by Laura Zigman
He laughed.
“Which is what’s going to happen when you try to melt a pan full of sugar and water so that it liquefies and turns amber so that you can pour it into the window spaces and it doesn’t melt—but just dries out and crystallizes again and you have to throw it away and do it four more times before it works.”
“Listen, maybe I should just buy one of those kits from Linens ’n Things. The kind with the walls and the roof already made that you just glue together.”
“No way,” Julia said. She hadn’t had this much fun in weeks—imagining him tormented by what he had blithely referred to when she’d made it the previous Halloween as that “neat holiday craft project.”
He squirmed under her poking finger and wrestled himself on top of her.
“But when you build it and put it together,” she said, giggling into his neck, “don’t forget to improve the flow!”
Still laughing, he kissed her on the forehead and rolled off her and over to his side of the bed. Then he closed his eyes, yawned, and shook his head. They lay there for a few moments in blissful silence, until Peter sighed loudly and with great exaggeration.
“God, I’m exhausted,” he said.
“Me too.”
He turned to her. “Oh, good.”
She turned to him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He smiled wanly, his eyes still closed. “Just that I’m too exhausted to, you know, do anything.”
She leaned up on one elbow. “Who said I wanted to do anything?”
“I thought you were trying to, you know, get me in the mood.” He slid over to her before she could thwart his efforts to cuddle. “I mean, we haven’t even done it once since you started working again.”
“You thought I was trying to get you in the mood? I thought you were trying to get me in the mood. I mean, who was on top of whom?” She winced at the formality of her sentence construction, but she couldn’t help feeling just a little ridiculous—not because she’d actually been in the mood and Peter had rebuffed her advances but because she hadn’t been and he’d rebuffed her anyway.
Not that it mattered, since in seconds they were both fast asleep, snoring and drooling and snuggling like there was no tomorrow. Which was one of the recent wonders of married life: the cure-all of sleep.
15
Julia felt like a dead man walking early the next morning at LaGuardia as she made her way down the ramp to the US Air shuttle to Washington.
She and Mary were the first to board the aircraft, and once Mary informed the lead flight attendant that they were switching seats—she wanted the front row, directly opposite the entrance to the aircraft and right next to an emergency exit—she moved toward the window, still crouching beneath the overhead compartment, and turned to Julia.
“You know, I don’t even know what your last name is.”
Julia smiled. It was only on the top of every single page of the itinerary she had handed Mary in the limousine on the way back from Long Island, though she wasn’t about to point that out.
“You do have one, don’t you? Or are you one of those idiots who only goes by their first name?”
“It’s Einstein.”
Mary raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Einstein? As in Albert?”
Julia smiled again. She’d been the butt of this joke ever since she could remember, and she wondered, yet again, why she didn’t just pronounce it differently—the wrong way—Einsteen—to avoid all the inevitable annoying comments.
“Why the shuttles don’t have first-class sections I’ll never understand,” Mary said, loudly enough to be heard by both flight attendants squished into the nearby galley-kitchen. “With senators and congressmen and reporters and journalists and movie stars flying up and down the Northeast corridor, you’d think they could separate us from the riffraff and give us some decent accommodations.”
A vision of her fantasy accommodations for Mary Ford appeared in Julia’s head and floated inside it like a little gas bubble—a padded cell with a soundproof door, a gigantic padlock, round-the-clock security and administration of meds—and as she rushed to take off her new black suit jacket and shove it and her stowable piece of wheelable luggage above her head and slide her briefcase underneath the seat in front of her, Mary started handing her things to put away: her quilted Barbour coat (“The Queen of England wears the same coat, so you better find a proper wood hanger for it”), her yellow Louis Vuitton makeup case (“This always goes under my seat, with the strap facing forward in case I need to get at it during the flight”), a small black nylon Prada zippered pouch bag (“Here, hold this until I tell you I need it”) which Julia referred to in private as the Claus Von Bülow bag and which later she would come to find out contained a variety of dental hygiene implements (including a travel-size toothbrush and toothpaste; dental floss and dental pick) that Mary Ford used after each and every joyless meal they were forced to share (“The gums are the final frontier, the last vestige of youth. And when they go, it’s all over”).
Once Julia had followed Mary’s instructions to the best of her abilities (which is to say, to Mary’s complete dissatisfaction), Mary told Julia to get out the schedule, the airline tickets, a copy of the ad which was supposed to have run in that morning’s Washington Post in order to promote her evening appearance at Nordstrom, and any other materials she might have in her possession which related in any way to the tour.
“I don’t like surprises. If you have a stick of gum in that bag of yours, I want to know when you plan on chewing it.” Mary glared at Julia and settled into her seat, trying to increase the slack on her too-tight belt. “I don’t like being underprepared or underinformed. I want to know everything there is to know about the store I’m appearing in before I step into it, and I want to know everything about an interviewer who’s interviewing me before I sit down with them. I don’t want to get blindsided again the way I was by Jack Be Nimble. I don’t want to walk into a reporter’s trap.”
Poke.
“Traps are for bears.”
Poke.
“Stupid bears.”
Poke.
“Papa bears, mama bears, and baby bears with shit for brains.”
Poke. Poke. Poke.
Julia tried to nod as calmly as she could, but Mary’s latest psychotic-sounding string of nursery rhymes was making her uncharacteristically flustered. Desperately trying to remember the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” but confusing it with “The Three Little Pigs” and “The Three Blind Mice” (Julia suddenly wasn’t sure which story was which and whether or not it even mattered), she pulled the files out of her briefcase and—despite all her Container Store packing and organizing accessories—paper clips popped off and became entangled with rubber bands and manila envelope clasps; her cell phone and the Palm Pilot Peter had lent her and tried to show her how to use and her hairbrush fell onto the floor of the plane and rolled into the aisle before she could catch and retrieve them.
As Mary grilled her, Julia found it possible to answer only half of her questions correctly—she knew which three female celebrities Barbara Starr, the Washington Post Style writer who was scheduled to talk to Mary that afternoon, had most recently profiled (Diane Keaton, Gwyneth Paltrow, the Duchess of York); she knew how many daily newspapers were part of the Gannett group (101) and what their combined paid circulation was (7.6 million; 2.2 million for USA Today alone) and how many Fox television affiliates there were (39); and she knew which, if any, of the competing celebrity fragrances Nordstrom carried in its beauty department (Britney Spears’ and Sarah Jessica Parker’s).
Mary shifted in her chair and stared at the long line of distracted, oblivious passengers filing onto the plane. Taking her sunglasses off, she sat forward in her chair, talking a little more loudly than she usually did.
Julia had initially wondered why Mary would have wanted to sit in the very first row of seats—risking being recognized and bothered by curious celebrity seekers throughout the flight. But
as Mary’s eyes continued to sparkle and her instantly recognizable voice got louder and louder, Julia realized that she’d chosen the first row precisely because she wanted to be recognized. Only the flight was already half full and not one person had stopped, stared, whispered, blushed, or pointed.
“Talk about ironic. I spent so many years trying to disguise myself so I could walk down the goddamn street without being mobbed that now no one recognizes me anymore.” Mary forced an even broader smile, then laughed and readjusted herself in her seat until finally someone—one of the flight attendants—a sweet, young, bottom-heavy blonde with cornflower blue eyes and bright pink lipstick—approached.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, with the exact proportion of nervous excitement, servitude, and caution most people displayed when addressing celebrities.
Mary Ford smiled, deeply satisfied. Finally, she had been “spotted.” And since all it took was one person to make a has-been’s day—just one!—Julia was practically giddy with relief.
The flight attendant blushed slightly and lowered her voice, and when she did, Mary looked at Julia: she couldn’t wait for the unsuspecting young woman to make a complete fool of herself.
“You know,” the flight attendant began politely, “this is an emergency row. And we usually ask that people who sit here be capable of opening the door in case of—”
Mary’s smile quickly faded—instantly she understood that the flight attendant had not recognized her but had approached her only in order to ask them to change their seats. And Julia knew Mary well enough to know that her embarrassment would quickly turn to humiliation and then to rage.
“In case of what?” Mary barked, her face a protective mask covering the raw embarrassment and disappointment underneath.
The flight attendant’s smile faded. “In case of—”
“What are you telling me? That I’m too old to be sitting here?”
Mary squinted at the pin just above the young woman’s left breast—a pair of fake gold wings with black lettering—while the flight attendant blanched, horrified that Mary’s loud voice had carried to the rows immediately behind them and to the steady stream of passengers still filing in.
“What does your name tag say?”
“Jill.”
“Jill,” Mary repeated. “Jill the Pill went up the hill to annoy and insult the passengers,” she singsonged.
The young woman, visibly confused and frightened, looked at Julia for help, but Julia, confused and frightened herself—this was, after all, the first time she had really been out in the world with Mary Ford, not just trapped in a private torture chamber in the back of a speeding limousine with her—could only shrug helplessly and empathetically.
“You don’t know who I am, do you, Jill?” Mary continued without bothering to wait for a response. “Well, you should. You should know who I am. Go call your parents from one of these stupid airphones that never work and tell them that you met Mary Ford today and she refused to move her seat because even though she’s seventy-four she’s fully capable of opening an emergency exit door on an aircraft.”
Jill backed away, and as she did, Mary turned to Julia.
“You call US Air as soon as we land and complain about this Jill,” she stage-whispered. “Then you call Jack or whatever idiot booked our travel arrangements and tell them to switch our flights. I’m not flying US Air for the rest of the trip. Then get a bottle of water from Jill. I don’t want to be dehydrated when we land.”
For the next ten minutes Julia was so busy following orders like that, that she didn’t have time to remember to get scared the way she usually did every time she got on a plane ever since Leo had been born. But the instant the aircraft started to back out of the gate and taxi toward the runway, Julia put her pad between her legs, closed her eyes, and sat on her hands so Mary wouldn’t see them shake.
She could feel Mary staring at her as the plane sped down the runway and then lifted into the air—those twenty or thirty seconds during every flight when Julia would always stop breathing because, convinced she was about to die and seeing her whole life flash inside her head, she would become full of deep regret and longing for all the things she had never done and would never do: volunteer in a soup kitchen, learn to cook simple everyday meals for her family, live to see Leo grow up. As the plane began to finally level off out of its steep incline, Julia opened her eyes.
“Well, this is all I need,” Mary said, throwing her hands up in the air melodramatically and seeming to defy the g-forces that were still pushing them back in their seats. “A publicist who’s afraid to fly. Don’t tell me you get airsick, too, because I’m not going to sit here with one of those vomit bags under your chin for the whole flight. I did that for my daughter every time we flew somewhere together, and all the thanks I got was having her complain to People magazine years later that my forcing her onto airplanes constituted severe physical and emotional abuse.”
Julia tried to dismiss the airsickness accusation by shaking her head vehemently, but she was afraid Mary would interpret her emphatic denial as a de facto admission of guilt so she forced herself to stop. Her untarnished flying record was something she’d always been exceedingly proud of, as a matter of fact, especially given all the times she could easily have gotten sick due to extreme turbulence, weather, or mental anguish: the connecting flight from Denver to Aspen with Michael Caine, the flight from New York to Chicago with Ted Danson, the flight from Dallas to New York with Shirley MacLaine. Despite being plagued by motion sickness when she was a child, she hadn’t had a relapse during her entire professional career.
Mary looked around the cabin for Jill, then motioned for her to come over.
“Albert Einstein here needs a drink,” she said, rolling her eyes, then paused to consider the available options. “Get her a vodka tonic with a lot of ice.” She smiled now at Jill as if they were best buddies, coconspirators in cahoots to get Julia, a complete incompetent, minimally functional.
More splitting.
“She looks like the Bloody Mary type, but the last thing I need is for us to hit an air pocket and all that tomato juice to come back up and go all over this suit. Then I’d have nothing to wear to my appearance at the Pentagon City Mall tonight.”
Julia wasn’t the Bloody Mary type, actually—in fact, she hated tomato juice almost as much as she hated vodka, not to mention that she wasn’t about to drink something with the word “Mary” in it—but she didn’t argue with Mary, especially after Mary had ostensibly done her a good deed: seen to her during her moment of need. Instead, she sat back and tried to ignore the puffy clouds out the window as the plane gained altitude.
When Jill returned with the vodka tonic, Julia felt obligated to drink it—or, at least, to make it look like she was drinking it—but on her empty stomach she could feel a hot finger of heartburn starting up her chest and radiating to her throat. Mary’s mood had shifted again and before she knew it she heard Mary telling Jill all about Legend and Jill listening intently as if nothing had ever happened.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Mary said, eyeing Julia’s vodka tonic.
Jill nodded sweetly.
“And what about you, Einstein?” Mary said. She checked Julia’s left hand for a wedding ring until she spotted the platinum band and modest emerald-cut engagement ring. “What’s your husband’s name?”
“Peter.”
“Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater.”
Poke.
“Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.”
Poke.
“He put her in a pumpkin shell.”
Poke.
“And there he kept her very well.”
As Jill moved away, Julia decided once and for all: she hated nursery rhymes and would rid Leo’s shelves of them the minute she got home.
“Of course that little Jill has a boyfriend,” Mary continued, nudging Julia with her elbow and engaging in still more splitting. “She’s young and she has a nonthreatening career.” She reached for Julia
’s drink as if it was hers to share and drained the cup. “Unlike me, who can’t find a man because all the men I go out with say I intimidate them.”
Julia herself would have used different language—frighten, terrify, traumatize—to describe what Mary Ford would do to a man sitting across the table during a dinner date. It was, in fact, much the same language Julia would use to describe what Mary Ford did to her in a limousine, or at a table in the cosmetics section of a department store, or on an airplane—and she made a conscious effort to remember to tell Peter about Mary’s comment. She would, in fact, have reached for her pad again to make a note—Mary Ford finds the fact that she scares the shit out of men a complete mystery—but the pilot announced that they had just begun their initial descent to Reagan National.
The plane banked left, then right, then left and right again. All that motion plus the vodka in her system would have been more than enough, on a good day, to easily unsettle Julia’s stomach and destroy her equilibrium. But this, of course, was not a good day. It was a terrible day. The stress of being trapped on a flight with Mary Ford and knowing she was stuck with her for the next two days in Washington and Atlanta made the liquid in her stomach suddenly lurch upwards and before she knew what was happening she was pawing frantically at the empty space in front of her for an airsickness bag. But, being in the first row, there were no seats in front of her, and since there were no seats in front of her there were no seatbacks, no seatback pockets, no in-flight magazines, and, most importantly, no airsickness bags. Just an unread complimentary copy of USA Today on the armrest between them.
She called Peter from her room at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where she was lying with a cold facecloth on her forehead and a can of ginger ale on the bedside table, and told him what had happened next: how she had gotten sick into the newspaper right there next to Mary the moment the plane had landed, and how Mary was so outraged that she threatened to call John Glom himself to have both Julia and Jack fired. And the fact that it was Julia, not herself, who was surrounded by flight attendants and given a wheelchair escort off the plane and through the airport to where the limousine was waiting, didn’t help. When they got to the car, Mary insisted that Julia sit up front with the driver instead of in the backseat next to her.