Lala Pettibone's Act Two

by Heidi Mastrogiovanni

“I had it comin’.”

  “You certainly did.”

  “God love her, Aunt Geraldine read me the riot act. Which was apparently exactly what I needed that morning. I guess you could say, though of course I had no idea at the time, that that morning was when Act Two of my Act Two officially began to begin.”

  Laugh Allowed

  “Stop it,” Geraldine said. “Get in here. Stop whimpering and do not make me regret offering you refuge.”

  “I shall swath myself in cotton from head to foot,” Lala declared tearfully. She stood in the doorway and twitched, and Geraldine had to grab her and drag her inside. “I will never show my skin again. I will never be naked again, in any context whatsoever. I swear, I had you pegged for sexy nightwear.”

  “I don’t wear this when I have male guests,” Geraldine huffed.

  She marched Lala into the kitchen and sat her down in the breakfast nook. Then Geraldine opened a cupboard and pulled out a large steel bowl.

  “I’m making pancakes. And we’re having mimosas.”

  “Omigod, that’s a great idea,” Lala said. She lunged for the refrigerator and thrust the door open. “I’ll be the bartender. You’re out of orange juice? I don’t see any in here. We don’t need it.”

  Lala sat in the nook drinking while Geraldine mixed and flipped.

  “I truly wish I hadn’t done any of that last night. I had such a great time with David. Gérard? We never had sex. Which in hindsight I see is a good thing. So I was thinking David will help me stop thinking about Gérard, and then it turns out David is delightful, and now I’m already mooning for David. I don’t know, maybe there’s still hope. Maybe David’s horrible. Maybe I’ll find out he’s wanted in seventeen states for deceiving widows out of their money. What if he dies on that sailing trip? What if I never see him again? I’ve gotten so good at feeling sad. How will I ever not feel alone at the rate I’m going?”

  Geraldine placed two plates full of fluffy silver dollar pancakes on the table and sat down opposite Lala.

  “These are gorgeous,” Lala said. She grabbed a fistful and shoved them in her mouth. “Forgive my manners. I’m stuffing down pain with food.”

  “Listen to me,” Geraldine said. “You are done complaining. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lala said. “God, these are delicious. You should open up a little breakfast café. In your courtyard.”

  “Let’s stay on point, shall we? Do not make me show you news footage of people who are really suffering. Do you understand?”

  “I do. You’re absolutely right. If I could argue with you, I would. But I can’t. I know when I’m being a pill.”

  “Would it be really nice if David lived here and you two lovebirds could maybe see if this one-night-stand had any substance and you could maybe start your lives together?” Geraldine asked.

  “Yup,” Lala said.

  “Yes, it would. Would it be really nice if no one in the world were ever hungry or poor or frightened again?”

  “Yup,” Lala said.

  “Would it be really nice if no one were ever mean to animals, any animals, ever again?”

  “Very nice,” Lala said.

  “Indeed. So what do we do in the meantime? We do our best. And we count our blessings. Do you understand me?”

  “I do,” Lala said.

  “Good. Do not make me fetch a legal pad and stand over you with a ruler while you write a list of all the many things for which you should be grateful.”

  “Actually, by a not entirely surprising coincidence, I was doing exactly that right now in my head. Seriously. I’m not making that up. And it’s a long list.”

  “Of course it is,” Geraldine said.

  Lala stood and lifted her plate and glass.

  “Here, lemme clean up,” she said.

  “Sit,” Geraldine ordered. “I’m not finished with you.”

  Lala sat.

  “Uh oh,” she said.

  “I read your screenplay.”

  “Ohhhh nooooo!” Lala yelled. “Aunt Geraldine, unless you loved it, I’m definitely in no shape to hear you cut it to shreds today, so maybe we should wait for a few decades until I’m stronger and we can—”

  “I loved it,” Geraldine said.

  “What?” Lala whispered. “But it’s got one-dimensional characters and a cheesy—”

  “This is not trigonometry,” Geraldine said. “This is all completely subjective. You know that. Don’t you? I’ve read reviews of A Map Without Latitude. Some people hate that book.”

  “Impossible,” Lala gasped. “That book is genius.”

  “Honey, you think it’s brilliant, and other people eviscerate it. Okay? I rest my case. There are no absolutes in creative work. Except for Jeffrey Koons. I swear, no one can convince me that he’s not kidding with all that huge acrylic crap he creates. I happened to think your screenplay was entirely compelling. I was very involved in the story. I couldn’t put it down.”

  “Wow,” Lala said. “Is there more champagne? I didn’t see any in the fridge. Do you have any hidden elsewhere in the house? We could put it in the freezer, and it would be ready to drink in about fifteen minutes. Or if not, I could run out and get a chilled bottle.”

  “Just do me one favor.”

  “Uh oh,” Lala said.

  “Please rewrite the damn thing as a comedic novel. You need lots of people to get on board, and you need lots of people to agree to give you money before you can get a movie made, am I right?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “But today, you can publish your novel yourself, right away, am I right?”

  “Yes, but . . . a comedic novel?” Lala said. “The story is so sad and tragic.”

  “Think Kingsley Amis. Think Lucky Jim,” Geraldine said.

  “I love that book! I laughed aloud at that book!”

  “I know. I did as well. Because it’s delightful. So please reread Lucky Jim, and please be inspired by it, and then please make your story laugh-aloud hilarious. Because, as much as I love the characters and their journey, at several points in the screenplay you’re bordering on—okay, don’t get upset—you’re bordering on bathos.”

  Lala threw her head back. Geraldine thought she heard cartilage cracking somewhere in her niece’s body.

  “Bathos? I was going for pathos. Damn it!”

  “The title’s funny,” Geraldine said. “So make the damn book funny. Now, clear this table and go upstairs and do your best. With everything. Because you know what today is, right?”

  “I do?”

  “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  “Oh, that,” Lala said. She nodded. “That’s true. If I could argue the point, I would. But any way you look at it, today is indeed that.”

  Lala felt a bit unsteady on her feet when she exited Geraldine’s apartment and walked up the stairs to her place. She had been hit with so many intense experiences since she met David less than twenty-four hours earlier. Plus, she had been drinking quite a bit of undiluted champagne since she got to Geraldine’s house because there had, in fact, been no orange juice in the refrigerator, leaving Lala to wonder why Geraldine had mentioned the word “mimosas” in the first place—not that she cared because she loved champagne just by itself.

  But the air was already fresh and warm by the seaside in Manhattan Beach, and the sky was such a lovely shade of bright blue, and, if there were any clouds on the horizon, Lala certainly couldn’t see them.

  Fuck it, Lala thought. Why not seize the moments and do the best I can with them?

  Lala thrust her front door open. Her beasts were draped over the couches and were snoring and did not stir when she entered. Lala manifested a considerable snit as soon as she saw this.

  Oh, sure, she thought. Now you’re passed out. But last night, when I wa
nted to bonk David some more? Then you’re wide-awake and in desperate need of being walked.

  Lala scurried over and tickled her dogs between their toes, which brought all of them to slow, snuffling, old-dog consciousness.

  “Okay, puppy dogs! Up and out! It is a gorgeous day, and we are not going to miss one more minute of it!”

  _______________

  “I think we might walk as far as downtown and see if there’s a pet store that has sunglasses for dogs, shall we?” Lala asked her three hounds, who were all methodically sniffing the sidewalks as Lala tried, without success, to keep them at a little bit of a brisk pace. “Look how lovely this neighborhood is. Look how bright the sun is. At least look up once every five minutes and get your noses off the ground and notice how pleasant this day is, for Chrissake.”

  The troupe passed houses with small yards in a wonderful smorgasbord of styles. Some were classic California Mission, others looked like they belonged in the Cotswolds. Still others could have been transported to Charleston without a hammer swing’s worth of renovation.

  The fences surrounding the properties were also charmingly varied. Brick stood next to white picket which seemed to coexist quite peaceably with the adjacent stucco wall that was having a close relationship with a barrier of hedges on the other side.

  Many of the homes had dogs that barked at Lala and her brood through windows or that rushed out an open front door to greet or confront the newcomers.

  “It kind of kills me to say this,” Lala confessed, “but it’s nice here. Nice. Lots of dogs. Cute, cute, cute, cute, cute homes. I can smell the ocean. I’m kinda having a good time. Here. In California. Without the man whom I just recently spent hours schtupping, and whom I would really love to schtupp again tonight after a long, delicious dinner downtown at some charming restaurant that would then become ‘our place’ and the staff would all know us and adore us because we always leave a huge tip, and the owner would send over bottles of wine and stuff. I’m having a good time right now, right this moment. I’m not fretting. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Lala sat down on the curb and started crying.

  “I don’t know,” Lala sniffed. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “I could be entirely wrong about this. My instincts right now could be as off as my gaydar was in the ‘80s. David could be a lunatic, a thief, a Republican. It’s just that he was so sweet to me, and I think he might be a great guy. You guys never met Terrence. You would have loved him. And he would have loved you. Terrence was a great guy. Uh oh. Uh oh. Pathos-potentially-bordering-on-bathos alert.”

  Lala patted Yootza, Petunia, and Chester, then she abruptly stood and started walking again at an accelerated pace. Her dogs were startled by the steady pull on their leashes to discourage the nonstop sniffing that was their birthright.

  “Let’s get to town, people,” Lala said. “We’ve got a ton of stuff to accomplish today. Our new life beckons.”

  By the time they were headed back to Geraldine’s place more than five hours later, Lala had joined Geraldine’s gym, signed up to volunteer at the Dogs of Love private animal rescue shelter run by a close friend of Geraldine’s, and flirted shamelessly with the adorable waiter at Geraldine’s favorite downtown restaurant that had an outdoor patio where “pooches were most enthusiastically welcome.”

  “Where would we be without Auntie Geraldine, huh?”

  Lala gazed down at her dogs, who were marching at a pace that at first surprised her but then made sense when Lala remembered that they knew dinner was waiting for them at home. The pack looked quite jaunty, with all three sporting their new wraparound, high-UVA-protection doggie sunglasses to protect their eyes from the almost constant Southern California glare.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to make this up to Auntie Geraldine,” Lala continued. “As God is my witness, I will care for her in her dotage, such as it will be because I bet she’ll be a pistol right up to the end, and even that won’t be enough to make up for her saving my life. What the fuck is that?”

  Yootza, Petunia, and Chester were completely thrown off their stride when Lala suddenly started racing down the street, and they had to gallop to keep up. And they were even more confused when she just as suddenly stopped and began walking very slowly. But then their hound noses kicked in, and they saw what Lala was moving toward.

  Up ahead, an especially huge Great Dane was barreling at them with his leash flying in his wake. And behind the dog was a man in an electric wheelchair, giving chase at what was probably the fastest speed the wheelchair could achieve. “Benedict!” the man shouted. “Benedict, come back, please!”

  “Okay,” Lala had enough time to whisper to her dogs. “Let’s not scare Benedict away, okay? Calm energy. Calm.”

  Just as that last word calmly and quietly escaped her lips, Benedict caught sight of the group and altered his course to intercept them. Yootza growled protectively.

  “No growling,” Lala whispered. “Everything is fine.”

  But Yootza was having none of it. He reared up on his stubby hind legs and bared his teeth at the charging monster.

  At which point the charging monster skidded to a halt in front of them, rolled over on his back, and, with his tail wagging, assumed the doggie Esperanto stance for “I submit to your superior status, Mighty One.”

  Yootza was as surprised as Lala. He got back down on all fours and, with a look that indicated he was still on alert for a possible deadly trap being set up by the quivering harlequin pony, sniffed Benedict’s butt.

  “Just know that I will not be lulled into a false sense of security by your admittedly very engaging and believable performance,” Yootza’s attitude seemed to say.

  The man in the wheelchair came puttering up next to them.

  “Wow, your dog is a sweetie pie,” Lala said. Lala rubbed the dog’s vast belly. “What a gentle giant. I love that phrase. Gentle giant. I love that. I love gentle giants.”

  “Thank you,” the man said, his voice quavering. He grabbed Benedict’s leash, but let the dog stay on the ground on his back, where the Great Dane seemed quite happy to be sniffed and rubbed and licked.

  Lala stopped rubbing and stood up. She offered her hand to the man. As she did, she noted that he was a big man with his left leg in a cast, from thigh to toes. The man was, by Lala’s estimation, a few years older than her Aunt Geraldine. He had a welcoming face, despite his lack of any lips to speak of, and one that was made all the more appealing by his clear agitation at having nearly lost his precious dog.

  The man was, by any objective standards, very attractive. Lala smiled at him.

  Hello, she thought. Is it possible that fate has brought me a way to pay back Auntie Geraldine much sooner than I hoped?

  _______________

  “Did your wife decorate the house? It’s lovely.”

  “She did. Just before she passed away last year,” Monty Miller said.

  God, I’m a horrible person, Lala thought. I ask this poor man a leading question just to find out if he’s single.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lala said.

  She took a big bite of a large, fluffy, buttered biscuit. They were sitting in the living room of Monty’s home. The house was quite spacious, but had the cute feeling of a public television set for a broadcast of one of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

  Lala sat in a puffy armchair, and Monty had his broken leg elevated on a recliner. Between them, all four dogs were asleep on a futon that Lala had unfolded when everyone made as though to leap up on it.

  “Wait! Wait, wait, wait!” she had demanded. “It will never accommodate you all like that.”

  Lala refilled Monty’s teacup and then refilled her own. They gazed over at their sleeping dogs.

  “Perfect fit,” Lala said. Monty smiled at her.

  “Are you married, my dear?”

  “Widowed.”

 
Lala saw Monty blanch.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you, Monty. It’s no fun, huh?”

  “No fun at all.”

  “Did you and your wife always live in Manhattan Beach?”

  “No, no, we lived in the other Manhattan. The one in New York. My daughter moved us out here when Trudy got sick.”

  “You lived in Manhattan?” Lala yipped. “So did I! The West Village.”

  “Oh, I always wanted to live there. We planned to move there one day. We were on the Upper East Side.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Lala said. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding, forgive me.”

  “Nothing to forgive,” Monty said. “I’m in agreement. It was fun before gentrification when we moved there after graduate school. But I could only put up with so many precocious youngsters being smiled at with parental smugness while the well-dressed little tykes ran to the curb and barked ‘Taxi!’ with that truly nausea-inducing air of self-conscious superiority that they all seem to affect.”

  “Monty, I adore you,” Lala said. “Hey, I think it’s getting close to cocktail hour. Don’t get up, just tell me where you keep the booze.”

  Two hours later, Lala was cheerfully walking the comfortable distance from Monty’s house to Geraldine’s.

  “You know what I must not do, right?” she asked her dogs. “I must not get ahead of myself. I mustn’t get crazy and have that frantic energy that I so often do and then scare them both away from each other and screw this up entirely.”

  Lala undid the latch on the gate and the dogs calmly walked through to the courtyard with her. They felt no need to bolt up the stairs to their home because Monty had already given them all dinner along with Benedict.

  “Okay, everyone,” Lala said. “Cool is the word. Cool.”

  Lala rapped on Geraldine’s front door. Geraldine opened it with a full martini glass in her hand.

  “Lovely timing,” Geraldine said.

  Lala felt her jaw twitching ever so slightly as she crossed Geraldine’s threshold.

  Don’t do it, she thought. Do not do it.

  Lala walked very, very, very slowly across the tile floor of the entryway.