My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  “Run through this one more time,” I said. “You were being so solicitous of Quill because he controls the purse strings of the theater. I get that. But what would you do if that awful book became a play? Even Siobhan McKenna couldn’t—”

  “Wrong, sweetie! You play it very, very straight. For laughs.”

  I thought about it. It was an amusing possibility.

  “Now you have absolutely got to help me by following up on this,” she said. “This could be the great breakthrough of my career. This could really be an amazing performance.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, already capitulating. “I have to call and pretend that idiotic book—”

  “Sweetie,” she said, seizing my hand.

  “All right,” I said, “but one phone call. That’s the limit.”

  “Can’t you see me?” she said. “Something like this is the perfect challenge. You create a subtext. You let the audience know there’s a subtext. He’s crazy if he doesn’t see that in Albee’s Zoo Story. That play is nothing but subtext. It is simply everything.”

  I had not read the play. I could already see myself returning to the used-book store. I unscrewed the bottle cap and took another drink of juice. Being with Dara was always an adventure. I didn’t believe that Edward Quill would ever have called me to ask my opinion about what I’d typed. He had only thought of that because he’d run into Dara; it had only been his way of getting into the subject—his own little fabrication.

  “It’s got to happen,” she said, in a hushed voice. “Just knowing it would happen would make it possible to do the greatest Nora imaginable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It would be such an incentive to become her. Don’t you see? I could take everything that was going to come—I really mean this: I would be perfect; I would set the world on fire as Gracie—I could make Gracie the subtext for Nora. Nora would grow as big as a geyser. She’d go off like something from under the earth’s surface blowing sky-high.” She grabbed me by the elbow. “The phone call will be the best favor you could ever do for me,” she said. It was so histrionic even she knew it was an outright lie. Dara mocking Dara was one of her favorite modes. “But one more thing I must ask of you,” she said. “You said on the phone your car was for sale?”

  “Yes,” I said, amazed at how quickly she could change subjects.

  “Because it needs so much work,” she said. She was repeating what I’d told her the day we set up this lunch.

  “Right. Bob insists upon being honest with whoever buys it, so they don’t come back and kill us.” I smiled at Bob’s odd logic.

  “Do you really need the money?” she said. She whispered: “Save my life.”

  “Dara—you want the car?”

  “My car died,” she said. “Here’s the thing. I’m really embarrassed about this, but I don’t have the money right now, and my car bit the dust. It totally bit the dust. It was towed to the car graveyard. Tom wants to get me another one, but I don’t want to be any more indebted to him—particularly not while he’s still entangled with Big Bernie and the Situation. Listen: let me have it, and when I get my first paycheck, I’ll pay you back.”

  I had no idea how to say no. I didn’t even think Bob would be terribly upset if I gave her the car, because he was so worried that whoever got it—in spite of the low price—would come after us, once they discovered it was in such bad shape. Someone had done that to Trenton, years ago: come after him with a tire iron, after the car he’d sold them threw a rod. Bob had always been horrified by Trenton’s near brush with death. Trenton had barely made it from his front lawn into the house and closed the door when the tire iron the man was wielding split the door. If Dara had the car, it would remove his worry about violence in his future, and it would also be a good deed. Bob had already picked out a used Volvo for me; I would be getting it over the weekend.

  “Take the car,” I said. “Of course.”

  Tears overflowed her eyes. “I think the technicality is that I have to buy it from you,” she said. She rushed on: “You know—something to placate Motor Vehicles. I have to buy it from you for some tiny amount.”

  “I’ll add it to what you owe me for your share of the picnic.”

  “Don’t tease,” she said. “I’ve felt so awful about not having enough money to pay my share these last few weeks. Even when I get my paycheck, it’s going to be nothing. Tom tries to reassure me things will change, but I don’t know. I’ve thought about giving up acting. I’ve at least considered reconsidering everything.” She smiled weakly. “I want to tell you about it sometime,” she said. “What little money I have has been going to my sister. She’s in bad shape right now, and I’m all she has. But that’s another story. I want you to know something: for selling me your car, I will forever be indebted. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  She reached in her bag. She took out four quarters and pressed them into my palm. She closed my hand over the money and looked at me the way I’d seen fortune-tellers overreact with clients at the carnival. It was as if she seriously believed energy from her was flowing directly into me through her fingertips. She might as well have been home sticking pins in a voodoo doll, but I didn’t know that then. Her touch was at once so strong and so soft. The paradoxes Dara embodied—the equivalent of a whisper meant to be overheard—always made whatever she said both urgent and, because in those days I confused urgency with truth, true.

  She had just purchased my car for one dollar.

  That fall there was a combination graduation/wedding celebration: Bob’s completing his course work at the end of summer school, and Drake and Bonnie Collingwood’s delayed celebration of their marriage. Drake did not want a big party—he thought weddings should be “a private affair,” as he told Barbara—but he did agree to be one of three guests of honor at a restaurant in the North End. The day of the party, Frank was in bed with a strep throat and a high fever. Janey almost cancelled, but once the results of Frank’s throat swab came back and the doctor phoned in a prescription for antibiotics, she decided she could leave him after all. A friend of hers—a nurse—took Joanna for the day. Max decided to stay home with his father (which meant a day of watching TV); his older brother, Pete, went back and forth until it was almost time to set out, and then decided he wanted to go. He got into the backseat of my Volvo, carrying his old running shoes, in case his new ones started to hurt, and a pile of comic books. He also brought a small insulated cooler in the shape of a Pepsi bottle, in which he carried a can of Dr Pepper and a pack of M&Ms he offered to us only once, in a desultory way. Pete had shaggy bangs, which he wouldn’t let Janey cut, that hung over his eyebrows. He pronounced my bangs, which I was already tired of being tickled by, “cool.” He liked us both better than he let on, but we could see that he’d been truly divided about the trip: leave his brother and risk being taunted about the great shows he’d missed on TV, or go with his mother to a party in the big city and use that as a trump card? Pete was six. His brother was five.

  “How old do you have to be to get married?” he wanted to know.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Janey said to him. That was when we saw the M&Ms. That was when he poked the package vaguely in our direction and mumbled that if we wanted some, we could take them.

  “Bix Hinton’s parents got divorced and then got married to each other again,” he said. He was pulling off his new running shoes, wiggling his toes in his socks.

  “I hope they’re the right size,” Janey said.

  “Do you know them?” Pete said.

  “No,” Janey said.

  “Because if you did, you could tell me what they’re like,” Pete said. “Hey, cool, Aunt Jean. You really took that Ford.”

  I inclined my head to the side, acknowledging his compliment.

  “Confused people,” Janey said. “That’s what they sound like.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t ever divorce Dad and marry him again,” Pete said, turning so his back was against the back door, his
legs stretched in front of him on the seat.

  “I bet I wouldn’t,” Janey said.

  “Because it would be too much trouble,” Pete said.

  “Not only that, but we don’t want to get divorced,” Janey said.

  “How do you know Dad doesn’t?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” Janey said.

  “How do you?” he said.

  I was familiar with the pattern: as soon as his mother indicated she was bored, Pete would zero in. That was all it took to make him persist.

  “You can give a toast at the party,” I said, hoping to distract him.

  “Hey, Mom, how do you know?”

  “Nobody ever knows anything for sure about relationships,” Janey said. “But I want you to know, Pete, that I do not foresee a problem about our staying married.” She looked at me. “Insecure,” she mouthed.

  “What did you say?” Pete said.

  “Pete, if you’re going to be a boa constrictor, I won’t invite you to go with me the next time I go to Boston.”

  She often admonished both boys for being boa constrictors when they got in certain moods; it was the big squeeze: seizing her, in an attempt to get her undivided attention.

  “What did you mean about toast?” Pete said, poking my seat from behind.

  “You raise a glass after a wedding and say a few words wishing the bride and groom happiness.”

  “Grandma says they didn’t have a real wedding.”

  “They did have a real wedding,” Janey said. “It just wasn’t in a church.”

  “I’m going to marry somebody rich,” he said.

  “That’s what we all think at one time,” Janey said. “Don’t hold your breath, Pete.”

  “Isn’t Dad rich?” Pete said. It was a joke question, meant to be cute. Janey harrumphed.

  “Then isn’t Uncle Bob rich?” he said, wiggling lower in the seat. He had our attention. That was all he wanted.

  “If you’re brilliant and charming and handsome and amusing and a unique person, you don’t have to be rich,” Janey said.

  “That’s me,” Pete said.

  “Oh, it is?” Janey said. “What’s the most amusing thing about you, Pete?”

  “Big feet,” he said.

  “That’s true,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “Now may I please converse with your aunt?”

  “I can make you want to talk to me,” Pete said.

  She shook her head from side to side silently.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Do you know where these M&Ms came from? Bix Hinton stole them from CVS.”

  “Oh, great,” Janey said.

  “See?” Pete said.

  “Well that’s just great,” she said. “And what makes you tell me that, my darling son?”

  “Because I knew I could get you to talk,” he said. Then, to my surprise, Pete gave up his campaign and began to read his comics, chewing audibly. In the rearview mirror, I saw him unzip the thermal bag and take out the Dr Pepper. Instead of opening the can, though, he rolled it up and down his thigh. He was still at the age where anything and everything could be a game.

  I hadn’t thought about Bonnie Collingwood’s ring for a long time, but the night before, on the phone, I’d remembered to ask Bob if she’d received it yet. “No,” he’d said. “Forget all about that. Drake asked for it back some time ago—the day of the funeral, I guess it was. He thought he’d spent too much on it.”

  “That’s awful,” I had said.

  “It’s not your business—or mine. Drake can make up his own mind about what he wants to do.” Then he had gotten angry—probably as a preemptive strike against my continuing to question him. “Jewelry is something I don’t think about,” he said, “but I must say, I find it really irritating when everybody becomes so materialistic.”

  “Who’s materialistic?”

  “Oh, you didn’t overhear her, I guess, but Barbara was saying at the funeral that she was going to keep Grandma’s opal and wear it and then leave it to one of you in her will, even though Grandma wanted to be buried with it. I agree with Barbara: that would have been a waste. But couldn’t she have just done what she was going to do without comment? Why would she think Frank and I would want to hear about all the tedious details?”

  “She probably felt guilty.”

  “I don’t care if she did, or if she didn’t. If Drake had wanted to give the ring he bought to Bonnie, that would have been fine. If Dara Falcon is going to pawn her jewels to stay alive, more power to her. It’s been done before.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I ran into Tom a while ago at the post office—Christ, I see the guy everywhere, like he’s the mayor of the goddamn town—and he was having a crisis because Dara Falcon’s car had broken down, and she refused to let him loan her the money for repairs. Suddenly she’s selling his mother’s ring. His mother’s ring! Tell me that isn’t mind-fucking him.”

  Dara was selling the diamond-and-ruby ring? She had seriously considered that, before asking for my car?

  A brief conversation between Pete and Janey:

  “Are we going to a Red Sox game next summer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Cool.”

  “Your parents are very cool. Remember it.”

  Around Newburyport, traffic picked up. A hippie in an aqua Mustang convertible passed us, his bandannaed golden retriever panting happily in the passenger seat. The music from the car was loud enough to make Pete sit up to see where it was coming from. He watched the car until it turned off at the next exit. Nothing else on the highway was as flashy: women in station wagons; men in junkers. Trucks.

  Janey was wearing a short-sleeved dress with a square lace collar, patterned with tiny rainbows. She had on pink Pappagallo flats. A white plastic purse was on her lap. I was wearing a two-piece navy-blue polka-dot dress and black patent-leather high heels. That morning, I had discovered that my only stockings had a run, so I was wearing Peds, and self-conscious about them showing above the edge of my shoes. I’d pulled my hair back with plastic tortoiseshell barrettes. The night before, I had plucked my eyebrows and tried putting on two different shades of pink lipstick, to see which looked better. One was too bright, and the other too dull: I’d resolved to buy several new ones the next time I was in the drugstore. At least that would give me more imperfect possibilities.

  “What do you think Bonnie’s going to wear to the dinner?” I said to Janey.

  “Something fashionable,” Janey said. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

  “She is,” I said.

  “You know what?” Pete said. He had taken off his socks and was playing with them, like a cat. “Grandma’s worried about Drake being married again, because she doesn’t know if Louise will like her new mother.”

  “I’m sure Louise will,” Janey said.

  “Why are you?” Pete said.

  “Because she seems very nice. I’m sure she’ll come to love Louise, if she doesn’t already.”

  “Do you love Louise?” Pete said.

  “Yes,” Janey said. “I love everyone in the family.”

  “Do you wish she was yours?”

  “Three children are enough for me,” Janey said.

  “I wouldn’t want her to live with us. She’s no fun.”

  “She’s had a difficult life,” Janey said.

  “I know she has, because her mother left Uncle Drake and because Gran’ma Martha died.”

  “That’s right,” Janey said.

  “But I still don’t want her to live with us,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. She isn’t going to.”

  “Who would she live with if this time Uncle Drake left Aunt…what’s her name?”

  “Pipe down,” Janey said.

  “I want to know!”

  “Bonnie Collingwood,” I said.

  “Who would she?” Pete said.

  “Honey, she’d live with her father.”

  “She wouldn’t have to go back
to her real mother?”

  “No,” Janey said. “Her mother lost custody of her.”

  “Then she would not live with her mother or with Bonnie Cottonwood,” Pete said. He was thinking aloud. What was he really thinking about, though? Was he worried because of his friend Bix’s parents’ strange exits and entrances?

  “Collingwood, honey. Not Cottonwood,” Janey said.

  Pete was pulling the socks across his face, like a magician capturing the audience’s attention with scarves. When he was finished, the rabbit that came out of the hat was: “Gran’ma says Bonnie isn’t going to be around long anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?” Janey said. “Grandma didn’t say that to you.”

  “She said it to a lady on the phone,” Pete said.

  Janey sighed. “You have a way of always being right there at inopportune times.” She looked at me. She looked forward and shook her head, defeated. After a few seconds of silence, she said: “Pete, I want to make one thing very clear. Whatever you overheard Barbara saying, I do not want you to bring it up in Bonnie and Drake’s presence. Is that understood?”

  “Understood,” he muttered.

  “Now please put your socks back on and act your age.”

  “They itch,” he said. He held them over his nose. “Phew! They stink, too.”

  Janey rolled her eyes. “You did understand what I just said to you, didn’t you, Pete?”

  “YesIheardyou,” he said, in an uninflected rush.

  “That’sjustgreat,” she replied. Then: “That is just great.”

  I looked at the piece of paper on which I’d written directions to the parking garage. I turned the piece of paper over and saw that I had scribbled Bob’s instructions on the back of the Snell’s receipt for the purple plant. I had overwatered it, and it had yellowed and died. Every day it had not recovered had made Bob more self-satisfied. He commented on how fitting it was only once, but when I moved it from the dining room table closer to a window, he had called it right: “Still isn’t going to make it,” he said. If it had remained warm—if the light had still been strong, and the days long—I was sure it would have. Not willing to take all the blame, I blamed the season as well. I took it as a sign of what was to come: difficult conditions, not sun-drenched days. Like Janey, I sometimes dreamed of living in Florida.