The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

by Rebecca Miller

  ‘If I have an office,’ Herb told Pippa, ‘I give that maniac three hours a day when she can call me. The rest of the time, I’m retired.’

  Though Marigold Village was a retirement community, there was office space available. Mostly rented out to businesses that catered to the residents, the smaller units were modestly priced. Pippa found Herb a room with an adjoining toilet that looked out onto the mini-mall. She got him a sofa, a desk, a chair, a coffeemaker, and a small fridge. Though Herb kept justifying the office, telling her why it would allow them more quality time together, Pippa was actually relieved to have him out of the house a bit. She wasn’t used to their new constant proximity, and she felt the need to be by herself these days. Since she’d discovered the cigarettes on the car floor, flashes of apprehension would surge through her body out of the blue, like electric current. She was having alarming dreams. In one, a body was carried out of her neighbor’s house on a stretcher. Someone unzipped the body bag, and it was Pippa, her face gray. In the dream, she wasn’t actually dead, but she wasn’t able to open her eyes or speak. As they carried her away, she realized with horror that she’d be buried alive. She didn’t mention the dream to Herb. She didn’t tell him she had been smoking, either. Every time she was about to mention it, as a sort of joke, she felt ashamed.

  *

  Pippa was just coming out of Why Not Furnishings in the mini-mall, carrying an almond-colored throw for Herb’s new couch in an oversize shopping bag, when she heard a squeal of brakes, the heartrending scream of an animal, and the sickening crash of a car. She stood on her toes, craning her neck to see the road, then walked toward it uneasily. When she arrived, she saw that a tan Toyota had smacked into a lamppost. Its front end was crumpled. The driver, a man in his seventies, unhurt but dazed, was opening his door. A few old people were already clustered on the sidewalk outside the convenience store. Pippa walked toward them, made her way to the front of the crowd. There was Chris Nadeau, kneeling on the sidewalk, cradling a big white dog. The animal had a glistening, six-inch gash along its side. It was yelping. Chris was stroking its long white fur. When he saw Pippa, he looked up at her with such naked, beseeching sadness that she dropped to her knees beside him, then instantly regretted it. It was too intimate a thing to do. And now she was stuck there, crouched beside Dot’s half-baked son, a dying dog in his lap.

  ‘Is he yours?’ she asked. He shook his head, looking down at the dying creature. ‘I saw it happen through the window,’ he said softly. She looked at the dog. It was whimpering and shaking. She found it unbearable to watch. She turned to Chris. He kept his eyes on the dog’s face. The man who had hit the dog kept insisting, ‘He jumped right out at me.’ The dog started panting, its clear, light eyes fixed, white froth like whipped-up egg whites foaming at the corners of its mouth. Chris bent over and murmured something into its ear. Pippa couldn’t see the dog, just the back of Chris’s head. When he sat up, the dog was still, its eyes clouded over. Chris still didn’t move. Neither did Pippa. They sat there, heads bowed, as though it was their pet that had died.

  A van arrived with ‘ASPCA’ written on the side. Two men got out. Chris let them lift the body off him, then, without glancing at Pippa, he stood up and walked back into the convenience store. One of the men from the ASPCA asked her if it was her dog. Pippa shook her head, brushed off her knees, picked up her shopping bag, and walked unsteadily to her car. She felt shaken and strangely moved.

  *

  Moira was late. Pippa leaned back in the aqua leatherette banquette and scrutinized the small oil paintings which were hung at regular intervals on the walls of the restaurant. They were all dutifully painted, humorless landscapes. She thought about her old friend Jim, how he would have looked up at them, his head slightly bowed. He would have nodded slowly. ‘Ah, yes,’ he would have said, smiling grimly. She wondered if Jim was still alive.

  Moira appeared, out of breath, kissed Pippa, strands of black hair escaping from her ponytail. She smelled pleasantly of milk.

  ‘I am so sorry I’m late, I was writing and I looked at the clock and –’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Pippa, ‘I was just relaxing, enjoying the art. That’s a great buckle,’ she said, fingering a silver sheriff star below Moira’s belly button.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Moira, covering it with her hand and sliding into the opposite bench, her large suede handbag clutched to her side. An effeminate waiter appeared. ‘Oh! Hi! Can I please have, um, an iced tea? The one with, um, melon in it?’ Moira said to him with involuntary flirtatiousness. Then she looked back at Pippa, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear girlishly, and smiled, a dimple indenting her left cheek. No wonder she had been her father’s favorite of seven kids, Pippa thought. She must have been a magical child, with that heart-shaped face, those enormous, Indian orphan eyes – and that imagination. In her messy, breathless, self-obsessed way, Moira was adorable. There was no getting around it. You could think her sincerity was ridiculous, you could lampoon her overblown sexuality, her exaggerated appreciation of life, but finally, you just had to throw up your hands and love the absolute purity of her confusion. Disarming. That was the word for Moira.

  ‘You look so beautiful,’ Moira said, scrutinizing Pippa’s face. ‘What are you doing different?’

  ‘It’s the indolence,’ said Pippa.

  ‘I wish I could be so peaceful and good like you.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘You seem so … beatific.’

  Pippa laughed. ‘If only you knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Oh, a variety of things. I’m like one of those shiny used cars that have been in a terrible accident. They look perfectly fine on the outside, but the axle is bent.’

  Moira smiled, puzzled. ‘You’re so mysterious about the past.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘You never say anything about your life before.’

  ‘There are things that happened that I don’t dwell on.’

  ‘What, like what happened to Herb’s first wife?’

  ‘Second.’

  ‘Second. He said she was already crazy.’

  ‘Not that crazy.’

  Moira sighed, put her head in her hands, and sniffed.

  ‘What?’ Pippa put her palm on Moira’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m just a rotten apple,’ said Moira, wiping the tears off her cheeks. ‘I’ll never have a normal life.’

  Pippa was used to her friend’s sudden episodes of self-flagellation. She always used humor to bring her out of her maudlin spirals.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Pippa. ‘What’s normal? You mean marriage?’

  Moira nodded, blowing her nose. ‘It’s over between Sam and me. Oh, Pippa, it’s all so completely fucked up. I – I’ve gotten myself into – I’m going to be forty with no man, fifty, not that it matters but it does. I – I just wish I knew how to recognize the right man.’

  ‘Oh, pish tush,’ said Pippa. ‘You can be married to anybody, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Pick any man in this room, in the right age range, I could be married to him.’

  Cheered up by the game, Moira surveyed the room, then pointed to a thin man wearing glasses, looking at the menu with distaste.

  ‘He just needs his routines, that’s all,’ Pippa said. ‘I bet you if you anticipate his needs before he knows he has them, he’ll be docile as a lamb.’

  ‘What about that one?’

  ‘As long as you stick your finger up his ass when he’s coming, he won’t give you any trouble at all.’

  ‘Pippa!’

  ‘Sorry, it just slipped out.’

  ‘You make it seem like … so unromantic.’

  ‘Courtship is romantic. Marriage … is an act of will,’ said Pippa, taking a sip of water. ‘I mean, I adore Herb. But the marriage functions because we will it to. If you leave love to hold everything together, you can forget it. Love comes and goes with the breeze, minute by minute.’
/>
  Moira shook her head, smiling, baffled. ‘I can’t get my head around that one,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Pippa, amazed at this act of complacent cynicism she was playing. When in God’s name had she started saying ‘pish tush’? When had she even heard it? Did she really believe what she was saying, about marriage being an act of will? Yes, she realized sadly, she did. After all she and Herb had been through together, after what they had lost to be with each other – their very souls, perhaps – being married ended up being an act of will. It made her want to tear through the dull present, claw the vivid past back into herself, devour it like a bear busting into a camper’s stores. She wanted to run out of the restaurant, to find Herb and kiss him violently on the mouth (she could imagine his surprised, bemused expression as she crushed herself on him), to burst into tears, scream even – lose control at last. Instead she waited, smiling, for her lobster sandwich, and wondered if she might be on the brink of a very quiet nervous breakdown.

  Part Two

  Pippa Begins

  I emerged from Suky’s womb fulsome and alert, fat as a six-month-old, and covered in fine, black fur. After a brief look round the delivery room, I turned my face to my mother’s swollen little dug and latched on, sucking so noisily that I sounded like a litter of piglets. My mother burst into tears at the thought of having given birth to this beast. The doctor’s reassurances that I had merely been gestating a little too long, and thus had time to grow a dusting of vestigial hair, harkening back to the days when human beings belonged to the ape family, did nothing to calm her down. Being the wife of a pastor, she was ambivalent about evolutionary theory, and couldn’t help feeling that my bestial looks, explicable as they apparently were by science, somehow reflected a basic flaw or sinfulness in her own character. Handing me back to the flabbergasted doctor, she launched herself off the delivery table, her legs still rubbery from the anesthetic, and ran down the hall, slipping on her own blood and screaming ‘I had a monkey!’

  It took two nurses and a doctor to subdue all five feet, two inches of Suky Sarkissian. They injected her with a sedative, then gave her a private room, which our insurance didn’t cover, but the hospital threw in for free.

  *

  The sense that her daughter magically embodied all that was wrong in herself never left my mother. Long after I had lost my furry coat and grown into a pretty, chubby little girl, she thought she discerned in me a deviousness, a lustiness, a general badness, which was, in secret fact, her own. At the age of two, I would clamp myself to her leg like an amorous dog. She always shook me off her, shrieking. One time, desperate to be freed from a crowded Greyhound bus, I scratched her face until it bled. She wept for my cruelty. I even took a crafty little poop in one of her favorite shoes, hoping to foil her plan of going out to dinner one night. It was one of a pair covered in pink velvet that matched her new dress perfectly. When she saw what I had done, she tried to be furious, but she couldn’t stop laughing. For, in spite of the flaws in my character, or because of them perhaps, Suky loved me fervently, even ardently. She just couldn’t get enough of me, couldn’t stop cuddling, sniffing, kissing, nipping at me. I remember at the age of six or seven struggling to emerge from one of her embraces, not because I did not enjoy her affection but because I actually could not breathe.

  I was the first girl after four boys. Suky mothered my predecessors fine; she herded them into and out of the bath as if it were a sheep dip, then shooed them into bed like a flock of pigeons. She ferried them conscientiously to their endless sports competitions. Yet I had the feeling, growing up, that Suky saw only me. Being the only girl, I had my own bath every night, and Suky would sit on the lid of the toilet, legs crossed, languorously watching me as she filed her nails, or stood at the mirror plucking her eyebrows. We would chat about this and that – the other girls in my school, who was friends with whom, who was planning on running away, what hairdo was best for which occasion – while in the next room my brothers shouted and teased and bashed one another over the head. At bedtime, she gave all the boys a swift kiss good night, but she lay down with me, tenderly stroking my head till I was asleep. We would dance to Bobby Darin in the kitchen, my feet on hers, holding hands, round and round and round.

  I was the youngest, and for a few years, this lavishing of attention made a certain amount of sense. But once I was six and could fend for myself, the boys began to resent Suky’s clear preference for her only girl. She even bought a camera, the sole function of which was to take pictures of me. She dressed me as angels, cowgirls, movie stars. Occasionally she photographed me naked. She was the most passionate of mothers.

  Suky was a diminutive, peppy woman with bright red hair and a high, squeaky voice with a slight southern lilt, a shadow of her mother’s viscous Mississippi drawl. Her waist was so tiny, her ankles so slim, she had to shop in the teen section of the local department store. I was proud of Suky’s Tinker Bell figure; other people’s mothers, with their rounded, fleshy bottoms and jiggling breasts, struck me as bovine and sloppy compared to my lithe, lively, tireless mother.

  Suky smiled easily, wore her hair in a low beehive, and nearly always kept her eyebrows up in an expression of bemused surprise. In spite of this, I think she was a closet pessimist. I could tell by her driving. As she man euvered our fat-assed station wagon around the narrow country roads, she sat bolt upright, her little hands clamped to the steering wheel, knuckles white. Every time we approached a turn, she whacked the horn, warning the eighteen-wheeler that was surely barreling round the bend, making ready to spin out of control and flatten us. An insomniac, she would stay up deep into the night, baking cookies, paying bills, or just pottering around. I remember waking from a bad dream in the middle of the night. The house was dead quiet. Knowing she’d be up, I walked downstairs and found her trimming the dead leaves off the plants in her pajamas. She was happy to see me. She made cocoa; we snuggled up to each other and watched TV till five, when we both passed out on the sofa, her arms around me, my head on her breast.

  Suky slept there often. She’d say she was up so late, there was no point going to bed. We’d come down and find her huddled under the blanket she kept for watching TV. I would shake her awake, and she’d shuffle into the kitchen, drink a glass of orange juice, look at the clock. At seven on the dot, she’d take her medication – she was always muttering about her thyroid being off-kilter. By the time my dad came downstairs, she was dressed and cheerful, masterfully fixing everyone’s breakfast, packing lunches, organizing book bags. She cooked nourishing meals but rarely sat with us at the table for long, preferring to stand by the stove spooning rice pudding from a china cup into her endlessly chattering mouth.

  But then there were days when my chirpy, talkative, cheerful mother went quiet and staring, seemingly deaf to even my requests. She would dump the dinner on the table and rush away from the teeming mass of us to lie down and eat toast with butter in front of the television that stood at the foot of her bed. My father, Des, sighed when this happened, but he didn’t reproach her. He knew there were times when his wife quite simply shorted out, went limp and affectless as a run-down robot. Des would rally then; singing in his painful rasp, he washed dishes, supervised baths. I relished these evenings being overseen by my father, because he would ignore me a little. I was just part of the other kids, not a unique and special creature, not the apple of anyone’s eye. It was a relief. I roughed around with the boys, wrestled, kicked, giggled. But inevitably a sense of guilt overwhelmed me on those nights and, wish as I might to simply go to bed with a rough kiss from Dad, skipping the elaborate affections of my mother, I felt her pull me toward her; her will had infested my own. I walked into her room then. She was always fully dressed, on the bed, her plate of toast on her abdomen. She looked at me with a mix of joy and apprehension, as though at any moment I might renege on my affections. I had such power over Suky; it frightened me and made me bold. Sometimes I let my face go cold and stony just to watch the fear flash in her e
yes.

  Des

  An impassive Hartford Armenian, my father had a thick, gravelly voice that made him sound as if he had just eaten a large spoonful of peanut butter. He moved his powerful, squat body with a deliberate, oxlike slowness. The russet circles surrounding his kind black eyes made him look perpetually exhausted. Father Sarkissian never got too happy, but then he never got too sad, either. His unlikely choice to become an Episcopalian minister had been made against the wishes of my grandfather, a fervent Armenian Orthodox who never forgave his Protestant wife for luring their only son from the church of his ancestors.

  As it turned out, Des was a born pastor. He worked on his sermons scrupulously, kept the rectory open late for lost souls who needed a sympathetic ear. Yet one sensed, beneath the folds of his holy robes, not the airy, bodiless expanse of the spiritual man but the squirming flesh of a man all too much alive. Des always emphasized Christ the man in his sermons, to the point that some of his parishioners wondered aloud whether he actually thought Christ was also God, seeing as he nearly never mentioned it. To be honest, I don’t think my father cared much about the God part. The miracle was the reality of Christ, his it-ness, the fact of him. I remember at dinner he once said that what really mattered was what people did to each other here on earth. The Holy Ghost could take care of itself.

  Des was a compassionate man. He listened with a concerned, interested look as people with porridge-colored complexions and red-rimmed eyes told him their troubles on their way out of church or at our house in the evenings, when they had put their children to bed and had a few hours’ respite before their daily obligations kicked in again. He seemed to enjoy us kids, in an abstracted sort of way, cocking his head and watching us as we did our homework, argued, played. He was always tender with us when we were hurt or sad and would sit with a weeping child for an hour, well after the crisis had passed, holding a small hand, in no rush to go anywhere. In that sense, he was the opposite of Suky, who skittered around in a flurry of activity eighteen hours a day. She relaxed only when she lay down with me to put me to sleep, humming wisps of songs into my ear in her high, breathy voice and curling a strand of my hair round her finger.