in which we read Pride and Prejudice and listen to Bernadette
Sylvia’s first impression of Allegra was that no one had ever before had such a beautiful baby.
Jocelyn’s first impression of Grigg was that he had nice eyelashes and a funny name, and didn’t interest her in the slightest.
Prudie’s first impression of Bernadette was that she was startling to look at and dull if you listened, which you hardly ever had to do.
Bernadette’s first impression of Prudie was that, in all her long years, she had rarely seen such a frightened young woman.
Grigg’s first impression of Jocelyn was that she appeared to think sharing an elevator with him for a few floors was some sort of punishment.
Allegra’s first impression of Sylvia was blurred with her first impression of the larger world. For me? she’d asked herself, back when she had no words and no way to even know she was asking. And then, when Sylvia, and then, when Daniel had first looked into her eyes—More for me?
In Austen’s day, a traditional ball still opened with the minuet. The minuet was originally danced by one couple at a time alone on the floor.
“Everyone knows,” Prudie said, “that a rich man is eventually going to want a new wife.” She was seated with Bernadette at a large round table at the annual fund-raiser for the Sacramento Public Library. Rich men were all around them, thick on the floor as salt on a pretzel.
At the far end of the hall, in front of the huge arched window, a jazz band played the opening notes to “Love Walked In.” You could look up five stories, sighting along massive stone columns past four rows of balconies, each railed in wrought iron, to the dome of the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria. Great rings of glass hung suspended above.
Prudie had never been inside the Library Galleria before, though one of the teachers at the high school had had her wedding here. Somewhere on the balconies were little bronze fox faces. Prudie couldn’t see them from where she was sitting, but it was sweet to know they were there.
This was a romantic space. You could imagine serenading a lover on one of those balconies, or assassinating a president if that was the sick way your imagination ran.
So Prudie was disappointed that, simply because they’d both arrived before anyone else, she would now spend the evening seated by and talking to Bernadette. Dean on the other side, of course, but when couldn’t she talk to Dean?
In point of fact, Prudie would not be talking to Bernadette so much as Bernadette would be talking to Prudie. Bernadette talked way too much. She meandered around her point, which, when gotten to, was seldom worth the journey. A housewife in the fifties, and, Prudie reminded herself, poor Bernadette, because they actually did expect you to keep your house clean back then. The women’s movement arriving at last, but too late to save Bernadette from the tedium of it all. And now an old lady of little interest to anyone. Peu de gens savent être vieux.
Both Prudie and Bernadette were here at some expense—tickets were one hundred twenty dollars apiece—to provide Sylvia with moral support. It was a dinner; it was a dance; local writers had been promised as entertainment, one to each table—Prudie was looking forward to that—but Sylvia was why she’d come. Sylvia had to attend, because it was for the library. And Allegra had said that Daniel was coming, too, and bringing a date—that family practice lawyer, Pam, he was so in love with.
While all Sylvia had was the Jane Austen book club. They weren’t much, they couldn’t even the score, but they could at least show up.
Everywhere Prudie looked she saw the signs of wealth. She tried for the fun of it to view the scene as a Jane Austen character would. A young woman with no money and no prospects, here, in the way of all these rich men. Would she feel determined? Would she feel desperate? Would there be any point in looking about, making a secret selection, when you could only sit and wait for someone to come to you? Prudie decided she would rather teach French at the high school than marry for money. It was a decision quickly made, but she could always revisit it.
Dean had gone off to check Prudie’s coat and get himself a drink, or he might have objected to her comment about rich men and their new wives. Dean was not a rich man, but he was the faithful sort. He might have said that money wouldn’t change him. He might have said that Prudie was the wife he would want, for richer or poorer. He might have said that he never would be rich, and wasn’t Prudie the lucky wife, then?
Prudie wouldn’t have made the comment in Sylvia’s hearing, either, but neither Sylvia nor Allegra had arrived yet. So far it was only Prudie and Bernadette, and Prudie didn’t know Bernadette all that well, so Sylvia’s divorce was one of the few topics of conversation they had in common. Jane Austen, too, of course, but the meeting on Pride and Prejudice was still a week away; Prudie didn’t want to spoil it with premature articulation.
Bernadette had set aside her no-effort dress policy in honor of the black-tie occasion and was très magnifique in a silver shirt and pants, with her silver hair moussed up from her forehead. Her glasses had been repaired and the lenses cleaned. She was wearing screw-on chunks of amber on her ears. They looked like something Allegra might have made. Bernadette’s earlobes were very large, like a Buddha’s; the earrings elongated them even further. There was a slight scent of lavender perfume and maybe a green-apple shampoo, the zinnias in the centerpiece, and some hardworking air-conditioning. Prudie had a good nose.
Bernadette had been responding to Prudie’s statement for quite some time and still hadn’t finished. Prudie had missed much of it, but Bernadette usually closed with a recap. Prudie waited until she appeared to be winding down to listen. “Being rich doesn’t effect the wanting,” Bernadette was saying. “So much as the having. You can’t possibly know all your husband’s failings until you’ve been married awhile. Happiness in marriage is mostly a matter of chance.”
Clearly Bernadette didn’t understand that they were speaking of Sylvia. Her opinions, while reasonable in some other context, were inappropriate in this one, and it was a good thing Jocelyn wasn’t there to hear them.
Prudie gave her a hint. “Daniel is such a cliché.”
“Someone has to be,” said Bernadette, “or what would the word mean?”
Subtlety was getting Prudie nowhere. She abandoned it. “Still, it’s a shame about Sylvia and Daniel.”
“Oh, yes. Capital crime.” Bernadette smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made Prudie think she’d maybe understood what they were talking about all along.
The band switched to “Someone to Watch over Me.” The song caught in Prudie’s throat. Her mother had been such a Gershwin fan.
An elegant black woman in a mink stole (in this heat!) sat down next to Prudie, who was forced to tell her that the whole table was taken. “So I see,” she said coolly. Her mink brushed over Prudie’s hair as she rose and left. Prudie worried that the woman might have thought she was some sort of racist, which she certainly wasn’t, anyone who knew Prudie could tell you that. She would have liked nothing better than to share the table with such an elegant woman. Where the hell was Jocelyn?
“It’s hard to choose a person to spend your life with,” Bernadette said. “Lots of people don’t get it right the first time out. I certainly didn’t get it right the first time out.”
Prudie wasn’t surprised to learn that Bernadette had been married more than once. Hadn’t Allegra complained to her that Bernadette always did repeat herself? (Hadn’t Allegra said this more than once?)
Allegra was lying across the bed in the room where Sylvia now slept alone. Sylvia was trying on dresses and Allegra was advising. None of the mirrors in the house showed your whole figure down to the shoes, so an advisor was advisable. And Allegra had an artist’s eye. Even when Allegra was little, Sylvia had trusted her judgment. “Are you going out like that?” Allegra would ask, and Sylvia would answer no, no, of course she wasn’t, and go back to her room to try again.
They were running a bit late, but since Sylvia was dreading the whole evening anyway, running late seemed desirable. She would have liked a glass of wine, and maybe more than a glass, but she would be driving. Allegra was drinking a chilled Chardonnay and hadn’t even started to dress yet. She would throw something on in two minutes and be breathtaking. Sylvia would never tire of looking at her.
It was too hot to have the blinds open, but Allegra had said she couldn’t see Sylvia well enough with them closed. Sunlight streaked the bedroom wall, cut to ribbons by the slats of the blinds. Half the family portrait was illuminated—Allegra and Daniel were bright and golden, Sylvia and the boys were in the shade. In a book, that would mean something. In a book, you wouldn’t feel good about what was coming for Sylvia and the boys.
“There won’t be anyone there my age tonight,” Allegra said. Sylvia recognized it as a question, even though Allegra hadn’t inflected it as one. Allegra did this whenever she thought she already knew the answer.
“Prudie,” Sylvia reminded her.
Allegra gave Sylvia the look Sylvia had been getting ever since Allegra turned ten. She said nothing out loud, because Prudie had recently lost her mother and should be treated with kindness. But Allegra had no patience for Prudie’s French. She herself didn’t speak Spanish to people who wouldn’t understand it. When you shared a mother tongue, why not use it?
“What’s the point of having dancing at these events, anyway?” Allegra asked. “I’m not just speaking on behalf of the lesbians here. This is for us all. A dance is about who you’ll dance with. Who will ask you? Who will say yes, if you ask? Who you’ll be forced to say yes to. A dance is about its enormous potential for joy or disaster.
“You remove all that—you provide a band at an event where husbands just dance with their wives—and the only part of a dance you’ve got is the dancing.”
“Don’t you like to dance?” Sylvia asked.
“Only as an extreme sport,” Allegra answered. “With the terror removed, not so much.”
Grigg had suggested that he drive Jocelyn into Sacramento because he was still new to the area, while she had been to the Galleria on other occasions. As Jocelyn had dressed for the evening she’d found herself filled with affection for him. Really, he hardly knew Sylvia, plus his income was not what it had been. Yet here he was, buying a pricey ticket, putting on a gray suit in the dreadful summer heat, and spending a whole evening with a bunch of old women, and married women, and lesbians, just from the goodness of his heart. What a good heart that was!
She finished her makeup and then there was nothing more to be done, except to brush the dog hair off, and absolutely no point in doing that until she was out the door. Jocelyn was ready to go at the exact moment they should have been going.
But there was no sign of Grigg, and in the twenty minutes she waited, her affection began to fade. Jocelyn was a punctual person. This was, she believed, a matter of simple courtesy. Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.
Waiting gave Jocelyn too much time to think about the evening ahead. She’d hardly seen Daniel since he moved. She could look around her own house, and there was the stereo system he’d helped her pick out, the dryer he’d helped her hook up. All those times over all those years, Daniel had dropped by with a movie he and Sylvia had rented and thought Jocelyn would like, or Chinese food when they knew she’d be getting back from a show too tired to eat unless she was made to. Once when she had had a nasty flu, Daniel came over and cleaned her bathroom, because he suspected the toothpaste on the mirror was preying on her mind and interfering with her recovery.
Hating Daniel was such terribly hard work that in his absence Jocelyn had allowed herself to stop. Although she would have said this to no one, tonight would be hard on her as well as Sylvia. She had no desire to see Daniel’s new girlfriend and no desire to look closely at why that should be. She resented Grigg for the delay in getting it over with.
Then, when Grigg did arrive, there were no excuses, no apologies. He seemed, in fact, to be totally unaware that he was late. Sahara was wild and welcoming. She seized a ball in her mouth and raced between the chairs and over the couch, oblivious of the heartbreak that lay just ahead. This diverted attention from Jocelyn’s cooler reception. “Nice dress!” Grigg said, which in no way soothed her, but made it hard to be snappish in return.
“Let’s go,” she told him. She was careful not to make it sound like an order and not to make it sound like a complaint.
She added a request, in case her tone had been off in spite of the effort. Since it was Jocelyn, her request might have sounded to the uninitiated, something like an order. “You need to dance with Sylvia tonight.” By which she meant: Daniel needs to see you dancing with Sylvia tonight. Jocelyn stopped and looked Grigg over, more thoroughly than she’d ever done before. He was quite a nice-looking man in his own un-eye-catching way. He’d do.
Unless he was a goofy-looking dancer. “You do know how to dance?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, which didn’t mean anything, lots of people who couldn’t dance thought they could.
“You don’t look like a dancer.” Jocelyn hated to press, but this was important.
“What do I look like?”
Who could say? He looked like a country-western singer. A college professor. A plumber. A spy. He had no distinctive look. “You look like someone who reads science fiction,” Jocelyn guessed, but apparently it was the wrong answer, even though he claimed to love those books so.
“I have three older sisters. I can dance,” Grigg said, and he sounded really, really annoyed.
On country dancing:
The Beauty of this agreeable Exercise (I mean when perform’d in the Genteel Character) is very much eclipsed and destroyed by certain Faults. . . . One or two Couples either by Carelessness or Want of better Instruction will put the whole Set in Disorder.
—KELLOM TOMLINSON, Dancing Master
“Prudie and I went to the Scottish games at the Yolo County Fairgrounds last weekend,” Dean told Bernadette. “Suddenly she’s craving the Highlands. Have you ever been?”
“Not to the games,” Bernadette said. “But to the fairgrounds, Lord yes. When I was young I danced all over the state every single summer. Of course, county fairs were much tinier then. They were so small they’d fit in your pocket.” She waited to see whether anyone wanted to hear more. No one told her to go on. No one changed the subject, either. Dean was smiling at her. Prudie was stirring her drink with her celery. The data was unclear.
But Dean and Prudie were both so very young. Bernadette could see that if anything interesting was to be said tonight, it fell to her to say it. “I was in a group called the Five Little Peppers,” she continued. “My mother thought tap dancing was the ticket to Hollywood. She was real ambitious for me. And real out-of-date. Even then, late forties, early fifties, tap dancing was—what do the kids say now? Played?”
“Okay,” said Prudie. Her pale face had frozen over at the word “mother.” Bernadette felt so sorry for her.
“Were you and your mother close?” Prudie asked.
“I liked my father better,” Bernadette said. “My mother was sort of a pill.”
We lived in Torrance then, so we were close to Hollywood, but not as close as Torrance is to Hollywood now, seeing as the roads and the cars are all different. I took tap and ballet at Miss Olive’s. I was the best dancer there, which didn’t mean squat, but gave Mother ideas. Dad was a dentist with an office in the back of our house, and one day he worked on someone who knew someone who knew someone in pictures. Mother pushed and prodded and coaxed and sulked until Dad got us introduced to someone somewhere in that chain of someones.
Mother paid Miss Olive to choreograph a special number just for me—“The Little Dutch Girl.” I had this lace apron to pull over my face and peek out from, and I had to learn to tap in those big wooden shoes. Over we drove. And then I never even got to dance. That Hollywood muckety-muck took one look at me. “Not pretty enough,” he said, and that was the end of that, except that Dad made it clear he thought he’d humiliated himself for nothing and he wasn’t doing it again.
I didn’t really care. I always had a lot of self-confidence and the studio guy just seemed like a horrid man. Mother was the one hurt by it. She said how we wouldn’t ever go to any picture he produced, so I never did get to see Easter Parade until it was on television, even though everyone said Judy Garland and Fred Astaire were so great together.
Anyway, Miss Olive told Mother about this group called the Five Little Peppers and how they were looking to replace one of their girls. I auditioned in my silly wooden shoes, because Mother had paid for the choreography and wanted a return on that investment. You couldn’t do a heel roll in those shoes to save your life. But the Peppers took me because I was the right height.
It was a stair-step group. I was taken on as the first stair, which meant I was the tallest. I was eleven then, the fifth stair was only five.
The thing about a stair-step group is that the littlest stair gets a lot of attention simply for being little. The littlest is pretty much always a spoiled little apple. The first stair gets a lot of attention if she’s pretty, which, never mind what some people said, I was okay to look at.
Being first stair actually made me a better person. Kinder, more tolerant. All that attention turned me good. It didn’t last. I didn’t grow and the second stair did, and the next summer we switched places. I learned that the girls in between the first stair and the last stair, well, they’re just the girls in between.
Especially the tallest of the girls in between. I was the nicest girl in the Peppers when I was first stair, but when I wasn’t, then the new first stair was the nicest. Funny how that worked.
Our manager was this tyrannical old woman we were made to call Madame Dubois. Emphasis on the second syllable like that. Madame. We called her other things when we were on our own. Madame Dubois was our manager, our micro-manager. She told us how to do our makeup, how to pack our suitcases, what books we should read, what foods we should eat, and who our friends should be. Nothing was too large or too small to be left in our incapable hands. She gave us notes after every performance, even though she wasn’t a dancer and never had been. My notes were always about how I should practice. “You’ll never be really good unless you practice,” she said. And fair enough. I never really did and I never really was.
Our bookings were handled by an oily guy named Lloyd Hucksley. He had spent the war as a supply sergeant and now was scuttling around doing whatever Madame Dubois got into her head he should do.
I danced with the Peppers for eight years. Other girls came and left. For a couple of seasons my best friend was the third stair. Mattie Murphy. But then she started getting taller and I didn’t and then she stopped getting taller, so we were the same height. We knew one of us would have to leave. It was awful to feel that coming and not be able to do a blessed thing about it. Mattie was a better dancer, but I was the better-looking. I knew how it would be. I asked Mother to let me quit so Mattie wouldn’t have to. And also because Lloyd Hucksley seemed like he was getting sweet on me, now that I was older.
Oh, I had my reasons for wanting to go, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. What would happen to my motion picture career if I up and left the Peppers? When Mattie and Lloyd got married, you could have knocked me over with a feather.
After Mattie left I was the third stair. You’d think I would have met a lot of people; we traveled so much. You’d think it was a real exciting life. You’d be surprised what a steady set entertains at the county fairs. Everywhere we went it was the same faces, the same conversations. I was always wishing for more of an assortment. That’s when I got so into books.
Mother was turning desperate. She made me perform everywhere, family gatherings, cocktail parties. She even made me dance for Dad’s patients, because, she said, you just never know who’s going to turn out to be someone. Can you imagine? You go to have a tooth pulled and there’s a top-hat-and-cane number thrown in? Dad finally put a stop to it, thank the Lord. Though some of those patients were very appreciative. People will sit through anything if it puts off a tooth extraction.
Sylvia was standing in the walk-in closet, looking at the empty clothes-rod where Daniel’s suits and shirts used to hang. Perhaps it was time for her clothes to spread out a bit, enjoy the open space.
“I’ve been thinking about Charlotte,” Allegra said. She was still in the bedroom, sprawled on the bed. “In Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie’s friend who marries the tedious Mr. Collins. I’ve been thinking about why she married him.”
“Oh, yes,” Sylvia answered. “The troubling case of Charlotte Lucas.”
The only sign of Daniel left in the closet was years and years of paperwork—taxes filed jointly, warranties for appliances picked out together, smog tests passed, mortgage payments paid. And on the top shelf, letters written during the summer of 1970, when Daniel drove to the East Coast and back with a college friend. Someday soon Sylvia would get those letters down, re-read them. In thirty-two years of marriage she and Daniel had spent very little time apart. She’d no memory of what they’d written to each other during that early separation. There might be something in the letters that would be useful now, some sort of clue about what had happened and why. Some guidance for living alone.
Some guidance for living alone as long as Daniel was coming back. Until tonight Sylvia had been able to behave as if he were just away somewhere, on another trip. She hadn’t even tried to pretend this; it pretended itself. Tonight, when she would see Daniel with Pam for the first time—Allegra had met Pam, Sylvia hadn’t—tonight he would really be gone.
She put her game face on and walked back into the bedroom. “I like Charlotte a ton,” Sylvia said. “I admire her. Jocelyn doesn’t. Jocelyn has very high standards. Jocelyn has contempt for people who settle. Jocelyn, you’ll note, is not married and never has been. But Charlotte has no options. She sees one chance for herself and she makes it happen. I find that moving.”
“Sexy,” Allegra said. She was referring to Sylvia’s dress, a thin, clingy knit with a low neckline.
“It’s too hot for a knit,” Sylvia said. She wasn’t sure that sexy was the look she was going for. She didn’t want Daniel to think she’d tried too hard, cared too much. She skinned out of it, went back to the closet. “Does Charlotte really have fewer options than Lizzie?” Allegra asked. “Lizzie’s already in her twenties. No one’s proposed to her yet. She has no money and lives in a small, confined society. But she won’t settle for Collins. Why should Charlotte?”
“Lizzie is pretty. It makes all the difference in the world.” Sylvia zipped herself into her linen sheath and came out again. “What do you think? Too casual?”
“You can always dress something like that up,” Allegra said. “The right shoes. Jewelry. You should iron it.”
Too hot for ironing. Sylvia took the dress off. “It does bother me that Austen wouldn’t make up a good man who finds Charlotte worth having. The Brontës would have told her story very differently.”
“Charlotte on Charlotte,” Allegra said. “I will always love the Brontës best. But that’s just me—I like a book with storms in it. What I was thinking was that Charlotte Lucas might be gay. Remember when she says she’s not romantic like Lizzie? Maybe that’s what she means. Maybe that’s why there’s no point in holding out for a better offer.” Allegra rolled onto her back and propped her wineglass onto her face so as to get the last drops. Sylvia could see her nose through the curved glass. Even this, on Allegra, was a flattering look.
“Are you saying Austen meant her to be gay?” Sylvia asked. “Or that she’s gay and Austen doesn’t know it?”
Sylvia preferred the latter. There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author’s back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face. If Sylvia were a character in a book, that’s the kind of character she’d want to be.
But wouldn’t.
Grigg and Jocelyn found themselves behind a tractor on the way to the freeway. Grigg edged out a couple of times, only to fall back, when he probably would have made it past just fine if he’d really hit the gas. That’s what Jocelyn would have done. The air-conditioning in his car was too feeble for the Valley summer. She could feel her makeup melting into her mandarin collar.
There was dust on the dashboard, and a large collection of cups and wrappers from various snacks and meals around her feet. Jocelyn hadn’t offered to drive her own car, because it had been five whole days since she’d vacuumed it. The passenger-side window was streaked with dog spit and nose prints. She hadn’t wanted to ask Grigg, all dressed up as he would be, to deal with dog hair and dirt. Evidently he’d had no similar compunction.
“Say,” Grigg said. They’d made it onto the freeway, and the tractor disappeared behind them in a stink of exhaust. Sacramento had some of the worst air quality in the country.
Grigg was driving exactly the legal limit; Jocelyn could see the speedometer. Daniel was the only other driver she knew who did that. In the whole world. “Say,” Grigg repeated. “Did you ever read those books I bought for you? The Le Guins?”
“Not yet.” Jocelyn felt a tiny sting of conscience. Feeling guilty did not improve her mood. Book-giving became a pushy, intrusive action when it was followed by “So how did you like those books?” Jocelyn gave many, many books away and never asked whether anyone had liked them.
Why should she apologize over not reading two books she’d never asked for? She didn’t have to actually read science fiction to know what she thought of it. She’d seen Star Wars. When would Grigg get off her case about those damn books?
In all fairness, she reminded herself, this was the first time he’d mentioned them. But she’d felt his not mentioning them on other occasions. So there was no need; her conscience was clear, yet she seemed compelled to defend herself. She tried to do this without sounding defensive. She turned to face Grigg and he was looking directly back at her. She hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected to see straight through his eyes to—whatever. It gave her a sudden squeezed feeling in her chest; a sudden heat spread over her neck and face. She hadn’t felt that squeeze, that heat for a long time. She had no intention of feeling it now. What had they been talking about? “I like books about real people,” Jocelyn said.
“I don’t understand the distinction.” Grigg’s eyes had returned to the road. “Elizabeth Bennet is a real person, but the people in science fiction books aren’t?”
“Science fiction books have people in them, but they’re not about the people. Real people are really complicated.”
“There’s all kinds of science fiction,” Grigg said. “When you’ve read some I’ll be interested in your opinion.”
In just the time it took for Grigg to finish that sentence Jocelyn recovered her composure. He’d kept his tone neutral, but really, how rude. If he weren’t being so unpleasant she would have pointed out the exit where she sometimes took the dogs to run. In the other direction was a bird sanctuary, which, in cooler weather, was also a nice hike. She would have told him how, in the winter, all the brown, dry fields here flooded. You could look across a tabletop of water and see the tallest branches of the trees. She might have said that only a native could love the summer landscape of the Valley, with the grasses all dead and the oaks parched and gray. She might have found herself saying something poetic, and God knows nothing good ever comes of that. No danger of it now, though.
A truck loaded with tomatoes passed them on the right. Jocelyn could smell it going by. Several tomatoes bounced off and hit the pavement when the truck swerved back into their lane. How could they possibly be traveling more slowly than a tomato truck?
Grigg switched on the radio, and some group Jocelyn was too old to know or like came out of it. Grigg didn’t ask whether she was okay with the music or the volume or anything. Then, before she knew what was happening, he had taken the Jefferson Boulevard/Downtown exit. “I-5 is quicker,” Jocelyn said, but it was too late.
“I like the Tower Bridge,” Grigg told her. “I like to see the river,” which, in fairness, you could do from the bridge, but it wasn’t much of a view. I like to sit in the baseball traffic, he might as well have said. I like to be on the surface streets as long as possible, waiting at the stoplights. I like to be as late as I can manage to be. Hadn’t the whole point of driving together been that Jocelyn would tell Grigg how to go and he would go the way she said? She liked nothing about Grigg this evening.
And she was not, had never been, the sort of stupid woman who suddenly liked a man simply because she didn’t like him. Thank God.
The car vibrated on the bridge and Grigg’s voice took on an odd tremble as a result. A cartoon voice, young Elmer Fudd. “I wonder which writer will eat with us? I hope you don’t have to deal with anything, you know, too genre.”
The Capitol dome appeared in the distance, rising into the golden dusk dead ahead. Grigg stopped at another red light when he could have sneaked through on the yellow. “By the time we get there the whole thing will be over,” Jocelyn said.
The light turned green. Grigg was slow changing gear; the car made a peevish noise. They passed the dandelion fountain, a sad sight when there was no water in it, heat braiding the air above the metal spikes. Around the K Street Mall the car made a strange coughing sound—three times in rapid succession. Then it died.
For, if they should happen to begin out of Time, it is a thousand to one if they recover it throughout the Dance. But on the other Hand, had they waited a remarkable Place of the Tune, and taken the Time at Beginning, they might have come off with Reputation and Applause.
—KELLOM TOMLINSON, Dancing Master
Grigg was out of gas. He was just able to coast to the curb, leave the car almost parked. Jocelyn had Triple A, but she’d left her card behind in her usual purse. She was carrying a tiny clutch bag with nothing much in it. Hadn’t brought her cell phone, or she would have called Sylvia half an hour earlier to say they were going to be late. Poor Sylvia would be wondering where they were, why Jocelyn had left her to deal with Daniel and Pam all alone. Sylvia would never have left the house so ill prepared for disaster.
Grigg didn’t have Triple A. “Is there a gas station nearby?” he asked.
“Not for miles.”
“God, I’m sorry,” he said. He unbelted his seat belt. “Why don’t you wait here? I’ll find a phone.”
“I’m going to walk the rest of the way,” Jocelyn told him. “While you’re getting the gas.” She didn’t think this was an unreasonable decision, but if it was, she didn’t care. She was proud of how calm she was being. She had been kept waiting, insulted, and stranded. All this, with impeccable, icy self-possession. Who wouldn’t be proud?
“How far is it?”
“Ten, twelve blocks.”
There was a vagrant across the street. He wore a Bay to Breakers T-shirt, the really classic one with the fish that looked like a shoe. Jocelyn had that same shirt, but his had Rorschach blots of grime down the front and he’d tied a bandanna around one of his biceps, as if he were in some kind of paisley mourning. He was watching them with a great deal of interest. He called out something, but not something she could decipher. “True bread” was the closest she could come.
“It’s too hot to walk that far,” Grigg said. “And not necessary. I’ll find a phone and call a cab. I really am so sorry. I had the car in the shop just last week, because the gas gauge was screwy. I guess they didn’t fix it.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just want to be with Sylvia. I don’t mind walking.”
“True bread,” the man across the street called out, more insistent now.
“I’m not staying here,” said Jocelyn.
What was ten or twelve blocks to a man in flat shoes? Grigg said that he would come then, too. They started off. This was not the best part of town. They crossed street after street at a quick pace, stepping over cans, flyers, and one plate of vomit. Jocelyn wiped her face and rubbed her mascara into her eyes. She couldn’t imagine how she must look. Her hair was flat with sweat about her temples. Her skirt was sticking to her legs.
While Grigg looked fine. No jacket—he’d left that in the car—but no real wear and tear, either. It was more irritating to Jocelyn than anything else he’d done the whole evening. It was also sort of impressive. “What do you think of Sylvia?” she asked.
“She seems very nice,” Grigg said. “Why?”
“She’s more than nice. She’s smart and funny. Nobody kinder.”
“Sylvia is in love with Daniel,” Grigg said, as if he knew what she was up to, which, of course, she was and he did.
“There’s no percentage in that.”
“But see, it’s not for you to say. It’s not for you to decide who she loves. You should stop interfering and let her work out her own happiness.”
Jocelyn went rigid beside him. “You call it interfering?” Her voice was both incredulous and deadly. It contained all the fury of finding herself walking fifteen, sixteen, seventeen blocks in the Valley heat because someone had neglected to fill the gas tank, of trying to be a good sport about it only to find herself insulted by this same someone. “To wish my friends happy? Where Sylvia is involved I hope I never do stop interfering,” Jocelyn said. “I won’t ever apologize to anyone for that.”
Would you mind if I didn’t go tonight?” Allegra asked.
All the air went out of Sylvia’s lungs. Of course I mind, she said, but not out loud, she was still Sylvia. How can you be so selfish? How can you even think of sending me off to face your father alone? How can you not know what this night is doing to me? (Why did we buy you a hundred-twenty-dollar ticket?) Please, please come.
The phone rang before Sylvia managed a word. She guessed it was Jocelyn wondering where they were, but Allegra picked up the receiver, checked the caller ID, and set the receiver back in the cradle. She rolled onto her side so that Sylvia couldn’t see her face.
“You’ve reached the Hunters’,” Daniel said. Sylvia hadn’t changed the message, on the grounds that it was good for unknown callers to get a man. She’d neglected to factor in the impact of Daniel’s voice on her, because usually, if the message ran, it meant she wasn’t there to hear it. “We’re not home. You know what to do.”
“Allegra?” Sylvia recognized Corinne’s voice. She sounded sad and possibly drunk. “We have to talk. When are you going to talk to me?
“I saw Paco today. He told me I’ve done two unforgivable things. You should have been the one to tell me this. You should have let me defend myself. I think even you’ll agree that’s only fair.”
Corinne was obviously just getting started. Sylvia had recently cleared the tape, so there was plenty of empty time. She felt awkward overhearing this private message; Allegra, so open about the broad outlines of her sex life, was secretive about the details.
Maybe she’d talked to Daniel. Sylvia wished she could ask him whether he knew what Corinne had done. Sylvia needed Daniel’s help to deal with Allegra. Sylvia needed Allegra’s help to deal with Daniel. No one was being any help at all.
Sylvia picked up Allegra’s wineglass and took it to the kitchen. She stood at the sink in nothing but her slip and waited for Corinne to finish. She could still hear her voice like a stream of water in the distance, no words, just a rise and fall. Sylvia washed and dried the glass by hand, the way Jocelyn was always telling her she should.
She was angrier and angrier with Allegra. Whatever had happened, whatever Corinne had done, Allegra was the one who’d left. You didn’t walk out on someone you loved. You didn’t sit silent while they poured their drunken hearts into your phone machine, as if you didn’t even hear them. People in love found the one way to stay together.
She thought of Allegra’s drawn face and reddened eyes. She thought of how hard Allegra was finding it to get to sleep at night, how at midnight and one and two, she herself would wake to hear some movie playing on the DVD player. Allegra had even talked of getting a pirated Fellowship of the Ring, although she thoroughly disapproved of pirating, although when they’d seen it in the theater she’d complained and complained about the way Gimli was being played for cheap laughs.
Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children—happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way. Allegra had always been plenty interesting enough. Time for her to be happy.
How dare you, she said, standing in the kitchen, to Allegra in the bedroom. How dare you hurt my daughter so much. You pick up that phone right now, young lady—you let Corinne apologize. You let her atone for whatever it was, those two unforgivable things that she did.
You let Allegra be happy now. You let Allegra be loved.
The band was taking a break. Bernadette, Dean, and Prudie were joined at the table by a writer named Mo Bellington. Mr. Bellington had too much hair and not enough neck. Nice teeth, though. Bernadette noticed people’s teeth. Everyone did, but not everyone knew that they noticed. Bernadette’s father had worked on Bernadette’s teeth himself, with the result that, though she was now well along in her sixties, she had never lost a filling.
According to promotional materials on the table, Mo Bellington wrote mysteries that took place in the tiny town of Knight’s Landing. His detective was a cynical sugar-beet farmer who unearthed femurs and knucklebones almost every time he roto-tilled. On the table was a postcard of the jacket of Bellington’s most recent book. The title was Last Harvest. The two final t’s were knives, blood dripping down the blades into a field below. Bernadette was pretty sure she’d seen covers like that before. Nor did the title seem original. But if the artwork wasn’t wholly new, still she thought it reasonably well achieved.
“I guess you’re my group,” Mr. Bellington said, looking with obvious disappointment at the empty chairs. There was loud laughter at a nearby table. At another, someone tapped a wineglass with a fork, preparing to give a toast. Clearly there was livelier company elsewhere.
“More of us are coming,” Bernadette assured him. “I can’t imagine where everyone is. Jocelyn is the most punctual person alive. I’ve never known her to be late. Sylvia, not so much so. And Allegra. Don’t ask!”
Mr. Bellington made no answer and looked neither reassured nor entertained. He was a very young man to be writing books already. Bernadette could tell right off that he hadn’t lived long enough to have much to say. His sugar-beet farmer would be thinly drawn.
He walked around the table to sit next to Dean. This put his back to the rest of the room. Bernadette would have thought a writer would want to see what was going on.
If he’d taken the empty seat next to Bernadette, he’d have had his back to one of the huge columns and been able to see the dance floor and the podium and the band. Bernadette could see fully three other tables of people. But she had herself become invisible, especially to younger men. This had begun back in her fifties, so she was used to it by now. She’d become more audible to compensate.
“This whole event puts me in mind of my first husband,” she said. “John was a politician, so I know from fund-raisers! Comb your hair, dear, wash your face, and here’s a list of things you can say if anyone tries to talk with you:
“One: What a lovely event this is.
“Two: Isn’t the food delicious?
“Three: Aren’t the flowers beautiful?
“Four: Isn’t my husband the best man for the job? Let’s all be quiet now and listen to him talk! I myself am going to smile like an idiot the whole time he’s speaking.”
Even without music the room was noisy enough, the table big enough to make conversation across it difficult. Bernadette could see that Mr. Bellington wasn’t planning to try. He spoke to Dean. “If you have any questions about my books,” he said, “that’s what I’m here for. Content? Process? Where do I get my ideas? The word ‘last’ in Last Harvest is kind of a pun. ‘Last’ as in ‘final,’ but also ‘last’ as in ‘most recent.’ Ask me anything.”
There was something pompous, self-important in his delivery. Bernadette had just met him and already she was liking him less. The first course arrived, a lovely mushroom soup with maybe a dash of sherry.
“This is delicious,” Mr. Bellington said. “Well done.”
He directed his words toward Bernadette. What was that about? Did he think she’d made the soup?
“Do you love Jane Austen?” she asked. There was only one possible answer to the question. She would like to think that any man who wrote would get it right. She spoke loudly to lessen the risk of being ignored, and repeated her question just in case. “What do you think of Jane Austen, Mr. Bellington?”
“Great marketing. I envy her the movie deals. Call me Mo.”
“Which of her books is your favorite?” Prudie smiled in that unhappy way that made her lips disappear.
“I liked the movie with Elizabeth Taylor.”
Prudie’s hand had become unsteady. Bernadette saw the tremor in her Bloody Mary. “Your favorite Jane Austen is National Velvet?”
Prudie was being mean. Bernadette resolved to stop her. Soon. Meanwhile, it was good to see her putting up a fight. Not five minutes earlier her mother’s death had been painted across her face like one of those shattered women Picasso was so fond of. Now she looked dangerous. Now Picasso would be excusing himself, recollecting a previous engagement, backing away, leaving the building.
Dean coughed helpfully. Somewhere in the cough was the word “persuasion.” He was throwing Mo a lifeline.
Mo preferred to go down. “I haven’t actually read any Austen. I’m more into mysteries, crime fiction, courtroom stuff.” This was disappointing, but not damning. On the one hand it was a failing; on the other, manfully owned up to. If only Mo had stopped there.
“I don’t read much women’s stuff. I like a good plot,” he said.
Prudie finished her drink and set the glass down so hard you could hear it hit. “Austen can plot like a son of a bitch,” she said. “Bernadette, I believe you were telling us about your first husband.”
“I could start with my second. Or the one after that,” Bernadette offered. Down with plot! Down with Mo!
Dancing master Wilson complained about certain figures, such as “lead down the middle and up again” or “lead out to the wall and back,” noting that they were angular and dull. “Straight lines,” he said, “are useful, but not elegant; and, when applied to the Human Figure, are productive of an extremely ungraceful effect.”
“Start with the politician,” Prudie said. “We’ll get to the others. We have the whole evening.”
Bernadette loved to be asked to tell a story. She settled in for a long one. Anything for Prudie. “His name was John Andretti. He grew up in Atherton.”
John made the best first impression. He had an instant charm; you were the most fascinating person in the room. Until someone else caught his eye.
I met him up at Clear Lake, where we were tapping on the Fourth of July. It was my last year with the Peppers and we weren’t the Little Peppers anymore, because we were kind of grown-up for that. We were the Red-Hot Peppers by then. And I was the shortest. I was the last stair, even though I was nineteen years old.
My family was supposed to go to Hawaii for three whole weeks that summer. I was so looking forward to it. But my father felt he couldn’t leave his patients for that long, and so it was a trailer instead of a bungalow, a lake instead of the ocean. One damn tap dance after another. Madame Dubois had us all in polka dots that year. There was a flamenco craze. Going on in her brain.
Dad came with us, because he loved to fish. There was mercury in Clear Lake, from the old mines, but we didn’t think about that at all then. Now they tell you to only eat one fish from that lake a month, and this after years of cleanup. I didn’t like fish, so I would pick at my plate, even though Mother was always nagging us to eat it. She used to call fish “brain food,” which is what we all thought back then. Now I read how they’re putting warning labels on tuna. But eggs are good again. You have your good fats and your bad fats.
I once bit the end off a thermometer just to see if I could. Turned out to be dead easy. I spit the mercury right out, but Mother was so upset she gave me ipecac anyway. Then there she was all those years later, trying to get me to eat those fish.
I went swimming a lot, which was probably no better for me. I’d just learned to water-ski. So I was out on the lake one day, and John cut too close with his boat and upended me in his wake. Steered round to apologize and picked me up, shouting to my father how he’d take me in to shore. He used to say that he’d landed me like a fish. You’re the littlest thing I ever pulled out of the water, he used to tell me. I should have been made to throw you back.
He was a good politician, at least as far as the getting elected went. He remembered people’s names, and not just their names, but the names of their wives, husbands, children. He had a narrative line.
Bernadette nodded politely to Mo. “People don’t always realize how important that is in running an election. The voting public likes a good plot. Something simple.”
John’s was a classic. Or else it was a cliché. He was born real poor, and he made sure you knew that straight off. His speeches were all about his hardscrabble background—the obstacles overcome, the disappointments survived. The pledges he’d made to himself when discouraged. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. Brave stuff.
With just a hint of some old betrayal. This was the genius part. Nothing too specific, but the clear implication that he was too good to give you the details. Not one to tell tales and all. Not one to hold a grudge. You had to admire him for his generosity as well as his determination.
In truth he was the angriest man alive. He kept a list of insults. I mean an actual list, and there were items on it that went back twenty years. There was this boy named Ben Weinberg. They’d gone to school together; John’s father worked for Ben’s father. Ben had brains, friends, athletic ability, and lots of old money. The best of everything. John had to struggle so to get one-tenth of what was just handed to Ben. In the story of John’s life according to John, John was Oliver Twist and Ben was Little Lord Fauntleroy.
One day when John was sixteen Ben called him a nasty little climber, and there it was, twenty years later, number three on John’s list. His mother had places one and two.
“So easy not to be a climber when you’re born on top,” John said. We were married by then, and I was starting to get a clue. Before that I bought it all. I didn’t see the list until I made my first appearance on it. I was certainly no judge of character back then.
I hope I’ve learned a thing or two since. No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it. You see a campaign that focuses on character, rectitude, probity, and that’s exactly when you should start asking yourself, What’s this guy trying to hide?
But, there you go. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, just as they say.
“Tout le monde est sage après le coup,” Prudie said. “Yes, dear,” Bernadette answered.
After Lloyd and Mattie left to get married, Madame Dubois said we couldn’t any of us date anymore, as it was bad for the act if we got reputations. We were to remember we were ladies. So John and I snuck around, and finally I left my dancing shoes behind and we ran off and got married in Vegas at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. There was the nicest woman working there, Cynthia something-or-other. I remember she said she’d been a clerk at Woolworth before this job, and she missed the free fabric ends she used to get. Isn’t it funny, the things you remember? The chapel had some dresses, and I tried them all on, but they were too big for me. I really was the tiniest thing back then, couldn’t fit into anything off the rack.
So Cynthia altered a skirt for me right on the spot, and she combed my hair and did my makeup. There were a few couples ahead of us; we had a bit of a wait. She gave me a cigarette. I never smoked in my life but just this one time—the occasion seemed to call for it. Cynthia pointed out how now I was going to be Nettie Andretti; I’d never even thought of that. I was going by Nettie then. That’s the day I began using my full name, Bernadette.
While she did my hair, Cynthia told me this story—how there was a curse on her family because her grandpa had once hit a pure white cat with his car. He said it was an accident, but it probably wasn’t, because ever since, whenever anyone in the family was about to die, they saw a white cat. Her uncle saw a white cat from his bedroom window when he was only twenty-six. It streaked through the yard, grabbed one of his socks from the clothesline, and made off over the fence with it. And then he went out that very night with some friends and got killed in a bar fight by someone who thought he was someone else. They never did find that sock.
Cynthia was in the middle of telling me this. She had just said how her mother said she didn’t believe in any of that nonsense and to prove it went out and bought herself a white cat. I know something weird happened next, because of the way Cynthia was telling it, but I never heard what. John and I were called just then and I had to go get married. I was in a bad mood when I said my vows, because I wanted to hear the end of the white cat story. I’ve always wondered how that ended.
The year before I met John, Mattie had begged me to come and visit her and Lloyd. He’d gotten religion, and they were living in a commune on this ranch in Colorado. Mother was so angry to think I might have married Lloyd with just a little effort, since he really had been sweet on me first. And now he’d turned out so spiritual. Really, she was very middle-class. She should have known there’d be nothing respectable about the truly righteous. She packed my clothes like I was off for four weeks of Bible study.
The commune was run by a Reverend Watson. I thought he was a megalomaniac. Lloyd thought he was attentive. Lloyd always had liked being told what to do.
I don’t think Reverend Watson had any religious training at all. His inspiration was the Latter Rain sect, but he cut and pasted as suited him. He preached that the trappings of the occult—things like zodiac signs and numerology—had been stolen from God by the devil and it was up to him to wrest them away, put them back to their holy purposes. And there was something about extraterrestrials, too; I forget exactly what. They were coming to get us, or they’d already been and left us behind. One of those two.
While I was visiting, he had them all reading a book called Atomic Power with God, Through Fasting and Prayer, which said that if you could learn to control your appetites you’d gain supernatural powers. You’d be released from gravity. You’d be immortal. So Reverend Watson said we were all to fast and be celibate. They mostly served boxty, because it was cheap, so the fasting was sort of redundant, and the celibacy was nothing to me, but Mattie minded. No one in the community drew a steady paycheck. God was to provide. I would have called my parents to come and get me, but the phones had all been turned off.
The minute Lloyd heard immortality was possible, then immortality was what he wanted. Every day that passed without him floating up to heaven was a great disappointment to him. To Reverend Watson, too, and Lloyd minded the reverend’s disappointment more than he minded his own.
They were all trying to pull me in, even Mattie. I didn’t blame her; I just thought she needed rescuing. One day Lloyd asked me to work the Ouija board with him. He was so disheartened. He still couldn’t fly and the spirits weren’t talking to him, though they were quick enough to send messages to the rest of the congregation. I was sorry to see him so down, and fed up with things in general. I mean, my father was in the Masons and I was queen of Job’s Daughters one year. We went to church. I sang in the choir. But I hadn’t lost my mind over it.
So I pushed the planchette. Leave Watson, I made it say. Lloyd leapt up so fast he knocked his own chair over. He went straight to Reverend Watson and told him Satan was striding amongst us, and Reverend Watson came right back to cast him out. There was a tremendous to-do and I was sort of pleased, because things were less boring than before, but Reverend Watson’s eye fell on me then and it was a suspicious eye.
There were only four women in his congregation, and we began to hear a lot about Eve. None of it good. Reverend Watson believed that Eve had done a whole lot more than speak to the serpent in Eden. He believed she’d slept with it. True believers were descended from Adam and Eve, he told us, and then, looking straight at me, unbelievers from Eve and the snake. And since Adam’s downfall was to listen to Eve, the women were now forbidden to speak. All the evil in the world, Reverend Watson said, came from listening to a woman’s voice.
Mattie was afraid to go against Reverend Watson. There I was, her guest for four weeks and I could only talk if there was no one to hear me, which certainly misses some of the point of talking. But then Reverend Watson went to a conference in Boston, and when he came back, we were allowed to speak again, as he had a new plan for transcending the mundane plane of our earthly lives. The new plan involved psychotomimetics. Latter Rain with LSD. Acid Rain.
Lloyd was high for days. He finally had some visions of his own. He saw that he could fly, but just didn’t want to. What do I have to prove? he asked. I took it myself. It made me so happy. Everything around me danced. Pots. Fenceposts. Goats.
I saw it all from somewhere above, as if life were one big Busby Berkeley number. We were on the ranch, very isolated from the outside world. It was winter. Hundreds of crows gathered in the trees outside the kitchen. There were so many it looked as if the trees had leafed all in black. I went outside and they swam up in elaborate patterns, like words inked on the air. They settled down again, cawing at me. “Go,” they said. “Go. Go. Go.”
“I just love crows.” Bernadette looked at Mo. “I hope you put lots of crows in your books. I bet they flock around the sugar-beet fields. Especially when bodies are being unearthed. You could have crows who find clues. There’s a bunch now, nesting in the parking lot of the University Mall. I see them when I go to get my hair cut.”
“I sort of do that, only with magpies,” Mo said. “Magpies really represent the Valley to me. One reviewer said I had a magpie motif. I use them for portent as well as theme. I could explain how I do that.”
“If only we were talking about magpies,” Prudie said firmly. “Go on, Bernadette.”
Well, it seemed to me if a crow told you to do something you should do it. I left without even changing my clothes. I walked right off the ranch. It was miles and miles to a road with any traffic, and it rained before I was halfway there. Great gobs of rain, so thick I could hardly see through.
My shoes were covered with mud, as if I was wearing shoes on my shoes. I remember thinking that was a real profound thing to think. The mud would break apart and re-form while I walked. Made my feet so heavy, it seemed like I was walking forever. Of course I probably didn’t go in a straight line. Not as the crow flies.
By the time I finally reached the highway I’d sobered up. Hitched a ride with a man about my father’s age. Mr. Tybald Parker. He was shocked by my appearance. And he scolded me for hitching, said it was a dangerous thing for a woman to do. He gave me his handkerchief.
I told him everything—not just Mattie and Lloyd and Reverend Watson, but everything I could think of. The Peppers. Dad’s dental practice. It was so nice to talk freely again; I never stopped to think what I should say and what I shouldn’t. It was such relief.
He got me a hotel room so I could shower and sleep, and he bought me a meal with no potatoes in it and helped me call my parents to wire me some money so I could get the bus home. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” he told me just before he left. It was the first time since I’d gone to visit Mattie that I felt God’s presence in my life.
I got a Christmas letter from Mr. Parker every year for more than twenty years, until he died. They were wonderful letters, all about people I didn’t know, getting degrees, getting married, going on cruises, having babies. I remember how his grandson went to UCLA on a baseball scholarship.
So, all the while I was learning about John and his temper and his grudge list, he was learning about me. Drugs, cults. Visionary crows. He was quite frantic; it was very bad for the campaign. He told me I must never say anything about anything to anyone. I was so tired of being told to shut up. But I stayed quiet. Got pregnant, which John said was a sure vote-getter. Smiled, smiled, smiled, and secretly hoped he’d lose, so I’d be allowed to talk again.
One day he had a debate scheduled, all five candidates meeting the press. I fixed his tie. “How do I look?” he asked, and I told him he looked good. He was a handsome man. Turned out there was a pair of my underpants stuck to the back of his jacket. They’d been in the dryer; I suppose there was static electricity. They were huge because I was pregnant, but at least they were clean.
I don’t know how they got on his jacket. He said I must have put them there when I hugged him. As if I wanted the voters and the press and everyone to see my underpants! I showed up on his list again; by now no one had more appearances there than I did. Bernadette has destroyed me, is how the item read.
As if he needed me for that. John turned out to have a past, too, a little bywater off the public narrative. Gambling debts and an arrest record. Aggravated assault.
He ran off with my little sister without even divorcing me. Dad had to go looking all over the state for them to bring my sister home. Because of who John was, it made the papers. Our family didn’t look so good, either. The drugs came out then. The cult. One of the Peppers told me they had an opening, but when I went to talk with Madame Dubois she wouldn’t take me back now that I was a mother, and notorious to boot. Madame Dubois said that some standards had to be maintained. She said that I’d pollute the Peppers.
She told me no one would ever marry me again, or my sister either, but that turned out not to be a problem.
If a fine Picture, beautiful Fields, crystal Streams, green Trees and imbroider’d Meadows in Landscape or Nature itself will afford such delightful Prospects, how much more must so many well-shap’d Gentlemen and Ladies, richly dress’d, in the exact Performance of this Exercise, please the Beholders.
—KELLOM TOMLINSON, Dancing Master
Sylvia decided to speak frankly with Allegra. I really need you tonight, she was going to say. I don’t think it’s all that much to ask. For one evening, try to think about me.
She met Allegra in the hallway, wearing Sylvia’s knit dress. “Okay?” Allegra asked.
Sylvia felt a wash of relief, partly that Allegra was coming, partly that Sylvia hadn’t told her she had to. Confrontation with Allegra rarely turned out the way you planned. “Sexy,” Sylvia said.
Allegra’s mood had improved. She had a lighter step, a straighter back. She was carrying Sylvia’s midnight-blue dress with the sunburst stitching at the shoulder. “Wear this.” Sylvia put it on. Allegra picked out earrings and a necklace for her. Brushed Sylvia’s hair to one side and pinned it. Applied eye shadow and lipstick, gave her a tissue to blot with. “Pues. Vámonos, vámonos, mamá,” she said. “How did we get so late?”
Sylvia took Allegra’s hand as they went outside, squeezed it once, let it go. Beeped open the car and slid into a long, hot night.
The entrée arrived, salmon and string beans, served with a local Zinfandel. An extremely successful mystery writer delivered the keynote while everyone else ate. Initially there were problems with the microphone, some rasping, squealing feedback, but this was quickly solved. The keynoter was brief and charming; he was perfect.
After he finished, Mo told Dean that the legal procedures in the extremely successful mystery writer’s books were all screwed up. “Lots of people don’t care,” Mo said. “I’m kind of a stickler for accuracy myself.” He began to take Dean through the errors of the other writer’s most recent book, point by point. “Lots of people don’t understand how the discovery phase works,” he said. He was prepared to explain.
Bernadette leaned in to Prudie and spoke quietly. “I may have shaded a few things. I didn’t know Mo was a stickler for accuracy. I thought he just liked plot. So I added some bits. Sports. Lingerie. Sexy little sisters. Guy stuff.”
“Drugs. Talking animals,” Prudie said.
“Oh, I didn’t make up the crows.”
Prudie found she felt no immediate need to know which parts were true and which weren’t. Maybe later she would. But Bernadette was not her mother; maybe she’d never care.
“My husbands weren’t any of them bad men. I was the problem. Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there’s no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.
“And then I couldn’t fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me. So I’d lop some part off, but then I’d start missing it, wanting it back. I didn’t really fall in love until I had that first child.”
The music resumed. Prudie could see the black woman, sans mink, dancing. She’d taken her shoes off as well as her stole. Her partner was a stout, bald white man. Three other couples were on the floor, but this pair drew your eye. There was something deeply incongruous about wearing formal clothes and boogying on down. It took a good dancer to make you overlook this. Prudie wondered whether they were married. Was she his first wife? Had she lopped off some part of herself to make him fit? If so, she looked pretty happy without it.
Now there were eight couples on the dance floor. Half of these, by Prudie’s calculation, were rich men with their second wives. She based her identifications on the differential between the woman’s youth and attractiveness and the man’s, and on Sylvia’s behalf, she disapproved. She had herself married a man much better-looking than she deserved, which seemed to her the way it ought to be done.
Dean saw Prudie watching the dance floor. “Dance with me, baby,” he said. It was an obvious plea to miss the detailed explanation of search and seizure.
Prudie hadn’t danced, even alone in the living room to Smokey Bill Robinson, since her mother died. Her mother was a huge fan of Smokey Robinson’s. But Prudie thought she could do this for Dean. It wasn’t a lot to ask. “Okay,” she said. She realized she couldn’t. “In a minute. Maybe later.”
“How about you, Bernadette?”
Bernadette took off her earrings and set them by her plate. “They’d weigh me down,” she said, and followed Dean off.
A shadow fell over Prudie. This turned out to be Jocelyn arriving at last, stooping down to kiss her cheek. “You hanging in there?” Jocelyn asked. She smelled of sweat and soap-dispenser soap. Her hair was wet and spiked around the edges of her face. Her makeup had been partially and patchily removed. She fell into the chair next to Prudie, bent down, removed one shoe and massaged the arch of her foot.
“You missed the soup and the keynote. I was worried,” Prudie said. She actually hadn’t been, but that was only because Bernadette had distracted her and no thanks to Jocelyn. Prudie should have been worried. Jocelyn could be deliberately rude, but she was never thoughtless. Jocelyn was never late. Jocelyn was never—unkempt. How weird was this, that Bernadette would look better than Jocelyn? “No sign of Sylvia,” Prudie told her. “No sign of Daniel, either. What do you think that means?”
“I’ll go phone her,” Jocelyn said. She put her shoe back on. “I’m surprised about Daniel. Allegra said he’d be here for sure.”
“ ‘Scenes might arise unpleasant to more than myself’?” Prudie suggested.
“Sylvia would never make a scene.”
“You would.”
Jocelyn left. Grigg took the seat by Mo. There were several empty chairs between Grigg’s and Jocelyn’s. Your love is lifting me higher, the band played. Only without any words. “Can you give Jocelyn a ride home?” he asked Prudie. “Later? After the dancing? I ran out of gas.”
“Sure,” Prudie said. “But Dean will take you to get gas. Whenever you want.”
Jocelyn returned to the table. “They’re five minutes away,” she said. “Almost here.”
Grigg busied himself with his dinner. He turned his chair to face Mo. “So. Mysteries. I love mysteries. Even when they’re formulaic, I just love the formula.”
“Mine aren’t formulaic,” Mo said. “One time I didn’t even have a murder until right at the end.”
Who didn’t love mysteries? “How do you know Bernadette?” Prudie asked Jocelyn.
“She was married to my godfather.”
“What did she do?”
“Job-wise? Ask her.”
“That would take too long,” Prudie said.
“I don’t know that I can do it short, either. She never finished school, so she was always picking up this or that. Teacher’s aide. Manicurist. I remember she told me she worked a carnival once, getting people to throw rings around stacks of dishes. She was one of the Snow Whites at Disneyland for a while. Pet sitter. Mostly she married. Very Austen-like, except that there were so many of them. I don’t mean that to sound mercenary. You know how cheerful she is; she always thought this was the one that would last. I used to worry about her kids, but just on principle. They always seemed fine, and they turned out great.
“She was my favorite of all Ben’s wives. They lived in this big old house in Beverly Hills with a beautiful garden and a wrap-around porch. There was a pond with goldfish and a wooden bridge. It was the greatest place.”
“Not Ben Weinberg.”
“Have you heard of him? He was a Hollywood bigwig for a while. He worked on a lot of Fred Astaire pictures.”
Easter Parade. “Oh my God,” said Prudie. “Too much plot!”
She turned to look at the dance floor. It was night behind the five-story arch of glass; inside, the balconies were strung with chains of lights, now lit like constellations. The band was small and distant. She saw Dean—tall, handsome, and kind of jerky when he danced, but in a good way.
Bernadette was rotund, but elastic. She had a serious shimmy in her shoulders, loose knees, rocking hips. She was sugar-footing one minute, buck-and-winging the next. A restrained, ladylike cha-cha. It was too bad Dean was out there with her. He was obviously holding her back.
Sylvia locked the car in the parking garage and waited with Allegra for the elevator to the street. She was relaxed, relieved. Jocelyn had phoned to tell her that Daniel hadn’t shown. Sylvia had forgiven Allegra for almost backing out on the evening (and now felt guilty for making her come). She’d even forgiven Allegra the serious crime of making Allegra unhappy.
Somewhere around the second floor she said, “You know, I don’t think there’s anything truly unforgivable. Not where there’s love,” but Allegra was reading an ad for Depo-Provera on the elevator wall, and she didn’t answer.
Jocelyn spoke to Prudie, but pitched her voice so that Grigg and Mo would also hear. “Don’t you find that people who dance well don’t usually go around telling people they dance well?”
“Any savage can dance,” Grigg said. He got up, walked over, held out his hand. Jocelyn’s feet hurt all the way up to her knees, but she wouldn’t give Grigg the satisfaction of saying so. If he wasn’t too tired to dance, then neither was she. She would dance until it killed her.
She ignored the hand, rose without his help.
She didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at her. Prudie looked at them both, walking off together, angry backs, angry arms, perfectly synchronized angry steps.
Prudie’s mood had been volatile since her mother’s death. She’d had a pretty nice evening here, listening to Bernadette’s stories, making a mockery of Mo. Now suddenly she felt abandoned by Dean and by Bernadette, Jocelyn, and Grigg. It was silly, they were only dancing, but there it was; they’d left her all alone. She was always being left behind.
“I feel untethered,” she told Mo. “As if the rope tying me to this earth had snapped.” This wasn’t something she could say to Dean. He’d be so hurt to think he wasn’t her tether. She could say it to Mo only because she had had too much to drink and would never see him again. Or read his stupid books.
“Then it’s time to soar,” Mo said. He leaned across the table to say it, so the zinnia centerpiece brushed the bottom of his chin. He came close enough to see that she was crying, then straightened up in a helpless, startled way. “Don’t do that!” he told her. “Come dance instead. If you think Dean won’t mind.” The band was playing the Beatles’ “Come Together,” which, out of all the hundreds of Beatles songs, was her mother’s absolute favorite.
“Let’s not and say we did,” Prudie almost answered, because that’s what her mother would have done.
But it was such a nice thing for Mo to have said. It seemed, in its small way, like sound advice. A plan, even. Dance instead. She could stay here, alone if you didn’t count Mo, who didn’t count, or she could make herself join the party. She wiped her eyes with her napkin, folded it, and set it on the table. “Okay,” Prudie said.
So what if she’d refused an earlier offer from the man she loved? He would ask again. In the meantime there were lights and flowers, glass rings and bronze fox faces. Rich men and nice men and absent men and men who just liked a good plot. If the music was good, why not dance with them all?
Bernadette told us:
By the end of Pride and Prejudice, Jane, Elizabeth, and Lydia Bennet are all married. This still leaves two Bennet girls, Mary and Kitty, unattached.
According to Austen’s nephew, she married them off later. She told her family that Kitty Bennet eventually wed a clergyman who lived near the Darcy estate. Mary Bennet wed a clerk from her uncle Philips’s office, which kept her close to her parents’ home and part of the only sort of society in which she could distinguish herself. Both marriages, according to Austen, were good ones.
“I always like to know how a story ends,” says Bernadette.