The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

by Rebecca Miller

  Not one of Herb’s friends abandoned him after Gigi killed herself. Only her own old cronies, a handful of Europeans whom Herb had always deemed too boring or pretentious to socialize with, stayed away from him now – not that they were missed.

  Just about everyone Herb knew had thought that Gigi was a head case, as it turned out, and, though all of them saw what had happened as a tragedy, they were also relieved that Herb was no longer encumbered by an erratic and increasingly embarrassing wife. What they thought of me – Well, they folded me in, like raisins in a cake recipe that doesn’t call for them but won’t be ruined by them, either. Herb could have married a llama and his circle would have accepted it. He was a truly charismatic man. He had some power in the publishing world, but it was his dynamic charm, his ferocious appetite for existence, his connection to a bigger, Titanic, preneurotic period in American literary life, when people drank Scotch with dinner and wrote unapologetic sentences and ruined each other’s lives unconsciously, with the ignorance of children, that held people in his sway.

  I clutched at marriage, held it like an infant, fed it, pampered it. No man was loved the way Herb was. He marveled at the genius of his choice as I fetched him his slippers, massaged his temples with scented oil, spent half the day cooking. I did not yet know how to truly be this new person. I did not know how to run a house, take care of a man, be faithful. But, like a dancer learning a new routine, I relied on repetition to teach my brain. At first I was lost in my role, feeling like an impostor as I forged checks with my new name, chose a décor for our new apartment, sold the house in a house and found a humbler place farther inland for weekends. I didn’t really know how to shop for clothes or plan a dinner party. I just kept pretending, kept playing dress-up, answering the phone in a singsong voice, as I had when I was ten and married to my invisible husband Joey. I worked at my new identity for years, until the motions of everyday life as Herb’s wife were as natural to me as walking.

  It wasn’t until I became pregnant with the twins, though, that I really believed my own act. These two creatures squirming inside me were facts. They had blood, eyes, destinies. Unlike me, they were born perfect, male and female, complete. I thought there was something magical about boy-girl twins. It was a gift, a sign. I gave myself to them with the joy of a penitent. And gradually, through the nights lying awake between Ben and Grace as they clutched at my hair in their sleep with their warm, soft hands, sniffed my neck, held me fast with their chubby arms, strong legs clamped over my abdomen, I began to change in a deeper way. My children’s limbs grew around me like roots; I became a part of them. I began to want what I felt they needed. Using Suky as an inverse model, I made myself eat proper meals, seldom drank, took no medication.

  As the twins grew up, it became clear that they had opposite personalities. Ben was kind, curious, intelligent. He loved all sports, was a good student, worked after school in the mail room of Herb’s publishing house by the time he was thirteen. He was a responsible, sensible kid.

  Grace was high-strung, fierce, a leader. She had strong vigilante tendencies, which became troublingly apparent at the age of five, when she knocked a boy unconscious with a softball bat for stealing her brother’s SweeTart candies. As a toddler and very young child, she refused to wear clothes. I still have a scar on my wrist from a bite she gave me while I tried to wrestle her into a party dress – we were going to a wedding. In the end, I had to hire a babysitter and leave her home, because all she would wear was a string of beads. All the combs in the house had teeth missing from ill-fated attempts at taming the thick, tangled fair hair that grew in stubborn spirals around her shining, intelligent face. Grace felt everything with almost alarming intensity. She could be so possessive of me that at times I felt her affection like a plastic bag over my face. I have to admit, my feeling for her could be just as violent, and sometimes it frightened me, because I remembered Suky and the rigid clutch of her embraces, the way she held me down to kiss me, making me laugh so hard I ended up crying, feeling crushed, feeling that she would actually kill me. With Ben, it was effortless. I adored him, he adored me, that was that. But with Grace, it was a love affair, complete with sudden flashes of dislike, tearful fights, and sweet reconciliations.

  One night when Grace was eight, I spied on her. I had put the twins to bed an hour before and tiptoed up to check on them. The door was ajar, and I peeked in. Ben was fast asleep. Grace, however, had secretly put on the reading light and was dancing. Her white nightgown and crazy nest of blond hair glowed in the incandescent light. The dance was both savage and graceful. She was whispering a song, or a spell, as she whirled like a dervish, round and round, her hands carving the air into arabesques. As I watched her, spellbound, through the crack in the door, I thought, What would it take to turn this feral little creature into someone who would let herself be whipped? In that instant, I realized that all I wanted for my daughter was that she be as unlike me as possible. I had to protect her.

  Silently, I walked away, stealing myself for the coming sacrifice. From that night on, I began to both keep her at arm’s length – trying with all my might to maintain some neutrality, force the drama out of our relationship, be as little as possible like Suky – and at the same time spoil her systematically, in a deliberate, thoughtful fashion. I discouraged her from helping in the house, pushed her to play competitive sports, encouraged her tendency to dress like a boy, play like a boy. I wanted her to be like a man – to have the expectations of a man – that sense of being heir to the world. I wanted to break the chain of servitude that linked the women in my family.

  My system worked. Grace grew up with arrogance, charm, optimism, and total belief in herself. The fact that she came to despise me was a sad side effect of her upbringing, but I guess it was inevitable. She saw me as pathetic, a slave, a flop. I was at the kids’ service day and night. I had no job, and very little help in the house aside from the cleaning. Throughout Grace’s adolescence, I hoped the day would come when she realized what I had done for her. She would then look at me with radiant love once more, as she had that afternoon long ago, when she’d taught herself to read and asked, ‘Now do you love me more than Ben?’ But that moment never came. Her need for me had evaporated.

  When the twins were small, I had a recurring dream that I was served up on an enormous platter and my children ate me. They had always loved ribs; they snapped mine off with strong, greasy fingers and consumed them voraciously, with barbecue sauce. The strange thing was, I was conscious in the dream, and I was smiling. All I could think of was how much protein the kids were getting.

  In spite of all my devotion in the early days of my marriage, there were moments when, like a wolf domesticated by humans, I caught a scent of my old ways and felt hemmed in. A beautiful young man walking by on the street, the sight of teenagers high in the park, sometimes threw me off balance; I could feel myself teeter on the edge of my new existence and imagined the thrill of kissing a man I barely knew, or the sharp kick of amphetamine between my eyes. But I never strayed. Herb felt the solemnity of our vows, too, but he refused to cast a shadow of guilt on the marriage, doggedly seeing Gigi’s suicide as the natural, almost inevitable, flowering of her illness. He savored his second dose of fatherhood. He had failed his first kids, angry mediocrities in their thirties by now. I was his shining ticket to happiness, new life, a second chance at youth. The fact that we had built our bliss on another person’s despair – we forgot it eventually. We lived as if we deserved our luck.

  Miranda

  Yet I was plagued by a maddening insecurity about Herb’s love for me. Almost invariably, the same poisonous daydream would infuse my mind as I pushed the kids through the park in their stroller, trying to lull them to sleep after lunch. The details of the fantasy were different, but the thrust was the same: I find a letter. I find a scarf. I find a pair of underpants. I come upon Herb with his lover in our apartment. I come upon them in the beach house. I come upon them in the park while walking the twins. She is al
ways dark, tall, buxom, more intelligent than I. I weep. I mourn. I accuse. I confront. He leaves me.

  I got so involved with these scenarios of betrayal and abandonment that I barely knew where I was. One day, I was walking along in Central Park, imagining haranguing Herb as his gorgeous lover covered herself with my guest bedsheets, when a lady in her sixties approached me. ‘Mrs Lee?’ I looked at her, confused. She had a sharp nose, small, dark, friendly eyes. She was English. It was then I realized I had tears on my face. I smiled, embarrassed, and wiped them away. She introduced herself as Miranda Lee. Herb’s first wife! She’d seen a picture of me standing with Herb at some charity event. She wanted to say hello. She had become a psychotherapist. I should have taken her card. Instead, we chatted on a park bench while the twins slept. She was an intelligent woman with a sense of humor, especially about Herb. When she mentioned him, it was with an amused, condescending expression, as though he was a naughty child. Solitude radiated from her, but it wasn’t imbued with bitterness. It just seemed like a fact of her life, something she accepted, even cherished. She had made a considerable life for herself since the divorce. She had a thriving practice, two sons who were her dear friends, she had a lively social life, went to the opera.

  When we parted, she said I seemed like a lovely person. And then she said, ‘Take care of yourself, Pippa.’ She looked me in the eye when she said that. I was flustered by her warning, and slightly insulted, for Herb, and for myself, yet what she said stayed with me. After that day, I banned the fantasy of Herb’s affair from my thoughts. It took a lot of discipline, but I managed to shoo it away just about every time it started running through my mind, till eventually I kicked the habit altogether. I trained myself to trust him.

  Snow

  I remember one winter, at the country house of friends with young children, everyone went tobogganing but the twins and me. I had stayed inside with them all morning, thinking they were too young, at two, to be on anything moving so fast. Herb came in, though, eyes shining, cheeks flushed from the cold, and said that the other kids in the party were having a great time, they were just a little older than ours. Wouldn’t I come out with the twins? Herb rarely went gamboling outside, so I said yes, all right. I armed Ben and Grace against the cold with snowsuits, fat jackets, mittens, hats, and boots, and they waddled out ahead of me. The sky was clear and blue; the snow sparkled. Herb slid onto the back of the toboggan, holding the rope. Then came fearless Grace, snuggling up to her daddy, then me, then Ben, my sweet little Ben. Herb’s long legs were like iron railings along the row of his family, as one of our friends gave us a little push. So fast – I hadn’t known it would be so quick – and the snow! I couldn’t see, there was snow flying into my face, I was blinded, out of control, clutching Ben, Grace against my back – I was terrified, flying through space with Herb bellowing, steering, and Grace screaming with joy, all of us shrieking in the white screen of no picture, till at last we slid onto the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill and slowly came to a stop. We all rolled off the toboggan. Catching my breath, on all fours, I looked up at Herb: his whole face was encrusted with snow, his eyebrows like snowy mountain peaks; the furry trim on the twins’ hoods was white and glistening, their light eyes peeking out of sugary faces. We all looked at one another and laughed, we laughed so hard, turning in toward each other, a circle of people who belonged to one another, and to no one else. That was the moment I felt us become a family, a unit apart from the world. That was when I became Pippa Lee.

  Part Three

  Lion Turds and Potatoes

  The night after her lunch with Moira, Pippa dreamed she was walking through a deserted shopping mall, chewing a wad of gum that had lost its flavor. The escalators were stock-still; rolling metal gates were clamped down over all the storefronts. She took the wad out of her mouth and started searching for a place to throw it away. She found the garbage, got rid of the gum, and was just wondering whether she could persuade someone to open the tobacco kiosk so she could buy some cigarettes when she heard a rough, breathy sound beside her. She turned and saw an enormous lion. He was serenely lapping up a puddle of strawberry ice cream from the floor. His mane was coarse and had golden hairs woven into the reddish thicket. Pippa was terrified.

  The lion ignored her. He took a few bouncing steps and leapt gracefully into an enormous planter with an artificial palm tree stuck in it. Squatting, his back rounded, great haunches quivering, the lion shat onto the fake earth. He looked sheepish and vulnerable. Pippa felt sorry for the lion. Having accomplished his task, he sped off the huge flowerpot, as if disavowing his humiliation, and padded down an immobile escalator, moving as fluidly as a river, an invincible predator once again. Finding that she had a plastic bag conveniently wrapped around her hand, Pippa stepped over to the great turd and scooped it up dutifully, as she had a thousand times in Gramercy Park when walking Milo, their corgi, who’d died of pneumonia back in 1996.

  ‘Mrs Lee?’ She heard the voice coming from inside the tobacco kiosk. She walked over to the iron gate and peered inside.

  ‘I would like some cigarettes,’ she called out into the darkness.

  ‘What kind?’ said the voice.

  ‘Those white ones,’ she said.

  Chris Nadeau stood behind the counter of the Marigold Village convenience store, watching Pippa, who was standing in her nightgown, holding a large baking potato that she had retrieved from the bin, a plastic produce bag over her hand, her gaze fixed somewhere behind his head. ‘Marlboro Lights?’ he asked helpfully. She didn’t respond. He leaned over the counter and brushed her arm with his fingers. Pippa felt his touch as a shock from the metal gate of the tobacco kiosk, but it was enough to rend the dream. She looked down at her nightgown, the potato in the bag, her bare feet. As she looked up at Chris, his eyes filled with curiosity and concern, her mind gradually collected itself around her realization.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said softly.

  ‘Would you like me to take you home?’ Chris asked.

  She nodded, handing him the potato.

  By the time they got to her place, weak light was seeping into the darkness, like a drop of ink tinting a glass of water. One bird called out. Pippa made no move to get out of the truck.

  ‘Mrs Lee,’ he said. ‘Pippa?’ His gentleness surprised her. She felt tears on her cheeks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is the last thing you need. First your mother and now me.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ said Chris.

  ‘It’s just, I walk in my sleep. Recently, I have been. Something must be wrong … with me. The weirdest thing about this …’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I just feel so young,’ she said. ‘Like a very young person.’

  ‘Well, you’re young for around here,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mean that. When I was very young … I was always in the middle of some kind of drama … and as I got older and had a family, I gradually stopped being in the center, you know, I stepped aside, and other people were in the center; when you have kids that just sort of happens. And I got used to that. And now I am living this weird little drama and I am the protagonist and I just feel so crazy, even though I know it’s a very commonplace problem, millions of Americans are probably up buttering their stereos as we speak.’

  He laughed, and so did she.

  ‘You’re an unusual person,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘That’s what I am trying to tell you. What’s unusual is that I’m acting weird.’

  ‘Trust me,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t tell anyone … about this,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  She looked over at him and noticed his eyes for the first time. Dark as the bottom of a lake, they shone with the helpless honesty of a dog’s eyes.

  ‘Well, thank you – and good night,’ she said, getting out and pushing the heavy door shut.

  Herb was asleep. Stark naked, legs twisted in the sheets, hi
s arms flung out on either side of him, his hairy barrel chest exposed, he looked like he had been washed ashore, like Odysseus on Circe’s isle. But for Herb, the adventure was over, Pippa thought sadly. She wished that the future wasn’t so predictable, that this house was not the death house. That it wasn’t just a matter of time before he had the morphine IV in, and the nurse sat in the corner reading her magazine. Eighty years old. How long did he have?

  Herb opened his eyes and saw her crouching beside him. ‘What are you crying for?’ He sounded irritated. He knew what she was thinking. He rolled over and went to sleep. She knew he was right. She had to stop being so sentimental. She needed a doctor, too. Pills, probably. She hated the idea, she never even took an aspirin if she could help it, but she was driving in her sleep, for goodness’ sake. At breakfast she would tell Herb. She would tell him and he would fix it, say something dry and logical, and then she would do what he said. She didn’t feel like sleeping, so she took a shower, dressed, and made coffee.

  Finally, at nine o’clock, Herb came out looking sullen. He took a sip of the coffee and made a face. ‘This is piss,’ he said. Wordlessly she got up, took his cup, poured it out, and ground a new batch of beans. He sat there stewing. When she presented the second cup to him, he tasted it and said, ‘Let’s get a new machine.’

  ‘This is a new machine.’

  ‘Let’s get one that makes a decent cup of coffee. We can afford it, we sold all our real estate.’

  ‘I’ll look them up,’ she said. ‘Maybe Consumer Reports –’ Herb got up and went to the sofa, started reading the paper. She knew better than to try to talk to him when he was in a bad mood.