Caught Dead in Philadelphia
By Gillian Roberts
Copyright 2011 by Judith Greber
Cover Copyright 2011 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print in 1987.
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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Caught Dead in Philadelphia
By Gillian Roberts
This, too, is Robert’s
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
One
At 7:58 A.M. on a wet Monday morning, twenty-seven hours after giving up cigarettes and a green-eyed disc jockey, I was not in a mood to socialize. Facing myself in the bathroom mirror had exhausted my conviviality. Choosing a sweater and skirt had used up my intellectual reserve.
Nonetheless, the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting any deliveries. The Philadelphia Inquirer had already arrived, hurled at the house with such vengeance its front page was gashed. So much for scheduled guests.
The only unexpected deliveries I receive are Nice Young Men sent C.O.D. by relatives who cannot bear the stigma of a thirty-year-old spinster schoolmarm in the family. I have tried to end their shipments by sending them clippings, statistics on delayed marriage and child-bearing. I’ve tried to convince them that it’s un-American, not to mention unfashionable, to rush into anything except high-tech careers.
They respond by sending more Nice Young Men. But the N.Y.M. don’t arrive in the mornings, anyway.
I shuffled to the front door and stared through the peephole. The act was a formality. The peephole tilted upward, like a telescope. With it I could sight the Big Dipper at appropriate times of the year, but that was all.
“Mandy? Open up! Please! It’s me, Liza.”
“Liza who?”
“Liza Nichols.”
Surprised and puzzled, I opened the door onto Liza and the monsoon season. I was willing to lose a little of a rushed morning to find out why a near stranger would visit at this hour. Liza bolted past me, then slowed down, dribbling a damp trail around the room that serves as my kitchen, dining, and living room. She tossed her raincoat over my suede chair, shaking her black hair like a puppy. She was of the perfect-featured, small sort men treat like children or dolls, but at the moment she looked pasty instead of porcelain skinned.
“Thank God you’re here!” she exclaimed. “Don’t know what I’d have done otherwise.”
I discreetly removed the raincoat and brushed off the chair. I am not a fanatic housekeeper, but suede is impractical at best, and sopping raincoats are definitely off limits. And now that I’d given up the disc jockey—and maybe more important, cigarettes—the chair was my only impractical and unwise love object.
I waited for a clue as to why Liza was in my living room at this ungodly hour. She shouldn’t have appeared in my life until shortly after two o’clock, and then it should have been in my classroom. Liza was a co-worker, not a friend. She was a part-time teacher of creative dramatics. She was a very good actress, onstage and off, although she was about to take early retirement from playing other people’s scripts when she married in three weeks. Along with all the rest of the English faculty, I had been at her engagement party a few weeks earlier, a joyless affair that was easy to confuse with a press conference. But perhaps I am unfair. Or jealous. Liza was marrying one of the most proper and wealthy of Philadelphians, a candidate—and likely winner—for state senator, and after that, judging by his demeanor, King of America.
“I’m exhausted,” she said in her stagy manner. “Got off the bus and walked for hours. I didn’t know where to go. If I hadn’t remembered you lived on Litton, if your house hadn’t been right here…” She collapsed extravagantly onto my sofa and leaned back against the cushions.
“What bus? From where? Why?”
She waved away my logical questions in an irritating queen-bee manner.
I put her coat on the radiator, discounted most of what she’d said—she was, as I said, fond of dramatic overstatement—and dared one more inhospitable question. “Liza, what brings you here?” I picked up my coffee cup and sipped the lukewarm brew.
“I need time,” she said between a sneeze and a yawn. “Have to think. Can’t go home. My mother’s impossible. Always was, but she’s worse since the engagement. Worried that I’ll blow it. Wants me to regain my virginity before the wedding. Anyway, this is a good place. I always tell her I’m here when I’m going to be out all night.”
I put down my coffee cup. “You tell her what?”
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, with no real interest in how I might feel about it. “See, my mother—”
But, as if it had heard the maternal password, the telephone rang. “Coffee, Liza?” I finally asked, because she was eyeing my cup, looking like a hungry, wet poodle. Besides, the question delayed answering the call, and I knew, in the damp center of my bones, who it had to be.
My mother always seems surprised that I answer my own phone, although I live alone. “Amanda?” she asks, terrified that a man might answer and she’d have to decide whether she was outraged or delighted. She was unsure enough to have gone through a person-to-person phase, but while that protected her innocence, it was too expensive. She switched to a discount service with horrible reception.
My mother calls because she thinks that if she pounds the word “marriage” on my head, repeats her basic message—“Get Married!”—enough times, and emphasizes the time requirement—“Get Married Soon!”—I’ll buckle under. And she has chosen early Monday mornings, she says, because I’m too hard to reach other times. I say it’s because she figures that with my resistance low anyway at the start of another week of spoiled and dull-witted adolescents (“other people’s children,” as she subtly calls them), I’ll be receptive to her message. And then she’ll have one of her sisters ship over another Nice Young Man.
“I’d love some,” Liza said, and I was hard pressed to remember what she meant until she added, “coffee.”
I nodded. My mother chirruped greetings from Florida. She had been up all night with insomnia.
“All I really need is to talk to somebody,” Liza said from the couch. My mother had the same need, and she took precedence. She began cataloging the condition of her various body parts. I held the phone on my shoulder, set out another coffee cup, and waited for the water to boil. Mama progressed from sciatica to hemorrhoids. I opened a can of cat food and put its contents in a bowl on the floor.
�
�Milk?” I whispered in Liza’s direction. Unfortunately, my mother’s ears are not one of her afflicted parts, and she cut short her analysis of hot flashes to question me about the milk drinker.
“A friend from school, Mother. Female.” I don’t know whether my answer disappointed or relieved her. “Liza,” I added, “the one I told you about. Who’s marrying Hayden Cole, remember?” Mother made impressed coos. I had won a few points by being in the same room with a person who believed in marriage.
“You know how sometimes you think you’re so smart?” Liza said, more or less to herself. She nodded her head, then shook it. “Then you find out you’re a stupid…” Perhaps she had rushed to me after flunking an all-night IQ test. She nervously tapped her nails against her bottom teeth, fiddled with a locket at her neck, and twisted her engagement ring. “And the two of them…”
I held up a finger, trying to signal Liza to wait for true confessions until I was finished with Mama. Liza sighed and seemed to shrink. She lit a cigarette.
I tried to inhale whatever smoke drifted my way. I certainly missed cigarettes more than the disc jockey. But then, I’d quit smoking cold turkey, and quit him only after whatever we’d had was long since dead.
“Sugar?” I whispered. Liza held up two fingers. Her metabolism worked overtime. I dumped a pack of carcinogenic sweetener in my own cup.
Since my coffee partner was not a prospective husband, my mother reminded me that I wasn’t getting any younger. I listened, meanwhile filling the cups with brown powder and boiling water.
My mother informed me that it was a sunny eighty-four degrees down there.
Liza sneezed.
I resent my parents’ metamorphosis into leathery sybarites. When they sold their house up here, they sold out, donating their boots, loyalty, and Puritan ethics to Goodwill. Florida had frizzed their brains, made them forget that weather is to be endured, not enjoyed.
Too sweetly, my mother asked me for a local report. She knew about April in Philadelphia. Had anyone ever written a song about it?
A sheet of windblown rain slid down the front window, breaking into fine patterns on the many panes. “It’s a little humid here, Mom,” I said. “And Mom? I have to go now. Time to leave for work.”
My mother remained unperturbed. She asked if I’d ever considered a dating service. She had heard about an actual matchmaker, very modernized, complete with computers. Since I seemed unable to end the conversation, I tried to be a good hostess. I “ummed” while Mama told me not to knock something before I tried it. I squeezed the receiver between my shoulder and ear and walked over to the sofa with Liza’s coffee.
The coffee made it, some of it even inside the cup. But the telephone cord lassoed the milk carton, the sugar bowl, and my coffee on the kitchen counter. I heard the crash and returned to find everything in a new and dismaying pattern on the kitchen floor, slopping over the cat food.
I would like to think I’ll eventually outgrow the gawky stage.
My mother let me get on with my life. After all, if I wasn’t going to move South or find a husband, I’d better hang on to my job.
“Don’t clean it up,” Liza said as I replaced the receiver. “I’ll do it.”
“That’s okay. No problem.” I picked up the dripping milk carton.
“Please, Amanda? Please?” The urgency in her voice startled me. “Talk to me instead.” She lit a second cigarette. “I’m so mixed up, and you’re so together, so self-sufficient. You know what you want, what to do….”
Liza was not an ace at judging character, but I didn’t contradict her. I stepped over the slop and went into the living room.
“I really look up to you,” she said.
“That’s because I’m taller.”
“My mother’s no help.”
I didn’t like being categorized with the previous generation. I’m older than Liza, but only chronologically. If half her anecdotes were true, she’d lived her quarter-century double-time.
I hid my annoyance by putting on lipstick, a darker shade than normal. I’m aware that I’ve been given a fair share by nature, and I basically like myself. I like being tall. I like my hair, although I sometimes wish it would decide whether it’s red or brown. I’ve also got great knees, but that doesn’t count for much. As for the rest of me, even on my worst days I know that I’m not likely to turn any viewers into stone.
But when I’m around Liza’s miniaturized voluptuousness, her shiny black hair and smooth white skin, I feel oversized and drab. Even today, when she was at her worst.
So I boosted my color quotient with extra makeup. When I can afford analysis, I’ll work out the deeper meaning of these ego problems. In the meantime, blusher is cheap.
Liza exhaled great gusts of smoke. Every time she filled the air with that comforting old stench, I had problems remembering what I was trying to prove by quitting. “I’d do what I want,” she said abruptly, “if I knew what it was. If everybody would lay off, stop offering advice. Everybody has answers, but I don’t know if they’re my answers. How do you know?”
“Me? I don’t. But I know what you mean. I just broke up with somebody who kept telling me what I wanted and who I was, and—”
“Jesus, what a number she did! What did I ever do to her? And then he—I mean what if it’s a lie? How do I know if she—?”
It sounded like one of my mother’s bad connections. Either I was hearing every third word or Liza was less than coherent. In any case, my nerve endings and professional pride couldn’t withstand her indefinite pronouns.
“Liza, who? Who is he? And for that matter, who is she? Your mother?”
“My mother?” She looked startled and bemused. “What does my mother have to do with…? Oh, Lord, do I sound nuts? I’m just tired. More than tired, I’m…” She looked close to tears. Then she shrugged. “Tired. That’s all. Forget it. You’ll be late for work.”
“I have a few minutes.”
“Thanks, anyway.” Her bright smile looked pasted on. “It isn’t really anything I can discuss. I guess I got flustered in the rain and dark, but I’ll handle it. If you’ll let me stay, I’ll nap, and my head will straighten out. That’s all I need.” She continued beaming beatifically, but her nervous fingers worked on her damp hair, her neck, her green T-shirt.
I did have to get to work. Still, I put on my raincoat reluctantly. It was not yet 9:00 A.M., and I had already failed at something.
She pulled the afghan around her and stretched out on the sofa. “You’ll be at the two o’clock class, won’t you?” I asked, needing reassurance.
“Sure. I won’t stand you up this time.” Then she grinned. “But I’ll stand up. Properly. Complete with bra.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Last time I was in, the office witch gave me a memo about undergarments. Teachers, even part-time, are not allowed to have nipples.” She grinned. “Get going,” she insisted. “I have to sleep. Forget my mood. I have.”
I locked up with the uneasy feeling that her smile and her great drowsiness were masks she’d remove the moment I left her alone.
* * *
By one o’clock, my Monday lunch hour, my stomach walls were huddled together, praying for something to digest. I tried to bribe them with the polyethylene soufflé of the day, but after a few bites, I decided to fast.
“I’m going upstairs to mark papers,” I said.
“The food’s not that bad,” Gus Winston answered. “Kind of tickles when it bounces around inside. Anyway, keep me company.”
He smiled. I love his face, a mobile, slightly eroded sand sculpture. I looked at my dog-eared stack of ungraded compositions, knowing that as soon as they were marked, double their numbers would spring up in their place. “Maybe I’ll get some of it done next period while Liza teaches.”
“In that case, work now. Never rely on Liza. For anything.” Gus was the resident Liza expert. They worked together at a semiprofessional repertory theater. They had done other th
ings together, very briefly, but that history had left him with more scars than Vietnam had.
“She promised.”
“She always does, doesn’t she? That’s easy for her. It’s harder remembering the promise a whole week later.”
“But this was this morning. In my own living room.”
Gus put down his fork. “I didn’t think you had coffee klatches at dawn. Or was it the morning after a pajama party?”
“I don’t know what it was. The rain washed her in this morning.”
Gus chewed the last of his soufflé meditatively. Vietnam had ruined his left leg, scarred his face, and narrowed his acting ambitions, but it obviously hadn’t touched his digestive tract. “Is she still at your house?” he asked.
“Probably. She wanted to nap. Why?”
“We—I have to talk to her. Tried to last night, after the show, but she was having one of her tantrums.”
“She was odd this morning, too. What’s up?”
“You tell me. I don’t understand a goddamn thing about Liza Nichols. Hasn’t she told you that? She’s told everybody else.” He stabbed his red square of Jell-O and watched it shudder before pushing it away, his fork sinking in its heart. “I hear she’s being coached on how to fit into Hayden Cole’s once-and-future life. How to dress, talk, change her style. Senators can be prima donnas, but their wives are supposed to serve tea and smile on the sidelines.”
“Patience, Gus. She isn’t a wife yet. And he isn’t a senator, either.”
“Details. She’ll be his missus in three weeks, and he’ll either win the state or buy it, just as he already bought Liza.”
There was nothing for me to say. Gus hadn’t gotten what he expected from life or Liza Nichols, and I couldn’t do a thing about either situation.
He muttered in semitheatrical fashion. Too softly to be understood and too loudly to be ignored.
“Speak up or shut up, Gus. All I hear is smidgies, and it’s making me crazy—sissies and stupids? Sounds like preschool.”
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