“You mean…for my life?” Lulu asked.
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t know,” Lulu said, thoughtful. “I’m only nine.”
“Well, that’s sensible.”
“Lulu is very sensible,” Dolly said.
“But what do you imagine for yourself, that’s what I’m asking,” Pia said. She was restless, fidgeting her dry, manicured fingers as if she wanted another cigarette but was making herself wait. “Or do kids not do that anymore.”
Lulu, in her wisdom, seemed to divine that what Pia really wanted was to talk. “What did you imagine for yourself,” she asked, “when you were nine?”
Pia suddenly laughed. “I wanted to become a movie star.”
“And then you did.”
Pia lit a fresh cigarette. “I did,” she said, closing her eyes as she exhaled. “I did.”
Lulu turned to her gravely. “Was it not as fun as you thought?”
Pia opened her eyes. “The acting? God, I could do it every minute. Every second. But I hated the people.”
“How come?”
“They were phony. They lied constantly. And when you got through all the phoniness and the lying, it turned out they were mean.”
Lulu nodded as if this was something she knew all about. “Did you try lying too?”
Pia laughed. “I did, actually. I tried it a lot. But whenever I pulled it off, I had this urge to put a gun in my mouth. That’s what’s called a no-win situation, kiddo.”
“I don’t want to be an actress,” Lulu said. “I don’t like having to say the same thing again and again.”
Pia glanced at Dolly. “Where did you get this kid?”
They drove and drove. Lulu did math. Then social studies. She wrote an essay on owls. After what felt like hundreds of miles of desert, punctuated by bathroom stops at outposts patrolled by soldiers, they tilted up into the hills. The foliage grew dense, filtering out the sunlight.
Without warning, the cars swung off the road and stopped. Dozens of solders in camouflage seemed to materialize from the trees. Dolly and Lulu and Pia stepped out of the car into a jungle crazed with birdcalls.
Arc appeared. “The general is waiting,” he said. “He is eager to greet you.”
Everyone moved as a group through the jungle. The earth under their feet was soft and red. Monkeys scuttled in the trees. Eventually they reached a set of crude concrete steps built into the side of a hill. More soldiers appeared, and there was a creak and grind of boots on concrete as all of them climbed. Dolly kept her hands on Lulu’s shoulders. She heard Pia humming behind her: not a tune, just the same two notes repeated.
The hidden camera was ready in Dolly’s purse. As they climbed the steps, she took out the activator and held it in her palm.
At the top of the stairs the jungle had been cleared away to accommodate a slab of concrete that might have been a landing pad. Sunlight poured down through the humid jungle air, making wisps of steam at their feet. The general stood in the middle of the concrete, flanked by soldiers. He looked short, but that was always true of famous people. He wasn’t wearing the blue hat, or any hat, and his hair was thick and unruly around his grim triangular face. He wore his usual military regalia, but something about it all seemed slightly askew, or in need of cleaning. The general looked tired—there were pouches under his eyes. He looked grumpy. He looked like someone had just yanked him out of bed and said, “They’re here,” and he’d had to remind himself of who the hell they were talking about.
There was a strange, short pause when no one seemed to know what to do.
Then Pia reached the top of the stairs. Dolly heard the humming behind her, but she didn’t turn to look; instead, she watched the general recognize Pia, watched the power of that recognition move across his face in a look of appetite and uncertainty. Pia came toward him slowly—poured toward him, really, that was how smoothly she moved in her gold dress, like the jerking awkwardness of walking was something she’d never experienced. She poured toward the general and took his hand as if to shake it, smiling, circling him a little, seeming embarrassed to the point of laughter, like they knew each other too well to shake hands. Dolly was so taken by the strangeness of it all that at first she didn’t think to shoot; she missed the handshake completely. It was only when Pia pressed her narrow gold body to the general’s uniformed chest and closed her eyes for a moment that Dolly came to—click—and the general seemed disconcerted, unsure what to do, patting Pia’s back out of politeness—click—at which point Pia took both his hands (heavy and warped, the hands of a bigger man) into her own slender hands and leaned back, smiling into his face—click—laughing a little, shyly, her head back like it was all so silly, so self-conscious-making for them both. And then the general smiled. It happened without warning: his lips pulled open and away to reveal two rows of small yellow teeth—click—that made him appear vulnerable, eager to please. Click, click, click—Dolly was shooting as fast as she could without moving her hand, because that smile was it, the thing no one had seen, the hidden human side of the general that would stun the world.
All this happened in the span of a minute. Not a word had been spoken. Pia and the general stood hand in hand, both a little flushed, and it was all Dolly could do not to scream, because they were done! She had what she needed! She felt a mix of awe and love for Pia, this miracle, this genius who had not merely posed with the general but tamed him. That was how it felt to Dolly now—like there was a one-way door between the general’s world and Pia’s, and she’d eased him across it without his even noticing. He couldn’t go back! And Dolly had made this happen—for once in her life, she had done a helpful thing. And Lulu had seen it.
Pia’s face still held the winsome smile she’d been wearing for the general. Dolly watched her scan the crowd, taking in the dozens of soldiers with their automatic weapons, Arc and Lulu and Dolly with her ecstatic shining face, her brimming eyes. And Pia must have known then that she’d pulled it off, engineered her own salvation, clawed her way back from oblivion and cleared the way to resume the work she loved more than anything. All with a little help from the dictator to her left.
“So,” Pia said, “is this where you bury the bodies?”
The general glanced at her, not understanding. Arc stepped quickly forward, as did Dolly. Lulu came too.
“Do you bury them here, in pits,” Pia asked the general in the most friendly, conversational voice, “or do you burn them first?”
“Miss Arten,” Arc said, with a tense, meaningful look, “the general cannot understand you.”
The general wasn’t smiling anymore. He was not a man who could tolerate not knowing what was going on. He’d let go of Pia’s hand and was speaking sternly to Arc.
Lulu was yanking Dolly’s hand. “Mom,” she hissed, “make her stop!”
Her daughter’s voice jerked Dolly out of a momentary paralysis. “Knock it off, Pia,” she said.
“Do you eat them?” Pia asked the general, “or do you leave them out so the vultures can do it?”
“Shut up, Pia,” Dolly said, more loudly. “Stop playing games.”
The general spoke harshly to Arc, who turned to Dolly. His forehead was visibly moist. “The general is becoming angry, Miss Peale,” he said. There was the code; Dolly read it clearly. She went to Pia and took hold of her bare arm. She leaned close to Pia’s face.
“If you keep this up,” Dolly said softly, “we will die.”
But one glance into Pia’s pained, broken eyes told her it was hopeless; Pia couldn’t stop.
“Oops!” Pia said loudly, in mock surprise. “Was I not supposed to bring up the genocide?”
Here was a word the general knew. He flung himself away from Pia as if she were on fire, commanding his solders in a strangled voice. They shoved Dolly away, knocking her to the ground. When she looked back at Pia, the soldiers had contracted around her, and the actress was hidden in their midst.
Lulu was shouting, trying to drag Dolly onto her fe
et: “Mommy, do something, do something! Make it stop!”
“Arc,” Dolly called, but Arc was lost to her now. He’d taken his place beside the general, who was screaming with rage. The soldiers were carrying Pia; Dolly had an impression of kicking from within their circle. She could still hear Pia’s voice:
“Do you drink their blood, or just use it to mop up your floors?”
“Do you wear their teeth on a string?”
There was the sound of a blow, then a cry. Dolly jumped to her feet. But Pia went on, unbowed. “I hope they haunt you,” she bellowed hoarsely. “I hope they visit you in your sleep.”
And then she was gone; the soldiers took her through the door of some structure nestled in the trees beside the landing pad. The general and Arc followed them in. The jungle was eerily silent: just parrot calls, and Lulu’s sobs.
It was because of Arc that Dolly and Lulu got out. While the general raged, Arc whispered orders to two soldiers, and when the general was out of sight they hustled Dolly and Lulu down the hill through the jungle and back to the cars. The drivers were waiting, smoking cigarettes. During the ride Lulu lay with her head in Dolly’s lap, sobbing as they sped back through the jungle and then the desert. Dolly rubbed her daughter’s soft hair, wondering in a numb, helpless way if they were being taken to prison. But eventually, as the sun leaked toward the horizon, they found themselves at the airport. The general’s plane was waiting. By then, Lulu had sat up and moved across the seat.
Lulu slept hard during the flight, clutching her Kate Spade bag. But Dolly didn’t sleep. She stared straight ahead at Pia’s empty seat.
In the dark of early morning, they took a taxi from Kennedy to Hell’s Kitchen. Neither of them spoke. Dolly was surprised to find their building intact, the apartment still at the top of the stairs, the keys in her pocket. It hardly seemed possible.
Lulu went straight to her room and shut the door. Dolly sat in her office, addled from lack of sleep, and tried to organize her thoughts. Should she start with the embassy? Congress? How long would it take to get someone on the phone who could actually help her? And what would she say?
Lulu emerged from her room in her school uniform, hair brushed. Dolly hadn’t even noticed it was light. Lulu looked askance at her mother, still in yesterday’s clothes, and said, “It’s time to go.”
“You’re going to school?”
“Of course I’m going to school. What else would I do?”
They took the subway. The silence between them had become inviolable; Dolly feared it would never end. Watching Lulu’s wan, pinched face, she felt a cold wave of conviction: if Pia died, Lulu would be lost to her.
At their corner, Lulu turned without saying good-bye.
Shopkeepers were lifting their metal gates on Lexington Avenue. Dolly bought a cup of coffee and drank it on the corner. She wanted to be near Lulu. She decided to wait on that corner until her daughter’s school day had ended: five and a half more hours. Meanwhile, she would make calls on her cell phone. But Dolly was distracted by thoughts of Pia in the gold dress, oil burns winking on her arms, then her own insane pride, thinking she’d made the world a better place. The memory made her sick.
The phone was idle in her hand. These were not the sorts of calls she knew how to make.
When the gate directly behind her shuddered up, she saw that it was a two-hour photo shop. The hidden camera with its roll of film was still in her purse. It was something to do; she opened the door and went in.
She was still standing outside the shop an hour later when the guy came out with her pictures. By then she’d made a few calls about Pia, but no one seemed to take her seriously. Who could blame them? Dolly thought.
“These, uh…did you use Photoshop or—or what?” the guy asked. “They look, like, totally real.”
“They are real,” she said. “I took them myself.”
The guy laughed. “Come on,” he said, and Dolly felt a shudder deep in her brain.
What else would I do?
She rushed back home and called her old contacts at the Enquirer and the Star, a few of whom were still there. Let the news trickle up. This had worked for Dolly before.
Soon a messenger arrived at her apartment to pick up the prints. Within a couple of hours, images of General B nuzzling Pia Arten were being posted and traded on the Web. By nightfall, reporters from the major papers around the world had started calling. They called the general, too, whose Human Relations Captain emphatically denied the rumors.
That night, while Lulu did homework in her room, Dolly ate cold sesame noodles and set out to reach Arc. It took fourteen tries.
“We can no longer speak, Miss Peale,” he said.
“Arc.”
“We cannot speak. The general is angry.”
“Listen to me.”
“The general is angry, Miss Peale.”
“Is she alive, Arc? That’s all that matters.”
“She is alive.”
“Thank God.” Tears filled Dolly’s eyes. “Is she—are they—treating her okay?”
“She is unharmed, Miss Peale,” Arc said. “We will not speak again.” They were silent, listening to the hum of the overseas connection. “It is a pity,” Arc said, and hung up.
But Dolly and Arc did speak again. Months later—a year, almost—when the general visited Washington and then came to New York to speak at the UN about transitioning to democracy. Dolly and Lulu had moved away from the city by then, but they drove into Manhattan one night to meet Arc at a restaurant. He wore a black suit and a wine-colored tie. He seemed to savor retelling the story, as if he’d memorized its details especially for Dolly: how three or four days after she and Lulu had left the general’s redoubt, the photographers began showing up, first one or two whom the soldiers ferreted out of the jungle and imprisoned, then more, too many to capture or even locate—they were superb hiders, crouching like monkeys in the trees, burying themselves in shallow pits, camouflaging themselves in leaves. Assassins had never managed to locate the general with any precision, but the photographers did: scores of them surging across the borders without visas, curled in baskets and wine casks, rolled up in rugs, juddering over unpaved roads in the backs of trucks and eventually surrounding the general’s enclave, which he didn’t dare leave.
It took ten days to persuade the general he had no choice but to face his inquisitors. He donned his military coat with the medals and epaulettes, pulled the blue hat over his head, took Pia’s arm, and walked with her into the phalanx of cameras awaiting him. Dolly remembered how startled the general had looked in those pictures, newly born in his soft blue hat, unsure how to proceed. Beside him Pia was smiling, wearing a dress Dolly hadn’t seen before, black and close-fitting. Her eyes were hard to read, but each time Dolly looked at them, rubbing her gaze obsessively over the newsprint, she heard Pia’s laugh in her ears.
“Have you see Miss Arten’s new movie?” Arc asked. “I thought it was her finest yet.”
Dolly had seen it: a romantic comedy that showed Pia in an easy, footloose mode. She’d gone with Lulu to the local theater in the small upstate town where they’d moved shortly after the other generals began to call: first G, then A, then L and P and Y. Word had gotten out, and Dolly was deluged with offers of work from mass murderers eager for a fresh start. “I’m out of the game,” she’d told them all, and directed them to her former competitors.
Lulu had opposed the move at first, but Dolly was firm. And Lulu had settled in quickly at the local public school, where she took up soccer and found a new coterie of girls who seemed to follow her everywhere. No one in town had ever heard of La Doll, which meant Lulu had nothing to hide.
Dolly had received a generous lump sum from the general shortly after his rendezvous with the photographers. “A gift to express our immense gratitude for your invaluable expertise, Miss Peale,” Arc had said over the telephone, but Dolly had heard the smile and understood: hush money. She used it to open a small gourmet shop on Main Street, where s
he sold fine produce and unusual cheeses, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights Dolly had designed herself. “This feels like Paris,” was a comment she often heard from New Yorkers who came on weekends to visit their country houses.
Now and then Dolly would get a shipment of starfruit, and she always made sure to put a few aside to eat with Lulu. She would bring them to the small house they shared at the end of a quiet street. After supper, the radio on, windows open to the night, she and Lulu would feast on the sweet, strange flesh.
Dika Lam
Years before my sister Allie became the champion you know and love—winner of the International Matzo-Ball-Eating Contest, titleholder of the Conch Fritter Invitational, the girl who downed nine sticks of butter in five minutes—she binged her way through a dinner dare that became her finest hour (and my longest).
Allie had moved back to Toronto that May. She had dropped out of her biology program at the University of British Columbia for the usual reasons—boredom, problems with authority, and an unscrupulous lab partner who stole her transfer pipette—but she had also discovered that she was not made for science, and to admit that she missed the point of higher education was not very Chinese. By then, the Toronto travel magazine that had hired me to pen captions and reject unsolicited manuscripts had finally decided to send me someplace that might actually give me jet lag; when our mother found out I was going to Alberta to cover the annual rodeo extravaganza known as the Calgary Stampede, she urged me to take Allie along.
“She likes cowboy boots,” my mother said, as if this were a weakness to add to my sister’s MedicAlert bracelet. “I’ll pay for her ticket.” She pressed a check into my palm, wildly inflating the airfare by several hundred dollars. The amount looked even more absurd against a background of soft-focus puppies, one of those sample designs at the back of the book. I thought of all the checks she’d handed over when I was little so I could pay the hydro bill or fix supper when adult supervision remained several subway stops away.
This Is Not Chick Lit Page 12
