The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

by Rebecca Miller

  I knew what was upsetting the pastor’s wife. It wasn’t her morals being tormented. It was jealousy, straight up. She was crazy with it. In fact, she was plain old crazy. They all were, really, my slow-moving, slow-talking brothers, with their laconic language and leaden eyes – they had all built their personalities up like bulwarks against her mania and neglect. Depressives, every last one of them. And my father – well, he had learned how to take care of himself. I had been eavesdropping on his phone conversations with Mrs Herbert Orschler for a year. The two of them met every Friday afternoon, like clockwork. Poor old Suky would have no lover now. Because I was leaving. I knew it the minute she heard the news; her face crumpled like a child who’s lost her favorite teddy under the wheels of a bus. Gone forever, that little stuffed bear. I couldn’t stay after that performance. I mean, I didn’t need a degree in psychology to realize there was something wrong between me and my mother.

  It came in handy that I was so pissed off. Not just by this one episode but by the pills, by her being so needy all the time – the whole thing. I had become like one of those men you see in the movies who wear aviator sunglasses and chew gum and never get ruffled. That’s what I was trying to be: Clint Eastwood if he was a seventeen-year-old girl. I packed some clothes in a duffel bag, took my savings from the job at Oakley, drove my mother’s car to the bus station, and left it there with the keys in it. I never got to say goodbye to Mr Brown. He left Oakley, without his wife. I never heard from him again, but years later I found out he was teaching at a school in Canada. I guess I sort of ruined his life. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just freed him from a miserable marriage and a pathetic, colorless existence. Maybe he’s happy. Maybe he’s got grandkids by now.

  Aunt Trish

  I knew Mylert Walgreen, the heavy, wheezing kid behind the counter at the bus station. He had graduated from my high school the year before. Mylert’s curiosity was definitely piqued by my sudden, solitary trip to New York City in the middle of the school week. I had rarely spoken to Mylert in school; we traveled in different circles. He was one of the kids who shuffled through the halls, head down, knees rubbing together, hoping not to be noticed, not to be teased. I never bothered kids like that; I even defended them now and then against the other bullies. My prey was of a higher order: kids who thought they were cool but weren’t. Mylert put on no such airs. Now that he’d graduated, however, he had a certain swagger, an air of adult authority that rankled me.

  ‘Are you running away?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not your business what I’m doing, Mylert,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not supposed to sell tickets to unaccompanied minors,’ he said.

  I sighed, looking up at the ceiling, trying to gather my thoughts.

  ‘So are you?’ he asked. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘No, you dipshit, I’m going to visit my aunt Trish in New York. Now give me the ticket.’

  ‘On a Wednesday?’ I just glared at him till, looking somewhat put out, he took my money and officiously handed me the bus ticket. I was sweating. Aunt Trish. So that’s where I was going. And now I had confided in Mylert Walgreen, of all people! My parents would find out within an hour. Oh, well. What was so terrible about that? I wasn’t running away, I was moving away. I had no legal obligation to stay in school anymore. I was starting my life, and that was that.

  As the bus pulled away, I thought of Mr Brown, his flared, delicate nostrils, the bewildered look that came into his eyes when he looked at me. I missed him so much.

  *

  Aunt Trish lived on Thirtieth Street and First Avenue, above the Fresh Day deli. I rang the bell marked ‘Sarkissian’. The apartment was 45. I climbed five flights of wide brown metal stairs. The walls on the way up were lined with white ceramic tiles; the floors in the hallways were tiled with tiny, grimy black and white hexagons. The smell of cigarette smoke and fried onions mingled in the air.

  After what seemed like half an hour, I found apartment 45. The door was ajar, and Aunt Trish was right behind it. A small woman, she was shorter than I was, but she gave me a bear hug that nearly cracked my ribs.

  Aunt Trish was a kind, energetic, helpful woman. She wore round glasses, had short, dark hair; a constellation of black moles dotted her face. Her body was square, short, hunched forward, as though she were always getting ready to break out for a touchdown. I had called her from the bus station.

  ‘Your father called before you did,’ she said, crouching into a brown, nubbly couch with a Navajo blanket slung over the back of it. I fell into an armchair beside her, my legs spread wide. The chair had a high back and wings on either side of my head. ‘Apparently, you told the boy at the bus station you were going to see your aunt Trish.’ She grinned at this, showing the wide gap between her two front teeth.

  ‘What … did my dad say?’ I asked.

  ‘He told me you got into trouble.’

  ‘Did he say what kind of trouble?’

  ‘Not exactly. Something about the prep school next door to you.’

  ‘I fell in love with the math teacher. And we got caught. And my mom is a pill-head.’ This last piece of news didn’t seem to surprise Aunt Trish; it just made her go quiet, a sad smile on her face.

  ‘So what’s the plan, Stan?’ she asked.

  ‘I just don’t want to live at home anymore.’

  ‘You’ve only got a few more months of school left, right?’

  ‘I’m dropping out.’

  ‘You’re gonna regret that.’

  ‘All I know is, I’m not going home.’

  Trish sighed and looked down at the mahogany coffee table for a long time. On it was a large book with a black-and-white photograph of a mountain on the cover. The scene looked cold and dreary. On the back wall of the living room was a colorful painting of mountains in a desert. There were cacti in the foreground; in the background, the sandy mountains were striped with pastel colors. I wondered what it was about mountains that Trish loved so much.

  ‘Apparently, your mother is pretty upset,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Trish caught the ice in my gaze.

  ‘Look, as far as I’m concerned, you can stay in – um – Kat’s room for as long as you need to. You’re my favorite niece, you know that. But there’s going to be a discussion with your parents later today, and it’s not going to be pretty.’ Dread pulsed through me.

  ‘They’re coming?’

  ‘They should be here in about two hours.’ I felt trapped. Maybe the best thing was to get out while there was still time. But where would I go?

  ‘Who’s Kat?’ I asked. Aunt Trish lit up a Marlboro from a pack in her shirt pocket.

  ‘She’s my roommate,’ she said, inhaling.

  ‘I didn’t know you lived with someone.’

  ‘She just moved in a couple of months ago,’ said Aunt Trish. ‘So. You hungry?’ I shook my head. I hadn’t eaten all day, but my stomach felt sealed. She was coming. Suky was coming. I had to hang on to this feeling of rage; I had to keep it going. If I let it collapse, if I let guilt creep in, I would end up in her arms; I would end up sucking on a baby bottle until I was twenty.

  Eventually, the buzzer rang. My father’s rasping voice sounded incomprehensible over the intercom. I worried about the two of them climbing all those stairs. Aunt Trish went into the hall and looked down the stairwell to be sure they found us. When they arrived, Suky looked wrung out, wan. She kept blinking really hard and smiling at Trish. Then she reached out to hug me and stopped her hands in midair. Des didn’t bother taking his coat off. He sat down in Trish’s wing-backed armchair and let out a long sigh. Suky and I were at either end of the couch. Trish stood leaning against the kitchen counter, a cigarette in the crook of her fingers, tilted forward, ready, as ever, for the big sprint. I couldn’t believe Aunt Trish was even considering keeping me against the will of her older brother. She had always seemed so shy and easygoing to me. And in my experience, adults stuck together. But Trish was different. She rarely showed up for hol
idays or family gatherings. When she did, she always arrived alone and spent a lot of the time on our porch, on her own, smoking. She would call now and then, send cards and presents, but that was it.

  ‘It’s time to come home, Pippa,’ Des said quietly.

  ‘I’m not going home. I’m staying with Aunt Trish.’

  Des looked at his sister darkly, then back at me. ‘You can’t just run away from what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘You can’t do that in life.’

  ‘I’m not running away,’ I said. ‘I’m just done, that’s all.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’re done?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to live … with you.’ My eyes fell on Suky for a second, then away.

  ‘Oh, so it’s all my fault,’ she said. Her voice sounded shrill, taunting.

  ‘What’s all your fault?’

  ‘What you did. That man has been fired. His wife is, she is … devastated.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was your fault. Nothing is your fault, okay? I just don’t want to be home anymore. I can’t go back there, and that’s that. You can force me to go back, but I’ll leave again. I’m done, don’t you get it?’

  Suky’s eyes were swollen and overflowing. ‘So you’re not even coming home for Christmas anymore?’

  ‘Mom, I didn’t say that. Please. I will. Of course I’ll come home for Christmas, I just don’t want to live at home.’

  ‘What did I do? What did I do to make you so secretive and unhappy?’

  ‘Nothing. Please, Mom. Please.’

  Des growled at Suky. ‘Will you stop whipping her up? For mercy’s sake.’ Then, turning to me, he said, ‘Do you realize your mother was so upset she had to get an injection to calm her down?’

  I looked over at her. She looked crushed; her whole body was slumped to the side of the couch, her face a mask of misery and confusion. A muscle spasm dimpled her cheek with an irregular, spastic beat. I so wanted to make her better.

  ‘Mommy –’ I said. She brightened. A hopeful smile flickered on her face. ‘I’m sorry, I – I just can’t.’ And then I got up and grabbed my coat from the peg in the entryway, flung open the heavy door, and clattered down the metal steps of Trish’s building, my mother’s voice echoing through the stairwell – ‘Pippa come back – Pippa I promise –’ I looked at her standing above me. Her stick-like body, that flame of hair: she was a lit match, burning herself right out. I don’t remember what she promised. I ran away from her, down First Avenue, zigzagging thirty blocks downtown as the lights changed, all the way to Houston Street. I didn’t know where I was going. I turned left and walked fast, head down, imagining her behind me, grabbing at my clothes. I passed Avenues A, B, C, D, till I came to the East River. Then I just stood there on the side of the FDR Drive, cars whipping past behind me, and watched the boats go by, churning up water turned the color of fire by the setting sun’s reflection. I was wearing a thin cotton peacoat, and the wind ripped through it. I turned up the collar, shoved my hands deep into my pockets.

  ‘This is where I live’ – I dared think it. Intense, surprising happiness socked me in the gut. No one knew exactly where I was at that precise moment. I was just another person in this vast city. If a truck swerved from the highway and mowed me down, I would go to the city morgue, be buried with the bums. For these few seconds, I had escaped the radar of my mother, my father, even Aunt Trish. I was just myself, connected to no one. I was free.

  Shackles

  When I got back to Trish’s place, my parents were gone. I thought of Suky, of what she must have felt when I didn’t come back. Of the long, silent car ride back home. I sat down on Trish’s couch, put my hands over my face, tasted the salt of my tears.

  Trish put her arm around me. ‘Listen, kiddo. It’s tough times. Your mom has a serious problem, okay? I’m saying it. I know no one else will. It’s not your fault. I think you did right getting away. It doesn’t mean it has to be forever. And it doesn’t mean you can’t call her and tell her you love her, either.’ I started sobbing when she said that. Because I did love Suky. I loved her more than I could imagine loving anyone. I felt so bad for hurting her. Trish just kept her arms around me, saying, ‘Sssh, ssh, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault …’ Eventually, she laid me down under the Navajo blanket and turned on the TV. Gilda was playing. I remember thinking, Rita Hayworth had red hair, Suky has red hair. And then I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, it was dark outside the window, and I was immediately aware of two people whispering in the kitchen. I turned and saw a tall, gangly woman with dark hair the shape of a Roman centurion’s helmet tossing salad in a bowl. She looked down at me and winked. ‘Hey,’ she said. Her voice was low, husky. Aunt Trish reached into the oven and took out a tray of sizzling beef patties.

  I ate two hamburgers and drank a quart of milk. Kat and Aunt Trish watched me with indulgent grins on their faces. Kat had a lozenge-shaped face, a broad mouth, and eyes that slanted downward. Every now and then, she would bob her head to some song she had in her mind, humming very quietly to herself.

  When I finally slowed down on the ravenous eating, Trish laid down the law. ‘Okay, Pipps. Here’s the deal I made with your parents. These are your choices.’ She raised her stubby thumb. ‘You go back to school here in the city.’ The forefinger came up. ‘You study on your own and take the high school equivalency test.’ The middle finger now. ‘You go back home.’

  I opted for the test. No way was I going to negotiate another high school’s social life for just one semester. It wasn’t worth the stress. Kat stood up now, cleared the plates, then yawned, stretching her arms high so her concave belly showed beneath her short sweater. ‘I’m gonna go work in my room a little, before Pippa goes to bed,’ she said. ‘Night, Pippa.’

  ‘Night,’ I said. Then Kat turned to Aunt Trish, bouncing from one foot to the other.

  ‘See ya, baby,’ she said, and bent down to kiss her. Trish moved her head so Kat had to peck her cheek, but Kat took her chin and held it, kissing her right on the mouth. All of a sudden I knew why Aunt Trish wasn’t exactly a regular at family events. Kat skipped off into her room/my room. Trish looked at me and made a gesture, a that’s-the-way-it-is-what-are-you-gonna-do shrug. I smiled at her encouragingly, raising my eyebrows.

  ‘So we’re a couple of black sheep, you and me,’ said Trish. Then she cracked a smile and leaked a growling, phlegmy giggle. It was the nicest, most reassuring thing anyone had ever said to me. I felt I belonged somewhere. I belonged on the outside, with Aunt Trish.

  *

  Kat and Trish slept under a shiny maroon bedspread. Over their bed hung a large painting of a naked woman with huge eyes and very long eyelashes. She looked both cute and lewd. Life with Trish and Kat was quiet at first. Kat’s room, where I was staying, wasn’t a bedroom; it was an office with a couch in it. The desk was cluttered with papers and an electric typewriter. Though she worked as a secretary in a wholesale textile business in Chelsea, Kat was writing a novel. At six in the morning, she would glide in with a mug of tea that smelled of warm mud and start typing. I then dragged the comforter to the couch in the living room and tried to sleep until Trish stomped into the kitchen around seven. She worked in a warehouse in the meatpacking district, carried a clipboard.

  Trish made me pull my weight: every day, I took out the garbage, cleaned the kitchen, mopped the floors, studied for the high school equivalency test. And looked for a job. I hadn’t had much experience, aside from Oakley, and they weren’t going to be giving me a recommendation anytime soon. Finally, I found a restaurant on the Lower East Side, El Corazón, willing to take a chance. I didn’t speak Spanish and could barely make myself understood in the interview with the enormous, somber owner-chef, Señor Pardo. I couldn’t see why they wanted an English-speaking girl working in the place at all till Señor Pardo pointed at a group at one table and said, ‘You serve the English-speak customers.’ I looked over. Three young men and a woman in their twenties huddled in a booth, speaking English
and smoking filterless cigarettes. There was a pudgy, blond fellow with flecks of paint on his hands, an elegant, tall one with very long black hair, a girl with a large nose and an amused-looking, painted mouth, and a skinny guy with puffy eyes and a poker face who was slumped in his seat. They all looked exhausted. ‘Now,’ said Señor Pardo, handing me an order pad. I walked over to the group. ‘The United States loses the war in Vietnam,’ the pudgy one was saying, ‘Greg Brady gets a perm.’

  ‘Do you know what you want?’ I asked.

  ‘There goes the neighborhood,’ said the thin, puffy-eyed fellow. But as he looked up at me with his poker face, his gaze stayed on me for an instant too long. They all ordered margaritas. I served this group almost daily for months, I learned their names, but I never went out with them, never saw where they lived. Until later.

  *

  I felt elated in Kat’s presence. She was glamorous, in a way, always jutting out her small breasts, swiveling her narrow hips in tight bell-bottoms, making poor old Aunt Trish seem dusty and square, her dark eyes moist with devotion to the creature she shared her bed with. Once, I asked Kat what her novel was about. She flashed Trish a sly smile.

  ‘Let’s just say it’s no work of art,’ she said.

  ‘But what’s it about?’

  ‘Love,’ she said. ‘The mysteries of love.’ Aunt Trish blushed and got up to clear the table. I wanted to read that novel.

  One night, the two of them had a dinner party. They invited a few women and two men. I was invited, too. I wore a lavender sundress, even though it was frigid outside. It was the only dress I had brought with me from home. When she saw me in it, Kat whistled a long, low note that made me blush. One of the women at the party was named Shelly. She was brash, had sandy blonde hair and a big chest. She kept saying, ‘When I was in the film business,’ which for some reason made everybody laugh except for Aunt Trish. She didn’t laugh, she looked at her plate through her round glasses, smiling and shaking her head.