by Bella Pollen
Here, though, in the liminal dark of the cinema, there didn’t have to be a future or a past. Here, even if only until I caught my breath, I could exist in the gap between the two where time didn’t move at all.
Besides, The Man in the Iron Mask was playing and musketeer movies have always been Dad’s first love. And mine.
On-screen Leonardo DiCaprio battled with his villain twin while I struggled with my own. It’s all very well keeping your other self secret and imprisoned, but one day she will out.
But not now, I begged her. Please, not now.
A flutter, like the whir of helicopter blades pushing against my skin, and then my stomach contracted again. In my mind I touched the tip of my finger to the palm of my unborn baby. They say trouble makes you stronger, but even I know it’s love that makes you grow.
Breathe, I thought, breathe.
“Froggins?” Dad was still waiting.
“I’m good,” I said airily. “Why do you ask?”
“Just checking,” he replied. But he, too, looked down at our long pianist’s fingers.
And he smiled.
It occurred to me then that if we were one and the same, kindred spirits divided by a generation, he was my canary down the mine. Dad also took a corner too fast on his career. He also had two sets of children, ducked out of family life, packed that airport bag. In the end he was smart enough to recognise that my mother equaled home, and he always came back. Doesn’t matter how much he loves us, though, he still needs to run away from time to time. A part of him will always crave flight, and that means a part of me will as well. It’s no accident that we are sometimes accidentally in the same place at the same time.
The contractions were stronger now. I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. He didn’t ask why I wasn’t in hospital.
He knew.
For the same reason he had driven a hundred miles to London, parked his car on an overpriced meter, and paid to see a movie instead of watching a video at home: To lose himself in the dark. To steal time.
Dad . . . hey, Dad.
This is why I keep conjuring up my father in strangers. So he can ask me if I am OK. Because only he understands why sometimes I’m not.
As my hand relaxed, he offered up his red-striped paper bag.
“Popcorn?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” I said.
See? Perfect father-daughter date.
THE WEST
2% MUM
Some nights their faces swam in front of me like a photo line-up of the NSPCC’s most wanted. Anya, who hid Beefeater gin in the back of the pram; Sticky Lisbette having sex in my bed; Munchausen Sal squeezing blood from her own thumb into baby’s nappy so she could raise the alarm of internal bleeding—and this was only a sneak preview of the au pair saga. Had these girls always been psychotic or had they turned into child-loathing, passive-aggressive sociopaths after a month or so embedded in my family? Too many hands had rocked my cradles, but with four babies now, what were my options?
I would live and die for these small beings I had brought into the world, but if they were to make it through park outings without being molested by the royal swans or a trip to the department store without being dragged through the teeth of the escalator, they were always going to need a more attentive eye than mine. Out here in the San Juan Mountains, though, things would be different.
Here, nine thousand feet high, at the end of a twenty-mile dirt road, in a rolling meadow of wildflowers, Mac and I had found a place like nowhere else. When a snip of homesteading land cropped up for sale one day, we bought it over the telephone. Two years, a thousand scribbled drawings, a posse of locals, and a lake of Budweiser later, Mac decapitated the last of the monster thistles from around the doorway and carried me over the threshold of the home we’d built together—a big barn made of reclaimed pinkish wood with a view onto a million acres of wilderness.
After the nervy tightness of London, the vastness of the West was like a cool liquid running through my head. Here was a place we could lose ourselves without getting lost. A place where itchy feet didn’t feel mutually exclusive with raising a family. A place to focus on creating something new, even if that something was made out of words and sentences instead of colour and thread. And truth be told, it was time to get on with it.
Sudden withdrawal from any drug comes with side effects. A month after our CEO closed down my business, my body shut down. In the weeks that followed, plank-like, except for a comic limb twitch or two, I was wheeled off by Mac to a succession of doctors who tweaked and cracked their way to a diagnosis. It was idiopathic, psychosomatic. It was dilemmatic, melodramatic. Either way, the episode trapped something in the base of my spine that I still felt from time to time. Pain, sharp as a cattle prod, a reminder of something lost, something integral to my sense of self.
But I had it all worked out. Up at the barn, Mac would run his business remotely and shoot pack rats. I would write at the table in front of the big window while keeping a benign eye on the kids, as they skipped through the Indian paintbrush and charmed grass snakes with flutes carved from the branches of a fallen aspen tree. I had little difficulty picturing myself stuffing hay into pillows and trimming our winter coats with marmot fur, while the children churned butter out of dandelions and perfected their needlepoint. Forget Thai take-out, foraging would become our new byword. We’d live off the land. Tickle trout onto our dinner plates and garnish them with chanterelles harvested out of the still, quiet forests of the Rockies.
Alas, the marmots were ridden with fleas, the trout laughed in our faces, and the only grass snake in the valley died of cardiac arrest at its first human encounter. Isolation meant no playdates for the kids, and after a few days they turned gloomy and began draping themselves over the furniture like pressed flowers, demanding microwaved dinners and mourning the lack of Gymboree. I myself was disappointed to find that a move to the wilderness was no cure for my feeble housekeeping skills. Laundry piled high and dust patterned the floors in crop circles, while the big glass window quickly became ticked by battalions of kamikaze insects. If weaving up and down the mountain for supplies took, well, six hours, bulk buying resulted in the autopsy drip of rotting salad and bowls of penicillin-sprouting lemons.
They say that on retirement former powerhouses of multitasking quickly deteriorate to the point where they can barely manage a chore a day. Looking back, I marvelled at how much I got done while in the business of fashion. I hacked up cloth, wrangled with lawyers, got hammered with factory workers, smarmed up to buyers, hauled Freddie the dyspeptic tailor out of his bed in North London twice a week, and still had time for a vibrant second career as agony aunt to all fifteen of my employees. Post-fashion I managed one thing only—fractional movements of a mouse over a pad. I used to have a range of excuses for devoting too little attention to my kids, not least of which was the geographic location of my office, but the day I went to work in my head was the day my mothering skills really died on the vine. Oh, I soothed and patted and hugged and praised, but there were robotics involved and my children were not fooled.
My pioneering spirit lasted a week before I caved in and posted a sign in our local Walmart:
HELP REQUIRED: MUST LOVE KIDS. EXCELLENT DRIVER. NONSMOKER ESSENTIAL.
Enter Pamela.
She blew in one stormy day sporting an orange sun visor—which, it would transpire, she wore all year round, indoors and out, irrespective of the weather.
“Keeps the goddamn flies from biting, ya know?” she said, shaking off her wet plastic poncho to reveal an interview outfit of spangly boob tube over a pair of velour leggings that bagged fatally around the ass whilst obscurely managing to give her a camel toe at the same time.
Pamela was a lanky woman, with dye-stained hair, intelligent eyes, and the slight look of a codfish around the mouth. Originally from Texas, she had a drawl that bent every phonic rule in the book and she delivered it in startling monotone, uninterrupted by a single um or any other speech disfluency. Ri
ght from the start she made it clear that helping with kids was out of the question.
“They’re a little rich for my taste,” she stated, as though I’d offered her a sugared plum along with her cup of coffee. “And don’t go expectin’ me to give these up”—she pulled out a crumpled pack of Pall Malls—“because a true addict never quits.” She struck a match and drew on her cigarette with relish. “Now listen up, because this shit you only get to hear once.”
Over the next hour, Pamela laid claim to a tough life, and there was no question that it showed in her slate-coloured teeth and mottled gums. I swear this woman had wrinkles in places I’d never seen before. She alluded cheerfully to halfway houses, a daughter long since given up for adoption, and an old flame living in a Detroit penitentiary whom she liked to visit from time to time. “So you get why I don’t come cheap,” she concluded, stretching out her sandals and admiring a farrow of toes playfully crawling one over the other like unruly piglets. “But I’m fast and I won’t slam you on the hours.”
Everything about Pamela should have been heartbreaking, but nothing was. I looked at the flimsy wad of my manuscript and couldn’t think of a single reason not to hire her.
Pamela was soon working for us three times a week. She arrived mid-morning in an ancient Dodge stippled with rust. She drove like a Pulp Fiction character: insanely fast, Sonic Burger in hand, fag jammed between her lips. It’s a long and deeply rutted road from town up to our barn, and the Dodge didn’t always make it intact. It was not unusual to see her freewheeling the final hundred yards down to the deck holding her burning exhaust pipe out the window and hollering at the children to fetch duct tape.
The interior of her car was an artwork that might have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize under the title Everything I Have Ever Consumed. The upholstery was yellowed by nicotine, the seats dotted by cigarette burns and tacky with Gatorade. If the clutch was sometimes difficult to depress it would be due to the pile-up of browning banana skins wedged beneath it. The floor was littered with spent cartons of red wine, and every time Pamela opened the driver’s door, she triggered an avalanche of crumbling Styrofoam.
This might not have been the greatest CV for home help, but it turned out she was a fiend with the broom and had an Olympian skill for folding laundry, even if everything she washed came out of the machine the same colour.
When I suggested the dividing of loads into whites and colours, she declared: “That’s a myth. I don’t buy into any of that holistic, organic crap.” Before long the whole family was dressed à la Pamela in outfits of fatally bagging greige, but who cared? I was back working. As far as achieving something, we are all given a finite amount of time. The more of it I spent in the real world, the less accessible my imaginary one became. I still didn’t understand how this trade-off worked, but I knew that each time I went through the magic wardrobe, I was leaving lost children behind me. Pamela might not be the obvious choice to bring balance to our lives, but help, as the saying goes, comes in unexpected ways.
Cleaning was far from Pamela’s only skill. She had a degree in evolutionary psychology, “plus,” she informed us, “I cook real good, too.” I never dared take her up on the offer, but occasionally, standing at the stove, I’d hear the familiar slap of flip-flops behind me. “Scoot!” she’d order, hip-bumping me out of the way. “Cookin’ relaxes me.” And I’d watch, helpless, as she stirred into my black bean soup ash from the tip of her cigarette along with the cache of flies off her sun visor, many of which weren’t actually dead but had been resting against the orange plastic as if kicking back against the windshield of a yacht and enjoying the view.
Pamela may not have liked children, but they were very taken with her. Within days Jesse and Sam began scripting a sitcom based on her imagined home life with an idler of a husband who lounged around in soiled Carhartts while Pamela served up retaliatory cat-food dinners and beer full of spit. In no time at all, the whole family was talking in Pamela’s vernacular, but this was safe to do only once she was done with work and careening down the mountain again. Not only did Pamela’s knowledge span an eclectic variety of subjects, she was also blessed with supernatural hearing.
Yes, Pamela could hear a watch tick in space. She could hear water bubbling in the earth’s shallow crust. She was everywhere and nowhere. Say the discussion turned—as discussions sometimes do—to Meat Loaf’s real name. Pamela would switch off the vacuum cleaner and from the other side of the room drawl, “Oh, that’ll be Michael Lee Aday.” No matter how obscure the question, no matter how far she was from its point of origin, Pamela had the answer. “That’ll be Kissinger!” she’d say, emerging from the charred intestines of the grill.
“Sweet Jesus, will ya check in the Book of Genesis?” she’d shout up from the hinterland of the basement.
The only time Pamela had trouble hearing was when it came to actual cleaning instructions.
“You want me to dust the what?” she said, tapping dustpan and brush against her crepey leggings.
“The baseboards?”
“Why, in God’s name?”
“They’re dirty.”
“Nobody looks down there!”
“The tops of the pictures too, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Say again?”
“The tops of the pictures?”
“Goddamnit, I’m tall as a stork and I never had the urge to look that high. Don’t waste my time.”
Right again. As long as the bears weren’t snuffling through the garbage, as long as our pillowcases weren’t infested with earwigs, what did it matter? Sometimes you need someone to come along and teach you how to prioritize.
Whenever Pam’s workload became too heavy she conscripted the children to active duty. They became adept at keeping the animal traps baited, and her habit of heckling them, whilst necking beer from the bottle, only drove them to try harder as they struggled in and out of biting storms, arms piled high with firewood. Honestly, things seemed to be coming good for all of us.
At some point during her assemblage of careers, Pamela had been a counsellor of sorts, and she’d certainly developed a refreshing way of dealing with self-aggrandizement.
“You any good at that?” she’d demand, each time I settled in front of the computer.
“OK, I guess.”
“Got anything to say that ain’t bin said already?”
“Uh . . . well, I’m trying . . .”
“Those words gonna mean something to anybody apart from you?”
I’d scuff my heels and stare at my sentences, helplessly trying to squeeze some divine truth from them.
This cut no ice with Pamela. “Well, it ain’t no rhetorical question. Will they or won’t they?”
“Probably not.”
“No wonder you got pain in your back, slumped all day at that thing. Shut it down and help me fold this goddamn sheet.”
I did as she said. Moreover, on top of every page of text I took to scribbling Pamela’s initials, along with Voice! Point! Universal truth! Just as a reminder that pretty much everything else could be incinerated.
After she’d been with us awhile, Pamela began to bring items up to the house that she figured we might be interested in buying. The first time she delved into her knotted black garbage bag we feared the worst, but out came a first edition of an Ansel Adams book, for which she asked five dollars. “And don’t you dare smoke me on the price!” she warned. The following month she arrived with a four-by-six-foot Magnum poster of The Magnificent Seven. “I know how y’all like this film crap,” she said, hauling it out of the back of the Dodge and staggering up the steps with it on her back.
“Where do you get all this stuff, Pamela?” I wondered.
“Folks who don’t need it no longer,” was all she’d say.
The print was in wonderful condition and signed. The framing alone was worth two hundred dollars.
“Yours for twenty,” Pamela said.
Despite her modest prices on these finds, Pamela had in
deed begun slamming us on the hours. “Yeah, I don’t really work that way,” she said, brushing aside the time sheet I eventually produced. “So what if I’m a little off here or there. God help me, I’m worth the extra, and it’s not like you’re gonna do it, right?”
She had a point.
“You wouldn’t have a prayer without me,” Pamela liked to remind me every now and again. “My time is a gift, and don’t you forget it.”
One morning, eating cereal, I noticed that the milk didn’t taste right. Its texture was so watery it barely constituted nutrition. I checked the carton in the fridge. I AM THE 2% the slogan proclaimed. I placed the carton back in the door shelf, feeling the thermo-chill in the air. Was that me as a mother? Diluted? If time was a gift and I was giving 98% of it to writing, then Pamela, even with her egregious clock punching, was heaven-sent. So I suppressed my doubts, hoping that, as with the colour of our Pamela-laundered clothing, the money would all wash out even in the end.
From time to time Pamela complained of loneliness. “Oh, it’s not the sex,” she’d remark to four-year-old Mabel, who she’d taken to treating as a confidante. “Sex I can get anywhere. It’s the companionship, know what I mean?”
The children proposed a match with Rabbit Charlie, who lived in the woods in a classic silver Airstream, which he shared with a hundred floppy-eared rabbits. Rabbit Charlie had pellucid blue eyes and immaculately combed white hair. It was rumoured that he’d once been a Mr. Chips–style philosophy professor undone by the death of his wife, though an equally reliable source claimed he’d never so much as kissed a woman. The only thing that convinced me the relationship was ill-starred was an image of Pamela skinning his beloved rabbit family, one after the other, asserting, “Hey, a girl’s gotta eat, don’t she?” Turned out, though, Pamela had her own recipe for romance.
