by M. E. Kerr
“Go to bed, Mama,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
I felt a little punch of disappointment when she did. It was the first time I’d ever been ill that Mama hadn’t tucked me in.
Sunday mornings Mama never made an appearance until after Dr. Robert Schuller’s sermon on television. He was this little blue-eyed, bespectacled man who preached positive thinking while the cameras swept around the church showing thoughtful faces, flower arrangements, then trees outside, fountains and people sitting in parked cars listening to him. A lot of the times I’d crawl in bed with Mama and watch, too. Mama and I did a lot of things like that together. Sometimes we’d fix a huge bowl of buttered popcorn and watch Lawrence Welk in bed, or we’d find an old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical extravaganza and make a fried chicken/potato salad picnic to eat on the floor in front of the set while we watched.
Lamont drove into Seaville to avoid another confrontation with me, to get The New York Times and have breakfast. I made Mama her hangover cure: skimmed milk with a tablespoon of brewer’s yeast and a tablespoon of wheat germ, whipped up in the blender. Then I took it in to her. I figured she’d have the guilts pretty badly and I didn’t want her to. All I wanted her to do was tell me Lamont was going, for good.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked her.
“Are you?”
“I didn’t think you’d remember that I was sick last night,” I said.
“Oh I remember,” Mama said. “I remember last night very well.”
“I took some Maalox and it helped,” I said.
“I’m glad something did,” she said. “Maggie, I’m sorry if you were embarrassed in front of your new friends, but that’s life.”
“I thought it was gross and juvenile,” I said. “I think they did, too.”
“Well juveniles don’t have a corner on gross and juvenile behavior,” said Mama. “You kids think we’re supposed to pack it all away the day you’re old enough to answer back.”
“I can see getting smashed,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind if he was someone your own age.”
“I wouldn’t mind that, either,” said Mama. “Open the windows wider, please, Maggie. I could use some fresh air.”
I went across and pulled the drapes and fixed the windows. Then I went back and sat on the edge of Mama’s bed. “Mama,” I said, “what if I decide not to go along with this new storyline of Fedora’s?”
Mama’s expression didn’t even change. “What if you do? The last thing I want to talk about right now is storylines.”
“You may not ever have to again,” I threatened, “if I quit for good.”
“That’s right,” Mama said.
“Do you really hear me?” I insisted. “I’m talking about giving up my career for good. For good. I want to go to college.” That last sentence was a surprise even to me.
“I hear you,” Mama said. “Turn on channel 9. Hour of Power is coming on.”
That afternoon I stayed in my room while Lamont read Mama’s tarot cards out on the deck. I could hear Lamont forecasting a possible trip and a meeting with a dark stranger, and Mama squealing and exclaiming, while I turned the pages of a book I wasn’t even reading. I was still in my room when they went swimming, and later when Mama came in and asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with them.
“I’m having spasms,” I lied. “How could I eat?”
“Rest and take your Librax,” Mama said. “We won’t be late.”
Monday morning early, I took off in the Mercedes without leaving any note. I drove to Hampton, bought a copy of Daytime TV and had breakfast in a luncheonette there.
There was a feature article in the magazine called “Sabra and I Have to Wait.” It was supposed to be an interview with Peter Tripp, the daytime actor I’d gone to the awards banquet with almost a year ago and never seen since. Peter played a preacher’s son who was always in trouble, on Turning Point. He was fifteen and when he wasn’t in front of a camera he took out his contact lenses and wore thick Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, scratched his eczema, and played some game of his own invention called “Where Is?” (Where Is Fels Planetarium?. . . Wrong! It’s in Philadelphia! Where is Nakhon Si Thamarat? . . . Wrong! It’s in Thailand!)
There was a picture of me out in front of the studio, and a picture of Peter, with his lenses in and his Airedale on a leash, and a quote which was supposed to be Peter’s, in a banner over the two pictures. “We knew what was happening to us and why it couldn’t be!”
The writer of the article probably never even met Peter. He probably wrote the story from notes he’d taken down during a telephone conversation with Turning Point’s publicity person.
The article was about our magic attraction to each other and how we had to fight against it because of our careers. Peter was supposed to have promised his dead twin brother he’d be a star by the time he was twenty-one, because that had been his brother’s ambition. “Sabra,” the article continued, “would never do anything to upset the dream, for in real life Sabra is a deeply sensitive girl who wants to grow professionally as much as she wants Peter to realize his ambition. But there are long nights, too many of them, when their hearts ache for each other.”
It was a bad, dated picture of me, taken way back when the Wedge was in style (my hair hasn’t been that short in years), and I made a mental note to find out if Hometown’s publicity department was still sending out photos like that, or if it had come from an old file of the magazine’s.
After I finished breakfast, some vacationers on the main street spotted me, and I signed a few autographs.
Then I shopped and kept calling Charlie’s until he came home.
That afternoon on Hometown, Storybook Sabra had a scene with her shrink as the tune-in-tomorrow tease at the end of the show. Charlie and Wally and I watched it in Charlie’s living room, while Charlie and I played backgammon.
Storybook Sabra had been trying to fit in to a normal life at Clear City High School, after her mother’s indictment for murder. She was telling her shrink about her experience with a sorority that had been rushing her.
Sabra: I didn’t make Tri Ep.
Dr. Day: Do you blame your mother?
Sabra: Not really. I knew they wouldn’t pledge me, even if Mom wasn’t up on a murder rap. I’m not like them.
Dr. Day: Is that the only reason you think they don’t you?
Sabra: Isn’t that always the only reason people don’t want you? It’s why they don’t love you, too. All the cliques in the world from sororities to churches to kaffeeklatches to your own relatives are saying just one thing: I’ll love you when you’re more like me.
There was a slow fadeout on my face with tears glistening in my eyes. The tears were actually drops of Visine.
“That’s a neat line,” Wally said. “I’ll love you when you’re more like me. That’s really what my father is saying to me underneath it all.”
“It’s what the whole world is saying to me,” Charlie said. “Sabra, I think I’m going to gammon you.”
“Your game,” I said, picking up my pieces. “I’ll never make it.”
Mama’d say that Charlie’s house was kitschy. It was as far from the feeling in our apartment in New York as a cactus plant growing out of a china turtle’s shell is from a bonsai tree. There were plastic slipcovers on the rayon slipcovers. There was a yellow vinyl recliner with a magazine pocket stuffed with old copies of Gun World. There was a machine-made sampler framed on the wall that said: RELIGION SHOULD BE OUR STEERING WHEEL, NOT OUR SPARE TIRE. There were two miniature American flags crossed under a picture of Charlie’s father as a sailor in World War II, on the mantel beside a stuffed owl. There was wall-to-wall yellow carpeting with a floral pattern and a deer’s head hanging out from the wall over the T.V. In one corner there was a glass gun case with a padlock on the door. In the opposite corner there was a very green and shiny-leafed plastic palm tree.
Charlie’s mother was helping run a yard sale, so we had the house to ourselves. When I’d arriv
ed there, I’d called Mama.
“Okay, Maggie, where in the name of blue blazes have you been? I called the hospitals.”
“At a friend’s house.”
“Whose?”
“Mama, I have my private life and you have yours.”
“Mine has left for New York,” said Mama.
“I don’t care where Lamont is,” I said.
“I told him you want to leave the show for good, so there’s no point in his hanging around Seaville. How’s your tummy?”
“I’m sure you’ve got more pressing matters to worry about,” I said.
“Are you taking Librax?”
“Like how to spend more money on Lamont,” I said.
“Lamont is gone, Maggie. Now come home. We’ll have dinner and compose a letter to Fedora.”
“I’ll be home for dinner,” I said.
“I want you to know you’re doing the right thing, too.”
“By coming home for dinner?”
“By leaving Hometown,” said Mama.
After Hometown went off, Charlie and Wally and I lazed around watching a Batman rerun. I hadn’t done anything like that since The Dark Ages when Sam, Sam, Superman had us trapped in suburbia and I was under the spell of Elvis Presley. Mama called what we were doing “lollygagging.” She’d come bursting into my room, turn off Elvis and say to me, “What are we doing lollygagging around here like Mrs. Average and her daughter, Mediocre? Let’s go to The Apple for some fun!”
We’d head down the Palisades Parkway for New York doing eighty. We’d visit agents and casting directors Mama’d known when she was in the business. Mama would show me off and brag how well Sam, Sam, Superman was doing, exaggerating like crazy. (He was working for Tackier Brothers Toy Company then, pushing Adam Zee Worm, a computerized animal that said the alphabet, and One, Two, Three Flea, another one that counted to a hundred and lived on a plastic dog’s back.)
My own father had been an actor like Mama, only he hadn’t lived long enough to make a name for himself. “It’s in your blood, Maggie,” Mama used to tell me. “You’re not just another salami decorating the deli ceiling—you’re special!”
We’d end up someplace like the Promenade Cafe in Rockefeller Center for their Summer Sundae; Joe Allen’s for pecan pie; or the Russian Tea Room for baba au rhum. Mama could always turn an ordinary day into something different; neither Mama nor I were ordinary-day types.
I was thinking a lot about that while the three of us hung around Charlie’s. A part of me was standing over by the gun case sizing up the scene, and wondering how I’d fit in anywhere without Hometown. Until I’d talked to Mama on the phone that afternoon, everything I’d said about quitting the show had a make-believe feeling to it, because I’d really just been threatening Mama with the idea. There was nothing make-believe about Mama’s tone of voice, though.
Charlie was talking about some new idea his father had to send him out to Oconto, Nebraska, to work on a farm. An old Navy buddy raised cattle someplace in Nebraska, and needed more hands.
“Maybe you’d like it,” Wally said.
“Maybe I’d hate it,” Charlie said. “I never even heard of Oconto, Nebraska.”
“Don’t do anything you don’t want to do,” I said.
“My father says I can’t hang around here, it’s not a boarding school,” Charlie said. “My job at Loude’s ends in September.”
“Why Nebraska, though?” Wally said. “It’s so far away.”
“That’s why,” said Charlie.
“You should go to New York City,” I said. “You’d fit in there.”
“My mother thinks it’s Sin City,” said Charlie.
“Nobody gives a hoot if you’re gay in New York,” I said.
“If I told my mother I was going to New York City to live, she’d have to take all the dirty pots and pans out of the oven where she shoves them, so she could put her head in and end it all. Once a week my mother spends a whole day taking a Brillo pad to every pot and pan we own. They stack up in there until it looks like a Teflon graveyard.”
“You want to know something my shrink says?” I said. “She says the solutions to all your problems are right in front of you, waiting to be handled. They’re like horses with the reins already attached to them. It’s just up to you whether you want to grab hold of the reins.” If my shrink ever said anything that long she’d have to go to bed for a month to recover from complete exhaustion. It was really something Dr. Day, Storybook Sabra’s shrink, had said.
“What would I do in New York?” Charlie said.
“Get a job. Meet me for coffee after my classes.”
“Where are your classes?” Wally said.
“I don’t know yet, but I’m grabbing the reins. I’m quitting the show.”
“Why?” Wally said.
“I’m going to be a normal person,” I said.
“I can’t stand overachievers,” Charlie said.
At that point Mrs. Gilhooley came through the back door calling out, “Charles? Are you in there? I need some help with a cornucopia I bought you for your room at the yard sale!”
“How did you know I always wanted a cornucopia for my room?” he said.
“Don’t be so smart, this has got the waxed fruit already in it,” she called back, “and it’s a knockout!”
Before I drove home, I dropped Wally off at his house.
“Would you go out sometime with me?” he said.
“You mean now that I’m going to be a normal person?”
“You have to start somewhere,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, “call me.”
13. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.
Late Monday night, Legs Youngerhouse, the tennis pro at the Hadefield Club, was shot to death by a jealous husband. Tuesday morning we were busy preparing Slumber Room II for him, at the same time getting ready for Miss Wheatley’s funeral. When my father discovered we were short one pallbearer for Miss Wheatley, he told me to call Charlie and see if he could get a few hours off from Loude’s.
“For eight dollars an hour, I’ll carry Legs on my back all by myself,” said Charlie. “I’m going to need all the money I can get my hands on by Labor Day.”
“It’s not Legs you’ll be carrying, it’s Miss Wheatley,” I said, “and I thought you’d be more upset.”
“I got over Legs a long time ago,” Charlie said.
Mr. Llewellyn was practicing “High Hopes” again in our chapel. My father and Mr. Trumble were backing out the ambulance to rush down to the Hauppauge morgue for Legs’ body.
Charlie said, “I broke the news last night that I’m going to New York.”
“You can tell me about it when you get here,” I said. “You’ll need a dark suit, white shirt, quiet-type tie.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Charlie said. “My mother wept until the nine-o’clock movie came on, and my father said if I wanted to live in a big city I should consider San Francisco.”
“Why San Francisco?”
“I think because it’s farther away,” said Charlie. “Are suede shoes okay?”
“As long as they’re dark,” I said.
While I was dusting the coffins in the Selection Room, Deke Slade called to say they hadn’t received a single order from any of Legs’ family or friends.
“It isn’t a P.O., is it?” he asked.
“Not that we know about,” I said.
“By the way, I’m having a party Thursday night,” he said. “Eight o’clock, if you want to come.”
“Thanks,” I said. “All the red roses you sent over for Miss Wheatley are dead already.”
“Then bury them with her,” Deke said.
In addition to “Evasions,” I wrote one other composition for English that Mr. Sponzini gave me an A+ on. It was called “Fear and Funerals,” and it was about all the superstitions responsible for the way we bury the dead.
I spent a week researching it at the Seaville Free Library. I started off by knocking down the theory that
the wearing of black had something to do with showing respect for the dead. The truth was that mourners wore black originally out of fear that the ghost of the corpse would want to lure them to their deaths, too: Black was thought to be an inconspicuous color that wouldn’t call attention to those nearest the coffin.
The coffin was carried out feet first so the corpse couldn’t look back and beckon one of the family to follow it in death. The long, exaggerated eulogies were because no one wanted to chance offending the dead. The flowers were to appease the ghost; the music was supposed to lay his spirit to rest, and so was the handful of dirt tossed into the open grave.
“What are you proving, Wally?” my father said when I showed him the composition.
“I’m not proving anything, just explaining how these things came to be,” I said.
“It seemed to me you’re knocking the business,” said my father. “I don’t care if you did get an A+. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
As a curious man, on the scale of one to ten, my father rates about –1 when it comes to the folklore of funerals. Although he’d never own up to it, I think he still carries with him a lot of the old guilt undertakers used to have about the profession. Some of them actually used to live in towns miles away from their mortuaries, and pretend they were commuting shopkeepers or salesmen.
You might call my father a bland conversationalist. He likes to make small talk about weather record highs and lows, anyone’s family connections, a ballplayer’s batting average, or anything that falls into the category The Way Things Were Back When. He and Mr. Trumble can do a whole number on the hurricane of ’38, Pearl Harbor Day, or butter rationing during World War II. There’s no radio back in the shop. The two of them reminisce while they work. You can turn on the intercom that connects the shop with our house and hear them:
“Wasn’t she Louise Waite’s niece?”
“Oh yes, a Waite on one side and a Palmer on the other. You can see the Palmer resemblance.”
“Well Louie was a holder of the Purple Heart, if I remember correctly.”
