The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (29 page)

After a time he takes the pick he had strapped to his backpack in case and begins to dig.

In the hours or days that follow, Weston eats, he supposes: by the time the hole is big enough to settle down in, his supply of granola bars is low and the water in his canteen is almost gone but he is not ready to go back into his house. In between bouts of digging, he probably sleeps. Mostly he thinks and then stops thinking as his mind empties out and leaves him drifting in the zone. What zone, he could not say. What he wants and where this will end, he is too disturbed and disrupted to guess.

Then, just when he has adjusted to being alone in this snug, reassuringly tight place, when he is resigned to the fact that he’ll never see her again she comes, flashing into life before him like an apparition and smiling that sexy and annoying, enigmatic smile.

“Wings!”

Damn that wild glamour, damn the cloud of tousled hair, damn her for saying with that indecipherable, superior air, “What makes you think I’m really here?”

The girl folds as neatly as a collapsible tripod and sits cross-legged on the floor of the hole Weston has dug, fixed in place in front of him, sitting right here where he can see her, waiting for whatever comes next.

It’s better not to meet her eyes. Not now, when he is trying to think. It takes him longer than it should to frame the question.

“What have you done with my stuff?”

Damn her, for answering the way she does. “What do you care? It’s only stuff.”

Everything he ever cared about simply slides away.

They sit together in Weston’s tight little pocket in the earth. They are quiet
for entirely too long. She doesn’t leave but she doesn’t explain, either. She doesn’t goad him and she doesn’t offer herself. She just sits there regarding him. It’s almost more than he can bear.

A question forms deep inside Weston’s brain and moves slowly, like a parasite drilling its way to the surface. Finally it explodes into the still, close air. “Are you the devil or what?”

This makes her laugh. “Whatever, sweetie. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he shouts. “I don’t know!”

“So get used to it.”

But he can’t. He won’t. More or less content with his place in the narrow hole he has dug for himself, Weston says, “It’s time for you to go,” and when she hesitates, wondering, he pushes Wings Germaine outside and nudges her along the access tunnel to the hub, the one place where they can stand, facing. She gasps and recoils. To his astonishment, he is brandishing the pick like a club. Then he clamps his free hand on her shoulder and with no clear idea what he will do when this part is done or what comes next, he turns Wings Germaine in his steely grip and sends her away. Before he ducks back into his territory Weston calls after her on a note that makes clear to both of them that they are done. “Don’t come back.”

Behind him, the cellar waits, but he can’t know whether he wants to go back to his life. He is fixed on what he has to do. Resolved, relieved because he knows this at least, he sets to work on the exit where he left her, erasing her with his pick.

—
The Naked City
, 2011

How It Works

I see them framed in a Gothic arch, two handsome women caught in mid-confrontation. It’s like something out of an old movie, a black-and-white weepie my mother saw as a kid, although she would deny it,
In your dreams. That was way before my time.

They sit with heads bent under slanting light, one blonde and one—the habit makes it hard to tell. They’re both women of a certain age, although Lydia is, face it, farther along in years and worldly experience than the abbess—I think. Mother Therese is younger, but who knows what she was up to back in her days as Terri Gordon, rising starlet? Both have the chiseled profiles, the entitled air of born stars. It’s about bony structure, although unlike her holy adversary, my mother has been surgically enhanced.

Lydia spins out her life in terms of
although.
Weighing this against that, bent on making herself look better to the few people who matter in her odd, Lydia-centric world. My mother is the star of her own life, eternally searching for the right man to share the screen with her. And if she defies probabilities and forces this encounter with the abbess? If you’re that deep into this failure of the imagination, Mother, go for it.

They are fighting for the soul of Gerard LaPierre. Mother Therese wants it for God, although if Gerard is to be believed, God already has it. My mother could care less about souls. She wants him for herself.

I can’t wait to see the movie.

Note to Mother: dood, it’s not a movie.

Don’t call me mother. If anybody asks, we’re dear friends, and if they remark on the resemblance, yes, we’re related. We could be sisters, right?

My mother’s newest acquisition told her that he just turned thirty, but he looks older to me. In fact, he told her a lot of things.

Lydia’s new man has the same big, square head and blunt, handsome features as her comic book idol—what’s his name? Captain Marvel—and how long has it been since he flew? Right, Mother, these details date you without leaving a trace, and you don’t even know.

This Gerard looks kind of like him, with the same blunt features and empty
eyes, same dark hair like a backslash over the brow. He flashes the same bland, sweet smile. Instead of the cape with the lightning bolt, he arrives cloaked in a boyish, vulnerable air, unless that’s tragic inevitability.

Practiced, engaging and needy in equal measure, he spins out his story, smiles, and waits. He is quite the storyteller. And what a story! Your heart goes out: poor guy.

“My father was a black Irishman, that’s all Mam would say about him, even though I begged to know. He ran out on her as soon as she got pregnant and it made her angry and sad. She tried hard but was bitter every day of her mortal life. She tore up all his pictures but I guess I look like him, why else would she whip me the way she did? Poor little Jennie LaPierre, nobody to love her, no place to go and ugly to boot. Out of a clear sky she’d turn around and smack me for no reason, and I suppose that’s why. She was a hard woman, but she tried. God knows she tried.

“In our part of Minnesota, Catholic girls didn’t get pregnant and if they did, God forbid, then they had the baby and either she married the guy or she went back to school and her parents brought it up, the town we lived in was that old-fashioned and remote. We lived so far out in the sticks that the only other option was St. Mary’s home for unwed mothers, and that’s where I lived until I came here.

“See, my mother was a ward of the state. Even I would have to say she was never good looking, I guess she was pretty hard to place, so she landed with foster parents who didn’t care a fig about children and acted like she was a great burden. They didn’t want her, they did it for the sake of the monthly check from the state. She lived on table scraps and they worked her like a dog and she never heard a kind word or saw a penny from them. Then she got pregnant. She hid it for as long as she could, but they kicked her out as soon she began to show.

“So she ended up with the nuns, and unlike every other girl who went to St. Mary’s, my mother stayed. See, the deal is, they take bad girls in when they get in trouble, and take care of them until their babies come, the idea being that after they give the baby up for adoption, they can go back to their lives unencumbered, and most of them do. My poor Mam had nobody and nothing to go back to. She was fifteen!

“The sisters took pity and gave her a kitchen job, at least to start. I was the only child on the place. It was lonely but they made a big fuss over me, which is just as well. Mam wouldn’t give me up because she just wouldn’t. She probably loved me, but she didn’t like me much. The nuns said I’d be better off with
a nice family in want of a child but Mam said stop, or she’d throw me in the river and jump in after me. She said I was hers to take care of and she swore she would, by God, take care of me until the day she died.

“I love my mother and she did try, but Lord, she was mean. Thank God for the nuns.”

His recital slips out too easily, and the tone? Archaic, like a book you find in your grandmother’s house and start reading out of sheer boredom. He probably says “Lord” every time he tells the story, and the story never varies. Where did you get it, man? Masterpiece Theater? Some things are too good to be true, but Mother bought it. Excuse me. Lydia did.

She bought him.

This is how my mother keeps new men in her life. She may flirt to get their attention, but she pays for what follows, and believe me, she can afford it. She co-opts her quarry with intimate dinners by candlelight in adorable country inns, where she seems almost as pretty as she thinks she is. She buys ambience: a wide, deep sofa by the fireplace where she and the chosen can sit after dinner, lulled by the flames before they go upstairs, and they will go upstairs where there are always feather mattresses in big brass beds. These places are not cheap, but for the time being, for as long as she likes, he is hers.

She consolidates her position with gifts: the barn coat Gerard is wearing the day I get my first look at him. The new Leica hanging around his neck, because she’s cast this new man as the next Helmut Newton or Annie Leibovitz—typical Lydia, she’s bought him everything but a car, although she’s only known him since September.

No problem. My mother is a living showcase for subtle excess. Nothing but the best for our Lydia: the newest sports car, with another coming as soon as new models hit the floor; A-list wraparound shades, designer jackets, and top-of-the-line jeans, boots by Gucci or Prada, depending, a gaudy contrast to the nun’s medieval-looking habit, although I’ve tried to warn her off that encounter. A sheepskin coat and a mink vest to wear over her thousand-dollar cashmere sweaters because her newly renovated weekend place is, after all, in the country. As though she would risk breaking a heel hiking in these woods.

Walking into her costly little shack in the woods, I know I’m not here for quality time with Lydia, who always has reasons.

I’ve been summoned to admire the nice new life she has decorated and furnished in this nice new town. Since then I’ve learned to hate the country. The monstrous pines and thick greenery give me psychological nosebleeds. The rustic farmhouse and Lydia’s antiques are locked in combat: highly polished,
fragile tables teeter on weathered floorboards so heavily varnished that they slide on the slant, while her fussy chairs and elaborate side tables cling to the new bearskin rug with their little claw feet. I am alarmed by the profusion of silk cushions in her lavishly enhanced farmhouse boudoir—only Lydia would think of her bedroom as a boudoir.

I want to believe she invites me because somewhere deep, she actually likes me, but for Lydia, I am an accessory with one simple function: I’m pre-set to arrive, exclaim over all her choices, and admire.

And is Gerard an accessory?

It’s hard to know. That first day, I mistake him for the last of a series of personal appearances as neatly scheduled as performers waiting to do their turn onstage: Lydia’s nice new friends, walking into the perfect setting for the next scene in her nice new life.

Now I’m not so sure. Had she planned this or does Gerard come and go whenever he wants?

Our lunch guests for Lydia’s grand opening are her suave Realtor and his wife, the kind of friends she makes every time she sets up another new life. Her next-door neighbors come over from their refurbished farmhouse in time for tea and leave on the stroke of twilight. The couple she’d invited for drinks thank her and go on to the next party and Lydia sighs the way you do when the curtain comes down on Act One. I sit there in her silent, perfect little living room, exhausted and honored.
Finally. It’s just us.

It’s scary. She’s my mother, but we’ve never been, well, what you would call close. Oh, it’s not her fault that she sent me to live with Grandmother after she and Hal divorced; after all, was
she
supposed to look after me when job-hunting was first on her to-do list?

I remember the cab; I was three. Lydia leaned forward on the seat, intent on delivering me to Bronxville. I remember her rhinestone compact that she handed off to me to shut me up. There were three compartments clasped in the mouth of a fake gold frog. I made the frog’s mouth pop open and shut until the hinges snapped. Lydia smacked me and we both burst into tears. I even remember what she said, “It isn’t you, I loved that thing and now it’s ruined.”