The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

by Rebecca Miller

  The truth is, I never got to know my father very well. Suky eclipsed him; the fire that burned in her day and night blotted him out in my imagination. He was a shadow figure, a refuge at times but not fully real to me as a man. I find this sad, because now I realize that, of all my traits, the ones I got from my father are the most valuable; it was the Des in me that allowed me to survive.

  It didn’t seem strange to me that my parents barely spoke to each other. Their exchanges were almost entirely confined to talking about the children, or simple requests, such as ‘pass the milk please.’ As far as I could tell, Suky spent any free time she had with me. She got most of her affection from me, too. I wonder what my parents’ life together was like before I was born, or when they were newlyweds. In one early photograph, they seem shyly happy together, holding hands and smiling outside my father’s first parish in Hartford. My mother is wearing a flowered housedress. Her face is young and round. Growing up, I was fascinated by this image, because Suky was not tiny then. She was almost plump.

  Dolls and Husbands

  I was always a housewife when I played, a little mother pushing my toy vacuum cleaner, a fussily dressed baby doll on my hip, or primly taking messages on a pink pretend phone for my husband, a tall, shadowy being I called Joey. Sex with Joey was a swift, choreographed movement. I would lie down, flap my legs open and closed, and stand up again, returning to my chores. I think I got the idea that you lie down from my friend Amy, who was, at nine, already a bit of an aficionado.

  ‘You know what the worst word in the world is?’ Amy asked me one day as we played in the dark corridor of our second floor. ‘What?’ I asked. Amy stood against the window, pensively swiveling the head of one of my dolls round and round. A web of fine, shiny brown hair tumbled to my best friend’s waist. Her cornflower blue, crescent-shaped eyes gave her an old-fashioned, wistful air. ‘Fuck,’ she said flatly. Then she turned to look across the street at her older brother, Andy, who was mowing the town green. Amy’s family was rich compared with ours, yet all the kids but Amy had summer jobs, to teach them the value of money. I watched Amy from behind: her arms rested on the crossbar of the window frame. Her lilac dress was cinched at the waist by a slender belt and fell in neat little pleats to just below her knees. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankles. I felt awed by her elegance and her beauty. There had never been such a girl, I thought, so perfect, so confident, so lovely. I felt like a troll in comparison. I was short, my face was flat, my hair was the color of straw, my eyes like gray marbles. One summer afternoon, as I pulled on my bikini bottom, Amy contemplated my muscular stomach with a cool, thoughtful air. There was a faint line on my belly, like a sepia seam, from my navel to my sex. She pointed to it and said, ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘When you were in your mother’s stomach, you were going to be a boy until the very last second.’ I looked in the mirror, at the broad muscles in my little shoulders, the round, strong thighs. I didn’t look like a girl at all.

  ‘You’re a boy-girl,’ she said, laughing. I laughed, too, though I felt my throat constricting. I shoved her onto the bed, and we tumbled, hysterical now, screaming, wrestling. Then we lay very still beside each other, catching our breath. I propped myself up on one elbow. Amy had a chipped front tooth that glimmered inside her parted lips.

  ‘If I’m a boy-girl, then I can be your boy-girlfriend,’ I said.

  ‘No you can’t,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘That way, when you have a real boyfriend, it’ll be easy.’

  She mulled this over for a moment. ‘But we wouldn’t tell anybody.’ She looked at me, her eyes narrowing.

  ‘You think I’m dumb, or crazy?’ I asked. Then I let myself tip forward, very slowly approaching her face, and kissed her. Her lips felt cool and rough. She pushed me away, laughing, but later that day she let me do it again.

  We kissed a few more times that summer. I persuaded her to let me lie on top of her twice, as well. I loved feeling myself crush down on her. She struggled out from under me, though. Once, I was surprised to see alarm in her face as I pinned her down; she was clearly relieved when we heard my mother’s steps on the stairs.

  Years passed. Amy turned out to be a very intelligent girl. She got A’s in everything but history, a subject she detested for some reason of her own. I was an indifferent student. The words in my schoolbooks held no reality for me. I consumed them reluctantly, as if they were stale bread. I spent less time with Amy now; she was always in the library with her brainy friends. She studied at a round table with those geeks, sitting up straight like a princess, her long, dark hair glistening down her back, and worked away for hours under the admiring gaze of Mrs Underwood, the wheezing librarian. Ravaged by cigarettes, she rolled an oxygen tank with her while she was stacking books.

  The kisses Amy and I had shared melted away into a childhood we both remembered like a dream. I could no more have kissed her now than fly a 747. I wouldn’t have known how. I was thirteen, and I must tell you I was really something. Two compact and perfectly formed breasts had sprung up on my chest like mushrooms, overnight it seemed, disconcerting my brothers and sending my mother on an emergency shopping trip for my first bra. It took my father months to notice them. I’ll never forget the look of muted surprise on his face as I bent to clear his plate and he realized what had happened to me. I was small and lithe, with copper-colored hair, padded little hands, and a face like a cat. That’s what everyone said, that I looked like a kitten, with my broad, flat face and wide, slanting gray eyes, my small, cupid’s bow mouth – and my lassitude. I could lie on the couch in a torpor all morning long, then spring up and bolt out the door in a pair of tiny shorts, my mother shouting after me, pleading with me to come back in and change.

  As I have mentioned, I was a sexual creature pretty much from the get-go. At eleven, I found a way to achieve orgasms while doing the breaststroke, which subsequently led me to join the swim team of my junior high school and accounted for my iron thighs. In my early teens, though virginal in the extreme – I had never even kissed a boy – I developed a peculiar fantasy in which I met a faceless, unimpeachable gentleman whose pristine heart was overwhelmed with forbidden love for me. The boys in my school held no interest for me. They were all dying for it. I needed to find someone who absolutely didn’t want to be seduced. But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the moment, I’m thirteen, Grandma Sally has thrombosis, and Suky is going to Delaware.

  Aha!

  Grandma Sally was fat. We saw her as rarely as possible. Suky could hardly look her. But, thinking back on it now, I don’t think it was disgust and embarrassment about Sally’s weight that kept her sparrowlike daughter away from her. I think the reason was that Grandma Sally had the full measure of my mother. I remember, on one of her rare visits, Sally followed Suky with her hooded eyes as her daughter sped around the kitchen, sponged down the table, made individually tailored, assembly-line sandwiches for each of her children (none of whom liked the same things), then swept the floor – talking breathlessly all the while. The whites of the old lady’s eyes glimmered beneath dark irises; her double chin was cradled in her hands, a half-eaten piece of pie on a plate between her elbows, two thin, blond braids pinned to the top of her head. Eventually, she sat back, crossed her arms over her chest, and drawled in pure Mississippian: ‘You never moved that fast when you were a kid.’

  ‘Well, Mother,’ Suky said with forced cheer, gritting her teeth, ‘when I was a kid, I didn’t have five children.’

  ‘You were a lazy, dreamy kid,’ said Sally. ‘Nobody changes their tempo that way. Tempo is tempo. It’s one of the basic things about a person.’

  ‘You and I just have different styles of mothering,’ said Suky, smiling coldly and patting her stiff nest of hair. ‘I like to keep on top of things, that’s all.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ said Sally suspiciously, shifting her enormous weight on her chair and poking at her pie with her fork. I couldn�
��t figure out what Grandma Sally was getting at – but I knew it enraged my mother. Her anger made my belly tense up and ache. The discomfort was so intense, I went outside, in order to break the suction between us.

  But that December, Grandma Sally seemed to be dying, and in need of her hyperefficient daughter to play nurse. So off Suky went, having left enough soup and lasagna in the freezer chest to last us a month, even though she only planned to be gone four days. The first two days of my vacation from Suky were heavenly. I’d amble home from school with my brothers, stare into the refrigerator, poke around in the cabinets, eat whatever I felt like, turn on the TV. Des spent afternoons in his study, working on his Sunday sermon, or meeting troubled parishioners. One parishioner who seemed especially troubled that week was Mrs Herbert Orschler. I always thought of her whole name when I saw her, because she once dropped an envelope from her purse, and I picked it up. Before I handed it to her, I read, typed out, ‘Mrs Herbert Orschler.’ I thought what an odd name Herbert was for a woman and wondered if, nestled beneath her snug dress, was a small, secret penis. Amy, that fountain of information, had once told me there were people who were born both male and female. This disgusted and fascinated me, and I wondered whether Mrs Herbert Orschler was visiting my father so often because of the stress caused by her genitalia. The day after my mother left for Grandma Sally’s, I was passing the door to Des’s study. It was ajar; I peeked in to find Mrs Orschler seated in an armchair, my father leaning in to hold her hand. This seemed slightly odd to me at the time, but I put it down to the duties of a pastor, which were mysterious and manifold, as my father always said.

  It turned out that Suky had to stay away a whole extra week tending to her mother, whose approach to death was as sluggish as her housekeeping. (She would in fact outlive Suky by five years.) Back in the rectory, benign neglect was the order of the day. I didn’t do my homework once. We ordered in pizza nearly every night and ate it in front of the television, ignoring the laden freezer. I don’t think I washed much. A pact had developed between us kids and our father: he wouldn’t bother us if we didn’t bother him.

  The caramel colored plastic bottles of pills in Suky’s bathroom medicine cabinet and nestled between the nutmeg and the cloves in the spice rack were just part of my childhood, part of the furniture, like the rough cotton drapes in the living room or the one chipped square of brown linoleum in the kitchen. I didn’t think about the shiny capsules, one half blood maroon, the other a transparent little dome filled with cheerful red and yellow orbs like miniature gumballs, which my mother swallowed in the morning and the afternoon with a toss of her head, hand to mouth fast as a hummingbird, until I heard the word “Dexedrine” in a cautionary TV movie about speed-addicted beatniks I watched one rainy afternoon with my oldest brother, Chester. The word rang a bell. I stole into the kitchen and checked the prescription bottle. Sure enough, the active ingredient was Dexedrine. Speed! All at once, the manic cheerfulness, the jumpiness, the sudden bouts of deflated disconnection, Grandma Sally’s suspicions – all started to make a horrible kind of sense. Even Suky’s overwhelming affections seemed like drug-induced delirium. I took the bottle and ran into the living room. Chester was slumped on the couch, his long legs splayed out, a vacant look on his face as he watched TV. I showed him the label.

  ‘Mom takes that stuff,’ I said, gesturing to the television. He turned toward me slowly, irritated by the interruption.

  ‘What are you doing with Mom’s medicine?’

  ‘It’s Dexedrine. See?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So that’s why she’s so perky all the time.’

  ‘Oh, shut up. She’s not a drug addict. Those people in the movie are taking it to get high.’

  ‘But what’s the difference?’

  ‘You think companies would sell diet pills full of speed? It’s a tiny amount in there. I can’t believe you’re even saying this.’

  I just stood there in front of him until he kicked me out of the way. Maybe he was right. Maybe she didn’t need the pills except for a diet. So I took ten of them, just to see.

  Whoosh! Wow did I have energy! I jumped up and down on my bed for about half an hour, my heart racing, then I ran downstairs and started telling Chester all these really funny things, and imitating our neighbors, and laughing, falling over myself. Des even came out of his study; I was absolutely nuts.

  ‘What the heck happened to her?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll bet you she took Mom’s diet pills,’ said Chester sleepily. ‘She was asking about them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Des asked, springing into action. He grabbed me by the arms and pinned me down on the sofa, under the light.

  ‘Open up your eyes!’ he commanded. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  ‘Goddamnit, open your eyes!’ He held my eyelid open. I saw his tawny face, with the bluish cast of his shaved beard under the skin, his bushy eyebrows, the dark hairs escaping from his nose, so close it was alarming. ‘We’re going to have to take her to the hospital,’ he said. I slipped out of his grasp, bolted up the stairs, dove into my room, and locked the door. Then I huddled in the corner, my mind going off like fireworks, my legs twitching. They had to pick the lock. In the end, Des decided against the hospital. I was coming down anyway, and had already started crying and throwing up.

  I woke up at 9:30 the next morning. The house was silent. I came down to find Des, sitting in front of a cup of tea and the paper. He smiled at me kindly. I basked in his focused gaze.

  ‘Sleep well?’ he asked.

  ‘How come you didn’t wake me up for school?’ I asked.

  ‘Your body needed the rest, after yesterday. That was a dangerous thing you did.’

  ‘If those pills are dangerous, why does Mommy take them?’

  ‘They’re not dangerous for her, she takes just a few, and she’s a grown-up, not a kid.’

  ‘But why does she take them?’

  ‘Her mother got so terribly fat,’ said Des. ‘She’s afraid the same thing will happen to her.’

  ‘Is she … an addict?’ I asked, using the word I’d learned from the TV drama.

  ‘Oh, for mercy’s sake, Pippa, sit down and eat your cereal. Your mother is no more an addict than … that squirrel out there.’ I looked out the window. A large gray squirrel was frantically gnawing on a seed dropped from our bird feeder. The creature did, in fact, move a lot like Suky.

  When I came home from school the next afternoon, Suky was in the bath. I barged in, opened the medicine cabinet, and took out the bottle of pills. I had two more bottles in my fist: one from the kitchen and another I had found behind the tomato paste in the larder. Suky glared at me, her face tight with anger as I lined up the bottles neatly, side by side.

  ‘So who are you, really?’ I asked. There was a long pause. ‘I’d like to know what you’re like without this stuff.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said in a chilly, reasonable tone she almost never used with me. ‘That is medicine. You took enough to kill you.’

  ‘What would happen if you stopped taking it?’

  ‘I would get fat,’ she announced crisply, arching her back so her pink nipples peeked out of a skin of bubbles, then sank again.

  ‘I don’t care what you look like,’ I said softly. She rested her feet on the end of the tub and assessed her glistening, pink toenails.

  ‘Okay,’ she said in an offhand way. ‘Fine.’ But she kept looking at her feet with stubborn interest until, eventually, I left.

  The next day, the pills were gone. Not a pill in the house. That was her answer to me. She seemed more focused, serene, engaged. I was so relieved. The fact that she was wiping tears away while she was vacuuming and staring vacantly out the window while she ironed – my gratitude swept it out of my mind. At least she was my real mother. I loved her intensely then, and kept hugging her, kissing her. When I did, she smiled weakly and patted my arm. A week passed, and she started cheering up again. I never saw her take a pill, but she was acting l
ike she’d drunk six cups of coffee, all day. I knew she must be hiding the drug somewhere. Whenever I got a chance, I searched. I found small stashes of pills in Baggies all over the house – in her underwear drawer, inside the freezer, taped under the couch. In the beginning, I would remove them and flush them down the toilet. But it didn’t make any difference. She seemed to be taking more and more. Burying the habit had made it more important, the need more acute. Her behavior was erratic. Her pupils were constantly dilated, her reactions to sudden noises, even the telephone, were exaggerated, almost theatrical. She was prone to sudden bursts of weeping.

  I tried to talk to Des about it again, but he brushed me off gruffly. They were in it together for some reason. And then I saw it – or I thought I did. With Suky out of her mind on speed, he was free to pursue the spiritual life, including consoling Mrs Orschler, and whomever else he had tucked under his robes of office. But now I think that was unfair. I think he was simply kind enough to accept Suky for who she was, and unwilling to have me insult her with a truth that could only be destructive. Or no. Maybe my father couldn’t face that his wife was a drug addict because to face it would be to see his marriage and his life as a lie. So he didn’t see it. Or maybe he was just plain lazy. I’ll never know.

  By the time I was fifteen I could barely look at Suky; her touch made my skin hurt. Each time I pulled away, she lowered her eyes, as if acknowledging her sin. I could see the glimmer of tears beneath her lids. I watched her behavior now with a coldly observant eye. She met my gaze with a strident stare. We had always known what the other was thinking, my mother and I. So, without having a single conversation, I expressed my disgust and sense of betrayal, and she, in her own way, refused to be controlled. Dinners became unbearable. She would prattle on senselessly from her station by the stove, laughing and blushing or crying and crazy, and I would stare at her, fantasizing about smacking her in the head, till I couldn’t take it anymore and had to go into the bathroom, sob, and hit myself in the face. Returning glassy-eyed to the table, I would find my father and brothers eating and exchanging monosyllables, passing the dinner rolls as if nothing was the matter. Suky and I were on our own, locked cheek to cheek, dancing jerkily to a long, long number.