The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Peabo?”

  “Corwin Peabody—he’s the teacher,” she said, a bit stiffly—she sensed my skepticism and was defending my father against some charge I hadn’t yet made. Or, she was doubtful herself—but doubt was a sin to her and she refused to recognize it. “He’s teaching Pop, and Pop’s teaching me. I mean, just showing me a few little things. He loves to take me up there and show me what things look like from the sky,” she said, and laughed happily all of a sudden. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh since they’d left. “You’d think he owned the state of Wyoming, when he’s up there,” she said.

  She was there beside him, asking him starry questions, taking him more deeply into her possession every time he answered one. This was to be her consolation, for the loss of her mother—she would own her father absolutely, and forever.

  “It’s not expensive?” I asked, looking for a way to discourage her without seeming to speak against Pop.

  “No, it’s not, Beatrice,” she said sulkily—did no one trust her? “Flying lessons do cost a lot, usually, but Pop made a deal with Peabo—he’s helping him get in on the ground floor of this mining deal, so the lessons are reasonable … actually they’re free.”

  And how was school? She liked school very well, she said primly—true, she had studied these same things last year, but there was nothing wrong with a little review, and it meant less homework so she had the time she needed to keep up the house. The real education was the new geography, the culture of the West—who had known about all of it, the Indians, the Spanish Catholics? There was so much she was learning by living in a new place, meeting new people, seeing a completely different way of life, and goodness, learning to fly.

  “How many fourteen-year-olds have the chance to do that, after all?” she asked me. “No, we have a wonderful life out here, it’s great!” she said.

  “I’m so glad, Dolly,” I said.

  After a long pause, she added, “So I don’t know why I feel so awful, just so dull and gray all the time—I shouldn’t talk about it, I don’t mean to depress you,” she said, but having started, she couldn’t help but continue: “I’m ruining this great trip he brought me on, I try to only cry in the shower so he won’t see me, but now he thinks I’ve got some cleanliness fetish and he keeps telling me not to waste water.” She laughed—we laughed together.

  “You must miss Ma,” I said, thinking that one’s mother is one’s lantern, and if you can’t see the way forward by her light, you’re likely to lose the path altogether. But I had said, as usual, the wrong thing.

  “No! No no no, it’s not that. I’m old enough to do without Mommy, it’s not that at all. I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I’ve always been this way, you know that.” She spoke with disgust, certain that if only she were more vigilant she could beat the misery out of herself. She’d decided to stay with Pop and would stand by him even if it meant forgetting there was any other choice. She refused to miss her home, her school, her friends, her sisters, her mother, and she was left explaining to herself over and over what a fascinating life she was leading, castigating herself for her failure to enjoy.

  And the one clear, beautiful moment in the midst of this was her pleasure in flying, that is, her pleasure in Pop’s pleasure in flying. I too remembered those times when he stepped out of his gray sadness into the light: suddenly the world was full of possibility. Then he’d fade again and with him, whatever the hope of the moment had been—maybe something as simple as the stair rail he’d meant to fix, still rickety months later so that Teddy toppled off and came up holding a piece of it in his hand—was gone. If I’d been alone with him, in Wyoming, a state situated exactly at the edge of the earth, I supposed I’d like flying too.

  “It’s exciting about the baby, isn’t it?” Dolly asked, in the voice of a very good girl, who would always put her own little troubles aside to rejoice in the happiness of others.

  “Very exciting about the baby,” I said. Far too exciting. Or maybe I was just killing the little bit of joy my family had managed to scrape together, acting like a stuffy, disapproving old spinster aunt.

  “It’s not like people can’t change,” Dolly said. “And Butchy’s a nice guy, underneath it all. He’ll love the baby when it comes. He’s just nervous beforehand, you’ll see.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. There was a black streak through Dolly, along which, if we weren’t careful, she would some day come apart. We allowed for it without thinking, worked around it and so were shaped by it ourselves. Not Pop, of course—he was sealed into his own world, opposed to coddling the quirks of other people’s personalities. This trait made him consistent, though—reliable. If Ma was careful of your tender spots one day, then she’d be at them with a hammer the next, and if she was supposed to pick you up at three o’clock and arrived at six, you’d better admit your watch had gone berserk. Pop would be there on time and in person—only his self was missing. So Dolly had taken him as her own. This had been fine when we were all together, and the rest of us could keep her in mind, but now?

  “It’s like you don’t have any faith in us, Bea,” she said sulkily. “How are people supposed to manage without that? Ma didn’t believe anymore, and that was when Pop lost his nerve, he didn’t have the touch like he used to and the business went down. That’s why flying is so important, do you see? When he’s up there, way up over everything, with all the controls in front of him, when he can look down and see the whole world below, then he can feel the problems fall away, that he’s onto a good thing. That gives him the confidence he needs so he can spread the good word about the mine. So the flying would be worth any amount of money—it’s an investment. Do you see?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. I saw that she was speaking in his phrases, filling in all of his blanks. Her life depended on it.

  “It’s so hard for him,” she said, “without Mommy, you know, anything that cheers him up is important. Family is everything to him. You should come visit us, Beatrice, it would be good for him.”

  Somehow this reminded me of Sid’s saying it would be healthful for Palomino to have sex with me. “It’s expensive,” I said.

  “But, you can afford it, Bea. You have a job.” She figured that people who had jobs could afford things: I used to think like that too. Our ignorance, how immense it had been. I glanced at Lee’s Burberry umbrella in the corner, the proof that she’d be back. I wasn’t alone.

  “No!” I said. “I can hardly afford…” But what was I thinking? Was I going to tell Dolly the truth? That I hadn’t been able to manage the job of dietary aide, and so had given it up for a position as a shopgirl that paid even less? That I spent most of my time cowering in my little apartment, dreaming of a lottery win or a disaster, anything that would save me from having to figure out how to live? Tell a bunch of people who have nothing but faith to sustain them that their leader has no idea where she’s going?

  “It’s the time,” I said. “You come see me, can you?” I asked, so heartily I sounded Texan to myself, and was tempted to add: I’ll show you a fine time, little lady. I felt better just hearing myself confirm Dolly’s notion of me—a competent, admirable person, someone who knew what to do, living proof that members of our family could, with some simple training, creep in from the mad ledge and take part in life. Infatuated with this image of myself, I happily suspended my own disbelief and thought how nice it would be if Dolly came to live with me. And if things didn’t work out for Sylvie and Butch, she and the baby could come too, and maybe my mother, which would mean Teddy, and then I’d have to pull myself together and act like the person they thought I was—there’d be no other choice.

  Until then, Ma would be reading by stolen lamplight, Sylvie would follow her heart, Dolly would be learning to fly. But I was here, safe, with Lee. The picture I’d seen the day I peeped through her window was of herself, age six, standing very straight in front of a neat little Monopoly house, unsmiling but content, firmly planted in that earth. Neither smiles
nor beauty were essential in Lee’s world—in fact, these were luxuries that suggested a lack of humility, a dangerous inattention to duty. I smoothed the hair down at the nape of her neck—she was pocked even there; acne must have plagued and mortified her, but the thickly scarred complexion left behind didn’t blush to reveal every emotion, like mine.

  Every morning I drove her to work, bidding her goodbye not with a kiss (we didn’t dare), but with a complicitous glance against which no kiss could measure, a glance that set us above the rest of the world, and suggested that our love, with its back-beat of secrecy, was for all its mundanity a great, important drama, something much more exciting than any mere man and woman could achieve. On Monday, my day off from LaLouche, I’d return to the vast Aetna parking lot to wait while the claims adjusters and actuaries streamed past me through the dusk, meeting their wives and husbands, going to pick up their kids at day care or shop for groceries or any of those activities that illuminate ordinary lives. Here Lee came, in her pants and blazer, and the wire-rimmed glasses she’d gotten because she admired mine—lately we’d been asked several times if we were sisters. She hugged her leather “organizer” to her chest, stepping around a puddle with self-conscious care.

  “Do you want Chinese?” she asked. And the city faded to lavender, the streetlights blinked on east to west along the avenue, and the evening began to shape itself in apartment after apartment, in each of thousands of orderly lives.

  Ten

  “STET, ARE these twenty percent off, or thirty?” We were doing markdowns, many, many markdowns. The fall season had not been what Stetson had hoped. I pushed through the curtain into the back room, carrying an armload of lime and mustard djellabahs, and found him standing on his desk in the dark, to screw in a lightbulb above. His hair had grown an unruly inch, and this change had seemed to bring another—he moved quickly and unself-consciously now, and he had a strength I’d never have guessed. The day before, he’d picked up the triple mirror and moved it across the room as if it was made of cardboard. I couldn’t lift the corner of it myself.

  “How many alcoholics does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” he asked.

  “Thirty-five?”

  “None. We prefer to remain in the dark.”

  “Stetson, that is just not you,” I said.

  “Oh, but it was, it was,” he said. “Honestly I feel like just giving those djellabahs away,” he said. “Even I don’t like them.”

  “Why did you buy them, then?”

  “It was the look for fall,” he said, derisively. “Flick the switch, will you?”

  I did, and there was light. “There, a miracle,” I said.

  “They look even worse with the light on,” he said, with a sigh that reminded me ugly djellabahs might be his undoing.

  “It’s one season, that’s all, Stet.”

  “Josip,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Josip Dinge. That’s my name. But Stetson Tortola sounds better. Josip Dinge sounds like the name of a drug addict.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said.

  “It is, though,” he said. “I mean, I say alcoholic to pretty it up.” He laughed, then looked straight at me—he wanted me to know. “An honest man would say drug addict, because that was what it was.”

  “Once, maybe.”

  “A desperate, pathetic man,” he insisted. “It’s something no amount of silk can cover. Something you spend the rest of your life working back from, every minute of every day.”

  He took the djellabahs from me and carried them into the half-price bin, his mouth set with workman’s stoicism: salvation would come to him through diligence, if it came at all. Watching him, I felt pure light, as if his confession was a sun rising in the corner and its light was flooding in on us, changing everything, so next minute the haughty mannequins would turn from the window and embrace each other with faces full of grief and hands trembling with tenderness.

  I thought: He’s just like me.

  * * *

  “STETSON,” I said, a few days later. “There’s something I ought to tell you.”

  He’d heard the catch in my voice and looked up. “What?”

  “I, I’m a lesbian. I’m gay.”

  My pen was shaking so that it suddenly made a little graph on a silk jacket, which shocked me. Why should a person as gay and proud as I was shake so, over the revelation of a perfectly natural thing?

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, you know, don’t you? I like women—more than—you know.”

  “Really?” He looked more baffled than anything else. “You sure?”

  “Well, yeah I’m sure,” I said, taking offense, as if he were questioning my credentials. “I mean, my girlfriend’s pretty sure.”

  “Your girlfriend.” He sat back against the desk, crossing his arms and taking stock of me, and his manner, which had faded since the day he told me about the drugs, returned. “And who, pray tell, is your girlfriend?”

  “Lee Schuyler. She works for the Aetna.”

  “My,” he said, looking me up and down the way he had the first day. “I wouldn’t have thought—I mean, not that you can tell—” He was stumbling all over himself. In one minute I’d gone from being someone he could say anything to, to someone he hardly dared look at. I’d only wanted to match his own confiding honesty with my own, and instead I’d opened a door on something far too private—as if I’d tried to send him a valentine and given him a real gory, fatty heart instead. I dropped the pen and put my hands out as if I could grab the words back.

  “I’m sorry, Stetson. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Don’t be silly!” he said, hands to his heart. “You know I’m not like that!”

  I knew he wasn’t going to like me less—if anything, he’d like me more—I was a representative of a type of person he of course liked and would stoutly agree with. But I wasn’t Beatrice anymore. Our little alliance, which had developed in its own natural and peculiar way, was irradiated by this news.

  “I know you’re a good liberal, Stet,” I said. “It’s not that.”

  “It’s just not very Princess Margaret, I guess,” he said.

  “I told you I wasn’t Princess Margaret,” I said grumpily. “A princess! Stet, I got on the wrong bus the other day and didn’t have the courage to get off again, so I rode it to the end of the line and took a taxi back for fear the driver would look down on me.”

  “You project Princess Margaret,” he said, overruling me. Then he added: “My girlfriend will be interested to hear this.”

  Here was a revelation. I wasn’t going to take the bait and ask about her. I felt like bursting into tears and making some angry accusation—though what on earth would it be?

  “Why?” I asked, sullen.

  “She just will,” he said. “She wants to be a social worker.”

  “Oh, so you think I need her help?” I asked with a bitter laugh.

  “No, no!” he said, but we couldn’t look each other in the eye. “Of course not!” he protested. “Everyone has the right to love in whatever way—”

  “Whatever way,” I echoed, so he could hear his condescension, his little push away.

  “I don’t mean it that way,” he said, though. “You’re deliberately hearing something I’m not saying—why?”

  “Because you’re saying something you’re not hearing!” I said with great anger. But it was five-thirty. “Go on,” I told him. “I’ll lock up. Go away.”

  * * *

  “LIKE ME? They loved me,” Ma said on the phone. She’d made some revisions to the job letter, and the guys who were developing the old Parkington place as townhouses were considering her for the front office. “Nobody else can give them the kind of class I do, and that’s what they’re looking for, style, someone who will define the way people see the place. They need chutzpah, and if there’s one thing I’ve got, it’s chutzpah!” She belted this out so grandly, I expected to hear a big chorus come up behind her�
�Fiddler on the Roof meets Anything Goes.

  “It’s the red suit,” she said. “That’s what carried the day.” I heard a thud in the background: her kicked-off pump hitting the wall.

  “The red suit?”

  Honestly, how did people like me, people who had no sense of showmanship, survive in the modern world? “Red denotes power,” she explained. “A woman in a red suit shows a man she can hold her own, that she’s got the confidence, the ability.”

  I saw, in my mind’s eye, a woman in a power suit cowering behind a desk in fear of a ringing phone.

  “So, they implied you had the job?”

  She laughed. “I showed ’em what I can do for ’em, that’s for sure. They’re the right kind of people—powerful people. Everything clicked, we’re made for each other. Perley took me aside and said he was very impressed. Then he put a piece of ice—out of his bourbon—down the back of my jacket! Now, that’s what I call a good sign … don’t you?”

  I took too long to answer.

  “Well,” she said, “I think it’s a very good sign.”

  * * *

  LEE TOOK me out to dinner: she loved to drive me out along the highway service road and let me choose between the steakhouse with the huge neon cactus, the Swiss Chalet, Moby Dick’s, which was built to look like a clipper ship, or the Shamrock, with its real thatch roof—this was the America I was dying to be part of, a vast paved landscape studded with bright plastic replicas of exotic places.

  “Tiki Hut!” I said, Tiki Hut being the most ornate, a green pagoda with a dragon breathing real smoke beside the carved doors. Inside, it was lush and dark with a real waterfall at the back surrounded by palms heavy with plastic coconuts and mechanical macaws.