Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  Emily hissed back, “No, Nina, don’t pull—”

  Nina must have pulled. The car’s headlights blinked on, long enough to illuminate me standing at my open window as bare as Michelangelo’s David, towel dangling loose in my hand. I jumped to one side of the frame and pressed my back against the wall the way a movie cowboy takes cover in a gunfight. The headlights flicked off again, but I could hear the two of them stifling laughter. Like Will Rogers said, everything is funny as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

  Once I couldn’t hear the car’s wheels crunching gravel I peeked out the window, towel wrapped around my bits this time. When the Pierce-Arrow was almost all the way down the long drive to the main road the headlights flicked on again.

  Although I was so mortified I was certain I’d never be able to face either one of them again in daylight, I decided to wait up until Emily and Nina were back, just to be sure they made it home in one piece. But once I had a reason to stay awake, I fell asleep almost immediately.

  The worst of that particular heat wave broke by the following afternoon. For the next couple of days I chose tasks that would keep me out of sight of Nina and Emily. I mucked out stalls when it wasn’t my turn to, wormed the kittens, and weaseled out of serving dinner by offering to dish up food and scrub pots for Max so he could get out of that hot kitchen for a change.

  I’d gotten over the incident entirely, or so I told myself, by the time Sam and I were scheduled to shepherd a late Friday afternoon trail ride. Emily had been slated to ride, but Nina hadn’t signed up. That morning she’d been seized with the urge to join in, so the two of them asked Sam if it would be all right for them to double up on Dumpling, bareback. Both were slim, and the gelding had carried his share of guests who weighed as much as those two ladies put together more than once, so Sam agreed.

  Oh, you’ve never ridden bareback, much less double? Well, it’s definitely the way to go if both riders are friends and know their way around a horse. It lightens the load, of course, skipping the saddle, and also keeps whoever’s riding in back from getting pinched by the shifting of the tack with every step the horse takes. The camaraderie that comes of it, well, that’s an added bonus. Think of it as the equestrian equivalent of sharing a sundae with a friend.

  Seeing those two riding that way reminded me of a couple of pretty little girls back home in Whistler. Hannah and Judy. Lovely, scrappy, barefoot sisters who rode their pony bareback all over town and used a halter equipped with hay-string reins in place of a bridle. Their features were as delicate as the flowers on my grandmother’s hand-painted china, but they dressed in their older brothers’ hand-me-downs and, like their brothers, would light into anybody on the playground they felt had slighted them. My heart’s desire had been to ride that pony sandwiched safely between those two little warriors. When I begged permission to invite the sisters over to play, my mother said not under any circumstances. That, moreover, I’d get a switching if I ever put a leg across their mount or set foot inside their house. When I asked why, she said, “Because their father’s folks are not our kind of people.” Why this was so my six-year-old self did not question. When Miss Pam laid down the law she did not brook dissent.

  Late one afternoon my mother realized she’d misplaced me, went looking all over, and finally spotted my Buster Browns poking out the front door of a little tar paper bungalow over by the railroad tracks. I’d followed the girls home and had been delighted to discover their house was only a few blocks away from mine. Their mother had been gracious enough to invite me in to have an after-school cookie. I dared not disobey my mother, so when Miss Pam found me, I was lying on my stomach half in and half out of their house with crumbs all over my face. My mother was not impressed by my ingenuity. Every detail of that afternoon was etched sharply in my memory, as any flagrant act of disobedience rewarded with a switching so often was.

  Little did my mother know how valuable that afternoon’s experience would turn out to be. During my interview with Margaret it struck me that she wasn’t looking to hire some snooty formerly rich boy for the job of fetching and carrying for her ladies. So when she asked me to tell her about where I’d grown up, the house I described wasn’t the Bennett manse astride a yard the size of a city block. It was Hannah and Judy’s little bungalow.

  On the trail ride that day I’d volunteered to ride rear guard while up ahead Sam indicated points of interest: A cow’s skeleton picked bare by buzzards that the Hollywood set designer had insisted we leave there for “authentic desert texture.” The gated field out beyond our trickling thread of a creek, fenced off because it was riddled with gopher holes that could snap a horse’s leg. The ranch had lost Katie’s first and only calf that way after the two of them had been turned out for a final ramble together before the calf was sold off to be bottle-raised and Katie started her life as the resident milk cow.

  When we reached the water’s edge, Sam invited everyone to dismount so he could point out all the animal tracks: rabbit and bobcat and the little x-shapes stamped in the earth by roadrunners, so perfectly symmetrical back to front that it was impossible to tell which direction the birds had been running. I stayed in the saddle watching some of our ladies climb off their horses and squat alongside Sam, nodding and murmuring among themselves.

  “Maybe I should go in costume as a roadrunner at the masquerade tomorrow night,” I heard the Zeppelin say. “I never know whether I’m coming or going either!”

  I’d heard Sam’s spiel a million times before and had given it about as many times myself. Both Sam and I could deliver it in our sleep. While he recited the points of interest I was mentally rehashing and feeling shamefaced about that sorry childhood episode with Hannah and Judy. That’s why I hadn’t noticed Dumpling slowing and falling in step with my mount. “Ahoy, Cashmere,” Nina said, and flashed a grin. “Too bad we haven’t been seeing as much of you lately.”

  “Nina, please,” Emily said. She squared her shoulders and arranged her features carefully into a semblance of calm, but nonetheless blushed red. “About the other night, Ward. We wanted to ask—”

  “—if your spotlight dance—” Nina jumped in.

  “Nina!” Emily said. “What we wanted to ask, Ward, is for your forgiveness for the inadvertent intrusion. I’m sorry it took so long, but we didn’t want to bring it up in front of all the others.”

  “No need to apologize, ladies,” I said.

  “Tell me, Cashmere,” Nina said, “why were you standing there in front of your window in your birthday suit?”

  “Oh, I stand in front of my window naked every Tuesday at about that time,” I said. “Some of our ladies enjoy a midnight show.”

  “Do they?” Emily asked. “Well, I hope you’re paid extra for that.”

  Now I felt my own face get hot.

  “Emily,” Nina said, “he’s joking.”

  “Oh,” Emily said, then buried her face between Nina’s shoulder blades. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Sometimes, yes,” Nina said. “But most of the people who are interesting are idiots at least every now and then. Proves your willingness to take risks.”

  “Actually, ma’am, I was worried somebody was stealing your car. I heard the engine, so I got out of bed to check.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ward,” Emily said. “I should have told you we were going out. It was a spur-of-the-moment sort of a thing.”

  “I thought you hated driving,” I said.

  “It’s not the driving I hate so much as the oncoming traffic. Other drivers are so unpredictable.”

  I nodded. “True enough,” I said.

  “I owe you another apology, Cashmere,” Nina said. “I’m sorry if your backwoods accent has made me misjudge you. My darling Sam’s grammar can be a little wobbly, but yours is excellent. Not that Sam’s butchering of syntax makes me love him any less.”

  “You know what Sam says about underestimating people,” I said, trying not to sound like I was lecturing her for talking down to me. Which I was.
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  “What?”

  “No way to tell if an egg has a double yolk until you crack it open.”

  “Sam’s such a philosopher,” Nina said. “Do you know what he said to me the last time I was here when I kept complaining about my roommate?”

  “What was wrong with your roommate last time?” Emily asked.

  “Nothing particularly memorable. Certainly not as memorable as the advice Sam gave me. He said, ‘Pull the weeds in your own yard first.’”

  We three were still bringing up the rear when the lot of us got back to the barn. Nina said she wanted to help Sam with the horses, which freed me up to go help Max set up for cocktails.

  When we got to the house Emily ran up the porch steps in front of me, then hesitated long enough to say, “You know, Ward, Nina can be tactless and condescending, but she has a good heart. By the way, I like your accent. Just because you don’t sound like us doesn’t mean you’re ignorant. You haven’t had the same opportunities we had, growing up.” She snapped a rose from the climber and tucked it behind my ear, then turned and rushed into the house.

  I hung back for a little while, wondering if Hannah and Judy’s mother still lived in the little tar paper house she’d raised her family in. If she did, she was one up on Miss Pam. My poor mother. The thought of her darling son, Howard Stovall Bennett III, as a common laborer building the Boulder Dam already like to have killed her. I tried to imagine Miss Pam’s face when Nina complimented my grammar. My mother, sprung from a long line of overeducated, underfunded folk, was a proud graduate of the University of Tennessee at a time when not many women bothered with college. I doubt I could have convinced her that such condescension from someone with less formal schooling than she had was in the least bit funny.

  I found Emily standing by the hall table where the daily mail was fanned out, holding an envelope in her hands and studying it. “Did Portia write you?” I asked. “That’s good news.”

  “Don’t I wish,” Emily said. “No, this one’s for you. It’s postmarked Whistler, Tennessee. Is that where you’re from?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It must be from my folks.”

  “The return address says ‘Daniel Horn.’ Although this handwriting has so many curlicues that first name also sort of looks like ‘Daniela.’”

  I took the envelope and tucked it in my pocket without looking at it.

  “Who’s Daniel? Or is it Daniela?” Emily asked.

  “It’s Daniel,” I said. “He’s nobody. Just a man my parents used to know when I was a kid.” I took the rose from behind my ear and stuck it behind hers. “You should keep this. It’ll just fall in the sink while I’m doing the dishes.”

  I went into the kitchen to wash my face and hands and cover my dusty clothes with a clean apron. As soon as I was alone I took my uncle’s letter out of my pocket, tore it to shreds, and shoved it into the garbage.

  Chapter Eight

  “Just because she was a fortune-teller doesn’t mean she was a fortune-keeper,” Nina was saying as I circulated through the library soon thereafter carrying a tray of Max’s champagne cocktails, each with a bright red maraschino cherry bobbing merrily inside. Much of our guests’ talk that afternoon, even during the trail ride, had been about ginning up the costumes for tomorrow night’s masquerade at Tony’s Spanish Ballroom in Reno. Nina plucked a drink from my tray and winked at me. “Thanks, Cashmere,” she said.

  Margaret looked at her wristwatch. “Well, I can see into the future,” she said, “and I predict a photographer will be here in about half an hour to take our group picture. I asked him if we should set up sooner but he said no, the angle of late-afternoon sunlight is particularly flattering. He guarantees we’ll all look gorgeous in his photo, and I said, ‘Of course we will, because we are.’ And not to worry, ladies, our man behind the camera teaches over at the university and develops his film in his own darkroom. None of his photographs have ever leaked to the press.”

  Margaret, bless her heart, ran through more or less the same speech every time the photographer came, and was always convinced her clientele would cherish this photographic talisman of their stay with us. I was never so sure about that. Try as I might, I never could imagine anybody hauling out a scrapbook, tapping the group shot taken at the Flying Leap, and saying, “Ah, here I am in Reno, cooling my heels until my divorce went through.” I always figured those photographs got tossed into a wastebasket or shoved into the back of a drawer and forgotten. But, look here, this one you found must have meant something once to somebody, because the given names are penciled on the back. Martha, Theresa, Liz, Anna, Renée, Nina, Emily, and Mary Louise; Sam, Ward, Max, and Margaret. I think Anna might have been the Zeppelin’s real name. Or maybe Renée. Hmm. Zep could have been Theresa, too, come to think of it. Oh, well. She’ll always be Zep to me.

  Would you like some of this Jell-O? No? I don’t blame you. They keep trying to pass this stuff off as dessert, but it just isn’t. Jell-O always makes me think of death. Every time I attend a funeral for a patient, I look over at the widowed partner or bereft children and think, “Hoo boy, I hope you like a Jell-O salad, because several dozen will be wiggling your way in the next week or two.” How congealed salads jazzed up with marshmallows and pineapple tidbits got to be the go-to dish for the bereaved I’ll never know. Of course, it’s not the gift that matters. What matters is the impulse to give.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch—I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited to have the chance to say that, so thanks, too, for giving me the opportunity to get that off my chest.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I wasn’t surprised to see that Emily had changed for the photograph into something fresh and pretty I’d seen flapping on the clothesline earlier that day, a floral outfit figured in red and pink that went well with her varmint boots and the rose she still had tucked in her curls. Nina had also freshened up: hair brushed, face washed, divested of her revolver but not of her pearls, wearing a filmy lavender dress that made her eyes look a little lavender, too. Seemed like her only act of rebellion that afternoon was draping herself sideways across a chintz armchair instead of sitting in it facing forward with her ankles crossed as Emily Post decreed a lady should.

  “She can’t have been much of a clairvoyant if she couldn’t foretell her own future,” the Zeppelin said. She had her hands on the back of that armchair, which also happened to be her favorite place to sit. Nina willfully ignored her.

  “Maybe she had a blind spot when it came to herself,” Emily said. “Lots of people are like that.”

  “A blind spot big enough to steer an ocean liner through, sounds like,” Zep said. “The woman built herself the biggest library in the state even though she didn’t know how to read. If buying books you’ll never read isn’t throwing away money, I don’t know what is.”

  “Gambling is throwing money away,” Emily said. “Spending hundreds of dollars on clothes you’ll never wear is throwing money away. Buying books is an investment in the future.”

  “Emily’s right,” Nina said. “Where there are books, there’s hope. I have stacks of novels I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s the best reason to go on living I can think of.”

  “Because you know how to read,” Zep said.

  “I used to read the funny papers for Portia before she learned how,” Emily said. “Maybe that woman had somebody to do that for her, to read her all those books she bought herself. The way Milton’s daughters read to him after he went blind.”

  “Milton? Milton who?” Mary Louise asked.

  Emily and Nina exchanged looks. “Milton Bradley,” Nina said. “The board game guy.”

  “I didn’t realize he was blind,” Mary Louise said. “Gosh, I loved that Game of Life when I was growing up. I always beat my sisters, so they stopped playing with me. I had to play against myself.”

  “Did you win?” Nina asked.

  “I don’t see how I could lose if I was the only one in the game.”

  “People find a way to do that more oft
en than you’d think,” Nina said.

  “What happened to her in the end, Margaret?” Emily asked.

  “What happened to who?”

  “That mining millionairess.”

  “Eilly Bowers?” Margaret said. “Oh. Her three children died while they were little and she outlived all her husbands. Also her money. Died broke, old, and alone in a poorhouse in San Francisco something like thirty years ago.”

  “I was a child then,” Emily mused. “I might have passed her on the street. Imagine that. She could have warned my mother not to let me marry Archer. Although I doubt I would have listened to my mother or anybody if they’d tried to stop me. He was so handsome before all his hair fell out. Not that I minded that. Not like he did.”

  “All I’m saying,” the Zeppelin said, “is that if the Bowers woman really had the gift of prophesy she should have been able to see what was coming. All clairvoyants are charlatans and liars.”

  “How do you know?” Nina asked. “She might have seen her future back when she was working her fingers to the bone over her washtub, scrubbing all those miners’ dirty laundry. Couldn’t believe anything she’d pictured would actually happen, that she’d be the richest woman in the United States one day, then dirt-poor all over again. Then it did, just the way she’d seen it. So she decided she had a gift for prophesy.”

  “Some gift,” Emily said. “I can’t think of anything worse than being able to see into the future. If I knew what would happen to me most days, I’d never get out of bed.”

  “I can think of something worse,” Nina said. “Getting something you’ve wanted all your life, then realizing it wasn’t what you thought.”

  The Zeppelin, God love her, was one of those chipper old broads who believed the secret to eternal youth lay in steering her ocean liner in the opposite direction of a conversation listing toward sadness. “Ladies, please. We are straying from the question of the hour. What should I wear to the costume party? The easiest thing would be to go as a cowpoke, but so many other people will be doing that, and I do hate the way my dungarees squeeze all the blood out of my lower half every time I sit down.”