Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  I spin around, and a dark shape moves swiftly toward me. “Lois!” The shape is calling to me in Brad’s voice, is wearing Brad’s jacket, brandishing a large flashlight. “Lois! Are you all right?” No, I’m not. But I am outrageously relieved to see him. Habit compels me to conceal my gladness, though, to show no weakness. It’s annoying, after all, to need rescuing. Again.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and although my voice sounds reasonably calm my knees buckle, and I reach out and clutch the guardrail, bracing myself against cold, hard metal. I reassemble my scattered mind, my wits. I’m Dr. Lois Lonsdale, perfectly reasonable woman, respectable professional, successful author. Not crazy. I reach in my mind for a soothing string of C words, and they don’t come. There’s blank space where my words are supposed to be, like the distance between the swaying footbridge and the cold river below. A space you could fall through.

  “That was Sean, right? Was that a knife he was holding?” Brad sounds both incredulous and angry. “Have you lost your fucking mind?” I don’t say anything. That tone of voice, I tell myself, grasping at indignation, doesn’t deserve an answer. Not crazy.

  “Come on,” he orders, reaching for my arm and pulling me along. I go readily enough. He passes my car and guides me to his, not very gently. “You can pick yours up tomorrow.” He’s not asking, and I don’t bother to object. Suddenly I feel as if something inside of me has collapsed, some elaborate, delicate structure has come crashing down. “Fucking nutcase is right,” he says, starting the car. “I won’t argue with that.” And he doesn’t say much else until he escorts me into my apartment, makes me a drink, and sends me to bed. “We’ll call the cops tomorrow,” he says, and I save my arguments for later, though of course that can’t be allowed to happen. This is between me and Sean—and Zed, and Carly May.

  I don’t even thank him.

  Chloe

  I veer east and head for Nebraska. I don’t think about why I’m going or what I expect to find or what I plan to do when I get there. I don’t even think about Daddy, and I sure as hell don’t let myself think about Gail. I stop only for gas and cheap truck-stop food and feel like Carly May again, like the passing miles are erasing time, year by year, dragging me backward. It’s not a feeling I like much. But I have to go. There’s never any question of not going.

  Lois

  One day that summer, Zed burst into our room with a big dictionary open in his arms. “I have a good one for you, Lois,” he announced. I had already learned to be wary; I knew he did not approve of my spelling. It was pure memorization, requiring no critical thought or creativity, he charged—nothing more than a game. A waste of time, like Carly’s pageants. But now the ground seemed to have shifted; he was full of a strange energy. Still, I expected a trap. “Syzygy. Can you spell that, my little monkey? Come on, spell it like you’re on stage.”

  “Syzygy,” I said, and I could hear the trepidation in my own voice, although I knew the word. “S-y-z-y-g-y. Syzygy.” The word had pleased me when I found it, its oddity curiously balanced by its symmetry, its visual spikiness counteracted by its lilting rhythm. But it is also a word all serious spellers know, a spellingbee staple.

  “And what,” he asked quietly, “does this word syzygy mean?”

  I shook my head, looked down, ashamed because it was clear that I should be.

  “Who cares?” Carly interrupted, in a brash attempt to draw his attention away from me. He shot her one of his rare scathing glances. Even though she was defending me, something in me was glad to see that she, too, could lose his favor.

  He slammed the dictionary shut and tossed it at me; it landed on the floor beside me with a thud. “Look it up,” he said, and strode from the room.

  Syzygy is a complicated word. It can refer to the alignment of three celestial bodies: the sun, the earth, and the moon, for instance. Or it can refer to any two points in the orbit of any celestial body (planet, moon, whatever) where the object is either in opposition to or in conjunction with the sun. Or it can refer to any two related things—and these things may be either alike or opposite; each thing retains its own individual characteristics within this relationship. Or, in poetry, it can refer to two feet in a single metrical unit. All of these possibilities taxed my very limited, sixth-grade understanding of both astronomy and prosody. Etymologically, I noted that syzygy comes from a Greek word referring to the yoking of two oxen; this at least I could visualize. The definitions seemed not so much simply disparate as downright contradictory. Syzygy is a relationship between two things or a relationship between three things. It implies things that are alike or things that are opposite. It involves the solar system or poetry or oxen.

  Zed returned later for a report, as I had known he would. I was more nervous than I had ever been at school, but there was no need, in the end: his mood had softened. “We’ll concern ourselves only with the astronomical application,” he began, sounding teacherly. “Let’s say that I am the sun.” He positioned himself in the middle of the floor of our room and signaled us to rise. “You are the earth, Carly, and Lois, you’re the moon. Now you know of course that the earth revolves around the sun. Revolve,” he commanded Carly. “And the moon of course revolves around the earth. That’s you, Lois.”

  We revolved. The room was really too small for three celestial bodies; we tended to collide, and soon we were laughing. “Pay attention,” he admonished. “Stop, both of you, when you find that all three of us are in a straight line.” Within a few seconds this more or less occurred, and we halted abruptly. I had ended up in the middle, with the sun on one side and the earth on the other. “Syzygy,” he proclaimed. “And since the sun and moon are on the same side of the earth, they are considered to be in conjunction. Now, resume orbiting.”

  He stopped us again when Carly, the earth, was in the middle, and he stood on one side of her and I, the moon, on the other. “Syzygy again. But this time the sun and the moon are in opposition. This is the full moon. During conjunction, the moon is new. Either way, this is when the tides are strongest; the gravitational pull of the sun and moon work together. Understand?” We nodded.

  “Well, then,” he said to me, nodding as if he felt that something had been settled. And he left. We tumbled to the floor from our orbits and regarded each other in silence for a moment as our laughter died away. It was Carly who spoke first, looking at the door through which he had vanished. “He’s crazy, isn’t he,” she said slowly.

  “Bats in the belfry,” I agreed. It was an expression I had heard my father use. “But … not in a bad way, exactly?”

  Carly looked thoughtful.

  I imagine the word syzygy has never been used so much in conversation as it was in our odd little household that summer. To me, it had acquired yet another level of resonance from our performance of it, and it had less to do with the alignment of celestial bodies than with the shifting relationship between the three of us—sometimes aligned and sometimes not; in conjunction or opposition. Both of us orbiting him; me circling Carly circling him. Eclipses, tides. They could all be understood in terms of syzygy—or its absence.

  Later, we became two related objects, not three. Locked in some sort of orbit, I am tempted to say. Or yoked: forever bound, against our will. There is an explanation I came across once, written by someone who was attempting to resolve the seeming contradictions in the word’s meaning, the apparent confusion between two objects and three. In science, he said, the identification of two aligned objects necessarily implies a third: the investigator or observer. This, too, seems rife with interpretive possibilities. Who’s the observer here? Then or now?

  * * *

  One morning near the end of the semester I awake with the cabin fresh in my mind; I dreamed it again. I pad into the kitchen in my L. L. Bean slipper socks, last year’s Christmas present from my parents. I make strong coffee; I empty the dishwasher. But really I am walking barefoot across the rough wooden floors of an Adirondack hunting lodge. The floorboards are warmer in the places where the s
peckled sun has forced itself through the overhanging branches of the trees that surround us. I am afraid.

  My dreams have always insisted upon the fear I don’t remember feeling at the time.

  I call Brad and belatedly thank him for rescuing me, if that’s what he did. I cannot think about the night on the bridge. Sean sent me a copy of a document purporting to be his birth certificate, indicating that he was born in Greene, New York, to Patsy and William McDougal. Which proves what, exactly? I recycled it. Brad is angry with me for refusing to go to the police. He demanded an explanation, and I refused. My desire to confess to him has vanished. For now I’ll keep my story to myself. My stories. There’s strength in that, and safety.

  Nutcase: Nameko, neginoth, norgestrel, nagami, ninjutsu. Nacreous, nobelium, nonuple. Nilpotent. Niqab. Nemesis.

  My words are back.

  Part Four

  Chloe

  You could say I treated my father badly. You could say it was shitty to go off and leave him like that, never bother to write or call. Maybe it’s fucked-up that I call him Daddy in one breath and then in the next admit that I haven’t seen him in over ten years. All I can say is this: he abandoned me first. I was just a kid. And if he had ever wanted to find me, it wouldn’t have been that fucking hard.

  I’m driving. Trying to think and trying not to think.

  Lois

  He only meant to help me. It was an offering. Misguided but genuine. Not a threat. He knew I wouldn’t take his suggestion—wouldn’t mark myself, as he called it. It was a test, and I passed. I believe this, mostly. It was my fault. It doesn’t matter. He is not who I thought he was. Just a troubled student. I never want to see him again. I’m not crazy. I’m moving on. I find it hard to leave my apartment, though, and I can’t face going to campus. Brad administers my final exams for me and brings me stacks of papers to grade; he is reluctant to leave me alone. I grow accustomed to his watchful presence. I am not good company, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  One evening we are sitting side by side on my couch, grading papers in what I think is companionable silence, when I notice that it’s been a while since I heard the steady scratch of Brad’s pen. I glance sideways, wondering if he’s dozed off midessay, and am startled to catch him watching me intently. Surprised into looking directly back at him, I realize how seldom I really do look straight at Brad. His dark blue eyes are too serious, too intense. I turn my attention back to the paper in my lap, but it’s too late. Brad reaches out and touches my hair—terribly gently, like the slightest of breezes. Then his hand moves from my hair to my chin, pulling my face back to meet his. “Lois,” he begins, the very word a blow. I brace myself for what I know is next. “I’m so worried about you. You have no idea how much I care about you. Let’s just get out of here, let me take you somewhere, let’s…”

  I wrench my face from his too-tender grasp with none of his gentleness. “I do plan to get out of here,” I say. I can hear the chill in my voice. “As soon as I submit my grades. But I’m going alone.” Part of me wants to fly at him, pummel his stupid plaid flannel shirt, demand why he crossed the line—the friendship line, so carefully drawn and defended; why he is ruining everything. But that’s not the part of me I allow to speak. “I’m grateful for everything, I really am. But I think I need to be alone now. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  He looks confused, and I realize he’s wondering whether I am simply repeating my intention of going away on my own at some point, or whether I actually mean that I need to be alone this very minute. I stand up and move toward the door so that there can be no doubt. I pull my old cardigan tightly around my chest, holding myself in.

  Awkwardly, he begins to gather his papers. “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. Not your bizarre involvement with Sean, not your treatment of me. And I wish to hell I didn’t care.” His words seem far away, addressed to someone else; I don’t let them in. “I think you’re making a mistake,” he says as he leaves, his words sad and heavy with reproach. He closes my apartment door quietly behind him, but somehow I’m relieved to hear the downstairs door slam so hard the whole house shakes.

  When he’s gone the air in my apartment seems to settle, and I feel as if some important balance has been restored. Lois, you’re the moon.

  I go to my computer and act on the plan I hinted at to Brad: I buy a plane ticket to Vancouver, leaving a week from today. I will arrive well before I am scheduled to meet with Chloe, before shooting on the film begins. It seems like a good idea, for reasons I can’t altogether explain. Alone, I don’t have to.

  Then, with a curious kind of relief, I decide to abandon my grading and turn to Gary. He’s there waiting, but he is floundering a bit. He still can’t decide what to do with the actress. He doesn’t know how to find the writer or what he’ll do with her when he does. The actress pounds on the trunk from the inside, but no one hears her. I wonder how much air she has. I wonder how I could calculate this. I Google it, idly, and am shocked to discover that I am one of countless people who have inquired how long a person can survive in the trunk of a car. A scan of several discussion threads reveals that there are no easy answers: there are too many variables, weather chief among them. The actress is in no immediate danger, I conclude, as long as it’s not too hot and Gary is providing her with water. Of course he is, I decide. He brings her food and water and he asks her questions through a crack in the trunk, though there is nothing she can say that will make him happy. He keeps his hand on his knife in case she tries anything stupid. He prefers knives to guns—because of his father’s death, of course. He was only a child, but he’s heard stories all his life, even if they weren’t intended for his ears—and usually they were not. He’s read the newspaper reports. He wants nothing to do with guns. He’s building a small arsenal of sharp objects.

  I learn, too, that cars manufactured after 2002 are equipped with an escape mechanism: an internal latch that will release the trunk. This doesn’t strike me as a problem for my plot; naturally Gary drives an old junker. (What kind, exactly? I make a note to myself: I’ll need to figure this out.) I remind myself to check my own car to see whether it has an escape lever. How would you know to look for it, if you found yourself in a trunk? Before quitting for the night I make sure the actress has a bottle of water and a snack. I wonder briefly how she can eat and drink if she’s gagged, how Gary can ensure her silence if she isn’t. But these are the kinds of problems I can solve.

  I don’t think about the knife that lies at the bottom of the shallow river on the other side of town, though Gary’s newest knife is very much like it.

  Chloe

  At first, Arrow seems unchanged. The same businesses line Main Street, the same wide spaces separate the houses. The kids riding bikes up and down the side streets might as well be the same kids, with the same dogs at their heels.

  But when I knock at the door of the farmhouse, a stranger answers. “Can I help you?” asks a middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned housedress. A dress Gail wouldn’t be caught dead in. There’s a bulldozer in the yard, some kind of construction going on in the back of the house. An addition. Bad idea.

  For a very uncomfortable second I can’t think what the hell to say. Then I manage to stammer, “My father—my family—used to live here.”

  “The Smiths?” the woman says, helpfully enough. She looks vaguely familiar. Very vaguely. “That was a while back. They moved into town years ago, before … you know. When they sold the farm.” Not being clear on who I am, exactly, she isn’t going to give much away.

  No point in asking her questions, but I ask one anyway. “Where in town?” Daddy would never have sold the farm. I’m confused. There’s something going on here that I don’t know about. I don’t know how he died, of course. Gail’s note was skimpy on details. Had he become sick years ago?

  She tells me the way to my grandmother’s house, and I get back in the car.

  * * *

  Grandma Mabel’s house has been torn down and replac
ed with some horrible modern thing that looks totally out of place on the street, which is lined with respectable mid-twentieth-century white houses, like in some John Mellencamp song. This one is big, square, plastered in pale pink faux adobe. Gail comes to the door in tight jeans and a low-cut, sleeveless blouse. Somehow she’s already heard that I’m here—my Prius hasn’t gone unnoticed, here in the land of big American cars. Or maybe the woman at the old farm called. Gail’s makeup looks freshly applied, in my honor. She isn’t smiling.

  “You’ve had some work done,” I say, following her into the kitchen.

  “You mean the house?” She looks around proudly, like a cat that just ate a goddamned German shepherd. But meaner than a cat.

  “No, I mean you.” I don’t bother to keep the nastiness out of my voice. It’s already clear that there is going to be no pretending. There’s been extensive lipo, I speculate, and some work on the face and neck. Lots of work on the boob region.

  “Where’s Grandma Mabel?” I ask, seeing no signs of her furniture, her taste, her presence. The pastels and gold accents look like they might be at home in a Barbie penthouse. Or Florida. This could only have happened over Grandma Mabel’s dead body. Which would make a certain amount of sense, I suppose. I brace myself for the news.

  “She’s out at Ravenswood.”

  That’s a nursing home twenty miles away. Could be worse. “I’ll go see her,” I say, before I remember that I should tell Gail nothing, nothing at all.