by Carol Anshaw
Nora had never been in the auditorium of this school, but could see clearly its hardwood stage, its heavy velvet curtain. She carried inside her a full catalog of stages. The small, black box stages on which Harold tried to find his motivation as one supporting character or another. The high-gloss stages on which her mother yanked the microphone out of its stand, threw the cord behind her, and began her beguine. The larger, more lavishly lit stages on which Vicki Ashford tossed back her signature blond mane. Back even further than that, into legend, to the stage at Radio City, to her mother and Fern Lawler, younger than Nora ever knew them, their bodies perfect, their as-yet-unveined legs kicking in unison with all the other Rockettes. All this energy pumped into insignificant moments of connection with strangers sitting beyond the footlights. She couldn’t face that same earnest supplication she knew she would find on Fern’s face this afternoon as she was giving her all for the approval of the audience inside.
Still, eventually, she turned off the ignition and got out. She repeated to herself what Russell had told her a couple of times this past week, that this show was nothing, augured nothing, was not about Nora and her philosophical position on all things theatrical. It was only about Fern being part of a salad.
She came in at the back of the small auditorium. Everyone was either applauding in a lunatic parental way, or snapping pictures of the dancers in the salad number as they left the stage, apparently having taken the last of their bows. She scanned the backs of a tomato and a lettuce wedge before she spotted Fern—even from behind Nora recognized her immediately, from the little skip-steps she took when she was especially happy or proud of herself.
She tried to wish her into turning around one last time, so she would see her mother standing here, not being a jerk. But she didn’t turn. She just kept following her fellow croutons, heading in the same direction, away from Nora, preoccupied with having to shove a little to get herself and her costume through the parted curtain.
Misty
NORA AND HAROLD and Lynette and her old friend Fern Lawler, all of them dressed up for the occasion, are shooting out from the Intracoastal to the open sea on Art and Lynette’s old inboard, a mahogany-hulled Sea Skiff, its huge engine rumbling away beneath them. As in their early days, Lynette is at the helm, her children in the back. Nora trails her hand overboard and turns to look at the wake—sunlight pulverizes the spray to glassy dust. She thinks Harold looks quite captainish in a white linen suit until she catches the slight blue blush of shadow on his lids, the yellow tinge to the suit, from its long time hanging in the back of someone’s closet, then on the rack at Value Village.
They are here this afternoon, following the coastline south from Fort Lauderdale to put Nora’s father to rest. He died two days ago, a middle-of-the-night heart attack. Lynette phoned 911, but by the time they arrived, there was nothing to be done.
He has left them instructions; he had everything written down. No funeral or memorial service, just a simple cremation, his ashes scattered on the waters in front of the Tiara Hotel on Miami Beach, where Vicki Ashford hit the peak of her (hence his) career in the mid-seventies. It takes them awhile to motor down from Lauderdale, hugging the coast as they pass Hollywood and Dania, Golden Shores, North Miami, to where the hotels start pumping up, finally arriving at a patch of ocean in front of the huge pink and white absurdity that is the Tiara in its gentie decline. Lynette cuts the engine, and the boat slows, then sidles among the light, lapping waves as Nora twists off the top of the container, which is about the size of a coffee can. They all look inside. The contents are lumpy—ashes and chunks. Lynette reaches in and takes out a piece.
“Bone,” she says.
“Something to think about, isn’t it?” Fern Lawler says, her small face half-hidden behind huge sunglasses. “All those grapefruit diets and collagen creams. The eye lifts, the tummy tucks. In the end, you wind up chunky in a can.”
No one has brought along any words to read or recite, and at any rate, their gathering is too small. Besides, a big eulogy wouldn’t be Art’s style. He was a quiet man in a noisy business. Elegant posture, beautiful socks—even his Variety obit mentioned the socks. He was an earnest man, devoted to his family, and to the business of entertainment, which fascinated him.
They all look at one another for a next step, but they’re stuck, stunned by the impact of sudden event.
Lynette takes charge. “Look at me,” she begins singing quietly in her thin showgirl voice, joined mid-line by Fern Lawler, an octave lower.
“Misty” was Art’s favorite number. Nora overturns the canister and the contents spill onto the surface of the Atlantic as Lynette and Fern continue in ragged harmony, as helpless as kittens up a tree, never knowing their hats from their gloves.
“I called Vicki,” Lynette says when they are back inside her deeply air-conditioned house, overlooking one of Fort Lauderdale’s Venetian canals. Lynette adores air-conditioning, finding it an unequivocal improvement on previous concepts such as “fresh air” and “outdoors.” She keeps the rooms as chilled as a florist’s display case. “Vicki’s not well—ghastly diabetes, I think they just sawed her feet off—but she still sent these.” Lynette gestures toward a lavish arrangement of Casablanca lilies in a cut crystal vase.
“She was always a bitch,” Fern Lawler says, “but a classy bitch.”
Nora loves, has always loved, everything about Fern Lawler. The long string of husbands, the spaniel dogs, the major jewelry, the hacienda in Beverly Hills, the fortune built on the wealth and financial advice of the husbands. After her brief years in show business, she took up painting and has made a small reputation for herself. Somewhere along this road of art, entertainment, and money, she took off for four years in the Peace Corps teaching English in Nigeria. Fern Lawler has always lived large, acted on impulse, and shrugged off regret. Nora hoped to pass along some of her spirit along with the name she gave her daughter, whom Fern Lawler still calls “Little Fern.”
When the two old buddies have gone into the kitchen to get drinks, Nora, shivering lightly, goes to the hall closet, finds an old terry cloth beach jacket of her father’s, and puts it on. In the hallway mirror, she can see that her lips have turned a little blue. When she’s back on the sofa, facing Harold, she says, “That’s so sad. About Vicki.”
“I know,” Harold says. “She hasn’t been doing so well lately.”
“How do...?”
“Well, we keep in touch, of course.”
Nora doesn’t pick up on whatever he’s trying to tell her, but understands it is something specific, that she is sitting inside some small comfy foyer of ignorant bliss, an instant before the door at the other end blows open.
“You know,” he says, as though he is amplifying the information, and Nora fears that Harold has been moved by their father’s death to make some dark, horrible confession.
“I don’t,” Nora says. “I don’t have any idea. And to be frank, I’m not sure I want—”
“She was my first, my, well—”
“What can you be talking about!?” Nora says, lowering her voice even though her mother and Fern Lawler are two rooms away. “We were children.”
“I was fourteen. It’s not as though she took advantage. Basically, I just thought I was extremely suave for my age.”
“Oh, man. Please. Don’t tell me about this.”
“Okay,” he says.
“How could something like that even start? I mean, I’m trying to get a picture.”
“The big pool at the Tiara? The one that was shaped like a harp with the strings made of tile stripes on the bottom of the pool? She had her own cabana there. She had this mix of iodine and baby oil for tanning. She was a major tanner—do you'remember?—a semipro. Those little eyecups, the reflector thing under the chin. Anyway, it was, you know, could I spread some on the back of her legs, and it pretty much went from there.” He pauses, staring into the miniature rain forest of their mother’s terrarium coffee table. “Her suite at the hotel was l
ike an apartment. There was a closet as big as a bedroom. She had the most amazing lingerie. Special-order stuff.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Well, it wasn’t ‘on’ exactly. Or off. It was more catch-as-catch-can. I guess I was in college when Dad stopped managing her.”
“Years?! You’re talking about years?!” Nora is whispering and shouting at the same time.
“I thought martinis,” Lynette says as she comes in from the kitchen, followed by Fern Lawler, both of them walking as though in a traditional procession of their tribe, carefully balancing a tray of cocktails, another of snacks—olives and Goldfish crackers. Their arrival pulls the emergency brake on Nora and Harold’s conversation.
Nora tries to regroup. As she takes a glass from the tray, she looks up at her mother. Lynette is still an attractive woman. She has not given in to the reductive mechanisms of aging. She stands out among the other old ladies around here for not having cotton candy hair, for not having defaulted into the determined cheer of pastels and floral prints. She looks only like a slightly worn version of her signature self, the persona she designed for stage and screen. She still has her black pageboy, is slim in her version of mourning clothes—black capri pants and a caftan top. She still has most of her height, which set her apart in her heyday. Now she would be somewhere down the chorus line. Her legs are shot, she’ll tell you that, then add, “But I’ve still got my dancer’s back, they can’t take that away from me.”
Like Fern Lawler, who also dyes her hair (in Fern’s case, a shiny auburn), and bleaches her teeth and gets her eyes done every few years, Lynette has taken on aging as a sort of modernization process. A little cosmetic surgery, a multitude of sins hidden behind large sunglasses, a devotion to European body wraps. She has also performed minor renovations on her lifestyle, to keep abreast of the times. She no longer smokes, although she says, “Existentially, I’m still smoking.” She has given up red meat, cut back on her cocktails. Even her addiction to ginger ale is behind her; she now drinks spring water and sautés vegetables in a small wok. As she will tell you, she keeps active. She’s into aquarobics.
Although up close Nora still finds her mother oppressive, with her inexhaustible supply of friendly suggestions for how Nora might live her life, or raise her child, or cut her hair, from a distance she is still fascinated by Lynette, particularly by the arrogance with which she has traveled through a life that probably wouldn’t have given anyone else much confidence at all. She did some film work early on, pictures where the plot called for a good-looking, feisty secretary. She was a minor dancer, first at Radio City, later in dinner theater. And then there were the three years on her TV show, Glenda’s Girls. In spite of this smattering of response to her looks and talent, Lynette has always seen herself as a star, and lived up to this inner image.
“To my dear husband,” she says, clinking the rim of her glass against Nora’s and Harold’s.
“Dearly departed,” Fern Lawler says, offering her own glass for clinking. She travels with a flask and so is usually a couple of cocktails ahead of everyone else.
They sip until Harold lifts the silence with a short chorus of fond memories about Art. The time he brought home two dogs as prospective pets, rejects from Cynthia and Her Capricious Canines—Pinky and Blue—four-legged vaudevillians who could jump through hoops and over the sprinklers of all their neighbors, who could stand on each other’s backs and bark out an offkey version of “Happy Birthday,” but who also pooped casually and with no sign of remorse on the laundry room floor, a habit acquired through their years of confinement in a backstage kennel.
Then there was the time he tried to take Lynette and Nora and Harold on what he thought would be a regular American family vacation at a rented cottage in the Adirondacks, then spent half of every day driving to and from the pay phone at the gas station at the crossroads, booking an entire tour for the Harmonicuties.
“Your father was born for the cell phone,” Lynette says, gesturing with a toothpicked olive. “He just showed up a little too early, technology-wise.”
Nora doesn’t say anything. She knows she should be offering some charming anecdote from her own stack of memories, but she is too busy trying to push away an image that has crept back, this time in more detail—her brother, pubescent and pumped with hormones, on top of Vicki Ashford in some ludicrous bed, something with a round mattress and a satin headboard. She can smell the Chanel vaporizing into the hotel room air above them, can see the seams of borrowed fishnet stockings running up the back of Harold’s long calves as he services the Purring Kitten.
They wait for their ranks to fill in. When everyone is here, Lynette will take them all to the Moonlight Carousel, her favorite romantic restaurant. It occupies the top of an old hotel and overlooks the ocean near the harbor at Port Everglades and serves sole amandine and beef Wellington and cherries jubilee with lots of tableside theatrics—decantings and debonings, tossings and flamings. The restaurant itself revolves slowly with hydraulic creaking, providing diners with a panoramic view of the marina at Bahia Mar, the ocean, the high-rise condominiums out of which most of the patrons have come to have dinner. Nora will pop a Dramamine before they leave the house.
Jeanne and Fern are flying down together after their respective classes. Fern’s arrival will prompt a feast of adoration. She is adored competitively by Lynette, because she is her granddaughter, and by Fern Lawler, because she is her namesake, and by both of them because Fern is who she is.
Jeanne is not adored, but is genuinely liked by the old gals, although with Lynette, it was rough-going at first. In principle, she curls a lip at the notion of lesbians. The only ones she has known personally were a couple of Rockettes. Tough characters, but also tragic—so off in the wrong direction, suffering terrible heartaches without the ultimate payoff of husbands.
Although Nora knows her mother loves her, and even likes her in the sense of enjoying her company, she also understands that she is a disappointment for having squandered her legacy by not even trying for some rung of stardom, and also for being sexually peculiar, an oddity Lynette cannot present in an uncomplicated way to her friends.
At least, as Lynette told Nora in the past, Jeanne is “normal-looking.”
“Whatever that means” had been Nora’s response, but of course she knew. Jeanne wears dresses and make-up and a stylish (but not too severely stylish) haircut and earrings (but only two, as opposed to sixteen in one ear). Lynette can, with some measure of comfort, refer to Jeanne as Nora’s “friend,” can cast the two of them in a domestic situation together without ever having to picture them naked.
A thought flickers across Nora’s consciousness: as opposed to Pam, who is precisely the sort of woman Lynette could only imagine in bed with her daughter.
Pam hasn’t called. Nora left a message on her cell phone yesterday about her father dying, and has checked her own several times last night and today, but there is nothing in the mailbox. (The cell phone is a recent purchase. At home, she hides it beneath the seat of her car. Pam is the only person to whom she has given the number. She buys minutes on a card so there won’t be a bill.) This isn’t the first time Pam has ducked out of reach; it has happened a couple of times before. She will be suddenly, startlingly incommunicado. Meaning she doesn’t call Nora, doesn’t respond to Nora’s calls. For a few days, Nora will go crazy inside while trying to act normal at work, or at home, or here in her mother’s living room. And then Pam will return as casually as she departed, and it will turn out that Pam and Melanie went to Starved Rock for a few days of hiking, or Melanie’s parents came to visit. And Nora will sink with these reminders that Melanie has the whole of Pam except for the little compartment in which Nora waits. Like her unanswered messages in the mailbox of the cell phone in Pam’s glove compartment.
Nora tries to climb out of herself and offer something to the moment she is supposed to be inhabiting. She asks her mother, “Are you going to be all right, down here by yourself?”
>
“Oh, I have my friends, too many really. My bridge group, the aquarobic gals, my Thespians.” Lynette is involved in a theater project out at the city senior center. They cast their productions from the pool of themselves and so wind up with Stanley Kowalskis and Sally Bowleses in their seventies and eighties, which gives the plays a whole new spin.
“Money’s not a problem,” she adds. “Your father and I have gone through all the papers and accounts together, a few times. Like little fire drills. I just wasn’t expecting widowhood so soon.”
“I know,” Fern Lawler says, weighing in with a second opinion. “I thought he had real golden-years potential.”
“Exactly. I know he was a little overweight, a little sedentary, but still. He was only seventy; I’m only sixty-eight. I thought we’d have a longer run of it is all.”
Harold suddenly starts weeping, his head in his hand, his shoulders shuddering. Nora’s emotional state is dry, but dark. She thinks, a little angrily, about how soon into her childhood she had to get used to her father leaving, how he was a receding character for the whole of her life. When she was little, he was always going on the road with Vicki or some other client. Art’s idea of being a good father was being a good provider, which meant working most of the time. When he retired, Nora was already long gone from home, raising her own daughter. She had fleetingly thought that perhaps, with some of his new free time, he and Fern might form the friendship Nora had missed out on.
Instead, with no deals to close or calls to make, Art settled back into the quiet, remote person he must have been by nature. He took up deep-sea fishing, spending long days—even those of Nora and Fern’s visits—on rank-smelling boats with other quiet old guys in squashed hats and clip-on shades. Other guys who felt they had talked enough for a lifetime, now they’d fish.