by Mary Hogan
“I’m Sonny, and this is my sister, Cher.”
They laughed again. Muriel laughed, too. How could you not? When she wanted to, Pia could wring charm out of the air itself. As could their mother. When she wanted to.
Chapter 14
“C’MON, SLOWPOKE!”
Pulling her mother’s arm behind her, Muriel expertly weaved through the weekend crowds in Times Square.
“I’m on your tail, cowgirl!”
Saturday matinees had become a tradition. A tradition. Muriel was beside herself with joy. They caught the L train into the city, interlocking fingers on the subway. Together, Lidia and her younger daughter dashed up Broadway through the winter’s cutting air, the breezy warmth of spring, the perfect limbo of fall. On those Saturdays Muriel felt positively carbonated, as if she’d once been an orphan and was now an only child.
“Giddy up, Mama. We don’t want to miss curtain.”
“Yeehaw!” On rare occasions, Lidia even skipped.
With her chin lifted, Muriel felt superior to the unfortunate people without loving mothers like hers. She felt sorry for her siblings, too. Their mother had chosen her—not her tongue-clucking sister, not her brother Logan who rammed headlong into people on the sidewalk because he never looked up from his feet. Not even Owen, who never kissed her mother on the lips. Clearly, he didn’t cherish his wife the way a husband ought to. The way it was onstage. Lidia wanted Muriel—and only Muriel—to escort her into the city on their special Saturdays.
Instantly Muriel forgave her mother for treating her so offhandedly all her life. They dressed in fancy outfits. Lidia, elegant in her double-strand pearl choker; Muriel, all grown up in a pashmina shawl. They were two girlfriends on the town, together at last. It didn’t matter that Lidia had once blatantly preferred Pia. Those days were over. It was now Muriel’s turn. Her sense of living on the outskirts of her family was gone for good. At last, she was the special one.
“I love you, Mama.”
“You, too, moje kochanie.”
Muriel knew well what love looked like; she’d seen it from the orchestra section—the way the Phantom gazed at Christine through his mask while she sang in her soft pink spotlight, how Curly and Laurey followed their hearts despite the turmoil in the entire state of Oklahoma! That was love. Even con man Harold Hill changed his whole life for Marian the librarian in The Music Man. They didn’t know what love was till there was them.
True love was selfless and forever, lit with cool blue gels and accompanied by violins and sometimes cellos. Love was passionate and heartfelt and sung full out up to your lover’s face, touching noses almost. Genuine love was harmony. No fear of a cracking voice or hitting the wrong note. No self-consciousness. And as the music swelled, love was expressed in an urgent kiss that melded two faces, lips pressed on lips, transcending all conflict. Nothing like the listless pecks her father deposited on her mother’s cheek before he left for work. The same type of kiss with which Muriel grazed Babcia Jula’s papery skin, her nose wrinkled and her lips pinched because she hated the smell of mothballs and lilac perfume. Real love was nowhere near anything she’d witnessed or experienced at home.
Even as a girl, Muriel saw that her parents’ marriage was a lie from its first two words: “I do.” Neither willingly did anything the other wanted to do. Lidia wanted to move into the city or back to Rhode Island, Owen dreamed of living on an isolated ranch in Montana. Lidia loved shopping, Owen loved playing chess. Lidia wouldn’t even consider buying her husband’s slacks at Sears.
“What’s wrong with wearing silk?” she once asked Owen, who simply stared at her in disbelief.
“Do you actually think I’m the silk-wearing sort?”
From the start, the Sullivant marriage was a series of silent fulminations. Basement doors were slammed, cold dinners were dumped in the trash, hardwood stairs were pounded upon, grudges were locked in eyebrows. Owen Sullivant had been flailing from year one. Fatherhood struck him so abruptly he felt the pull of his previous life the way an amputee feels an itch on a phantom limb. One day a petite blonde is on top of you—on top!—the next day you cease to exist.
“Hand me that diaper, will you?”
“The one with the bear on it?”
“Ach. I’ll get it myself.”
Always able to fix what was broken, Owen was completely at sea.
“A man needs a son,” said Father Camilo, the Pawtucket parish priest to whom Lidia confessed, “My husband is distant and silent.”
Through the confessional lattice, he said, “A marriage built with mortar requires cement.” Father Camilo’s wisdom brought Lidia back to her home church in Rhode Island every month or two.
“Go home and be his wife,” he said.
“I don’t love him,” she whispered.
“Holy matrimony is God’s covenant for life.”
She leaned close. “How do I endure?”
Father Camilo paused only slightly before advising, “Give him a son. A man needs a son.”
So Lidia got busy. She bought a digital thermometer and a small notebook. Beginning with the first day of her menstrual cycle, she noted her body temperature when she first woke up. Before her feet touched the floor. Religiously she kept a chart. She hid Owen’s condoms in the bottom of her jewelry box.
“What the deuce?” he said, rifling through the drawer in his bedside table. In the first years of their marriage, they made love Saturday afternoons, like clockwork. Lidia charted that, too. Her reward for accepting her husband inside her was ordering dinner delivery from Uvarara, their favorite Italian restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue. On sex day she didn’t have to cook.
“We don’t need that silly thing,” Lidia said in the kittenish way Owen hadn’t heard since before Pia was born. She shut the drawer next to his side of the bed and rolled over onto her back. “It’s time we were proper Catholics.”
“But—” Owen was weak. He’d felt so lonely in his fledgling family he saw a life raft when Lidia whispered, “A son will change everything. I promise.”
When Lidia didn’t conceive right away, she turned to her mother for help. “Will you spend the weekend with Pia?”
“Oczywiście.” Of course.
Lidia organized a surprise trip to Cape May on the Jersey shore when her chart told her she was most fertile. The rhythmic insistence of the waves would get them both in the mood.
That night in the hotel bathroom, Lidia bathed and powdered herself and teased her hair at the crown and took a deep breath knowing her husband waited on the other side of the door with a bottle of sherry and two crystal glasses borrowed from the lobby bar.
“Ready for me?” she asked through the door.
Owen laughed nervously when he stated, “I believe I will be once we get going.”
Though he tried to stifle it, he sighed. Before they were married, sex had never seemed like so much work. God forgive him, but the thought flew through Owen’s mind that he’d rather be on the shore watching birds. A month later when Lidia announced, “I’ve missed my days,” he felt faint. But eight months after that, Lidia turned out to be right. Everything did change. Owen had his first glimpse of effortless love. Logan Ennis Sullivant silently entered the world.
“Not a peep, this little peanut,” Lidia had said, cradling her tiny infant son. Weighing only six pounds full term, Logan exited his mother’s womb with his eyes wide open and one hand curled beneath his chin like Rodin’s statue The Thinker. From the start he seemed to quietly evaluate his surroundings as if preparing for a pop quiz. He never wailed when his nose and mouth were suctioned, slept soundlessly in the hospital incubator. Once home, he stared at his parents with a penetrating expression.
“How can it be that a baby doesn’t cry for his mother?” Lidia asked, unsure how to rear a child who didn’t seem to need or want her. Lifting Logan out of her arms, Owen held him aloft and gazed into his baby’s curious eyes. “He’s my son.”
That was that. Father Camilo had been right. Lidia
had Pia and Owen had Logan. Muriel, conceived years later after a holiday party and too many flutes of champagne, belonged to no one. Even her cobwebbed name was carelessly chosen. “Who names a child Muriel? I mean, God, Mom.”
“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, Muriel.”
“An innocent baby. What did I ever do?”
“Muriel was your sister’s choice,” her mother told her.
“You let a child pick my name?”
“She saw it in a book I was reading. Very famous.”
“The fat old lady in Courage the Cowardly Dog?”
“That’s a cartoon, Muriel. I was reading Animal Farm.”
“I’m named after an animal?”
Lidia looked bored and shrugged. “To jest to, co to jest.”
It is what it is.
Muriel’s mother named her after a goat and raised her as an afterthought. Until their special Saturdays changed everything.
Chapter 15
IN A MATTER of minutes, Pia had consumed a full glass of Rioja, half a prime rib slider on brioche, a side of raw oysters with mustard aioli, and several Parmesan cheese fries.
“Oh my,” Muriel said for the second time that day. Her sister had always been a frisée and grilled skinless chicken kind of girl. Dressing on the side. Club soda with lime.
“You only go around once,” Pia said, licking her fingers.
Richard and Edward, the two men seated next to them, were enchanted. Muriel couldn’t help but roll her eyes when metrosexual Richard, with his professionally buffed fingernails and man-scaped brows, said, “I love a woman who eats like a truck driver but looks like a socialite.” It was such a bullshit male fantasy—effortless beauty. Muriel wanted to inform the two drooling men that Pia’s looks were nothing but effort. She practically lived in a salon. She normally ate like a starved rabbit. If Pia had a job or no housekeeper or no rich husband to provide a limitless ATM card, she could never afford the time and money it took to look so effortless. Private Pilates classes, weekly manis and pedis, microdermabrasion, Botox, Restylane injections, full-body waxing, a trim and highlights every six weeks. And she did have a husband, by the way. In spite of the way she was acting. That’s what Muriel wanted to say. Instead, to test her theory that some women were born with the ability to blind men, Muriel quietly smeared a little salad dressing on the tip of her thumb, then delicately licked it off. Both men turned away in disgust.
“Another round, please,” Pia said, leaning back and draping her beautiful hand suggestively on the passing waiter’s arm.
Having barely started on her first glass of wine, Muriel sucked in her stomach, curled her ragged fingernails into her palm, and muttered, “Not for me, thanks. I’m fine for now.”
“Oh, Cher. Don’t be such a stick.”
Muriel willed her face not to register shock at Pia’s bizarre new personality. As her sister frothed her flirtation, Richard and Edward laughed with their heads flung back and their Adam’s apples bobbing up and down. They regarded Muriel in an infuriating “Must you wear that?” kind of way. She’d seen that look on her mother’s face a million times. Dry mouthed, Muriel adjusted the linen napkin in her lap and took another forkful of the baby arugula salad with lemon vinaigrette she’d ordered in an attempt to appear petite.
“When you’re not being a stick, what do you do for a living?” Edward asked, dutifully wedging her into the conversation he really wanted to have with her sister. Before Muriel could formulate an answer Pia said, “What does anybody really do for a living? Most of us just pass through.”
“Duly noted,” Richard said, revealing his job as a lawyer.
Personal injury, Muriel thought, duly noting Richard’s tacky gold pinky ring. Edward never pressed the livelihood question, which bothered Muriel since most people were impressed by her job. At the very least they asked for Broadway recommendations. Of course, few knew that a casting assistant was really a glorified NERF ball. The soft frame off which bounced nerves and words. (Hard angles would never do in casting, not when there were so many hard feelings.) By the time the second round of wineglasses was delivered, she was again invisible.
Pia drowned another slider with hearty swigs of wine. A flap of prime rib dangled briefly between her white teeth before she sucked it into her mouth with a Hannibal Lecterish thup thup sort of sound. Muriel could hardly believe her eyes. She’d never seen her sister so crass before. It was unnerving. She seemed unhinged. Casually leaning close to her ear she whispered, “You okay?” Pia loudly replied, “Seriously, Muriel, you really do need to live a little.”
“Muriel?” Richard raised both brows.
“Seriously, Muriel,” Edward echoed, “why not live a little?”
She wanted to slap all three of them in their good-looking faces.
“My little sis is a fossil, I’m afraid,” Pia said.
Muriel smiled fakely. “Just call me Maiasaura.” When they all stared blankly, she was agog. Had they never seen Jurassic Park or Dinosaur Week on the Discovery Channel? Regrouping, Muriel flicked her lank brown hair in what she hoped was a lighthearted manner and said, “Living has always been Sonny’s specialty.”
A FUDGE-FILLED CHOCOLATE cake with hot fudge drizzle. That’s what Muriel was thinking about one matinee Saturday while she sat alone in the theater during intermission watching the audience stand and stretch. Her mother disliked overdone chocolate, but Muriel thought it impossible.
“It’s chocolate, Mama,” she would say in the Times Square Applebee’s. “The only thing better is more chocolate!” Lidia would smile patiently, her face flushed and joyful. Coffee and dessert after matinee Saturdays was the sole time Lidia didn’t frown when Muriel was herself. Even though she drank black coffee while Muriel devoured her favorite triple chocolate meltdown, she never once asked her fleshy daughter, “You sure you want to eat that whole thing?” Dessert at Applebee’s was almost as delicious as the Broadway shows themselves. It was their secret time together. Neither mother nor daughter needed to verbalize the fact that they didn’t want to go home. Not just yet.
That particular Saturday intermission was the perfect day to be indoors, engulfed in the chilled cloud of a blasting air conditioner. The humid summer heat felt like sweatpants after a long jog. Lidia hadn’t wanted to take the subway into the city earlier. “We’ll look like wet rats,” she said. That morning she’d washed and set her hair.
“C’mon, Mama,” Muriel had whined.
Taking the car wasn’t nearly as fun as the train. She couldn’t sit shoulder to shoulder with her mother, breathing in her jasmine scent, snaking her fingers around her cool palm. In the car was a radio, a windshield, side mirrors to consult. Cars didn’t travel under the East River in a tunnel that smelled like adventure itself.
Muriel had an idea.
“I’ll go down to the platform first. The second I hear the train coming, I’ll yell and you can run down.”
It was the thick steamy air underground that made the subway unbearable. Lidia wore a blue silk dress that was so thin it looked like a ripple of water. Already it was hanging limply.
“Okay.” Lidia stayed up top while Muriel swiped her brand-new MetroCard and positioned herself near the bottom of the stairs. Her mother had been right. The subway air did feel like a suffocating wet wool blanket. Instantly, her hair stuck to her head. The soles of her bare feet felt sticky in her sandals. Her purse, precisely big enough to hold a Playbill, was floppy in her hands. Minutes passed like ketchup from a narrow-necked bottle. Suddenly, her chest felt the familiar rumble of an oncoming train.
“Mama!”
Lidia scurried through the turnstile and down the stairs on her classic pumps in time to hear the train’s doors bing bong open. Inside, the air-conditioning was blessed relief. “Ah,” they both said at exactly the same time, as if they were exactly alike. Muriel scrambled to a seat with enough room to make sure they were close, but not so close her mother would pull away.
In Times Square that Saturday the gut
ters stank of dead water; the sky was the color of faded jeans. By now, Muriel knew the area better than her own neighborhood. Circumventing the weekend crowds, she led her mother in a roundabout way beneath the overhang of the Booth Theatre, through Shubert Alley, past the mounted show posters. Lidia’s rakelike fingers felt warm in her daughter’s hand, damp with summer trapped between their grip.
A throng milled about in front of the theater as always—men sucking on a final cigarette while their wives waited inside in the bathroom line, friends meeting with a cheek kiss, out-of-town theater parties disembarking from their chartered buses. Muriel marched right through the open doors. Behind her, Lidia handed the usher their tickets and followed her daughter into the frosty lobby. Programs in hand, they padded down the carpeted path to their seats—always on the aisle near the back of the middle orchestra section, exactly the way Lidia wanted it.
As if she’d arrived home after a long trip, Muriel melted into her seat and inhaled the familiar scent. Coffee, cologne, and that indefinable theater smell. Upholstery cleaner, maybe, or stage makeup? Burned dust from hot footlights? All she knew for certain was that she could be blindfolded and still know the moment she walked through the lobby doors of a Broadway house. Perhaps, she thought, it was the collective aroma of anticipation, a glandular preparation for the fact that anything could happen on a live stage.
“Know what that is, Mama?”
Muriel pointed up at a flickering light along the inner rim of the ornate oval ceiling.
Narrowing her eyes, Lidia said, “A fire hazard?”
“A ghost.” Muriel had read all about theater ghosts in the library, how they haunted Broadway in the middle of the night. Long after the stagehands locked the props away and mopped the footprints off the stage, apparitions wandered the wings, some endlessly awaiting their entrance cues, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage as in Macbeth. Others preferred to communicate directly with fresh audiences by “winking” with the houselights as they settled in their seats.