by Ann Hood
When he walks in, she holds the door open and peers into the hallway. No ophthalmologist waiting there.
“Where’s the U-Haul?” Katherine asks.
“I parked it in a garage,” Andy says.
He seems nervous. His jaw muscles are twitching slightly, the way they used to before he took a big exam, or first performed surgery.
“I thought maybe we could have some lunch first,” he says.
“Great,” Katherine says, leading him to the couch. When he sits, she adds, “Can you believe this was my bed?”
He blushes slightly, and shrugs.
“It’ll be good to have a real one,” she continues.
“A real one?”
“Bed,” Katherine says.
“Oh. Right,” Andy says, and blushes again.
Just when she thought it never would, the awkwardness passes, and Katherine finds herself telling Andy everything she can think of to tell him. She talks about Lucy. She tells him about Julia, and the Chinese delivery boy-drummer. She talks about the way here in New York, you can buy socks and earrings and 100 percent wool scarves right on the street corner.
He is talking too. She has long ago forgotten his enthusiasm for medicine. But now she remembers. He describes patients and treatments in loving detail, and Katherine finds herself warmed somehow by this, by sitting here beside him and listening to his voice.
What she wonders as he talks is whether it is worth giving up this familiarity, this ease and comfort, for passion. All those dinners when she sat across the table from strangers, she was waiting for a lightning bolt to strike, for Fourth of July to begin, for that feeling she gets now in the dark with Spencer. But, she keeps thinking, is it worth losing this?
Andy is saying, “I know you would love the food there, Kat. The menu changes every night. It’s like getting surprised, you know?”
“Yes,” she says. “I know.”
Andy stops talking and smiles at her. “Of course you do,” he says.
There are no lightning bolts, no fireworks. It’s the same. She can predict where he will touch her next, how many times he will move inside her before he’s finished. Whatever Andy has been doing with Shelly, these things have not changed. But still, Katherine feels happier than she has since she first came here filled with satisfaction and courage.
What he says when he catches his breath again is, “I must be nuts.”
“Why?”
He strokes her cheek. “Because I would go right now, this very minute, down to city hall and marry you.”
Katherine turns to face him. Their eyes are very close. She can feel his breath on her. It smells like Scope. “You would?” she whispers.
Andy nods. “I guess that makes me the biggest pushover ever.”
“What about Shelly?” Katherine asks him.
“I don’t love Shelly,” he says. “I love you.”
They did not bother to open up the couch. Instead, Andy opened the quilt he had brought her and spread it on the floor. Now, he pulls it over them both, wraps them in it like a cocoon. Katherine smells detergent, and knows he had it washed before he brought it to her. She knows that he tightened the nails in the furniture, and polished the wood. She moves still closer to him, until she is pressed against him completely. Andy sighs softly when their bodies touch.
“Are you still blue?” he whispers to her. She is, but it is different now. She knows there are no right answers, no true things to do. She thinks about passion and the way her insides seem to melt when she and Spencer make love. She thinks about this very instant, how right it feels to have Andy here with her.
“Right now,” she says finally, “I couldn’t be happier.” Andy hugs her. “Really?” he says. “Really?”
Katherine nods. For this instant, that’s the truth.
Aliens and other invasions
BEFORE HER FATHER RAN off with Miss Texas, Julia can remember a different childhood. In it, she does not yet have to buy her clothes in the big girls’ department. Her mother boldly ventures out, not only around their own neighborhood, but frequently into Manhattan, where she eats lunch in restaurants and goes to theater matinees on Wednesday afternoons. Her father is in those memories too. Not as a blur the way he lives in her mind today, but as a man who stood in the middle of Garfield Place and played catch with her. He wears a sweatshirt and faded blue jeans. And her mother cheers them on from the stoop. Everyone, in these images, is smiling—Julia, her mother, her father, even passersby.
Can it really be that the warm Saturday morning when Julia’s father left them was the last time her mother smiled? That it was in that instant that the apartment grew dark and airless? That Julia ballooned into a fat, lonely child and her mother stopped going out? Julia isn’t sure. But she knows there were months of dinners from restaurants that delivered. Pizza, Chinese, and BBQ chicken. She knows there were months when she dressed herself for school, did the laundry, brought her mother meals in bed; when her mother did not open the shades on the windows or even leave her bedroom.
When Julia started doing the grocery shopping, she used to eat her way through the aisles, pushing pink iced cupcakes into her mouth, small bags of Fritos, Scooter Pies. Her mother sent her for tests on her thyroid. “How can you be so fat when we hardly keep any food in the house?” she used to say. But her thyroid was fine. At school she started to pay other kids for their lunch desserts. Oreos and Twinkies and homemade brownies. There seemed to be a spot inside her that Julia could not fill up, no matter how hard she tried.
On tells her that she is not fat. But she can’t see that. She tells him about all the food she used to eat. “But Julia,” he says, “that was a long time ago.” Still, she looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.
What Julia wants to know is if her memories are real. She wants to know if her mother really stood on that stoop cheering and smiling, if her father played catch with her. She wants to know what is true and what isn’t.
Her mother is not exactly agoraphobic. She sometimes takes a cab into Manhattan and meets with her editor or agent. She goes to the movies on Flatbush Avenue on Sunday afternoons by herself. It is just that she doesn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. But On tells Julia that she should clear things up with her mother. That she should spend some time with her. “You never know,” he says. And Julia agrees.
She fills the loft with fresh flowers. Spring flowers. She puts them in old jars that she buys at a flea market in SoHo. She sells her earrings at that flea market too. Her new designs are made from nuts and bolts and screws. She shops in hardware stores on Canal Street. She is amazed by the varieties of these things, by all the possibilities there are.
On does not work for his uncle anymore. Instead, his band keeps getting more and more gigs all over town. Julia spends her nights watching them. Most nights, On goes home with her. She tells Lucy that she feels an order to things that she has never felt before. She tells Lucy her own life is becoming clearer and that she wants to go to film school. She has so many ideas. She wants to write screenplays, and she outlines them in great detail for Lucy and Katherine.
Sometimes, when she is alone at the loft in the late afternoon, and the light comes through the large windows, Julia almost gasps out loud. The light shifts and spills, and she cannot believe that all of this—these flowers bursting from jars, On’s shirt tossed across a chair, this furniture and these nut-and-bolt earrings, are all her doing.
It is on one of these late afternoons, just before the sky turns violet, that Julia calls her mother and says, “Tomorrow I’m taking you to lunch.”
“Oh,” her mother says. “I don’t think so, Julia. Not tomorrow.”
“Yes. Tomorrow. I want you to get in a cab and meet me in the city.”
Her mother says, “I’m sorry. It’s just not possible.”
Julia keeps talking, as if her mother hasn’t refused. “On Broome Street there’s this great little place. We’ll meet there at one, okay?”
“No, no. Not at one.
”
“Mom,” Julia says, “there is no good reason for you not to have lunch with me at one o’clock tomorrow at the Cupping Room.”
She hears her mother breathing hard. She imagines the miles between them, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the stretch of Flatbush Avenue.
“Come on,” Julia says softly.
“Well,” her mother says. “Well.”
“Good,” Julia says. Then she repeats the name and address of the restaurant again.
Her mother walks into the restaurant like an alien arriving on a new planet. She squints and bumps into things. Her eyes dance around the room, not even settling on Julia but rather observing the waitresses and the food and other customers as if they are foreign and new to her. Finally Julia goes over to her, takes her by the arm, and leads her to their table.
Even though it is April and mild weather, her mother wears a black wool coat. She refuses to take it off, and keeps it buttoned to the neck.
“Relax,” Julia tells her.
Instead, her mother inspects all of the silverware, then carefully wipes each piece with her napkin.
“You know,” Julia says, “it’s the most normal thing in the world for a mother and daughter to have lunch together.”
“Oh,” her mother says, rubbing a spoon with a hard vigorous motion, “I know that. Meredith always has lunch with Jodi. Every Friday, like a date.”
Meredith is her mother’s agent. Julia nods. “See,” she says.
Her mother relaxes a little, but when it is time for them to order, she can’t decide what to have. The waitress stands, tapping her pen against her order pad, sighing loudly.
“Maybe you could come back?” Julia says to her.
“No!” her mother says. “You do it. Just order the food.”
The waitress rolls her eyes. Her name tag says BeBe.
“What kind of name is BeBe?” Julia’s mother asks her.
“French,” the waitress says.
Julia begins to order. Once she starts, she can’t seem to stop. She orders appetizers, soup, sandwiches, and an omelette. She orders juice and coffee and water.
When the waitress walks away, Julia’s mother says, “I never heard of the name BeBe. Have you?”
Julia shakes her head no.
Her mother opens her purse and takes out a little notepad. Carefully she prints BEBE. FRENCH.
“Who knows?” she says. “Maybe Vicky Valentine can save a little French girl named BeBe somehow. It’s good to know these things.”
The food comes and fills the small round table. There is no room for the bud vase or the wine list. Julia has to move them to make room for all the food.
Her mother tastes everything and likes none of it. Still, she keeps taking small, birdlike bites from each plate, then wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“I want to ask you something,” Julia says finally. “I want to know if Daddy ever played catch with me in the street. If he used to have a Princeton sweatshirt and high-top sneakers. If you used to wear pink lipstick.”
“Probably,” her mother says, continuing to taste and frown.
“Yes or no?”
Her mother stops, puts down her fork. “I hate that man,” she says.
“I know,” Julia says. “I guess I do too. Remember how he used to promise to come and get me? Or how he’d tell me I could go there?”
“How could I have been so foolish? That’s what I ask myself. To have loved someone like that.” She shakes her head.
“You didn’t know he was going to leave you,” Julia says.
“There were signs. Lipstick on his shirts. Expensive perfume on him. I didn’t want to know.”
Julia tries to focus on those good memories, when everything seemed clean and light.
“He used to teach you how to pitch,” her mother is saying. “Sidearm. Curveball. You could do them all.”
Julia feels tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” her mother says, “don’t get upset about it. When he left us, I spent months trying to think of what to do. That’s how I came up with Vicky Valentine. A brave little girl who has a good family on Park Avenue. I thought she’d help you.”
“Help me?” Julia says. “I hated her. I thought she was the daughter you wanted. Blond and cute, saving lives and solving mysteries.”
Her mother smiles sadly. “There are no Vicky Valentines,” she says. “I thought you knew that.”
“Ma,” Julia says, “it took me a long time to figure that out.” Her fingers bend, start to remember something else. When you throw a curveball, she thinks, you put two fingers on the seams. You twist your wrist. You put a spin on the ball.
On is right, Julia thinks. You never know. When she put her mother in a cab home, her mother said, “I don’t want to do this a lot. No offense but it’s not my cup of tea. It would be nice if you came by more often though.” Somehow, this makes Julia relieved and happy. There is no June Cleaver lurking in her mother. There is no Vicky Valentine lurking in herself.
She stops and buys food at Dean & DeLuca. She spends too much money on ravioli stuffed with wild mushrooms, on homemade cream sauce. She feels extravagant.
When Julia walks into the loft, she stops dead in her tracks. There is a woman dressed in a blue crushed velvet jumpsuit standing in the middle of the floor, scowling. Even though Julia is sure burglars don’t dress like this, Why else would a strange woman be in her apartment?
“If you move,” Julia says, “I’ll scream.”
“Are you the woman staying here?”
Julia straightens her back. “I live here,” she says. “Yes.”
“Good,” the woman says. “Then maybe you can tell me where all this shit came from.”
“Who are you?” Julia asks.
“Holly Kaye.”
The name sounds vaguely familiar, like a name she’s seen in a magazine or something.
“This is my apartment,” Holly Kaye says.
“Your apartment?” Julia says. Her legs start to wobble slightly.
“I came by for a few things and I find … clutter. Everywhere.”
She has on pancake makeup, bright lipstick. And Julia thinks she is wearing a wig and false eyelashes. She wants Holly Kaye to leave, to take her few things and get out.
“I mean,” Holly Kaye is saying, “you were told that this was like a temporary arrangement. I’m only in Atlantic City. I didn’t relocate or anything. You’re not supposed to move shit in.”
She is definitely wearing a wig, Julia decides. Real hair is not that color red. Real hair moves.
“I mean,” Holly Kaye says again, “I’ll be back in June. You and your shit have got to go.”
Julia moves into the room and starts to unload her groceries. She tries to pretend this woman isn’t here. She remembers that Holly Kaye is a lounge singer working in Atlantic City. When she first moved in, Julia had found publicity pictures of her dressed in a miniskirt and white go-go boots.
“I have a car waiting,” Holly Kaye says. “I don’t like this.” She sweeps her arms outward. “I don’t like clutter.”
Julia keeps unpacking.
A horn starts to honk outside the window.
“That’s Wayne,” Holly Kaye says. “I could tell the agency, you know. You could lose this job.”
Julia shrugs. “I’m getting my own place anyway,” she says. “So I don’t care if you tell them.”
“A wiseass, huh?” Holly Kaye says. “Don’t get too comfy.”
After she leaves, Julia discovers that Holly Kaye has walked off with some of her nuts-and-bolts earrings. But this doesn’t make her angry. Instead, she laughs. Then she washes the floor where Holly Kaye stood, trying to reclaim the apartment. She washes and washes until long after the sky has darkened from violet to inky blue. But something has been taken away.
Good morning, America!
“LUCY,” ASHLEY HAYES SAYS, “this is big. I mean big.”
They are sitting in a midtown restaurant eating lunch. It is the kin
d of place that Lucy and Jasper used to say they would go and celebrate at when one of them became famous. “Or,” Jasper used to say, “when one of us actually gets paid for our art.”
Ashley Hayes, the My Dolly editor, wears thick black-framed glasses and a bustier under a short black jacket. She has already asked Lucy who her colorist is, and it took Lucy a few minutes to realize they were talking about hair and not illustrations.
“Coloring books, a boy dolly, a wardrobe,” Ashley Hayes is saying.
They are sitting underneath a large plaster breast. Across the restaurant, on another wall, hangs a plaster nose.
Lucy nods as Ashley continues.
“A sister, paper dolls.” Ashley smiles. Her lipstick is very red. Paloma Picasso red. “You are going to be rich,” she says.
Lucy thinks, This is happening to someone else.
“We want it by Christmas,” Ashley says. “Intense work but I know you can do it.”
“Yes,” Lucy says, finally speaking. “I can.”
The waiter arrives and places Lucy’s pumpkin ravioli in front of her. There are julienned strips of squash on top of it.
“Simplicity,” Ashley says, twirling her black squid-ink spaghetti on her fork. “That’s the key to the success of this. Boy Dolly. Baby Dolly. No fancy names. No fancy clothes. When you came up with that drawing, you hit on something, Lucy. That book hits the stands next month. Get ready.”
Suddenly, all of Lucy’s time is spent at her drawing table by the window. She has to finish the counting book for Nathaniel. She has to get to work on clothes for My Dolly and on Boy Dolly and Baby Sister Dolly. She has taped a picture on the wall above the table. It is her third-grade class picture. There she is, in the back with the tall children. And there, in the front, is Harriet Becker with her tangled dirty-blond hair. She is looking down at the floor. Her dress is too long, a faded blue checked one with puffy sleeves.
At home in Massachusetts, Lucy searched through her closet until she found this picture. She brought it into the kitchen and asked her mother whatever happened to Harriet Becker.