The Lion is In
Page 1
The Lion Is In
Also by Delia Ephron
NOVELS
Hanging Up
Big City Eyes
NONFICTION
Funny Sauce
HUMOR
How to Eat Like a Child
Teenage Romance
Do I Have to Say Hello?
The Lion Is In
DELIA EPHRON
BLUE RIDER PRESS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York,
New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton
Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd,
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland,
25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin
Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson
Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,
11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017,
India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale,
North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New
Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,
24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2012 by Delia Ephron
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Permission pending for use of an excerpt from “Love Like Law” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelsohn, New York: The Modern Library, 2007.
Copyright © 1976, 1991, 2007 by the Estate of W. H. Auden.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58056-1
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
BOOK DESIGN BY NICOLE LAROCHE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Jerry, heart and soul
Table of Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
The Lion
18
19
Tracee
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Lana
28
29
30
31
32
Rita
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
Three hours south of Baltimore. Six p.m. or so. June third.
Two young women stand by the side of a rural two-lane highway. They are not sure what the road is or where it goes. In a frenzy, they left the interstate at a random exit, took one turn and then another. They are heading south, not intentionally.
They are pretty enough to stop traffic, although there isn’t any to stop. Lana is wearing ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and those flat plastic shoes called jellies. Tracee is in a wedding dress and veil. She has been crying for several hours and has run out of tears. Now she is simply sniffling and her nose is red. Her dress and shoes don’t match but no one can see that because her strapless gown is floor-length, a gorgeous swath of satin, beading, and lace. Even though she keeps the hem off the ground—clutching and hoisting the sides to bunch it around her hips—her copious ruffled underskirt hides black platform sandals.
Their car, an old Mustang, has a flat.
Lana slips off a jellie and smacks it against her thigh to get the gravel out. She wants to swear—she wants to let loose with a stream of expletives, this tire situation is such a calamity, potentially a nightmare, but she can’t swear because she has given up swearing as a result of… Well, it turned out that giving up one thing led to giving up others. Giving up is becoming addictive. In addition to being five months and two days sober, she is twenty-one days without a Pepsi and six days without so much as a “damn.” She feels cleaner as a result, as if fresh from a bath. But even more frustrated. And edgy. She bites hard on her pinkie nail while eyeing the flat.
“I was thinking,” says Tracee, “do you think that maybe J.C.—”
“I don’t want to hear about him anymore. He’s a jerk. An asshole.” Lana wonders if “asshole” is a swear word. Probably. Sort of. Close. “I’m swearing again.”
“But you’re not drinking.”
“That guy is a shit.” Now it’s official. She is swearing again. “I mean it. My ears are falling off. Please, I am begging you. Forget him. God, the way he talks.”
“Huh?”
“‘Kiss my ass’ is one thing. Everyone says it, fine, it’s cool, but ‘How’s your ass?’ is not hello and ‘Watch your ass’ is not good-bye, but that is not the point. That is merely personally offensive to me. For your birthday he gave you a lottery ticket that was already scratched.”
Tracee remembers, how could she ever forget J.C. dancing around the room, grinning, teasing her to guess what was in his shirt pocket. “It’s the thought.”
“What thought? It was a losing ticket and it was scratched. What is the thinking here?”
The thinking? There was thinking, Tracee’s sure. How had he explained it? Somehow. It’s a tick away, but with Lana ranting at her, she only sighs.
“You were practically his maid,” says Lana.
“I like the Laundromat. I like the smell.”
“Do you like the smell of the grocery store and the vacuum cleaner?”
“Sorry,” says Tracee.
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Sorry,” she says, apologizing for apologizing. She wiggles, trying to keep her dress from slipping. The strapless part is threatening to fall, but if she lets go of the bottom to adjust the top, the bottom will brush the ground and get dirty. “Would you pull up my front?” she asks Lana.
“Sure.” Lana gives the fabric between Tracee’s breasts a tug and then retur
ns to the problem of the tire, taking a few steps back to see if a bit of distance might be enlightening. “I didn’t realize that flats were so flat. The bottom looks melted.” She walks around to the trunk and pops it.
“What are you doing?”
“Changing the tire.”
“Wow. How?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen people change tires.” Lana pulls out the jack and nearly drops it. It’s steel, not that she couldn’t have told you that but she wasn’t prepared for the weight. She lets it rest on the ground while she tries to figure out how it works.
“Suppose someone sees us?”
“Who’s going to see us?” Lana pumps the handle, trying to make the jack rise.
“Everyone. The world.” Tracee is close to hysterics again. Hovering in the vicinity. She sounds like a mouse with someone’s foot on its tail.
“Get in the car and scrunch. They’re looking for two women, not one.”
“They’re looking for me.”
“And me.”
“Not as much as me.”
“Tracee, scrunch.”
Lana hefts the spare out of the trunk. She hops back as it thuds to the ground, barely missing her toes.
2
A woman walks by the side of the highway. She’s been walking for several hours, simply putting one foot in front of the other and wondering where it will get her.
The woman, who recently turned fifty, is wearing her Sunday best: a buttoned-up polyester blouse with a bow at the neckline, a lemon-colored A-line skirt with a matching rather shapeless jacket. Her long hair, sparrow brown streaked with gray, is pinned up in a bun. The sun is low enough on the horizon that the light has dimmed. She doesn’t need to squint, thank goodness, because it sometimes gives her a headache.
She expected the road to be what it is: empty. She took this route for that reason, is familiar enough with the area to know that the road leads nowhere interesting.
Way up ahead she sees a car, from this distance no more than a silver bump shimmering in the evening sun.
Tracee notices her first. She has slid down in the seat as far as she can, the voluminous folds of her skirt riding up to her chin. The car is hot. The dress—in this situation like a blanket—is suffocating. She bounces up to cool off, sees the woman, and squeaks with anxiety.
Lana looks.
“What’s she doing here?” says Tracee.
Lana shrugs.
They watch her steady unhurried approach.
“Hi,” says Lana.
“Are you all right? Do you need help?” The woman is friendly but not curious. She doesn’t, for instance, peer in the car window or peruse Lana from head to toe. She appears merely polite.
The spare is now attached, and Lana has been trying to secure the nuts—or are they bolts? She isn’t sure. She knows that if she doesn’t screw them very tight, the tire will spin right off the car once they get going and then God knows what will happen.
“I’m having the worst time tightening these.”
The woman considers the problem. “If I press with my foot, I think that will help.”
Lana fits the long-handled wrench over whatever it is, nut or bolt. The woman places her foot on the wrench handle and then, grabbing on to the roof of the car, hoists herself up so that her entire body weighs the handle down. She’s a smallish woman, about five feet, three inches, and her figure, once trim, has gone round. Lana presses with all her might. The wrench makes a satisfying half circle.
They repeat the process several times until they are confident the tire is securely attached.
“Thank you so much,” says Lana.
“Thanks,” Tracee calls from inside the car, keeping her face averted.
“It’s nothing,” says the woman. “You’re welcome.”
Lana tosses the wrench in the trunk and wipes an arm across her sweaty forehead. She repacks the trunk with the flat tire and the jack, refusing to let the woman help. “You’ll get dirty,” Lana tells her. Which is true. “Would you like a ride?”
From inside Tracee squeaks.
“Excuse me.” Lana sticks her head in the window while the woman steps back to give her privacy.
“Can we trust her?” whispers Tracee.
“Of course we can’t trust her. We don’t need to. Tracee, they’re looking for two people, not three.”
She pulls her head out of the window and smiles at the woman.
3
Lana drives. She feels fantastic now. Jazzed. Better than she’s felt in months. She presses on the gas, inching over the limit, and looks over at her friend, who is tracing patterns of lace on her dress.
Lana floors it.
Tracee jerks up and swivels around to see who’s after them.
Lana laughs and slows the car down again. It’s been such a nice day, she thinks. Their bolt out of Maryland, hammering Tracee into some semblance of sanity, the disaster of the flat, solved. The white noise of the tires rolling on asphalt is music to her ears. She turns on the radio and punches the dial, looking for something to sing along to.
The woman they picked up has to sit sideways because the Mustang, a sporty two-door, barely has a backseat. She takes off her shoes, brown pumps with stubby heels. “Excuse me?” the woman says.
Lana lowers the sound.
“Do you mind if I unfasten my bra?”
Surprised by the question, neither she nor Tracee answers, and the woman fills the gap. “I’m asking because it was kind of you to offer a ride and I don’t want to do anything to upset you.”
“The first thing I do when I get home…” Lana loses her place for a moment mentioning home.… “Well, not just home but wherever I’m staying. The first thing I do is unfasten my bra.”
“So you don’t mind?”
“No. Go ahead.”
The woman untucks her blouse, reaches under, unfastens her bra, and retucks.
“I’m Lana, by the way. This is Tracee.”
“Hi,” says Tracee.
“Rita,” says the woman. “Nice to meet you.”
“Where can we drop you?”
“Where are you going?”
“We’re not sure.”
“That’ll be fine.”
Tracee shoots Lana a look. Rita settles in the backseat.
4
Two hours. Farther south.
Tracee, who is tall and skinny with an appealing gawkiness, gets sudden hunger attacks. “I need to eat,” she announces, popping up straight in her seat. She doesn’t threaten to faint (which she often threatens but never does); still, Lana recognizes the state, Tracee’s light-headedness, a glassy-eyed stare. “I have low blood sugar,” Tracee tells Rita, and then wonders why in the world she said that. She imagines Rita repeating it to a cop, “She said she had low blood sugar.”
Anyway, Tracee isn’t certain that she does have low blood sugar. She read about it once when she was sixteen. In the waiting room at Planned Parenthood. She and Lana had gone to the clinic to get their birth control pills refilled. As she recalls the gist of it now, eight years later, the magazine described the condition as jitters that can be cured only by eating everything in sight.
“Look.” She waved the magazine at Lana. “I’m not a freak.”
“You have a bona fide medical condition,” Lana affirmed after reading.
Although now that Tracee is berating herself for spilling an identifying characteristic to Rita, a stranger who could turn her in, she decides that she will deny the condition. She imagines herself on the witness stand. “That wasn’t me in that car. Why would I say something like that? I don’t have low blood sugar. No doctor ever told me I did.” This worry preoccupies her for the ten miles it takes to find a place to eat in this near wilderness… until Lana pulls the car into A & R, a white box by the side of the road with no indoor seating, simply a walk-up window for pickup.
“Order for me,” says Tracee. “Whatever. This dress attracts too much attention.” This last she adds for Rita’s benefit, t
o account for why she hides out in the car until the only other customers leave, an older couple sharing a sundae.
“What’s fast?” asks Lana, reading the menu written in plastic letters on a board behind the counter.
“Everything,” says the counter girl.
“Fried chicken then. Two orders.”
“That’s fifteen minutes.”
‘Why’d you say it was fast?”
“Did I?”
“I asked what was fast and you said everything.”
“Oh, right. What can I get you?” the counter girl says cheerfully.
“I don’t know why you said everything was fast?”
The girl simply raises her eyebrows and waits.
“Okay,” says Lana, bummed, not about the fried chicken but because she can’t get a rise out of the girl. “Two patty melts, two waffle fries, and two Pepsis.” Now it’s official. Lana is back on Pepsi. Swearing and back on Pepsi. She takes a packet of sugar, rips it open, and shakes the contents into her mouth.
“I’ll have the same, a patty melt and waffle fries,” says Rita so faintly that the counter girl asks her to repeat it. “Only do you have orange juice?”
“Orange slush,” says the girl.
“Oh.” Rita hides a smile. “No choice then, orange slush.”
When the food is ready, each identical order in a cardboard boat, Lana pulls out everything she’s got, several crumpled dollars and spare change from her back pocket, and lays it on the counter.
“How much again?” Rita asks the cashier. Trying and failing to divide the total by three, she has forgotten the amount she began with. “I’m terrible with numbers. Sometimes Harry says…” She stops, thinks about that, and doesn’t finish her sentence. She unzips a small change purse, pries out four dollars folded into a wad, and adds it to Lana’s contribution.
“You ladies are short a dollar forty,” says the cashier.
Rita flips her change purse upside down, dumping out some change.
“Now you’re short sixty-five cents.”
“I can give the slush back,” says Rita, but Lana runs to the car and gets Tracee to turn up the rest by scrounging around in the bottom of her purse.