Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

by J. R. Helton

  We pulled into the Hampton drive and parked under the balcony. We slowly walked back up the steep front steps and went inside. Karen went into the master bedroom.

  “We’re going to change,” Betty Sue said. “There’s an open bottle of red wine inside the refrigerator. You can get that and three glasses, please, if you like, and I’ll roll a joint.”

  “Okay.”

  “Meet ya on the porch.”

  She waved and walked into the bedroom. I found the wine and three matching glasses, walked through the den, opened a sliding glass door, and stepped onto the deck. I set the glasses and bottle on a white table surrounded by wicker-and-metal chairs and lounges. I walked to the far corner of the balcony where a floodlight shone brightly out across the yard. Susan was perched on the railing facing me, her shirt undone. She unbuttoned my shirt and ran her hands along my back. I held her, and the wind blew her long hair into our faces.

  “I have to get home.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “I’m late. I have to go. My parents—”

  “Let’s go back inside.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “We need to keep this screen door shut,” Betty Sue said. “Be careful over there. All those boards are rotten. I need to get BH to get José out here and fix this deck. Or maybe someone will buy the house before it falls down.”

  “Probably be easier to sell the house.”

  “Probably.” She poured wine into her glass. “Thanks for bringing the wine out. Did you have fun tonight?”

  “Yes I did. I’m really glad I came out.”

  I took my glass. Betty Sue filled hers, and we toasted each other.

  “To you,” I said.

  Betty Sue smiled and sat down. “To me. Let’s light this.” She lit the joint, and we passed it back and forth.

  “Karen’s wonderful, isn’t she?” she said, holding in smoke.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She’s incredibly beautiful. Men constantly fall in love with her.”

  “Is there one in love with her now?”

  “Yes there is. His name’s Chandler, an architect. They live together. He’s very handsome, though somewhat older.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “She has such a happy outlook on life. She’s very centered.”

  “She is.”

  “I think it’s because her parents died tragically young and she basically had to raise her younger brother and sister by herself. It must have forced her to see the good things, made her very strong. Her own child is fabulous.”

  I coughed. “She has children?”

  “Well, just one. April, who is . . . at least twelve, I think. She is a darling little girl—or really, almost a teenager.”

  “How old is Karen?”

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “I thought she was around my age, twenty-five or twenty-six, max.”

  “She’s thirty-four, ten years younger than me.”

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “She’s come out here for two weekends now to clean the house.”

  “Does she clean well?”

  “She’s very thorough.” Betty Sue took a hit and put the roach in the ashtray. “Do you want any more of this?”

  “No thanks.”

  Betty Sue checked the den for Karen and whispered, “She said something very strange today, though, that’s made me wonder about her motives. I really hate to be suspicious, but I think she wants to move out here and live in my house for free while I stay at Martin’s in Austin and work on the screenplay.”

  “Where’s Martin?”

  “It doesn’t matter, he’s out of town. I have a room there now, you know.”

  “Oh, that’s right. So what makes you think this?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked up at the sky, then quickly back at me. “What she said was that April really loved Cypress and that she couldn’t wait to see my house again and that all April ever talks about is me, my house, and how fun it would be to live in Cypress.”

  “And?”

  “Well, April’s never seen my house. And I only met her one time, a long time ago at Melissa Montgomery’s house for about one minute, certainly not long enough for the child to develop a fixation on me or my house.”

  “How do you know she wants to live here for free?”

  “That’s how she works. I mean, she’s really Melissa and Brian Montgomery’s cook. And she cleans for them and takes care of the kids when Brian’s on the road on tour. They really love her and give her everything. They even make her car payments.”

  “I see.”

  She stared, measuring my response. “I don’t know. She’s very sweet.”

  “And here she comes.”

  Karen slid open the screen door and walked onto the porch. She was wearing a pink Mexican house dress, her hair was down, and she had on sandals. Her toenails were painted red.

  “I’m sorry. I had to call about April,” she said and poured herself a small glass of wine.

  “How is she?” Betty Sue asked.

  Karen sat down in a chaise lounge next to Betty Sue. “Oh, she’s fine, wonderful, fantastic. Did I tell you she wants to take singing lessons? She sings like a bird, though, already.”

  “I guess she gets it from her mother,” Betty Sue said.

  Karen sipped her wine. “I guess.”

  I sat up. “Do you sing?”

  “I used to,” Karen said. “I used to sing a lot. My ex-husband, back in California, used to have this jam band that was pretty hot. I mean, they were popular down around Hermosa Beach. He played the drums and they didn’t really have a lead singer. So I tried to convince them they needed a female lead singer, but they wouldn’t let me join. I think I could’ve really helped them out.” She stared up at the sky.

  “Can she go to school Monday?” Betty Sue asked.

  “Who?”

  “April.”

  “Oh yes, she’s fine.” Karen looked at me. “I really hate for her to miss school. She loves her school.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s this special school, see,” Karen said, and touched Betty Sue’s knee. “Betty Sue’s heard this so many times. It’s called the Walnut School, and it was developed in Austria years ago by this old psychiatrist named Karl Fratzholz. What they concentrate on there is the spiritual side of education. If a child doesn’t grow up with a balanced knowledge of his or her spirituality, then it’s like she’s missing something, something just as important as reading and writing, maybe more important. I think it’s more important. For instance, my daughter, April, couldn’t really read until she was nine, but through the Walnut School, she’s been given this sense of confidence, she’s been wrapped in this spiritual cloak”—she ran her hands along her arms—“that consists of a strong sense of her inner self, the goodness in herself that enables her to function much better than other children her age. Now she’s reading and writing at the level of a sixteen-year-old.”

  I looked up at the stars. The cloudy edge of the Milky Way was visible. “That’s great.”

  “It’s like white light,” Betty Sue said. “You can surround things with white or pink light, and all that remains is goodness. I know whenever I think of Dean and the divorce, I surround him in white light and he exists comfortably there on his own, responsible for his own happiness. You are only responsible for yourself.” She drank a swallow of wine. “You cannot, no matter how hard you try, make someone else feel the way you want them to, all the time. You’re not responsible for their happiness.”

  “Or their misery?” I said.

  “All you can do is give them your love and warmth and be yourself, and then they have to deal with it. You should do that with your stomach problems, Jake. Surround your anxiety in white light,” Betty Sue said. “You have to release all of that negative energy
about your father. No one is more responsible for how you feel than yourself. That recliner over there has just as much of an influence on your outlook on life as anything else. You can only do it to yourself. You choose to grieve or be angry. I did with Dean for years until one day I wised up and made the decision to take advantage of this life I’ve been reincarnated into and be happy. Every day, consciously decide.”

  Karen swatted a mosquito on her leg. She lifted her skirt to examine the bite, and her pale upper thigh came into view. “That’s what the Walnut School helps you with. You get in touch with the things in life that are truly important, and then you know how to make the right decisions when you have to.”

  “Right.”

  We leaned back in our chairs, staring up at the black sky.

  “You know,” Betty Sue began, her voice quiet and steady. “I’ve been told there’s an energy vortex behind my house in the backyard.”

  I had a drink of wine. “By the swing set?”

  “No, I don’t know where it is exactly. It was so strange. I met this woman at the Harmonic Convergence Costume Party in Santa Fe. I had come as”—she looked at me defiantly—“one of my former selves, a princess from a planet of Pleiades. Well, it turned out that this woman, Nancy, was from the Pleiades system, too, and she was from Cypress.”

  “What a coincidence,” I said.

  “It was. And anyway—oh, y’all don’t want to hear this.”

  “No, tell us.”

  “Yeah, tell us,” Karen said.

  “Okay. She said that right in front of the hill, the area between the Henshaws’ house and mine—she knew the Henshaws—there is this incredible amount of energy that is a conduit to the other side of the world. And that my land was in the exact corresponding place as the Pyramids of Egypt.”

  “Wow,” Karen said, “that’s wild!”

  “I thought so.”

  “Neat,” I said, and looked back up at the sky.

  “So, Jake,” Karen said, “tell us about The Cry of the Plain.”

  “I don’t remember too much of it. It was mostly just work all week and parties on the weekend—quite a few parties, actually.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “Yeah, I guess it was. I wouldn’t have been able to go to any of them if Susan hadn’t been so well connected.”

  “That must have been exciting for her to be the assistant to the producer.”

  “The work seems to suit her. She has a good memory and is so—”

  “Beautiful,” Karen supplied.

  “Uh, yeah, everyone definitely seemed to love her. I was constantly being told by people how the movie couldn’t have been made without her. The producer she worked for, Ian Watt, is young and new at this. I think his dad’s some big shot at ABC, right?”

  Betty Sue shrugged.

  “He is, and anyway, just about everybody hated Ian’s guts because he was such a cocky little penny-pincher. Susan was the only person that could get along with him, so she served as a sort of liaison between all the warring parties on the set and the production office. She made herself essential, which is what you have to do. And she was friendly, which doesn’t hurt either.”

  “She sounds like a sweetheart,” Karen said.

  Betty Sue sat up. “Is that the phone? Did you hear the phone?”

  There was a faint ring.

  “Yep.”

  Betty Sue stood up and opened the sliding screen door. “BH and Denny said they might drop by. They’re supposed to call.”

  “You know, I’m getting kind of tired,” Karen said, and yawned to prove it.

  “I’ll tell them not to come over,” Betty Sue said and shut the screen door.

  Karen and I glanced at each other and looked away.

  “So,” Karen said.

  “So.” I stood up and walked to the railing.

  “I bet you really miss Susan.”

  “I do.”

  “You must have a really strong marriage if you can be apart like this.”

  “We’ve known each other awhile.”

  “A lot of trust.”

  “Right.”

  I stared down at the driveway. Karen walked to the railing and stood by my side.

  “It must be really neat that she works for the producer.”

  “He’s just one of the producers, and I don’t know how neat it is.”

  “What?”

  “In a way it kind of pisses me off.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. I feel like . . . she’s getting ahead of me somehow. She’s learning all of these . . . words. The money language. I don’t know it. Ian Watt knows it.”

  “But you’ve got a pretty neat job, too.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I just . . . I’d hate for this to be the end, you know? What I do.”

  Karen moved closer and leaned over the railing.

  “Ow,” she said, and looked at the white underside of her forearm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Something scratched me.” She ran her fingers over the old dry wood.

  “I think some nails are—”

  Her hand stopped on my arm. “Here it is,” she said, and ran her finger over the nail. “So you don’t want to be a painter?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sick of hanging around painters.”

  She looked up at me and smiled. “I’m hanging around one.”

  “They’re not all as exciting as me.”

  “Betty Sue told me that you were really an artist.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Yep. Do you still draw?’

  “Not really.”

  “I’d like to see something you’ve drawn.”

  “Thanks, Karen.”

  Betty Sue opened the screen door. “They’re already in Austin.”

  Karen sat down in her recliner. “God, where do they get the energy?”

  “I wonder,” Betty Sue said. She sat down and then stood up quickly. “I’m just throwing this out: What do you think about going to bed? Could it be bedtime?”

  Karen yawned. “It’s nice and cool out here.”

  “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow,” Betty Sue said, moving toward the door.

  “Not too much,” Karen said. “The house is pretty clean.”

  “It is, but don’t you have to go to Melissa’s and then Martin’s?”

  “You’re right, I forgot. How did I forget that?”

  “I don’t know,” Betty Sue said and opened the screen door. “Jake, you can sleep in Susan’s room.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or you can stay out here if you want. I just have to get some sleep. You can have that roach if you want.”

  “Thanks, Betty Sue.”

  She came to me, stood on her tiptoes, and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. “Good night, dear. I had a lot of fun tonight. Thanks for coming with us.”

  “Good night.”

  Karen waved. “’Night, Jake.”

  “Good night.”

  They walked inside. I turned, put in a dip of Copenhagen, and spat down onto the driveway, twenty feet below. The bright bowling pin stood like a sentinel across the road. The dry cleaner’s sign shone steadily. A gray cat emerged from the darkness at the corner of the deck and hopped up on the railing in front of me. I held out my hand, and the cat pushed her face against my fingers, making precise turns and purring on the edge of the wood.

  * * *

  In the morning, I took a shower in Susan’s old bathroom. It had now been taken over by Betty Sue. Beauty paraphernalia was scattered across the tile between the sinks: eyeliner and shadows, lipsticks, a variety of lotions, brown vitamin bottles, and a special perm brush I’d been warned not to use. Several black-and-white snapshots from crowded photo booths were tacked to the wall. Betty Sue and Susan and friends, pushing one another aside to be in the center. A picture of myself
sitting on the front porch petting an alert golden retriever. A postcard of Kandinsky. A picture of Matisse writing a letter behind an industrial-size bottle of Clinique body wash. The water in the shower smelled like sulfur. The longer I stayed in, the stronger the smell became. I brushed my teeth, shaved, dressed, and went into the kitchen.

  Betty Sue was washing dishes. A paper bag, filled with clothes, sat by the front door.

  “Mornin’.”

  “Good morning. Did you want some breakfast?”

  “Are you having some?’

  “No, I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “I’m fine then.”

  She rinsed three red plastic glasses. “I put some things Susan left here by the door for you to take back to Austin. There’s a shirt and cap of Dean’s in there too, if you want them.”

  “I do, thanks.”

  She put a dish in a yellow rack. “Are you going to go back soon?”

  “Yeah, in just a minute.”

  “I’m not trying to rush you. You can stay as long as you like. I’m going over to BH’s house, and Karen’s coming with me. Then we’re going back to Austin.”

  “I thought she was going to clean here.”

  “She’s almost finished.”

  Betty Sue turned off the faucet, dried her hands on a towel. “O-kay,” she said and walked around the counter and we touched cheeks. “I’m going to put on my makeup. Thank you so much for coming with us, and listen, we’re going to Calhoun’s tonight in Austin for dinner. Tommy Joe’s playing there, and I love Tommy Joe.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, he’s fantastic, you have to join us. You’ll love him. Melissa Montgomery is coming, and Karen, and Roger Allen is going to play with Tommy Joe.”

  “Roger Allen?”

  “He’s a new songwriter in town. He’s from Vermont. Melissa’s his new manager.”

  “What happened to Brian?”

  “She still manages him, too, but, you know, he’s already been a huge success so—”

  “Now it’s Roger’s turn.”

  “Let’s hope so. Bye, dear. Don’t forget your things. We’ll be at Calhoun’s at seven-thirty.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you.”

  “Oh wait! I found this the other day.” She bent over and looked through a large straw purse under the counter. “It’s that sketch you did of Susan at the airport.”

  I took the paper from her hand. “Oh yeah.”