her sight, which wasn’t often. Mama and I did everything together, went everywhere together. When we were separated, we were on the phone together. It was as much my doing as hers—I have to be honest about that. I felt right with Mama close, unsure of myself when she wasn’t around.
Mama said, “Maggie, sweetheart”—she always called me Maggie when she was being her most sincere self—“this is your vacation. Stop worrying. Ulcers heal. There’ll be other roles, better ones. You just toast yourself in the sun, run on the beach and forget your troubles.”
I stood up and turned off the set. I was going to take a walk on the beach so we could both sneak a smoke. “Mama,” I said, “won’t you miss doing the show?”
“You did the show, Tootsie Roll, I didn’t.”
“You know what I mean, though. We’ll be civilians.” It was an old term Fedora still used for anyone who wasn’t in the business.
Mama gave my rear end a swat with a copy of Soap Opera Digest. “Don’t you sneak a cigarette wherever you’re going now,” she said. She knew me like a book.
“The last time I quit smoking, I went up to a hundred and thirty,” I said. “And remember the way I looked in The Dark Ages? Sam, Sam, Superman used to call me The Blimp.”
“He didn’t mean that in a bad way,” Mama said. (I don’t know how anyone could mean it in a good way.) “I’m no sylph myself. Once we’ve both kicked the filthy habit we’ll look like a pair of beached whales for a while.”
We both started laughing then. We laughed for a long time, longer than the joke was funny. I’m not sure what Mama was laughing at, but I think I was laughing because I was relieved. I got my ulcer around the time Fedora began talking about extending Hometown a half hour. When Dr. Baird told Mama he didn’t advise my doubling my work load, I expected Mama to go into a real tailspin. She didn’t, though; she just sat across from him saying, “I couldn’t agree more,” but it never rang true to me somehow. Mama thrives on show business. If she had to choose between going for a day without any food and reading Variety, she’d choose Variety . . . and Mama loves to eat, a lot!
I still remember the time Mama got a sort of crush on the leading man in Hometown. She was spending a lot of time on the set with him, going across to McGlades for drinks with him, talking for long hours on the telephone with him at night. His wife complained to Fedora about it, and Fedora told Mama she was going to end my storyline if Mama didn’t do something about it.
Mama sent me to the set while she sat around The Dakota swallowing Valium and listening to old Tony Bennett tapes for hours on end, smoking and staring at the walls. We couldn’t talk about it together. Mama could never admit that Nick was just this pompous creep who went around trying to make any female in his path fall in love with him. It gave me stomachaches to hear Mama defend Nick, and we went through a bad time when we hardly talked at all.
Then one day after months had gone by, Mama came to the set as though it had all never happened. She gave Nick a smile, that was it, and went back to being my mother, cleaning up my dressing room, fussing over my wardrobe, cueing me and brushing out my long, blond hair—the whole bit. She even called Fedora, who was on the coast at the time.
“Well,” she said, “the news from this end is that the great storm has passed, the sea is calm, the little skiff is not capsized, sails are up. We’re still very much in the race.”
I don’t know what Fedora’s answer was, but I do remember the next thing Mama said.
She said, “Now get her that new storyline you’re always promising, toss in five hundred extra clams a month, and we’ll be back in business.”
It was right after that when Fedora started the whole “Tell me more” bit which made me famous.
The only flaw Mama has is that she’s overprotective. She’d keep me under glass if she could, until she was sure I was able to handle myself to her satisfaction, which would be sometime when I’m forty.
Around the time I got my ulcer, Fedora was trying out this new young writer named Lamont Orr. She wasn’t sure whether she was going to keep him as part of her regular stable of writers or not. The cast called him Lamont Bore, because he couldn’t stand to have one word of his dialogue changed, even when it didn’t play well. Here was this twenty-four-year-old, apple-cheeked kid, who’d never written anything but a few weird off-off-Broadway shows and some daytime television, trying to throw his weight around with talent that had been in the profession for years and years.
Fedora let him hang around the set to get the feeling of the show, and she sent us off for Cokes together to see what kind of a rapport we’d have. When Mama would try to come with us, Fedora would dream up some reason to have a conference with her. Once she just said flatly, “I want them to get to know each other, Peg! They have to, you know, if Lamont does her scenes.”
Mama was always saying things to me like “I guess the kid’s getting to you, hmmmm? He’s okay if you can get past all that Brut he splashes on himself.”
“Mama,” I’d say, “how can a man with a permanent wave get to me?”
“Well it’s the fashion now,” she’d say. “Someday he’ll probably blink his baby blues at you and you’ll be giving him his home permanents yourself.”
We had Lamont to dinner one night, and when he walked through our front door, the first words out of his mouth were, “What a lovely pied-à-terre, Peg!” Peg, he called Mama, when Mama was old enough to be his mother. Pied-à-terre, when he was born and raised in Bolivar, Missouri.
“Oh am I in love!” I said to Mama when he left. “
Be still my beating heart! Mama, he compared himself to Dostoevsky. He said, ‘. . . Both Dostoevsky and I believe character development is primary to plot development.’ Did you hear it?”
Mama said, “If he ever . . . if he ever makes even the smallest kind of pass, I want to know about it.”
“Oh the whole world will know about it,” I said. “He’ll cry out, I’ll kick him so hard.”
As I was collecting my bathing suit and towel for a walk to the beach, Mama said to me, “Let me ask you something now. How do you really feel about leaving the show?”
“I think I feel relieved,” I said.
“You think you feel relieved?” she said. “What do you mean you think you feel relieved?”
“I think,” I said, “beat, beat, another beat, I’m relieved.”
“Get outta here!” Mama said. “And good luck with your mouth!”
3. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.
Instead of underwear in the summer, I always wear a pair of trunks under my jeans so I can take a swim at one of Seaville’s beaches if I feel like it. This drives my mother up the walls. My mother says it’s no way for the son of a funeral director to behave. Funeral directors’ children, according to my mother, must lead exemplary lives because of the very delicate nature of the profession. Our home is supposed to be the sort of home one wants to see their loved ones resting in “at the end of the long journey”—to use another of my mother’s euphemisms for death.
If you want to know anything at all about the protocol of running a funeral home, don’t ask my father, ask my mother. I think my mother’s the world’s foremost authority on the dos and don’ts of funeral-home life. Do keep all the shades in the front of the house at the exact same level. Don’t sit around in any front rooms watching television with the drapes open at night. Do keep “the coach” (the polite word for the hearse) in the garage with the garage doors down, at all times. Don’t just throw out old “floral tributes” in the trash, but stuff them into a Hefty Lawn and Leaf Bag so they are not recognizable as old flowers. On and on and on.
Every time I slip out of my trousers on the beach, I hear my mother’s voice in my mind crying, “Wal-ly! Oh, no!”
That hot August afternoon after I left Harriet’s, I left my pants and shirt and sneaks in a ball on the sand, and walked down to the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, and Lunch Montgomery, this old blind-in-one-eye, black-and-white hound dog, was running around in the surf barking. That meant Monty Montgomery had to be around somewhere, a prospect I didn’t welcome.
A few afternoons a week I worked for Monty in the store he and his wife owned, called Current Events. Monty sold newspapers and magazines, greeting cards, games and office supplies. He also sold T-shirts, standard ones already printed up, or the kind you could have anything you wanted printed on them. I was the printer, the poor slob who fitted the letters on the shirt and then stream pressed them into it. For this I got $2.60 an hour. The fair thing would have been for Monty and his wife to pay me about triple that, since I acted as their go-between. I don’t think they even talked when I wasn’t around. When I was there, Monty would say things to me like “Ask her why she orders twenty copies of Town & Country every month when we only sell three.” Martha, his wife, would come back with something like “Ask him if he’s heard that slave labor is against the law, or hasn’t that rumor spread to the beach where he spends all his time?”
Monty would say, “Ask her if she imagines my idea of the perfect life is working twelve hours a day in some hick store selling Sugar Daddies to runny-nosed kids?”
Martha would say, “Ask him when he’s ever worked twelve hours a day anywhere.”
“Ask her,” Monty would say, “if she thinks I got an education at Yale to stand here marking half the TV Guides New England and half Manhattan.”
“Ask him,” Martha would respond, “if he could have done better with his striking Yale education why he didn’t.”
They were your real all-American happily married couple, the kind you saw eating out in restaurants across the table from each other without saying anything but “Pass the salt,” or “Where’s the butter?” Silently We Eat Our Sizzling Sirloins, Hating Each Other’s Guts Department.
Lunch was really Martha’s mutt, but he followed Monty whenever Monty took off for the beach, which was a lot in the summer. Monty would swim out and Lunch would stand in the surf barking, as though he was a scolding stand-in for Martha.
Lunch’s blind eye was a light blue color; the other eye was black.
“Did anyone ever tell you you were hilarious looking?” I asked him.
The dog ignored me. Sure enough, there was Monty out in the ocean, riding the waves on a surfboard.
The only other person around was this blond girl, sitting on a towel. Everyone else was in the area where the lifeguards were, about a half mile down the beach.
I was standing there wondering what the chances were of going in the water without having to strike up a conversation with Monty.
Monty’s conversations begin something like this: “Hi there, Wither-Away, seen any good corpses lately?”
A variation: “Hi there, Withering Heights, I’m dying to see you.”
Then he’d hold his sides laughing, give me a cuff to my ear, and start in on my relationship with Harriet.
“You going to marry her?” he’d ask. “Lots of luck, fellow. I married my high-school sweetheart and it’s been downhill ever since.”
I wasn’t in a mood for Monty ever; that day, I really wasn’t.
I walked down the beach away from him, past the girl on the towel.
Then I heard her calling me. “Hey! Hey, there! Hey!”
I turned around and she was standing, taller than I was, this long-legged, slender, pale girl with large green eyes and a tiny mouth. She wore a black bathing suit and a large gold cuff bracelet. She looked as though she’d been hospitalized all summer, or imprisoned—kept somewhere where the sun never shined.
“I came down here with cigarettes and no matches,” she said, walking up to me. “I don’t know how I could be so dumb.”
“I don’t, either,” I said.
“Well do you have a match?”
“It isn’t dumb to forget your matches,” I said. “It’s dumb to smoke.” I stood there trying to figure out why there was something vaguely familiar about her, even her voice.
“Thanks an awful lot,” she said. “I had the feeling I could count on you the minute I saw you.” She was holding a package of gold Merits in her hand.
“Do you think you can count on the tobacco companies to look out for you?” I said.
“I don’t need someone to look out for me,” she said, “I need a match.”
She started to walk back to her towel. I didn’t want her to go. It wasn’t that I needed another girl who towered over me in my life again, but I had this really flaky feeling that I’d spent time with her. Déjà vu or something. My father and mother had a song when they were courting called “Where or When.” My mother liked to play it on the piano and sing along. It was about meeting someone and feeling you’d stood that way with them and talked before, and looked at each other the same way before. That was sort of the feeling I had with this girl.
I tried to stall her. “A long time ago,” I said, “cigarettes had simple names: Kools, Camels, Lucky Strikes, Old Golds.”
“They’re still in existence,” she said. “Where have you been?”
“Where have you been?” I said. “You’re the whitest girl on the beach.”
“I was in an insane asylum,” she said.
“You’d have to be a little crazy to let the tobacco companies manipulate you,” I said. “Why do you think they’d name a cigarette something like Merit? Merit’s supposed to mean excellence, value, reward. What’s so excellent, valuable and rewarding about having cancer?”
“I’ve heard of coming to the beach for some sun,” she said, “for a swim, for a walk. I never heard of coming to the beach for a
lecture.”
“Think of the names of the new cigarettes,” I said, realizing I’d stumbled on an idea that wasn’t half bad. “Vantage—as in advantage; True; More; Now. The cigarette companies are using hard sell, because they’re scared that the public will wise up to the fact they’re selling poison.” Not bad at all, Witherspoon. I complimented myself. “Live for the moment because you won’t live long. Get More. Be True to your filthy habit.”
“Just say you don’t have a match,” she said.
At that moment, Lunch came skidding in between us, chasing a rubber duck that had been tossed in our direction. He was wet and she let out a scream, while Monty came jogging up to us with one of his sadistic grins. He had on a T-shirt with YALE written across it. He had his usual ingratiating opener.
“Hi there, Wither Up And Die. Cheating on Harriet?”
Then he took a look at the girl and did a double take.
Monty is not subtle in any way. He is this big palooka who lifts weights every morning and measures his chest size once a week. He is a wraparound baldie, who uses the last few strands of hair he has left to wrap around his already-denuded crown. When he does a double take, his whole body participates. His shoulders swing, his neck jerks, his hands shoot up to his hips with his elbows bent outward, his mouth drops open and his eyes bulge.
“Why, you’re Sabra St. Amour,” he croaked.
“That’s right,” I found myself agreeing aloud in stunned amazement. “That’s who you are.”
That’s who she was, not nearly as beautiful as she came across on the big boob tube, but it was Sabra St. Amour, ail right: the soft long blond hair and sea-colored eyes, the husky voice (not so sensual sounding when you realized it was caused by clogged lungs), the small, slanted smile.
I said, “But I just saw you on the tube,” and stood there like any star-struck jerk, incredulous, and staring at her.
“That was on tape,” she said.
Monty stuck out one of the elephant paws he has for hands and said, “I’m Montgomery Montgomery. How do you do.”
She winced in pain as he crushed her bones and pumped her arm up and down. “How do you do,” she said.