A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 18
‘I’ve only met the guy once, and I didn’t like him,’ she had said lamely. ‘And his wife!’
Aha. ‘What about her?’
‘I hate her,’ Mimi had said to my surprise.
To answer my stare, she’d advanced the story that the woman kept a photograph of her father in his casket – on her bedside table.
How on earth did Mimi know that? Something in her face had warned me not to ask. But I’d told her about the time in New York when I’d gone out for a drink with the photographer who’d said my eyes were like opals (I’d always love him a little for that). He’d confessed to me after several Scotches that when he’d first opened shop, he’d made some money that way. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he told me earnestly, ‘how many people want pictures of their loved ones in their boxes.’ Then he’d made me swear to keep his former sideline a secret.
I mulled over that odd story as I unrolled the special pouch that held my arsenal of brushes. I decided that we all carry our dead with us. My hostess-to-be just carried hers openly and visibly.
Nickie the philosopher.
My left nostril is a fraction larger than my right. I painted it even. The work of art complete, I slithered out to the kitchen in a lounging robe I saved for great occasions, a gorgeous thin slinky thing. The big room was in a state of chaos. Mimi was determined that our Thanksgiving feast be full and traditional. She’d hauled every spice out of the rack so she could pick up what she wanted instantly. A heap of sweet potatoes was piled on the counter, and the turkey was perched to thaw in the drain rack.
Attila was prowling around the fringes of this bounty, hoping to snitch some of it. Mao was curled up on top of the microwave staring at the turkey as if it were a live bird she was stalking. Mimi was crumbling the still-steaming corn bread, a pained expression on her face. She glared at me as I opened the refrigerator.
‘Now, Nick, don’t get drunk tonight, you hear? You can’t have a hangover tomorrow. You won’t eat much if you have a hangover.’
‘Okay, Mimi,’ I said meekly. ‘Can I have a sandwich now?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, and suddenly grinned. The old warmth was back. ‘I reckon you might find some food around here.’
‘What would you recommend?’ I asked seriously. ‘The peanut butter and jelly or the leftover meat loaf?’
‘Oh, boy, a meat loaf sandwich. Make me one, too, will you? Heat it up in the microwave, with cheese all over it.’
I began rummaging through the refrigerator. It might take me hours to come up with the meat loaf, the shelves were so jammed. ‘You’d think,’ I muttered, ‘we were expecting an army instead of just us and Barbara.’
‘Well . . . Charles is coming.’
I froze with my hand, finally, on the meat loaf. I felt the tension radiating from Mimi. She thought I was still worried about her protection of Charles, but actually I was struggling to slam a mental drawer in which a corpse had just moved and groaned. ‘Okay,’ I said, when I could. I heard her sigh behind me.
Cully hallooed from the door then, so the moment passed. I unearthed the serrated knife to slice some of my homemade bread for our sandwiches. Cully wanted one, too.
‘When’s Barbara coming over?’ Cully asked as we sat on the benches in the breakfast nook wolfing down our food.
‘Seven-thirty, eight,’ Mimi said indistinctly. ‘We’re going to set up the dining table in the living room, and we’re going to figure out when the turkey has to go in, and she’s going to grip the bird while I reach in to get the innards out. I don’t think I got him out of the freezer soon enough, to tell you the truth. I think the cavity’s still frozen.’
‘Wear rubber gloves,’ Cully advised. ‘That’s what Rachel always did.’
Oh, great.
The phone rang when I was halfway to the counter to either make another sandwich or throw the meat loaf at Mimi and Cully. I picked up the receiver on our brand-new kitchen wall phone. (Mimi had gotten tired of standing in the hall to talk, and had had the old one taken out.)
‘Hello? May I speak to Nickie?’
‘Mother?’ I felt age sit on my shoulders. I felt the stillness behind me as Cully and Mimi quit eating.
‘Baby? Guess where I’m calling from!’
Oh, not the outskirts of Knolls, please no. She’d come to see me at Miss Beacham’s like that, once. She didn’t sound drunk. But she sounded uncertain, shaky. I felt my face settle into tense lines.
‘I don’t know, Mother. Where?’
‘Well.’ I heard her take a deep breath. ‘I checked myself into a center for alcoholics two weeks ago.’
‘What?’ I felt dizzy and sat on the floor with a bump, taking the telephone receiver with me. I drew my knees up. ‘You what?’
‘Sober for two weeks,’ she said, and began crying.
‘Oh,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Oh, Mama!’ All the years sloughed off. I pounded my fist against my knee for joy. ‘Mama! Really? Really?’
‘This is my first phone call,’ she said. ‘They don’t let you make a phone call for two weeks, until they can be sure you won’t plead to be taken home.’
I noted the call had not been made to Jay.
‘Where is he?’ I didn’t have to specify who ‘he’ was.
‘Gone.’ Her voice was very controlled. ‘I waited till he went out of town. I’m really kind of a coward, Nickie. I’m glad you’re grown up now. Maybe you can understand. I waited till he was gone. Then I filed for divorce, and I changed all the locks on the doors, and then I packed a bag and I headed here after I called my doctor. I was so drunk I barely made it. In fact, I drove over some bushes at the entrance. But they took me.’
The tears trickled down, tracking the work of hours. I gestured frantically at Mimi and she passed me a napkin to blot them. I felt the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor bite into my rump through the thin bathrobe. The muscles in my rear were cramping. I didn’t care.
‘Are you there, honey?’ The frail voice was scared again.
‘You’re wonderful,’ I said. ‘Oh, bless you, bless you.’
‘Hardly wonderful,’ said my mother, with a ghost of amusement in her voice. ‘Fourteen years too late. Not wonderful. And it’s not over, by a long shot.’
‘You’ll make it,’ I told her fiercely, trying to will my hope through the telephone line.
‘For the first time, yesterday I really began to think I might,’ she whispered.
‘You will.’ I paused. ‘Have you heard from him?’
‘He can’t call in,’ she said smugly. ‘I won’t come to the phone.’
‘Yahoo! Good for you, Mama!’
‘I have to go, Nickie. It’s a long road out of these woods. Don’t expect too much.’
‘You think you might be out by Christmas?’
‘I don’t know. I hope so. Maybe I’ll feel strong enough by then.’
‘If you are, I’ll come home,’ I promised. I took down her phone number and address at the center.
‘That’ll give me a goal – Christmas,’ she said, and chuckled. I hadn’t heard that chuckle in so long I barely remembered she used to do it all the time.
‘I love you.’
‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘Bye bye, Nickie.’
‘Bye, Mama.’
We both hung up very gently.
Mimi smilingly passed me another napkin.
* * * *
My fitful good mood, which had been artificial earlier, now had some basis in fact. I almost danced as I got ready for the party. I only dance when I feel secure; my dancing resembles nothing so much as a frog leaping from pad to pad.
‘Now I know you’re human,’ Cully remarked as I capered from the bathroom to the closet to extract my costume. I swept by him in a particularly daring maneuver and gave him a kiss on the forehead.
‘Did you ever doubt it?’
‘At one time,’ he admitted.
‘Why?’ I stopped cavorting and looked at him.
‘Oh . . . you never admitted anything was wrong.’
Well, well, well. I sat down at the foot of the bed with a thud. ‘Explain.’
He folded his fingers together and looked at me with his lips flattened. I got a glimpse of what his patients saw. (Or did he call them ‘clients’?)
‘You were so beautiful,’ he began, and I winced. It always came back to that in the end; my blessing and my curse. ‘You were intelligent. You did very well at school, even while your home life was falling apart. Mimi told us what was happening with your parents, eventually; but you never said anything—’
‘I was ashamed,’ I interrupted.
‘I can see that now, but at the time – I was inexperienced, too, you have to remember – it just looked like it wasn’t touching you.’
A very different view of one of the most anguishing periods of my life. I’d been so afraid of tainting the smooth Houghton household with my sleazy problems. Faced with the cold perfection of Elaine, who could openly discuss having an alcoholic mother? I told Cully this.
‘I can understand it now,’ he emphasized. ‘But then, I was only a kid, too. I was busy being a mighty senior in high school, then a lowly freshman in college, and every time you came to see Mimi I would go through torment. You just seemed far too perfect for someone like me. Then you went off to New York to become exactly what you wanted to be. Brave. Beautiful and brave, smart, successful. Making a lot of money. I met and married Rachel. Then you came to Mimi’s first wedding looking like a woman from another planet, your clothes and face were so sophisticated.’
‘Cully, I got drunk as a skunk at that wedding.’
‘It was the first time I thought you might be a real human like the rest of us,’ he said with a grin. The pursed lips and steepled fingers were gone, and he was Cully my lover, not Cully the observer.
‘Did you lust after me?’
‘You bet. Wet dreams.’
‘Yahoo.’ We grinned at each other, and I licked my lips in a parody of lasciviousness. I smoothed his mustache with one forefinger. He bit the fingertip.
‘I saw your face everywhere I went for years. I used to buy magazines if your face was on the cover.’
‘But you came to see me in New York, with Rachel,’ I said carefully.
‘All the feelings I had for you were so indefinite, you seemed so unattainable, that it didn’t seem to have any bearing on my real life, my life with Rachel.’
Good. I didn’t want to hear that his marriage had broken up over a fantasy, even a fantasy of me.
‘Your apartment was beautiful. Your life was full of glossy people. You were on top of everything.’
Of course I had wanted to seem on top of everything, because Cully and Rachel were coming. I told him that too. He shook his head ruefully.
‘When Mimi told me you were coming back here, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe you had suffered any setbacks, any defeats. I let my adolescent picture of you go on and on. That never matured. The rest of me grew up, but not the part that held that image of you.’
‘And then . . .’ I murmured. And then I got raped.
It hung in the air around us.
I pounced on Cully and nipped him on the throat. I messed up his hair, something I knew would aggravate him. ‘No more introspection,’ I commanded. ‘It’s time to party.’
* * * *
Cully made a gorgeous Robin Hood. I’d found an oversized plain green shift up in the attic. Mimi vaguely recalled an aunt of hers leaving the shift behind after a visit to Celeste, and never asking for it again. Belted in, it made a fine tunic for Cully, coming down more than halfway to his knees. He had a pair of high brown boots he wore in the woods, and I made him pull on a pair of green tights of mine. Underneath his tunic, he wore a green flannel shirt. I’d made the hat, which sported a feather, from bits and pieces of green felt and an old hat of Celeste’s. Cully had borrowed the bow and arrow from his friend on the police force, who practiced archery.
Naturally, Cully wanted me to dress as Maid Marian. I wondered if she had drooped around in the forest in long dresses waiting for Robin to return bragging about his exploits, or if she’d dressed up in tights, too, and aimed arrows right along with the best of the Merry Men. I finally decided that having donated my green tights to Cully’s costume, it would be too much trouble to corral enough green for my own. I decided to go as a good fairy, since I’d found the perfect dress in my own closet. It was fluffy and white, scoop-necked and flouncy and romantic as hell. I’d worn it in a show and bought it on a whim afterward. It dated from a romantic revival by some designer who never made the grade.
I had spent the morning constructing my crown from cardboard and glitter and putting together a wand from a cardboard star and a fly-swatter handle, also liberally beglittered. I curled my hair furiously and fluffed it out into a blonde cloud, then painted two pink spots high on my cheekbones. I’d even unearthed some gold nail polish.
When Cully and I were ready, we presented ourselves to Mimi, who smelled strongly of sage and cranberries.
‘Good fairy, please turn this frog into a prince,’ Mimi requested in a piping child’s voice, pointing at Cully.
‘Poof!’ I said obligingly, in the most dulcet voice I could manage. I waved my wand. ‘Young frog, you are a prince for this evening only, a limited-time offer.’
‘Ping,’ Cully responded, widening his eyes and standing up straighter to enact his transformation.
We all laughed like hell, Mimi having drunk a couple of glasses of wine while she was cooking, and Cully and I high on being in love.
Barbara came in before we left. She looked perkier than I’d seen her look for months, color in her cheeks and a little bounce in her walk. I thought she’d enjoyed learning to play poker. She was wearing boots and had a scarf wound around her neck. She warned us it was getting colder outside by the minute. ‘But I love it. It’s like home.’
‘Fairy Clarabelle will waft us to the party on her magic broomstick,’ Cully said with a straight face.
‘You better warm it up before you get on,’ Barbara commented.
‘Think we ought to take the car?’ Cully asked me. ‘I didn’t want to, since there won’t be much room for parking and it’s only three blocks. But I don’t want you to freeze in that thing.’
I told Cully I thought I could endure three blocks’ worth of cold, so we set off on foot.
* * * *
Once guests have unlaced themselves enough to put on costumes, you have the makings of a pretty uninhibited party. I decided that about two hours later as I leaned against the kitchen counter chatting with my hostess Sally (the lady who allegedly had the corpse photograph on her night table – how had Mimi known that?). We agreed on this matter – costumes equaling letting one’s hair down – after great deliberation. I’d had one glass of wine too many, and my hostess had had about three too many. Our conversation was rather erratic.
We rambled into a heated discussion on whether men or women had originated the idea of witches. Sally thought women labeled ‘witches’ were persecuted by men to express their general fear of women, and I thought women claimed to be witches to attain some power in a chauvinistic society. Since our conclusions were the same – witches had gotten a pretty raw deal – we ended the discussion pleased with each other.
At long last my hostess perfected her tray of sausage balls. I offered to help by carrying it into the living room; and that’s how the accident occurred. The house was old, with floor furnace grates; and as I passed through the hall, my heel caught and broke in one. Miraculously, I managed to keep the tray upright even as I slid to the floor.
‘Poor thing,’ my new friend Sally observed. ‘At least the sausage balls are okay.’
I thought that was a callous point of view, but fortunately hadn’t enough breath to tell her so.
Several gentlemen (a mouse, Hitler, and Tarzan – who must have been freezing – among them) helped me to my feet, one of them feeling me up in the process. I couldn’t identify the culprit until I saw the leer on the mouse’s face. I didn’t know his name and couldn’t recall seeing him before. With a gracious smile, I leaned forward to his ear and whispered, ‘You bastard.’ The leer disappeared in a hurry, replaced by a shocked reaction to my unladylike language.
I decided it was time to find another glass of wine and Cully. After reassuring my rescuers that I wasn’t hurt, I coasted through the big old rooms looking for him. I’d last seen him in the company of a lean dark woman he’d introduced as his high school sweetheart (rather tactlessly, it seemed to me). She had giggled like a maniac and ducked her head in a way that made me positively loathe her. I’d debated opting for northern directness and telling her to buzz off, but instead had fought fire with fire and given her the sweetest smile I could construct while remarking that since those high school days were so long ago, she and Cully surely must have a lot to talk about. Of course, I’d removed myself immediately thereafter, and I hadn’t spotted Cully since.
I didn’t see him now. My vinous sense of well-being was evaporating as my coccyx began feeling the effect of the slide to the floor. Lurching around on one heel wasn’t making it feel any better. I wanted Cully to appear, fired with great concern, and beg me to tell him I wasn’t damaged. He didn’t. I couldn’t spot Miss High School Sweetheart either. I decided after some careful thought that my attitude could best be described as ‘piqued.’
The shoe situation had to be remedied. I considered lasting through the party by taking both shoes off, but my host and hostess had not gotten around to renovating the floors yet, and the wood looked splintery. In a spurt of independence, I decided I would walk back to Mimi’s and get another pair of shoes, and then return to find Cully frantic with worry over where I’d been. A neat consolidation of motives.
‘Sally, I’m just going to run home and get another pair of shoes,’ I informed the hostess.
She nodded vaguely and said, ‘Suit yourself, Mike.’ Crossed wires, there.
With some difficulty I found my coat, checking out a couple of bedrooms before I located the one that held all the wraps. By sheer chance I noticed Cully and the dark-haired woman weren’t in any of them.
