Mildred had heard about twin telepathy, which made sense given their involuntary cohabitation in that most sacred sanctuary—it was hard to imagine each ever developing fully on her own. Cynthia’s extrasensory perception, on the other hand, was more phenomenal because she’d chosen it, and Brooke did whatever she could to nurture it as well. Geographically separated though they were, Cynthia swore she knew whenever Brooke was on a bender or fighting a particularly bad strain of insomnia. The minute such warnings came, she called Brooke, often catching her late at night on her car phone as she sped along the highways of Los Angeles. It was her only way of letting off steam, Brooke had said whenever Mildred expressed concern about her driving alone at night. But she wasn’t going anywhere, her mother protested, never fully understanding what Brooke had meant when she said she was more at home in her car than she’d ever been in her apartment. She liked being out on the open road. Part of the world, yet insulated from it. Imagining what it was like to fly. She’d graduated from the swing to that car too fast, Mildred said to herself.
One cold autumn day, she was on her way into the kitchen. Outside the windows, crispy leaves barely clung to the old maple and she could not get Brooke on the telephone. It was Saturday so she wasn’t on the set, although they had been shooting her scenes at odd hours to accommodate drunk-driving school. Perhaps she was with her boyfriend. The young man from the movies. A star. When Mildred was young they would have called him a matinee idol. And perhaps he wouldn’t have had such trouble with the tabloids, something Brooke told her not to preoccupy herself with—there wasn’t a truthful word in those pages.
Mildred filled the kettle with tap water to make a cup of tea and turned on the stove. She searched for a task to occupy herself until the water boiled, but the dishwasher was loaded, the counters wiped clean, the stove sparkling. She sighed and was practically ambushed by an unbridled release of emotion. The day had brought a homebound sadness, its mass rising from her abdomen up through her chest and grabbing her by the throat when the sigh came. Although familiar, the feeling was not one Mildred could quantify or qualify, and, as Brooke might have advised, what would be the point of that? If anyone had asked Mildred Harrison what was the matter that day, she would have responded succinctly, “Life weighs.” She had long ago accepted the particular isolations of marriage and family life.
Her eyes drifted out the kitchen window where she saw Cynthia standing beneath the old maple pushing the empty swing as if there were a person sitting in the seat. A pinch like an epidural shot through Mildred’s spine and she felt as if time had flashed back a few years. After the accident, Cynthia had avoided the swing except to push Brooke back and forth, her own two feet planted firmly on the ground. It suddenly dawned on Mildred that all of Cynthia’s “training,” from her early years as a hot dog to the day she sat quietly in the backseat of their station wagon after they’d dropped Brooke at the airport to begin her work on the soap, were to help her keep the home front alive for Brooke. Mildred’s gloom swelled. She could barely keep her eyes on the forlorn teenager with her short hair and drab clothes without wishing she’d done things differently. If only she had an inkling of what she might have changed.
The kettle bubbled into a whistle, startling Mildred away from the window. She filled her mug with water and watched the tea bag rise to the top. There was no keeping it down despite the battle she waged with her spoon. For some reason this comforted Mildred. She leaned her face into the flowery effluvium and inhaled deeply. The smell of chamomile made her nose twitch. Soon she would remove the tea bag and get on with her day, but first Mildred Harrison did something so out of character she later told Tom she felt as if she’d been possessed by the spirit of the recalcitrant tea bag. For on that blustery fall morning, Mildred Harrison wrapped herself tightly in her lumber jacket, set aside her mug, and walked out back to sit in that swing while her younger daughter pushed.
THE LOVE HOSPITAL
IN A CAR CULTURE, YOU ARE WHAT YOU DRIVE. You knew all about that living in L.A. Hollywood was like the high school parking lot magnified for the silver screen. You drove a supercool sports car and told People magazine you cruised the highways alone at night. It helped you clear your head. My parents had given me a new Saab (black—my father thought all cars should be black), and as soon as I passed my road test I started driving back and forth on Middle Neck Road, breezing past the manicured yards and temples and private turnoffs bursting with bushy green trees, cruising along Northern Boulevard into Queens and stopping at the diner for a grilled cheese and chocolate shake. I got on the L.I.E. and drove past the airports, Shea Stadium, the globe from the World’s Fair, the old staple factory where workertrolls bent metal deep into the night, and sometimes I made it to the Midtown Tunnel and into Manhattan, where I spent my last summer on the outside working at an ad agency, filing papers, answering phones, making color Xeroxes of storyboards. They called it an internship.
All summer long I drove, stopping for long stretches at night in front of Edie’s house, but she wasn’t inside. “She’s still in Ohio,” her mother said, when she came to the door in her sweatpants, her face and eyes puffed out as if she hadn’t slept for days, and Ohio became a mythical place, as far-off as the planet Andromeda. Where Edie had gone to “rest” after Los Angeles. And every time I crossed her front lawn, hopping over the revolving sprinkler, my sneakers slipping through the wet grass, crickets yapping their heads off, I tried to think of something to tell her mother that didn’t sound like I was making excuses.
I went over and over it in my mind, drew storyboard sketches—sometimes I could only get stuff out in my book. Edie’d been giving me shit about it that afternoon. We sat in the window of a touristy bar on Melrose, waiting for Chuck and drinking more coffee since the waitress wouldn’t serve us beer. My international student ID card didn’t cut it out there; people obeyed the law. Not like New York where you got points for ingenuity. Edie’d opened up the local paper and was reciting all the places we could go later if we had a car. I took out my book and charcoal pencils and started sketching our morning on the set. I wanted to remember your eyes, the way they’d locked onto mine. That old guy Mickey had taught me about faces, but it was harder working from memory than videotape. Maybe I’d have to wait a few weeks to get that scene before finishing. In the top corner of the page, I started outlining big black circles with bright lights inside. Edie grabbed my wrist. “What are you doing?” she asked, and I looked at her like, what the fuck do you think? “Don’t give me that face, I know what you’re doing, but what is it with you? I’m trying to figure out a plan for us and you’re not helping at all. I don’t get you, you just sit there with that stupid book.” She tried to wrangle it from me, but I held on with both hands.
“Let go!” I said.
“You’ve been carrying that thing around since I met you”—she twisted our hands with the book off the table, huffing—“don’t you think it’s time I saw it?”
“Get out of here!” I pulled harder, standing up out of my seat for leverage. Edie squinted. A shadow moved up beside her.
“Hey, ladies,” said a chubby guy with curly black hair and thick stubble on his cheeks. “What’s all this?”
“Depends.” Edie spit out her words, not letting up on the book. “Who are you?”
“Just someone who cares.”
“You got a car?”
“Of course.”
She smiled and let go.
The guy said his name was Rex and he was a consultant for a nightclub. He said he would take us there that night. He said he and his friends would pick us up, and I knew it was pointless to argue when Edie gave him Aunt Fifi’s address.
They showed up around ten, three guys in jeans and boots and T-shirts. They smelled of wet newspaper and cigarettes and carried a couple of six-packs. One of them was missing two fingers. Another had skin stretched so thin across his face he looked like a Halloween mask. They could have been anywhere from twenty to forty, and I’m no expert
, but they didn’t look like consultants. None of this bothered Edie, who invited them in and poured beers into tall glasses. We smoked some and talked about Aunt Fifi’s house and the city and how it was so different from New York, though none of them had ever been there. They’d heard about the crime. The skeleton seemed overly interested in me. Edie winked when he sat down and stretched his arm out behind me. He asked what we were doing in L.A. “We came to see a taping of World Without End,” I said.
“That’s not why we came!” Edie rolled her eyes at me. “Some TV friends hooked us up. They said, ‘If you’re going to be in L.A. you have to come to the set.’ You know how that is … but we really came to party.”
“Well, you came to the right place,” said Rex. He took a long hit off a joint and held it in. I couldn’t believe he was sitting on Aunt Fifi’s couch, he looked so out of place among the ancient treasures, like if my father in his designer suits were to find himself working in a coal mine. Something about this felt really wrong.
“So, where are we going tonight?” Edie asked, and they said they had a special place in mind. They said it was the hottest club in the city. They talked about all the movie people who hung out there.
“Have you ever seen Brooke Harrison there?” I asked.
“Who?” said my guy, his hand tightening around the upper part of my shoulder.
“She’s on World Without End.”
“Nope,” he said and gripped me harder; my arm felt paralyzed. “Never heard of her.”
I inched a few feet back on the couch, thinking, These guys are bullshit. You and John Strong went out all the time. Everyone in Hollywood knew you. I tried backing up a bit more, but the skeleton pressed into me. “There’s too many of them, you know?” he said. “And they’re all stupid bitches when you get right down to it. Wanna kiss me?”
“Um … I can’t … I have something …” Stammering, I managed to get halfway off the couch.
“Come on, baby, just relax,” he yanked my arm. “We’re gonna have fun tonight, we’re going to the club. We can dance. Don’t you like to dance?”
“No.” I jumped up and saw Edie sitting at the player piano with Rex and the fingerless guy squishing her from both sides. They were pounding the keys, but no sound came out. I ran into Aunt Fifi’s bedroom and locked the door behind me.
A few minutes later Edie knocked. “Come on, Lil,” she pounded, “we’re getting ready to go.”
“I’m not going.”
“What!? Stop being such a loser and open this door!”
This went on for some time, her demanding I open the door and me saying no. Finally, I relented and let her in, again locking the door behind us. “Don’t do this, okay?” she pleaded. “It’s too fucked-up. You know, you are so spoiled. You want everything handed to you on a silver platter. You think your dream guy is just going to plop himself down in front of you? Well, let me tell you, that ain’t gonna happen. I mean, look at you. You’re a total freak!”
“Shut up!”
“No, you shut up! I can’t believe how ungrateful you are. Once again I’m practically delivering opportunity to your goddamn doorstep and you’re acting like I’m a criminal or something.”
“Those guys are jerks. They don’t know the first thing about Hollywood.”
“They know more than you do, they live here. And they’ve got connections. Maybe we’ll even see your little soap star.”
“He didn’t know who she was.”
“You asked him? Jesus fucking Christ, what did I tell you? You’re going to ruin this thing before it even starts, you always do …” I sat down on the bed, crossing my arms in front of me. Edie came up next to me and rested her hand on my thigh. It felt like cement. “Okay, look, I’m sorry,” she said, taking another tack. “You’re right, these guys are probably idiots, but they’re going to take us out. Do you want to go back to New York and say, ‘Yeah, I was in L.A. and all I saw was the inside of a TV studio’? Well, I don’t want to say that, so please, Lil, just do this one little thing. Is that so much to ask, after all I’ve done for you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head back and forth.
“Please …”
“I’m not going.”
“Don’t make me do this alone,” she said, a strain I’d never heard in her voice. Like she was trying to convince me to donate a kidney to save her mother’s life or something. Might have worked before that afternoon, before I’d seen you on the set. But we’d really clicked and the last thing I wanted was for you to catch me running around with a bunch of hooligans (that’s what my grandmother would have called them). Image was everything in this town.
Edie begged and begged. She offered to get me pot from the Ayatollah when we got home, told me she’d buy me the pants I wanted from Reminiscence, said she’d do anything, and still I wouldn’t budge. “God, you’re so stubborn!”
“I’m sorry … I just can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.” She stood up and turned toward me, pointing her finger in my face. “Okay, Lil, if that’s the way you want it, fine. But don’t come crawling back to me ever again. We’re through.”
“Oh, come on, Edie.”
“I mean it. You and me, we’re kaput. Finito.”
“It’s just one night.”
“‘Quoth the raven, nevermore!’”
She sauntered off in that tight black evening gown, slamming the door behind her. Outside I could hear her saying she’d be going alone tonight, her friend had come down with something, and one of them, I think it was the skeleton, shouted something about a case of bitchitis. I got up and locked the door. Returned to the bed, steaming mad as I listened to the shuffling of their departure, sounds I’d heard a million times listening from my room at home. The shutting off of this, the picking up of that, one last trip to the bathroom, glasses placed in the sink … there was still time. Someone always forgot something, and it took a few minutes to get settled in the car outside. I could unlock the door and make everything all right, but fuck her! I had just as much right to demand she stay home with me. Only the second I heard the car turn over, I felt the blood rush out of me, my stomach an empty valley.
I ran outside and caught a couple of brake lights down the street. “Edie!” I trudged a few more feet, shouting and waving my arms, but the car turned. Shit, I thought … shit! I smoked a couple cigs in the wet night, when it finally hit me: I had the keys to the sea-green Buick buried in my jeans, I’d taken driver’s ed. I could try and find them.
The car never started, and I slammed my fist against the dashboard the way I’d jabbed my knuckles into the mirror of my parents’ bathroom the night I discovered Blair was gone for good. They all left after a while. But knowing that didn’t make anything any easier. The bottom of my hand throbbing, I pounded until the glove compartment popped open, and inside it was a gun. Or what looked like a toy gun, almost; I’d never seen a real one up close.
I picked it up, and it wasn’t at all weaponlike. Shiny silver with an ivory handle, no bigger than Edie’s metal pipe in the palm of my hand, this gun couldn’t be real, could it? It was more like the pistols I’d seen saloon girls tuck into their satin underwear in the Old West town, although they could have been real, too. That was all about re-creation, authenticity. I dug further into the glove compartment and discovered a powder-blue Tiffany bag full of bullets. More than fifty of them. I lined up a few on the dashboard like tiny missiles or lipsticks in a department store, the oily, metal-y smell snaking up my nose, then inspected one in my hand. Smaller than my pinkie, it had a gray tip and copper body, and at the base said norma and .38 SPECIAL. Of course, Norma was Marilyn and .38 Special a weird country-rock band, and although I had a feel ing the bullet had been around before either one of them, I wanted to show Edie how everything connected with everything else, but she was off somewhere in the thick of it, and when she finally did return hours later, so mangled, her eyes puffed up like balloons with makeup smeared all over them, I was thankful I’d tu
cked the gun inside my belt. I’d first heard a car door slam, footsteps, then the triple ring of the bell out front. Opening the door, I found what was left of Edie: A bloody crack split her lips. Her nose was large and disjointed, big yellow circles under her eyes. Aunt Fifi’s dress barely clung to her body. Her hair smelled like cat piss. It made me want to puke. “Are you okay?” I said, and she gazed right through me. “Edie!” I reached for her shoulder, but she brushed me off. “We should go to a hospital or something. You’re so … I’m calling Gustave, okay?”
“You really missed out tonight,” she said, walking right by me like she’d really had the time of her life. The wind blew in after her, then I heard a humanlike rustling in the bushes. I grabbed the gun from my belt and ran outside, scared shitless but no way was I letting anyone fuck with her again. I circled the house, went down the driveway and out to the street, the gun leading the way for me—it was all clear. I ran back inside, bolting the door behind me, and found Edie in the bathroom, wetting a clean white washcloth with hot water and dabbing her face. Within seconds the cloth was stained with blood and makeup. Pink water flushed down the sink. I felt sick to my stomach and suggested again that we call Gustave. “It was so fun.” She talked slowly into the mirror, her lower lip so thick she could barely pronounce the consonants. She mumbled something that I swear sounded like “life experience,” and then set the washcloth over her face.
“Edie.” I put my free hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.
“Get off!” she shouted from underneath the terry-cloth veil.
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