(smiles, removes her oversized sunglasses)
It’s me.
BLISS
What are you doing here?
AUDREY HEPBURN
I should ask you. You’re writing this screenplay.
BLISS
I am?
AUDREY HEPBURN
(nods)
All of this…
AUDREY admires the endless layers of yellow chiffon cascading down BLISS’s skirt, then looks at the other girls.
…is your design, your dreamy little story. You alone know what it all means.
(pauses)
But it’s time to get back, Bliss.
BLISS
Back to what?
AUDREY HEPBURN
What we’re here for.
(whispers)
The Show.
BLISS
(confused)
The Show?
RED-DRESS GIRL flares up; small flames erupt from the hem of her dress.
RED-DRESS GIRL
(rolls her eyes)
Get up to speed, newbie.
BLISS
(to AUDREY HEPBURN, pointing her eyes at RED-DRESS GIRL)
Red makes me nervous. So different than the blues.
BLISS raises her eyebrows, wonders if AUDREY HEPBURN gets the Breakfast at Tiffany’s allusion.
AUDREY HEPBURN smiles knowingly, impressed that someone BLISS’s age even knows the classic film.
AUDREY HEPBURN
(sighs)
Everything I learned I learned from the movies.
BLISS
Me too.
BLISS turns to finish this conversation, but in a flash, AUDREY HEPBURN is gone. RED-DRESS GIRL and GREEN-DRESS GIRL leave, and just when BLISS starts to follow them, she notices the fourth mirror light up. Her voice sounds familiar. A woman in a dewy, flower-petal-pink gown stands in front of the mirror but doesn’t turn around. She has no reflection. The scent of hollyhocks floods the room, and a monarch butterfly flutters around her.
PINK-DRESS WOMAN
(softly, sweetly)
Bliss? Stay awake, Bliss.
BLISS listens, but her head starts to throb again, her eyelids grow heavy, her consciousness drifts.
BLISS
(drifting in and out)
I have to pee. This bathroom is beautiful, but I can pee in a cornfield if I have to.
PINK-DRESS WOMAN
There are no cornfields here.
BLISS
Thank God, right?
(suddenly remembers)
Cornfields are everywhere, where I come from. Cornfields as far as the eye can see.
PINK-DRESS WOMAN
Sounds like a fairy tale.
BLISS
Not really. Actually, I like it here. Really. It’s different. Different is good. Who wants to live in the same old, boring place for their whole life?
PINK-DRESS WOMAN doesn’t say anything. BLISS feels like she’s in trouble now. BLISS doesn’t tell her how a super-small part of her does wonder where the sun is. When the sun decided to come out in The Other Place, it was big and golden. And the stars there? So clear and bright. BLISS definitely doesn’t tell the WOMAN that she misses them.
PINK-DRESS WOMAN heads for the powder room exit. Words trail behind her as the butterfly darts to and fro.
PINK-DRESS WOMAN
Bliss? Don’t fall asleep.
(fainter)
Enjoy The Show, Bliss. Enjoy The Show.
BLISS
(drifting)
Totally. Absolutely.
The door shuts.
Chapter Nineteen
For me, the road to salvation now stretches so far into the horizon, through acre after acre of today’s and yesterday’s cornfields, a landscape riddled with my sins, that I wonder if the road even has an end. Every time I turn around, every time my heart feels a pang of regret, it becomes clearer that asking for forgiveness might be my only way out. But who the hell is going to forgive me for my transgressions, and who the hell should? There is Bliss, yes, and there will be Bliss, every day, until I will her back to life with my words. But there is someone else I’ve wronged. Yet another person I’ve abandoned.
Today, since my visit to the hospital is over, I will drive straight to her. I know the way. I’ve traveled this road thousands of times. For years on a bicycle—then later in my 1975 Monte Carlo that backfired out of a rusty exhaust pipe when it reached fifty miles per hour—and now, in my parents’ Ford.
When I drive up the lane, I breathe in Charlotte’s farm—fresh-cut hay, unearthed soil, smells from my other childhood home. Memories arrive like a montage fit for a queen. A Corn Queen. First scene—the memory of the lemonade stand from when Charlotte and I thought we could earn enough money to go to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Second scene—cleaning chicken coops as punishment for being at Joey’s house when we said we were at the library. Third scene—Charlotte and I in shiny, purple and blue prom dresses, posing on the front porch. Fourth scene—our last summer together, walking beans for Charlotte’s father, learning exactly how to cut down velvetleaf and buttonweed so it didn’t ruin the yield. Fifth scene—and this should be bittersweet, but instead it’s just bitter—Charlotte and I sitting in her car on my last day in True City twenty years ago, wanting the courage to tell her the biggest secret of my life.
But if I had told Charlotte, that would’ve made it real, and that would have been unbearable. I could never tell her, that much I knew, but being around her, keeping the secret from her, had posed a problem of best-friend proportion. Charlotte would’ve sensed it. She would have eventually seen it in my eyes, so I had said a silent goodbye I thought would be forever.
Until today.
I drive toward the little white farmhouse and think of so many weekends spent watching E.T., The Goonies, and with my insisting, James Bond marathons, into the wee hours of the morning. So many sleepovers devoted to Charlotte listening to my endless pining over Joey Darnell, and role-playing what on earth I would say if Joey and I ever had a conversation that lasted more than three sentences. So many summer afternoons wasted away listening to the Go-Go’s, singing into hairbrushes. Halfway up the lane, past the apple tree, past the big red barn, I notice a series of square signs nailed to solid, white posts jutting out of the ground. More signs. So many signs here.
I read the signs as the truck inches forward. The first sign, a tidy collection of red lettering, bears an affected, colloquial greeting. Welcome to the backdrop seen ’round the world. The second one, swirling with shiny blue paint, invites strangers to Pose in your very own American Gothic painting. The third and last sign states the obvious. No appointment necessary.
At my parents’ funeral, Mrs. Davis said that hard times had prompted Charlotte and her husband, Steve, to open up their home—the front yard at least—to tourists and passersby who were searching for an up-close look at the history of American Gothic. In 1930, when Charlotte’s mother was just a baby. Grant Wood, the young aspiring artist and native Iowan, had driven by the house and fallen in love with its Carpenter Gothic Style. He had his sister, Nan, get out to pose in front of it, and later painted in the man based on the likeness of his Cedar Rapids dentist.
I stop the car and take in the panoramic view of the farm, a sight that should’ve been familiar. But everything looks somehow different now. This can’t possibly be the same sky I’d seen as a girl. This sky, a vibrant azure blue, is nothing I remember witnessing before; and what is going on with this late-afternoon sunlight? Whatever it shines upon—the oak treetops encircling the farm, blankets of cornfields swaying in unison—gives everything a heavenly glow. At first glance, I’d say the enchanting radiance is but a mere scientific shine explained by light refraction, but something deep inside me says there is no need for revision, I have the rig
ht word: shimmer. Everything shimmers here. An otherworldly shimmer, like an offering from the sky above, like a gift for those who choose to live on such hallowed land.
More surprises. First, the rich air that made me dizzy yesterday, and now a heavenly shimmer cast upon things as mundane as a muddy combine threatens to make me doubt my own eyesight and sanity. At least the people are predictable here. This I can count on. Midwesterners are polite, yes, but don’t forget that the first musical number from The Music Man is “Iowa Stubborn” for a reason. If you are disloyal to a midwesterner, expect an affable termination of your friendship, a well-mannered cutting of the proverbial cord—a cord that Charlotte will, no doubt, sever today.
A breeze, urgent and purposeful, sweeps past me as Charlotte Davis rushes out her front door. I imagine myself cleansed by the sudden gust, baptized by its purity, and in my dreams, forgiven. But when Charlotte emerges from below the famous arched window, I feel as dirty as the brown, stained dish towel she has flung over her right shoulder.
“Sorry, I was upstairs…” she says, a little breathless, not yet looking at me. When our eyes meet, she pauses, stares.
Charlotte looks a little like my best friend, and a little like a woman who is in the middle of something. Lots of somethings.
“Hey, Char.”
At the sight of me, Charlotte stops for a moment, lets the midafternoon sun, now on fire in the August sky, kiss her creamy, porcelain skin dulled by years. Her once-shiny red hair has lost its sheen and is pulled back into a sort-of ponytail, she looks like an exhausted Julianne Moore, not camera ready. She takes a long look at me, her old friend, hair a bit matted down from the wig I’d worn this morning, and surveys me from heels to cardigan.
I stand motionless. How could I blame Charlotte for not wanting to see me? There was so much I’d missed. Her wedding. The birth of her two children. Her sickness—God, when I think of how devastated I was to hear the news, but how I didn’t know how to reach out to her—my stomach cramps up with shame.
Moments turn to seconds while I await Charlotte’s verdict. Just when it looks like she is on the verge of blasting me with the truth, I see her blink away a lifetime of resentment. “Nice outfit,” she says. She peruses my schizophrenic fashion ensemble. “I’m no fashion plate, but I think the layered look died in the late eighties.”
I let out a decade-long sigh. “This look, you should know, is big in LA.” I smile. “Very cutting-edge.”
Charlotte walks toward me, hugs me with the kind of authority earned by truly knowing someone. “I’m so sorry, Janie.” She places her warm hand on my cheek. “I was at the funeral. In the back. Didn’t know if you’d want to see me, so… God… I just saw your mom last week. I can’t believe”—she releases her hand, swipes tears from her face like they are a nuisance, and whispers—“they’re gone.”
“I know.” I nod away my own tears. “You look great, Char.”
Charlotte tries to tame her disheveled, gray-streaked bangs that have escaped her afterthought of a ponytail. “Your eyebrows do funny things when you lie, Janie. I happen to know this.” She wipes her hands on her jeans and gives me a you’re-full-of-crap look that no one in Los Angeles would’ve dared give me.
I take her in. In the montage of my life, Charlotte Davis is in every scene. She’s the supporting cast member who never got top billing—my Marissa Tomei, my Geena Davis, my Shelley Winters.
“It’s good to see you, Char,” I say, standing now as a stranger on the porch of a house that was once my second home. I feel the porch boards sag beneath me and remember two young girls in first-day-of-school outfits standing in this very spot, posing for mothers who wanted to freeze time.
The horizon fills with new shades of orange and pink, colors that, for farmers, promise a generous harvest. The smoldering sun inches its way behind twenty acres of Davis cornfields, and I know time is not frozen, but passing right before me.
To my surprise, Charlotte holds the front door open for me. The heavenly smell of a hot dish, slow-baked with intent, wafts out, and she lets me in.
Maybe the farmer was right. Maybe our true home can forgive anything, even when we’re at our darkest.
After all, this is home, and I’m at my darkest. Charlotte seems to know this, so she opens the door.
That is to say, she has to.
“Welcome home, Janie.”
Chapter Twenty
Charlotte looks unsettled, and not just because of me—it’s like somehow her life has developed an unsolvable complication during my too-long absence.
After checking what I can assume is some sort of meat concoction in the oven, she glances up at the clock, only to be interrupted by Lady Gaga and her “Poker Face” blaring from her cell phone. I can’t help but wonder about her choice of ringtone. The Charlotte I remember—sweet and hopeful, now the choir director at her church—would’ve chosen something uplifting, more inspired by her faith, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” or “Don’t Stop Believin’.” What hand has she been dealt that makes her need to hide something?
I can just imagine Charlotte at church sporting the perfect poker face—a pleasant, almost-smile, a deadpan gaze out toward a congregation who looked to her to keep their hearts singing—when she was supposed to be listening to Pastor Larson’s sermon about commitment. Come on, God, cut Charlotte some slack. She looks exhausted. After all this time, all these years of doing the right thing, deciphering right from wrong has probably started to become muddled gibberish, like goo-goo Gaga.
As I watch Charlotte fumble with her phone, a heavy truth settles into me. We are all faking it, bluffing our way through life, pretending to have all the answers while really having none. Here is my childhood friend, trying to disguise her sigh when a number flashes on her phone screen, but still she answers the call—probably a friend in need or some other selfless quest for a woman twice as thoughtful and dignified as me.
“Charlotte’s Meatloaf Hotline,” she says, mustering a perky tone from a place of necessity. “What’s your meatloaf emergency?”
Oh. My God. I stand corrected. Nothing dignified here.
After she says the words—and I can’t believe she’s said them—I try to disguise my shock and horror by squirming in my vinyl-covered kitchen chair. I bet she knows what I’m thinking—Oh, sweet Jesus, thank God this is not my life—and something tells me she wishes the same thing.
“Uh-huh. Oh, sure. You bet,” Charlotte says. “And so it’s all crumbly, right?” She bends her head to the left, wedging the phone between her neck and shoulder and takes her own dinner out of the oven. “No, no, no, I’m not in the middle of anything at all,” Charlotte says. “It’s okay… No, no, ma’am. Oh, please don’t cry, ma’am. It’ll be fine… Ma’am, don’t cry. You’re just hungry. And tired. I get it.” It sounds like Charlotte might be describing herself. She stops moving for a moment, slumps into the kitchen counter with an ease that looks practiced, and speaks as honestly as someone wearing a Sponge Bob oven mitt can.
“Believe me, I totally get it.”
She lifts her unmitted hand and raises an apologetic finger toward me, letting me know it won’t be much longer. Then, with the get-it-done flair of a good midwesterner, she regroups.
“Okay, ma’am, when will your guests be there?”
She pauses to listen.
“All right. I think I know what you did wrong.”
I relax into the kitchen chair, finding comfort in the familiar territory of critique.
“You used too much oatmeal, no biggie,” Charlotte offers. “Just reglaze it with barbecue sauce and ketchup and turn the oven up another fifty degrees. It’ll be fine.”
Then she turns her head to steal a private moment with this meatloaf-making stranger. “Ma’am?” I hear her say in a softer voice. “Listen. Tried and true’s overrated.” She gazes outside. Charlotte breathes in. “Sometimes we gotta cut
our losses, try a new recipe”—she softens her voice—“and not look back.”
I bet Charlotte hopes I didn’t hear that. I bet she thinks it will sound like justification for my own reckless abandonment, especially since she knows how I love being right. I wish I could tell her that I know how wrong I’ve been.
“It is never, ever about the meatloaf,” she says, the phone still resting on her soft cheek as she leaves her meatloaf stranger with this loaded advice.
Memories flood my brain, and I start to feel the weight of Charlotte’s life. Meatloaf is serious business, because supper in the Midwest is serious business. A good family eats supper together. A good mother, a good wife, makes sure of that, and she doesn’t do it out of obligation; she does it because it fulfills her, completes her like the last ingredient in a perfect recipe. Tried and true.
Oh, Charlotte.
“Sorry about that,” she says and hangs up the phone. “Here.” She hands me a plate stacked high with slices of fresh-baked sourdough. “And have some homemade jam,” she says before she scurries back to the counter.
“Char,” I say to Charlotte’s back.
She knows what I’m going to say, what sort of drama we’re on the brink of, so she ignores me and begins to fill a tray with vegetables from her garden. “Um, let me give you some of our fresh peaches with our own cream. I remember how much you love that.”
“Char. Stop.”
She finishes piling up the tray and then begins to rearrange things on the counter. “The corn this season is out of this world,” she says. “Just wait until you—”
“Char, stop!” I erupt, then soften my voice. “Look at me. Please?”
She stops moving but doesn’t turn around. I have dreamed of this moment so many times—how confident, how strong, how right she’d be when she tells me how selfish I’ve been. Like life has caught up with her and I’m not sure she can take this on top of everything else. She ends up saying the opposite of what I think she means in the form of a passive-aggressive stall tactic.
“Whatever,” she mumbles and wipes the already-clean counter.
The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel Page 11
