by Lydia Millet
Bill was handling the seating plan for the fete. It was to be a sit-down dinner for fifty, followed by drinks and dancing.
“You got your three basic groups,” said Bill. “You got your geriatrics, on your mother’s side, you got the friends, and you got your money men. Your mother and me, plus you and the mystery guest, will be at the head of the table, facing the stage. Geriatrics to our right, money men to our left. My broker, your mother’s brokers, assistants, lawyers, investors, a sales rep or two, you know the deal.”
“Friends?” said Estée. “I told you, I don’t have any friends. How am I supposed to have friends? I haven’t walked five hundred feet without you watching in two years.”
“Tut-tut,” said Bill. “Let’s not be down in the mouth.”
“I’m not inviting any friends,” insisted Estée, but Bill was unconcerned.
“How’d you like to sing a song?” he queried.
Her grandfather and the fetid great-aunt arrived on the eve of the occasion, after driving across three states from Texas. “There’s my girl,” said her grandfather when she greeted him. “Why look, your little rosebuds have bloomed.” Great-uncles and cousins-once-removed would be joining them in the morning. Bill put them up in the barracks, lately fallen into disrepair, but not before dealing the grandfather a cuff to the ribs.
“You old geezer,” he said when Granddad doubled over.
“Don’t do that, you pig!” shrieked the great-aunt. “He has a bad liver!”
Bill added a jovial insult or two and told Estée to show them to their rooms.
“How Betty could ever have married that bloodsucking lowlife,” sighed the aunt, depositing her baggage on the floor. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear,” she added as an afterthought. “I’m sure he’s a wonderful father.”
Estée watched the minute hand pass 12:00 at midnight and lay in bed elated, assured of her jailbreak, counting no sheep but feeling, with hands walking softly over cotton ribbing, nubby seams and mattress tacks, these well-known dimensions for the last time. She saw herself borne aloft on the downy back of a gigantic white bird, its wings moving up, down, up, through the ether, but she couldn’t sleep until she had added a series of complex knots, bolts, and handles that anchored her securely to the bird’s back. Only after the last lock had slid into place was she safe in her position, could she drift off sweetly, a rolling patchwork of green and yellow farmland far below.
When she went downstairs in the morning, decorators were scurrying around from table to wall to shelf and standing lamp, frantic and full of their tasks. Ceilings and furniture were festooned with crepe paper, green, red, white, and gold: it was a jungle of hideous indulgence, banners graven with “Estée-18” and “Happy! Happy!” draped from curtain rods, staple guns wreaking havoc on the plaster, flowers on every surface. Betty could not have done worse. In the kitchen, caterers bustled and swore, setting out tiers of glasses and sculpting huge monuments in succulent fruit. They were putting trays in the oven, rolling dough and cutting bread, mixing pastes and chopping nuts, grinding fresh basil with mortar and pestle, blending cilantro and allspice. The smells gave her a rush, hastened her on her way out the back door, past the sand lot where the cocks had fought, past the dilapidated shed where Persians had been bred, into the boneyard once a compost heap. This to remind herself that all the normal rush and frenzy of the house, its forced goodwill, was paid illusion.
In the dirt the skulls and talons of long-deceased roosters were still visible. With a stick through the eyehole she lifted a skull. Clusters of tail feathers had not yet decayed and the plumes stuck out of the mound here and there. Yellowed claws curled in on themselves. Gnats circled above the heap in the bar of shade cast by a jacaranda. She extracted a pack of Bill’s cigarettes from her shirt pocket, smoked one surveying her old country, congratulated herself, and then threw the butt onto the mound.
“What are you wearing? Let me see you model it!” said Betty, as her manicurist applied gleaming silver nails to her finger stumps. Estée found a dress in a closet in the attic, debutante style and ancient, put it on with difficulty, and went back to be inspected.
“A little more risqué might be nice,” said Betty, “to show off your attributes, but I guess it’ll have to do. And for that you paid nine hundred dollars?”
“And fifty,” said Estée brashly.
She was watching Bill set up a slide projector in the banquet room when one of the decorators, running messages for Betty, came to tell her the rest of the relatives had arrived. Parked behind the catering truck, they were a vanload of elderly people Estée did not recognize. Betty was rolled out to greet them and sat in her chair at the top of the stairs. She smiled, the gracious hostess waiting for them to mount the steps, as Estée assisted a drooling old woman in a dark-blue felt hat. As their progress up the steps dragged on, Betty’s bright smile turned into a strained grimace. An old man had reached the summit, his cane tap-tapping at the rail, and tripped on Betty’s outstretched foot. Estée helped to steady him and he snaked a hand around her and pinched her buttock. Betty stretched out her arms to him.
“Unca Dicky!” she cooed in a baby voice, and made kisses in the air in his direction. “Mwuh-mwuh! You’re looking great! You haven’t changed a bit!”
“The help is getting prettier every day,” he said, gravelly voiced and lecherous, as he pinched Estée’s other buttock out of Betty’s sightline.
“No, that’s your great-niece, Estée!” said Betty, offering up a giggle.
“All the better!” said the doddering lech as Estée moved away from his fingers.
“Isn’t there anyone my age?” she whispered to Betty, leaning down. “Don’t they have kids? Grandchildren?”
“All dead,” said Betty gaily. “Unca Dicky had a low sperm count even in his prime. One kid came out mangled. Everyone? This is the birthday girl.” Estée stood beside her, crowded in by the jungle, vines of hanging crepe paper and foliage of balloon clusters, as Betty wheeled around the circle of sedentary relatives and introduced them one by one. “Your Great-Uncle Randy, Unca Dicky, Aunt Ruthie, Aunt Linette, Cousin Lee-Lewis, Uncle Martin, Aunt Sara, and everyone, this is my daughter Estée, isn’t she gorgeous?”
“Oh please,” muttered Estée, but gray and white heads were already waggling from the recesses of overstuffed love seats and high-backed chairs.
“Just like you, Betty,” said a woman with a hairy wart.
“Like a picture,” put in Aunt Sara, and Unca Dicky made an obscene motion with his right hand under a bundle of red streamers. “Nice setup you got here!” Dicky crowed. “All with the dough from the sewage? The shit and the pisspots?”
“You mean landfill. Oh, Bill diversified,” began Betty, and Estée headed for the banquet room. She was interrupted by the doorbell and opened the portal onto an endless vista of young women wearing lipstick and dresses, smiling and holding purses up in front of them.
“I’m sorry,” said Estée. “Who are you?”
“We’re here for the party,” said a redhead in the vanguard. “Are you the birthday girl?”
“But who are you?” repeated Estée.
“We’re your friends!” said a couple of them in unison, and a merry titter ran through their colored ranks.
“Excuse me, what?” said Estée. “I don’t have any friends.”
“Count your blessings honey,” said a blonde with large hair. “Your daddy hired us,” and they swamped her, surging through in waves of chatter and sprinkles of glitter, headed for the tables.
Then came the flanks of businessmen, some of the faces she remembered from the cockfights. They swarmed toward the hired friends, who were standing in small bunches near the stage, preening and talking, flopping their hair and stretching casual arms out in self-conscious poses. Estée helped seat the old people in front of their place cards until Bill came up and took her arm.
“This is Peter Magnus. He’s in real estate. My baby daughter, Esty.”
“Estée,” said Est
ée. “He says it wrong.”
“Pete,” said Pete Magnus, and shook her hand. He was puffy-faced, shining, and tanned a plastic shade of brown, with a jerky smile. “Pleased to meetcha.”
“He will be sitting beside you,” said Bill, and then stage-whispered in a rush of gin-soaked breath, “Mystery guest.”
“Your dad,” said Pete Magnus, “is one of my clients. New account. He’s a good guy though. Your dad’s a good guy.”
“Whatever you say,” said Estée, and went to settle a skirmish between Aunt Linette and a red-haired hired friend who was jabbing her in the chest.
“Would you tell this old bag the card has my name on it?” said the redhead between gritted teeth. “See? Car-la. C, A, R, L, A. Is her name Carla?”
Betty’s face, at the foot of the table, was hidden from the rest of the assembly by a huge sprig of baby’s breath. Estée sat down between Pete Magnus and Bill, who were discussing a leaseback deal.
“Are those call girls?” she asked Bill, but he was clanging a fork against his wine glass.
“On this special occasion, Esty’s eighteenth birthday,” he boomed over the chatter of disinterested guests, “we’re gonna show a slide show later on, after the food. Home movie–type stuff. Memories! Big announcement to make. Now enjoy the vittles. Band’s taking requests.”
“What big announcement?” asked Estée.
“Your birthday present,” said Bill. “Surprise.”
During the soup Estée watched Carla spoon-feed the executive beside her. Pete Magnus leaned in front of her to talk to Bill. “Ever thinking of putting this place on the market, send it my way,” he offered, while Bill scarfed raw oysters and washed them down with gulps of rosé. Caterers and maids served over shoulders, Betty tried to talk through the baby’s breath to Unca Dicky, and the country band played “Jambalaya” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Carla and the executive made an indiscreet exit leaving napkins crumpled on their plates. Down the length of the table, around the linen corners, played social pantomimes, the call girls making free with spirits and finger food, emitting squeals as suited legs transgressed beneath the table and suited arms jostled bare ones above it, spilling wine and food down their shirtfronts. Pete Magnus, talking debentures, futures, and municipal bonds over sherbet, was cut off as Bill swayed to his feet, the band finished “Weary Blues from Waitin’,” and the lights went down.
“Here we go, Hallmark moments,” boomed Bill, and clicked a button on his remote control. Above the stage a picture flicked from a white square of light. It was a baby in a wading pool, its blond mother holding its hand as the cherub stared openmouthed, round-eyed at the camera, a blowup turtle air tube on its waist, bleached by sunlight.
Bill clicked again and the pool gave way to a picnic scene, another blond mother holding a child in a frilly playsuit on her lap, smugly smiling, pinky up its nostril. This brought out a laugh or two, but giggles and gasps from untold points in the darkness signaled guests at other leisure.
The slides followed the child through kindergarten, skiing scenes, campfires, a family Christmas, a pony ride, then a prepubescent wearing a Hawaiian lei on the deck of a cruise ship.
“But they’re not me,” hissed Estée at her father. “That’s not us!”
“Six of one, half-dozen of the other,” said Bill.
He clicked again and the next slide came up: a pretty girl in a cheerleader outfit, blue-and-gold pom-poms and short skirt to match, flashing orthodontic teeth in adolescent glamour. Behind her stood parents, their heads out of proportion to their bodies. The heads were Bill’s and Betty’s, stuck to the smaller-scale figures in the scene.
“This shot was taken at a funny angle,” said Bill. No one cared. Betty was breathing through an asthma mask and across the table from Estée an old man had removed his soiled diapers and placed them on his dirty plate. New couples crept off, leaving the banquet hall behind them. Chairs scraped back two by two.
“The Adirondacks,” narrated Bill. Estée looked up to a vista of pines, a checker-shirted family in the foreground, with a blond teenager, face hidden by a baseball cap, and fishing poles. Their faces were Bill’s and Betty’s, this time matched with bodies even tinier. Bill had never looked so slender. The heads loomed large, hovering like balloons over toothpick necks and torsos.
“What do you think, they can’t tell the kid isn’t me?” whispered Estée. “I mean, she doesn’t look anything like me except her hair’s the same color. Jesus.”
“All kids look alike,” said Bill, and then loudly, “This is us in Yosemite, you see the geyser, what’s it called …”
“Old Faithful?” piped up Unca Dicky.
“There you go,” said Bill. “Now just a couple more.”
“This is a trip, they don’t get it do they?” said Pete Magnus to Estée. “What a trip, it’s hilarious. Guy’s got a real sense of humor.”
“Yeah,” said Estée. “He’s funny.”
“Here you see us at Disneyland,” said Bill. “There’s Esty next to Mickey there, you got your Goofy in the corner, summer of what, ’85.”
“Great pic, I love it,” said Pete Magnus nervously.
“But it’s a publicity photo for Disney,” said Estée. “It’s got the logo at the bottom.”
“Cracks me up,” said Pete Magnus. “Good one, Bill.”
“Last but not least,” said Bill, “you got your high school graduation photo, Esty with all her friends here,” and he clicked the slide wheel into its last image, a generic frame of a huge group of students, faces too small to be recognized, flinging mortarboards into the air.
Sporadic applause.
“What a beautiful childhood,” murmured Aunt Ruthie.
“You were lucky, you should appreciate,” said Uncle Jerry.
“Gave her everything she wanted,” piped up Aunt Sara, and Bill was Mr. Congeniality, beaming to beat the band.
“Now time for our special announcement,” he said. Two businessmen were still seated at the table, one bald, the other on crutches. From upstairs came sounds of breaking glass and gales of laughter, faint and musical, then strident. Feet thundered across the ceiling, bedsprings groaned. Betty had put down her inhaler and was smiling vacantly, nodding, hands in her lap. The old people played with food remnants and looked down at their plates.
“This is a special announcement,” Bill repeated. “My daughter Esty here is getting married!”
Into the absentminded oohs of geriatrics Estée made her protest. “What are you talking about?”
“With a generous dowry of over 100,000 shares in the Coca-Cola Company, she is betrothed to Mr. Pete Magnus, over here on the right.”
“Hey Bill, spring this on a guy,” joked Pete Magnus weakly, his voice trailing off.
“Ridiculous,” said Estée.
“I mean Bill, hey, we just only met,” said Pete Magnus, trying for good-natured ribbing. “I mean hey, I’m not that kind of guy!”
“Here’s the deal,” said Bill, leaning over to talk out of the side of his mouth. “This stock, common, it’s at, what, thirty bucks a share, this is all yours if you get married to my daughter.”
“No way,” said Estée.
“Just look after her, put her up,” said Bill. “Get married when you feel like it.”
“Forget it,” said Estée.
“Pete, is it a deal?” Bill handed him a leather portfolio across the tabletop.
“Sheesh, goddamn,” said Pete Magnus, an apologetic look at Estée, all the while opening the portfolio, pulling out a sheaf of stock certificates. “Bill, never so shocked in my—”
“The young couple!” yelled Bill, straightening again. “My daughter Esty and her new hubby Pete! Let’s give ’em a hand!”
Applause started up, a pitter-patter of weak hand-clapping from the relatives. One executive slapped his knee, while the other stared at his watch.
“Just take it,” said Estée to Pete Magnus. “I don’t care. No one’s getting married.”
&nb
sp; “Pete here,” said Bill, “is gonna be my son-in-law!” He leaned over the table and grabbed Pete Magnus by the hand while Estée rolled her eyes. Betty clapped mechanically. “Start up the band, boys,” crowed Bill. “Better than a cash gift, direct transfer, no capital gains tax, ain’t that right Petey? Your basis here is pretty high—” and Estée left the table, grabbing her wine glass as she went. As she passed the gimp executive he muttered to his companion, “Guy needs to get a sponsor, take him to some meetings.”
The path to her bedroom, where the overnight bag and the strongbox lay waiting, was fraught with voyeuristic detail. Corners yielded flashes of intertwined limbs, discarded clothing, blurred, rapid movement. On the stairs she passed the redhead, straddling a guest with his pants down, and a golden square marked Trojan. Another man, cradling a helium tank, recited, “Hail Mary, full of grace,” at high-pitched hysterical speed, and in the hallway above, where she stopped at the telephone table to call for a taxi, a limp brassiere adorned Betty’s favorite hanging fern. Its owner crawled over to reclaim it with wriggles and cries of “You old horndog!” as her pursuer attacked from behind. Naked save for a loosened tie, and a face lipsticked onto his stomach with nipples for eyes, he reared up on his knees and made his belly button talk by sucking his stomach in and pushing it out again. “Hey babe, wanna ride in my car?” and the fern’s pot crashed down, spilling soil on the carpet.
In her bedroom Estée interrupted a threesome, two girls jumping on the mattress in high-heeled shoes, observed by a man in one of Betty’s wigs.
“Excuse me,” she said, and tried to reach under the bed, but her request went unheeded and the bed collapsed on her arm. The springs scratched and pricked and the jumping jacks tumbled downward, engulfing the dilapidated suit, who lay prone and gazing skyward. She grabbed her strongbox, dragged it out, scoring bloodlines into the skin of her arm, and was ready.
The redhead, blocking her exit path, was hanging out of an oversize shirt. “Got a rubber?” she asked the jumping jacks. “It broke, I only had one. I don’t want that sheepskin crap. Plus I could use a Rolaid, you got one in your bag Tam?”
