by Carol Anshaw
His having left so early and often should make his death easier to bear, but Nora instead finds herself in a place where facts can’t touch feeling. She sits freezing in her mother’s living room, shrugging deeper into her father’s beach jacket, falling while no one notices, into a small moment of self-pity for having lost a father she’d still been vaguely hoping to gain. She thinks how death shuts even the unopened door.
Across the living room, Lynette has gone over to hold Harold as he weeps. While she’s doing this, she apparently is also softly nudging him out of the spotlight.
“I’m a widow,” she says, holding her son and shaking her head in disbelief. She sounds as though she has read the line on a script, then the gesture in parentheses beneath it.
Nora can see that her mother is beginning to transform Art’s death into the latest in her lifetime string of dramatic moments. She speaks, not so much in direct reply to anyone in the room, but as though she is being interviewed by an invisible television personality who has asked some terribly sympathetic question about where Lynette will go from here—courageously, of course—and what she will do to fill the emptiness.
“I think I’ll get a cat or two,” she says. “Your father was allergic, but now, what the hell.”
Offer
WHEN THE COMPRESSOR on the refrigerator shuts down with a sigh, it’s as though this exhalation is the last sound in the world, now sucked into the powerful and complete silence of the kitchen.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Tracy says finally. “You’re only around in little bursts. Happy, fun bursts. You’re not here for the hour-after-hour part, the day-after-day part. He was a colicky baby, and now he’s a fussy baby. He needs his mommy all the time. He’s Mr. Personality, but sometimes at four A.M., I could do with a little less personality since I already got an hour’s worth of it at two-thirty.”
“I know,” Fern says. “I’m not making a big judgment. I love you and I love Vaughn and I’m trying to figure out how to get things to a better place.”
“It’s not going to happen again, if that’s what you’re worried about. I must’ve just lost it when he was crying for so long. I wanted him to stop is all. I yanked him out of his crib. A little too hard. It wasn’t great, what I did. I’m not saying it was great.”
As though he knows this conversation is about him, Vaughn is watching them intently from his swing, which is set on the table amid their cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts Fern brought with her. The microwave pings. Vaughn’s bottle is ready. Today is the first Fern has seen of him with a bottle.
“The breastfeeding thing,” Tracy says. “It’s over.”
“Where are your lovely parents?” Fern says. She has noticed that they don’t seem to be rattling around anywhere.
“Out at the factory. They’re never here anymore. They’ve got a new herb. Tree bark from some Himalayan valley, it’s supposed to give you earth-moving orgasms. They can’t ship the stuff out fast enough.”
“They’re part of the problem.” Fern wants to spread the blame a little, so Tracy won’t feel like Fern is beating up on her. “Where are they when you need them? You don’t have enough support. Like, if you lived in a small Sicilian village you’d have generations of extended family handy. Or even in Idaho. You’d have an old farmhouse and a reliable husband and a kindly aunt who’d take the baby while you went into town in the pickup on Saturday night for the hoedown. You don’t have any kind of bigger situation that can absorb a baby. All you’ve got is you.”
“All you ever have, really, is you.”
Fern doesn’t want to listen to Tracy go existential.
“Hey. Let me give you a break. I can take Vaughn days I don’t have class, maybe bring him to Harold’s when I work over there, see how that goes. I could keep him over some nights.”
“Oh, man, your mother would love that.”
“She’ll be cool.” Fern has no idea how Nora will be; she’ll worry about that later.
“I saw her last week, by the way. Before you all went to Florida. She was coming out of Selmarie.” She punctuates this piece of information by lowering her head and raising her eyebrows, so Fern will get her drift.
“Not alone,” Fern says. “I knew. I knew something was going on. I know her. I am not fooled by her disguises. She fluffs up those throw pillows, all comfy on the sofa, reading a book with Jeanne’s feet on her lap. Jeanne’s feet with those fuzzy sock slippers on them. The picture of domestic bliss. But I saw through it!”
“I was out with my friend here.” Tracy has him out of the bouncer. He is latched onto the bottle. “We were hanging out in the little square. They were coming out, heading to cross the street.”
“Where were they going, do you think?”
“The apothecary shop. I waited to see. But that’s not the crucial part. They had to cross the street, and your mother was going to lunge out without looking, but the girlfriend stopped her, and this is the thing—the way she did it was putting a hand down in a restraining way on your mother’s thigh.”
“So?” Fern says.
“Well, try thinking how many times I’ve put my hand on your thigh.”
“What’d she look like?”
“Mmm. Scary. Crewcut. Skinny. Black jeans. Long black coat. One of those things the Marlboro Man wears when he’s getting the herd in from the snowstorm.”
“Oh boy. Just her type.”
“But Jeanne’s not like that.”
“Jeanne makes a nice presentation. Jeanne is who my mother wants to want. But who she really wants? You should have seen the babes before Jeanne. And the ones I saw were probably the more presentable babes. There were others I think she brought in at night, after I was asleep. But even the ones I met were sullen things. That’s what I think she really wants—sullen and impossible. Someone who’ll push her around a little. Maybe a little on the dumb side. Someone she can’t really bring into her life. I can’t believe they were out in broad daylight. She must be totally lost. Oh, my poor mama. I could almost feel sorry for her.”
There’s a long pause during which Fern assumes they are on the same page, thinking about her mother’s ridiculous affair. But then Tracy says, “You haven’t told her, anyone, anything, have you? About me, about this Mommy Dearest thing?” Tracy gives Vaughn a kiss on his furry head, a protective gesture, although she is the one they are trying to protect him from.
“Of course not.” The truth is she hasn’t told anyone except James, whom she told right away. But she can’t let Tracy know that. Tracy has been tentative about accepting James’s arrival in Fern’s life. If James is Vaughn’s father, that would account for it. Tracy hasn’t come forward with that piece of information, and Fern hasn’t pressed. It could just be that Tracy sees James as someone on her pile of discards and isn’t comfortable with him turning up again in her life. Whatever the snag between them, Fern is hoping it will eventually smooth itself out. In the meantime, she tries to downplay the intimacy she has with James.
When she told him about Vaughn, about what she’d discovered and what she thought she—which means they, really—was going to have to do, he listened and rubbed Lucky’s ears with his thumbs for such a long time that Fern thought he was going to say this was more than he’d bargained for. (They are so far “together” in only the loosest way.) But then he said they should definitely help, but that first she needed to talk with Tracy, to get her cooperation, make her part of the new plan. Fern had intended to follow up immediately, but then she had to go down to Florida, a delay that made her nervous, but also gave her time to fine-tune the conversation—supportive and nonthreatening—that she’s having now.
Tracy has a good poker face. You have to look hard to get what’s going on beneath the blankness. Today, though, there’s a new element. Fern pays attention, tries to figure it out. It’s not only that Tracy has lost her bad-girl look, her attitude, her weird signature make-up with all that sixties eyeliner. Or that her home dye job is that unfortunate housewife m
ousy mauve, now with roots. What’s new about how she looks is something more fundamental, the tracks of hard times.
“You must think I’m such a loser,” Tracy says.
“I think everything is hard. I think what you’re doing is especially hard. I don’t know that I’d be doing much better.”
“But you would. Of course you would.”
“Maybe,” Fern says, but they both know she probably would be doing better. They are both capable of fucking up, but Tracy’s potential along these lines has so much more range.
“Let me show you what he can do,” she says to Fern as she hands Vaughn over. He is making funny faces; he thinks he’s the pinnacle of wit. Tracy goes to the living room and fetches a bolster pillow from the sofa, sets it down on the floor, and then takes Vaughn and props his stomach on the pillow.
“We play wheelbarrow.” She picks up his feet and starts rolling him gently back and forth. He starts laughing.
“You try it,” she says to Fern. “He loves this game. I take him for rides in the car, too. We drive around. Lots of walks. He’s a guy who likes to be on the move. Mr. Mobile.”
Mercifully, the phone rings, saving her from any more of this pitch. Fern doesn’t want to watch Tracy selling herself as a good mother, a flawed but improvable human. She shouldn’t have to do this.
Fern takes over the wheelbarrow operation while Tracy gets the phone. She holds Vaughn by his fat ankles and tries to imagine the weight of the responsibility Tracy bears, as well as the huge connection that must come with shepherding someone through the beginning of his life. Then she imagines being Vaughn, pinning all his hope on Tracy, on her coming through for him.
It’s a guy on the phone. Fern can tell. Tracy has a whole other voice she uses for guys. There is suddenly a little challenging element in her tone. And then she has hung up. She’ll save this call for later. She doesn’t want to have this conversation with Fern around.
“How was Florida?” she says instead.
“I feel like I was only there for a minute. I hardly knew my grandfather. I mean once he read to me from a picture book. I was like four or something. The main point was trying to be there for my grandmother. My Fern was there, too. The two of them—she and my grandmother—are total characters together. They’ve been friends since they were our age. Inside, I think, they’re still the chorus girls they were all that time ago. They have tons of stories.” She pauses, then asks Tracy, “What do you think our stories will be?”
Tracy hardly has to think at all. It’s as though she had stories at the ready, as if there were going to be a quiz. “The time we were in Michigan with your dad and Louise and we were skinny-dipping at night and that boat of fishermen puttered by and we had to swim like crazy to get to our clothes.” She pauses to think some more. “When you had appendicitis that summer in high school and I drove you to the hospital and you were in agony and the thing was about to burst and then they gave you that huge pain shot in the emergency room, and then you wanted me to get you out of there and take you to the beach. Don’t worry. We’ll have plenty of memories for our golden years.”
Fern pauses, then says, “So. Okay. You’ll let me start picking up some of the slack? When you can’t do it, you’ll know I’m there, ready to step in.” She doesn’t want this conversation to turn bad. She just wants it to be over with, behind them. And so she doesn’t say anything else, only waits until Tracy shrugs and picks Vaughn up off his bolster and holds him and says, “Sounds like a plan.”
Madame X
NORA IS PUTTING TOGETHER a “Crying Jag” party for Jeanne. Two pricey bottles of Bordeaux and a video are riding on the passenger seat next to her. She has just been to Facets, where she tried to get Imitation of Life, but it was out. (How could it be out?) So she settled for a second-best weeper—Madame X. Lana Turner is a little older in this one, a little more doughy in the face, thicker in the waist. Her age works against her in the setup scenes, where she’s supposed to be a blushing bride, but for her in later scenes, where she’s down in Mexico in the Cucaracha Hotel, on the long lam from her past—the suspicious-looking death of her playboy boyfriend, the child and husband she was forced to leave in order to spare them scandal. Now reduced to drinking absinthe with a blackmailing Burgess Meredith. Destroying her mind, marbles all but lost.
From memory, as vibrant as though it happened only the night before, Nora can see herself and Harold and their mother in front of the television, sharing the box of Kleenex on the big round coffee table in the den of the house in White Plains. The three of them watching one of these movies, all favorites of Lynette’s. The tragic figures in these films are always women—mothers cast off because of their class or color or indiscretions, forced to hide themselves away, watching their children from afar. Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas. Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce. Lana Turner as Madame X.
In Harold’s case, these stories seem to be another element in his peculiar imprinting. (He is not invited tonight. If he came, he would give everyone the benefit of his expertise. On the movie; on Lana Turner’s entire filmography; on her life, which was as lurid as her movies—the multiple marriages, the teenage daughter killing the gangster boyfriend, the late-life devotion to the nightclub hypnotist. No, Harold will not be coming tonight. He’s probably already watching Imitation of Life anyway. Who else could have rented it?)
Nora’s next stop is Pete’s up on Western. At Pete’s, they put pizza on an industrial scale with long rows of stainless-steel ovens manned by sweating guys with huge biceps, their torsos bound in white aprons smeared with tomato sauce. These guys shuffle pizzas in and out of the ovens with spatulas of the gods. In front of them, closer to the counter, is a shorter line of order-taking women of similar heft. They sit facing a bank of wall phones, a notepad and a small raffia basket in front of each of them. A sign on the wall reads:
ALL GIRLS ON 7–11 SHIFT MUST PEEL GARLIC
From Pete’s, Nora heads home in a vapor lock of greasy cheese and cardboard. The pizza, the movie, the Bordeaux, this whole evening is a satin pillow plumped up under Jeanne, everything arranged as a small pageant in her honor, showing off Nora’s encyclopedic knowledge of her lover, combining elements guaranteed to please. Nora can already see Jeanne weeping at the end of Madame X. Of course, she understands that she is proving something.
Arriving at their house in a half-hour will be Nora’s friend Stevie and Stevie’s girlfriend, Lauren. Although Lauren is twenty years younger than Stevie, they seem to be a perfect match. They don’t even joke about the May-December thing, and when you’re with them, it does seem about as insignificant as Lauren being a couple of inches taller.
Since Nora has told Stevie a little about the thing with Pam, and since she always assumes any secret you tell anyone is tacitly telling her partner too, she supposes everyone tonight but Jeanne will be holding the same soiled scrap of information. Jeanne will be the only one in the room whose enjoyment of the pizza and the good Bordeaux and Madame X will be wholehearted and unburdened. Nora joins the chorus of everyone who would hate her in this moment.
“Oh, lovely,” Jeanne says when the pizza box has been opened, the wine uncorked and poured.
Fern slides in with Lucky at her heels, both of them scouting for pizza. Fern takes a slice, tears off a strip of crust for the dog, nods hi to everyone. Then stands looking at the scene in the living room as though the sofa and the TV are props on a stage, as though she and Jeanne and their friends are actors in a small, domestic drama staged by Nora.
Nora has been getting a lot of these penetrating, ironic looks from Fern. At first Nora was sure she was being judged harshly, but now she suspects that what Fern is actually doing is pitying her. She can’t decide if pity is better than disapproval, or worse.
“Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” Nora says, trying to get in the way of Fern’s look, also to get her to join the group. Lauren is also in her twenties; Fern would fit right in. Even as she offers it, though, Nora is confident he
r invitation will be rejected. Fern is already backing out the doorway.
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a little sleepover buddy tonight. I think I’m just going to hang out with Vaughn and work on my presentation for my seminar.” She gives Lucky a nudge forward and slips with him back out of the room before anyone can delay her with polite conversation. Tonight is the third or fourth time in the past couple of weeks that she has kept Vaughn here. She’s trying to give Tracy a break. She’s a good friend, Nora thinks. And although she and Jeanne have been woken a few times by Vaughn’s middle-of-the-night longings for contact or food or changing, it is also nice to have a baby in the house again.
“A toast,” Jeanne says, lifting her glass, and Nora thinks how beautiful and lovely she is, small and still, even after all this time a little mysterious for being from another place. Then she thinks how the wine looks like liquid garnet in their glasses and how full her home is tonight and how this is her real life, the life she is meant to be living.
Jeanne’s toast is to Stevie and Lauren, who have bought a house. It’s an awful house—too far west and in a gang-riddled neighborhood. The owner lives in Saudi Arabia and has rented the place out for years and was only selling to avoid the long-distance legal hassles that would have come up if the property were condemned. But now—as opposed to the years ago when Nora and Jeanne bought their house, which was merely dowdy and paneled everywhere—the only houses any of their friends can afford are in distant neighborhoods, requiring a map to find them, or terrible houses, which will be years in the reclaiming.
“There was shit in the corners of one of the bedrooms,” Stevie says. Something like pride reverberates under the statement, a Swiss Family Robinson dauntlessness.