Authors: Joyce Maynard
L
IKE
I
TOLD
Phil Donahue, I don’t care how it happens, any parent who has to bury their child, their heart is broken. That’s all there is to it. Broken. Crushed. You wish you could die. Dying looks good. Burying your son is a hundred times worse than if you just died yourself.
But terrible as it is for anybody that loses a child, at least the people that lose their son in a war or something, they can hold on to the thought that there was a point to it. If he was driving drunk, that won’t stop you from going crazy with grief. Won’t stop you from missing him or loving him either. But at least then you’ve got to say to yourself, “He made his bed, now he’s lying in it.”
But this. I go back over and over it, and you know, I could accept losing him. I’d accept never going fishing with my son anymore. I accept it that I’ll never again sit in a gym watching him take a foul shot, and then look over at me with that grin of his and give me the thumbs up. Never get over it, understand? Just accept it. The part that makes me so I want to pound my head through the wall—and I’ve tried it, believe me— is what was the point?
If it actually had been a robbery, and Larry walked in at the wrong time, and some creep got scared and shot him—even then I could maybe say it was like an accident. They weren’t thinking about my son, they were just thinking about themselves. They didn’t know what they were doing. Didn’t know whose brains they were blowing out. Just some guy walking in the wrong door at the wrong time. No face. No name. No life.
But tell me what I’m supposed to think of this? They knew, and they did it anyway. They knew he was a nice ordinary guy that loved his wife, coming home from a long day of work, thinking maybe she’s got a beer and a kiss waiting for him, and instead it’s the muzzle of a gun.
I can even deal with the two creeps that shot him. They didn’t know my son Larry. They were just a couple of losers whose own lives were so worthless they must’ve figured his was the same. You live in a world of crap long enough and everything looks like crap to you. Don’t get me wrong. If I had the opportunity I’d like to spit on their faces and then spit on their parents for bringing scum like that into the world. I could watch them hang and never blink. If they were here now, I could wring their necks with my bare hands. But as much as they disgust me, they’re not the ones I think about when I get up in the middle of the night wanting to scream.
It’s her. She knew my son. She slept every night in the same bed with him. Knew he would have done anything to make her happy. He handed her his heart on a plate and she threw it in the garbage disposal. She didn’t do it because he was unkind to her. She didn’t even do it because she hated him. He just got in her way. So poof, she gets rid of him.
She ate at our table. We called her our daughter. Even afterwards, in her grief, whose hand did my wife hold, whose telephone number did she dial when she couldn’t stand it anymore and just needed to cry? Hers. The only one we thought could understand the depth of our loss, the only one we imagined that shared the bottomlessness of our pain.
Now it turns out that all the time we were just watching a show. It was all one big performance.
I tell you, she had us going there. We bought it. So did my son.
Kind of makes you wonder what else out there that you think is real isn’t really. Like those people that say we never actually landed on the moon, the whole thing was just staged in some sound studio somewhere. People who say Kennedy isn’t actually dead, he’s just a vegetable in some nursing home someplace. Who do you trust anymore? How do you know anything’s real anymore? How do you know who else out there, that you thought was your friend, might just be waiting for the right moment to stick a knife in your throat? Why does a person do something like that? How do you ever get over it?
Like I said on “Donahue,” my son gave her his love and promised to stick with her forever. Her, I guess she figured his life was about worth the price of that gold chain we gave him when he graduated high school. “But I tell you how it is for Angela and me, Phil,” I said. “Our lives are over. She might as well have put a gun to our heads too. I wish she had, Phil. I wish she had.”
W
ORK IN HOMICIDE AS
long as I have, certain themes emerge. You get where you can spot what the crime’s about, and mostly it’s one of three categories. Money, sex, ambition. This one now, it was all three. Depending on who you were talking to. It was money for the loser that helped. For her, ambition. But for the poor slob that did the husband in for her, it was sex of course.
Sex now. You put sex into a situation and everything changes. A woman wants to get out of her marriage. Her husband doesn’t want a divorce. She’s got to dump him, but he’s holding on. Nobody knows what to do. Then sex enters in. She gets a sixteen-year-old boyfriend. Now she’s crossed a line. Broken the rules. Once she’s done that, it’s an easy step to the next point. Once she’s already taken her clothes off, danced for him in her garter belt, once she’s let him screw her, anything can happen. After that they both know what an act it is, going around looking like regular citizens. Once you’ve heard the crazy things a person says in bed with another person and you’ve thought the crazy things a person thinks when it’s happening, it’s like you’ve entered into this other country where no more laws exist. Once sex gets into the picture, you can never go back to being one of those other kind of people that act like they don’t ever sweat. I mean, under these clothes we’re wearing, we’re all just a bunch of animals, aren’t we? Once two people have sex they can’t pretend different anymore.
So after she screwed him I figure the next step was easy enough. Now that they’ve done whatever particular odd thing it was that turned them on, what’s the big deal about taking him aside one day and saying, “Suppose we get a gun and blow my old man away?” Easy enough to start talking about buying bullets and making it look like a burglary, once you’ve done the other.
And for his part—we’re speaking of the boy now—you might just as well give a sixteen-year-old boy crack cocaine as give him a nice-looking twenty-five-year-old woman to fuck. He’s going to be a slave, you understand? A fucking slave. He’ll do anything just to get in her pants again. Fix your car? Mow your lawn? Kill your husband? Sure. He’s got to have it, you understand? Got to.
Nobody likes to say this, but we all know it’s true. Sex is just so bizarre. Here we all are, walking around going to the supermarket, making bank deposits, shooting the breeze with someone over at the barber shop about our car. Acting like we’re all normal. Everybody keeps up the act. How’s it going? Just great. How about you?
And the whole time we’re doing this, we’ve got this other life going on—the life you live beyond closed doors, alone, or not alone, in the dark, when you’re just a naked body, burning up with animal desires. Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is strange? Tell me, am I the only one who notices?
I go register my car. Woman at the Division of Motor Vehicles hands me a form, sticks her pen behind her ear, types up the form. “Another hot one,” she says to me. “Think it’ll ever rain?” You can tell she’s just come from the beauty parlor. She has these little pearl earrings on. Wedding ring. Photos of the kids on her desk.
But what I’m thinking is, What does she look like when she’s got her girdle off and some guy on top of her? Does she go home at night, put on cutout panties and a pair of handcuffs, and wait for her best friend’s husband to come over? Or lie there alone listening to old Frank Sinatra records and touching herself? Let’s face it, once you throw sex into the equation, anyone out there can become crazy. We’re all capable of bizarre behavior. Who follows the rules? What are the rules anyway?
W
E’RE GOING TO MEET
Oprah, can you believe it? They called us last week, after
USA Today
picked up the story about Suzanne jumping off the bridge. We were on “Good Morning America,” “Evening Magazine.” That’s not even counting the local shows. I tried taping them, but we were on all three channels at the same time, so we could only get one. It’s OK though, because this is just the beginning. Sally Jessy Raphael wants us to come on her show too. We’re also talking to Geraldo. Suzanne Maretto would die if she knew. Turn over in her grave, I mean.
First thing we did after the people called from Oprah was run out and get a big can of Ultra Slim Fast for Lydia. Like Suzanne used to tell her, the TV camera puts ten pounds on a person. But we have eight days to work on taking some weight off, if she sticks to the Slim Fast and maybe a few rice cakes. We’re going to the mall for something to wear on the show. Not stripes they told us. But Lydia already knew that too. From Suzanne.
But that’s not the most incredible part. Yesterday this woman comes to see us. From Hollywood. She’s a producer. Did you ever see that made-for-television movie about the girl with the deformed face that had to go around with a bag on her head all the time, until this fashion model with terminal cancer gave her money for an operation? She was in charge of that one. Also the boy that turned out to be allergic to his own family. I never saw that one, but it starred that kid from “It’s All in a Day.” The cute one.
She wants to buy the rights to Lydia’s story. We already signed a contract. They’re paying Lydia $10,000 right away, and a lot more if the network goes ahead and puts the movie on TV. Which Ellen—that’s the producer—says is basically a sure thing, on account of how our story has, like she says, all the elements they go for in Hollywood. She loved it when Lydia told her the part about walking in on Suzanne and Jimmy that time. And her doing her cheering routine in just her garter belt.
At first, after all this happened, I guess Lydia’s head got pretty messed up. Thinking about how Suzanne never really liked her at all, and Jimmy going to jail, and having to face all the kids at school that talk about her all the time now, and nobody wanting to sit with her at lunchtime, like she’s an alien.
But now it looks like things are really working out. This producer, Ellen, says they’ll even fly us to LA when they start filming. To be consultants. Meet the stars and everything. Those kids at school that won’t be friends with my kid—do they get to be in
People
magazine? Do they get to meet Oprah? I ask you.
Which gives Lydia motivation for her diet, naturally. Like Suzanne always said, evidently, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
B
ELIEVE IT OR NOT
I used to be skinny. Back when I was in preschool, before Suzanne was born, people used to say I looked like one of those Walter Keane paintings—you know the ones I mean, of some little girl with big eyes and toothpick legs that look like she just got out of Biafra or a concentration camp?
My parents were always trying to get me to fatten up in those days, if you can believe it. Mealtimes, the two of them would sit with me through the whole entire Huntley-Brinkley news, plus “Newlywed Game,” one at each end of the table, and me in the middle. “Now the airplane’s flying into the hangar. Here’s one for your Aunt Pamela. One for Uncle Roger. We’ll buy you a Skipper doll if you finish your vegetables.…” Nothing worked.
Then they brought Suzanne home from the hospital, and everything changed. Suzanne this, Suzanne that. “Have you ever seen a more beautiful baby?” “Listen, I bet she could be in commercials. Gerber or Beach-Nut. Pampers, maybe. That’s how Brooke Shields started out, you know. And look at her now.” I remember this one time, when we took her out to the supermarket, this woman stopped my mother and asked her if she’d thought of sending Suzanne’s picture to Ivory Snow. For the box. She said she’d never seen anything so cute in her life as Susie in that little bunny dress of hers. Then she must have noticed me, because she said I was cute too. “But for goodness sake, get a little meat on her bones,” she said.
I started making myself eat my vegetables. I joined the clean plate club. I even asked for seconds. Thirds. Dessert. Snacks. Yes, I will have a potato. Butter or sour cream? Give me both. Please.
I thought then they’d be happy, but you know, they never noticed. When I went to the doctor, and he said I was in the ninety-eighth percentile for weight, I thought they’d be proud. But by then they were just worried about Susie being underweight. Now all they did was keep making that plane fly into her mouth. One for Aunt Pammie. One for Uncle Roger. They told Susie they’d buy her a ballerina doll, if she’d stay in the clean plate club for a whole week. “What about me?” I wanted to yell. But I didn’t say anything. I kept figuring any day now they’d notice what a good job I was doing, how big I was growing.
I started eating more and more. It got to where I knew I was too big. The only clothes I fit were chubbettes, and even then, I could always feel the elastic on my panties cutting in around my thighs and my stomach. My undershirt left little red marks in my armpits, from rubbing. But I couldn’t stop.
Evenings, when my dad came home from the lot, he’d stand in the doorway and put his briefcase down. “Who’s my big girl?” he’d call out. We’d both come running. But the one he picked up was Susie.
“I’m the big girl!” I wanted to yell. “I’m the biggest one of all.” Only I didn’t.
Saturday mornings, he took her with him on his golf game. She rode on the back of his cart at the club. I stayed home and watched cartoons, with a big plate of pancakes and lots of syrup. As long as I had food in my mouth, things felt OK.
When you’ve got two sisters like that, it gets to where people always look at you like you were half of a set. She was the blonde, I was the brunette. She was the baby, I was the big sister. She was the skinny one. I was fat. She was the star, center stage. I was her hairdresser. She was popular. Me—take a wild guess.
When the whole business started, after Larry was killed, at first it looked like here we go again. Suzanne on TV every night, getting interviewed, having her picture in the paper. Everybody feeling so sorry for her. My mother went out and bought her a whole new wardrobe, for goodness sake. On account of how her old clothes would probably remind her too much of how happy they’d been, and so forth.