by Jane Smiley
Isabel cleared her throat and began again, controlling her tone of voice this time so that it sounded cooler and more rational, all the better to prosecute. Zoe began again, too, making herself think that if she just kept quiet and still and pretended to listen, this could take, at most, ten minutes, and then she could get away from Isabel, from Paul, from Delphine, from Max, from Simon, from Charlie, and the others, who didn’t matter except that they chattered away, tossing up interference and keeping the noise level high and irritating. Isabel said, “The thing is, Mom, you don’t think I heard what you said, but I did. You said, ‘We need to talk about Max’s project. Call me.’”
Isabel was right. Zoe had not thought that she had heard that little remark; she had been, in fact, not even sure that Stoney had heard her, and, yes, she had been using her condolences about the car as a way to insert that remark, and, to complicate things further, she didn’t even care whether Max made an independent film in his bedroom or not. What she really wanted to do was to get Stoney to talk to her about what was going on between him and Isabel, and she couldn’t think of another way, especially in front of Isabel, who had been stuck to Stoney like a second head all morning. Until that moment in the dining room. Now Stoney was nowhere to be seen, and she was trapped by Isabel in the pantry. She glanced up; she couldn’t help herself. Stacks of dishes arranged in neat rows by color were arrayed all around them. One of the two girls—maybe Marya?—stopped in the doorway, glanced in, and walked away. Zoe said, “They must want to get in here—”
“I don’t care! And if your phone rings, I don’t care. Why should Stoney call you about my father’s project? What business is it of yours! You are not attached to it!”
“No, I’m not. Fine. Tell Stoney to forget what I said, I don’t care.”
“But that’s not the point. The point is that you said it—”
“I was just taking an interest, Isabel—”
But Isabel said, “That’s a lie! You don’t just take an interest, in fact you don’t take an interest at all, so why pretend that you do? You’re pretending that you do because you have some reason to, and I am just telling you to back off, because it’s his project, and just because we all happened to spend ten days together for some reason after thirteen years doesn’t mean you are part of the family and you can show an interest. If you wanted to show an interest, you should have shown it before this. Now it’s too late!” She said the words “show an interest” as if she were spitting out garbage.
Now Zoe had the sense to say, “What are you worried about, Isabel?” And even though Isabel shook her head and said, “I’m not worried about anything,” emphasizing the word “worried,” a look crossed her face that indicated that she was worried about something, though whether it had to do with Max or with Stoney, or even with Delphine, Zoe had no idea. Isabel went on, “And if I were worried, you would be the last person I would tell about it, but I’m not. It just drives me crazy that for ten days you’ve been sitting around, making yourself at home, offering your opinion, parading your new guy around here, just like it’s the most natural thing in the world, when it isn’t at all! It’s not right that we should all act like we’re just a happy, normal family when—”
“When in fact we just happened to be thrown into the bunker together, or into the lifeboat, for that matter, or the Titanic, or—”
“Go ahead and make fun of me, but there’s not going to be this Hollywood ending where we all finally come to respect one another after our harrowing trip together!”
“Fine, Isabel. Please, have it your way. But do step aside, because I want to get out of here.”
“That’s the very reason I will not step aside.”
“Isabel, do you know how crazy you sound?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you want to sound this crazy?”
“I don’t care how I sound to you, as a matter of fact.”
Zoe could hear footsteps in the kitchen, maybe the footsteps of two people, and also out the window, in the driveway, tramp, tramp. All at once, she felt all her wishes to be out of here, to be getting into her car, to be somewhere like Paris or Morocco, fall away. Here she was. Here was Isabel. Here was the sink, and here were the dishes and the silverware and the serving platters and the hardwood floor beneath her feet. Yes, excess in here, but plain old excess, not excess with added-on flourishes of excess. No one’s imagination had been put to work overtime in here. In here, she did not feel the press of six hundred years of history and culture as she did in the rest of the house. It was actually restful in here, in a way. She took a deep breath and said, “Okay, don’t go away. Don’t let me out. As long as you’ve got me here, I’ll tell you something about my life.” She almost smiled at the brilliance of this trick.
“Oh, God, Mom! All about you again.” And Isabel fell for it.
“Well, it’s your choice. You can leave, or you can stand there and listen. If you leave, I’ll be happy, because I can leave, so if you don’t want me to be happy, you can bar my way.”
“I’m not listening.”
“Fine, don’t listen. But I am talking.”
Isabel began to hum. It occurred to Zoe to tell her that she was acting like a baby, but instead she began telling her story. She said, “Remember that friend you had for a while, what was her name, Lee Anne, and her mother had been Miss Minnesota back in the 1970s? And she and her sister had a piano in their room, and every child in the family played two instruments and also took ballet? And she wasn’t allowed to spend the night because she had to practice the piano first thing in the morning, and to go to bed by eight? You thought they were all so funny.”
Isabel stopped humming long enough to toss her head. “Of course I do.”
“Well, that was my life with your grandmother, except it was all done in the context of the hotel where she worked in Miami. We got up at five and got dressed. We got to the hotel by six, and she went to work in housekeeping. We didn’t have a piano at home, but for an hour before the schoolbus came, I practiced on the piano in the lounge bar. Then I went to school on the bus, and after school, the bus dropped me off at the hotel, and I had lessons. The guy who played the piano at night gave me piano lessons, and his wife, who managed the cabaret dancers, gave me tap and jazz lessons, and after I was eleven, she gave me singing lessons, too. His name was Eddie Farrell and her name was Violet Hartman, and they had done a couple of musicals in Hollywood in the thirties. They had had a school in New York before they gave that up and moved down to Miami. Mom worked overtime to pay for all the lessons. When I wasn’t going to school or doing homework, I was having lessons. And I did a lot of shows and recitals. The three of them said that they were grooming me for a stage career at the time, but I think now that, for Mom, it was more about keeping me out of trouble.”
“You don’t have to tell me—”
“The tale of my tragic childhood? I know that, though I never have really just laid it out for you, Isabel. It was work. It wasn’t cooking and cleaning and making beds, but we went about it in the same way. Mom loved all those movies, Little Miss Marker and The Seven Little Foys, Yankee Doodle Dandy, that sort of thing, where the children are productively employed. She figured if I was making rhythmic noise, either tapping or playing the piano, then I wasn’t getting into trouble, and since she was who she was, I went along with it—” She held up her hand to forestall the inevitable protest. “Anyway, it was fine with me, because when I made some money, doing whatever, she would take me shopping, and we always bought clothes for me, and she always said she couldn’t find anything for herself that she liked. My reward was that I was the best-dressed kid in school.”
Isabel had a skeptical look on her face, but she had stopped humming.
“Of course, she was no dummy, and she knew the difference between Lena Horne and rock and roll. When some guys at my school asked me to be in a band in Miami, she let me, and she let me wear the Rasta locks and the tank top and everything, but, Isabel”—Zoe made sure
that Isabel was looking her in the eye, which she was—“she sat in the audience every night, and when Terry McFadden, who had the van, took me home after a show, he was taking my mom home as well. Every single time. The guys thought it was a joke, but it was okay in a way, too, and, frankly, their own parents liked it, so I put up with it. Our life was not about rebelling, it was about making it. Always had been and always would be. And when we got to California and I met your dad, she orchestrated that, too.”
“So you’re telling me you were in purdah or something? You were the virgin sacrifice in an arranged marriage? Oh, please, Mom.”
Zoe refrained from rolling her eyes, which Paul said was a contemptuous and alienating gesture, the contemptuous and alienating gesture, probably even among chimps, and went on. “Why do you think of us as not working-class? Why do you think she didn’t put me to work doing what I could do best? The plan was never for me to have a childhood, Isabel, and then rebel and find myself and realize my inner nature—it was always to sing and dance instead of peel potatoes and weed the vegetable patch, and it was also to avoid the occasion of sin, because the big problem with having a baby if you are working-class is that you can’t keep working. Didn’t any of your economic-theory professors tell you about these things?” That was a good one, thought Zoe.
She leaned forward expressively, and Isabel, perhaps without realizing it, leaned backward. Zoe knew she could probably get out at this point, but she chose not to, as Paul would say. “Max fell in love with me. I knew that. I saw that he liked me and he was good-looking and important, but Mom said, ‘Zoe, he is very much taken with you.’ Do you think I loved him, or that I knew what love was, or that I was prepared in any way to reciprocate? I was used to doing what I was told, and usually what I was told to do was fun or rewarding. So I thought what I felt for Max was love, and then I got pregnant, and there you were, and I had a movie to be in while I was pregnant, and another movie to be in after you were born, so it seemed perfectly natural that you would be bottle-fed and that Delphine would do most of the baby care. She wanted to do it. It was easier for her to maintain your routine than for the two of us to pass you back and forth, and anyway, the doctor said that the most important thing was a stable routine. And anyway, and please pay attention to this, Isabel, for your grandmother, child-rearing was not about Mom and Dad and the baby in their little nest, it was about whoever has the time and the space to do it, does it. That’s the way they do it in Jamaica—”
“I’ve heard this excuse before,” said Isabel, in a sullen and dismissive tone of voice. “And I know most of this stuff.”
“What’s the difference between an excuse and a sequence of events?” said Zoe.
“An excuse lets you off the hook,” said Isabel.
“Even so, I think that, for once, you should hear about this ‘sequence of events’ from my point of view.”
Isabel did make a face, but she still didn’t move. Zoe stared at her. Her temper was beginning to spark again, even though while she had been relating this information it had soothed her and distracted her from thoughts of Marcelle. For a moment, she paused and did what Paul suggested, imagining dowsing, dripping—the coals and fugitive sparks and occasional explosion being hit by sprays of water. Finally, she said, “Here is what Max said to me. He said, ‘I want you no matter what happens.’ It was very romantic. I believed him. He was almost twice my age. I thought that all Mom’s hard work and mine was paying off at last. I thought it was the American dream.”
“Didn’t you want to be with me?”
Zoe took a deep breath and decided, after all these years, to be honest, because clearly she had nothing to lose. She said, “I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“How could I know? You were a six-and-a-half-pound baby; you scared me because you seemed so fragile, and then, when you were old enough to hold out your arms, you held them out to my mom. When I held you, you cried, and it seemed sort of natural that way. Now, you can go ahead and say that was my fault, and I’m sure it was, but it takes more courage than you think to be a mother, and when someone is always around, giving you an out, and the baby seems to prefer that person, well, you don’t really necessarily develop that courage. That’s my opinion. Think of it this way, Isabel: when I was your age, you were three and a half years old. You may not remember that you had a point of view, too, but you did, and your point of view was that I was not the preferred person, that I was not really the mom. And that was my point of view, too. Just giving birth didn’t actually make me feel like the mom. In my mind, your grandmother simply defined what a mom was, and she seemed to define what a mom was for you, too. I was that young. Now, you tell me, what could I have done about that?”
“You’re blaming a baby?”
Isabel could not really have said what she thought of this story, because, unfortunately, she was too well educated in sympathizing with working-class women of color not to respond in spite of herself, but though she was accustomed to sympathizing with Delphine, it was novel to be sympathizing, even remotely, with Zoe. It was unfortunate, as well, that Zoe’s take on the whole thing was so believable that you could write a paper about it—“Working Girls: The Sociology of Female Stardom in the Hollywood Movie Industry, 1940–1990.” Still, she said, “You’re blaming a baby?”
Zoe looked exasperated now. She exclaimed, “I’m not blaming you, Isabel. I’m saying that you came into the world with a strong personality and that I was surrounded by strong personalities. Do you think I’m lying?”
Isabel resisted, but then she admitted, “No. But you have a strong personality.”
Zoe leaned back and then leaned forward again, which seemed to push Isabel back no matter how much she wanted to hold her ground. Zoe said, “Do I? I have no idea, actually. To me, it seems like I just do as I am told.”
In fact, Isabel could not have said exactly how or why she had entered into this conflict at this moment, in this place, on this day. An hour and a half ago, she would have said she was content with things, practically happy. She wanted to go back to her own bright fire-lookout of a room, and she was about to. She wanted to have a really good talk with her dad and actually work out what her next life-step was, and she was about to. Stoney and Simon, in their different ways, had been entertaining, and then—admittedly, stoned—she had slept well. When she woke up this morning, the Iraq war and global warming had actually seemed to be problems she could deal with. But she’d overheard Zoe in the hallway, tossing off that meaningless but intrusive and unwarranted remark, and then she’d been in the dining room and Zoe had come in with that self-satisfied look on her face.
Zoe said, “Anyway, you know she lost a baby when she was in Jamaica.”
“I know that.”
“So you can imagine that she was obsessed with safety.”
“I know that.”
“So she kept me absolutely safe.”
“I know that, too.”
“Well, then, when you came along, and you were premature, though pretty big and healthy, it was automatic for her to decide that my expertise and commitment to safety, at the age of nineteen and having had no real child-care responsibilities in my life, left something to be desired.”
“But you didn’t have to move out.” And now here she was, thought Isabel, saying this utterly obvious and mistaken thing; her line for years had been, Thank God she moved out and took her entourage with her! Just last night, she had remarked to Stoney that it was a shame they couldn’t stay here for a day or two without Zoe and Paul and Charlie and, yes, Simon, and even Elena (because, though she liked Elena well enough, Elena was incredibly, though subtly, ubiquitous). Even Cassie could go. Stoney had said, “I’m not sure I’m ready for the unadulterated scrutiny of you and me if we were here with just Max and Delphine,” and she hadn’t had an answer for that, except, “It’s going to happen sooner or later.” Her arguments with her mother seemed to have a rhetoric of their own that never, ever truly reflected t
he complexity of her feelings.
“You and Delphine came to the set with me every day until it was time for you to go to school. You remember that time we filmed in North Carolina? And that time in England? That was part of the contracts. I had those two trailers, and you and your grandmother occupied one and my junk occupied the other, and that went on for five years, and you remember that, right?”
“It was fun.” Isabel didn’t say that going to the set when Zoe was working was more fun than staying home when she wasn’t working, which had seemed utterly dull and isolated by comparison. She didn’t say it because it didn’t seem to suit her argument, and it did seem as though, with everything she did say, her argument kept dissipating and transforming into something she herself didn’t understand.
“Well, you were a cute kid, and everyone always made a big deal of you, and you liked it when the girls would do your hair and put makeup on you and dress you up—”
“And there were horses and other animals sometimes. It was fun.” She stressed the “was.”
Zoe seemed to ignore the stress. “Well, you were no trouble, except, once, I had to do a scene where I fell in a river and had to drown, and you started screaming and wouldn’t stop until I came out and got dried off and dressed and you were sure that I was all right. Delphine actually made the director stop filming for an hour so that you wouldn’t have permanent emotional scars. We never let you watch after that, because we weren’t sure what you were making of things. But then it was time for you to go to school, and of course that made it different, so you started staying home, and Mom was staying home with you, and it was more like regular people, with me going out to work and coming home at the end of the day.”
Then she said, “So the first movie I did that you stayed home from was Something Good, that movie with Nick Nolte, did you ever see that? It was something really bad in the end, but we had fun on the set, and that was the first time in my whole life that Delphine wasn’t around for some reason.” Isabel felt herself go on the alert. She could not have said why, but she wasn’t exactly surprised when Zoe continued: “The first time! Isn’t that amazing? So of course I fell in love.”