by M. E. Kerr
“Every time I eat at your house I get confused,” I said. “I feel like I’m going to suffocate or something.”
“We won’t eat with our kids,” Harriet told me. “I don’t like a big crowd around the table anyway.”
8. Sabra St. Amour
“The in place with the locals is a place called The Surf Club,” Lamont Orr said after we’d finished eating charcoaled steaks out on the deck. “How about popping in there for a while later?”
“Oh shush and listen to these words,” Mama said. She had on a tape of Frank Sinatra old favorites. She shut her eyes and moved her face in heartfelt frowns while Sinatra sang “A Foggy Day in London Town.” The new Elton John tape Lamont had brought us for a gift still had its cellophane wrapper on.
Lamont stuck his feet out and admired his Roots shoes. Then he put his right arm up on the arm of the director’s chair and admired his wrist hair, and his gold Cartier signet ring.
Lamont was a walking/talking borrower of other people’s glory. He always wore the little knit shirts with the Lacoste alligators on them, the Frye boots, the Gucci loafers, the Burberry sweaters, everything had someone’s famous label or signature or symbol on it. When he spoke he often began sentences with “I think it was Camus who said,” or “As R. D. Laing once said,” or “Wasn’t it Freud who said—” Lamont never seemed to wear anything or say anything original.
If you went out to dinner with Lamont in a restaurant where Lamont faced a mirror, you lost Lamont for the whole evening. He was always watching himself in the mirror.
He seemed to always shop until he found just the right shade blue to match his eyes, or rust to match his newly curled hair. He used QT so he was bronze all winter, and in the summer he was Mr. Wonderful on any beach with his tall, lean, brown body.
Something inside Lamont told him that he was hated by nearly everyone, so Lamont invented these psychological games and tests to help people forget they felt like barfing when he was around.
The first time he ever came on the set, he must have sensed Mama’s overprotective nature right away. He completely ignored me and got her all involved in drawing a house. What kind of a house, Mama asked him and he said any kind she wanted to, and Mama got out this piece of paper and worked on this house through most of my rehearsal. Then Lamont studied it like he was some big-shot psychologist, interpreting one of those Rorschach inkblot tests. He frowned and tsk-tsked over it, and finally he said, “You are a very warm person, very warm, because look at all that marvelous chimney smoke. Some people draw chimneys with no smoke coming out and some people don’t even put chimneys on their houses, but you are a person of extraordinary warmth. I can tell that instantly.” Then he told her she was someone who liked people because she had sidewalks leading up to her house, and she made it easy for people to visit her because she had doorknobs on the doors, and she was an optimist because there was the sun drawn over the house. By the time he was finished telling her about herself, Mama was leaning so far over toward his director’s chair, she looked as though she was about to spill into his lap. He reached out and pushed back a lock of her hair which had fallen forward, and it was as though someone had hit Mama over the head with a mallet. Mama straightened up and stared at him and thanked him for “administering the test” (Mama always got terribly formal when she was seething inside), and that was the last time Mama went anywhere near him, unless he was near me. Then she bird-dogged him.
It was Fedora’s idea for Lamont to come out to Seaville and talk with Mama and me about the storyline. He was supposed to renew his acquaintance with us and get our ideas, and see if we could all work it out.
He was being diplomatic by not bringing up anything about the show his first night in town; he was pretending he’d been planning to come out that way all along, and delighted to know we were in the vicinity.
When the Sinatra tape was finished, Lamont tried again. “Everybody says the in place with the locals is The Surf Club.” Lamont didn’t even know anybody in Seaville besides Mama and me, but if he read about something in a newspaper or magazine, or heard just one remark, he always said “everybody says” or “they say” as though he had his fingers on the pulse of the world.
“Do you want to whip over there later for some action?” Lamont asked.
“How about a little action, keed?” Mama said to me.
“You go,” I said.
“Not without you,” Mama said.
“We don’t have to make up our minds right away,” Lamont said.
Mama got up and began clearing away the dirty dishes. “Please don’t talk about me while I’m gone,” she sang out.
“Why don’t you leave the dishes?” Lamont said. “Just leave them in the sink?”
“Why don’t I oink?” Mama said. “Why don’t I run around on four legs with a curly tail?”
Lamont laughed and laughed at that and Mama carried out the plates.
Lamont studied his manicure for a moment, holding his fingers up in front of his eyes. Then he said, “If you had to spend the rest of your life in a prison or in a hospital, which one would you choose?”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s a test,” he said. “I gave it to your mother while you were dressing.”
“I’d have to think about it,” I said.
“Take your time,” he said.
“Whose test is it, your test?”
“It’s a famous psychiatric test,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“You have to answer first.”
“A hospital,” I said.
“I said a prison,” he said.
“What’s a hospital mean?”
“People who say a hospital are usually passive types. They like to be waited on. They’re choosy. Fussy. They like their comfort,” Lamont said.
“What about people who choose a prison?”
“Ah!” Lamont said. “They’re aggressive. They like discipline. They try to get along with most people. They feel guilty. They scheme.”
“Are you giving her the test?” Mama yelled in from the kitchen.
“What did Mama say?” I said.
“She said a hospital, too,” Lamont said.
“I said a hospital,” Mama said. “What did you say, sweetheart?”
The thing about Lamont was you couldn’t concentrate too long on how you wished he wasn’t around. He always found a way to distract you.
The Surf Club was packed with people of all ages. It was right on the dunes about seven miles down from our beach house. Lamont and Mama and I were squeezed between some teenagers and a big cigar-smoking, red-faced man and his wife. The man was wearing a T-shirt which said “AM I GLAD I MARRIED PEARL COHEN!” They were drinking champagne to celebrate their twenty-second wedding anniversary. Lamont began a conversation with them right away.
Mama looked across the table at me and said, “Isn’t this fun?” She had to shout to be heard.
When our drinks came, Lamont was reading the cigar smoker’s palm and Mama paid the bill.
“Are you having a good time?” Mama asked me, cupping her hands to use them like a megaphone.
I smiled back at her, and we sat opposite each other for a while watching the dance floor.
About ten minutes later, Wally Witherspoon went dancing by with this short, black-haired girl.
I put my hand up to cover my profile, and sat there sipping my ginger ale. I felt funny about speaking to Wally. Mama didn’t even know I’d met him. She didn’t know I’d lost the bracelet or he’d found it. It really wasn’t like me to keep secrets from Mama. I think the only reason I did was because I didn’t want her to have a moment’s worry about the bracelet, if I could help it. Then I just got into it, and it seemed easier not to mention it at all. Mama wouldn’t have understood my offering to take someone she didn’t even know to a movie.
The reason I asked him was because I knew Mama was driving Fedora down to Huntington that next day. I thought I could repay Wally that way for
returning the bracelet to me. When he said he couldn’t make it, I waited a few beats to see if he’d suggest another time or something besides the movie, but he didn’t. I’d never asked a boy to go anywhere with me. I felt as though I’d made a tremendous goof. I felt like Mama, too, offering to pay for everything all the time. Mama was always saying to people, “Let’s all go out for dinner—my treat!”
I felt like an old “lonely at the top” cliche, the superstar-whose-phone-never-rings sort of thing. I even had the idea he might have told his friends about it, that maybe they’d all had a good laugh over it.
While I watched him dance, out of the corner of my eye, I remembered the man who owned Current Events teasing him about someone named Harriet. I supposed that was Herself. She had this smug little air of self-possession about her, but she was ordinary: pretty, but not beautiful, what Mama’d call run-of-the-mill. I couldn’t help wondering why he wouldn’t even go to a movie with me, what there was about her that made him so loyal. For all I knew I was the victim of my own publicity, believing all the lies which weren’t true: a dud posturing as more, the pits thinking she’s the mountaintop.
Right at that point the band stopped playing, and the leader stepped up to the microphone. “Tell me more!” he shouted.
My stomach did a flip.
Mama gave me a little wink, and Lamont held up his palm and clapped one hand against it silently.
“That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, we have a celebrity in our midst this evening, Miss Sabra St. Amour. Tell us more, honey. Stand up and tell us more!”
Mama and Lamont beamed and the man who was glad he’d married Pearl Cohen took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned forward and stared at me.
“Give ’em a thrill, baby!” Mama called across the table to me.
“Tell me more!” people began calling out.
“Come on up here to the bandstand and take a bow, Sabra!” said the bandleader.
After the first punch of fear, I felt the familiar cool flooding through me, and the little kick. I was on my feet, all smiles.
9. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.
I guess there’s a Deke Slade in every high-school graduating class. He’s the jock and the bully and the one about fourth from the bottom scholastically. Deke was the son of the leading florist in Seaville, so I knew him pretty well. Our fathers did a lot of business together.
I suppose someday Deke and I will be working out the same little deals. I’ll be asking relatives of the deceased if they want me to make the floral arrangements (discouraging the idea of a Please Omit funeral), then getting Deke on the phone, throwing the business his way for a small cut. (Our slogan is “Death Is Just Another Tomorrow.” Theirs is “Don’t Wish Tomorrow You’d Sent Flowers Today.”)
If it wasn’t for this future collusion Deke and I had to look forward to, I’d have been a perfect target for Deke. At school, I’m not part of the gang that piles into cars to cruise around during lunch hour, nor one of the bunch that loafs around in the hall getting off hilarious one-liners that the others all crack up over. In that great High School Filing Cabinet where every one of us is typecast, I’m under G for gross.
I figure no matter what becomes of Charlie, years and years and years from now, there’s one name he’ll never forget: Deke Slade. Of all the “outies” Deke had to choose from, he chose Charlie to torture. Through four years at Seaville Senior High, Charlie was the mouse and Deke was the cat playing with the mouse.
Deke began making cracks the moment we arrived at The Surf Club. We were all drinking beer—Charlie had to go to the bar and get them for us, because he was the only one with a driver’s license proving he was eighteen. When Charlie got up from the table, Deke would swagger over and make cracks about Charlie to Ethel. He’d ask Ethel things like who was the girl she came with and did they wear each other’s clothes?
When Charlie’d come back carrying a tray of beer, Deke would call out, “Waitress, will you take my order, dear?”
Charlie and I tried to ignore Deke, the same way you try to ignore black clouds that suddenly appear out of nowhere on a sunny day at the beach, or a crazy who gets on the same bus with you and starts yelling that you killed God. Harriet had no love for Ethel, but her back was up because Deke was causing a scene, so she came back with a few remarks of her own. “Oh boy, Deke, are you insecure!” and “How come you don’t have a date tonight, Deke?” It was like an assault on the Rock of Gibraltar with a feather duster. Deke just blinked at Harriet and got his mouth in gear for another series of insults aimed at Charlie.
Ethel couldn’t take it. She became tongue-tied and red-faced. She moved her chair a few inches away from Charlie, and stared down at her beer, periodically bursting into nervous giggles. Finally, while Charlie was up getting another round of beers, Ethel just took off with Deke.
Charlie pretended he couldn’t care less. For a while we sat around talking about what he was going to do with his life. College was out; the Gilhooleys barely afforded their weekly supply of SpaghettiOs, beer and gunshot. Charlie said he’d hate leaving Seaville but he’d have to, because there was no way he could ever be anybody in Seaville.
“It is a real pity that you chose to make yourself conspicuous,” said Harriet.
“I don’t mind being conspicuous,” Charlie said, “I mind being poor.”
“This town is dying,” I said, and Harriet said, “Then we can’t complain, honey.”
While Harriet and I danced, Charlie sat by himself nursing a draft beer. “I hate to leave him sitting there alone,” I said, and Harriet said, “I hope he won’t go early and leave us without transportation.”
Harriet watched over the money as though we were already married.
“A taxi will cost us four dollars!” she shouted across the floor at me while we did the boogie. “My father can’t come and get us tonight, either. Hector has one car and Harvey has the other!”
“I’ve got the four dollars, Harriet!”
“Then we won’t have enough to get hot dogs at Dunn’s later!” Harriet complained.
“Let’s not go to Dunn’s tonight,” I said.
“Oh, Wally!” She gave me one of her looks, because Dunn’s was the place where everyone went at the end of a Saturday night, and Harriet was a girl who went to the place where everyone went at the end of a Saturday night.
“Where’s all your money then?” I said. Harriet was the cotton-candy maker afternoons at the Seaville Soda Shoppe, but her salary was never part of “our” money, as mine was.
“You know I’m saving for my trousseau,” she said. “You know Daddy’s got to spend his savings on my brothers’ educations.”
We began having what Harriet liked to call later “a tiff” right there on the dance floor. It wasn’t that I wanted her to spend her money. It was just that the whole idea of Harriet’s trousseau sent me off into fantasies of shipping out for any destination on tramp steamers and banana boats. A year away didn’t seem a lot like a year away when all Harriet seemed to do was talk about our wedding as though it was tomorrow. Out of all of Seaville High School, why had I picked the one Junior Ms. with antediluvian ideas like becoming engaged and saving for a trousseau? Charlie said it was because I was on the rebound and desperate, that when he’d been on the rebound from Bulldog Shorr he’d sent away for “So You Want to Be a Priest,” published by The Junior Jesuit Society. (“How can you be on the rebound from somebody you were never even with?” I argued. “Try it sometime,” he said. “It hurts worse.”)
The set ended and the bandleader said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a celebrity in our midst this evening! Miss Sabra St. Amourl Tell me more, honey! Stand up and tell us more!”
“Don’t tell me she’s here?” Harriet said. “She must be slumming.”
“We’re here,” I said.
“We don’t have anyplace else to go,” said Harriet. “We don’t make forty to forty-five thou a year and could go anywhere in the world.”
They threw a spotlight on
her and she stood up in this pale yellow pants suit with her yellow hair spilling past her shoulders. She was smiling, and now there was no doubt who she was: She was made up; she looked the way she did on the tube, confident and beautiful, tossing out kisses through her fingertips while the piano player and the saxophonist tried to work out a few bars of her theme song.
It was Harriet’s idea to get me to go over and ask her for a dance. I’m not sure whether Harriet wanted to impress other people with the fact I’d met her, or whether she wanted to sit out a set with Charlie so he wouldn’t leave us without wheels.
Sabra introduced me to her mother, first, and her mother wanted to know how we knew each other. How in hell we knew each other. Mrs. St. Amour was this husky-voiced, big blonde with a bright red chiffon scarf tied around her neck. She was holding a long gold cigarette holder with one hand, a long, brown, unlighted cigarette attached to it. With her other hand she slapped her thigh hard and said at the top of her lungs, “Get this! She’s got friends out here I don’t know anything about!”
“We met briefly on the beach the other day,” Sabra said.
“So briefly you didn’t even think to mention it, hah?” her mother said. “Okay, little Miss Keep Things to Yourselfl! What are you, a closet extrovert?” She slapped her thigh again and laughed very hard at her own joke. Then she grabbed my hand, gave it a squeeze, pointed her cigarette holder at the man beside her and said, “This is Mr. Orr.”
“Glad to know you, Witherspoon,” he said.
“You’re the kid from Current Events,” said the man wearing “AM I GLAD I MARRIED PEARL COHEN!” He turned to his wife and said, “Pearlie, this is the kid who printed my shirt.”
“You put the P on crooked,” she said.
“Get up and dance, Sabra,” said Mr. Orr. He had rust-colored, tight curly hair, and a shirt the same color. He was stirring a swizzle stick around in his scotch, smiling up at me.
“Would you mind?” I asked him.
Mrs. St. Amour gave my arm a punch. “I’m the one you ask that.”
