The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “I was not going to let that plant emerge victorious,” she’d said, but I of course had been rooting for it. And here it was, sitting calmly beside a shell picked up on a beach vacation and a picture of someone Lee loved.

  She loved someone; she might, possibly, come to love me. Waist-deep in the shrubbery outside her kitchen window, reminding myself to note for Philippa the feminine qualities of the conch, I felt determined that I would come to live with Lee and her aspidistra here at Quail Run. Live with her, live like her, my pulse slow, my thoughts calm.

  I ran back up the long driveway to the bus stop, skipping over the speed bumps the way I used to skip down the school hallways when I was little. What a relief to be back on the old familiar treadmill, working toward love! The pounding pulse, the desperate inner pleading with a nameless god whose silence would leave me to learn the ways of another heart—the essential subject, the only one important enough to keep my attention. I took the bus back all the way to the Aetna Insurance Company, where Lee must be leaning in a doorway now, having a quiet conversation. Would she walk down the street for lunch? Was there a chance I’d cross her path? The idea of catching her in an act of normality, seeing her buy a pack of cigarettes or admire a dress in a shop window, made my heart jump.

  * * *

  THE SHOP I found myself standing in front of, called LaLouche, was a glass temple to the goddess of chic, and I imagined Lee going in there, choosing a few exquisite pieces and buying them without my million hesitations (were they too expensive, too pretentious, did they make me look fat, or silly, or like I had no idea at all what I was doing, etc.?). The faceless mannequins in the window leaned back against the air with their endless arms outstretched. One was carrying a stack of cashmere sweaters in muted, nameless colors, another was standing behind a card that read SALES OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE.

  I imagined that if I went in to apply, the owner might become hysterical and try to chase me out with a broom, as a guest of ours had when a flying squirrel fell down the chimney one time. But whoever got that job would have a view of this intersection—she could watch all day for Lee. I didn’t even dream of winning her, just of seeing her go quietly, competently by. Starvation hadn’t done it, sweating in the bowels of St. Gerasimus hadn’t done it—but now, for the first time since I’d arrived in Hartford, I really, really wanted a job.

  So I pulled open the high wide door and strode toward the counter, where a languid and infinitely supercilious man in a green silk shirt leaned against the wall and regarded me skeptically.

  “You’re looking for a job,” he said, as if he were a soothsayer.

  “How did you know?”

  He laughed very slightly, tore an application form off a pad, and handed it across to me with a black and gold fountain pen ten times the weight of the St. Gerasimus ballpoint in my purse. It had a good effect on my handwriting, so that the application looked interesting. By the time I’d filled it in, I heard the proprietor’s voice behind me, asking me if I could start that afternoon. He’d used the time to walk around and examine me from every angle, and he’d decided I would do.

  He himself looked like a maharaja, or maybe more of a goatherd—someone from an exotic storybook. His silk shirt flowed over broad shoulders, and his jeans were pressed, his boots had brass at the toes. He had stubble instead of hair, like he’d shaved his head and then thought better.

  “But,” I said, “how can you tell I’d be good?”

  “Instinct,” he said, with amazing arrogance, and reading my name off the top line: “Instinct, Beatrice Wolfe.” That was how he’d gotten so far in this business, he said, that was how he could know that, in spite of my apparent mousiness (he paused to let this remark sink in), I had potential.

  “Stetson Tortola,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s my name,” he said drily, stepping back, his eyes ticking over me as if he was registering my various capacities on some internal seismograph, then giving a quick nod. Yes, he was sure of it: he could do something with me. “Does it surprise you?”

  “No, no—why would it surprise me?” I was always careful not to seem surprised—otherwise someone might guess I didn’t know anything.

  “Ever considered dreadlocks?” he asked.

  I had not.

  “Well, you ought to,” he said, holding up a picture of Bob Marley that he apparently kept behind the counter for this purpose. “Dreadlocks would be just the thing. Sometimes a change of image is necessary.”

  I peered into the mirror, disappointed.

  “I don’t know.” I wondered if he’d ever considered wearing deerskin, or an old T-shirt, because his face didn’t go with his clothing—it was a wary, curious face, not the mask of narcissism I knew from Sweetriver and would have expected from a man in silk.

  His eyes flicked over me and then around the store, looking for imperfections. He saw a sweater out of place and stepped around me to get to it as if I were a boulder in the road.

  “What weekly salary would you need?” he asked.

  Salary, my God. The word was barely in my vocabulary. Ma had made a salary, in her teaching days, but she took it in cash; she liked peeling off twenties to dazzle the pharmacist or the veterinarian with her insouciance, show how little she cared for it all. Money was the antithesis of love; so we didn’t associate with the kind of people who made salaries.

  But then of course, we didn’t associate with anyone. “I’m not really sure,” I said. Then I remembered what my father had said. “Would a hundred a week be okay?”

  He darted a glance at me and I wondered if I’d asked too much.

  “Would ninety be better?”

  “No, no,” he said, “I’m sure I can manage a hundred.

  “This a gift from Mom?” he asked then, plucking at my blouse. “Quite a look. Get something off the rack over there,” he said. “I mean, assuming you can stay today.”

  Something in his voice mocked the idea that I might have anywhere else to go. He’d seen through me, knew more about me than I’d told him somehow. For him, fashion was art, and retail sales its attendant philosophy—and by this standard, I was an imbecile. LaLouche clothes did not stoop to flattery—no, they demanded that their wearers live up to their rigorous, if mercurial, standards. If you couldn’t manage to look smug in a hacked-off sheath and furry leggings, pigment-dyed in two complementary shades of mustard, then you weren’t the LaLouche type and would have to creep across town and get yourself something polyester at Sears.

  And indeed, he shook his head sadly as soon as my hand closed on a hanger—“No flowers,” he said, with a contempt almost as tender as affection. “Try the olive. It’ll tone down the pinks.” He pressed a finger to my cheek as if it was a muffin he was testing, and my heart leapt. I’d fooled him. I really did look as gentle and flowery as a woman. “You want to play against type, in this case.

  “That’s a little closer,” he said, when I came out of the dressing room in something colored like a bruise, and stood in front of the mirror gawking—the dietary aide, the little squirrel, had disappeared. This person looked nearly like a predator, and seeing her I felt different than I’d felt in some months. Stetson had changed me into someone who might be attractive to Lee.

  “I don’t even know how this got in here—it looks like a tablecloth,” Stetson said, carrying the dress I’d picked first, with its depictions of morning glories twining, into the back room. My first task was to pack it up to send it back to its maker, and I went about it with brisk efficiency, imagining Lee would walk by and see me, and be enthralled.

  * * *

  AT HOME, I called the hospital and told them I was quitting. I was shaking—I’d never dared quit anything before, for fear I’d get addicted to quitting and end up back home looking for a pencil for the rest of my life.

  “You will never, ever work at St. Gerasimus Hospital again!” the supervisor said, sounding not unlike my mother. I felt responsible to seem undone, to weep and apologize an
d beg her to reconsider.

  “Do you promise?” I asked. It was the first bridge I’d ever burned.

  * * *

  “LOVE IS a transforming thing!” Philippa crowed. “I must say, you’ve pushed the envelope in the stalking department, actually getting a job on her street. And fashion is an excellent field for you. We need bold vision, there’s no appreciation these days of the way appearance can shape reality.”

  “There isn’t?” The phrase “bold vision” described Philippa, but she always saw her best qualities reflected in me. I’d be startled and disbelieving, then I’d catch a glimpse of the corner of something, and there it would be—bold vision, or whatever. “Seems like people think appearance can replace reality.”

  “Which makes for absurdity. But it can enhance reality,” she said. We were hitting on our basic argument—something about the role of glamour in life. Philippa’s childhood had been gritty and glamourless and alleviated only by celluloid; mine was all show so that every time I got a clod of earth in my hand I was grateful.

  I was going to flout her, and her damned precepts, from now until eternity. She could hardly expect me to live out her notions after she’d left me. I refused even to try to be lurid anymore, I was going with Lee and her aspidistra.

  “And happily ever after too,” I added, just to turn the knife.

  “But,” Philippa said. “The aspidistra motif—I’m not sure I fully understand. I mean, there was the time I followed Tallulah Bankhead into Saks and watched her try on hats, but I didn’t actually buy a hat myself.”

  “That’s where we differ. I have a great sympathy for aspidistras.” I told her how my mother had tried to extinguish ours, and she began to laugh like a mad gambler who’d put a quarter in the slot machine and gotten more than she could have dreamed. “I do believe, Beatrice, that this is history’s first example of a really heroic plant. I see it riding into battle astride its noble mount. It is going to emerge victorious!

  “So, how are we to accomplish this?” she asked.

  We agreed that I had to get Lee talking, draw her out of herself and into my web. Reenie was the potluck hostess next week, which complicated matters, but Philippa delighted in thinking through complications. What if I became Lee’s confidante, so that, as she poured her fears and longings into my ear, her affections were to change course, by degrees, and begin creeping in my direction? Would that be possible?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The thing is, Reenie keeps flirting with me.”

  “Now there’s a twist!” Philippa cried. “This could be fabulous.”

  “How? It’s just making Lee hate me!”

  “It is making Lee rivalrous, and that alone is a fascination!” she said. “She’s going to wonder what Reenie sees in you! Who knows where that could lead?”

  “So she might fall in love with me to avenge herself on Reenie?” I asked, full of hope. I did not ask myself whether a love excited by spite was really the kind of love I was looking for; I was in no position for such a proud question.

  Six

  I’D GOTTEN The Moosewood Cookbook because the most upstanding of our last dinner’s recipes seemed to have come from there, and settled on a “Comprehensively Stuffed Squash” for its enormous number of wholesome ingredients. Lee was behind me, quiche in hand, as I carried this masterpiece up the makeshift steps at Reenie’s. I didn’t dare turn to look back at her: she’d see I was casing her, planning to break and enter. She’d probably call the police.

  The house was a shell, really, with a piece of plywood laid across two sawhorses for a table and a bedspread tacked up as a bathroom wall.

  “You came!” Reenie said.

  “’Course,” I replied, stricken with shy happiness. So, it was scenario C: my favorite. I dared flash a smile at Lee, who looked as if she’d been run through with a bayonet. The others spilled in with their offerings while Lee busied herself setting out forks and knives from the drainer, with, I thought, a touching little officiousness, demonstrating what a very good little girl she was.

  “Do you need help?” I asked, and she glanced up in irritation, wishing I’d go away.

  “I could use some,” Reenie said. She was sweeping up a pile of fresh sawdust, which smelled of pure hope, and I rushed for the dustpan.

  “You did this all yourself?” I said. “It’s amazing.”

  “She’s an apprentice plumber, you know,” Lee said with pride.

  “You did the plumbing yourself too?” I said. Reenie nodded and offered to show me the bath/shower installation, and I was so happy, knowing this would trouble Lee, that I forgot whose heart I was pursuing, and bolted up the stairs behind Reenie with a thrill of expectation as if we were planning to kiss at the top.

  Reenie, however, wanted to show off the plumbing. She demonstrated the valves and faucets while I staved off a terrible urgency; Lee was downstairs, this was my one chance to be with her and instead, I was accidentally learning the difference between copper and PVC. In the midst of it, Reenie caught her own eye in the mirror, pulled a comb out of her pocket, wet it, and slicked her hair back with a gesture she must have learned from the movies. No one had actually done that since the midfifties, when my father, in his high-motorcycle phase, had worn his hair that way. My blood jumped: she was so thin and long-limbed and her movements so boyishly utilitarian, but her throat was long and smooth and white as milk, no Adam’s apple—that sign of a man’s secret vulnerability.

  “Paper cups?” Lee said, standing in the doorway. “Do you have any?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know,” Reenie answered, jumping up and brushing by us as she went down to look for them. Lee and I stood facing each other. She seemed to reproach me: she had dibs on Reenie, hadn’t she made that clear? I did feel guilty—not for trying to steal Reenie’s affections from Lee, but for allowing my own to waver. And out of that guilt, a thin tendril of sympathy began to grow.

  “It’s something to be proud of, building your own house,” I said, thinking that of course Lee loved Reenie—Reenie could do things. What skills did I have to show? My ability to keep the members of my family spinning like so many plates, so that as long as I kept running from one to the next, encouraging, consoling, nodding my head or shaking it, they would keep their precarious balance a minute more?

  “I hope you two manage to get together,” I said, with resignation. “For her sake.”

  And Lee blinked quizzically up at me, then her face shed its wariness and she nodded in agreement. “Thanks,” she said. “We better go down.”

  By the time we got to Kingdom Come something infinitesimal, and essential, had changed. I’d told them all about my new job, and Pat had given the others that look she used to remind them not to trust me. “It doesn’t bother you, perpetuating oppressive masculine ideals?” she asked.

  Her tone made me feel so guilty and defensive, I barely heard her words. “It’s a hundred dollars a week,” I said. I could afford to buy Lee a drink. She talked about Reenie as we danced, but it was a different kind of talk, more a way of getting to know me. We were at one with each other, now that Reenie had enchanted us both.

  “She’s strong,” Lee said, resting her head on my shoulder. “You should see her working. She just does the job step by step until it’s finished, it’s wonderful to see.”

  A slow smile, tender bouyant breasts, the ability to listen avidly and guess what underlies a conversation, a dreamy willingness to fall open in a man’s hands; I’d thought I knew the catalogue of female beauties—strength, or effort? No.

  “She’s, she’s just so…” Lee said, smiling hopelessly, dancing without reference to the heavy beat, as if to refuse its drive. Beside us Susan bopped miserably, like a chicken trying to fly, but the men around us seemed to be riding astride the music, and when the beat quickened they went with it together. I felt their vigor and loved it. I was skating at a rink once, falling down every twenty feet, when “You Beat Me to the Punch” came on and I did a perfect spin all of a sudden. The
music had seemed to ask it, and I wanted to oblige. It was like love, I thought, looking up into the mirrored ball, feeling the bass thump in the floor. I was among my own people at last, and Lee was coming around, and Philippa wanted to hear the story. I glanced over and saw Pat flash a warning at Lee, and a dark glance in my direction. Guilty, without knowing why I should be, I stiffened, and bounced back and forth on the balls of my feet, dancing the way Lee did.

  She was so quietly certain of everything. No, she said when I asked if she’d like another drink; she never had more than two. At midnight she said, “I’ll drive you home,” without inflection, as if this was just the next task on her list. Pat looked wary but Lee didn’t register it and I decided I must be misinterpreting. We went out to her car, a fifteen-year-old Mustang convertible, gleaming like a new apple, confirming my every sense of her, and she unlocked the passenger door for me with an offhand courtliness worthy of James Dean.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS later we were still sitting in it, parked in Frank’s driveway, with the engine off and the radio on. Lee was telling me about herself, or trying to. Her father was a certified public accountant, her mother a registered nurse. She’d grown up in Levittown, gone to secretarial school and junior college, moved up through the ranks at Aetna. She was in the education department now, teaching adjusters how to evaluate claims.

  “Wow,” I said, when she told me she had graduated from college in 1969, “You were there.”

  “Where?”

  “There. In the sixties!” I breathed, my mind filling so full of images that Charles Manson, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X all streamed together in a righteous, murderous procession. Straight out of the television and into my unconscious they’d come, while I worked my long division at the kitchen table, and what they had said to me, in unison, was: Come, grow, and soon passion will blaze up in you and your life will begin to mean something. Make love, not war!