Steps and Exes
Page 9
Sunny found Brio in the conservatory with the string quartet, dancing to Mozart as though the students played for her alone. “I need a new dress,” she announced to her mother. “I can tell I’m going to need a dress to live here, and party shoes.”
“Yes, yes,” Sunny soothed her, took her hand, pulling her down the long hall toward the foyer where Sunny could hear her sisters’
voices, her father’s laughter. Oh, it had been so long. And as she flew toward the door, Sunny created a wake of excitement behind her as the old Isadorans followed, gathered, listened, watched and collectively held their breath when Sunny burst through the crowd to greet her father, her sisters. She opened her arms to them in a great tsunami of reunion, of surprise, delight, disbelief, of unrestrained emotions, tears of joy, an avalanche of shouts and shrieks, hands flung over open mouths and mascara streaking tearstained faces, people cried and laughed and Sunny was swept into her father’s great embrace, breathed in Victoria’s rich cologne, felt Bethie’s arms enfold her. Brio, clinging to Celia, eyed them all with the grave suspicion of the only child of a single parent.
“And this”—Bobby approached Brio, the look on his face akin to the adoration of the Magi,—“this is my beautiful little Brio. Oh, Brio!
Brio! I am your grandpa! Life con brio!” And with that he snatched her from Celia, swooped her into his arms and began dancing about the foyer to a tune of his own making, in and out, round about.
Bethie snagged Sunny, hugging her, pushing and propelling her at the same time through the crowded foyer to meet Wade, calling out Wade’s name through the crush, bringing them finally face to face. Bethie glowed as she made the introduction, “My sister, Sunny.
Sunny, this is my beloved Wade.”
From Bethie’s ecstatic descriptions of Wade Shumley, Sunny 71
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had always assumed he was her sister’s equal in zest and vivacity, that he would percolate sex and energy, so she was surprised to meet a pale, narrow-shouldered, bearded man, flecks of gray at his temples, his thinning hair combed dramatically back from a magni-ficent forehead where thick brows arched over grave brown eyes, penetrating in their gaze. Lithe and lightly built, Wade was scarcely as tall as Bethie (who had Celia’s physical presence) and he probably weighed less.
He wore a sport coat over jeans and a T-shirt with a logo against animal testing and he took Sunny’s hands in both of his, consolingly.
“Your being here for our engagement is the best present we could possibly have. Elizabeth has told me many things about you, Sunny, but never how beautiful you are.”
Sunny murmured that she was glad to meet him at last, flushed and withdrew her hand. Putting one arm around Bethie, and one around Victoria, she watched, misty-eyed, to see Bobby dancing with Brio. Bobby Jerome had acquired bulk with age, but his inborn agility still served him. He had a big nose and twinkling blue eyes, and where Sunny remembered dimples in his face, he now had creases; his hair was almost entirely gray, bristly, caught in an unruly ponytail, as though the hair had been lassoed on his way out the door. Brio’s little mouth was wide with laughter and she shrieked with childish delight.
“How long has it been,” Nona York asked Celia, “since all the Henry girls have been together?”
Years and years. And yet, anyone could tell to look at the three, that they were united, that they shared some elusive link, an expression perhaps, an energy that translated slightly differently in each of them. Arm in arm, the sisters marveled over one another, over the more obvious changes time had wrought, Bethie and Victoria plucking at Sunny’s cropped and stubbly hair, while Sunny commented on Victoria’s midwinter tan which testified, it turned out, to a recent week spent at the Robbins family condo on Maui. Victoria walked like a woman accustomed to clay courts and thick carpets.
She exuded an informal, mannered chic and she wore a short, smart two-piece suit, mauve silk, matching high
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heels, gold accessories artfully arranged. Victoria swiftly assessed Sunny’s clothes and found them instantly wanting. “You have to come to Seattle soon. I’ll take you shopping.” Victoria was a marketing analyst at Nordstrom.
“You don’t like my dress?” Sunny held out her long skirt, laughing, “It looks like prewar wallpaper, doesn’t it?”
“Which war?” asked Bethie as Wade came up behind her. She freed herself from Sunny, turned and put her arms around Wade.
“We have to practice our nuptial kiss.”
Bethie beamed from every pore. She had arrived at that moment in a woman’s life when the present is its own vintage, and will not keep until tomorrow. Bethie had achieved a richness, a succulence somehow beyond the confines of the body proper, a moment that could not be infinitely maintained, but in its midst, even plain women take on a lush orchidean quality. Bethie was not plain. Or perhaps it was not the moment in her life, but the man. Watching Bethie close her eyes, tilt her head, part her lips for Wade, Sunny wondered if anyone had ever been that much in love. She felt like a tourist in a foreign country to witness Bethie’s happiness.
Slowly, from the foyer they all flowed toward the central hall, the other rooms, Bobby chiding Celia for keeping Sunny’s arrival a secret and Celia swearing she knew nothing before yesterday.
Brio rode high on Bobby’s shoulder with the aplomb of a girl who has just discovered the perfect lookout on the world. “Mommy says it’s not enough to be a family, you have to have a family. I always wanted to have a big family, like Olivia Hernandez, and now I have one. Wait till I tell Olivia,” she added with some smugness, under the impression that all one hundred fifty people here were related to her in some indirect fashion, and that she had completely outdone the Hernandez clan. “We’re going to live here with Celia.”
“You’re not going back to California?” Bobby stopped, and turned to Sunny. “You’re going to stay!”
Sunny nodded, pinked slightly in the flush of sudden atten-73
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tion, explaining inadequately that she was going to work for Celia.
“You don’t want to do that,” advised Victoria, as soon as she could pull Sunny from Bobby’s ecstatic embrace. “The pay is—well, you know what the pay is. Deplorable.”
“Don’t stay here,” Bethie joined in. “All roads on Isadora Island dead-end into the sea.”
“There are no opportunities—like zero—for advancement,” Victoria added, taking Sunny’s arm. The three sisters freed themselves from the crowd of relatives and well-wishers and moved together in unison, a phalanx of beauty down the hall.
“You don’t want to work here, Sunny,” Bethie counseled. “Toting laundry? Washing dishes? It’s scut work.”
“I have other skills”—Sunny paused pensively—“at least I think I do. I was a producer’s assistant, after all.”
“Listen.” Victoria lowered her voice. “Can you use a computer?”
“Of course. Can’t everyone?”
“Well then, don’t worry. Celia won’t have you toting dishes. She’s got all that up-to-date equipment, you saw it, didn’t you? And she can’t use it. It’s the truth. She won’t admit it, but it’s true. E-mail is the end of her abilities. Grant had to teach her that. She says she can’t learn the computer, but she’s just stubborn and she won’t. She’s a complete throwback when it comes to the real world. You’ve seen all those yellow stickies on the fridge and the chewed-up pencils and crazy ledgers. There’ll be work for you, believe me.”
“Though why you’d want to stay here, I can’t imagine,” Bethie said. “There are no men on Isadora.”
“You found one.”
“That was destiny.”
Sunny chuckled, “I guess there’s always Ernton Hapgood.” Ernton was a notorious ladies’ man.
“Or, you could always take Russell off Celia’s hands,” Bethie suggested. “He’s pressing her for commitment. Personally, I think 74
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“That’s the theory,” Sunny concurred, with an unspoken reflection on her own past.
“I only meant that in any healthy relationship there are mutual demands and obligations, and that’s not possible in adultery,”
Bethie explained. “There’s always the imbalance of expectations and the life you share with that person can’t ever be a whole life. Not when one person is dividing everything, and expressing anger from one relationship into another, owning both and belonging to no one, not even yourself.”
“Ignore her,” Victoria advised. “She talks like this all the time now.” Though Victoria was the youngest of the Henry girls, she had an incipient furrow between her brows, like an inadvertent slip of the sculptor’s chisel on her otherwise exemplary face. “The simple way to say it, Bethie, is: if you can’t trust a man to tell you the truth, what do you have?”
“A relationship that needs healing,” Bethie stated unequivocally.
She rattled off lots more phrases, thick and difficult as jaw-breakers, they seemed to Sunny, before concluding, “A person who needs to take responsibility for herself, and her actions within a framework of reality, who needs to heal these wounds and recover her childhood, discover her own adulthood, or remain forever a codependent.
Come on, Victoria. It’s time.”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“You must. You know you must. You have to do this. Today is the day. You want to be an adult, don’t you? Then take responsibility for your own choices.” Bethie took Victoria’s arm firmly, despite her resistance, and marched her off toward Celia. In a no-nonsense fashion, they collected her as well. The three of them vanished into one of the downstairs bathrooms. The door closed behind them.
“She’s going to make Victoria tell Celia she’s really married,” said Bobby confidentially, coming up beside Sunny, his guitar in one hand, Brio in the other.
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“But it’s Victoria’s secret, not Bethie’s. Victoria shouldn’t have to tell the truth till she’s ready.”
“Bethie says confrontation in the service of healing is justified.”
Discouraged from asking any more, Sunny went with him and Brio into one of the smaller sitting rooms, less populated because the food and drink were set up elsewhere. Bobby needed to tune his guitar, readying it for his performance later; he had written a special song for this wonderful occasion. Sunny could have guessed as much; Bobby wrote songs for every occasion, but over the years, they all came to sound the same. He was an accomplished musician with the instincts of a born teacher and patiently he explained to Brio the process of tuning a guitar, though she had no interest whatever in the tuning and awaited only the tunes. Sunny sank back into the comforts of a wing chair and basked in her father’s remembered presence, his feckless charm, undiminished, even if it were entirely out of date. He was over fifty, but he retained a youthful disdain for the workday world, for advancement, security, benefits and carpooling. He loved music and poetry, lyrics and children. He had already promised Brio party shoes, Woodland Park Zoo, the Space Needle, sailing this summer, beach picnics and anything else she desired. He tuned the guitar, all the while telling Sunny about his latest songs, his latest lyrics and his conviction that these songs would make him famous, that they would be picked up by big-time stars and sung all over the country. Sunny was the more touched that Bobby’s idea of a big-time star was Neil Diamond. She nodded encouragingly, occasionally exclaiming how positive it all sounded, how promising. Bobby was big on promise, and Sunny had long since learned to Let It Be. Let Janice inquire of him who, where, when and what will it cost? After Bobby’s breakup with Celia, Sunny had looked after her father till Janice took him In Hand (this was Janice’s favorite phrase and a fair description of their marriage).
Janice continually trussed him up with a sport coat, dress shoes, a résumé and vocationally trained him to go out into the real world to get a real job. But Bobby always
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subverted her, escaped the commute and continued to write music on guitar and piano, continued to give lessons on both instruments to a changing pool of adoring students. Bobby liked dawns and dusks and would sometimes observe these pageants as though the world were his own theater. He was an impossible man who believed all things were yet possible. He clung to his own possibilities, and if potential on the middle-aged looked rather silly, Bobby seemed unaware of any incongruities between his graying hair and his un-dimmed hopes.
“I’m going to find you a song, Brio, catch you a song just as soon as I can. It’ll be called ‘Brio’s Song.’” Bobby strummed the guitar.
“See, it’s in here, ‘Brio’s Song’ is inside this guitar and all I have to do is coax it out.”
Brio got down on her haunches at his feet and peered into the round guitar and said she didn’t see a song in there.
“No? Well, some songs aren’t inside. Some just float around, and you have to catch them. They’re in the air, melodies, just floating in air, but most people can’t hear them. Only certain people. Certain gifted people. Now, Sunny and Bethie and Victoria, they could always hear them. But Sunny was the best. Oh, Sunny could hear a song a mile off. Sometimes she used to come get me and say, Bobby, I heard a song down on Sophia’s Beach, you better go catch it! And I would.”
“I can’t hear any music,” Brio pouted, “’cept for them—” She pointed out the door down the opposite end of the long hall where the high school musicians had abandoned Mozart for Vivaldi.
“You will. You live here on Isadora, and you will hear songs,”
Bobby promised her. “And when you do, you reach out and catch that melody! Catch it—” He made a swoop with his arm and showed her a closed-up fist.
“Like catching a moth.”
“Exactly. You catch it and give it to me and I’ll turn it into ‘Brio’s Song.’”
Preceded by an Altoid pennant on her breath, Janice steamed into the sitting room and found them. “I finally got through to 77
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Celia and we’re all sitting at the family table. Todd too, but Celia balked at Mother. Come on, Mother.” She waved in the Wookie.
“I’ll make certain Celia doesn’t seat you by Ernton Hapgood. He’s already made a pass at Mother,” Janice informed them tartly.
The Wookie bawled out a greeting and embraced Sunny, saying how terrible she looked. “Is it the curse, Sunny? The curse used to make me sick.”
“Now, Mother. You go sit down and meet your little great-granddaughter, Brio.”
Brio gave Sunny a panicked look and ran to her knees, hugged them. “Everything’s very strange here for Brio,” Sunny explained to the Wookie.
“Everything is very strange here, period,” cried Janice. “I don’t know who’s worse, the ex-addict friends of Wade’s or the weird Isadorans. Have you got your speech, dear? Your glasses?” She fussed over Bobby affectionately. Janice was a short woman, short hair, short skirts, short stature, a short, solid sort of woman who wore jewel-tone clothes and high heels on whose narrow stems her mus-cular calves balanced. Her hair was sprayed until it stood like spun sugar and her mouth pursed in perennial disapproval, or perhaps Chronic Pain. “Really, Sunny, you should have given us some warning, told us you’re coming. Why show up at Celia’s? You could have come to us. After all your glamorous life, I can’t imagine why you’d want to work for Celia. The pay is terrible. It’s not what you’d call a career.”
“What’s Todd doing these days?” asked Sunny, desperate to evade Janice’s assertions.
“Todd is going to the community college. With Bobby. Bobby has many gifts but they need updating. He’s learning the computer, aren’t you?”
“I’m learning on-line.”
“You go on-line, dear,” Janice corrected, “you don’t learn it. What did y
ou do to your hair, Sunny? You don’t have any left at all.”
“There was an audition for Joan of Arc,” she explained, certain that sometime since the invention of celluloid there must 78
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surely have been an audition for Joan of Arc. “I was trying to get into character.”
Mercifully Janice’s place card was not near Sunny’s at the head table, the family table which ran the length of the ballroom, facing the mirrored wall. It was called a ballroom, but it had been designed primarily as a practice room for dancers (hence the mirror). In between the beveled windows and all along the walls were elegantly painted murals, opulent Art Nouveau maidens in bleached Maxfield Parrish colors, flowing hair, garlands and Grecian draperies, their breasts undraped, nymphs dancing in the mode of Isadora Duncan—not surprisingly, since the island itself had been freshly renamed Isadora by Sophia Westervelt. (Before she arrived with plans for her school, an Indian name had served this island from the dawn of time.) Sunny’s place was between Eric Robbins and Brio, and looking at their collective reflections in the long mirror, she realized only Bethie’s people graced the family table. “Where’s Wade’s family?” she asked her brother-in-law.
“They abandoned him,” Eric replied. Eric was a sort of Ken to Victoria’s Barbie, good-looking, well-dressed, mild-mannered, un-memorable. “When Wade was a drug addict they abandoned him completely, and they still can’t forgive him, even though he’s been absolutely clean for eight years. But he’s forgiven them.”
“It couldn’t have been easy, I suppose.”
“It wasn’t.” Eric briefly colored in for Sunny the tale of a man more sinned against than sinning, at least for the last eight years, when, not only had he forsaken drugs, but he had founded ReDiscovery, which was making a huge difference to Recoverees in the greater Seattle area. ReDiscovery wasn’t just for addicts. Wade’s program had broader applications, but Eric didn’t know what they were. Brio tugged on Sunny’s other arm, asking her mother to butter her roll. Eric asked Sunny if her daughter were named after the cheese.