by M. E. Kerr
“I don’t have the right shoes,” she said.
I handed her the ginger ale. A few people still drifted by and stared at her and there were several “Tell me mores” tossed out, but after a while everyone was too stoned to move, or too busy dancing, or too into their own things. We stood there.
“So this is normal,” she said. “They might as well all be from Mars.”
“They don’t know how to talk to you,” I said.
“They don’t know how to talk to me?” She gave a loud guffaw.
“You were sort of doing a number, too.”
“I was what?”
“Doing a number. Talking the way you talk on the show.”
“The writers write the way I talk,” she said. “I don’t talk the way the writers write.” She shook her head as though she was amazed she had to explain anything that simple to anyone.
“Is that the way you talk to the kids you go to school with?”
“We don’t socialize a lot,” she said. “We don’t have time for this—” She waved her hand as though she was waving away flying cockroaches, and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Just what did you expect?” I asked her.
“Just where is the john?” she answered.
I chug-a-lugged two cans of beer waiting for her. I watched her walk back from the john alone. No one was paying any attention to her anymore, not even laughing at her behind her back. I felt almost the way I felt sometimes at school, when Charlie was standing around in a group of us. Whoever’d talk would meet everyone’s eye but his, and I’d want to say Jesus, look at Charlie, too, he’s standing right here with us. . . . It wasn’t quite like that because what everybody at Deke’s was doing finally was forgetting all about her, that she was even there, and going on with their own business.
I looked at her in the T-shirt with her picture on it, in the jacket with the name of the show on it, carrying the Hometown bag, and inside the “Tell me more” ball-point pen to sign autographs with, and I remembered how she’d bragged about the man who wanted to write a book about her. She was looking all around her, as though she couldn’t believe she wasn’t being watched. I told myself I’d take her down to the ocean. I’d tell her the Queen of England could walk through one of Deke’s parties with a cortege of naked noblemen and no one would even turn around, once they were all freaked out on pot. I’d pick up a six-pack and take her somewhere and ask her all about herself and listen to her and feature her.
“Let’s split,” I said as she walked up to me.
“Let’s.”
I grabbed her hand. “C’mon!”
When she started the car, I said, “I know somewhere we can pick up some beer.”
She reached down and slapped in a tape, turning up Frank Sinatra full pitch singing “Violets for Your Furs.”
“Mama loves this song,” she said. “She knows all the words.”
She drove down Main Street going slowly, for her, around forty.
“We can pick up some beer at The Deli-Mavin,” I said. “It’s on the left.”
“Is that what you want, beer?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is that what you’re going to drink on your way to New York?” she said.
She didn’t stop at The Deli-Mavin. She kept right on going, and it wasn’t until we were on the Montauk Highway that I realized there were tears streaming down her face.
18. Sabra St. Amour
I remember when this character in Hometown went crazy after she was gang-raped by The Motorcycle Satyrs. She got into her Volkswagen and drove down to the main street in Pine Bluff, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, put her hand on the horn and screamed.
The writer told Fedora he got the idea for the scene from an old Dory Previn record, about a woman who began screaming in a twenty-mile zone. The song was supposed to be based on something Dory Previn did during a nervous breakdown.
I was thinking about that while I drove Wally into New York; I was thinking that I didn’t want to go crazy on the Montauk Highway. If I was going to crack up, I’d hold it in until I hit the city. If you have to blow your cork, New York City is the ideal place, maybe the only place you can walk around totally insane and still not be conspicuous.
I was also trying to tell myself it was possible it’d pass, the way Etta Lott’s hysteria did the night the powerful mayor threatened to force her into an abortion. Etta Lott had pulled herself together by telling herself she was made of stronger fiber than that. She’d sat down with an old picture album of her family for generations back, and watched their faces, and drummed it into herself that the Lotts were survivors. Well that was one way I was not going to be able to get myself off the hook, because we didn’t even own a camera until The Dark Ages, and old pictures of Sam, Sam, Superman would only push me all the way around the bend.
I think Wally was afraid we’d be traffic-accident statistics before we left Suffolk County, even though I was taking it easy for me. In Bridgehampton I stopped so he could buy humself a six-pack, and me some Merits. He didn’t give me his usual spiel about smoking; he hardly touched the beer.
I knew he was afraid to chance any loss of control, because he sensed I was on the verge of losing all control.
I stopped crying just before we reached Bridgehampton. When Wally lighted a Merit for me, I sucked the smoke deep into my lungs and let it narcotize me (“He’s narcotized now,” a police detective said once on Hometown, after letting this heroin addict shoot up in his cell. “We’ll be able to get more out of him now.”) I turned off the tape.
I began to talk. I told Wally everything that had happened between Mama and me: all about Lamont, and Nick before Lamont, about Bernadette’s letter and the lies Mama’d told me. It was a nice talk, in a way, a strange, peaceful talk, as though we were simply two old friends going for a drive somewhere, filling in the time with conversation.
I remember at one point Wally said quietly, “But you know, it sounds like you were doing to your mother what my father was doing to me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, and I was calm, too.
“You were forcing your life on her, the way he was forcing his on me.”
“I don’t think you’re listening,” I said, because I couldn’t see that at all, and he said, “Oh I’m listening, Sabra. Honestly. Go on,” humoring me, probably sorry he’d ventured an opinion.
I said, “Mama was the one who always told me I wasn’t just another salami on the deli ceiling.”
“That’s a good way to put it,” Wally said. He wasn’t going to risk any more.
I said, “Mama’s always talking about getting out of the business, but we all talk that way.” I laughed. “Then in the next breath she asks Fedora for five hundred more clams a month.”
“Yeah,” Wally agreed.
“You see it’s in our blood,” I said.
“Right,” Wally said.
“Mama just has a weakness for weak men,” I said.
“I see.”
“Mama has a weakness for weakness.” I laughed.
Wally laughed, too.
“Don’t humor me,” I said.
“Who’s humoring you?”
“Don’t throw bouquets at me,” I said. “Don’t laugh at my jokes too much. Do you know that old song?
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s called ‘People Will Say We’re in Love.’ It was Mama’s song with Sam, Sam, Superman, my stepfather.”
“Why did you call him that?” Wally said.
“It was Mama’s name for him,” I said. “Mama used to tell him he could do anything she set her mind to.” I remembered the time back in The Dark Ages when T.V. commercials first began featuring men and women who didn’t look like models or movie stars. The casting directors called them “uglies.” One night at dinner, after Mama’d splurged on a bottle of twenty-five-dollar champagne, she talked Sam, Sam into answering a casting call for an actor to play a bartender. He was supposed to hold up a bot
tle of new light beer called Pebble and say, “Pebble promises pleasure.”
Sam, Sam kept saying it was a tongue twister, and he’d end up saying “Plebble plomises pleasure” when he’d practice with Mama. Mama got him to say “Peggy Babcock” fast, over and over, so he’d master tongue twisting. “If you can say ‘Peggy Babcock’ five times fast, you can say anything,” Mama’d tell him.
We both went in with Sam, Sam when he had his appointment at the agency. The casting director raised her eyebrow with pleasure when she saw him, looked over his shoulder at Mama and shook her head up and down. (He was an ugly, all right.) When it came Sam’s turn to try out, he held up the bottle and said, “Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock.”
I just groaned and turned my back because it hurt to look, but Mama went tearing up to the set and threw her arms around him, and they both collapsed with laughter.
P.S. He didn’t get the part.
P.P.S. He always used it later in arguments, as an example of Mama pushing him.
I told Wally about that and about a lot of other things. I thought of what they say about someone drowning, that your whole life passes before your eyes while you’re waterlogged and going under.
Usually when I see the lights of Manhattan, on the way in, I breathe a sigh of relief, the way people do when they see the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor on their way back from Europe, and know they’re home. All the lights and the bridges and the tall buildings in the shadows always tranquilized me. That night, though, I could feel something revving up inside me because we were almost there, and then what?
Once the door shut behind us in the apartment at The Dakota, I could feel Wally tense up, too.
“It’s eleven forty-five, Sabra,” he said. “This is no time to call a writer.”
“Have a beer,” I said, and I looked up the number of The Plaza in the Manhattan telephone directory.
“We ought to call and tell people where we are,” he said.
“We will,” I said, “after.”
“Sabra, he’s going to think you’re—”
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just the wrong thing to do.”
“Have a beer,” I said. “Relax. How do you like our place?”
“I wish you’d wait until tomorrow,” said Wally.
“I can’t wait until tomorrow,” I said.
“Why?” he said.
“Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice,” I said.
“Now that’s a line from the show,” he said. “Isn’t that some line from the show?”
“So what?” I said.
“So you’re doing a number again,” he said. “Why can’t you just come up with a normal answer?”
“Like what?” I said.
“Huh?”
“What’s a normal answer for why I’m about to call Milton Tanner?”
“Jesus!” he said.
“Because I’ll be happy to come up with it if you’ll tell me what it is.”
“Oh God,” he said.
“Then you’ll love me because I’ll be more like you,” I said.
“You don’t want anyone to love you in the ninth place,” he said.
“No, I want to call Milton Tanner,” I said.
It was almost midnight by the time I reached him. I explained who I was and that I was ready to do the interview anytime, and Wally stood across from me punching his forehead with his fist and making faces.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” I said.
“I’m an insomniac, anyway,” he said. “What’s your address?”
“Are you humoring me, too?” I said. Wally shut his eyes and grimaced.
“Am I humoring you?” Milton Tanner said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m humoring you,” he said. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
Next I called Mama.
“Well isn’t that just ducky,” Mama said. “That’s just ducky that you called Milton Tanner. Be sure and make him right at home. Is Wally with you?”
“Why did you lie, Mama?” I said.
“I asked you if Wally was with you?”
“He’s with me,” I said. “You could have told me you met Lamont at The New School.”
“You tell Wally his mother’s looking for him,” she said. “You hear?”
“All those lies, Mama. All the times you laughed at Lamont with me and you were—” I couldn’t even say it. “With him.”
“The next time you read my mail, put it back in order. Try to have a little mystery about you, Maggie. Is your stomach all right?”
“The way you have mystery about you?” I said.
“Maybe I should have told you but as it turned out I didn’t,” Mama said.
“And that’s all you’re going to say?”
“No, that isn’t all I’m going to say, but it’s all I’m going to say ce soir, Maggie, because I’ve got a load of dishes to do and I’ve had it with you just taking off when you feel like it!”
“Just one lie after the other,” I said.
“You never liked anyone I picked,” Mama said.
“Maybe because your taste is terrible.”
“It’s the one thing that’s all mine, though, Maggie.” I didn’t say anything. I could feel things beginning to crumble inside, as though instead of internal organs there was a house of cards under my skin, and the top card had slipped.
“Tell Wally to call home,” Mama said, “and call me in the morning. You’re on your own now, Maggie.”
“Wait,” I said, but I heard the click, then the dial tone.
I was still in my bedroom staring at the Will Barnet print over my bed when I heard the doorbell, and then Wally talking to someone. Mama and I have a lot of Will Barnet prints and there are always cats in them. I remembered a cat I had once back in The Dark Ages, a tabby I called Loser, because he always positioned himself under this birdhouse that was on top of a long iron pole. There was no way he could ever catch a bird from that birdhouse, but he never tried another position, and he wouldn’t even come in out of the rain once he stationed himself there afternoons.
Sam, Sam used to holler at me, “You better get that word ‘loser’ out of your vocabulary, baby doll! You and your mother use that word about other people a little too much! There’s such a thing as winning and losing, but there’s no such thing as winners and losers. We all take turns at it. You’ll see, someday.”
I glanced up at the ceiling. “Okay, Sam, Sam,” I said.
I got up from my bed and went toward the living room. I could hear Wally saying softly, “ . . . not herself, so you’ll have to—”
“Have to what?” I said from the doorway. “Have to what?”
“Hi, I’m Milton Tanner.” He looked a lot like Telly Savalas, tall and bald, with green-tinted lenses in silver frames. He had his hand out.
We shook.
“Now where can have some privacy?” he said.
“In my bedroom?” I said.
Wally was slumped on the couch, holding a can of beer.
“Lead the way,” Milton Tanner said.
He sat down on my chaise lounge, kicked off his loafers and put his feet up.
“Do you have a tape recorder on you?” I said.
“No, I don’t use one.”
“Because I don’t want to talk into one,” I said.
“I don’t use a tape recorder.”
I stood there, and he sat there, and we both seemed to be waiting.
Then I sat on the chair in front of my dressing table and said, “There are some rumors that I’m leaving the show but I’m not.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked at me, waiting again.
I said, “Mr. Tanner?”
“You can call me Milton.”
“Milton?”
“What?”
“I had a fight with my mother. I found something out.”
“Well?”
“Well listen, I’d better tell you som
ething first.”
“What’s that?”
“I think I’m going crazy.”
“No you’re not,” he said.
“Yes, I think I am, Mr. Tanner, and I mean that.”
“You’re not going crazy, Sabra,” he said. “You already are. You always have been. You have to be in this business. This is a business for crazy people, see.”
“I believe my own storyline.”
“You better believe it, you wouldn’t be any damn good if you didn’t.”
“I say things some writer wrote for me instead of what I feel.”
“Neither does anyone, really. Neither does an audience. You and the writer tell them what they feel.”
“I don’t think I’m getting through to you,” I said.
“You’re coming in loud and clear, Sabra,” he said. “Now that kid out there in the other room isn’t crazy. He’s some nice kid who’s worried about you, but he needn’t be. Someday something you’ll say, or someone like you will say, will stick in his head, and he might even act on it, be better for it, but he’ll never be able to show it to someone else quite the way you showed it to him. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Normal people are self-conscious. They can’t act out. They wait for someone mad to interpret what they feel, someone who’ll step forward and say The hell with how this looks to other people, I’m going to show you yourself and myself and him and her, watch me! Now only a crazy risks that because you can wind up with egg on your face.”
“Etta Lott, on Hometown, said you have to step out of line to give the world something special,” I told him.
“Oh yeah, way out of line. . . . Daisy Harrow played Etta, didn’t she?”
“I was trying to remember her name just this afternoon.”
“She got a part in a series,” he said, “something Gene Reynolds is putting together for CBS. Honey, can we shut off your phone? In about ten minutes I’m going to be bothered with calls from the coast. I left this number like a damn fool.”
“Someday I’d like to do a series,” I said, switching off the phone.
