by Sarah Bird
Peggy is so far outside of Millie’s circle of goodness and light that she would never understand how certain extremely wealthy women believe that their money somehow entitles them to everyone else’s as well. It isn’t a logical calculation, but through force of will and access to a Rolodex that included every captain of industry as well as most of their generals and foot soldiers, Peggy somehow made it work. Driven by ambition and using family ties to every administration since Warren G. Harding’s, Peggy orchestrated the favor peddling and power grabs that transformed Junior from trembling nonentity into golfing buddy to presidents and the executive hit man who convinced his board of directors that his father was a few barrels short of a gusher and had to be removed.
“Uno’s dying words to the world were ‘Stop her. For God’s sake, stop that evil bitch.’ She ruined my life. She forced Trey to divorce me.”
“Forced him? Like at gunpoint?”
“No, not at gunpoint.” If Millie possessed a single sarcastic bone in her body, her comment would insult me. But she is so literal and innocent that I learned early on to treat her like a visitor from another planet. So I patiently explain, “Peggy would have cut off his money.”
“Oh.”
A normal person would have then asked, Didn’t your husband have any money of his own? or Why didn’t Trey just refuse and the two of you live in poverty? Since Millie is not normal and just wants to hear a fairy tale, I don’t have to answer No, and I don’t know.
“Okay, back to the wedding. Tell me about how you and Trey met.” Millie snuggles in, ready for more bedtime story.
“Right. The wedding. Peggy insisted on flying in this big-name photographer Chip Pinkley.” Chip Pinkley was a Back East society photographer who had documented every high WASP wedding for the past several decades. Even out on the Texas frontier, full WASP credentialing was essential to Peggy.
“Anyway, Chip needed a helper and I was hired. All I was supposed to do was hand him cameras, change film, check that no little ring bearer had his finger up his nose. Stuff like that. Easy breezy. But then the legend appeared. Riding one of those motorized scooters that immediately got bogged down in the grass, and it became apparent that I was going to be immortalizing the merger all by myself.”
“Well, they were lucky they had you, that’s all I can say.”
I shrug in agreement, remembering how, once Chip had settled in to document the afternoon light glancing off a patch of lichen, I’d had to rush around covering all the photographic bases from shots of the bride primping to the exchange of vows. Then I’d attempted to herd the families together to start the his, hers, and ours series. The scampish Dix boys, however, proved impossible to herd. “Anyway, that’s where I met Trey. He was actually very nice. He tried to help me.”
All I knew about Trey that afternoon was that he was the oldest of the Dix boys and something of a black sheep. After playing Margaret Dumont to the Dix boys’ Marx Brothers for far too long, I was on the verge of chucking one of Chip’s precious, prewar Leicas at them when Trey broke away from his fellow bad-boy brothers and asked me, “Could we have a word, Slim?” He put his arm around my shoulder, winked at his grinning brothers, and dragged me aside for a private huddle. Trey glowed with an anarchistic sense of mischief. The instant he embraced me, it was as if I’d been admitted to a charmed world where Trey and I were just a couple of bad kids, fun kids, mocking the pretenses and stuffiness of the grown-up squares around us.
“What did you notice about him first?” Millie asks.
“He smelled great. Like clean laundry and single-malt scotch. I’ve never met a man before or since who smelled better.”
That was true. As far as it went. I doubt I could explain it to Millie, but what made Trey smell so good was what was missing: the stink of worry. Worry was not, had never been, part of Trey’s world. Worry about anything: money, health, his future, the future of the world, feelings of others. Trey did not exude the slightest tang of worry. I snuffled up to him and sucked in the first worry-free oxygen to fill my lungs since the Internet bubble popped and the original incarnation of Wretched Xcess went Chapter 11. In fact, the moment before Trey Dix the Third put his arm around me, drawing me into his world, my major concern had been how many Cape Cod Crab Dabs I could stuff into the camera bag so I’d have something to eat the next day.
I fast-forward to our marriage and recall the utter bliss of floating on the warm ocean of Trey’s love and petrodollars. I felt so safe, so protected, so taken care of. Maybe safety, protection, and being taken care of are questionable reasons to fall in love with someone. But didn’t just those exact mate-seeking qualities help our Neanderthal foremothers ward off a lot of saber-toothed tigers, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of the species? Didn’t they put a lot of mastodon meat in the pot? I sigh heavily.
“Is this too painful for you?” I shake my head no, and Millie asks, “What else did you like about him?”
“In a totally sophomoric, completely juvenile way, he was funny. He made me laugh.”
“It may not be immediately apparent, but Sanjeev is quite funny.”
“Okay.”
“What happened next?”
“While I was trying to get him and his brothers together for a shot Trey started yelling like he’s trying to argue me out of making him take his clothes off.” I do my version of Trey’s West Texas accent, “‘No, Slim, no! I do not do nudity! Absolutely not! No matter how you threaten me, I will not pull my penis out and stick it in my mother’s ear! No. That’s final. What?! You’re insisting, insisting, on a full moon over Miami? Well, I guess, if you say it’s the one essential shot the bride is going to want in her keepsake album, who are we to argue? Right, guys?’And that was how I got the now-famous shot of all five Dix boys’ asses lined up next to their mother’s head.”
It was all there in the photos I snapped that day. Peggy seated with her five roistering sons formed up beside her like Praetorian guards. Henry Dix the Second, the pale paterfamilias, conduit of the gushers of oil and gas money—diversified now into an international portfolio of collateral interests—that fueled the rollicking crew, standing off to one side, his thin lips hitched upward in a smile as fixed and distant as the Mona Lisa’s.
In the first shot, Trey leans toward his mother pressing his thumb against one nostril and pretends to empty the contents of the other onto her head. In the next, he is making bunny ears behind her pewter-haired head. Then all the Dix boys assume gangsta poses, arms crossed over their white-boy chests, fingers poked out throwing gang signs. I even caught the moment when, without so much as shifting in her seat, Peggy reached around and walloped Trey with a surprise backhand that momentarily knocked the grin off his face. It wasn’t Hyannis Port, but the pack of Dix boys did have a Kennedyesque aura of family solidarity, a clannishness that would protect those within its embrace no matter what crimes they committed. And Trey, as infantile as he might have seemed, somehow made the low jinks a present to me. With his winks and flirtatious gun fingers he seemed to be saying, This is for you, baby. I’m making a total ass out of myself just for you.
“Was he cute?” Millie asks.
Was he cute? I remember the way Trey was that day, a day as blissful and bubbly as the Veuve Clicquot he kept whipping off of passing trays and thrusting into my hand. By the fourth flute, Trey had taken command of the camera and was focusing on the bride and her attendants and I was focusing on how Trey’s curly hair fizzed into golden ringlets in the dense Austin humidity and the way his broad shoulders filled out a tuxedo. Then the jacket came off and I noted some impeccable pec definition and had to wonder if there was anything lovelier than a fine-looking, fun-loving Texas man on a warm spring afternoon. And the answer had to be: Yes, one with a monstrous family fortune.
“Yes,” I tell Millie. “He was cute.”
Smell the Dividend Tax Cuts
I SIGH. Thinking about Trey reminds me why I swore off introspection. Reflexively, I reach for the Code Warrior cup and try to drizzle out a
drop or two. It is gone, really gone. And that makes me nervous. Man with the Golden Arm nervous.
Millie pushes the plate of vegan atrocities toward me. “Think you can eat a little bit more? Gotta get you healthy again.”
Energized by anxiety, I sit up. “Health, I’m so glad you mentioned that. I don’t like to talk about this, Millie, but if you must know, I’m on medication. For seizures. Both grand and petit mal. And I left my pills back where I was staying temporarily and I really, really need them.” I pray that Bamsie hasn’t cleared out my entire stash. Certainly the Baggies and bottles secreted in the empty Blue Bell cookies ’n cream container hidden in my freezer will still be safe.
“You want me to ride along with you to get them?”
“Actually, besides being out of gas, I probably shouldn’t be driving around in the little van.”
Millie’s eyes crinkle to signal that she is onto my naughtiness. “You let your safety sticker expire!”
I shrug, enjoying the momentary sensation of being the scrupulous sort of person who’d be bothered by an expired safety sticker as opposed to the type who hasn’t given a second thought to hurling a meat slicer from a moving vehicle into the path of oncoming cyclists.
“Don’t worry. I can take you. It’s on my route.”
I check the clock. Perfect. It’s time for the Platinum Longhorns’ monthly meeting, which means that the pertinent parts of Pee Heights will be deserted and my landlady, Bamsie Beiver, will not be on the premises. I have no idea what this “route” Millie is talking about consists of, but I don’t quibble. “Millie, that would be great!”
Once outside, however, my enthusiasm dims when I behold Millie’s means of conveyance.
“What is it?”
Millie beams with pride. “A tandem recumbent bike. Sanjeev designed it and we built it together.”
It is a Frankenstein creation welded together with parts cannibalized from other bikes and—judging from its weight—lead pipes and black hole antimatter. As we pedal down Twenty-fourth Street, Millie sits upright in back controlling brakes and steering. I’m in the reclining front seat, lying back far enough that I could be ready for that elusive pelvic exam. A lime green helmet squashes my head, my face is at the level of passing cars’ exhaust pipes, a bright red flag snaps jauntily on a whippy fishing pole thing high above my head, and a sticker on the back announces to the world that RECUMBENT BIKERS DO IT LYING DOWN!! It is not possible to be any dorkier. I occupy the molten hot core of all dorkdom.
Snazzy coeds in tiny, fashion-forward, organ-grinder-monkey jackets gape in pity at me, me, whom bRAVADO magazine had once christened “Fashionista Queen of Austin’s See and Be Seens.” Frat boys decorating for some spring bacchanal hoot, yell obscenities, and pantomime copulation. Millie gives a friendly wave in return. I try but cannot compact myself any further or slink any lower.
We cross Lamar, then over the bridge above Shoal Creek. A pack of happy mutts romps about in the leash-free zone of Pease Park below the bridge. Millie yells down to me, “Isn’t it great to be consuming calories instead of fossil fuel? To be out here, exposed to the elements, the wind whipping in our faces?”
Since the wind is currently whipping the stench of dog crap into my face, I don’t answer. As we chug past the park, then up the hill into Pee Heights, I am drenched in yearning for my paradise lost. I yearn for these pristine streets so blissfully devoid of human life. In Pee Heights the only faces one ever sees outside are brown and bent over leaf blowers. Oh, occasionally you’ll spot the odd walker or jogger, invariably female with a support group of other pedophiles marching toward the goal of seven percent total body fat. Male Pembies tend to get their sweating over with before dawn so they can shower, scram to the office, and start clocking the billables, churning the accounts, and clipping the coupons.
Human interaction in my old neighborhood is pretty much handled via the seasonal banner. Mother’s Day seems to be the current motif. Banners with tender daffodils bursting forth and mother cats licking kitties flap from the occasional rebel front porch where they haven’t been banned by interior designers. I love the banner interaction, so like e-mail with its unspoken message: I’m a friendly, welcoming people person. Just don’t ever actually show the hell up in the flesh and we’ll all be fine!
Here, amid the stately homes, the banners, the blessed Day After silence, I can breathe again. West Campus, with its hurly-burly of humanity, teeming masses clogging the sidewalks, students actually walking places, is Calcutta—oh, excuse me, Kolkata— in comparison.
“Turn here,” I yell to Millie. I put on giant, identity-hiding sunglasses that cover most of my face. As we approach Bamsie’s house, I strain my vision making certain that her Land Rover is not parked in the long driveway that circles back to the carriage house.
Once I ascertain that the driveway is empty, I bellow out, “Rudder left!” We turn sharply and are almost to the carriage house before I spy an IRS seizure notice posted on the front door.
Can’t have Millie seeing that.
“Wrong turn!” I reach behind my head, grab the handlebars, and jerk hard, causing the bike to run aground and chew through a wide swath of Bamsie’s xeriscaping.
“Blythe!” Millie screams as we come to a halt on the mauled greenery.
Hoping Millie will blame the petit mal thing for my eccentric behavior, I shudder spasmodically. “Sorry. We should go around the other way.” The way that doesn’t involve Millie spotting that seizure notice.
We circle back and end up hidden in a luxuriant patch of foliage. I am just about to dart into my hovel, when who should drive up to the front of the house but Bamsie Beiver.
Bamsie jumps out of the Land Rover and I am struck again by how much she looks like a very cute troll doll. Short and springy, Bamsie does everything she can to fight genetics by straightening her curly hair and wearing ridiculously high heels in order to look as much like her idol and best friend—tall, lean, blond Kippie Lee—as she can.
“Crescensio! Crescensio!” Bamsie shrieks for the gardener required to tend the xeriscape shrubbery whose main recommendation is that it requires no tending. Crescensio rushes over.
When it becomes clear that autopsies are going to be performed on every crushed leaf and blade, I ask Millie, “Do you know what would be just sososo ministerial of you?”
“What?” Millie answers.
“It would be just incredibly great if you would sort of scamper over to the little house and slither in the bathroom window that you break out with this rock. Then—”
Millie does not take the rock I try to hand her. “Why do I have to break into your house?”
“Okay, okay, I didn’t want to tell you this, but there’s really no choice. The IRS is after me because”—sticky, sticky, sticky; must call this one perfectly; fit the crime to the judge—“because of my anti-war activities.”
“No!”
Bingo. Not just a victim. A martyr. What liberal could resist?
“Yes. If you don’t believe me, go look on the front door. They’ve posted a seizure notice.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Well, certainly inconvenient,” I say debonairly. Not just a martyr. A martyr with style. “Only because of the”—I clench everything that will clench and grip my forehead—“seizures. So, if you could just…” I hand her the rock. “The bathroom window?”
“Why can’t I use the front door?”
“Well, you can except for her.” I point to Bamsie, who, fortunately, is still completely absorbed in berating the gardener. “The IRS has suborned all the rich neighbors. They’re on guard. Ready to turn me in. I can’t let them spot us.”
Good little liberal that she is, always up for a spot of class warfare, Comrade Millie’s lips quiver, then set into a firm storm-the-Bastille line. She narrows her eyes and asks, “What do you need?”
“Actually, if you could pretty much bring me the entire contents of the medicine cabinet?” Millie nods and steps away. I call
after her, “And the freezer? With particular attention to any Russian potato elixirs you might find there? And, and, and the carton of cookies ’n cream. I am, literally, addicted to cookies ’n cream ice cream.”
Millie creeps away and my depleted cells cartwheel, form pyramids, and toss one another into the air for joy. Then all the joyous frolics cease. What noise, what crack of twig, rustle of pebble, alerts her, I do not know, but Bamsie whips around so swiftly I don’t have time to duck out of sight. She whips out her Nokia and punches in numbers. No doubt Agent Jenkins deputized every woman at Kippie Lee’s garden party. Everything now depends on Millie accomplishing the mission with shock-and-awe swiftness.
Unfortunately, a quick glance in her direction reveals that Millie is not up to the task. She stands outside the bathroom, tapping at the window with the big rock, unable to commit even the pettiest of misdemeanors. I calculate time needed to break and enter, loot cabinet and freezer, and wriggle back out before the agent shows up. Rank amateur that she is, Millie will never make it. Now that my cover is blown, there is no reason for me not to take over. I dash to her side, seize the rock, and am about to bash in the window when I hear the bang of a cheap, domestic car door being shut. Agent Jenkins piles out of the Ford Focus.
“I’m feeling a lot better,” I say, hauling Millie back to the bike. When she hesitates, I shove her onto the passenger seat up front.
“But your seizure medication?”
“Another time!”
Blasting out of Bamsie’s driveway, we catch the agent unawares and roar right past him.
“More coal,” I yell to Millie. “Pedal faster.”
“This isn’t safe. You’re going too fast!”
In the bike’s rearview mirror, I watch the agent’s small car increase in size as it gains on us.
“Ramming speed.” My heart banging against my rib cage, I stand on the pedals and pump for all I am worth. The agent continues to gain on us. I have nothing left to give. My lungs are on fire and my legs have turned to wood. It is hopeless. Then an instance of divine intervention: A hill, a long, steep hill, appears. Gravity, what a marvel it is. The heavy bike shoots down the hill like a luge sled at Innsbruck.
