Love Always (30 page)

The telephone rang. As soon as Piggy got up, he turned the phones back on. The call was nothing that interested him; he was speaking in a normal tone of voice, so Lucy and his wife couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“It’s better if he gets a stimulating call right off,” his wife said. “He does better when he’s catapulted into things. Piggy needs a little prodding to seize the day.”

Piggy came out of the kitchen. He was holding a bowl with a bunch of grapes in it, which he did not offer to anyone. He sat
down, letting his wife get the next phone call. It was Hildon, wanting to talk to Lucy. She realized when she stood how little energy she had, how tired she was. Hildon was taking care of St. Francis. There was no Cindi Coeur column this week. Hildon acted as if just talking to Lucy, she might crack. He lied and told Lucy that everything was fine. He told the truth, that he missed her. St. Francis was holding his own. What he did not tell her was that his wife had left him and that she had decided to sue for divorce and name Lucy as corespondent. If he had ever had the ability to talk her out of this, he didn’t now; she had come back to the house, not knowing that St. Francis was there, and he had bitten her on the leg. She had found out that St. Francis was Lucy’s dog. This had delighted her lawyer. As Hildon rattled on nervously, she realized, suddenly that she had inherited St. Francis.

“Piggy making everything worse for everybody?” he said.

“Not really,” she said.

“You get some sleep?”

“I’ve had about five hours sleep in the last three days,” she said.

“Still coming in at the same time?”

“Yeah,” she said.

Hildon was picking her up at the airport. She decided that she and Nicole should go to Vermont rather than Philadelphia. When she was better able to deal with it, she would see her mother. It really did not seem possible that she would never see Jane again. It had taken Jane awhile, but finally she had figured out what she could do that was too dangerous, and she had done it. None of that silly hot-potato game they had played when they were children, both of them so fearful that it became fun, scalding their hands tossing a hot Idaho back and forth in the kitchen. Early on, Jane had convinced Lucy of the rewards of acting-up: everybody turned their attention to them, their mother doubted her ability to raise children, chaos resulted in later bedtimes and in rewards being proffered if they would only calm down. Maybe, Lucy thought, if Jane was in Heaven, she was enjoying looking down and seeing Piggy Proctor slumped over his bowl of grapes, his wife nervously
blowing on seashells, Lucy in a state of shock. Dealing with hot potatoes was much easier than taking the torch when it was passed: now she was a mother; now she was Jane.

Lucy realized what a coincidence it was that nobody in the family had a father. Or not for long, anyway. They were women who raised women. It might explain why they were all half crazy.

No it didn’t. Everybody was half crazy. She was being as self-indulgent as Noonan, who pretended to understand the world in terms of heterosexuals’ ideas of the way things should be. She had to fight this: it was not going to be the case that Jane, even in death, could still manipulate her so that she seemed to be an arch conservative.

It was far from true. She was only conservative in comparison with Jane. Conservative wasn’t exactly it, either; she had always had an advantage. She had always known something that Jane didn’t know. When they were teenagers, she had not told her because she wanted to protect her. As they got older, there seemed no way to capture the moment again, to explain.

When she and Jane were little girls, they had played in a backyard smaller than, but almost as congested as, Disneyland. They had been watched over by a woman named Miss Maybel. Miss Maybel was round and smooth, with skin the color of cocoa. She was from Jamaica. In retrospect, she must have been their father’s mistress. On Lucy’s sixteenth birthday she had been taken into New York alone for a grown-up dinner with her father. The dinner was so grown up that not only did he order a bottle of champagne, but after she had drunk half of it, one of the waitresses joined them at the table. “I wanted you to meet some real women—women who don’t act like your mother and all your mother’s friends,” he had said to her.

“Hey,” the waitress had said. “I’m meeting your kid. It wasn’t part of the deal that I had to hear about your wife.”

“You’re used to a bad deal,” Lucy’s father had said. “Isn’t that what you always say?”

Lucy had understood it all in a flash, and for some reason she had been terrified—terrified of both her father and the waitress. It was a rotten thing to have done to her—more punishment
in the guise of pleasure—but if he hadn’t been so outspoken, and so harsh, what happened next might not have happened. Her father had started to order Beefeater martinis made ten to one. She must have looked miserable enough to have softened the waitress’ heart. She no longer remembered how they got from the table to the bathroom, or why she would have gone, but she did remember the waitress drying off the formica counter at the side of the sink, and the two of them sitting there moments later, swinging their legs like schoolgirls. “Nobody is any one way,” the waitress had said to her. “I’ve got a lot of talent. Don’t look at me and just think I’m some waitress. Your father has a good heart. He’s also got a mean streak. You’re not just sixteen years old, right? You’re full of energy, like a kid, but another part of you can sit still in a restaurant and sip champagne with the best of them, right?”

Lucy nodded. She had gone into the bathroom afraid of the waitress—she supposed she went because getting away from her father seemed more important than avoiding the woman—but suddenly something about the way the waitress smoked her cigarette and slouched as she talked made her feel sorry for her, sorrier than she felt for herself. She had asked what the waitress did when she wasn’t a waitress. The waitress had hopped down from the counter to tap and twirl, and as she did, Lucy had felt happy and then almost elated. The waitress had freed her with the kick of her foot, in a way: if people weren’t any one thing, then of course situations weren’t. No one ever again changed quite so abruptly in her presence, but that was irrelevant: Lucy believed that the potential was there, and from then on she became the Lucy who was involved in something, and the Lucy who watched herself and the situation from afar. She felt sorry for all the people who didn’t realize that their world could change in a second.

It was Jane’s beauty and her craziness that made her attractive to men, but it was Lucy’s personality that attracted them. Ever since that night when she understood everything differently, she didn’t judge people in the same way. When they put on a performance to impress her, she was pleased that they had made the effort, if she liked them. Pleased but restrained,
because it was likely that the opposite was also true. And when men she did not care about put on a show, she was dismissive but polite, assuming that, of course, they were also men who were potentially interesting and attractive. Simply because she would not pass judgment, men became more and more fascinated.

This approach took its toll, of course. When doors were left open, it could get drafty at night. Endless opportunities were extended merely because she did not rule out possibilities. And since there were no particular ground rules, even those who were malicious couldn’t zip the rug out from under and topple her, because she had made no firm assumptions about where she stood to begin with. Sometimes, like today, what she was most sure of was fatigue. She could see the attraction of winding a turban around her hair, putting on a white robe, and marching off to meet her fate in crumbling Earth Shoes. As Nigel, at the magazine, was fond of saying, “Set the camera on infinity and you’re bound to get the long view.”

She went back to the living room. Piggy’s wife was no longer there, and Piggy stood with his back to her, reading letters and telegrams, head bent. PP was embroidered in elaborate letters on the back of his robe. He was as much of a father as any of them had. She might have thought of him as old, standing with his head bent, but instead of an old man’s scuffs, he had on blue Nikes, black knee-high executive socks, and two-pound ankle weights. That took care of that.

J
ANE
and Lucy’s mother, Rita, sitting at her desk in her house in Philadelphia, looked out at the park across the street and reflected on the fact that she thought of herself in terms of her connection to them: she was Jane and Lucy’s mother. Even though Jane was dead, she was still Jane’s mother—to another mother, at least, she would never have to explain that. She did not really feel that she had to explain anything anymore. She could not remember the last time anyone had asked her for an explanation.

In spite of the fact that she was under no obligation to explain anything, she was sitting at her desk because she had gotten up that morning wanting to write Lucy a letter. Lucy felt as bad about Jane’s death as she did. If she called to talk to her about it, though, Lucy would be brave. Lucy would not have to be brave reading a letter.

She was not sure what she wanted to say to Lucy. This, for certain: that from the first, the children had had the greatest interest in anything dangerous. They preferred to stand at the top of the landing, barefoot, toes overhanging the top step as if they were standing on a diving board, rather than to sit in a chair in the living room. They were as comfortable with height as the angels. Also, if anything was slightly precarious, they were drawn to it. They would have walked like the Wallendas on the clothesline stretched from the porch roof to the maple tree if she or her husband hadn’t grabbed them and lifted them down. They shimmied up the side of the tree like mountain climbers, and later in the day they’d be filthy from spelunking in the crawl space under the porch. There was always a reason:
the neighbor’s cat had been down there for an entire afternoon, meowing, and it might be hurt; the bird’s nest had to be brought down right away, before Daddy got home, because there was going to be a storm. They always thought of themselves as people on a rescue mission. As though it mattered that the balloon string had gotten tangled around the clothesline. As if the birds didn’t build nests strong enough to survive storms. The way they thought about it, inanimate objects were to be cared for just as if they were alive, and the whole world was there for the saving. They loved little things. Seedlings in the garden. Lucy probably remembered going out after a rain and trying to remove the little clumps of mud that weighted the new plants down. She certainly remembered the gardens. She could recite the names, still, of every flower.

Lucy probably did not know—but perhaps it would not interest her—that one time Jane cried all afternoon when a boy in the neighborhood poured boiling water on an anthill. It was as if she’d turned the corner and seen the river Styx.

They developed their own systems for things. That was admirable, of course. Why should mothers be so disturbed by inventiveness? Lucy had had such a terrible time learning the Palmer Method. “Fluid motion,” her teacher had said. “It is necessary to feel these curves in the hand,” moving her own hand like a metronome. When she wasn’t looking, Lucy would copy a page from the book, as she was supposed to. Then she would go back and add swishes to the letters—a combination of writing and painting, it looked like. “Ladies,” their dance instructor, Miss Jersild, would say, “spine straight, feel no weight. Head high, body dangling from the sky.” They were supposed to think of themselves as marionettes, erect but relaxed, waiting to be put into motion.

One day, in the basement, Lucy had stood on her father’s workbench, with torn nylons she had found in the wastebasket tied together, looking for all the world as if she were about to drop a noose over Jane’s head. Lucy couldn’t possibly have been about to hang her, because she worshiped Jane, always. They were just pretending—wanting to really feel the pull from above. It was one of the few times they ever took an abstraction
and tried to be literal-minded about it. They spent their lives doing quite the opposite.

Rita thought that that sort of imaginative ability could help a person. A pleasant notion, to think of dirty clothes piled high in the laundry basket as Monet’s haystack. To see the melting ice cream as a cloud.

Dear Lucy—How you two loved bubbles! I’d try to do the dishes and you two would reach around me and dip your blowers into the sink and lift them out and blow and blow. I had to put so much detergent in the water that the dishes almost slipped out of my hands. It took forever to rinse them. To think that I ever thought of all that fun as frustrating. There we’d be, bubbles all around us, a storm of them mirroring everything in the kitchen—all those mundane things, stepstools and canisters, become for a second mere flashes of color that popped and collided
.

They were endlessly fascinated with lightning bugs. They would beg to sleep with a jar of them in their room, air holes punched with the ice pick in the metal top. They’d put it by the night-light because they thought they blinked more when there was some source of light. It had its equivalent in Christian thinking—all the little children prospering under God’s radiance.