The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Then,” I said, “why the dreadlocks?”

  “You know, who else would look fabulous in dreadlocks?” Stet said, “Princess Margaret. I swear, if I could get Princess Margaret in here I could really do something with her. It’s that whole Ivy League thing that makes the dreadlocks matter, it’s seeing them where you expect a tiara. They do the same thing as a tiara, shapewise, you know. And that’s the kind of thing that suits you.”

  I knew he meant this as a compliment, but I was tired of having him lean back and gaze at me as if I was one of the mannequins. I turned on him.

  “What’s going on with your hair?” I asked him. He’d been letting it grow a little, and now it was all spiked up with gel, some new thing he was trying. “I thought you must have just gotten out of the shower, but that was hours ago.”

  “It’s the wet look,” he said. “It’s what they’re wearing—I don’t like to shock you, Your Majesty, but powdered wigs are passé.”

  But his sneer failed him and he sounded mostly hurt. I’d violated the impostor’s code and let him know I could see through his disguise. He checked the mirror fifty times that day and by the time I left I was feeling like a vandal.

  And why? So what if Stetson had seized with earnest solemnity on “the wet look,” or any look at all? Surely everyone ought to be able to worship as he likes? I was ready to turn out the world’s closets, upending bureaus and slitting mattresses until I found the jewels life was hiding from me, and I was infuriated to see Stetson’s devotion lavished on superficial things. Because I’d caught a glimmer of something deeper in him, and when it seemed to fade, I felt he’d betrayed me, sided with Lee to show me that the precious essences I’d dreamed of, the deeper insight and broader understanding, were no more than figments of a naive college girl’s imagination.

  Next morning he came in with the hair soft and dry, sticking up in little tufts. “Like it, Beatrice?” he asked, with his usual lofty acidity.

  “I love it,” I said, because he looked sleepy and rumpled like he’d just woken up, and because I knew he’d done it for me. “You should grow it out a little.”

  He smiled, almost shyly. “Nah, it gets unruly,” he said.

  “God forbid,” I said, fluffing up my own mop. “Wouldn’t do to let it run wild.” But since I spent most of my waking moments trying to change myself to meet somebody else’s ideal, I was terribly struck by his changing something in himself for my sake.

  “Did you used to wear it long?” I asked him.

  He almost flinched, for some reason, then got himself together and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It looked just like yours.”

  “Horrors.”

  He smiled immensely. “Then it got caught,” he said, keeping his eye on me to see my reaction. “In the axle of a car I was stealing.”

  “Why were you stealing a car?”

  “Had to get somewhere,” he answered, happy to have shocked me.

  “Like, a hospital?” I asked. He held back a minute more but then, the pressure was getting to him—he wanted to tell his story.

  “To see Jimi Hendrix,” he admitted. “I saw this Jeep just sitting in a driveway, the houselights weren’t on. I knew the back door would be unlocked, I knew the keys would be hanging there. That’s how people are, they can’t really believe—”

  “Some guy is just going to drive off in their car.” I looked at him sternly, like a third-grade teacher.

  “Exactly,” he said, laughing. “But I just got on Eighty-four, in the pouring rain, and I got a flat tire. Man, you have never seen anyone change a tire so fast.”

  “One of those miracles of strength, like guys have in a war,” I said.

  “Exactly. Except, I try to stand up, and my hair is wound in the axle. And while I’m lying there trying to get it out, there come the police.”

  “What happened?”

  “Guy had scissors in the glove compartment, cut me loose, wished me well.”

  “He liked you,” I said, thinking this cop must have seen the same thing I did in Stetson, a vital goodness that would make it impossible to imagine him a thief. “He just naturally helped you.”

  “Or, he was just stupid. Anyway, the next day, I left the car up the street with the keys under the seat. I’m sure it worked out.”

  “So, does this mean I have to watch my purse?”

  “No, no, of course not.” He looked protective, as if I could count on him to keep me safe from that old self of his. “I don’t do stuff like that anymore.”

  He was even talking differently, his irony was gone and he was watching my face like a guy watching a slot machine, to see how I’d take the story. I took it very well—like the money for his mother; it was a glimpse of something real, something solid in Stetson—something that wouldn’t change with the fashion. Just the phrase “stuff like that” had an adolescent ring that touched me. He could have been some guy on my school bus, before Sweetriver got me in its clutches. I disapproved of myself, but I couldn’t help liking his criminal spirit—I recognized it as if it were my own natural way.

  “No, now you’re a fashion guru,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m just a drunk, Beatrice,” he said jauntily. “Recovering, but basically, a drunk.”

  “Stetson!” His mother had hinted at this, and he probably knew it, but his telling me meant something different. It went into my heart like a hatpin.

  “Once maybe, but not now.” I swept my arm out to remind him what a palace he’d made. “It’s impossible for me to think of you that way!”

  “Then you’re wrong as usual, Beatrice,” he said, ducking into the back room.

  Nine

  “IF IT’S a girl, we’ll name her Seraphina,” Sylvie told me. Her voice had a child’s confidence—a thing so fragile, anyone could crush it—but she trusted me, she put it in my hands. Our hearts still contained the same vision, like two lockets with matching pictures enclosed.

  “Butchy’s making a lot of money,” she went on. “You know the old drywall plant out by the railroad tracks, the Nubestos plant? Somebody’s bought it, they’re going to make running shoes or something in there. But they’ve got to get all the old junk out of there and they pay in cash, no taxes!”

  “But Nubestos abandoned that place. They just laid everyone off and closed it overnight.”

  “Yeah, there was some kind of change in the law.”

  “Yeah, that Nubestos was going to be liable in about a billion dollars’ worth of lawsuits when all the workers died. Sylvie, that place is poisoned, that’s why they’re paying under the table.”

  “Butchy’s not afraid of it, not at all,” she said stubbornly. She’d not hear her man called a coward. She’d taken up his life and that meant taking up his views, his ideals, even his ignorance—something unmanly in the fear of ingesting poisons, and, I supposed, something unrealistic. Butch was going to die in a fight or a car crash; asbestos wasn’t quick enough to kill him. Sylvie always said “I don’t know” so sweetly, with such generosity: she was happy not to know, so someone could have the pleasure of explaining. She did know what could be accomplished with an admiring look, how much would be given to the girl who stepped back and seemed to want nothing at all.

  “Sylvie, you’ve heard of mad hatters, right?”

  “Like, in Alice in Wonderland?” she asked, sounding out of her depth. I would have to bring up English literature (that is, her lack of education).

  “No, or, yes, but, do you know why hatters used to go mad?”

  “No,” she sighed. “You mean there was more than one?”

  “They lost their minds because they worked with arsenic every day!” I said.

  “That’s terrible,” she said politely, without seeming to make the connection. Who can really imagine everyday actions—good things like hard work—as harmful? The history lesson of the Wolfe dinner table had been that the past was a hellhole, not to be peered into. Suppose you lost your footing on the bank? No, you lived with your back to it, and all its m
ad hatters.

  “I put geraniums on the front steps, and yesterday I put Contac paper with pictures of flowerpots on the kitchen walls; I just couldn’t scrub them really clean, you know?” She drew on her cigarette and I heard real happiness in her voice, the unfathomable satisfaction manifest in domestic particulars: the geranium at the window, the patchwork quilt, and under it, the man and woman, lost in each other’s love. She’d never guessed she could have it all so easily, so soon.

  * * *

  I HAD flowers too—a pot of calla lilies Lee had brought me as a gift—a secret apology for being the kind of person who had never wondered about fin-de-siècle Paris, I’d thought, when I saw her standing there in the door, wearing her corduroy pantsuit and carrying these flowers.

  “I don’t need calla lilies, not when I have you,” I’d said.

  “You always say the right thing,” she mumbled, as I took her in my arms. I was never, ever going to admit that I knew there was an aspidistra on her end table at home. I was going to help her make lasagne and then we were going to get in bed and watch a National Geographic Undersea Special together, if we could manage to keep awake. Sleep pulled on us irresistibly now, as if by finding each other we’d done our work on earth and were folded into comfort, away from strife, for evermore. Every night I dreamed I was walking the dirt road home.

  * * *

  “TEDDY GOT me a new lamp, from school, so I can work at night now,” Ma said.

  “Did they have some kind of a sale?”

  “No, he found it in the faculty lounge.”

  “Found it?”

  “It was in the back corner, no one used it.”

  “You mean he took it.”

  “Well, found, took—you wouldn’t understand this, of course, Beatrice, but people in our situation have to live by their wits.”

  “I guess that’s true,” I said. What did it matter to me whether Teddy found a lamp or stole one?

  “Without Teddy I don’t know what I’d do,” Ma said. “No one else is helping.” Then, suddenly, she broke into flirtatious laughter. “Larry!” she asked, in a dramatic whisper, flaunting her divine secret, “what are you doing back here?” Then came some kind of muffled struggle and the phone crashed to the floor.

  “Is somebody there?” I called into the phone, telling myself that Larry is a common name, and this was probably a much older and more distinguished Larry than the one whose eyes had poured something wonderful into hers.

  “No, no, nobody,” my mother said lightly, “Thank you, my darling, it always helps me so much to talk to you. You give me hope, and strength. Don’t forget, sweetheart, no matter what, never, ever forget how much I love you … good-bye, good-bye.”

  * * *

  “YOU HAVE to have faith, Beachy,” said Sylvie, when I repeated my conversation with Ma to her the next day. “Love overcomes all obstacles.”

  “I do, I do, I have faith in love,” I protested dully, thinking that Sylvie was never going to read Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina and so would be unlikely to get any great perspective on love—its sources, its consequences, its sacred power. I could still hear her wistful twelve-year-old voice singing: “Ta-a-mmy. Ta-a-mmy, Tammy’s in love.” That was all she had dreamed of—being precious to a man. A man full of strength, grace, and a certain suppressed rage—and in his eyes, that longing a woman knows she can fulfill. (Hubris, Sylvie, is the pride that goes before a fall.) Once this longing sucks all a woman’s love and effort into it and is still not filled, and there’s no hope to keep the rage in check anymore, things get broken, whole lives get broken. If there was money—but in Brimfield Valley there was no money, only television, alcohol, and faith-in-love. Love, a wheel worth breaking yourself on.

  On the other hand, Ma had read Flaubert and Tolstoy, and all she’d noticed was that Madame Bovary was the heroine, the eponymous main character of a Great Work, while the others, the good and happy wives and mothers, were part of the scenery against which Emma’s drama played out.

  “He’s not really her boyfriend,” Sylvie cajoled me. “He’s her assistant, more like.”

  “And with what does he assist her? Overcoming obstacles? They’ve already overcome two fairly large obstacles: her marriage, and her job!”

  “You’re such a know-it-all, Beach,” Sylvie said, with admiration and disapproval at once. Not only had I stepped beyond the family pale; now I went so far as to question Ma’s supreme right to map our moral territory according to her own caprice. There was that choice to be made—Ma or reality.

  “Larry’s really nice, really,” Sylvie said. “He’s sweet, you know, in a hulking sort of way, and he’s thoughtful—he stacked all Ma’s wood for her without her even asking—and he’s good with Teddy, just like a big brother.”

  “Which makes sense, really,” I said, “in that he and Teddy could be brothers.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s not that much older than Teddy! Ma is dating a boy!”

  “No,” she said, “not dating, not the way you mean…” her voice trailed away and after a moment she said, “Butch turns twenty-one next month, imagine! He’ll be legal. I wanted to have a party but he got all huffy and said what did I want, everyone to figure out he’s been using a fake ID?” She laughed. “Not that anyone doesn’t know it now, it’s just so Don won’t lose his license if the bar gets busted. They’d just say Butch tricked them, that’s all. But the cops won’t bust Butchy. Like Don says, Butchy knows when to trickle and when to pour, and they never bust a pourer.”

  For the first time in her life she knew things I didn’t. She was somebody—the bartender’s girlfriend, as fine a position in the valley as the mayor’s wife held on the hill. The old ladies there fussed over her pregnancy, telling her to put her feet up, knitting afghans, all the things she’d dreamed of, watching those Tammy movies with Ma through the endless insomniac nights, learning that love existed over bowling alleys and out back of the auto body shops, not behind the leaded windows of the fine homes. That—marrying up—had been Ma’s mistake, but she wouldn’t make another, now that she knew where she’d gone wrong. And Sylvie had collected her fallen hatchlings and abandoned kittens and now this stray man, one of those outlaw men whose feelings were stronger because they’re never dispersed into language. It was almost like the love and need bottled up in there made them big, because it made them restless, they had to spend huge effort to get rid of it, by lifting enormous beams and hauling in giant tuna and whatever. Sylvie had a man she could take shelter beneath, and she was fitting herself to him in every single way, becoming his comfort, his only luxury, picking up his mannerisms and habits of speech, withdrawing into his world, giving up everything else.

  “No, I like a real man,” she said, with a deep laugh of satisfaction, of knowledge beyond her years. “Though, I wish he was more excited about the baby,” she said. “He cares, I know he does, but, it’s like he doesn’t dare love anything for fear it will hurt him in the end. Oh, Beatrice, I just know I can make him happy, we’ll be such a nice family, don’t you think? But he’s so tense now, he gets mad at the drop of a hat—it’s the money, and we need a bigger place, and—”

  Little Springtime was barking wildly and she told him she’d take him out in a minute. “The neighbors have these huge dogs and they just let them run. He’s afraid of them,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think they feed them … they’re stoned all the time.

  “I saw the Mushroom in the Grand Union yesterday,” she said, getting off the subject. She meant Mrs. Markham, the ninth-grade teacher who Ma suspected had turned her in to the principal. “She didn’t even say hello to me, just stuck her nose in the air and walked right by, just because I’m pregnant. Jealous old prude, she can’t stand the thought of it—I’ve got Butchy and she’s all alone.”

  Ma had called Mrs. Markham a “poisonous old mushroom” in front of a room full of boys on detention, which had caused Mrs. Markham, who was in fact short, pale, and large-headed, to develop t
his nickname, a problem exacerbated by the fact that Sylvie had, purely by accident, called her “Mrs. Mushroom” to her face. So there was no room for question about the reason for the angle of her nose.

  “Why is everyone so small-minded?” Sylvie asked in a tone of perfect bafflement, Ma’s habitual tone. “Why can’t they just be happy for me, that I have a boyfriend who loves me, that I’m expecting a baby?”

  And so she sped happily, gloriously, even, toward her precipice, waving to those poor crabbed souls who, unloved by Butch, unpregnant, refused to wish her godspeed. As our conversation wound on, she lit the gas ring to start a new cigarette, praised her midwife (“She asks me—‘Did you eat your yam?’—can you imagine that, someone worrying over you that way?”) and told me more about the neighbor, whose idea of a family outing involved giving his two kids psilocybin and taking them to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. “And, did Pop tell you he’s teaching Dolly to fly?”

  * * *

  “DON’T TELL Mommy,” Dolly said.

  “I won’t, I won’t, but Dolly, he doesn’t know how to fly a plane yet himself. How can he teach you?” It was one thing for him to take flying lessons—but to give them?

  “You have to promise. I don’t want to upset her.” Then she paused, listening: “It’s okay,” she said, hushedly, “he’s taking a shower.” She listened again, and, satisfied, began to explain. “He’s so depressed,” she said, “that’s the thing. And the flying makes him feel hopeful. And if this deal gets, you know, off the ground, he’s going to buy a plane—it’s the best way to get out to the site, really, so he needs to know how. He is good at it,” she insisted. “He picked it up right away. Peabo says he’s natural.”