She introduced herself as Betty Boop, then explained that she’d had a fascination for old cartoons when she was little. Her real name was Melanie, after the character in Gone with the Wind.
“I always thought if my mother wanted a name from the book, she could have named me Rhett,” she said.
“Not Scarlett?”
“No way. I always hated that bitch. Nothing but a cock tease.”
Betty had taken Lillian in more than once, she confessed. She seemed so happy to be there. And Eunice could see how much pleasure Lillian took in stretching out on Betty’s spotless kitchen floor, in a band of afternoon sun.
“I didn’t know who her owner was. She doesn’t wear a collar. Did you get her microchipped?” Betty asked.
Eunice didn’t know what that was.
“They do it the vet’s office. Slide a little computer chip with your name and number under the skin. You find a stray animal, you take them in and they can scan it right there.”
“Huh.”
Betty offered her some coffee. Eunice didn’t care for any just then.
“How about a beer?” Betty asked.
“Sure.”
Betty’s trailer was as exotic as she was. One wall held a number of open Japanese fans; a pink scarf was draped over a table lamp; a small wooden desk with carved feet sat under the window, its surface crowded with notebooks and photographs all in black and white; three large, complicated cameras occupied the shelves of a bookcase in the kitchen next to the refrigerator. The kitchen table was decorated with woven placemats. In the center was a ceramic bowl full of apples. Betty and Eunice drank their beers in the living room, on opposite ends of a blue velvet couch. Lillian occupied the middle and carefully cleaned her paws.
“I was never really a cat person before,” Betty said.
“Me either. She’s my first.”
“Why ‘Lillian?’”
“Lillian Gish.”
“No way! You like silent movies?”
“I used to.”
“I like anything that’s old. Especially clothes.”
Eunice laughed. She was feeling the beer. She explained that she worked at Lindell, a place Betty should check out if she liked old things. Well, old people. Betty wanted to take her cameras up there and take some pictures.
“You know, portraits,” she said.
“Huh.”
“Would they go for it, do you think?”
Eunice said she could ask.
“Tell them it’s part of my thesis,” Betty said.
“Lots of retired professors there. Might work.”
Eunice collected Lillian and went home.
Alice said introducing a stranger to the residents was always difficult. The residents who still had their wits had trouble with new faces. And those that didn’t obviously wouldn’t care, but it didn’t seem right to put them on display like that. It felt exploitative. Did Eunice see her point?
Not really, but Betty did. She was disappointed, though. She needed interesting human subjects. She’d photographed her fellow students, their friends, her friends—she even had a shot of Lillian looking out the window. She said the intent look on her face made her almost human.
Betty was dressed that day in a floral chiffon dress from the 1930’s. She found it at a vintage shop downtown. Eunice suggested that she wear her hair in a matching style, with soft waves around the face. Betty’s hair was dyed jet black and as straight as if she’d ironed it. Eunice thought mournfully of her thick, wavy mess, now streaked with gray. She ran her hand fretfully through it.
“Why don’t you cut it?” Betty asked.
“Nah.”
“I can do it for you.”
“You know how?”
“I quit beauty school to go to college.”
The idea, Betty said, was to cut the hair in a bob, then put Eunice in a twenties flapper dress and set her up before the camera. She’d wash the plates with sepia, to recreate the era better.
“You’ve got a good figure for your age,” Betty said. Eunice hadn’t said how old she was. Side by side, gawking in the small bathroom mirror above the tiny rose-colored sink, it must have been clear that there were at least twenty years between them. Betty was smooth under the eyes. Eunice was puffy. The flesh on Betty’s jaw was firm. Eunice’s wasn’t.
The bob didn’t turn out all that well, but Eunice pretended she thought it was spectacular. For one thing, it was longer on one side than on the other. Her felt head felt uncomfortably light. She told herself she’d get used to it. She looked at the mass at her feet and remembered the brighter curls on that black and white bathroom floor years before.
The dress Betty had chosen for Eunice was one she liked to wear herself when she was feeling particularly “jazz age.” It fell to the floor when Eunice put it on. Betty was a lot taller. She said it didn’t matter, because the portrait would be just her head and torso. She draped a long string of fake pearls over Eunice’s neck and clipped one side of her hair with a rhinestone barrette. She put dark red lipstick on her lips, even though the picture would be in black and white.
“You’ll look washed out without it,” she said.
Betty moved a stool from the kitchen into the living room. She set up a lightbox she’d had in the closet, and tilted it this way and that until the amount of light that fell on Eunice’s face satisfied her.
After only a few minutes, Eunice tired of sitting still and turning her head a little this way and a little back that way. Betty shot frame after frame and talked the whole time.
“Beautiful. That’s right. Let all that inner light shine! Now, be mysterious. You’re hiding a secret, and you want very badly to tell it. You promised not to, and it’s absolutely killing you! Okay, now let’s change it up. Look sad, stricken. The love of your life has gone away, never to return. You simply can’t go on. Your heart has crumbled to a million little pieces.”
Try as she might, Eunice suspected that her expression remained just the same. She’d gotten too good at hiding what she felt. Was it working with the elderly that had caused that? Or did it happened before, when she was a child and wanted to avoid sparking her mother’s wrath?
“Perfect! A look of utter despair! I love it!” Betty said.
Lillian scratched madly at the door. Betty lowered her camera.
“Coming, my little love,” she cooed and let her in. Lillian rubbed herself along Betty’s legs, and arched her back when Betty leaned down to stroke her.
“She really likes you,” Eunice said.
“We’re the dearest of friends.”
Lillian looked up at Eunice. Her tail brushed.
“She’s not used to seeing you like that. I think you startled her a little,” Betty said.
“Maybe so.”
“Anyway, you look like you could use a break.”
Eunice stretched. She moved to get down off the stool. Betty bent down, and put her lips firmly on Eunice’s. She pushed her tongue in. While Eunice was processing the situation, and not really believing any of it, Betty picked up Eunice’s hand and pressed it to her breast. Eunice had never felt another woman’s breast. It was deliciously soft. So were Betty’s lips. Eunice bolted off the stool and stepped back.
“We could make a good team, you know. We even have our mascot,” Betty said.
“I think you’ve got the wrong idea.”
“Oh, no I don’t. I can always tell.”
“I’m too old for you.”
“Bull.”
“Then you’re too young for me.”
Eunice went into Betty’s room to change, hoping to hell she wouldn’t follow and push the point. She didn’t. Eunice left the clip, dress, and pearls on the bed. She rubbed off the lipstick with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said when she came into the living room.
“It’s okay. It happens.” Betty didn’t sound all that crushed.
She’s used to it.
Eunice looked at Lillian, stretched out on the couch.
“She’s happier with you,” she said.
Then she went home and packed up the balance of the uneaten cat food and Lillian’s bowl, and left them on Betty’s stairs.
chapter eighteen
Turning fifty didn’t rattle Eunice as much as she thought it would. She figured she was pretty good at handling milestones by now.
Her mother, then in her eighties, had developed crippling arthritis and a severe loss of mobility. She still lived in the country with zealous Jean and her daughter. She said she was well cared for. Eunice knew for a fact that her mother turned over her social security checks to Jean, and that the money wasn’t always put entirely to her keep.
She had her own room on the first floor. The heat was good. Jean’s daughter had some disability that made her speech hard to understand, but her wits seemed keen enough. She did the cooking and most of the cleaning. Jean was often away, using the only car available, visiting Dunston and smaller nearby towns, pedaling her pamphlets. Sundays were spent at Kingdom Hall in Elmira rather than at the one in Dunston. There’d been some dispute between Jean and the Dunston group that she preferred not to discuss. Eunice’s mother was packed up in the car, her wheelchair in the trunk, for the twenty-two mile drive along curving country roads that could be dangerous in bad weather. Eunice knew her mother didn’t like these drives, that in fact they made her nervous, but she never said anything to Jean.
That summer a new resident came to Lindell, Constance Maynard. She had her own cottage, so Eunice didn’t have any occasion to deal with her directly, but she saw her come and go in a new Mercedes. The clientele at Lindell was generally pretty well off, and many had high-end cars, but they drove them sedately, almost nervously, down the wide, flat road that connected Lindell to the highway beyond. Constance drove quickly, sometimes causing the tires of her car to screech. She walked quickly, too, with her head down and her purse clamped firmly below her left arm. She always seemed to be deep in thought, dwelling on some unpleasant, troubling item. She came once in a while to the dining room, though she could have cooked for herself, had she cared to. Eunice was on hand to ferry the nursing wing patients there and back and was able to observe Constance discreetly. She sat at different tables, as if trying to decide which person or group of people was most to her liking. She talked a lot, laughed a lot, and ate little. Eunice noticed right off that Constance focused much more on the men than on the women. Given that Constance was probably her mother’s age, Eunice was surprised to witness such a long-lived sex drive. The men, for the most part, weren’t all that interested. Constance’s energy went unmatched, which she took with visible disappointment. She was known to rise abruptly from table, drop her napkin roughly beside her plate, and march off with her characteristically rapid step. Eunice didn’t know why she was so fascinated by her. Then she realized it was because Constance reminded her suddenly, sharply, of Lillian Gish, at least in terms of her expressed determination and small stature.
Eunice didn’t see Constance for a while, and assumed she was keeping herself busy in wonderful and entertaining ways. The thought made her unhappy because her own life was neither. She wanted to give up the trailer on the inlet and move to an apartment closer to campus where she could be surrounded by young people. Moonshine was skeptical of this decision. She still lived in the house over the creek and told Eunice she should just rent her spare room. She took her out to a seedy bar one night so they could talk about it some more. Moonshine’s new boyfriend owned the place. He was their age, divorced, with a couple of citations for serving liquor to minors. Eunice expected him to be a rough sort, but he wasn’t. He reminded her a little of Ham, minus the long hair and glasses. He spoke softly, moved slowly, and gave off an air of solid reliability. Maybe that’s what drew Moonshine to him, Eunice thought. Though in his company she ignored him and talked only to Eunice, even when he took time to join them at their table and bring them another round of free drinks.
His name was Barry. He spoke with disappointment about his life, saying there were places he’d always wanted to see. He hadn’t been able to, because his parents always needed him close. He accepted that duty, though there were two other siblings who could have been called upon—an older brother and a sister who left home and never looked back.
“Did you stay out of guilt?” Eunice asked. He removed his bifocals and polished them on the end of his sweat-stained T-shirt.
“I wouldn’t say guilt, exactly. I just realized they would fall apart if I wasn’t there.”
Moonshine snorted. She’d told Eunice before that Barry had an over-developed sense of responsibility, which at the time Eunice had trouble reconciling with getting in trouble with the liquor board. He brought up that issue himself, as if he wanted to get it out of the way. He hadn’t even been onsite either time. First one manager, later fired, then another, also let go, hadn’t bothered to check IDs. Barry felt rotten as hell about it, really he did, because you had to protect young people and steer them in the right direction. And a bar was definitely the wrong direction. His own kids, three of them, had trouble sticking to the straight and narrow. That was probably because their mother didn’t believe in taking a firm hand. She was too tolerant, too quick to forgive their mistakes, especially the bad ones—like getting arrested for shoplifting or being suspended for cussing out a teacher. As he talked, Eunice sat with one elbow on the table and her cheek resting in her open palm. Moonshine, meanwhile, had taken herself to play a game of darts with a guy who looked like he was all of twenty-five.
Barry asked her about herself. She told him about her parents, working at Lindell, losing Lillian to her neighbor. She couldn’t tell how much he was taking in, because he was watching Moonshine across the room. When he finally turned his attention back to Eunice, he said, “The path of life is long and lonely.”
Eunice was just about to laugh when she saw that he being completely serious. She nodded gravely. His words depressed her, the more she considered them, and she had one free beer after another until she stopped thinking about it.
In the morning, Eunice didn’t remember how she’d gotten home. Her car was in the driveway. That she’d gotten behind the wheel, blind drunk, struck her as very poor judgment. She had to admit that over the previous few months she’d been drinking more, and the thought that she was following all too easily in her mother’s footsteps made her hangover even worse. Moonshine called to say she was having second thoughts about Barry. Eunice asked why. She said she’d met someone at the bar, one of the guys she’d been playing darts with, who seemed pretty interesting.
“Yeah? What’s he do?” Eunice asked.
“Do?”
“For a living.”
“Hell if I know.”
“Oh. Well, what makes him so interesting then?”
“He races motorcycles.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“Yeah, if you’re into cheating death for a hobby.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Stop being such a stick in the mud.”
Just the other day, Constance had used that same expression. Eunice had come across her in one of the lounges, sitting with a magazine, looking cross. She asked if there were anything she could do for her, and Constance said she’d just had a phone call from her daughter, the details of which she
didn’t share but which had left her in a state. Eunice had been glad to finally talk to Constance, and Constance seemed glad for the brief company. Just as Eunice was leaving, Constance had said of the daughter, “That girl’s trouble is that she’s always been a stick in the mud.”
When Eunice got off the phone with Moonshine, she drank a cup of very strong coffee, which helped her headache but did little to improve her morale. She took the small pad of lined paper she kept by her toaster, on which she made her weekly shopping list, and sat down with a leaky pen—the only one she could find. Her intention was to write out all the things she’d ever wanted to do or become, aside from Lillian Gish. Below each item she made a few comments.
Travel
Too expensive, unless going somewhere near, which is boring and basically stupid.
Going to college
How the hell am I going to 1) pay for it and 2) get admitted in the first place?
Starting a business and making a shitload of money
Here she paused. She didn’t know how to do anything except take care of old people. What money was there in that? There were agencies that sent aides around to help those still living at home, but that couldn’t pay very much. Unless you were the boss. Eunice could supervise people. She’d trained dozens at Lindell over the years. She wondered how much it would take to form her own home-care agency. Moonshine might have some idea. She was pretty sharp, though she never did follow through on her idea of buying the studio space downtown. One day she was eager, and then she stopped talking about it, which suggested to Eunice that she’d hit her ex-husband up for the money and gotten a quick, firm rejection. He was still paying her alimony, which on the one hand was good because she didn’t have to work, and on the other sucked for the same reason.
Eunice had never before considered that there was something to be said for economic adversity. When you were broke, you had to get a job. Having a job gave you at least some degree of independence. But Moonshine was pretty damned independent without having to work, so that line of reasoning was an instant fail.
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