I glanced out the front window at the weird agglomeration of three-, four-, and six-foot pickets that graced the edge of the lawn. “I was wondering about that,” I said, “but now tell me about your artistic selection of colors for said fence. I like what you did with the blaze orange and the fuchsia, but I’m not sure about the pea green and the chartreuse. And the barn red, isn’t that a bit retro?”
“Why Em,” said Betty Bloom, smiling her prettiest, “I just wanted the city to know how much I appreciated their regulations. And besides, what redhead is fully at home without such subtle hues?”
“Of course,” said I. “What was I thinking?”
We put together a lunch of kippers, whole-wheat bread, and mayonnaise (my contribution), and hummus, tabouli, and crisp fresh greens (hers) while Stanley chased cattle through the vast pastures of his dreams.
At 3:30, I pulled into the parking lot in front of the main building of Cecelia’s chic girl’s prep school. As it was another splendid spring day and school had just let out, the front steps of the building were awash with adolescent females, most clothed and brushed and primped within a gnat’s eyelash of looking like they were preparing for a photo shoot for some fashion magazine. As I mentally calculated the expense some of these creatures had gone to to turn themselves out for school, I began to understand why Cecelia had spent so much time, once her tears had dried, in telling me what I should wear to this event.
Some of the girls were bright-eyed and lively, others proud and haughty, still others painfully depressed. My charge fell in the latter category, I decided, as I moved into the throng.
I didn’t see Cecelia anywhere along the steps, which was the place we had agreed to meet. Stopping a smooth-faced blonde with half-lowered eyelids, I asked if she had seen her. “Oh, her? I don’t keep track of her.”
I tried another girl, an athletic-looking sort with a glisteningly oily face and nice manners, and another, a plump asthmatic with braces, but no one had seen Cecelia. “We’re just waiting for our mothers,” a redhead in pea green leggings offered, as if that should be all the information I needed. I found a seat on a stone bench at one end of the steps and prepared to wait.
As I waited, a long procession of BMWs, Volvo station wagons, and Mercedes coupes found their way down the long drive and circled in front of the steps, and girl after girl peeled out to be wafted away in her carriage. It was great theater, as each deb came up with her own variant on studied boredom while she dropped lazily into the waiting cushions of her parents’ forty- or fifty-thousand-dollar runabout. Before long, my eyes glazed with the ostentatiousness of the displays and I found myself eavesdropping on the conversations.
“Who’s she?” one six-foot-and-rail-skinny type asked the blonde with the dropping eyelids as she eyed me suspiciously.
“Oh, just someone looking for that Cecelia slut.”
“Oh,” said the rail.
A second blonde turned and joined the discussion, saying, “Oh, Heather, you’re just fascinated with sex yourself.”
“Am not.”
“Are.”
“Slut.”
“Whore.”
“Just where do you get off, Lily? I hear you’re doing it with that Jamison pig. Don’t his zits pop all over you when he comes?”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Oh, sure.”
Fascinated as I was by the verbal sophistication of their repartee, I got up and began to pace. Where was Cecelia? Had she forgotten the timing of our plans?
Just then, one of the enormous glass doors at the top of the steps crashed open, and all those jaded eyes involuntarily turned to see who had thrown it open. There, triumphant in a cloak of haughtiness a deeper shade of blue-black than any other present there that day, stood Cecelia Menken, my charge. I had the good sense not to call out, Get a move on, Celie, or we’ll be late for our appointment with that shrink!
Seeing me, Cecelia began to pick her way down through the mass of gawking onlookers, carrying herself in a fair parody of the regent allowing her subjects to observe her. I played along with things a little, meeting her halfway up the staircase with a gentle kiss and a half hug. Nodding gravely, Cecelia acknowledged me. “The outfit’s pretty good,” she whispered, “but did you have to bring that truck?”
“Hang in there,” I whispered back, and then, loudly enough so that every pair of ears could hear me, I said, “Sorry, Cecelia, but my Jaguar is in the shop today getting the leather seats oiled, and my man took my Cherokee to A Basin, so I had to bring the truck I use to haul compost for my herb garden. But perhaps you’d like to drive it, as practice. You know, for when your dad gets you a new truck so you can trailer your horse to the shows.”
Cecelia’s eyes lighted up. “Sure,” she chirped.
After we’d loaded up and Cecelia had treated me to a neck-snapping job of gearshifting that miraculously shot us through the gate and a mile down the road without backfiring the engine, I told her to pull over. “Enough practice for today,” I said evenly. “And besides, we’re late. Gotta put old Bessie here to the mistress’s hand.”
“Thanks, Em,” was all Cecelia had to say, as she settled back into her usual depressed glower.
“Did you like driving it?”
“No, it sucked. Why don’t you trade this in for something with an automatic? Coulda broken my shoulder trying to shift this thing.”
We argued the comparative merits of automatic versus standard shifts the rest of the way into Denver, where I stowed the reviled pickup in a lot and goosed Cecelia up the steps to Tina Schwartz’s second-story counseling rooms. Tina met us at the door and gave Cecelia a greeting that was full of gentle smiles. “Why don’t you sit wherever you feel comfortable,” she said.
I looked around the large room and saw a few padded swivel chairs and a broad camelback couch, but there were also piles of soft, inviting cushions in other corners of the room, should anyone feel more comfortable on the floor. A wide table was decked with modeling clay and stacks of craft paper and marking crayons, and there were weird creative output of very upset clients all along the walls and on the bookcases.
Cecelia dumped herself at one end of the couch and glared suspiciously around the room.
“I’ll just sit on one of these swivel chairs, Cecelia,” Tina said, “and Em, you sit wherever you’d like. Maybe Cecelia would like you to sit with her on the couch, to keep her company.”
I sat, and Tina got Cecelia talking enough to ask about the paints and drawing supplies on the table. Tina explained that many of her clients found it helpful to put their feelings into pictures. Cecelia looked doubtful but interested. In a few minutes, we moved to the topic that had brought us through the door: Cecelia’s trauma. “It must be awful to lose your mother, and lose her in that way, Cecelia,” Tina said. “Em tells me you can’t remember the event.”
Cecelia began to pick viciously at her cuticles. “No,” she mumbled. “But it’s behind me, you know? I don’t like to talk about it.”
Tina nodded respectfully. “Your call. Is there anything else on your mind you’d like to talk about? How about school, or your friends?”
Cecelia drew in her shoulders, looked furtively around the room. “Who cares about those bitches?” she said.
“They were really something,” I said.
Cecelia shot me a look of warning or thanks—I was not sure which.
I kept talking. “I mean, Tina, I went to pick her up and there were all these stuck-up babes with expensive haircuts, all standing around accusing one another of being interested in sex, like that’s something sick or abnormal. How’s an adolescent girl with a reasonably healthy endocrine system supposed to have anything else on her mind?”
Tina nodded. “I know, it’s a tough age.”
Cecelia began to search her hair for split ends, making a great show of ignoring us, but she had shrunk even farther down into the couch, and the one long, skinny leg she had slung over the other was now hooked tightly back behind t
he other heel like she was trying to twist herself into a knot.
Tina said, “Cecelia, you’re here to find out if you want us to work together. What do you need to know about me?”
Cecelia stared at the floor, said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”
Tina rose and showed her to the door. “It’s right down the hall to the left,” she said.
When Cecelia was well out of earshot, I said, “Tina, I brought that up to try to get Cecelia talking, but those girls really horrified me. Why do they call each other names like ‘whore’ and ‘slut’? Okay, some of them looked like they were on the way down to Colfax Avenue for an afternoon of soliciting, but that’s just the style, right?”
Tina shook her head. “The good old double standard’s still alive and well. We don’t treat girls with a whole lot of respect as they become women, don’t say, ‘Hey, you’re a woman now; congratulations!’ Instead, we say, ‘Now, don’t you get in trouble.’ We give girls such confused, devaluating messages. Where are our positive role models? Can’t think of many other than a chaste Madonna, eh? Next stop: Mother Teresa. Most children’s books that show someone being clever or adventuresome or leading others are about boys, so what does that tell us?”
“But why are women nasty to women?”
“Well, as we move toward middle age, women usually do start being more supportive of each other. We all know the punch line by then, know the joke was on us. But when we’re young, we’re really, honestly competing for the male of the species. And what’s the image we aspire to? We’re supposed to be pure and giving, but also drop-dead sexually attractive. When we grow old, we fear we’ll be castoffs. My uncle used to have a joke that went, ‘When your aunt gets to be fifty, I’m going to trade her in on two twenty-fives.’”
I laughed in spite of myself.
Tina continued. “We’re so upset about growing old in a society that has no use for old women that we project hatred and distrust on the young. That would piss anyone off.”
“But Miriam didn’t feel that way about Cecelia. At least I don’t think she did. Hell, she was out having an affair … .” My words trailed off as I tried to fit this piece into the puzzle Miriam had left behind.
Tina said, “Miriam didn’t have to feel that way, but if she didn’t actively campaign to give her daughter another outlook, the negative message was right there waiting to take over. I’ll bet Cecelia has the normal stack of videos in her home collection. Look at the story of Snow White: the jealous old queen who casts her out. What does that tell us? And her name’s Snow White, for heaven’s sake.”
“Yeah, not Horny Young Babe Looking for Experience,” I said.
Tina grinned. “Right, so what does Snow White do? She goes to live with seven little midgets with personality flaws, cleaning up after them without even being asked. In my business, we call that codependency. What kind of self-esteem or fulfillment do we see there? Then the queen tracks her down and really gets nasty. She appears as this ugly old hag and talks her into eating an apple, just so we don’t go around thinking old can really be beautiful, and with that apple motif, we’re back to the Bible, for heaven’s sake, blaming women for original sin.”
“Knowledge is evil,” I said, wondering again what Miriam had learned in her flight from the proscribed narrow path of decency.
Tina was warming to her story. “Okay, so the queen shows up as the hag and KO’s Snow White, but hang on to your hat: the only thing that will save her is love’s first kiss. Get the image? She needs a man to save her, but she’s got to be a cherry, or she’s got to stay in the glass coffin! God help her she should have experimented with anyone else!”
“But voilà, here comes the handsome prince,” I said.
Tina opened her hands skyward. “And that’s the end of the story, girls! He gives her a little peck, loads her on his horse, and they’re out of there. You remember the last words on the screen in the Disney version?”
“Wasn’t it, ‘And they lived happily ever after’?”
“In Gothic script, no less!”
“Like that’s the end of a woman’s story,” I said, thinking wryly of my lonely bed in a rented room. I tried to put Jim Erikson into that picture, but my overheated brain handed me the image of Chandler Jennings instead, smiling at me, turning the bed’s cold sheets into warm, soft sheepskin. Shaking the image from my mind, I tried to preoccupy myself with wondering just how long Cecelia was going to hide in that bathroom.
Laughing, Tina was saying, “So here’s the message, girls: keep house for emotionally stunted slobs and someday a prince will come save us!”
“Save us from what?” I asked.
Tina shrugged. “From having to grow up, perhaps?”
THIRTY
AS my laboring truck hauled us up the grade toward the point where Interstate 70 slices into the mountain front, I asked Cecelia what she thought of Tina Schwartz.
In reply, she mumbled something acidic, like “Psychologists suck.”
“You seemed pretty amenable to making a second appointment with her.”
“Do I get a choice?”
“Yes, damn it!”
Cecelia shot a hurt look at me, and I realized that I had in fact shouted at her. Why, because she wasn’t thrilled with my attempts at passing her off to someone else? Maybe it doesn’t suit her to get well, I thought. Then I’d be gone again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “All you need is one more person telling you to pull yourself together, and then running off somewhere. Would it help if I promised to stay in better touch?”
Cecelia’s eyes slid briefly toward me, then back to the road in front of us. Her posture was caved in, a slack monument to noncommunication.
I tried to make my voice soft and solicitous. “You know, it’s a long, hard life you got ahead of you.”
The truck ground steadily up the interstate. The landscape rolled by in a chaotic flow as we climbed through the towering earth-guts road cuts of Mount Vernon Canyon, a jumble of Precambrian migmatites that looked like God had stepped on her toothpaste tube with the cap off. So wild and beautiful were these squiggles of mashed earth history that they always caught my eye, but Cecelia looked neither left nor right.
“I’ve been reading your mother’s journals,” I said. “She seemed a complicated woman. Had a temper, huh? I’ll bet it felt like shit when she took off on you like that,” I added, kind of wallowing around in my own muddle of guilt and imperfect intentions. “I’ll bet—”
Cecelia wheeled on me. “Do me a favor,” she spat, her eyes wide with fear and rage. “Get out of my life!”
“Listen, Celie, maybe your memory’s not really lost. Like, maybe it’s just sitting there by the road behind you, like you kind of left it there because it was too heavy to carry.”
“Get out! Get out! GET OUT!” Cecelia screamed, so loudly that my ears began to ring. Her face went purple, a writhing mass of pain and anger.
I forced myself to look at the road, to remember that I was guiding a ton of metal up a hard surface at high speed. Okay, then, I’ll get out, I told myself. I don’t need this. Clearly, I am not welcome. Those are fighting words, and I see no tears coming out of those eyes. I will have a short chat with her father, in which I will tell him that I think we have a therapist who might get somewhere with the problem—his guess is as good as mine.
And then what? Thanks very much, I’ll be sending a final accounting sometime next week, and how about those job contacts?
Well, not exactly … . I’d perhaps add that I intend to take another spin up into Wyoming to cross my T’s and dot my I’s … .
But it didn’t go quite that way.
I parked the truck in Menken’s driveway and followed Cecelia into the Menkens’ big, impersonal house, chasing along behind her to make certain she did not slam the door between us, forcing me to wait on the front doorstep until her father came home and relieved me of the duty of “watching” her.
Cecelia careened into the kitchen and made for the pantry and
a very large bag of jalapeno potato chips. She was obviously not going to offer me some, so I took my own turn in the pantry, reemerging with a bag of taco chips. I chewed hard, trying. Having something to chew would help me to calm down, to remember that I cared about this girl.
The better to ignore my presence, Cecelia punched the message button on the answering machine. “Hi, Cecelia,” a recorded voice said unpleasantly, as if the name tasted foul in her mouth, “I need a ride to school tomorrow. You can pick me up at the usual time. Bye. Oh, this is Heather.” Heather, the blasé blonde from the steps of Cecelia’s school? Was she the “friend” Miriam named in her journal, the girl she overheard Cecelia talking to about Chandler?
“Bite me,” Cecelia screamed at the machine, her shoulders beginning to shake. She almost dropped her bag of chips.
The machine beeped and went on with a second message. “Hi, sweetheart, this is your dad. I’m on my way home, so please keep Em there with you until I get there. I need to speak with her. Thank you, darling, and see you soon.”
The machine gave a time trace for each call, and I calculated the time when we’d see J. C.’s Mercedes swing into the driveway. I didn’t have much time. I said, “Who’s this Heather creature, and why’s she bugging you for rides to school if she’s so blessed antisocial?”
Only Flesh and Bones Page 19