“That’s what you keep saying.”
“I am!” She kicked that big red rubber toy that Dollbaby used to leave in the middle of the room all dirty and slimy. No matter how many times she collects all those things and puts them on the back porch, Abby goes and gets them and scatters them back around all the different rooms, like it might bring Dollbaby back. “But she might come back,” Abby had said, Ben of course agreeing with her, and Kendra wanted to scream and stomp and say impossible.
Ben leaned down and picked up the toy where it had bounced against the wall and set it back on the beach towel Abby had left in the corner, under a photo she had taped to the wall. Dollbaby with angel halo and wings, the first Halloween they had her.
“Just be a good mother,” he said, and looked at her with those tired red eyes. Was he crying? Was he stoned? Did she give a damn? “Just do something just for her.”
“This party is just for her,” she said. “I am about to throw the best birthday party that any girl in her class has ever had. I can guarantee you that every mother in town will be calling me up afterward to try to get answers and copy it.”
“I rest my case,” he said, and she bit back what was the true and best thing to say to someone who said he was going to be a lawyer and then never got there.
What a loser. Kendra does not want a situation of till death do us part alimony. She might if there was more to get, which once upon a time she was led to believe there was. It would mean she wouldn’t ever be able to get a real job (fine with her) but also that she couldn’t have a live-in lover, not that she isn’t crafty enough to figure all that out and get away with it—she certainly is!—but all it would take would be for Mr. Sleight of Hand to hire the right lawyer who might hire an investigator and then that would be embarrassing.
Till death do us part alimony is a great way to stick it to someone for sure, but given she’s the one who is having an affair, it might be hard to do. And this is a topic that will divide a room full of women in a hurry. She heard one woman saying how such an agreement is a step back for women everywhere. That a smart woman should just get a chunk of something right up front and not live as a dependent. Well, Kendra has never been into all that feminist bullshit although she likes to appear that she is. Truth is that she is perfectly happy to be totally dependent on a man and never work at all and she is sure many women share this. Of course, they are also probably the boring housewife types she would never want anything to do with, but still.
She pretends to be a feminist just like she pretends to be compassionate when someone is struggling with her weight or blood pressure or bad permanent even though she really doesn’t give a damn. But why not lie? She does it all the time. Why not lie and create a whole new history for yourself, especially if no one ever takes the time to investigate and catch the lies. She has told that she once designed a costume for Bernadette Peters and that she once had dinner with one of the Bee Gees—she can’t remember which one—who insisted she stopped waitressing and join their table. He propositioned her and then sent her postcards for years that said he couldn’t forget her. It is amazing what people will believe. She has told that she is a descendent of both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant. I embody the whole Civil War right here in my own little body, she has said numerous times to great reaction and applause.
“Where are the postcards from the Bee Gee?” that awful Linda Blackmon asked. Linda is the one who copies everything Kendra ever buys and wears, and then Benjamin said “good question” and looked at her with hands up and eyebrows raised as if to say, Well?
“Burned, of course,” she said without batting an eye. “Why tarnish his image with what was really kind of pathetic?”
“That is so considerate.” Ben clapped his hands. “That’s my wife, the most generous and compassionate human walking the planet.”
Ben Palmer will deserve whatever he gets. He has practically ruined her life. He is the reason she has migraines and low blood sugar and likely what is called fibromyalgia. She gave him a baby and she has spent the best years of her life with him and for what? Did he ever take her on that cruise she wanted? How embarrassing was it when this one went to Rome and this one went to Hawaii and this one summers on Martha’s Vineyard and drops celebrity names all the time. Kendra deserves that, too and she is goddamned going to have it. She puts a sticker on the bottom of the big heavy Victorian sofa the woman with the birthmarked daughter left behind and what does she find but another goddamned chew toy. Chew toys and screws from that goddamned box he’s building. It’s all a mess. And she can’t wait to get out of it. She is hoping that she can keep her strength up until it is all behind her. Meanwhile, she is getting sick and tired of all the phone calls. I think I saw your dog on the playground, but I couldn’t catch her. I think I saw your dog two days ago at the Tastee Freez. The messages keep coming. I am so sorry to hear about Dollbaby. I hope you find her soon.
Wouldn’t she love to scream impossible! That is impossible. Dollbaby is gone and never to be seen again. Dollbaby took a little nap and never woke up. Kendra spent quite a bit of money for that little naptime, including a hefty tip for the long-haired solemn-faced kid who didn’t want to believe her story about why this dog had to be put down. “She practically bit a child’s nose off,” she told him. “Twenty stitches and who do you think paid for it all? We’ll be lucky if they don’t sue us for all we own. What do you need, the court order?” She finally convinced him even though the idiot dog was on its back and wagging its tail the whole time. “Appearances are so deceiving,” she told the boy.
Now she has to practice looking sad and work some tears into her eyes, because as soon as Abby walks in she will have to tell her the sad sad news. Someone called from way out in the country—Dollbaby got hit by a car. Oh, if only that fence your father built had not been so easy to get out of. Oh, if only the dear sweet thing had not gotten out and run away from home. If we ever get another dog, we will hire someone who knows what he is doing and can build a real fence. Poor, poor Dollbaby. Let’s try to picture her in heaven with a mountain of bones and beautiful fields to run through. Let’s give her a Persian rug to piss on all day long.
Notes about: Jeremiah Mason Bass
Born: August 5, 1932 Died: June 21, 2007, 4:10 p.m.
Winthrop Nursing Facility Laconia, New Hampshire
Mr. Bass was my last assignment in New Hampshire. Luke had instructed that I leave on a high note and clearly there will not be one higher than this. Luke’s request, other than to throw him a good funeral and make sure all legal issues were in order, was that I leave New Hampshire when I felt healthy and confident and had had a good experience. After Suzanne Sullivan, I feared that I would not be able to keep my word and I told the supervisor this. I had already said that I knew I could not handle children and now I had added anyone dying prematurely. I had dreamed of Suzanne Sullivan many times in the weeks after her death. In the dreams she always had the long blond hair she had in the pictures on the wall of her house and she was always doing other things, unwrapping snacks for her kids or looking up phone numbers. Once she was grooming a horse and she kept telling me that there had been a mistake and she wasn’t supposed to leave at all, that I needed to speak to people and make phone calls and see if I couldn’t get this mistake fixed.
No one can change this, Luke had said, meaning his own situation. The world is in motion.
“Can’t change it,” Mr. Bass said the first day I met him. He had been described by several as “colorful” and that would be a gross understatement. He said his whole life had been dictated by his name—Bigmouth Bass they call him. He said he had fished since he was big enough to hold a pole. He fished all over the United States of America and once down in Mexico when his wife won a trip for selling the most cars over at Regal Chevrolet. That was in 1976. He caught a marlin once and loved to tell the tale, what a fight it was—the pull, the pull—He was widowed in 1997 and has successfully gotten loose of every hook that almost caught him. They
don’t call me slippery for nothing.
He wore his white hair so slicked you could see the grooves of the fine-toothed comb he kept in his front pocket and he was missing quite a few teeth which he self-consciously hid with one hand cupping his chin and covering his mouth. “I’ve caught nearly everything you can catch,” he said. “Fish, I mean, and people always give me fish things because of my name and my work. Ran a bait-and-tackle shop for years while my wife sold cars. She was something. Now that was my hardest catch of all, took all kinds of lures and tackle to get her to bite—you know, Aqua Velva, which I think stinks, but she liked it quite good, and a luxury automobile and steak dinners and a shiny diamond ring. They called me Bigmouth Bass and they called her the other Bigmouth Bass. Once I called her the Bigmouth Ass and I wished I hadn’t done that ’cause she made me pay. I am not about to tell a decent young woman such as yourself how she made me pay, but just trust me that she did.”
Every inch of his room was decorated with posters and photographs and lures and tackle. He had a huge stack of rods in the corner and said he had a photo of every fish he’d caught since about 1956 when his daughter was born. He’s got every fish she caught and her brother, too. Every one. Every one. I cleaned them all and ate my fair share. He had several plaques of mounted rubber fish and he loved to press the little red buttons that made them flop and sing: “Take Me to the River,” “Pretty Fishy,” “Catch Us if You Can.” He liked to get them all flopping and singing at once and he did that right up to the day he died.
“You know what is so strange?” he asked, just before he drifted off and stopped talking. “I love the bottom feeders. I love to catch them and I love to eat them. I love grouper and I love catfish. But”—he paused and beckoned his son, a giant boy-looking man in his big summer shorts and tennis shoes, who kept wiping his face and blowing his nose into Dunkin’ Donuts napkins he kept pulling from his pocket—“I don’t like them in life. Don’t be a bottom feeder in life.” He shook his finger. “Your mother was not a bottom feeder and she sold cars so that should tell you something.”
The big boy son nodded and wiped his eyes and then looked at me and started laughing. He laughed until he wheezed and his father joined in with him. I left to get a cup of coffee when the daughter arrived, a woman built just like her brother who wore a Bass Pro Shop T-shirt and cap and placed an extra cap on her father’s head. I could hear their laughter all the way down the hall and when I returned they told me that they thought he was gone, that they were singing along to Pretty Fishy, and he just stopped breathing. “We sure are gonna miss you, old man.” The son leaned and kissed his father’s forehead and then blew his nose into a napkin and draped his arm around his sister. “He was a good one, wasn’t he?”
“A real keeper,” the daughter said. “A real prize.”
This was the high point Luke told me to find. Can’t change it. They don’t call me slippery for nothing. Anything about fishing will bring Jeremiah Bass to mind: lures and tackle and bait and hooks—the pull, the pull.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Jeremiah Mason Bass
A hand-crafted lure is valuable and it takes a lot of time and some good eyes and the still and steady hands of a surgeon and he has to get the light just right, a bright light under a magnifier and carefully loop and tie fine filament and one day he will build a ship in a bottle, maybe have a room full of ships in bottles and imagine himself a tiny little captain way down in there but Mrs. Bass says that’s leisure work and leisure time, but they aren’t there yet because children cost money and there needs to be food on the table and money in the bank and what better food is there than a fish, the Lord multiplied and multiplied those baskets of fish, the scales on their bodies numbered and all you need is a line and pole and some luck like a lucky lure, sparkly and shiny spinning down there below the murky surface down where it’s cold and the light can’t quite reach and you just sink a little lower and lower down where it’s cooler and darker, a little colder, a little darker, a wavy spin of algae and roots, down and down to the soft muddy bottom.
Stanley
STANLEY HAS BEEN READING a lot lately when he’s by himself—about roses—and listening to music. He has some of Martha’s books as well as all the catalogs she used to get that still get forwarded, his old address marked through and replaced with a yellow sticker and this address. It amazes him—this process of lives being forwarded, of someone like Martha, long dead, still being asked for her support, her opinion, her use of a coupon worth a hundred dollars if she acts now. He never realized until he started flipping through all of Martha’s magazines and books that he had really loved her garden, too. He didn’t do anything except admire it and can’t even recall if he admired it directly to her, but he certainly accepted compliments from so many people in town who said they often altered their driving path just to pass by. One young woman who had worked as an intern at the court house told him how her wedding bouquet came straight from his yard and that she had always felt guilty because she stole them in the middle of the night. He accepted her apology but didn’t tell her that this was something that had happened often through the years, so often in fact, that Martha was insulted when people did not take roses. Sometimes she would even tie a pair of scissors to a length of rope on the fence with a note that they pick respectfully and not touch this or that or the other, because so-and-so was planning to use those on the table of her debutante luncheon. It had not occurred to him how the garden had allowed Martha invitations to nearly every event in town and how she knew almost everyone as a result. It was something to admire and he has come to also admire the work that went into it. He has studied the layers and soil system and the constant pruning and tending that all those finicky fancy varieties required and marvels how she had done it all herself. She might send him or Ned down to the nursery with a list, but she was the one out there in dirty pedal pushers and white Keds (just like the pink ones Rachel Silverman wears). She wore a floppy yellow straw hat she had bought at Virginia Beach years before and what he has recently learned are called gauntlet gloves whose thick rubber protected her arms from the thorns.
He could imagine trying to have a garden, maybe even right outside his window there along the far side of the parking lot where he watches Rachel Silverman walk back and forth and where, unfortunately, he often sees the arrival of the funeral home car over at nursing. They try to be discreet but how impossible is that? Maybe some climbing roses on a trellis (like what he has marked on page 96 of one enormous catalog) would do the trick and he has found the names of many hardy climbers that he believes would take over in no time. Who knew there were roses with the growing habits and ethics of something like kudzu or bamboo, those types willing to run over whatever is in their path, like some people he has known, like himself from time to time he has to admit. And he has been just as prickly and unpredictable. What would Martha have said about that analogy? And what would Ned say? Ned would probably roll up his sleeves and show his scars; Ned can probably recall every prick and scratch of his life. Knock Outs, ramblers. Those would be Stanley’s kind of roses as opposed to the pedigreed tea varieties, which remain exactly as the pedigree dictates—this height and that weight—not unlike Martha who never changed in appearance except that couple of times when she got in her head that she needed to try to be someone other than herself and dressed up in some night garb that embarrassed him. He’s not sure why. Maybe it was because it wasn’t what he expected and as much as he liked to fantasize on the ramblers and the Knock Outs and things like men in a ring beating the shit out of one another, it really was not his nature either. He had wanted the pedigree and the guarantee of what he was getting, like the Labrador retrievers Sadie is always talking about and the one whose breeder had guaranteed there were not hip problems in that line. But no one could have guaranteed Martha’s health. No one saw it coming. God, he can’t go there, but what he can do is try to start a garden that might bring people out again. It would give some of these old shut
-ins something to do. He could probably get old Toby out there digging and hauling manure and no telling who else might join in. Maybe Rachel Silverman. Maybe this would be something Ned could also take an interest in and would make him feel he’d finally done enough. Maybe he could grow some vegetables, too, or have a water garden with some koi. That was something he’d said he wanted to do when he retired and Martha as a result had given him books all about it for every birthday, Christmas, and anniversary. He is reaching for the water garden catalog that comes from up around where Rachel Silverman is from, filing a note in his head to ask her if she’s ever been to Paradise Gardens up in MassaTOOsetts. He hears a knock at his door and quickly stashes the catalog and turns instead to the pinup poster in his latest Wrestling magazine, a great big poster of Kurt Angle who the crowds always greet with YOU SUCK. That’s what he’ll say to whoever it is. Ned.
“You suck!” he says, and waves the picture at Ned who eases the door shut and comes and sits. “I thought you left already. You need more money or something?”
“No. I just hate thinking about you sitting around all day with nothing to do.” Ned looks a lot like Martha—the fair skin and big blue eyes—the expression of someone who would love to laugh or scream but seems afraid to. “Why don’t we go out, do something. We can go to lunch. We could go hit some golf balls.”
“Since when do you golf?” Stanley asks, and quickly adds, “I thought you were more into cooking and playing with yourself.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Ned says. “I do like to cook, but I also like to golf and read and go to the movies.”
“What about date? Do you ever think about trying that?” Stanley leans forward and pushes all of his catalogs under his chair and pulls back out the Herb Alpert album cover. “You need to find someone like this—a creamy delight.”
Life After Life Page 20