by Ann Beattie
I realize that this sounds like I’m accusing you—like I expected you to be a bloodhound or something. I don’t mean that at all. I just want to know if I’m right that the attraction, at least, was mutual, and whether you might have stayed away because you were interested in someone else, or for some other personal reason. It would help me to know. I guess, rereading this, that I wouldn’t have written you if you didn’t do the Cindi Coeur column, after all. I never write letters and don’t know how I got the idea. Or the nerve. At any rate, enjoy the rest of the summer. There’s a present you’ll have found by the time you get this.
Sincerely
Don Severs
Dear Nicole,
Everyone on the show is terribly sorry about what happened. It is shocking news about your mother’s untimely death. I think that I am particularly moved by what has happened because I have always been a kind of stand-in mother. I want you to know that you can still count on me.
As we all know so well, the show must go on. You will have to hide your own sorrows to effectively portray the sorrows of Stephanie Sykes. Really, though it seems small consolation at a time like this, it does make one pause to remember how many gifts and resources we have been given to draw on. Hard work will help to heal the wound. I am sure that you can triumph over this, as Stephanie has gradually managed to master her alcoholism, etc. Remember that you are not just a teenage girl who has lost her mother, but a character in your own life, and that your life is under your direction. Hard work and dedication will put you over the hump.
I have read someplace that when someone has trouble, vague offers of support are often not very helpful, however sincere. I thought that we might meet and talk about anything you like the first Monday of every month at the Polo Lounge. My treat.
With good wishes,
Pauline
Dear Miss Spenser,
I have in my possession a check issude from the Starlight, Star Bright Corp, in the ammount of $90. Down at the bottom of the check, where there is a memo line, it says Dead Sheep. I do not know, if this is the way you are accustomed to doing things, but anybody with desent manners would know that this is no suitible apology. My wife and I have been country people all are lives and we know that an acident like this is a thing that happens. But you did not right or call to say that you were sorry that your new dog had done this. As it happens that particulur sheep was old ect. but with a dog like that it is dangerus, also on are property there are valuble sheep and if he got at the two pigs there would really be trouble as we have been fatenning them well for a long time and no money could repay us. We also have such pets as a cat and a parot out on the front porch and having seen how that dog lungd at the sheep I don’t even no that I cunsider my bird safe. I would think that you would have handled this matter difruntly than just to have someone send us money like that. I also have something else to say to you. You taught my daughter drawing last year and when they drew the animals in the teraryum you put stars on her work for bringing home things I am embarased my wife saw because they fetured a part of the annatome that I would not even right in this letter to a lady, the part of the annatome was pronownced and exageratid. It should have been X’d out by you when that part was their at all let alone a part almost as big as a lizurd itself. Letting children draw this is not art. If your dog comes on are property again I would feel within my rites to shoot him.
Your negbor,
Mr. D. Wiegand
1 Lucy—he likes you the best of all of them and wants you to visit. You always were nice to me, and I’m glad we got closer lately.
2 Leaving aside Maureen. Just heard the news. Good riddance!
25
THE morning after the funeral in Los Angeles, Lucy went downstairs to Piggy Proctor’s living room. She was the first one awake. She had forced herself to get up even though it was very early, because being awake and tired was better than being asleep and enduring the nightmares. Ever since she got the news about Jane, she had been dreaming her own death: death by drowning, boats sunk, planes exploding, cars crashing—your basic suburban five-year-old’s typical fantasy day.
There had been so many people in the room the night before that it seemed, now that it was empty, that it was an entirely different room. Glass shelves that separated one part of the room from the other held Piggy’s wife’s shell collection. The furniture was lavender and blue. Enormous, hazy paintings of the sky hung on opposite walls. The richer people became the more they felt comfortable with abstraction. Nowhere in Piggy’s house was there a picture of the sky with the sun, or of a vase with flowers, or a scene out of real life; it was all art that relied on blotters instead of brushes. Some paintings that seemed pointillist grew clearer as you came closer. Lucy wandered around Piggy’s big house like a person with glaucoma wandering through a gallery.
Letters and telegrams had overflowed the big white wicker basket on the table. A couple had fallen on the rug. Lucy picked those up and carefully put them back in the basket as if they were alive—like birds that had fallen out of a nest, that must be frightened to be alone. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at any of them, and this morning she was still unable to do it. She stood there awhile, and finally reached into the basket like someone in a contest, drawing a card. Mixed in with all the messages of condolence was a telegram to Piggy’s wife saying that Your lucky day may come soon, Mrs. Proctor. You are now one of ten finalists in Sacramento Bread’s fly away to France deluxe vacation. There were instructions about what Mrs. Proctor should do next. Well, Lucy thought, what would important days be without irony: the blizzard on election eve, enemy troops storming the village as a woman was giving birth, the child hiccuping during its confirmation, the new car stalling as it was driven from the showroom.
Lucy’s mother hadn’t been able to make the trip. Every time she got out of bed she fainted. The family doctor was visiting her every afternoon. She had picked up her mother’s diction; he was only her mother’s doctor. They hadn’t been a family for almost twenty years. Piggy’s wife had asked her if someone shouldn’t try to locate their father, to send word of Jane’s death. Lucy had told her the truth: she wouldn’t know where to begin looking. She really doubted if her mother knew where he was, and didn’t think she was in any shape to be asked. “Oh dear,” Piggy’s wife said. She had been saying it for days.
Nicole alternated between stony silence, not even speaking when spoken to, and weeping and clinging to Lucy. Lucy had gotten used to Nicole’s slim body and pretty face—she had taken her for granted—so that now it was quite shocking to have a scrawny little girl with a puffy, tear-streaked face curled against her, with her face buried against her body. Of course she was going to raise Nicole. The thought of giving her to her mother or to Piggy’s wife, who thought she should hire a governess and have her move into their house, was unthinkable. Nicole seemed relieved to know that she wouldn’t have to do that. But now there was the question of where to live. Nicole had said that she wanted to live in Los Angeles because of her career, but Lucy wasn’t entirely convinced that that wasn’t just bravado. She had even told Nicole that just because she had a career she was not required to continue doing what she had done—or that she might still have a career, but a different one. Nicole cried and said that she wanted to go back to Passionate Intensity. Piggy seconded this notion, emphatically, but Piggy was hardly objective. When Nicole said things like, “I’m a professional,” it sounded more programmed than sincere. No; Lucy wasn’t sure of that. She was so tired herself that she couldn’t think straight. Maybe she was just projecting.
The day before, walking to the parking lot after the funeral, the P.R. man had said to Piggy that he was disturbed because the Nicole Nelson doll was flat-chested: it was going to make the doll look too young, and they would be losing part of their market. Piggy had called the lawyer when he got home, raving about “getting some chest action.” Lucy had not known most of the people at the funeral. She had met Pauline once before, and although sh
e did not know Bobby Blue or his mother, she felt as if she did because he had so often been talked about this summer. She had stood across from him as the casket was lowered, thinking how inappropriate it was that she could not get men’s testicles out of her mind as her sister’s coffin was lowered into the ground.
After the funeral the minister, whom only Piggy’s wife had met before (she did not attend church: she had met him playing golf), had come back to the house for lunch. A caterer had set up bowls of fruit salad, bread, and cold seafood while they were gone. Piggy’s secretary was there in person to explain that an extremely unfortunate, entirely regrettable accident had happened. She had explained to the caterer, she would stake her life on this, that the cake was to be a dessert for a luncheon after a funeral, and that the baker might do “something meaningful.” She had meant, perhaps, a cross or a bunch of icing forget-me-nots or whatever to decorate the cake, but when she came to inspect things in the kitchen, she found that he had baked a large cake in the shape of a submarine. The caterer apologized, saying that his assistant had misread his handwriting, and seen something meaningful as submarine. Piggy stalked out to the kitchen, took a look, ordered the blue excelsior pulled away from around the submarine, took a knife and cut off the tail, cursed, and told them to bring the cake out when it was time for dessert. The secretary dispensed Valium in the kitchen. Piggy’s wife took so many that she fell asleep as the minister was talking to her about the condition of the grass on the back nine. When she woke up ten hours later, only Lucy was still awake, in the living room. She had had too many drinks to try to sleep, and not enough to have the nerve to awaken Piggy to talk to him. After a couple of drinks she had called her mother. Her mother had decided to wallow in her misery, and had taken down the baby album—they had been photographed so much as children that the album contained almost as many pictures as the O.E.D. had words—and she wanted to talk to Lucy about the past, rather than hear about the funeral. Lucy was trying to decide whether she should go through with her plans to return to Vermont with Nicole, or whether they should fly to Philadelphia to see her mother. There was no way to tell if seeing them would make things better or worse for her mother. She had asked Piggy’s wife, the night before, what she should do, but Piggy’s wife was as passive as he was aggressive. When she got nervous, she blew dust off her shells—imaginary dust, because the maid dusted them every day. Lucy had made her puff until she almost passed out. Jane had always been very amused by Piggy’s wife. It was part of the reason why she was so fond of her. Jane would have liked it that in her rush to get ready for the funeral, Piggy’s wife had not noticed that there was a nametag still stuck to her Chanel jacket. In script, at the top of the piece of paper, it said: HI, I’M, and below that was printed MRS. “PIG” PROCTOR.
Caterers and Chanel suits and swimming pools and Mercedes were all things Jane made fun of, but for years Lucy had noticed that she found it necessary to be around them—they weren’t something she could dismiss or just laugh at from afar. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” which her mother had so often said about Jane, might have been true: that she was more attracted to such things than she let on. It was easier for girls than boys to pretend, Lucy thought: from childhood, the girls were the ones who wore costumes and who acted out their dreams; when they got older they could move more gracefully into what they imagined than men. If people were going to be judged quickly all their lives—judged, even, the minute they walked into a room—it would be more helpful to have thought of yourself as a dancer than a firefighter.
She wondered how happy Jane had been. In spite of her fierce independence, it could be argued that she just turned her back on one world whose stereotypes she disliked for another, whose stereotypes she embraced. Jane had lived close to the limelight most of her life, but she had never been a star. If there was life in the galaxy, it was probably true that Pluto loathed the sun. This life must have made her feel unimportant a lot of the time. Nicole’s mother. The daughter Piggy never had. She wondered if Jane might have gotten married as a deliberate act of self-destruction. She had said to Lucy the last time she saw her that she was amazed by all the Hollywood people who were their own best groupies. She saw it as a sign of old age—of being from a different generation—that she was comfortable with being adored, or with adoring someone, but that she couldn’t just stand there and adore herself.
Lucy couldn’t stand the thought of going to Jane’s house and disposing of her things. Jane’s husband’s relatives had called and expressed their sympathy. He was in a coma and not expected to come out of it. They had said to Piggy that they didn’t want anything in the house touched. Lawyers had been called in on both sides. Lucy had overheard one phone call, during which Piggy had shouted, “Do you realize that there’s not one possession of your son’s in the house, unless he’s a drag queen? There’s a Harley in the garage. Period.”
Piggy came downstairs, in his satin robe. “How’s everybody doing?” he said. And just as quickly, “Spare me.” He went into the kitchen, yawning. He did not look any more rested than he had been before he went to bed.
“Piggy hates the morning so,” his wife said.
The telephone rang. As soon as Piggy got up, he turned the phones back on. The call was nothing that interested him; he was speaking in a normal tone of voice, so Lucy and his wife couldn’t hear what he was saying.
“It’s better if he gets a stimulating call right off,” his wife said. “He does better when he’s catapulted into things. Piggy needs a little prodding to seize the day.”
Piggy came out of the kitchen. He was holding a bowl with a bunch of grapes in it, which he did not offer to anyone. He sat down, letting his wife get the next phone call. It was Hildon, wanting to talk to Lucy. She realized when she stood how little energy she had, how tired she was. Hildon was taking care of St. Francis. There was no Cindi Coeur column this week. Hildon acted as if just talking to Lucy, she might crack. He lied and told Lucy that everything was fine. He told the truth, that he missed her. St. Francis was holding his own. What he did not tell her was that his wife had left him and that she had decided to sue for divorce and name Lucy as corespondent. If he had ever had the ability to talk her out of this, he didn’t now; she had come back to the house, not knowing that St. Francis was there, and he had bitten her on the leg. She had found out that St. Francis was Lucy’s dog. This had delighted her lawyer. As Hildon rattled on nervously, she realized, suddenly that she had inherited St. Francis.
“Piggy making everything worse for everybody?” he said.
“Not really,” she said.
“You get some sleep?”
“I’ve had about five hours sleep in the last three days,” she said.
“Still coming in at the same time?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Hildon was picking her up at the airport. She decided that she and Nicole should go to Vermont rather than Philadelphia. When she was better able to deal with it, she would see her mother. It really did not seem possible that she would never see Jane again. It had taken Jane awhile, but finally she had figured out what she could do that was too dangerous, and she had done it. None of that silly hot-potato game they had played when they were children, both of them so fearful that it became fun, scalding their hands tossing a hot Idaho back and forth in the kitchen. Early on, Jane had convinced Lucy of the rewards of acting-up: everybody turned their attention to them, their mother doubted her ability to raise children, chaos resulted in later bedtimes and in rewards being proffered if they would only calm down. Maybe, Lucy thought, if Jane was in Heaven, she was enjoying looking down and seeing Piggy Proctor slumped over his bowl of grapes, his wife nervously blowing on seashells, Lucy in a state of shock. Dealing with hot potatoes was much easier than taking the torch when it was passed: now she was a mother; now she was Jane.
Lucy realized what a coincidence it was that nobody in the family had a father. Or not for long, anyway. They were women who raised women. It might expla
in why they were all half crazy.
No it didn’t. Everybody was half crazy. She was being as self-indulgent as Noonan, who pretended to understand the world in terms of heterosexuals’ ideas of the way things should be. She had to fight this: it was not going to be the case that Jane, even in death, could still manipulate her so that she seemed to be an arch conservative.
It was far from true. She was only conservative in comparison with Jane. Conservative wasn’t exactly it, either; she had always had an advantage. She had always known something that Jane didn’t know. When they were teenagers, she had not told her because she wanted to protect her. As they got older, there seemed no way to capture the moment again, to explain.
When she and Jane were little girls, they had played in a backyard smaller than, but almost as congested as, Disneyland. They had been watched over by a woman named Miss Maybel. Miss Maybel was round and smooth, with skin the color of cocoa. She was from Jamaica. In retrospect, she must have been their father’s mistress. On Lucy’s sixteenth birthday she had been taken into New York alone for a grown-up dinner with her father. The dinner was so grown up that not only did he order a bottle of champagne, but after she had drunk half of it, one of the waitresses joined them at the table. “I wanted you to meet some real women—women who don’t act like your mother and all your mother’s friends,” he had said to her.
“Hey,” the waitress had said. “I’m meeting your kid. It wasn’t part of the deal that I had to hear about your wife.”
“You’re used to a bad deal,” Lucy’s father had said. “Isn’t that what you always say?”
