Shopgirl (9 page)

CHRISTMAS IS APPROACHING AND SHE
is making plans for travel to Vermont. She will leave on one of the worst flights imaginable, the red-eye to New York on Christmas Eve, connecting to Montpelier on a commuter flight at 8
a.m.
on Christmas Day, and then take a bus seventy-five miles to home. Ray gives her the cost of the ticket east, as he figures Christmas is going to strain Mirabelle's budget and why not help her. He also slips her an extra $250 so she won't be a pauper in front of her friends. She already knows what she is going to give Ray for Christmas, the nude drawing she made of herself the night of her Thanksgiving despair, in which she is suspended in black space. And he knows what he is going to give her, a hand-picked blouse from Armani, which he bought for her knowing she would be absolutely crazy about it.

Mirabelle begins the nightmare of holiday travel with a phone call from Ray wishing her well, and a black sedan he sent to take her to the airport. Even flying at these inhuman hours, the sedan is the last sanctuary of calm before the holiday crowds engulf her. After several hours, the 747 to New York stinks from the perspiration of 400 passengers being rocked and rolled in the uneasy Christmas air. She transfers at JFK and finds herself aboard a prop plane that sits on the runway a full hour before takeoff. On descent to Montpelier, the plane bounces through a snowstorm and scares even the pilot. Mirabelle has to comfort the twenty-five-year-old, six-foot-four footballer who sits next to her, who quakes with every engine downshift and every crank of the flaps. Mirabelle herself is not nervous; it just doesn't occur to her that the plane can do anything but land, and she alternates between soothing the athlete next to her and reading a book.

By morning, after retrieving her luggage without help and hauling it to a shuttle that takes her to the bus station, she looks like a college student bound for home, or a ragamuffin. The bus, warm and cold at the same time, heads through the light snow. The riders are equally divided: some of them are like Mirabelle, exhausted travelers who had bumpy naps on interminable night flights, while the others are wide-awake conversationalists on the first leg of their exciting Christmas journey.

When the bus pulls into Dunton at 11:30
a.m.
, Mirabelle can see her older brother Ken standing inside the depot, wearing a bright red parka the size of an oil barrel. They say quick hellos as she runs from the bus to the car wearing her skimpy L.A. jacket; the freezing wind tells her that she has been in L.A. too long. Her brother shifts the lime green Volkswagen into gear and mutters a “hey kiddo,” and then drives about five miles an hour on the icy roads. Ken is a policeman with an uncanny knack for tracking down criminals in his small town, mainly because he knows everyone and has a sixth sense for adolescents who might be headed in the wrong direction. She feels deep affection for her brother, although this has never once translated into honest conversation. She asks him how Mom and Dad are, and he answers truthfully, which is that they are unchanged.

Unchanged means this: Mom cannot imagine in this world that Mirabelle is having sex, and Dad ignores the subject entirely. Even though Mirabelle is twenty-eight years old, her status as a child in the house has never changed. Father to daughter, daughter to mother, the relationships are frozen in time, and it is this containment she felt nine years ago that squeezed Mirabelle out of the house and into California, where she could start digging in fresh dirt for her real personality. California doesn't matter, though, once she walks through her parents' door.

Moderation in all things, including success. Her dad supports his family well but has not succeeded past that. The house is small and paper thin; they have two old cars, but currently her father is on a rampage of relative success selling home products a` la Amway. The extra income means a few things are being refurbished, and a plastic sheet covers the entire roof of the house waiting for dry weather so it can be repaired.

Catherine and Dan have been married for thirty-five years, and the stoic construct of their relationship has been broken only once, when Dan revealed his seven-year affair with a neighbor. Catherine collapsed, then fought, then resurrected the marriage with a quiet power and sophistication that she had not shown at any other time in her life or has ever shown again. The one who was broken, who did not recover, who did not understand, and who saw the image of her father crack and shatter, was Mirabelle.

Mirabelle did not know how to rebound from this betrayal, and Dan did not know that while he was cheating on his wife, he was cheating on his daughter, too. But she still needed to be loved by this man who had committed the unspeakable, and the push/pull she felt toward her father confused and stunted her.

Even before this episode, Mirabelle had feared her father, but she could never remember why. She does remember a shift in his manner, sometime after he returned from the war. She remembers a loving, even jovial man who became sullen and removed, and whom she learned to be cautious around. With quiet pervading the house, Mirabelle would retire to her room and read, thus beginning a lifelong relationship with books. But now all that is years ago. Now her father is much more congenial, as though something has softened, as though his resolve to be unreachable has eroded with time.

“So how're you doin' out there?” Her father sits in the easiest chair in the living room, and Mirabelle sits on the sofa, verging on relaxed.

“I'm fine, I'm still working at Neiman's.”

“How's your art coming along?” Dan never sees her endeavors in art as frivolous, and as much as is possible for him, gets it.

“I'm drawing, Daddy. I've even sold some.”

“Really? That's great, that's just great. What do they sell for?”

“The last one brought six hundred dollars, split with the gallery.”

Mirabelle's mother brings a tray of Cokes into the room and just catches her daughter's modestly expressed boast. She looks askance at her, as if to say, “Can that possibly be true?” For some reason she feels the need to fake naïvete´ about this art thing that Mirabelle is doing. She pretends she doesn't get the preoccupation with it, that it is all beyond her understanding. The source of this self-deception is a mysterious and arbitrary decision to place certain arenas outside her realm of understanding, like the man of the house being simply unable to comprehend how to wash and dry dishes. The woman who had become a firewall of protection around her family when it was threatened now feels the need to play dumb.

The three talk on, then Dad suggests the family take a walk around the neighborhood, which they do. He leads her by certain houses so he can call out to neighbors and show off his daughter, and Mirabelle becomes the daughter she was to him prior to the revelation of his affair. She hangs back behind her dad. Her pose becomes awkward, her voice weakens, she shyly says hello to familiar neighbors, and none of what she has seen and experienced in California is present in her demeanor. Catherine stands by, in wife mode, and Mirabelle looks at her and wonders where her own deep eroticism could possibly have come from.

After the family dinner, with her brother's wife Ella making it five, Mirabelle goes to her room and sits on the bed amid the relics of her childhood. Her mother's discarded sewing machine has been stowed in the room, and there are a few stray cardboard storage boxes stuffed into her closet, but otherwise everything is the same. A clock radio from the seventies, predigital, sits on her bedside table, in exactly the same spot it occupied when Jimmy Carter was president. The books that Mirabelle dove into when she wanted to vanish from the family are still in perfect order on her painted wicker bookshelf. The yellow glow from the incandescent overhead light washes over everything, and it, too, is familiar. Although she feels she is a stranger in the house, she is not a stranger in this room. This room is her own, and it is the only place where she knows exactly who she is, and whom she is fighting against, and she would like to remain in it forever.

She opens one of the storage boxes––cardboard drawers in cardboard chests––and sees piles of old tax forms, long past any purpose of being saved, a few ledgers, and some rolled-up Christmas wrapping. She kneels down, brushing dust off the floor, and slides open the lower drawer. A folded sweater and more financial flotsam. She sees an array of photos tucked inside another antique ledger. She picks it up and the photos spill onto the bottom of the box. She sifts through them and sees Christmas pictures of herself at five years old, riding on her father's neck. He is all smiles and clowning, her brother is nearby with a space weapon, and Mom is probably taking the picture. But the mystery for Mirabelle is, what happened? Why did her father stop loving her?

Mirabelle lies back on her bed holding the photos like a gin hand. Each one is a ticket to the past; each reveals a moment, not only in the faces but in the furniture and other objects in the background. She remembers that rocker, she remembers that magazine, she remembers that porcelain souvenir from Monticello. She stares into these photos, enters them. She knows that even though the same people and the same furniture are outside her door, the photo cannot be re-created, reposed, and snapped again, not without reaching through time. Everything is present but untouchable. This melancholy stays with her until sleep, and she loves being held by it, but she cannot figure out why these photos are so powerful beyond their obvious nostalgic tug.

The next day, she and her dad take a walk in the woods. In Vermont, no matter in which direction you go, you end up in the woods, so they go straight out their own backyard. The snow is crunchy and manageable. Mirabelle wears her mom's parka, which makes her look like someone has inflated her. Dad is all man in a furry vest and plaid shirt and lambskin jacket. After the “how's Mom” discussion in which little is said and nothing is answered, Mirabelle produces from her pocket the photographs, and hands them to him.

“I found these last night. Remember these?” She laughs as she presents them, to indicate their harmlessness.

After reaching clumsily for his glasses, which are inconveniently stashed under layers of insulation, Dan looks at the photos.

“Uh-huh.” This is not the response Mirabelle is looking for. She had hoped for a smile or chuckle or flicker of some memory of pleasure.

“We were giggly,” probes Mirabelle.

“Yeah, it looks like we are having a lot of fun.”

He hands the photos back to her. She cringes at his disconnection from the events in the pictures.

Mirabelle suddenly knows why the photos have such a powerful effect on her. She wants to be there again. She wants to be in the photographs, before Easter, before the shift in his personality. She wants to be hoisted onto her dad's shoulders the way she was as a child; she wants to trust him and be trusted by him, enough that he would share his secrets with her.

“These were taken right when you came back from Vietnam, weren't they?”

Mirabelle has tried to open this door before. Today his response is the same as always.

“Not sure. Yeah, I guess.”

The air bites them as Mirabelle and her father continue to walk. Then, coming to a clearing in the snowy forest, they grind to an uncomfortable halt. Mirabelle pushes a hand deeper in her pocket and fingers the card given to her by Carter Dobbs. The distance from the house gives her courage and she thinks now is the time. “There's a man trying to reach you,” says Mirabelle. “He says he knows you.”

She offers him the card. Taking it, he pauses in the chilling snow and looks at it, saying nothing.

“Do you know him?” Mirabelle asks.

He hands the card back to her. “I know him.” And the conversation is over. But she had noticed something. When he was holding the card, he took his thumb and traced it over the name, and when he did so, he was powerfully distant from where he is now, in this snow with his daughter, in the woods in his backyard, in Vermont.

Her mother leaves the house to go babysit for her three-year-old grandchild. Mirabelle goes to her room after watching several hours of television with her now monosyllabic dad. The house is quiet, and she angles the shade on her bedside lamp and browses some of the books of her youth:
Little Women, Jo's Boys, Little Men, Jane Eyre, The Little Princess, Secret Garden, The Happy Hollisters.
Nancy Drew. Agatha Christie. Judy Blume:
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Deenie. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself.
But something catches her ear. Something . . . the sound of a cat? Or an injured animal in the far distance. But her mind keeps recalculating the data, inching the source of the sound closer than the outdoors. This wail, these moans, are coming from inside the house. Wearing her bunny slippers––a gift last Christmas from an aunt who underestimated Mirabelle's age by fifteen years––she opens the door to her room and steps out into the hall. She does not need to walk far to know that the sounds, which she has now identified as sobbing, are coming from her father, who is behind the closed door of his bedroom. She stands frozen like a deer with bunny feet, then guides the slippers backward into her room, noiselessly. She shuts her door without making a sound, as she had done one night twenty-one years ago after hearing the same cries coming from the same room.

The moaning has stopped, and now the house is quiet. Mirabelle sits in her armchair and sees her parka, which has tumbled off the foot of her bed and onto the floor. She retrieves Carter Dobbs's business card. She approaches her parents' bedroom and lays the tiny business card up against the doorway. Then she quietly slides her way back to her own room.