Plain Bad Heroines, page 4
This was the dangerous thing about coming home and being with family: the collision with her previous self.
Only six summers before, Harper had stepped onto her first set for her first film role of any kind. She had tried, then, to act like she knew it was a fluke, some random one-off chance for her to play movie star, but the whole time she’d held inside her the terrifying—it was terrifying—knowledge that there was hope in this situation she’d dumbly lucked into. Real hope. Hope that it could potentially change things for her forever, if she didn’t screw it up.
She was still young, but she was even younger then, only eighteen and pretty sure that even getting on that set was somebody else’s major fuckup that would soon be discovered, and so she had better take advantage of it quick, because if she messed it up she’d have taken something away from not only her own future, but her family’s future, too. (But, no pressure.)
And the most unbelievable part was that she’d pulled it off. Like, she’d fooled convinced a lot of people to believe that she was some sort of beautiful hick-town prodigy, some rare, talented bird they’d discovered in the wilds of Montana. It was too Hollywood to be believed.
And of course, that was Hollywood, exactly.
Only weeks before that first film, that first set, she’d been sleeping on her uncle Rob’s couch and right on the slippery edge of a life that might have ended up eventually looking a lot like the one her mom had long been living: get fucked up to escape your days until you don’t really give a shit about your days—and no one else gives much of a shit about them, either. (But only because you’ve made it so they can’t—because if they do, you’ll con them or pull them under with you.)
It was a life that Harper knew some of her friends (were most of them ever really her friends?) were living right now, in towns not far away from the deck on which she stood. In fact, if not for the smoke, she could’ve seen some of those towns’ windows wink in the setting sun, or flash like cameras against the dark mountainside. She was that close.
But instead of that life, here was chic Annie pulling off her embroidered cover-up so she could climb into the Jacuzzi while Ethan ran to get a water gun from inside the house where their so-happy and steady and sober (for now) mother was napping.
And here was Harper Harper* herself, standing on the deck of the house she’d just bought, documenting her success one post after the next.
In Rhode Island, Merritt Emmons looked at the black rim of woods in the distance and shivered. Her brain lit up with a Henry James line as she did, one from The Turn of the Screw: “It wasn’t a scene for a shudder.” Not that she’d shuddered, really, she’d shivered, but in either case, it wasn’t the scene for one, not with the popping firepit before her and Elaine roasting a marshmallow—roasting a fucking marshmallow!—next to her. Still, it couldn’t be helped: Merritt shivered again. The breeze off the water was almost always cold at night. She’d been chilly enough to pull on her sweater earlier and now both it and her hair—thick with natural curls and her one physical vanity—were steeped in wood smoke and salt mist. In the shower the next morning the ghost-smoke would rinse down her body and swirl the drain. She’d always liked that aftereffect.
Merritt had what she thought was the latest draft of the Happenings at Brookhants script there on the seat beside her. She’d read the thing maybe seven times already, and it’s not like she was even in it. She didn’t need to learn the lines. (Though she had learned them.)
She’d brought the script outside, to the terrace, to read aloud the most obnoxious sections to Elaine, but Elaine had stopped being amused several lines earlier and Merritt had quit her performance. This was, after all, Elaine’s home. She was the one to be deferred to.
Really, the fact of Merritt even having that script could be traced back to Elaine’s involvement. That she, Merritt Emmons, rapidly aging wunderkind writer from collegetown Connecticut, would soon be getting on an airplane bound for Hollywood, where she would be assisting in preproduction work on the film being adapted from her first book, her only book, was still as unreal a thing to her as the things she’d written about in that book.
The literal ghosts of Clara Broward and Florence “Flo” Hartshorn Merritt did not think she believed in. But the story of their thwarted teenage love affair and all the weird and terrible things to come at Brookhants: those things were documented fact. Those things were verifiable. And Merritt was someone who very much liked to have things verified.
She also happened to have had access to the best in primary-source material—diaries and yearbooks and newspaper clippings—because Elaine, the woman now so carefully building a s’more next to Merritt on an oversize outdoor sectional, was Elaine Elizabeth Bishop Brookhants, and certainly one of those names should ring a bell for you, Readers, if you’ve been paying attention. She owned the estate, her family’s estate, where what was left of the Brookhants School for Girls still stood. It was the same massive parcel of land that this, her historic ocean house, Breakwater,* was built upon.
But then, that’s Elaine Elizabeth Bishop Brookhants money for you.
Merritt had been visiting the property since second grade, the year her mother received a grant from Elaine’s research foundation, which kicked off a friendship between Professor Emmons and Elaine that lasted still. This happened back when Merritt’s father was still alive.
He wasn’t anymore.
The truth is, were Merritt’s father still alive it’s doubtful that she would have written her book in the first place. What happened, or at least what she told herself about what happened, was this: her father killed himself and as soon after as she could stand to, she threw herself into doing a thing to distract herself from that fact. That thing was writing the book The Happenings at Brookhants. Elaine had encouraged her relentlessly. In fact, for a long time, the intensity of Elaine’s belief in her was far greater than Merritt’s own belief in the book.
“So you aren’t happy with any of it?” Elaine now asked, fishing a peanut butter cup from the bag. Elaine claimed the earthiness from the peanut butter was a component so necessary as to outweigh any flimsy arguments from s’more traditionalists. She was a person like this: full of opinion and firm standing, she planted her flag in more topics than you could quite believe she could actually care about. Merritt loved this about her. Usually.
She was asking about the script and no, Merritt wasn’t happy with it, but it’s also true that her standards were both high and fickle. So many things felt so routinely disappointing to her that it seemed a shame to waste this evening on that mild unhappiness, one that she could admit to herself possibly wasn’t deserved.
“It’s just that it seems so blunted. But they also say you can’t really tell anything from a screenplay.” Merritt repeated this thing she’d heard and read and even said herself, though she did not believe it as fact when applied to her own work.
“I think it has its moments,” Elaine said, offering Merritt half of the now-finished s’more. Only Elaine could manage to break a s’more so cleanly. Where were the crumbs? Where was the gooey mess of marshmallow all over her pressed black capris or the smear of melted chocolate across the collar of her white linen shirt? Elaine went on, “And it’s really most useful to consider it as a means to an end, isn’t it?”
“Useful how?”
“Well, if you add up the performances, the costumes, the sets and the sound effects and the score—on and on—and then all the months of editing besides, the screenplay suddenly feels quite small, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know if small is the word I’d use,” Merritt said. Her fingers were sticky and a few graham cracker shards were already down her shirt.
“Merritt, don’t you think it’s maybe a tad precious to be so constantly disagreeable about your success?” her mother asked from the other end of the couch, a laptop propped on her knees so that its screen lent a ghoulish cast to her face.
If it seems I’ve mistakenly forgotten to mention her before now, forgive me, Readers. Though you should know that introducing her this way is also indicative of the role she played in her daughter’s life at that time.
“What you call preciousness I call critically informed realism,” Merritt said. “And not one thing about this movie is yet a success. If it even gets made.”
“What do you think, Lainey?” her mother’s ghoul mouth asked, her eyes not leaving her laptop and her fingers flying over the keys. “Is sullen the new look for the young artist?”
“It’s an old look,” Elaine said. “But I still say the best way to get over old work is to get on to new work.”
This was an even scabbier scab to pick, because Merritt was having a shit time writing anything new. She did have one idea, but—
“And not by resurrecting Truman Capote’s worst effort,” Elaine added, pressing her palms together and lifting them in mock prayer. “Please not that.”
See, Readers? Nobody but Merritt seemed to like this idea very much.
Merritt thought that maybe her father would have liked it, that her taking it on would have delighted him, but when she thought things like this she never trusted them; it was so easy to make him stand in as phantom antagonist to her mother whenever she and her mother disagreed.
“You know one day soon you’ll both be filled with shame,” Merritt said. “You’ll think, This book is exactly as it should be and yet because I lack vision, I tried to talk her out of it.”
“I look forward to that day, my darling,” Elaine said, “though I doubt very much you’ll get to it through Answered Prayers.” She patted Merritt’s leg a few times before standing.
“Ha!” Merritt’s mother said. “That was perfectly placed.”
“Give me the lowest form of humor and I’m the brightest star,” Elaine said. Then she did some comic impression of a showgirl flouncing her curls before gathering the s’mores tray.
According to Elaine, Truman Capote’s worst effort was his infamously unfinished final novel, Answered Prayers. Hence the pun.
She hovered. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “You’ve always worked well here and you’re also one to rise to the occasion, so write the thing and prove us wrong. At my age I’m so rarely proven wrong—I relish it when it happens.”
“I will write it,” Merritt said. “I am.”
Elaine smiled. Then she and her tray were on the stone stairs that led to the upper terrace and the bank of open French doors spilling light from Breakwater’s cavernous (and recently remodeled) kitchen. And then she was swallowed by her house.
Elaine’s opinions took up so much space that Merritt felt their absence when she was again alone with her mother. She scrolled through movie buzz on gossip sites and feeds, her own face now a ghoul mask awash in the light of her phone screen. She returned, as she’d been doing for days, to Harper Harper’s Instagram and read the comments on a post made not twenty minutes before—a shot from a Jacuzzi on a deck in the dark outdoors, The Happenings at Brookhants script cover page plainly legible from its perch on the Jacuzzi’s rim, legible and also close to becoming script soup if it happened to be brushed by a stray appendage. Harper’s caption: Taking a dip with my favorite new project.
The comments were a predictable mixed bag:
HOMOFOMO9 #GOALS ♥
kevinbranderson get me in that tub with you, mama
suefirrelisonfire excuse me?! new project what? !!
design.my.life OMG I FUCKING LOVE THAT BOOK I CANNOT WAIT I WANT TO REACH THROUGH THIS SCREEN AND STEAL THAT SCRIPT S;OKFEPFLPGK[WORGJOR[IUJRPIOT GAH!
NoYourGaybot sorry. that book is so basic and you should do better. your queer fans need you to do better.
TheRealHAnniehKBarries SO MUCH THIS
FeatherBirdBank #STAN #STAN #STAN
Whyureadingthisbruh$$? @neckbeard4lyfe is Bo Dhillon really into this shit? what happened to that guy?
MrsKnockKnockKnock Srsly: another round of “kill yer gays?” Could we just not?
And on. And on. And on they went—already 6,482 comments deep. Merritt typed her own comment. Edited it. Deleted it. Typed another. Edited it. Hovered over the post button . . .
She closed the app.
Then she used a garden hose to douse the fire pit, leaving it a sloppy pile of ash and char, said goodnight to her mother, and went to bed.
The guest room she slept in was on the woods side, not the ocean side, and it was dark even in the daytime as a result. Now, of course, it was night and even darker, but Merritt didn’t flick the light switch near the doorway. Instead, she brushed the keyboard of her laptop, open on the desk beneath the window, and its screen popped on and lit the room with a pale white glow. The screen showed a blank Word document. This was how much of her new book she’d managed to write.
Merritt pulled on her pajamas, leaned over the desk to close the window, and then, with her hand on the window, she stopped and looked closer: there were three dead yellow jackets in the inner casing along the screen. They were all in a clump together. One was missing its head. She wondered if they died this way, touching each other, or if the wind had piled them there afterward. She wondered when the head was lost and where it went.
Merritt left the window as it was and climbed into bed. As she lay there, she worried a thought. It was hard and unwelcome, like a popcorn kernel stuck in her gums, something she could run her tongue over but not properly dislodge. Not without assistance, anyway. Not without pointy instruments and blood and pulling it out into the light, leaving a wound behind.
The thought was this: she hadn’t actually been the one to write The Happenings at Brookhants. Elaine had been that book’s true composer, the one with all the ideas and the know-how to manifest them and she, Merritt, had only ever been the vessel for relaying those ideas—the chimp at the keyboard.
What had Truman Capote said? That’s not writing, that’s typing.
A typist. What if she’d only ever really been the typist?
About That Missing Copy of Mary MacLane’s Book
Come early December, it was found with Eleanor Faderman. Eleanor was one of the Brookhants students said to have been wary (or was it jealous?) of Flo and Clara. When Flo and Clara were alive, that is.
Eleanor Faderman had, in fact, tried to purchase her own copy of The Story of Mary MacLane after it had first caused such a furor on campus the previous spring, but she’d never been able to find it in any of the bookshops she visited during her summer holiday—at least not when her older sisters weren’t looking over her selections and magpieing their opinions to their mother.
Eleanor Faderman was short and slight, her features sharpened as if to points, her hair an odd sort of color, almost like it should have been brown but then most of the pigment had been leached from it, leaving it a dull tan. More importantly, Eleanor Faderman was known among her classmates to have the gift of thieving fingers and a curiously silent presence, the ability to slip in and out of spaces unnoticed. The students in her dorm made note of this often: Eleanor, where did you come from? Or its inverse: Wasn’t Eleanor here a moment ago?
Given these abilities, it wasn’t difficult for Eleanor Faderman to filch the copy of the book that returned with the bodies and then keep quiet about it, too. She had her chance due to the carelessness of a Pinkerton hired by Flo’s mother to investigate her death. That detective had been disinterestedly thumbing through the book as he waited to speak to Principal Libbie Brookhants about the tragedy. He was new to the Pinkerton agency and unhappy with this assignment: the deaths of Clara and Flo were, of course, gruesome and terrible, but he believed they were also wholly accidental, a cruelty of nature. When the principal finally opened her door to invite him in, the detective left the copy of the book on the table outside her office.
Our Eleanor Faderman watched him do this.
And that was that: the book was now hers.
Eleanor hid it in the back of a potting cupboard in the Brookhants Orangerie,* a glinting expanse of glass and light jutting off one side of Main Hall. Seven mornings a week, Eleanor worked in The Orangerie, tending to the plants and, in the winter, feeding firewood to its elaborate and cantankerous heating system. Most mornings, she was the first to arrive there, setting its gas lamps glowing if the thin light of pre-dawn wasn’t enough to see by—which it usually wasn’t. (While some structures at Brookhants had by then been electrified, The Orangerie was not among them.) Once she could see, Eleanor donned her work pinafore to water and feed, treat for pests, and pluck away death and deformity from branches and stems.
Those more mundane tasks complete, she indulged in The Orangerie pursuits she liked best: cutting and bundling herbs and picking any ripe fruits to later send to the kitchen staff for preparation. She did this only if the cook had left her a note telling her how many sprigs of thyme or blades of chives were required for that day’s meals. And, despite her fellow classmates’ complaints about the blandness of the Brookhants cuisine, most mornings the cook had left her a note, and Eleanor, snipping shears in hand, wandered the rows of herbs, fragrant and dense, relishing in her tiny harvests as she carefully twined them into bundles and left them in a basket next to the note that named them.
On some of those mornings, Eleanor Faderman also snuck a piece of fruit for herself. Not often, mind you. During the gray snowpack of winter in Rhode Island, an orange—a ripe, full-sized orange hanging from a tree branch—was a kind of miracle. Even those Brookhants students who didn’t spend much time in The Orangerie could have been counted on to throw fits if they had believed one of their classmates was stealing their portion of its bounty. But occasionally, Eleanor kept her eye on a runty lime, say, one hidden by its tree’s bright leaves, one she felt she could nip without anyone missing it. Save Miss Trills, perhaps.
