“Jesus Christ.”
“âand you can't take credit for the car, because Jimmy nearly browbeat you into it, and you know it. If it had been up to you, we'd have come out here in the Volvoâ”
“A Volvo is a prestige car.”
“Our Volvo looks like you've been using it to haul horse manure. Literally. I mean, I'm glad we bought the Mercedes. It's neat as hell. I've always wanted cream leather seats, just to see how long it takes to get them dirty. But I can just see you sitting there feeling you don't deserve it. Feeling
guilty
about it. Because that's what this place does to you. It makes you feel guilty about everything good that's ever happened to you.”
They were at Plumtrees School. Back in the days when Pennsylvania had still been a colony, and for years afterward, this had been Hollman's one-room schoolhouse. Back in the early sixties, when the town had begun to bulge with the never-ending baby boom, this had been painted barn-red and used as a kindergarten for the children of the people who lived in Plumtrees and Stony Hill. Now, Liz checked the sign on its side, it was some kind of office for the Health Department.
“It's so odd,” Liz said. “I can't imagine Hollman having its own Health Department.”
“I give up,” Mark said. He opened
Metamorphosis
and flattened it out against his leg. That was another reason why all his books fell apart. He had no respect for spines. “Someday, you ought to sit down and figure out what it is you want to do when you grow up. Try to get that done before I leave for prep school, so I don't have to worry about you stranded in the house on your own with nobody but Geoff to take care of you.”
I thought you were counting on Jimmy to take care of me
, Liz almost said, but didn't, because that was another whole can of worms and she had no intention of going there. They'd reached that odd T-intersection where going to the left led to some kind of industrial plant Liz had never actually understood. It called itself a sand company. She had no idea what a sand company did. She looked in its direction and saw that the big square funnels were still up. She had no way to know if they were running. When they were all growing up together, the girls who lived down that road were the ones they all officially labeled “Poor,” and
then ignored, because everybody on earth knew that poor people were not as important as rich ones.
She turned to the right, past the houses with the low white rail fences that made her think of horses, although nobody had ever owned horses this close to town, at least since the advent of the automobile. The road sloped upward to yet another intersection. On both sides, there were large frame buildings painted white and gray, with blank windows, like college dormitories in New England. Surely there had to be changes here, somewhere. The old high school was being used for something else now, and a new high school had been built as part of an educational park back there in Plumtrees. The library was supposed to have a new wing. The problem was that it all
looked
exactly as she remembered it. She felt she could get out of the car right now and walk on out to Mullaney's on Grandview Avenue or to the Sycamore farther down the road, and never miss a step or be confused by an uncertain landmark. This was Hollman as Brigadoon. It only woke up and came back to life when she was ready to visit it.
In the passenger seat, Mark put down his book again and reached out to take her hand. He flattened her fingers against his palm and pointed to them, silently, as if they were characters in a movie by a foreign director who believed in moments of significant pause.
Liz looked down at her own hand and saw that, somewhere between Plumtrees and here, she had bitten her fingernails so far down that the skin on her fingertips was split and bleeding.
Maris Coleman had been very careful about liquor since that day in New York that had ended so badly, and she was being especially careful about it now, in Hollman, because of the problem of the cars. Like most teenagersâand unlike BetsyâMaris had gotten her driver's license as
soon as she turned sixteen, but unlike people like Belinda and Emma and Chris, she hadn't used it much in the years since. Vassar had been very picky about undergraduates with cars when she was there. It made more sense to stick close to campus when she wanted to go “out,” and cross the street to Pizza Town, where the drinks were larger and more impressive than any she'd ever seen since. Harvey Wallbangers. White Lightnings. They came in tall ice cream soda glasses, and there was some kind of contest going on that only the boys entered. Drink three and get the fourth one free, or maybe it was four and get the fifth one freeâwhatever it was, it was dangerous, because those drinks had three or four shots of liquor in them. One White Lightning made her head spin. Of course, she was better than Betsy, who, when she went to Pizza Town at all, nursed along a single rum and Coke or 7UP and Seven, all night, and looked as if she were hating even that. Maris had never understood what it was about Betsy and liquor. Even later, when they had met up together in New York and Betsy had been drinking a fair amount in the evenings, she had never seemed to like it, and she'd treated hangovers as catastrophes. Maris had always thought there was somethingâprissyâabout somebody who pretended not to like liquor, something sour and stuck-up, and she had never believed that bit about how Betsy couldn't stand to be hungover. A hangover was nothing. You could get rid of it in sixty seconds flat by spiking your morning coffee.
The other problem with cars was the years since Vassar, when Maris had been living in New York, where she neither kept a car nor wanted to. She hated to drive, and hated everything that went along with driving. She had never been very good at it, and was probably even worse now. She hadn't been behind the wheel for longer than fifteen minutes in ten years. She didn't have any automobile insurance. There was also the problem of the laws against “drunk driving,” which didn't really mean driving drunk, but only driving when you'd had anything to drink at all. Maris knew that much from the public service announcements
that played late into the night when she was watching PBS or MTV because she couldn't sleep. In some places, police checked people who didn't look drunk at all. It wouldn't matter that Maris never showed her liquor, or even felt it, most of the time. She had been careful since that day in New York, but not because she believed for an instant that Debra knew what was going on. Debra thought she'd had food poisoning. It had been the talk of the office for days afterward, according to the reports she'd heardâshe'd been at home, where Debra insisted she stay, “recuperating”âand the women from the office had trekked down to Greenwich Village every afternoon to bring her boxes of pastry and take-out specialty salads from the little hole-in-the-wall gourmet delicatessen where they always got their lunches. Maris had thought, more than once during that period, that that was as good as life could get. She had never had to go out except to go to the liquor store, and that was only at the end of her own block. The only thing she could think of that might have made it better was a change in location, say to somewhere in the Caribbean, but she wouldn't have been able to afford that. It bothered her no end that Betsy got to go to the Caribbean all the time these days, even though she didn't like the beach.
It was because of the way she felt about cars that Maris was staying with Belinda Hart, and it was because she was staying with Belinda Hart that she saw Betsy get out of the big green Mercedes parked at the curb in front of English Drugs. Obviously, Maris thought, Betsy didn't realize that English now had a parking lot out in back. Maris heard a rustle in the apartment behind her. Belinda was coming out of the bathroom at the back of the kitchen. This apartment was worse than the one Maris had in New York. It had more square footage in absolute terms, but it was much more cramped, and its claustrophobic airlessness was not helped by Belinda's mania for knickknacks. The walls were covered with fake needlework samplers, trumpeting inanities.
He prayeth best who loveth best/All creatures great and small
, one of them said in ornate script made of navy-blue
thread to contrast with the faux-natural linen background. The verse was surrounded by kittens, puppies, and birds, frolicking in fields of tiny flowers. The tables were full of fake Limoges porcelain and knockoffs of Hummel figurines: white boxes trimmed in gold and scattered with painted purple violets; three-inch-tall goat girls wearing dirndls and carrying pails. The only thing that was missing was a statue of the Virgin in a grottoâbut of course that would have to be missing, since Belinda was a Methodist.
“Look,” Maris said, pointing toward the window next to the only dining table in the place. Of course, Maris thought, her own apartment had no room for a table of any kind, but that didn't really count, because it was in Manhattan.
Belinda went to the window and looked out. “Is that Betsy Wetsy?” She sounded startled. “She's so incredibly thin.”
“She works out nine hours a week. We've even got a room full of exercise equipment in the office so that she can work out there when she doesn't have time to do it in Connecticut. She hates gyms.”
“God, she was bad at gym in high school. Do you remember?” Belinda pressed her face closer to the glass. “Still,” she said.
“Still what?”
“I don't know. I guess I thought she'd look more like herself.”
“Meaning what?” Maris said.
Belinda backed away from the window and sat down in one of the other two chairs. Down on Grandview Avenue, there was no longer any sign of Betsy or the two boys. Belinda bit her lip.
“I've seen pictures of her, of course,” she said, “and I've seen her on television, but somehow I thought that when I saw her in person, she'd look more like herself. You know. Sort of lumpy and ⦠whatever. Sort of gray.”
“She doesn't look gray. She can manage to look pretty damned spectacular when she wants to make the effort, which she usually doesn't.”
“Oh,” Belinda said. She tapped her fingers against the tabletop. The top was peeling along the edges, much the way Belinda's nail polish was peeling along the sides of her nails.
“Well?” Maris said.
“Emma said the same thing. That she didn't look like you'd think she would, when you saw her in person. Emma and George saw her somewhere, in England, I don't remember. Emma didn't even tell me about it until last week. I don't understand people sometimes. The only thing is, wellâ”
“What?”
“Well,” Belinda went on, looking stubborn. “It might not work. This thing. I mean, if she's like that, and not like we remember her, then it might not work. So maybe we shouldn't try it. Because she's different.”
Maris looked into her cup of coffee, the pale coffee she had made from freeze-dried stuff out of a jar that was all Belinda kept for coffee. She would have to find a way out to a decent grocery store to pick up some beans and a grinder. Made like this, the coffee tasted too much like gin, which wasn't supposed to have a taste, but did. She was not surprised at Belinda's wavering. She had expected something of the kind, from all of them, because they really had no idea what they were dealing with. They all thought they could go back to 1969 and behave as if nothing had ever happened.
“Listen,” she told Belinda. “She hasn't really changed. Not the way you think. It's all an act.”
“It can't all be an act,” Belinda said seriously. “She really does look like that. She can't be doing it with mirrors.”
“But she is doing it with mirrors,” Maris said. “That whole attitude, that thing she's got of not giving a damn what anybody thinks, it's all an act. She cares just as much now as she ever did. She cares so much, it makes her sick.”
“Well,” Belinda said dubiously, looking out the window at the Mercedes again. “Maybe she cares about people like Jimmy Card and, you know, those people she's with on
CNN. George Stephanopolous. Like that. That doesn't mean she's going to care about us.”
“You've got it backward,” Maris said. “She can take George Stephanopolous or leave him, it's us who still get to her. And that gives us our chance. If things go on the way they've been going on, something will happen. You know it will. And it won't be good for us.”
“Maybe it won't be good for her, either.”
“Don't bet on it. She's got Jimmy Card to run interference for her. Christ, Belinda, aren't you sick of it? All those stories in the magazines, making it seem like we were all a bunch of brain-dead hoodlums, torturing the poor genius throughout her whole blameless childhood. That last story in
People
damn near made me throw up. And now she's here, and you know what? Within twenty-four hours, at least two reporters are going to be here, tooâ”
“I don't understand all this about the reporters,” Belinda said querulously. “It's not like she's Julia Roberts. She's not a movie star. She's just on all those news shows and you know nobody pays any attention to the people on those news shows. Why do they pay attention to her?”
“Because they think she's going to marry Jimmy Card,” Maris said patiently, “and because she's got a hot-selling book and looks like she's going to have another. Everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame. This is Betsy's fifteen minutes. Does it matter why?”
“I never got fifteen minutes of fame,” Belinda said.
Maris considered the possibility that Belinda had never heard the phrase before, or even that she had never heard of Andy Warhol, and dismissed it. Belinda read
Vogue
the way fundamentalists read the Bible, and had, for forty years. The problem with Belinda was that she never remembered anything. Maris knew enough to realize she had only a small window of opportunity. If they started to doubt, it would all fall apart, and in the end nothing would happen but a dull month's visit, with Betsy speaking at the library and the high school and going back to New York
to write an essay for
Dissent
on the death of small-town America.
Maris looked up and out the window again, and all of a sudden, there she was: Betsy, coming out of English Drugs' front door, holding Geoff 's hand while Mark followed close behind, carrying an enormous brown bag. Belinda moved closer to the window to get a better look, and as she did, old Mrs. Cardovan stopped at the side of the Mercedes to talk. Maris couldn't hear, but she could see what was going on. Betsy and Mrs. Cardovan were exchanging greetings and introductions. The boys were being made to prove that they had been well brought up, and knew how to shake hands and say the right things to older women. Mrs. Cardovan was very, very old. When they were all children, she had been the chief salesgirl at Noe's Dry Goods, which is what Hollman had had for a basic clothing store until the big discount places opened up in the new shopping center out on Route 6. She was as tiny as a dwarf, and hunchbacked. All the girls had wondered how she'd ever been able to get somebody to marry her. Now her gnarled olive-skinned face was beaming under her Darth Vader helmet of white hair.
Betsy was shooing the small boy into the back of the car. Then she turned and shook Mrs. Cardovan's hand, and Mark shook it, too, as if they had all just met in some big crush of a cocktail party. Betsy got in behind the wheel. Mrs. Cardovan waved a little and started to walk again along the sidewalk. The Mercedes kicked into life and edged out onto the road. There were other Mercedes in Hollman these daysâno place was as provincial as it had been in 1969âbut this particular Mercedes looked bigger than the others, or shinier, or more intimidating.
“Well,” Belinda said when the Mercedes was out of view.
“Exactly,” Maris said. “You've got to see what I mean, right? We can't just let it go.”
“Maybe,” Belinda said.
Maris drank down the last of what was in her coffee
cup. It was nearly straight gin. She bit her bottom lip to keep herself from heaving. The muscles in her arms started to twitch. She could see the green glint of the car's roof far up on Grandview Avenue, past the place where Noe's had been, past reality. Belinda was staring in the same direction.
“Well,” Belinda said again, still sounding uncertain.
“We've got to do something,” Maris said, getting up to go back to Belinda's kitchen counter. She put her cup down next to a ceramic spoon holder with “Home Sweet Home” painted on it in yet more ornate purple script, next to yet more ornate purple violets. She wanted to pick the silly thing up and smash it into shards.
“We've got to do something,” she said again, instead. “If we don't do something, this whole situation is going to jump right up and bite us on the ass.”