Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “How come, Daddy, did you do that?” Jake asked.

  “Do what, sweetheart?”

  “Hit him?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, and he, the literal kid, gave me a dirty look, and said, “I heard.”

  At least they weren’t the kids of a matinee idol or screen siren, which would have been worse, according to Jessica: you’d have to watch your parents necking with all kinds of strangers and family friends. That was before Rocky cooked up a romance for me on the radio show: he decided that we’d invite on one of his fake sisters, Ida, who’d always been described as the beauty of the family. (My own Ida was vain, and I’d hoped she’d like this piece of flattery.) The Professor would develop a crush on her from afar: “Tell me, Rocky, is she single?” he’d ask.

  “Is she ever!” Rocky would answer, and then, when she showed up (according to the script) she’d be so fat I’d say that calling her single was stretching the truth. Rocky wanted a fat actress, so that the moment she stepped onto the stage the folks in the studio would start laughing, which would set off the audience at home.

  “You know someone?” Rocky asked me. “Someone who needs steady work? Could be a regular character. Here’s your chance to cast your own Heloise, Abelard.”

  I didn’t.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Rocky, who usually left everything up to the writers and studio bosses. “Someone good,” he mused. “Someone funny and fat.”

  Well, of course he was playing a trick on me. I’d show up, and there he’d be in drag—that would make perfect sense, of course. In a movie, who else would play Rocky’s sister but Rocky? Not much of a joke, sure, but he and I were busy married men these days, and we’d take our laughs when we could.

  But when I arrived at the afternoon run-through, there was Rock in his street clothes, and, with her back turned to me, a terrifically fat blonde. She was shaped like a fir tree, fatter the farther down you looked. Her ankles seemed to almost cover her tiny black pumps; her hair was platinum, nearly translucent. She and Rocky were reading from the script already, and I could hear that her timing was good, that her voice could go from sultry seductive purr to angry foghorn blare in the same sentence. I felt even worse than usual that we’d given Rocky’s sisters my own sisters’ names.

  I walked across the stage to introduce myself. Rocky said to the woman, “Don’t take it hard, Ida honey, you’re just too much woman for a guy like the Professor.”

  “No, I’m not, I’m just enough.”

  “Hello,” I said. The woman turned and looked at me. She was younger than I’d expected, and her face wasn’t as fat as the rest of her. I couldn’t decide whether this was lucky or a mean trick. “I’m Mike Sharp. Your love interest.”

  She laughed, and set her hand on my arm. It reminded me of something. “Is that what you are?”

  “So they tell me.”

  The woman flexed her eyebrows at me. She had a thin nose that sprang from her face like a swan dive. Otherwise, she looked like a giant, bratty, lovable baby. “Mose,” she said. “Mose. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me.”

  And at that I almost fainted like my on-screen self would have, to be reunited with someone he’d thought dead. It took some looking, but there she was: Miriam, Mimi, my giant bratty lovable lost child.

  Still, I was the real Mike Sharp, not the celluloid one, and I had my wits about me: I kissed her cheek. I tried to get my arms around her, but I couldn’t. I felt like crying.

  She said, “You probably didn’t recognize me because I got my nose fixed.”

  “That must be it,” I said gallantly.

  She burst out into her beautiful raucous laugh, and that was the moment I did fully, completely recognize her. “Must be,” she said, “because I can’t imagine how else I’ve changed.”

  I looked at Rocky, who was beaming, either evilly or paternally: I couldn’t tell. “She’s got the part,” I told him.

  “Of course she does!” he said. “Let’s go out to lunch!”

  “Sure,” said Mimi.

  Her curls were a parody of her old blond wig; I could see how short hair would no longer have suited her. All I could think was, Is lunch a good idea? But I offered her an elbow and said to Rocky, “You’re not invited.”

  “No?” Rocky thought he was invited to every meal in the world. “Oh, okay. Old times. I understand.”

  “Good,” I said.

  I took her to Musso’s, my favorite spot, to a table up front.

  “So,” she said, as she struggled into the booth, “I don’t have to ask what you’ve been up to.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio.”

  “Carter’s hijacked your sisters, has he?”

  “For the time being. Listen, I’m a smart date. What have you been up to?”

  She set her fingers on the table. The backs of her hands were dimpled like a baby’s. “Radio work. In New York, mostly. I moved here a few months ago. Carter recognized me on the street. How about that? Saw me play Boston twenty years and a hundred pounds ago, picks me out walking down Sunset, comes up with a role for me. I don’t usually play fat women, so this is a stretch. You’re married,” she said.

  “Is that a question?”

  “Of course not. Can’t I read the magazines? You’re married.”

  “You?” I said, though I’d already noticed her ringless fingers.

  “Not anymore. I was married to Savant for a while.”

  “You mean a new Savant.”

  “Same old Savant.”

  “I thought he liked the saxophone player.”

  “Did. Does. All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time. He was a good husband, but a lousy lay. According to me, I mean. The saxophone player might think he’s a great fuck.”

  I’d forgotten how she could scandalize me, and how much I liked it. All though our conversation, I kept losing the thread of her, of my Miriam, until she did something in particular—laugh, bawl me out merrily, touch the bottom of her hair with her fingertips—and then I’d recognize her, and then I’d lose her again. It was like hearing slightly familiar music coming from another room and thinking, Oh, that’s what the song is . . . hold on, no, it’s not. I couldn’t decide what made me sadder: all the weight or the butchered nose. The surgeon had just scooped out the center like a grapefruit.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “Look at me, and then look at you.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t changed! We’re both eighteen years older, and you look exactly the same! And you’re older than me. You still’re older than me, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve changed,” I said.

  “You haven’t.”

  And so, sitting in Musso’s, I dipped my fingers in my water glass and put them to my hairline and softened the glue, and took off my toupee. I dropped it over the bread basket. Surely I looked like hell, bits of glue still stuck to my scalp.

  “Well,” I said, “I haven’t changed much,” but Miriam couldn’t hear me, she was laughing so hard. God knows I was ready to drop my pants to keep her laughing like that, to hear that wonderful mocking noise.

  She applauded me, as though she was—well, what she really was: my first teacher, pleased that her student has finally extravagantly succeeded at his course of study. “Jesus, Mose,” she said. “Jesus Christ. Look at us!”

  She was wonderful on the show that night, eerie though it was to stand next to her on a stage. We were cheek to cheek at the same mike, though this time she played voracious and I played prim. She seemed taller to me. Her current boyfriend, a nice-looking man with a hysterical infectious giggle, sat in the audience, good as gold; I don’t know when we got bigger laughs. Back during my old days on the road, I thought any girl I’d ever slept with was mine to sleep with forever, so long as I charmed her, and I could see that the statute of limitations might never have expired. If I wasn’t married. If I wasn’t a father. If she wasn’t so heavy. If I wasn’t very, very careful. She had the
same charismatic crackle as always, the same perfect unlined skin, the same pink round cleft tongue that flashed when she spoke. When Ida embraced the Professor over the air, Miriam embraced me in front of the audience, and because of her size and a well-deployed script, nobody could see her proprietary upstage fingers and where, exactly, they tickled me. She wore the same sinful cologne she’d favored as a teen, and she’d grown into it.

  “Now,” Rocky said after the broadcast, “it’s time for a cocktail, and I am invited.” He had his arm around Miriam’s waist. Twenty years ago they would have looked nothing alike, a dark-haired exotic beauty and a pie-faced, snub-nosed Irish comedian. But, boy, she did look like his sister now. “Where shall we go? The Mocambo?”

  “I need to go home,” I said, yawning. “Promised the kids. Rock? Could I talk to you a second? Business?”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” I said. I backed off the stage, beckoning him with one hand, waving good-bye to Miriam with the other. I could see her face change when she realized that this was our farewell; she lifted one hand and gave a toodling wave with the ends of her fingers, like the little girl she once pretended to be. I kept backing away till we turned the corner into a hallway and we couldn’t see her.

  “Not bad, huh?” said Rock. “She’ll be a regular, I think. There she was, walking out of the pancake house, and I almost told you a million times, but—”

  “She’s fired,” I said.

  “What? She was great. Did you hear those laughs?”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “My heart can’t take it. I guess I’m lucky you didn’t bring her over to the house, but Rock, listen: I can’t do this.”

  “But why?”

  I shrugged. It was sadness over what seemed to me her ruin. Fear over turning into the kid she’d dumped in Madison, Wisconsin, someone so completely abandoned he’d forget all the people who hadn’t left him. A little bit of habitual desperate lust. Years ago, I’d convinced myself that I’d only wanted to be friends with her, but I didn’t know how to do that now. I’d never had even a day’s practice.

  “Okay,” said Rock, pulling at his ear. “I think it’s mean—”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Kiss her for me.”

  When I got home, the kids were already asleep. “I put them to bed early,” said Jessica. “Too much of Daddy’s girlfriend on the show tonight.” She was sitting on the floor in her usual spot, her back against the sofa. I sat down next to her.

  “They would have understood.”

  “Maybe.” She turned and gave me a kiss on the cheek, an impersonation of our sound guy’s drawn-out ultrasuction pucker. Then she said, “You do have a girlfriend! Lipstick on your collar.”

  I pulled up my collar to see. Pink. A guy in the movies could always say, “Can’t you tell? It’s my own shade.”

  “I must have bumped the actress,” I said.

  “Who was she?” she asked. “She was awfully good. You know me, I don’t laugh for just anyone. She really had you going, though. I mean, you were awfully good too.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “The actress was just someone Rocky dug up.”

  She mussed my hair fondly. “They have credits on your show, you know, at the end. ‘Playing the part of Ida Carter, Miriam Veblen.’ It’s all right.” She got up—she always stood up from the floor like she was levitating, as though it took nothing—and then pulled me to my feet. “She scared the hell out of you, huh? Come on, Romeo. I’ll fix you a snack.”

  My Platinum Blonde

  Children, like all of us, are sensitive to class differences. They love two kinds of grown-ups: those who address children as genuine equals, and those who act like large children themselves. Rocky was the second sort. Children could wrestle him to the ground in seconds. My own kids adored him. The rest of our sophisticated friends would say to Jake, now age five, “Are you married?” Jake was the kind of serious boy who took this kind of joking for what it was, a polite but preposterous lie. “Not yet,” he’d say. “Maybe when I’m thirty.” That left his inquisitor with nothing to do with his next line. (“Handsome guy like you? Got a girl, at least?”)

  Jake’s seriousness evaporated at the first sight of Rock. He flat-out loved the guy. He even stole chocolates from his mother’s supply (she noticed, of course), to press, only slightly melted, into Rocky’s pocket. Rocky in turn brought firecrackers and comic books.

  “For me?” said Jake, hopeful.

  Rocky flopped on the ground and tiredly pushed his hair off his forehead so it would flop right back down, juvenile-delinquent style. “I dunno. You like these things?”

  Jake nodded cautiously.

  “Whattya got to trade?”

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you gambling with my child?”

  “I am bartering,” said Rock. “I am trading away these very fine, hardly thumbed comic books for your house. There is no gambling involved.”

  “The house is pretty big,” Jake offered. “You don’t have too many comics.”

  “I’ll just take your bed,” Rocky told him, “and I’ll throw in the fireworks. The kid owns his bed, right?” he asked me.

  Rock sat in the front row for all of Jessie’s recitals—usually just our kids clowning around for our friends—and applauded loudest. I couldn’t figure out how he could have been so often married without kids of his own. When we went to visit Tansy and his wife and children—talk about a fertile crescent! they had seven—Rocky brought individual presents. It took some talking to wrangle an invite, though.

  “Why are you keeping your kids from us?” Rocky asked.

  “Who says I’m keeping them from you?”

  If Tansy himself was small, Mrs. Tansy could hardly be seen with the naked eye. Rocky said that Jessica and I looked ready to stand on top of a wedding cake for a full-sized couple; the Tansys could have stood on ours.

  Small, small people, Mr. and Mrs. T. A screen door wouldn’t keep them out of your kitchen. The children seemed normal sized, though there were so many of them it was hard to keep track of ages.

  “How do you manage?” I asked Mrs. T., a good-humored, slouch-shouldered woman who loved to feign grumpiness and absentmindedness.

  “Who manages?” she said. “I just figure we keep production at this level, we’re bound to turn a profit eventually.”

  “Aren’t there seven kids in your family?” Tansy asked me.

  “Sure, but that’s different.”

  “Why? We like children. They keep showing up. We should send them to the pound?”

  “I’ll take your surplus,” Rocky said. There was a set of twin Tansy girls, and they were riding around on Rocky’s feet, one twin per shoe, holding on to his belt.

  “When are you going to have your own?” said Tansy.

  “These’re good. They match each other, and I think they’ll spruce up the living room. I’ll take them. Fifty cents a pound sound okay?”

  “We’re using those,” said Mrs. Tansy.

  “We all have to pitch in, Mrs. T. I have no kids, you have extras.”

  “Stop bothering Tansy’s wife,” I told him. “Bother your own wife. That’s where babies come from.”

  “You better not bother me,” said Mrs. Tansy.

  Later, when Mrs. Tansy had gone to put the kids to bed, which involved rounding them up as though she were a Border collie, Rocky and Tansy and I went to their dining room to smoke. The table was covered with white rings from the kids’ milk glasses, burn marks from hot dishes—the Tansys took everything casually. We sat at one end. Rocky poured himself a glass from a decanter that wore a little nameplate that said Gin, though the liquid was brown.

  “Don’t think I don’t want kids,” he said. “It’s just not working out that way for Lillian.”

  “Oh,” said Tansy.

  “She gets pregnant, but then . . .” He sighed with the hopeless mystery of it. “Four times. Probably we should—”

  “You leave that poor girl alone!” said Tansy. His passion surprised both
of us, probably the way Rocky’s casual confession had surprised him, and me. Rocky and I stared at him, and finally I cleared my throat and said, “You’re a fine one to talk, Mr. T.”

  “The sadness, I mean.” Tansy settled back in his chair. His feet didn’t touch the ground. “No woman should have to bear that sadness.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Rocky to blame himself in any way until Tansy yelled at him. What was he if not an innocent bystander? Nevertheless, within a few months, Lillian and he had adopted Rocky junior, a fat, chortling black-haired baby. Rocky senior joked to the press that in order to keep up with the Sharps, he and Lil had considered taking home half the ward at the Marymount Orphanage, but for now they were just keeping up with Rocky junior.

  “We picked out the one who’ll laugh at anything,” Rocky told me. He’d brought the baby over so Lillian could get some beauty rest. She required a great deal of beauty rest, apparently—she turned down all invitations that involved leaving her own house, though she liked throwing theme parties. Rocky made it sound as though she spent hours every day rearranging the furniture.

  Junior was ten months old when they brought him home, an excellent age for a baby. Our own baby, nine months older, was fascinated by him. They sat together on the grass where our back lawn sloped down toward the gated swimming pool I’d had installed for Jessica, shaped like a heart because in California you couldn’t have a swimming pool shaped like a mere swimming pool. (I’d suggested the state of Iowa, itself nearly swimming-pool shaped, but Jessica vetoed that.) Our two babies poked at each other and laughed—our baby, like Rocky and Lil’s, was a prodigious giggler.