by Peggy Webb
Even my sister, Jenny, never backs down from a thing she wants.
By the time I emerge from the oven, I feel like a frazzled underachiever, which won’t do at all. I don’t believe in feeling sorry for myself. I chose this life and I’m happy with it. Most of the time.
By the time Bonnie and I get to Daddy’s, he’s already home. Daddy never leaves work early. Many a night I’ve seen Mom put his dinner in the warmer.
He looks terrible. His color’s bad and he’s hunched over like a very old man. I always considered Daddy ageless, in spite of his thinning hair and slight paunch. He has this kind of eternally youthful spring to his step and twinkle in his eye. Or used to.
I kiss his cheek while Bonnie climbs into his lap and wraps her arms around his neck.
“Daddy? Are you all right?”
“I am now.” He smiles, but I can tell it’s forced. “How are you, sweet pea?”
He tickles Bonnie under the chin and she giggles. If anybody passed by and looked in the window, they’d think this scene was perfectly normal. Well, I’m here to inform them it’s not. There’s not a single thing normal about this house now that it’s empty of Mom.
“You two visit. I’m just going to put this casserole in the kitchen and your clean socks and underwear upstairs. Okay, Daddy?”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Poor Daddy. He says this every day when I come over. While I’m in the bedroom stowing his clean clothes, I turn back the bed the way Mom always did. Once when I asked her why she did it, she said, “It’s a loving touch, one of the many small gestures that keep a marriage fresh.”
I did the same thing for Rick until Mom left; I figured if she was wrong about the bed then maybe she was wrong about other things. I just can’t figure out what.
When somebody has been your hero all your life, it’s hard to turn around and think of them as fallible.
Before I go back downstairs I inspect everything to make sure the housekeeper is doing her job. Mom thinks Velma Lou is some kind of wizard. But once, after Velma Lou had supposedly cleaned, I found dust bunnies as big as baseballs under my bed, and she just laughed. Mom never was a stickler for order.
Things aren’t perfect up here but they’re passable so I head back downstairs.
“Daddy, do you need anything else before Bonnie and I go home?”
“Can you stay a minute, Kate? I need to talk to you. Privately.”
“Sure. Bonnie, can you go to Papa’s playroom and play with your toys?”
You never know how much a three-year-old will understand.
While she trots off with Rufus bounding along behind her—obviously glad to have somebody to play with—I glance at my watch. Rick will be home in thirty minutes, and I like to have time to touch up my makeup and greet him at the door with a kiss. Listen, I’m no dummy. His secretary, Cindi, was once Vardaman’s Sweet Potato Queen, and I’m not fixing to suffer by comparison. Who knows? A well-groomed, pleased-to-see-you wife at the door could be the thing that keeps his mind off Cindi’s sweet potatoes and other ample body parts and on his marriage.
I sink onto the sofa hoping this won’t take more than ten minutes.
“When do you think your mother’s coming home?”
“I don’t know.” Seeing the consternation on his face, I amend that. “Soon, probably.”
“Do you think she wanted me to go charging after her, Kate?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t told me much.”
“I forgot her birthday last month. Do you think she’s still mad? I made amends with a diamond bracelet. Shouldn’t that have been enough?”
Good grief. Who does he think I am? Dr. Phil? Daddy’s the one with Dr. in front of his name.
“She loved the bracelet, Daddy. I don’t think that’s what’s bugging Mom.”
He sits with his hands folded the way he used to when he was pondering something serious Jenny or I had done. I love this about my daddy—that he never flies off the handle. He simply mulls over a problem until he can come up with a solution.
Though, for the life of me, I can’t see how he’s going to figure out how to fix this mess our family is in. For goodness sake, what will we do if Mom’s not back by the Fourth of July? We thrive on tradition, and we’ve always had a big family barbecue in the backyard—Daddy’s baby back ribs and Mom’s double-chocolate layer cake.
And I don’t even want to think about Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“Kate, what would make a woman stay away a week? The only thing I can figure out is another man.”
“Oh, Dad…” I put my arm around his sagging shoulders. “I think Mom’s searching for something she thinks she doesn’t have, but it’s certainly not another man. She’s impulsive, but she would never do that.”
Amazingly, Daddy smiles. Who can figure parents?
“She has pulled some stunts, hasn’t she? Do you remember that time she came home from Wal-Mart with a pregnant teenager?”
“Do I ever.”
I had to give up my room. For two weeks. Mom found this runaway pregnant girl crying in the toilet and said it would have been inhuman and cruel to leave her. When Daddy asked why she didn’t call the authorities who know how to deal with that sort of thing, she’d said, “Why, Howard, you’re the authority. Wouldn’t it be kinder to counsel her and show her a little kindness for a while before turning her over to rank strangers?”
As if Mom, herself, were not a rank stranger. But then she’s always had this winsome, openhearted way about her that attracts people. Jenny used to say Mom collected stray people like some folks collect lost cats and dogs.
Time is ticking away, and if I’m not out of here in the next five minutes I won’t be home by the time Rick gets there.
“Is there anything else you want to talk about, Daddy?”
When he glances at the clock he gets this guilty look on his face, and I wish I hadn’t said anything. Would it hurt Rick to come home to an empty house once in a blue moon?
“Hon, I’m sorry. You go on home. You’re a good daughter…and a good wife and mother.”
He kisses me on the cheek and then goes to fetch Bonnie. At the door I give him last-minute instructions on heating the beef burgundy, and then I try not to speed going home.
Of course, Rick’s already there, pacing around the kitchen as if he’s accidentally come to the wrong house and doesn’t know what to do.
“There you are. I thought I was going to have to go out for dinner.”
Suddenly, I’m irked. You’d think a man with as many degrees as he has would at least know how to take a casserole out of the warmer. Squashing down my anger, I kiss him on the mouth. The worst thing a woman can do is light into her husband about something insignificant the second he walks in the door.
“Dinner will be ready in just a minute. I was over at Daddy’s.”
“How is Howard?”
“Barely hanging on. I feel like calling Mother and making her tell me where she is, then bringing her home myself.”
“If that’s what you want to do, it’s all right with me, of course, but I’m in the middle of the big hospital case, and it’s nice to come home to a good, hot dinner.”
For a minute I thought he was going to say it was nice to come home to me. I turn my back so he won’t see my fallen expression.
First Daddy is upset, and now me. It’s as if Mom’s discontent is spilling over and catching up with everybody she left behind.
Rick comes up behind me and puts his hands on my shoulder.
“Is everything all right, hon?”
That’s another thing. Why can’t he call me darling or baby or sweetheart or any number of other endearments? Hon is what my parents call me.
Suddenly I want to cry on somebody’s shoulder. But not my husband’s. It’s my mother’s shoulder I long for.
“Everything’s fine. Why don’t you and Bonnie go hang out together while I get dinner on the table?”
When he goes off
with our daughter—which is exactly what I told him to do—I want to throw the casserole into the middle of my Mexican tile floor and smash it to smithereens.
If Mom doesn’t come to home soon, somebody’s going to have to cart me off in a straitjacket.
CHAPTER 8
“Romeo in a Hawaiian shirt.”
—Beth
I feel like I’m fixing to give birth to Shamu, the whale, relieved that it’s finally going to be over and terrified I won’t be able to pull it off. I’m at the Price’s beach cottage, dinner is over and they’re expecting me to play my symphony.
Irma’s baby grand is in the corner, and ordinarily, I’d be itching to get my hands on it, but not tonight when I have to debut my own music. Too, Irma once gave a concert in Carnegie Hall and the only concert I ever played was for a band parents’ fund-raising benefit.
I stall for time.
“I’d love to hear you play, Irma.”
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Ken says. “Play that song you were playing the night we met.”
They met in Los Angeles, where Irma had been called in as a last-minute substitute for the warm-up act before Ken’s show at the Magic Castle. She launches into an elegant, wistful rendition of “Someone to Watch over Me,” and he gazes at her with such raptness and love, I want to weep.
“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her,” he says, almost whispering so he won’t drown out the music. “She was the most spectacular woman I’d ever seen, dressed in black velvet, shoulders bare, skin like peaches and cream. She had on a rhinestone choker, and with the lights on it, her face and eyes looked like somebody had lit them from inside.”
“You were mighty handsome yourself, darling,” she replies, never missing a beat.
“When she saw me standing in the wings and smiled, I said to myself, I’m the luckiest man alive. I still believe that. After all these years.”
Irma rises from the piano stool and touches my arm. “Your turn.”
I place my hands on the keyboard and feel the goose bumps pop up on my arm. The opening movement is majestic and lives up to the title of the opus— Soaring. I wrote the notes many years ago when every day was filled with magic and I knew all the secret words.
The second movement loses steam while my hands falter and my spirits sink. Ken and Irma are still smiling, but I can tell they’re only doing so out of politeness. If I were a stranger giving a tickets-only concert, they’d walk out of the room and demand a refund.
By the time I’ve finished I’m sweating profusely and greatly in need of a large alcoholic drink and a quiet place to cry. No razor blades allowed. No loaded guns and no ropes with a convenient rafter nearby.
Twenty years flushed down the toilet. This symphony should be named Plodding. That’s exactly how this music feels. There’s no excitement, no heart-touching poignancy, no rapture.
Shamu is in the room, stillborn, and I am bereft.
“It needs a little more work,” I tell them.
“Just a little tinkering here and there.” Irma is being generous. “But what an accomplishment. It takes more than talent to write a symphony. It takes dedication and discipline and passion.”
She’d change her mind about discipline and dedication if she knew it took me twenty years to produce one lousy piece of music. And forget passion. Soaring is as flat as my breasts when I was thirteen and Twiggy, longing to be sixteen and Marilyn Monroe.
In fact it reflects my life in ways I’d never been aware of—the tedious routine, the stuck-in-a-rut feeling I’ve had for the past few years. There’s a symbiotic relationship between art and life, and if one lacks a grand sense of passion, so will the other.
Ken and Irma have kept passion alive, not only for life, but for each other. You can see it in the looks they exchange, the way they touch and kiss, the sweet, secret smiles they give each other. No doubt when I leave they will walk into their bedroom, close the door and dance in perfect step to the ancient music of love.
When I leave I’ll be lucky to get home without driving my car into the nearest tree, which is my current state of mind.
After we say good-night and I get in the car, I tell myself to buck up. It’s not the end of the world, but might as well be because the world has vanished behind a curtain of tears and my dreams have vanished in the space of one evening.
What will I do now?
Scuttle through the lobby without being noticed, for one thing. The second is take a Tylenol PM, climb into bed, pull the covers over my head and hope I fall asleep in the next three seconds. I don’t want to talk to anybody, I don’t want to see anybody and most of all I don’t want to think.
But morning comes and I have to. I can’t face the world, can’t face Ken and Irma, and I no longer have an excuse to sit in a pink plastic chair on the patio and compose.
If I’m not a composer, what am I? Was my flight to Florida all for nothing?
I lie back down, shut my eyes and will myself to sleep again, but my body refuses to tolerate the selfish demands of my mind. I pop up, wound as tightly as a piano wire. No, not that. I don’t deserve to use any words associated with music or musical instruments.
A clock. That’s what I am, a clock about to explode from tightly wound parts.
The clock on the TV says 11:00 a.m. My stomach growls, but I’m not fixing to face people in a public place—perky waitresses and chatty busboys and nosy checkout girls. I don’t want them to see a grown woman cry.
Searching the bedside table for breakfast/lunch I find a stale Twinkie and the letter I wrote to Howard. Munching and sniffing, I read it again. It’s not bad. Maybe I ought to mail it. It might be the only accomplishment of my flight to independence and self-knowledge—finally speaking my mind, at least on paper.
Before I can change my mind, I dress and go to the post office incognito, big sunglasses hiding puffy eyes and my beach hat pulled low over my forehead. Afterward I drive, heading east on I-10 with nothing on my mind except escape.
Of course, there’s no escape with a cell phone. Jenny and Kate call and ask me how I am. I tell them I’m fine without feeling the least bit guilty about lying. A parent doesn’t have to explain everything to a child, especially if that parent hasn’t figured out the answers yet.
At sunset I pull over at a little roadside seafood shack, order fried shrimp and think about loss, loss of dreams, loss of a marriage.
It’s hard not to envy Ken and Irma. If I had that kind of joie de vivre there’s no telling what wondrous music I could compose. Certainly I’d have a better marriage. If people that age—at least seventy—can keep love alive, why couldn’t Howard and I?
Maybe they know some tricks I don’t know, some secret little love rituals that add spark to their union. By the time I get back to the Palm Breeze, it’s after eight, and I’ve decided to revive my sizzle by watching a pay-per-view adults-only movie.
Who knows? It might work. That late-night sex guru on Ask Sue recommends it. I heard her one night while Howard was out of town and I was flipping through TV channels.
Shoot, maybe I’ll have a double scotch on the rocks and call with my own question. “Hello, it’s me, Beth. I want to know how an out-of-shape, middle-aged woman who feels as sexy as a leftover squash casserole gets her husband to pay as much attention to her as he does the apple pie à la mode she served at dinner.”
Bathed and decked out in my nightshirt that proclaims Good Girls Have Haloes, Bad Girls Have Fun, I stretch on top of the bedspread, armed with the remote control and a bottle of gardenia-scented lotion. Woman à la mode. Ready to be not only the dessert but the whole seven-course meal.
The screen is small, no more than seventeen inches, and I have to lean forward and squint to see, which spoils the mood I’d hoped to create. Then the movie starts and I instantly try to figure out the plot.
Major mistake. There is no plot. Just a couple of actors with collagen-enhanced bodies cavorting around in skimpy, provocative clothing.
If I dres
sed in an outfit like that Howard would tell me to go and put on some clothes.
Of course, this is not Howard we’re talking about. This is a hunk with a Dasani bottle in his britches.
I stifle my giggles, tell myself to pay attention. This movie is not meant to be art, so I try to get into the mood by concentrating on the more prurient aspects. I admit to getting a bit hot when the Dasani bottle comes into view, but the minute they start making those fake sounds I crack up.
Nobody sounds like that. Or do they? Maybe this is the missing link between Howard and me. Maybe I ought to practice.
I try to imitate the actress and end up sounding like somebody choking on a chicken bone. By now I’m laughing so hard tears are obscuring my vision.
Which is not a bad thing. After I wipe them off and see what those two contortionist fools are doing, I completely lose it. I never knew sex could look so ridiculous when you’re not the one doing it.
Why don’t they put on their clothes? Why don’t they have a conversation above third-grade level, then go into the bedroom and shut the door like civilized people?
This misguided, silly venture is too good not to share. I pick up the phone to call Jane.
“Beth? You sound funny. My goodness…are you laughing?”
I tell her about the movie, then say, “Listen,” and hold the phone closer to the TV so she can hear.
“Good grrrief!”
Jane laughs in wonderful, full-blown abandon, and all of a sudden I’m homesick.
“I miss you,” I say.
“Yeah, I miss you, too, Beth. So, when are you coming home?”
“I don’t know. I left so fast, I didn’t stop to figure out how I’d get back. You know…I didn’t say to myself ‘If Howard says this or I do that, I’ll come home.’ I’m in limbo down here.”
“I’ll come down and we’ll drive back together, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s sweet of you, but I don’t think so. I really want my exodus to mean something more than losing weight and trying to find myself. I want this time apart to mean something important for Howard and me.”
