Absolute Brightness (4 page)

Once Leonard was on the scene, however, Mom somehow found the time to pause before a mirror and quietly appraise her looks. She seemed no longer satisfied with the person staring back at her. She began to consider changes, like flattering shades of lipstick, new outfits, fad diets, and even face-lifts. Was it just a coincidence that she started entertaining these ideas and following through with a few of them shortly after Leonard arrived? I don't think so. As everybody within a twenty-mile radius soon discovered, Leonard was a major fan of the personal makeover.

On the blank pages of his spiral notebook, Leonard drew the faces of generic girls and boys and ladies and gentlemen; and then, using nothing but a ballpoint pen and his overactive imagination, he transformed their faces into something fantastical. This was more than just a hobby, more than merely doodling; it was, like, his full-time job, his obsession. He could spend hours lengthening eyelashes, smoothing brows, shaping hair, making lips more fulsome, sculpting cheekbones, making a nose less pronounced, an expression more vivid and alive. I think he was trying to convince some unsuspecting idiot to be his guinea pig; but no one ever took the bait.

Once, he tried to sign Mom up to be a contestant on a TV show where they gave total strangers a new look and then redecorated the stranger's home to match. Mom kept saying that she was way too busy and couldn't even dream of doing such a thing. But Leonard kept after her. He reminded her that we all had a responsibility to improve ourselves or else we could become hopelessly outdated or, worse, extinct. He didn't care whether the makeover involved a person or a footstool, he believed in upgrade and overhaul. He had plans for everything and everyone—including himself. I once overheard him saying to Mom, “There's nothing wrong with you that a new do and a fresh Amex card couldn't fix.”

Of course it's possible that Mom might have found her way to changing her look on her own. Being the same old disappointed person day after day for the rest of her life might eventually have worn thin. But there is no denying the fact that Leonard's presence and his mania for the makeover goosed her along the path. In any case, within a month, my mother was a new woman. She had tossed aside the pair of powder-blue Reeboks that she'd been wearing to work for the past 150 years, and she was suddenly zipping around the salon in a pair of cute candy-colored mules. She also stopped putting on just any old pair of slacks before going to work. Instead, she wore a short skirt, so short that her legs seemed like they had a mind of their own and could go walking off at any moment without her. She began applying lipstick, eye shadow, and blush. She looked like a shelf item that had been reissued and priced to move. And the worst part? No one was supposed to notice.

“What's with you?” I asked her.

“Whaddaya talking about?” was how she sidestepped the issue.

When I found her collection of dowdy, loose-fitting leatherette smocks stuffed into a garbage bag out by the curb on trash night, I wanted to know what it all meant. She told me to mind my own business, but if I must know, she said, she had ordered a whole new supply of pink jersey smocks with an entirely different cut, a style of smock that she considered “more slimming.” She had a prototype, which she had been wearing for a week. “I like it,” she declared. “It's just so much better.” And to prove that this was true, she modeled it for me, twirling in the middle of the kitchen with the words
HAIR TODAY
dramatically embroidered across her breasts.

Customers began to stare at Mom, and it was clear by the way their eyes followed her around the salon that they wanted whatever she was having. I don't mean they wanted her smock or her new mules. No. They wanted their old lives back, their legs, their breasts, hair, skin—the works. If someone like my mother, a woman who was not so crazy about change to begin with, could effect a transformation so dramatic over a few weeks' time, then it must be available to anyone. And it wasn't that hard to see that Leonard was the mini-mastermind behind it all.

“Whose idea was the smock?” they asked my mother nonchalantly.

“Leonard's. He had a catalog,” she told them, pretending it was no big deal.

“What'd you do to your hair?” they wanted to know.

“Leonard's idea. Pretty wild, huh?”

Soon our phone started ringing off the hook.

“Is Leonard around?”

“Mrs. Ladinsky?” I said, my voice rising with surprise. I wanted her to understand that I considered it highly unusual for a sixty-seven-year-old woman, who had hair the texture of cotton candy and an estranged husband living in Tampa, to be calling my fourteen-year-old girly-boy cousin at ten p.m. on a school night.

“Yeah, it's me. Honey, lemme talk to Leonard, will ya?”

“Hold on,” I said, and then I pressed the receiver against the front of my nightgown, took a few deep breaths, and waited for a decent amount of time to pass. When I was finally good and ready, I said into the phone: “Sorry, Mrs. L, but Leonard's in the bathroom right now. I'm not sure, but I think he's masturbating and I don't want to disturb him.”

“I'll call back.”

Click.

I never told Leonard. Really, they shouldn't have been telephoning our house at all hours of the day and night and treating me like his personal assistant. It wasn't right.

Of course, the question we
should
have been asking was, Why did Leonard have so much influence? I'd been trying to get Mrs. Cafiero to stop coloring her hair Sunset Mist since I knew what hair dye was all about. Why hadn't she ever listened to me? Suddenly there was an orphan in our midst who had a power over Mrs. C that no one could dispute. At his suggestion, Mrs. C walked into the salon one sunny Tuesday and ordered Mom to “Chop it all off. I'm goin' au naturel!”

In fact, Leonard was so busy making everybody over, encouraging everybody to be herself, or rather to become his idea of who he thought she ought to be, that before long all the women were checking out their hair, their hemlines, their crow's-feet, and their bustlines in front of the full-length mirror at the salon. They spent hours trying to figure out if they should indeed go blond, jog, shop, tweeze, exfoliate, go online, learn to drive, or do any one of the 1,001 things Leonard suggested they do in order to improve their lives. Leonard was the go-to guy all our clients had been dreaming about, the guy who noticed them, the guy who wanted what was best for them.

I, however, wasn't fooled for a second. I suspected that Leonard was just trying to get on everybody's good side so that Mom would find him indispensable and then eventually ask him to stay forever. Because let's face it, he had nowhere else to go. We were the end of the line for him, and he was desperate. I just didn't see why
we
should have to be the ones responsible for him, why he had come to live at
our
house, or why people kept telling us it was such a perfect match. The mere thought of living with Leonard for the rest of my life, or even for another year, was more than I could stand. So for the next several months I devoted myself to the task of exposing Leonard's character defects and revealing his true manipulative nature to my mother. Once he had done something inexcusable, Mom would certainly make other “arrangements” and send him packing. Of course, I had to be crafty. I was so busy devising a plan, I never considered the possibility that Leonard might do it himself. And that was exactly what happened. I didn't even have to lift a finger. It was almost too easy.

 

three

“DON'T YOU LIKE
it here?” Mom asked as she freshened her lipstick and looked into her little illuminated compact mirror. It was Thanksgiving Day and Mom had decided that she couldn't possibly wrestle a turkey into the oven on her day off, and so we had ended up at the Fin & Claw restaurant.

“Well, I thought you girls liked it here,” Mom said. “Look. They have that nice cranberry sauce from a can like you like. We don't have to stay here if you don't want to. I thought it was your idea.”

Mom then pressed her lips into a tissue and took one last look at her corrected face before snapping the mirror shut.

“Wasn't it
your
idea, Deirdre?” she asked.

That's when Deirdre lost it.

“
No!
It was
not
my idea. It was Leonard's idea, okay? You
know
that. And really, Mother, you shouldn't do that at the table! It's very—”

“Do what?”

“That!” Deirdre snapped back and took a quick look at the compact.

“Oh, stop it, Deirdre,” my mother said as she tucked the compact back into her purse and out of sight. “There's no one here.”

I looked around the room. It was a sea of old folks, the kind of people who eat dinner before the sun goes down, the kind who don't count.

“Thanks a lot,” said Deirdre, making it seem as though Mom was saying that
we
didn't count either. She stared off into an imagined distance as if the whole world had meant nothing to her and there wasn't a single thing worth discussing.

“I wish I'd never been born,” Deirdre said in a very tired voice.

“You know,” Leonard began with an overly bright gleam in his eyes, “I read somewhere that to be born into this life is as rare as a one-eyed turtle rising to the surface of the ocean once every hundred years and he just happens to come up with his head poked through a hole in the center of a piece of wood that just happens to be floating right there where the turtle comes up.”

All three of us looked at him like he was one of those people at the bus terminal who try to hand you leaflets about the afterlife—which is to say we tried
not
to look at him at all.

“Anyway, that's what they say. It's pretty rare.”

Deirdre groaned, grabbed her purse, and got up from the table.

There was a time when behavior of this sort was out of the question where Deirdre was concerned, because once upon a time, Deirdre was happy. She got all As in school, laughed at everything, talked to everyone, and made up clever songs about Mom's customers on the spot. She smiled at strangers and she had a way of making the people we knew feel as if they actually mattered. When she was nine and signed up for junior cheerleading, she became squad captain within six months, not because she was particularly good at splits or high kicks or looked good in pleats, but because she knew how to rally the girls. It's a shame she didn't pursue her cheerleading in high school, but by then the light in her had dimmed a bit. No one really knew why. At the time, I just figured that she was going through stuff and that Mom and Dad's divorce had taken its toll. Puberty could have also explained it. Everybody knew that puberty could cause all kinds of unexpected changes; it was just a matter of degree. For Deirdre, the degree had been extreme.

“I think she needs a new look,” Leonard said, sipping his Diet Coke through a slim, red cocktail straw. “Something sassy. Something that says, ‘Hey, get a load of me.'”

Even Mom rolled her eyes at that one.

“And just for the record,” I interjected, “this was Leonard's idea. The restaurant. Not Deirdre's. Not mine. His.”

A word about the Fin & Claw: The Fin & Claw is basically a summer business, but it serves the community throughout the year as a tragic backdrop for birthday parties, anniversary and reunion celebrations, dinners in honor of graduating seniors, newborns, bank presidents, and the Elks club. Every family within twenty miles has contributed to its success. We never had much choice, really. It was one of the few places in Neptune where you could celebrate Thanksgiving Day in public. The place was described on the front of the menu as “a Neptunian lair fit for a king,” but really it was just a lot of cheap souvenirs and seaside frippery designed to inspire the summer trade into believing that they had traveled far from home. Starfish, palm fronds, and life preservers were tangled in swags of fish netting, all of it draped dramatically from the rafters and crossbeams. Stuffed sea game and fishing tackle hung on the walls. Large seashells (
not
native to the Jersey shore) were arranged along the ledges of the room. The salad bar had become a big draw long before they installed the see-through sneeze guard.

But the décor was not the only reason I'd hated the Fin & Claw with such a deep and abiding passion. The problem was that no one in Neptune could set foot in there without suffering from a severe attack of remembering. My family was no exception. The last time I was there, I turned to Deirdre and whispered that from now on we were going to refer to the place as “the tomb of our passed youth.” It was as if everything that had ever happened to us as a family was dead and hanging up in the rafters. My seventh-, eighth-, and tenth-birthday celebrations, as well as Deirdre's sweet sixteen. My dad was up there, too (though I tried not to look at him). Every prayer I ever directed toward that beamed ceiling of the Fin & Claw during those endless Sunday dinners was hanging alongside those horrid plastic lobsters and the splintered oars.

Josh Mintern, who was posing as a busboy in a bloodred jacket that clashed with his bright-red hair, delivered a basket of dinner rolls to our table. No wonder he couldn't look me in the eye—the rolls were so stale, they clicked against one another when he set them down in front of me. He had a golden trace of a mustache on his upper lip, and I thought,
My God, we're all growing up, and in about ten minutes we'll be old people ordering the early bird special and complaining about lumps in the gravy.

“Hey, Josh,” said Leonard, and he flashed a bright smile up from the table.

We were all stunned that Leonard was on a first-name basis with anyone in town, let alone someone a grade above him. Josh seemed surprised as well. He just stood there, looking as if he had just been hit on the head with one of his dinner rolls.