As Good as Dead (21 page)

He grinned. “Honor won’t get you no goodies at the candy store.”

“Call me a prude, Esmé”—my mom looked up from spreading the margarine on slices of toast—“but I don’t care for the profanity in my daughter’s work.”

Briefly, Esmé looked blank. “Is there profanity in your work?” she asked me. My mom flushed. She surely had hoped to impress my roommate with her high standards of decorum. Now, I supposed, she feared that she looked like a hayseed. Maybe she worried that I had shown the Workshop a story featuring a mother who regularly threatened to slit her wrists, packed her suitcases and set them by the front door and said she would be calling a taxi to take her to the Greyhound, she was done,
Get out of my sight!

Most likely, though, she entertained only the hayseed concern. After her scary episodes petered out, my mom never seemed to remember them. By the time I was fourteen or so, I’d started to feel more sorry for her than angry. I’d seen her bite her lip in order not to cry out the time that she scratched the needle across her beloved Johnny Mathis album in a rush to get the album off the turntable before my dad made it in from the garage to the house.

He hated it when she listened to romantic music.

“So what do you hear from the professor, Charlotte?” she asked.

I told Esmé, “She means Will,” then said, “Will is fine, Mom.”

She laughed. “Is that
all
?” She was leery of Will, the learned guy, but also excited by his good looks and nice manners.

“What do you think, Esmé,” my dad said, “of a fellow who’d run off and leave his girl all alone while he traipses around Italy?”

“Oh!” Esmé laughed and shook her head. “I’ve never met Will, Dave, but he writes such
long
and
serious
letters to Charlotte”—she winked at me—“I can’t imagine he’s got time to play around!”

My dad lowered his voice to almost a growl. “Lots of gorgeous women in Italy.”

Esmé laughed. “I bet he’s true, though!”

“Thank you, Esmé,” I said but felt sick at the memory of showing her Will’s letter.

“We don’t want her being a sap, Esmé,” my dad said.

“Of course not,” Esmé said. “No parent wants that.”

My dad helped himself to the toast from the plate that my mom now set on the dinette. The raspberry jam. The cup of coffee that Esmé poured for him. My mom stuck to coffee. Watching her weight? Like myself, back then, she regularly lost and regained the same ten or fifteen pounds, and she had gained since I saw her last. I could imagine her, getting ready to drive to Iowa City, hoping that the grain cooperative’s big green windbreaker would hide the pounds. Instead, it concealed the fact that she had a nice shape, a small waist.

“I should get dressed and let you three visit!” Esmé said.

I was grateful to her for being kind to my parents—also proud that she was my friend—and as soon as she was out in the hall, I whispered, “Isn’t she great?”

“I’ll say!” My dad grinned and rubbed his hands over his face in astonished pleasure. “I’d ask her out in a minute!”

“I meant as a
friend
!” I squeaked. “For me!”

One eye on the doorway, my mom leaned deep over the dinette, and she whispered, “A big fat ha-ha! I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

“Oh, trust.” My dad laughed. “Trust’s a different matter altogether! And if you kept her
real
close—” He broke off with another laugh.

“Men,” my mom muttered into her coffee cup.

I agreed with what I took for her meaning—
Aren’t they exasperating?
—but I stood up from the dinette as if I hadn’t heard. My whole life, she’d been available to let me know that she could
just tell
that so-and-so did not truly like me, was not a good friend and snickered at me behind my back. In her way, she meant to protect me, I think, but it was no good.

“When Will gets back”—she tugged at a belt loop on the back of my jeans as I moved past her and toward the kitchen sink—“you sure as heck better not leave her in a room with him.”

I protested. “Will
loves
me, Mom!”

She shook her head. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

My dad laughed at that, too. There had been only one incident in my life, apart from my bike accident, that had seemed to get his full attention: He and my mom had come home early from his union Christmas party and found me and my high school boyfriend having sex on the living room carpet. Once the boy was gone—shoved and shouted out the door and forced to dress on the back steps—my dad had slapped me around for a long time, had actually torn out a hunk of my hair at one point. What he really wanted was for me to agree with him that I was a “whore”—my mother tried to get me to do it;
Say yes, Charlotte, and he’ll stop!
—but it was too crazy. It was too stupid. I refused.

Really, I had the impression that the man viewed my life—the life of the accidental child who also happened to turn out a “bookworm”—as inconsequential, like a comic strip that he read now and then, or a TV series that he never stopped to watch for a full episode, so you could not really expect him to keep the characters straight.

What a crew the three of us were! With all of my reading and writing, I was anxiously civilized but remained so much like them, ruled at least half my waking hours by the notion that someone had done me wrong. Or might soon. We were Victims of the World. Which, in the family ethos, was quite different from being a sap. Being a victim was
not
your fault. Being a victim did not leave you disgraced. Degraded. Tainted.

Unfortunately, I did not understand that viewing yourself as a victim could make you,
poor little you
, liable to do damage to others; that victimhood itself was often sustained by self-inflicted wounds—tearing off scabs from things that would have healed if simply left alone.

After my parents left that morning, Esmé and I decided that we would work off our hangovers by walking to the Hamburg Inn for a late breakfast. I started us singing as soon as we were out the door because I wanted to eliminate the possibility of Esmé saying anything about my parents. (They’d looked so old, gripping the banister as they’d disappeared into the stairwell, that my irritation with them had shifted, and the need to protect them had flooded me again).

The Hamburg Inn was jammed with people when Esmé and I arrived. We just had settled ourselves along the diner’s front window ledge to wait for a table when I spotted a familiar battered fedora in a booth toward the back. Jeremy Fletcher. Unfortunately, Esmé spotted him, too. “He wants us to sit with him!” she whispered happily, and, sure enough, Jeremy Fletcher jabbed a finger up and down, signaling for us to join him.

I was happy that Esmé was happy, but why Jeremy Fletcher? Right after we joined him, a pretty waitress passed by our booth and he made a point of ogling her rear. “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed,” he said.

Still, I could see that Jeremy Fletcher wanted to be with Esmé. He had stood up and gestured for her to sit on the inside of his side of the booth, and when he had sat down again, he did something kind of odd—he was not tall, maybe five-eight, and she was five-seven, and he folded one of his calves under himself and
roosted
on top of it. Trying to look taller, I thought.

“So how are y’all feeling this morning?” he asked.

We both groaned. “And imagine this”—Esmé leaned forward and let her torso collapse on the tabletop—“Charlotte’s sweet little parents paid us a surprise visit! Came knocking with a loaf of white bread and a pound of margarine!” She grinned at me and then at Jeremy Fletcher. He grinned back. Before long, he began to talk at length about his novel; how “powerfully” it integrated the models provided by both “Shakespeare and the King James.”

Esmé was as smart as could be, really, but she seemed satisfied simply to listen to Jeremy Fletcher; to say
hm!
and
hm!
and occasionally lower her eyes or tilt her head to one side or the other as if, in that way, she fine-tuned her attention to this master.

An hour or so later, as we left him yammering away to some pipe-smoker outside the diner, she made a pitty-pat motion over her heart. “Isn’t he amazing?”

“I’d put our work up against his any day,” I said.

Esmé made wide eyes, as if I had overreached myself.

“Really!” I said. “And that ‘I wouldn’t kick her out of bed’ stuff? Come on. Ick.”

She threw her arm around my neck then and pretended to throttle me. “Oh, you think any man who isn’t your precious Will is a jerk!”

While I disentangled myself, I said, “That’s an exaggeration.”

“Okay, okay.” She gave me a sideways hug. “But you don’t get Jeremy, Charlotte. He’s the real thing. Like . . . Burroughs.”

“Burroughs. Yeah, Burroughs liked guns, too. Watch out, Es. Get cozy with Jeremy Fletcher and he might try a little William Tell on you. That’s how Burroughs killed his wife, you know. He tried to shoot an apple on her head. Then attributed the whole thing to evil. With a capital
E
.”

“You’re terrible! But, Charlotte”—she made a pretty pout—“what if it’s
you
he likes, not me?”

People giving you what was supposed to be a compliment strictly so that you would hand it over to them—it always depressed me, but I laughed and added what seemed to me both obvious and required: “Anyone could tell he was overjoyed to be talking to you and would have been happy to see me vamoose!”

“W-e-l-l.” She drew out the word; then, with a happy yip, she said, “I think you’re right!”

“I’m right.” I was happy to see a cute Workshop guy, Pedro Galvez, a ways up the street. I figured that Esmé would drop the subject of Jeremy Fletcher around Pedro Galvez. Why couldn’t she like nice Pedro Galvez, with his cute bandannas and bopping walk? A few days before, I’d ridden my bike by Main Library and seen her talking out front with Pedro Galvez, laughing so hard that she held on to his arm, like she’d fall over otherwise—

Now, however, as soon as she saw him, she grabbed my hand and started pulling me toward the door of a dry-cleaning place. “I can’t talk to Pedro!” she said.

I hardly knew the guy but hiding from him seemed mean, and I pulled back. “Stop!”

The look she turned my way before she disappeared into the dry cleaner’s was one I had not seen before—perfectly icy.

Alone, shaken, I continued up the street. Always so awkward, approaching people on the street, and soon came the moment at which it was necessary for me to offer the first smile of distant recognition. I smiled. After that, I alternated between quick looks down at the sidewalk, up at approaching Pedro—another little smile—then a look at the homemade poster-paint-and-paper advertisements in the windows of John’s Grocery—a smile—now down at the sidewalk again, until we were only a few feet apart, and I looked up and smiled and said, “Hey, Pedro.”

He smiled over my shoulder. At Esmé. Who now mock-wailed from behind me, “Why’d you abandon me, Charlotte?” as up she ran, waving a ticket that she apparently had charmed out of a clerk at the dry cleaner’s. “She’s a cruel girl, Pedro!” she said, but in a voice that was light and teasing. “She wouldn’t wait while I dropped off my sweaters, even though I told her I wanted to say hi to you!”

My heart was pounding. She was making absolutely no sense, but she knew that I would not say so (would not embarrass her
or
Pedro Galvez by pointing out that she had wanted to avoid him).

Pedro Galvez smiled at me. “You’re the girl who wore three-piece suits during college, right? To look like Borges?”

I sneaked a peek at Esmé. Once, I’d told her how, as an undergraduate, I’d read an interview with Borges in which he mentioned that, as a young man, he’d found it easier to disappear in a crowd if he wore a conventional suit and a tie; and so, I—a nineteen-year-old American girl in the late 1980s—had misguidedly adopted the same look.

“I wasn’t trying to
look
like Borges,” I murmured.

“A misunderstanding on my part,” Pedro Galvez said and bowed with a big swoop of his arm. Then he smiled at Esmé and asked her something about the night before; he’d thought that she was going to meet up with him at the Vine after she left the Victorian, and Esmé said, “Oh, yes, I’d really wanted to, but there hadn’t been any way that I could; in the end, you see, because”—she gave her pretty fingers a shake, as if they had been forced to hold something hot for too long—“absolutely nothing worked out right, Pedro!”

A few minutes later, when the two of us resumed our walk to the apartment, she said, “Thanks for not blowing my cover, Char.”

I know I sounded stiff when I answered, “You did make me look bad, though, Esmé.”

“Oh, foo! You couldn’t possibly look bad! Anyway”—she sighed happily—“for me, besides Jeremy, you’re the only person worth knowing here. I mean, it’s nice to see we could have other friends—and I know, I know, you have your precious Will off in Italy—but, otherwise, all we need is each other, right?”

She turned her dark brown eyes my way. They were intense, searching. Ridiculous, her asking me to agree!
I was furious with her! And she had been furious with me a few minutes before!