by M. E. Kerr
“Maggie,” Mama said, “I’m not talking you into this.”
“No one is talking you into it,” Fedora said.
“No one is talking me out of it, either,” I said.
“You make up your own mind, Maggie,” said Mama.
“Of course we’ll help you by taking a lot of the burden off your shoulders. No rehearsals, no sitting around on the set for long hours,” said Fedora.
“It was never my idea to quit in the first place,” I said.
“No, but it was your idea to get an ulcer,” Mama said, “and it’s my responsibility to see that you ease up.”
“Which she’ll do,” Fedora said emphatically. “Now. Oddly enough we already have the very best writer possible for this new storyline. I was going to get rid of him, but he handled the whole lobotomy segment for Wanda a year ago on Other Worlds.”
Fedora was always announcing the names of daytime writers the way Walter Cronkite might mention a Nobel Prize winner, the major difference being no one really knew who Fedora was talking about.
I started to tune out and worry about calling Wally Witherspoon to see if he’d found my bracelet, when I heard Mama roar, “Oh no!”
“You know who I’m talking about,” Fedora said.
“I most certainly do,” said Mama.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked.
“Mr. Bore,” Mama said.
“Lamont,” Fedora said. “You always got along well with Lamont, didn’t you, Sabra?”
I shrugged. “I can take him or leave him.”
“Leave him,” Mama said. “He gave you your ulcer.”
“La-mont?” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”
“She started having stomach trouble when we talked about extending the show,” Fedora said.
“That was when I started having stomach trouble,” Mama said. “She already had her ulcer.”
“I don’t know what gave me my ulcer,” I said, which was the truth. If something besides your physical shape really does create an ulcer, I’ll never know why I got mine. It showed up in the spring, after an ordinary winter. It wasn’t so ordinary for Mama, I guess. It was the winter she decided to take some courses in the evening at The New School. “You’re learning everything from how to count to a hundred in Latin to how to do a perfect pirouette,” Mama complained one day, “and I’m a stopped clock. So I’m going in for a little self-improvement.”
Mama went through some sort of middle-age crisis, I think. After she started classes she dyed her hair bright blond, fasted to lose weight, gave herself twice as many facials as usual, did exercises nightly—the whole bit. She went to the library nights when she didn’t have classes to put herself in an atmosphere where she could study her lessons. I don’t think it did Mama any good to be around all those young bodies and fast minds at The New School. She’d get out of patience with me when I’d tell her to drop out, the strain was showing. She’d blow up at me one day, then the next day buy me a present for blowing up at me.
It was the first time in our lives we didn’t have dinner together every night. Maybe the ulcer came from all the frozen dinners I heated up. I used a tape recorder to cue me when Mama couldn’t, and I still got all my lines perfectly for the next day’s taping.
Mama called for more drinks and sat up straight, lighting a cigarette.
“There are any number of better writers who can handle this storyline, Fedora. Ellis Fountain did an hour special for CBS on this very subject!”
“Ellis has done no daytime, Peg.”
“Lamont is only a kid!” said Mama.
“With a kid’s vernacular,” Fedora said. “He can do the medical scenes and Sabra’s.”
Mama’s eyes were getting bigger and her voice was getting louder. When the waitress brought another Manhattan to her, Mama didn’t even say please when she sent it back for the second cherry.
The whole thing got to me. I stood up and excused myself.
“Let me see inside your purse before you leave the table,” Mama said. She told Fedora, “I don’t want her off sneaking a smoke.”
“If she goes off and sneaks smokes, we keep that in the script,” Fedora said.
I showed Mama the inside of my purse. I might have had a pack of Merits in there, but something Wally Witherspoon had said on the beach that afternoon registered. I didn’t feel like being a pawn of the tobacco companies.
“Good girl!” Mama said. “You go powder your nose now.”
“Peg,” said Fedora when she thought I was out of hearing distance, “Sabra’s eighteen years old and you keep her like a twelve-year-old!”
“Oh really?” Mama said. “Then she keeps me like an octogenarian!”
7. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.
When she called from The Frog Pond she said she didn’t have long to talk. I said I didn’t, either. My father was right behind me, working himself into a lather over the fact the flower car we usually rented for big funerals was in a repair shop. Floral tributes were pouring in for Mrs. Lingerman, including one made of white carnations and shaped like a harp. She’d belonged to every organization she could join within a fifty-mile radius, and it was as though all the old ladies in our part of Suffolk County had trotted off to their florists with twenty-five dollars.
I don’t think Sabra St. Amour ever expected to see her bracelet again. She sounded surprised and delighted, so much so that she invited me to be her guest, go to a movie with her the next afternoon. She said it was the only time she had open. Since Seaville had just one movie, what she’d asked me to go to with her was Oh the Stars and Stanley Two.
This was when I blew my chance to be seen around the town with a superstar. (Eat your heart out, Lauralei Rabinowitz!) My father was standing at my elbow, glaring at me, with the Yellow Pages open to Funeral Directors. He’d been in the midst of calling around and asking colleagues how they were fixed for a flower car when her call came. Oh the Stars and Stanley Two was a science-fiction film with an R rating. Old Mrs. Pickens, the ticket taker at Seaville Cinema, knew us all and never let any of us under seventeen into an X-rated or restricted movie.
When I mentioned the fact it was an R, Sabra St. Amour’s answer had been “I don’t care if you don’t.” What I should have done was suggest something else to do, but by then my father’s mood was rattling me, and I was humiliated to realize she was seventeen or older.
So I blew it. I said, “Why don’t I just leave your bracelet with Monty Montgomery at Current Events on Main Street. You can pick it up first thing in the morning.”
“Fine,” she said, “and thanks again for taking care of it for me.”
Click.
I stood there looking down at the phone’s arm in disbelief that she could have come into and gone out of my life so fast.
“Give me that thing!” my father said, and yanked the telephone from my hand. . . . That was that. The next morning, early, my mother dropped off Sabra’s bracelet at the store, on her way to the A&P.
“Withered brains, you are a real jackass,” Monty greeted me when I went in to do my stint at the steampress machine the next afternoon. “You let something slip through your fingers you’ll never get a chance at again.”
“Ask him how come he hung around here all morning and didn’t go to the beach,” Martha said from behind a huge stack of Sunday Times parts she was busy assembling.
“Tell her I’m hungry for the sight of some female who still cares about keeping her figure,” Monty said.
“Tell him it’s easy to keep your figure when you’re able to stay home and not do man’s work all day,” said Martha.
“Oh ho ho!” Monty laughed. “Tell her that Sabra St. Amour happens to do man’s work, or doesn’t she know there are male actors?”
“Okay, enough,” I said. “How many shirt orders are there?”
“Five,” Martha said. “One’s in French so be careful you get it right.”
“She brought us a little present,” Monty said. “We put it up
over your work table.”
There was a photograph of her stuck on the wall with a thumbtack.
She’d written across it: “To Martha and Monty and Wally, with thanks from your friend, Sabra St. Amour.”
“Was she alone?” I asked Monty.
“All alone and lonely,” he said.
“Ask him to tell you how he made a fool of himself fawning over her,” Martha said.
“Tell her to shut her yap or I’ll shut it for her,” Monty said.
My first order was for an extra-large black cotton T-shirt with “Am I Glad I Married Pearl Cohen!” printed on it in white letters.
“Don’t serve me any beans,” Mrs. Hren said at dinner Saturday night. “They repeat on me.”
Mr. Hren passed her a plate with nothing on it but tossed salad. “Why would you fix something for a main course that repeats on you?” he said.
“It doesn’t repeat on anybody else,” she said. “Look at me. I can miss a meal.”
There was no arguing that. Harriet’s mother was fat. Her once-fine features were now swollen beyond recognition.
When I was dating Lauralei, my father was fond of saying that you could tell what a girl would look like in twenty-five years if you saw her mother. (Mrs. Rabinowitz had blond streaks through her wiry black hair, wore long, thick false eyelashes, and favored red and orange dresses gussied up with fur capes made from the skins of tiny animals, their little dead feet and tails still attached. . . .) My father shut up on that score the moment I began dating Harriet. I don’t think he was doing it out of consideration for Harriet or her mother. He was doing it because he would like me to marry Harriet and hang around Seaville the rest of my life doing you-know-what. He is not enthusiastic about college for fear I will completely lose interest in coming back, doing my twelve months in mortuary school, then returning to Seaville and starting work in the shop. That’s what he calls the place behind our house where our guests are prepared for the Slumber Rooms. I go there as little as possible, then only to shove something at him through the door: his lunch, his mail, a sweater on cold days.
Besides Mr. and Mrs. Hren at the dining table that night were Harriet and me, Harriet’s five brothers and her two sisters.
Once everyone had a plate in front of them, they shoveled the baked beans up with their forks as though pausing between mouthfuls had gone out of style.
Harriet had lately started wearing plastic rollers in her hair in front of me. She sat opposite me with her hair wrapped around them, a crumb of B&M canned brown bread at the corner of her mouth, complaining because she had to be in the company of Easy Ethel Lingerman that night.
“What do you kids know about morals, anyway?” Mr. Hren said through his steaming glasses. He bent over so close to his plate to eat that the warm casserole steamed his horn-rimmed spectacles.
Even though there wasn’t an adding machine in the room, I could always hear the clickety-clicks in between the Hrens’ words. About the only time they didn’t have their hands on the handle of an Addo-X was when they were eating or sleeping.
“Who cares about morals?” one of Harriet’s brothers said. I could never remember their names, though all the Hren children’s names began with H.
“Your sister just made an objection to being seen with Easy Ethel Lingerman,” said Mr. Hren. “I say what difference does it make? Morals, schmorals, right? Isn’t that what you kids think? Morals, schmorals.”
“Don’t provoke at dinner,” Mrs. Hren said. “Provoke anytime else but not at dinner. You get everyone excited, we swallow air and get gas.”
“Ohhhhh muth-ther,” Harriet’s little sister Hannah groaned.
“If there’s a better, more proper way to put it, put it,” Mrs. Hren said.
“When I was your age this kind of thing wouldn’t be discussed in a family situation—ever,” said Mr. Hren, “so count your blessings.”
“Who wants to eat baked beans and discuss sex?” said Harry or Harold Hren.
“Were we discussing sex?” said Mrs. Hren. “Who said anything about sex?”
“Morals, sex—same difference,” said Harvey or Hadley Hren. “I’d rather hear more about Wally’s meeting with Sabra St. Amour.”
“Tell me more!” Hedy Hren did an imitation of Sabra.
“I just met her, that’s all,” I said. I’d been sitting there washing down the beans with a glass of RC cola, remembering Harriet’s saying once that she wanted ten children; five girls and five boys.
“Was she happy-looking or unhappy-looking?” Mrs. Hren asked me.
“Would you be happy-looking or unhappy-looking if you were making about twenty-five thousand a year?” Harriet said.
“That’s peanuts in her field,” said Mr. Hren. “She nets closer to forty, forty-five thousand.”
I was imagining myself thirty years from now, sitting around the table with Wanda, Winifred, Wilbur, Warren, Wylie, Wendy, Wharton, et cetera, Harriet at the head of the table, entertaining Wendy’s boyfriend or Wylie’s girlfriend, speaking from my vast experience in the mortician business on some related subject, say the cost of seamless solid copper caskets, a summer’s night, a day in the life of an average Seaville citizen.
“Was she stuck up?” Mrs. Hren asked me.
“No,” I said.
“As a reporter about anything, stick to undertaking,” said Hector or Harry Hren. He was Hector, probably, the only imaginative one of Harriet’s brothers.
He wanted to be a cartoonist; he didn’t want to see his sister marry into the funeral-home business. Harriet told me he’d come into her room at night, after his date, after he’d gotten a little loaded on tequila sunrises, and he’d try to reason with her about what life would be like with me.
Harriet was looking forward to it. She even wanted to take some beauty-school courses so she’d be a first-rate cosmetician. My mother was always saying she could teach her; it’s real easy, anyway, my mother was always reassuring her. It’s like doing up your own face, said my mother . . . and I’d walk out of the room so I didn’t have to hear about it.
Mr. Hren wanted Hector to apologize to me for being sarcastic.
“Skip it,” I said.
“Apologize,” said Mr. Hren.
“This isn’t good for the digestion,” Mrs. Hren said. “Hector, say you’re sorry you’re sarcastic sometimes.”
“You’re sorry you’re sarcastic sometimes,” said Hector.
Mr. Hren smirked. “You darn kid,” he said, pleased. “You darn kid, you’re some smart-A, aren’t you?”
My own little future Wharton was telling me he wasn’t going to follow in my footsteps for anything in the world, and I was telling him back: You don’t have to. If you don’t want to, there’s Wylie, or Warren or Wilbur, or . . . on and on.
“How’s my grandmother doing?” Ethel Lingerman said while Charlie held open the car door for her. She was carrying an open can of Schlitz, and she flopped herself down on the front seat of Charlie’s small red Fiat.
“Hi Harriet. Hi Wally. Well? How’s she doing?”
“She’s resting comfortably,” I said. “She’s gone to her great reward.”
“Is a cat sleeping with her?” Ethel asked.
“No, the dog from next door is,” I said.
“The rumor is cats sleep in your coffins with the dead people,” Ethel said, taking a long swallow of beer.
“Pork Chop died last year and Corned Beef was run over by our ambulance this spring,” I said. “So that just leaves Gorilla.”
“I hope he’s not in with my grandmother because she hates cats.”
“It’s not a he, it’s a she,” I said. “Your grandmother won’t even notice.”
“I think it’s high time we stopped making these sorts of jokes,” said Harriet. “These sorts of jokes are in very poor taste.”
“Get her,” Ethel said to Charlie. “It’s my grandmother.”
Ethel was a Clairol redhead in a pair of tight red slacks with some kind of pink halter above them wh
ich exposed her middle and pinned back her enormous melon-shaped breasts. She had two pairs of earrings on each ear, one which dangled down past her hair, one rhinestone stars that nestled against her lobes. She had on a lot of blusher, and gobs of gooey black mascara, plus eyeliner.
Harriet became suddenly vastly interested in the scenery as we rode toward The Surf Club, staring at it intently while she pulled at her fingers in her lap. Charlie started a long monologue on Dance Day, which was a tradition every year at the end of the summer in Seaville. The Kings and Queens of Dance were crowned the evening of Dance Day; all day long there were dances of every kind performed on the village green. Charlie was trying to whip up some interest in the contest; Charlie was always trying to be someone in Seaville besides The Resident Fairy.
“I’d like to think of a superoriginal dance to perform,” said Charlie.
“Boy, will my grandmother roll over in her grave when she knows I was out with you tonight,” said Ethel. “Where’d you get the car?”
“I saved for it,” Charlie said. He worked for Loude’s Landscaping, digging holes and planting trees for six dollars an hour.
“I hear Lauralei Rabinowitz and Maury Posner are going to do the Charleston in that contest,” said Ethel. “Do you ever see Lauralei around anymore, Wally?”
“That’s all over with,” said Harriet, grabbing my hand with the fingers she’d been pulling, to prove it.
“I wasn’t asking you,” said Ethel. “I was asking Wally.”
Harriet stabbed my stomach with her elbow, holding my hand in a viselike grip. “That’s all over with,” I said.
“Oh my my my, we have a parrot along with us this evening,” said Ethel. She thrust her can of Schlitz back under my nose. “Polly want a beer?”
“Polly would probably catch something grotesque from that beer can,” said Harriet.
“Polly would probably catch something grotesque from that beer can,” I said.
Ethel slapped her knee and laughed and held the beer can up to her mouth, swallowing chug-a-lug.
“Don’t play into her hands that way,” Harriet whispered to me. “What’s the matter with you, anyway, Wally?”
