Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Five unsealed envelopes lay in a fan on the polished wood before her. The sixth sheet of notepaper was beneath her hand:

  Dearest Sophy …

  Dearest Sophy, the Decline and Fall Club will meet in July this year, almost forty years of meetings—except for 1998, the year you went away. That year we didn’t want to talk about your doing it, and we couldn’t imagine talking about anything else, so we didn’t hold the meeting at all. It was my year, but I just couldn’t. None of us could.

  Dear Sophy, I’m working very hard at do-gooding, but it’s only so I won’t feel so guilty. Every day I make myself eat, the way I promised you. I think of you all the time. Dearest Sophy, wish you were here.

  She drew a heavy line through the last few words. She didn’t wish Sophy were there. Sophy was there, so near as made no difference. Sophy wouldn’t go away. Sometimes Bettiann would be sitting at the phone, talking to someone, a pencil in her hands, and when she hung up and looked down at the pad, there’d be words there, things Sophy might have said or written. Or when she woke up, there’d be lines on the pad on her bedside table, Sophy’s thoughts, often argumentative, sometimes contradictory. Sophy was still giving her what for! After all these years.

  Bettiann gathered up the sealed envelopes and tapped them into a neat pile. Invitations to the other five to dinner in Santa Fe, Bettiann’s annual treat because Bettiann had money. Or William did. Pity Mom had drunk herself to death long before the denouement, after all those years of telling Bettiann what beauty pageants were for. Mom had always said they were a respectable way for girls to offer themselves, a respectable place to show the wares to possible producers or sponsors or husbands. Looky but no touchy, of course, not until after the modeling contract or the movie contract or the wedding ceremony.

  Well, it had worked. William had seen her first in a beauty pageant. He’d been a judge. He’d presented her with the college scholarship, and he’d looked her up after she’d graduated. He’d had this kind of Pygmalion idea about himself, or this Galatea idea about her, one. And even though she’d known William had money, she’d thought she was marrying for love. She’d thought love would make it okay. She’d thought William could make a miracle. It wasn’t until later she knew she wasn’t, it hadn’t, he couldn’t. She flushed. No one could, not even damned Patrick and his promises.…

  If Sophy hadn’t gone, they’d be meeting in Vermont this year. She’d asked for the year 2000, back at the beginning, when they were girls. She’d wanted the millennium, but she hadn’t stuck around to claim it. With Sophy gone they’d celebrate the millennium in Santa Fe, with Carolyn as host.

  “Host” to rhyme with “ghost.” Sometimes Bettiann would be so aware of the ghost that she’d actually look up, expecting her to appear. William even teased her about it.

  “Who’re you expecting, babe? You got a lover?”

  “Why, William,” Bettiann always said. “What a thing to ask!” William knew she didn’t have a lover. William knew that’s the last thing she’d ever have, or want. Even the idea of a lover made her sick to her stomach. She’d tried it once … well, twice. It hadn’t worked either time.

  Abruptly, she remembered Faye’s voice, from long ago.

  “Tell us something you really hate, Bettiann!” It was when they were in school, that night they’d all gotten squiffed at the party.

  “I hate having people touch me,” Bettiann had said, the words coming up like lava, superheated and uncontrolled.

  Which wasn’t enough, by itself. She had to tell them all of it; how her mom, who was an unmarried mom back when being an unmarried mom definitely wasn’t okay, had entered Bettiann in a beautiful-baby contest when she was two, and how they had won fifty dollars.

  “That was all it took,” Bettiann had told them. “Fifty dollars was all it took to get her going!”

  The first win hadn’t quite paid for Bettiann’s costumes. Second time out, when Bettiann was three, they won five hundred. By the time Bettiann was five, they were winning a thousand, two thousand, living on what she won, taking buses back and forth across the country, living in cheap motel rooms, meeting the other moms, going up against the same kids, time and again.

  Polished Mary Janes and bobby socks. Petticoats and hair ribbons. Blond hair in ringlets. Mascara on the lashes over those blue, blue eyes. Cute sayings for the judges. Half a sandwich is enough, Bettiann, you don’t want to look pudgy. Little songs and tap routines—military tap during the war. Tidi-rump dum dum, tidi-rump dum dum, tidi-rump dum dum dum didi didi dum, dressed in the toy-soldier outfit, the little wooden gun and the round rouge circles on her cheeks. Sparkle, honey, sparkle. Don’t eat so much, baby, you’ll get fat! White satin skirt and halter top with a stand-up collar. The collar had a treble clef and music notes sewn on in black braid. Little Miss Music, that one was. No french fries, Bettiann. Just say to yourself, I’m not really hungry. Green satin shorts and midriff tuxedo jacket with gold lapels and a gold-sequin bow tie. The shorts were too tight, and Mom said, See, I told you, you eat too much. You can’t get fat, baby. You’ve got to give the judges what they want.

  Funny that she couldn’t remember the actual contests, only the tiny costumes, the worn little shoes, cracked black through the gold or silver paint, packed in tissue paper in boxes under Mom’s bed where she’d found them after Mom had died. The costumes got more expensive the older she got. And the tap shoes. And the pain in her stomach that never seemed to go away. The doctors said it was nothing. After a while Mom quit taking her to doctors and just gave her Tums, but her stomach went on hurting and there wasn’t any end to the contests, one pageant after another, one sparkle after another.

  “Didn’t you go to school?” Faye had asked. “How did you learn to read?”

  She couldn’t remember learning, all she could remember was doing it. She read everything. It all went in there, inside, all smooched up together, no reason or order at all, no sense of history or sequence, just everything. She couldn’t add two and two, until one of the women they were traveling with took her in hand and taught her, all one summer, mile after mile. Bananas are three pounds for a dollar, how much change for two pounds from a buck? Sardines are eleven cents a can, how much for seven cans? Peanut butter is fifty-five a big jar, how much for four jars? And that’s what they lived on mostly: sardines and peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches made with day-old bread.

  “The law caught up with us when I was eleven,” Bettiann had told Ophy one night after lights out, lying in the companionable dark of their shared room. “I had to go to school, or the welfare would take me away.…”

  So she went to school, feeling like a moron until suddenly all that reading fell into place. She knew more than most of them and knew how to get around adults more than any of them. Teachers weren’t as tough as judges. They, too, responded to sparkle. School wasn’t bad, except Mom started to drink. Not that she hadn’t before, but not so much.

  And that set the pattern for the future. Fall and winter and spring, school and Mom’s drinking, and being on welfare. Not eating was easy on welfare. By the time Mom bought beer, there wasn’t money left over for much else. Summertime and holidays they went on the road, with Mom more or less sober. And Bettiann, winning and winning and winning. She had that sparkle, that shine, even though Mom had to tell Bettiann how to flirt with the judges. Men liked that, Mom said. They liked little girls to flirt.

  Bettiann hated it. Hated flirting, getting close. Even the MC’s arm around her made her stomach crawl because there wasn’t any Barbie-doll body under her clothes. On the outside she could pretend, but on the inside was only this wobbly ugliness, hidden under the costumes. The worst was when she was sixteen, the judge was young and good-looking, and the prize was five thousand, which they needed, and she tried to flirt with him, really tried. But when he caught her by the dressing room and grabbed her, held her, put his mouth on hers, it made her sick. She cried, and then threw up, and couldn’t even go on with the contest.

  �
�You have to stay with me, Mom,” she’d cried. “You’ve got to stay with me. He caught me alone, back there, you’ve got to stay by me!”

  “It’s sort of a game with men,” her mother had tried to tell her, angry and puzzled both at once. “He wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  The word stuck in her head. Was it all just a game? Was that what she was doing, just playing a game? She decided to ask a man they all called Uncle Frank, Max Frank, a pageant organizer who went from state to state, setting up the contests. They all knew him. He knew them. He drank a little too much, but he was safe. After rehearsals were over one night, she waited until he’d had a couple of drinks in the bar; then she went in and sat down with him and asked him if the pageants were a game. She figured, if it was a game, maybe there were rules she should know. Maybe there was an easier way to do it!

  “A game?” he repeated, the smoke from his cigarette making a veil between them, his voice slurred from the liquor. “Why, sure, I suppose. Kids like you, sixteen, seventeen, you bring us your yum-yum and we bank it just like money. You work for prizes—which don’t cost us anything, the sponsors put those up—and when you get a little used up, we cut you out to make room for the new ones coming along with their yum-yum all shined up. So long as the yum-yum keeps coming, we win. I guess if you got a winner, you got a game.”

  “Somebody has to lose, though. Don’t they?”

  “Well, most of the girls lose, honey. You know that. You can only have one Miss Wisconsin Sausage.”

  That broke him up, but Bettiann didn’t think it was funny. Right after that was when she began to obsess over everything. The costume. The makeup. The hair. The lights. If the costume was right and the makeup was right and the lights were right, she could pass long enough to get through the bathing-suit parade, which was the worst part, even though it was a total lie. Inside the suit, the lights, the makeup, her real self was there, hidden behind the sparkle of pretend. She was getting older, losing the yum-yum, the flab was there, the reality was there, and she was scared to death somebody would see it!

  That’s what she’d confessed to Ophy and only Ophy, there in the dark of their shared room at college, when telling secrets seemed safe. She couldn’t bear to think about having sex, having some man look at her.…

  “But you’re beautiful, Bettiann.…”

  “No. Not under the clothes.”

  “But I’ve seen you. You’ve got a great body. Not like me, all bones.”

  “No. You’re not listening. You know what it’s like? It’s like I’m a kind of a jug with a flower in it. Everybody looks at the flower, so none of them see the jug. The jug is ugly, it’s heavy and cracked, but so long as I hold that flower out there, nobody looks at the jug, right? That’s the sparkle, you know. Men see that, the flower, and the rest of me is there, too, but so long as I keep them looking at the sparkle, they don’t see it.…”

  The last pageant was the summer she was seventeen, with a four-year scholarship as first prize, that or fifty thousand dollars. When she’d picked the scholarship instead of the cash, Mom had screamed at her for two solid weeks and had then gone seriously back into the bottle.

  Bettiann wept to Ophy. “Mom says I’m only going to get married and have babies, I don’t need an education, but suppose I don’t! I’ll be too old for the pageants soon. I can’t go on doing contests. I hate it! I shouldn’t give her my whole life, should I?”

  “No,” said Ophy in her firmest, most professional-sounding voice. “You shouldn’t give her your whole life, Bettiann. You didn’t make her start drinking. You’re not responsible for that.”

  Basking in the sun of Ophy’s acceptance, Bettiann had warmed to an almost self-approving glow. “It’s all right. I’m here now. I don’t have to do the bathing-suit parade ever again.”

  Which hadn’t been quite true. She still did the parade, though now she wore couture clothes. She’d fooled Bill the same way she’d fooled the judges. She held the sparkle out there, and that’s all he saw. Instead of the ramp-strut it was the bedroom-tango, with the filmy negligee and the teasing smile, and then, pray God, the lights out so she could quit worrying about what was under the expensive silk. But William, damn him, always wanted to do it with the lights on, and that made her freeze up, because even now, even after all these years, even with the makeup and the hairdo and the exercise class and the clothes, it was still the same body lurking under the fabric.

  Who could compete? Who wanted to try anymore? If there could just be some honorable retirement! Some way to get out of it all. Sophy had told them that: “You need a way to stop! You need to become Baba Yagas and get out of it all.”

  Like all Sophy’s advice, past tense. Past and gone. Sophy’s car had been found in a lonely place, near a convenient bridge over a very deep lake. On the car seat was a letter from Bettiann. The state police had called her wanting to know how, and when, and why.

  Who knew? They’d all asked why, except Aggie. Bettiann had wept and Faye had raged, and Jessamine and Ophy had wanted to hire detectives, and Carolyn had kept after the missing-persons people for at least a year. But not Aggie. Bettiann had assumed Aggie had reacted that way because of the mortal-sin thing Catholics had about suicide, but later she thought Aggie might know something the rest of them didn’t. Aggie had been weird ever since the 1997 meeting in San Francisco.

  “Maybe Sophy was tired of who she was,” Faye had said. “Tired of being female.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Bettiann cried to her reflection in the hall mirror. “God, aren’t we all!”

  “Aren’t we all what?” her husband asked, suddenly appearing in the mirror, a crescent-William bending inquisitively around her distorted image. He had come in silently, earlier than expected, letting himself in instead of ringing for Bemis.

  “Sophy,” she said, surprised into truth. “Sophy was tired of being female. So Faye said.”

  He came across the room to her, the easy stride, the impeccable suit, the dark hair becomingly grayed at the temples, success incarnate, all well groomed and charming except for a slightly troubled look. What could William possibly have to be troubled over? He hugged her, his hi-there-female-person hug, the one he used for her, and the cook, and his secretary, Maybelle. All of whom were women of a certain age who did their jobs very well.

  “You said, ‘Aren’t we all?’ ” He gave her his full face, oh so handsome still, cleft-chinned, clear-eyed, sexy. Like those old movies of Cary Grant. Time was, after a few drinks, that look had set her aflame, all right. Get a few martinis down and a dark room, and it was like the Fourth of July.

  “Aren’t we all what?” he demanded.

  She grunted, surprising herself at the unlovely sound. “Aren’t we all tired of the trappings: Aerobics classes. Hair salon. Shopping. Whole days traipsing back and forth in high-heeled shoes. Fittings.”

  He stepped back, brows drawn together. “You’d rather not shop, maybe? You don’t enjoy it?” Something edgy there.

  “Enjoy it?” She laughed her melodious laugh, the one she’d worked on. (Lower the pitch, Bettiann. Women must never sound shrill!) “Shopping for women is like sports for men, William. Something to do when we have nothing important to do. It’s a pastime. When I was in my twenties, I think I did enjoy it. Seeing the new styles. But now … I’ve seen them all. It’s second time or third time around. Skirts up, skirts down. Lots of fabric, skimpy fabric. Bright colors, dull colors. And recently the clothes have been … ludicrous. Ridiculous. Like a dirty joke somebody’s playing on women. Certainly not something I could wear to look nice for the next charity luncheon. Sometimes I wish …”

  Now he had deep furrows between his brows. He pulled over a chair, sat down beside her.

  “What do you wish?” he asked, seeming really to care.

  “Wish I could let myself relax, like Carolyn.”

  “That’s the old one,” he said with faint disapproval. “The dumpy one.”

  “She’s no older than I am. But she doesn’t dye h
er hair, and she doesn’t go to exercise class three times a week. She doesn’t wear ridiculous clothes just because they’re fashionable, or three-inch heels. She …”

  His eyes narrowed. “You’ve always worn them. Even your bedroom slippers.”

  Suddenly, unaccountably, she was furious. “For God’s sake, William! Women my age wear them, yes! And fashion models wear them! And if we wear them all the time, the tendons in our legs shrink so we can’t put our heels down anymore. It’s part of the whole … thing!”

  He dropped her hand and sat back, face serious. “You’re saying high heels and extreme fashions are a sign of an affluent … ah, decadent society?”

  “No. I don’t know what I’m saying, but that’s not it.”

  “But you’d rather not be fashionable?” He was being patient, really wanting to know.

  She shrugged uncomfortably. A wife didn’t keep a husband by making him be patient, for God’s sake. “I didn’t mean to make a federal case of it. What I really meant was … Well, it would be nice to live in a world where women didn’t expect to be uncomfortable just because they’re female.”

  He looked at her, stared at her as though seeing her for the first time. She tried to read his face. What was he thinking? That it was her job to be fashionable? That he had her for that reason?

  He wasn’t looking at the sparkle!

  What was he looking at?

  THE PHONE RANG IN CAROLYN’S bedroom, early in the morning. She picked it up to hear an operator asking if she would take a collect call from Mrs. Shy-oh.

  Mrs. Chaillot. It was what Helen Jagger called herself, an ironic code.

  “I’ll take it, operator.” She heard a buzzing sound, someone swallowing painfully. “Is that you, Helen?”

  “Yes.” Laughter, a little hysterical, on the edge of control. “Who else but the madwoman.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Not much. Just a frantic desire to hear a human voice. I’ve been thinking about Greta’s little boys, and I got so sad.…”