LUCKY LITTLE LADY IN THE CITY OF LIGHT

MILDRED HARRISON FLEW TO LOS ANGELES. Despite the smooth skies and half-empty rows of seats, she spent much of the flight gnawing her fingernails and nursing the straw of the one Bloody Mary she allowed herself, habits she hadn’t been able to shake since Brooke had gone Hollywood. It was her most difficult trip yet. The next day she and Brooke would return together to Blue Bell; that night she envisioned herself helping her daughter pack and settle up a few loose ends, although she had no idea what Brooke had been through in the last forty-eight hours. She told Mildred she’d practically had to beg the producers for a two-week hiatus to “get her shit together,” not to mention the shame she must have suffered being hauled before an L.A. County judge looking like she’d just emerged from an opium den. The sight of her daughter on that entertainment program had kindled in Mildred a maternal call to arms, the kind that could turn any ordinary woman into an action hero.

At first Brooke had told her not to come. She’d been commuting between Blue Bell and her L.A. flat since she was seventeen and didn’t need an escort on account of one silly drunk-driving violation. But after speaking to Kenny Zeller who’d coughed up a few details about the arrest that Brooke had conveniently bowdlerized, namely the eighth of Bolivian pearl her little champion of world peace and drug-free schools had quickly stashed beneath the seat of her red Porsche, Mildred knew she had to make the trip.

“Bolivian what?”

“Not to worry, Mil, it wasn’t even hers. You know how things go out there. When in Rome … Anyway, get this—she managed to talk the cops out of searching her car. One of them wanted an autograph for his daughter.”

“But wait, I don’t understand. What did you say she was hiding?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. She was holding a little coke. Nothing to worry about, though. She barely touches the stuff. She’s a good girl, Mil. A very good girl.”

As Kenny spoke, Mildred felt the hands of guilt coil around her neck. Cocaine? She couldn’t imagine Brooke involved in anything like that. A little too much liquor was one thing, but cocaine! Mildred booked a flight and within hours was California bound.

At the airport car rental, she upgraded from economy to a full-sized sedan and took one of the company’s maps to ensure an easy departure. Whenever she made the trip without Tom, that stretch around the car rentals always unnerved her. Navigating the boulevards and highways of Los Angeles had been much easier than friends back home said it would be, what with the special map Brooke had given her. Mildred had a better chance of being stopped by the LAPD for slow driving than floating too far off track, and still those few blocks near the airport, where the scenery resembled a nuclear test site, teased her mercilessly. There were too many lots and too few signs, anxieties complemented by the pressure of her impending visit. Such nervousness always carried Mildred back to the first road test she’d failed almost twenty-five years earlier, running Tom’s Dodge through not one but two stop signs and rimming the curb on her parallel park. Vehicles were so weighty back then, Mildred couldn’t imagine how anyone passed the first time, yet the thought of telling Tom she’d failed had soured her stomach so badly she couldn’t keep down anything but chicken broth and toasted Wonder Bread.

It was Tom who’d given her driving lessons just a couple of months after they’d met, and if she hadn’t been in love with him already, it was fair to say she’d left their first class swooning over his wide eyes and angular jaw, a man as sensible as he was handsome, ten years her senior with a degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and steady work at Paxton Pharmaceuticals. That first day, Tom kept them sitting in front of the house more than an hour discussing every knob, button, and gauge on the dashboard. Mildred, however, was more interested in their thighs bumping up against each other, the soft cotton of Tom’s shirtsleeves against her forearms as he guided her hands in position on the steering wheel. She was close enough to smell the starch in his clean white shirt, a scent conjuring houses with built-in garages, morning kisses before work, all the little tidbits of security. She’d practically had them rearing a happy and healthy brood when Tom pulled her outside for a look underneath the hood. “Most people don’t have the first idea how a car works,” Tom had said. “But I believe it’s important.”

Imagine all those hours of lecturing, not to mention the flashcards Tom had designed to test her on the rules of the road, and still she’d failed that menace of a test. The funny thing was, when she finally broke down and told Tom, he simply smiled. Apparently, on his first test he’d mistakenly hit reverse as they were pulling away from the curb and slammed into a motorcycle. The inspector had failed him on the spot. “Practically everyone fails the first time,” he’d said, “but not everyone knows how a fan belt works.” Mildred was so relieved she actually spit up laughing, a faux pas that knocked them both into long silly giggles. Later, Tom cooked a T-bone steak and string beans, heavenly victuals for a girl who’d spent the past five days on sick food, and eating had never felt so immediate, so pleasurable, so intoxicating, her entire emotional canvas reified in this man feeding her string beans with his fingers.

Thoughts of young love were indeed comforting to a woman pushing fifty in a forest-green rental car, the L.A. freeway spread out in runnels of red and white lights in front of her. And leaving the airport had been a snap. A left turn out of the lot, then a right onto the boulevard, and a few yards later, the freeway. The sheer ease of it, even in the dark, had Mildred chuckling to herself as she pressed the gas pedal closer to the floor, almost delirious with her own success, although that elation soon tumbled into a touch of sadness, as too much of anything eventually bred its opposite. Often the pleasure Mildred took in her solitary victories left her wondering what she might have accomplished had she not jumped straight into marriage.

She turned on the radio and tuned it to the swing jazz station she and Tom loved, bursting in on a Rogers & Hart tune. The name would come to her, though the slash of trombone and snare ushered in thoughts of her husband. Three hours ahead, he was probably flicking the small light in the downstairs bathroom for his father’s midnight run before plodding up to an empty bed. The poor man—Tom, that is, not Grampy Harry. If Mildred sometimes found herself wondering where she might have been without him, she was comforted by the fact that he never knew quite what to do with himself at home without her. Once, a few years ago, when she’d returned from a weekend in Milltown visiting her parents, Tom said her absence had thrown him into the kind of fog that accompanied most antihistamines. A romantic notion. To think after all their years together she could still affect her husband as if she were a drug, and that was high praise coming from a man who developed pharmaceuticals for a living. Yet for all her it’s-only-fair equations, it still upset her to imagine Tom at home. Alone in a head cloud.

If Cynthia wasn’t working she might have kept him company after dinner, then again she wasn’t the type to watch TV or play Boggle with them the way Brooke did whenever she was home. Brooke was always more traditional in that way, which is why it was utterly incongruous to imagine her sniffing drugs. Of her two daughters, Cynthia was the one she’d been watching, worrying about the hours she spent alone in her dark room, leaving only for school or the public library, where she volunteered in the adult-literacy program and kept her library card active. Every day she’d come home with another corpulent hardcover Mildred couldn’t see behind the shiny University of Pennsylvania book cover Cynthia’d affixed. Mildred had once made the mistake of asking what she was reading. “Just stuff,” Cynthia had said.

“What kind of stuff?” Mildred pried.

“History, mostly.”

“But why do you hide them?”

“In the public transit system everyone’s a social critic,” she said, as if her statement were common knowledge, and although it had perplexed Mildred, her daughter’s demeanor curtailed further inquiry. Cynthia had a way of making Mildred feel downright invasive at times, an air Mildred couldn’t help thinking she and Tom had exacerbated, no matter how determined they’d been not to favor Brooke.

Mildred eased up on the accelerator, lightly tapping the break in tune with Benny Goodman as she exited the highway. At the first red light, she checked memory to map and had no trouble matching the few boulevard blocks and smaller streets that led to Brooke’s hacienda. Pulling into the driveway, she saw a few lights behind those blinds like crinkled white construction paper. When Brooke had first moved in Mildred assumed the blinds were temporary. There was no point to transparent blinds, especially for a young woman on television. But Brooke had tossed off Mildred’s concerns, saying the blinds were handcrafted in Mexico, as if the aesthetics would ensure her safety. Then she took Mildred’s hand and marched her out front to display a network of electronically censored strips, which triggered sirens and dispatched messages to the police station, taped over milky white windows. The closer you got the more opaque the glass. Blinds were irrelevant, Brooke had said, and Mildred could see her point.

She turned off the car and took a deep, damp breath before stepping outside. L.A. was colder than she remembered. Nothing like back home, but she was happy she hadn’t tucked her sable into the trunk at the car rental. Normally she wore the coat—a most extravagant twentiethanniversary gift from Tom—only on special occasions, but that night it was her way of keeping her husband close. She draped the fur over her shoulders in a style reminiscent of old Hollywood and grabbed her overnight bag. If she’d been true Hollywood stock she might have donned her sunglasses, in fact she might have had special sunglasses made for wearing at night when the sun retreated and the soul was caught off guard. But Mildred Harrison had lived her entire life in a place where sunglasses at night signaled blindness, delinquency, or lord knows what other psychological dysfunction, and therefore she was besieged by the stream of flashes like an asteroid shower. Of course, this being Hollywood and her daughter being Brooke Harrison, Mildred quickly realized they were not stars but cameras. Packs of them, or so it seemed. The onslaught of clicks and flickers, the thick lenses in her face, and hands tugging at her overnight bag disabled her. She wanted to turn and give the image-stalkers a piece of her mind. This was private property, not some Hollywood function. How dare they!

At that moment, however, Brooke’s door swung open and a young man ducked down the front steps with his arm outstretched. In a quick glance Mildred saw how handsome he was, even by movie star standards. She took his hand and together they barreled into the house, the young man slamming the door shut behind them. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Before Mildred could answer, Brooke threw her arms around her. “Mom, I’m so sorry!” she said, and Mildred felt her throat constrict.

There was so much she wanted to say, yet all she could manage was a teary, “Oh, Brooke!”

“Aw, Mom, don’t cry.” Brooke leaned back slightly. “I knew you shouldn’t have come.”

Again, Mildred couldn’t speak. She held Brooke tighter, amazed her daughter felt more childlike every time she touched her, as if television had not only stunted her growth but demanded somatic regression. She was getting more and more like women at the soap opera awards: plasticized smile over straight white teeth, and skeletal. Drugs? Mildred wondered, overwhelmed by the sudden urge to bare her breast, as if the dehydrated mounds had turned fertile in the presence of her undernourished daughter. It was symbolic, of course. The best Mildred could do was offer to cook dinner as she slowly disentangled her hands from Brooke’s bony hips.

“We ordered in,” Brooke said. “Is Thai food okay?”

“Thai?”

“It’s just like Chinese, only different,” the young man said as he handed her a Kleenex.

“Thank you,” Mildred nodded. “Thai … sure, why not?”

“Sure, why not? That’s right.” The young man stared at Mildred. She realized she’d seen him in that movie starring all the young actors. And in magazines. “She’s terrific, you really are lucky,” he said to Brooke, then turned back to Mildred. “Do you realize your daughter is the only person I’ve ever met who can’t say a bad thing about her parents?”

“Really now,” Mildred blushed, though she knew it was true. Ever since that first performance at the rec center, the entire Harrison clan had been committed to Brooke’s wants and needs, but at times like these Mildred found herself wondering at what cost.

“I keep telling Johnny I had a happy childhood, but he won’t believe me,” Brooke said.

“I’m so pleased you still remember it that way,” Mildred said.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, I don’t know …” Mildred stopped herself. There had to be some unresolved ache or untended feeling—why else would she seek the approval of millions? Not to mention the drinking, the drugs, and the other fringe benefits of fame that Mildred dared not even consider, especially with the young fellow in front of her smiling so wantonly, as if he were the kind of man who spent his afternoons pleasuring rich older women, a thought that actually made Mildred blush again.

“Wow, Mildred,” he said, “you’re even better than I imagined … and Brooke forgot to mention how beautiful you are.”

“Lighten up, Valentino, this is my mother!” Giggling, Brooke shoved her shoulder against his. He put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head, a gesture that comforted Mildred. Had she thought about it, she might have wondered if the presence of the young charmer John Strong had been orchestrated to steer the evening away from her daughter’s troubles (cocaine!?), but at that moment Mildred was relieved to find Brooke in a zesty mood, and the way the young man had commanded the scoping vermin outside was quite impressive. The result, Mildred would learn over dinner, of his Hollywood upbringing.

John’s father was Philip Strong, the actor and B-movie producer; his mother, Gail Vargas, had been a famous costume designer before succumbing to breast cancer a few years back. Both had shared a zealot’s tooth for the glamorous life, leaving John to grow up in the shadow of their sundry affairs and addictions as they struggled not to kill each other whenever one of them came crawling back home. They’d managed to stay married ten years, although the way John described it, their coupling seemed the antithesis of anything Mildred had ever called marriage. “I always thought one of them would end up dead before they split, and then one day my father saw the light,” John said. He paused to light a cigarette, a pastime Mildred might have prohibited during dinner, but she was captivated by the young man. A sly smile crossed his lips before he exhaled and continued his story. “I’m not just being metaphoric here. My father had this girlfriend who was a Christian Scientist and she started dragging him to services and reading rooms … they read a lot, you know? I suppose it’s more active than most religions, but anyway, before he could say uncle he was hooked on God and realizing that adultery was sort of problematic. Of course, he couldn’t ditch his girlfriend because she was tied into the whole religion thing, so he finally got his balls up to leave my mother. Mind you, I had no idea any of this was going on until much later, but when I was about nine, I guess, I came home from school one day and found my mother in the living room all dressed up and smothered in peanut butter.”

“No!” Mildred put down her fork, imagining a secondstring movie star: gorgeous, inviting, aging, and insane.

“Yes! And not just any peanut butter, this really expensive flavored stuff she brought back from Spain. It was so bizarre. She had about seven jars open in front of her—chocolate, banana, hazelnut. The room stunk of sweet chemicals and there was peanut butter all over the couch and carpet, in her hair, on her white silk dress with the feather collar, one of her most fantastic designs. She was brilliant, my mother. I’m not kidding, you go anywhere in town and say the name Gail Vargas, people skip a breath before picking up the conversation.”

“She designed for Katharine Hepburn,” Brooke said.

John beamed. “That’s right. And Audrey once, before she fell for Givenchy. Anyway, my mother’s standing there covered in gourmet peanut butter and you know what she says to me? She says, ‘Johnny, darling, can you get me a cigarette?’”

He snuffed out his own cigarette in his untouched chicken curry and took a sip of wine, eyes wandering between his two reticent dinner companions. “‘Johnny, can you get me a cigarette?’ Just like that. I can’t explain it, but I knew immediately my father wasn’t ever coming home again.”

“So what did you do?” Mildred asked.

“What did I do? I got her a cigarette. If she could pretend she wasn’t covered in peanut butter, so could I. From that day on we were pretty tight, even though I loathed most of her boyfriends. Gruesome parasites. It’s tough being a smart woman around here. Your options are totally limited.”

“I am never raising kids in this town,” Brooke said.

“Sweetheart,” John patted Brooke’s arm. “That’s not the moral. My parents should have had a nice affair and walked away. They both wanted too much to give anything back to each other, let alone to me. It’s like, what were these people thinking having a child?”

Silence descended upon the table. Mildred reached for the vegetables smothered in coconut sauce and took a few clumsy spoonfuls. She was already full but eating seemed easier than addressing John’s query. Who knew what people thought before coming together and having children? Probably many, like John’s parents, weren’t thinking at all. Imagining the heights of deprivation and privilege he’d known as a child had spun Mildred into an uncontrollable pathos. He was wise beyond his years, this young man, and the way he strung sentences together like tightly woven petit point bore the mark of someone who’d learned to entertain for survival, unlike her own daughter whose theatrical countenance seemed more of a luxury. Even in her drained and emaciated state, even with her stardom now tottery, Brooke seemed so steadfast and selfassured, as if she could walk away with her identity intact. Still, Mildred wished she’d eat more of the noodles she kept shifting from one side of her plate to the other. Like John, she didn’t seem at all interested in food.

“Brooke, you really should eat something,” Mildred said, unsure if she’d actually spoken out loud.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Honey, listen to your mother,” John said, then winked at Mildred. “I’ve always wanted to say that in real life. That and, ‘Do you have a warrant?’”

They all laughed, although Mildred could sense the star-flecked sadness prompting this young man’s character, and in that instant fancied herself a detective of the human spirit. For the diamond-cut wrinkles above John’s brow reminded her of Cynthia, who’d recently sprouted thick worry lines beneath the scar on her forehead, giving her the same kind of omniscient glare this young man had. Mildred couldn’t help thinking of the early years when Cynthia wouldn’t speak except to call out Brooke’s name, and of course the scar had cemented the two girls further. Only Brooke had the power to soothe her sister, just as her presence seemed a tonic to John’s melancholia.

In completing ourselves we look outside ourselves, Mildred thought. Tom was the most rational man she’d ever met while Mildred to this day remained a bundle of nervous ticks. A silent worrier, whenever her husband was more than a half hour late from work she stood at the front window pulling the curtains open and shut until he returned, and if Brooke missed her daily check-in, Mildred chipped the nail polish from her fingernails and methodically picked at her cuticles for hours. Oddly, these fears never materialized into action. Mildred Harrison was not the type to phone hospitals or local police stations, nor to hop on airplanes for that matter. But Kenny Zeller had frightened the daylights out of her, although now that she’d seen Brooke wasn’t the strung-out mess she’d expected, Mildred certainly didn’t want to burden her beleaguered daughter with her amateur soul-sleuthing. Even if she’d tried explaining her insights, Mildred would have talked herself into a circle. Was it the boy’s similarity to Cynthia that bothered her? His brooding presence? The way he couldn’t seem to get comfortable in his chair? It was all terribly confusing and the wine had glazed a fog over the room, if not behind her eyes. Mildred reached for her water and took a long sip. Through the glass she saw John Strong’s face floating amid the condensed droplets and imagined him drifting into the mist over the Hollywood hills like an image immortalized on a stained glass panel. Only Brooke kept him here on earth.

The wine had obviously eclipsed her brain waves as Mildred’s thoughts of heaven and earth were usually confined to the Sunday morning services they’d been skipping more and more unless Brooke was with them; it was one of the family rituals Mildred thought imperative to maintain. She wanted to keep home familiar to Brooke. That night in L.A., however, she determined she would return regularly to church, and she wouldn’t drink as much, for she surmised it could have been the alcohol that conferred such ethereal substance on the young heartthrob. After all, he was simply a young man trying to impress his girlfriend’s mother, a feat he would have accomplished without clearing the dishes and perking a pot of decaf while the two women sat at the dining room table. “See, he’s a good one,” Brooke said.

“He seems sad.”

“No, he’s just really deep.”

Mildred squeezed Brooke’s wrist and smiled. “I’m so happy for you, honey,” she said, deciding that her daughter was riding an eighth of one-hundred-percentpure love. (It did have a way of killing the appetite.) She remembered years ago telling her parents Tom was the smartest man she’d ever met, despite her family’s concerns that he was too old, too set in his ways, but Mildred, secure in the knowledge that Tom was it—her one and only—would not back down. A whiff of nostalgia for the steadfast girl she’d once been circulated, a longing transmuted into empathy in Brooke’s presence. But Kenny’s words still nagged, and Mildred felt her chest cave in and breath shorten as she summoned the strength to speak. “Brooke,” she said. “There’s something I have to ask you … about the … incident.”

“Oh, Mom, it’s all lies. I only had a couple of drinks. I was at a party.”

“But Kenny said there were drugs.”

“Drugs!” Brooke stood up and slammed her chair against the table, and Mildred felt her heart collapse.

She shouldn’t have said anything. She’d read about withdrawal, how it could make one irritable and paranoid. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” Brooke shouted.

“What is, my angel?” said John Strong, who’d entered the room with a silver tray.

“Kenny told her I had drugs.”

“You? Why, that is preposterous.” John put down the tray and, as he set out three mugs and poured the decaf from a glass pot, said, “Listen, Mildred, I can barely even get this one to take an aspirin unless she calls the doctor first. Trust me, one thing we don’t have to worry about with our girl here is drugs.”

“But Kenny said—”

“Oh, I bet I can tell you exactly what Kenny said. Milk and sugar?”

“A bit of each,” Mildred nodded, and he stirred her cup before sliding it in front of her, explaining that the whole thing had been a ploy and he’d like to get his hands on Kenny Zeller for taking it this far.

“This is the cocaine decade,” he deadpanned. “Over one hundred billion served … But seriously, it’s the drug that says you’re rich and successful and a little bit daring, but not too much, understand? It’s exactly what we need. All of those teen magazines are always talking about how good and wholesome she is, which is really the kiss of death when it comes to a career. There are only so many parts for nuns and virgins, you know what I’m saying?”

Though befuddled, Mildred nodded.

“Mom, you know I’ve been thinking about my next move.” Brooke sat down at the table. John handed her a cup of black decaf. “I don’t want to be on a soap forever. I’ve got too much to give.”

“It’s a dead-end job,” John agreed. “We’ve got to get her on to the bigger and better, and anyone’ll tell you it’s all about the next thing. About image. Me, I don’t have a problem with that. I’ve been a bad boy since day one, but come on, look at me. Do I look so bad to you?”

Mildred smiled. “I suppose not.”

“I suppose not … Mildred, you’re good. Okay, I admit it, I’ve got a past, but ever since I met Brooke I can’t stop thinking about the future. Right now, the only thing that matters in my life is making her happy.”

Reaching over and locking fingers with her beau, her eyes gleaming wet, Brooke said, “See, Mom, he’s just the sweetest thing.”

For the moment, watching her daughter and John coo affectionately, Mildred forgot all about Kenny and the cocaine. True, she was overwhelmed and still a bit discombobulated from the evening’s events, but she was also overjoyed for Brooke and couldn’t help imagining the future John had alluded to. There was no taming the pulse of young lovers; nobody knew this better than Mildred Harrison.

Later that night, as she rested her head on the spongy pillow in Brooke’s guest room, Mildred hummed the following lines from a Harold Arlen tune, “We might have been meant for each other/To be or not to be, let our hearts discover,” before drifting off into a wine-induced slumber. Yet a few hours later she awoke to a soundrack of old-time rock and roll thumping behind the wall next to her, accompanied by a louder, closer kind of keening. Like a woman crying at the top of her lungs, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry!” Or was it all part of a dream? The slurred syntax to her drowsy iconography—John Strong and a blonde (Brooke?) floating panel to panel in a stained glass scenario of Hollywood love.

It would be many months before Mildred remembered that dream, if in fact it had been a dream and not a premonition, for on the next morning she bolted quickly and happily out of bed, eager to sweep Brooke away from Los Angeles for a few weeks of R & R back in Blue Bell, P.A. Puzzling, though, was her insatiable craving for peanut butter.