Girl in the Arena (16 page)

CHAPTER 19

—Uber called, Allison says. —I couldn’t find you.

I watch her apply her lipstick and then throw the tube back into her purse. Thad and I are tucked in close in the backseat watching the fans waiting on the other side of the gate. I can see they’re making Thad nervous.

—Okay, I say.

Before we go anywhere Allison rides up and down for a while, adjusting her seat. She’s waiting for me to show a little interest. She looks at me in the rearview mirror. Up and down while I look at a text.

Sam wants to see if I can get together with her and Callie. I guess she’s feeling remorse at losing a suddenly high-profile friend. I keep writing back: 
Return to Sender
. She pretends it’s a joke and chats away.

—Is Thaddy’s seat belt right? It looks twisted around. By the way, Uber asked me to tell you he’s sending the crown off to a restorer. He’ll bring it back as soon as it’s ready. Then he apologized of all things. I think this really says something about his integrity, don’t you?

—Hold on, I say.

I’ve shut Sam off and I’m trying to help Thad. I tell him we’re going to wear sleep masks today, and put one of Allison’s blue silk ones on him. I worry that once we pull out of the drive all the flashes going off will send him into convulsions. It’s a steady stream of blinding wattage now as Allison backs up. I’m reminded that when you see a picture of a celebrity on TV or in a magazine, grinning to their gums, they aren’t smiling 
at 
anyone, because they can’t 
see 
anyone. They’re smiling into a wall of painful light.

Allison hits the switch, the gates open, and the car inches forward. The photographers push against our car doors now. They angle across the windshield and throw themselves at our rear window. I won’t let Thad take the mask off until we’re headed into Boston.

—Please drown them out, I say.

Allison reaches over and blasts a morning show on the radio. 
The weather will be fair, not too hot, not too cool.

—Not too hot, not too cool, Thad says.

A few dirty jokes, money giveaways, the traffic blocked up at the Lever Connector, talk and laughter, and we’ve finally pulled away. I get out of my seat belt for a moment, stretch into the front seat, and push the CD button. Mozart’s 
Così fan tutte
fills the car.

Although she and my succession of fathers have drawn varying degrees of attention from the media, this level of interest is different. Every time they shout their questions at me, about whether or not I’m going to marry my father’s murderer, I feel like someone who’s been shot up in a mall or wedged into a well unable to move, without a rescue crew—somewhere between dead and stuck. I can’t tell exactly how Allison feels about the fact that the focus has shifted to me because she has her personality face on, that expression that lets the media know she’s self-possessed and plans to stay that way. In either case, she’s dropped the topic of Uber for now.

I never know how she does it, but Allison is pretty good at sloughing off the paparazzi when she’s determined to get her car through physical space—though I’m certain she rolled over a photographer’s foot getting out—and eventually we’re moving toward downtown, with only a few cars and motorcycles tailing us. As we enter Storrow Drive, one of them pulls up alongside the car. Questions are screamed at me, mouthed, pantomimed. My name is called. My name, my name, my name. Tommy’s name. Uber’s blessed name.

I wait for Allison to go into that tenuous place where she could be one way but she could just as quickly be another. She might suddenly realize, as we slip over the BU Bridge, that there’s money to be made in writing her autobiography. And this could trigger an anxiety that she’ll get a contract but that writer’s block will set in. And then she’ll start to think that if she suicides, someone will write a biography instead and screw it up, screw her up, her children. Ever since Tommy told me about her faux deaths, I’ve chronically looked for the warning signs.

I wait to see if Allison will crash us just to get the pressure off. But maybe she’s okay.

She turns off Mozart and the soft voice of the GPS kicks on. I take the sleeping mask off Thad, who loves that voice and sometimes repeats everything she says. For several miles this dial-up woman tells us how to steer around bridges, neighborhoods, derailed trains. Tommy bought it a few months ago for Allison’s birthday and mounted it in the dashboard to make it look factory built. It has kept us from dead-ending or taking the wrong road I don’t know how many times.

—Where are we going? I ask.

—You’ll see, she says.

I whisper to Thad, telling him we’re playing a guessing game today—It’s called: 
What’s Our Destination?

I make up random bits to the game as we go because I have to do something.

I tell him, —Where we’re going there will be a long beach with sparkling clean water, big soft lounge chairs with lots and lots of pillows to curl up in, and plenty of fresh fruit, and we can just listen to the waves and relax all day.

I have no idea what I’m talking about, maybe I just want a vacation. Thad seems to take this in and give it serious consideration. He tilts his head and his eyes get huge as if he’s finally understood something.

Then he cups his hands around my ear and whispers, —We’re going to the end of Mom’s rope.

Just then, a photographer on a motorcycle inches past us on the left like the witch peddling past Dorothy’s house, holding her camera out with one hand, shooting rapid fire as Allison moves us across the city.

Allison is looking a little trapped, definitely wobbly.

—I should have put my hair up, she says, popping open the mirror embedded in the visor and spreading out the wisps of her bangs along her forehead as she drives.

—Allison! I say to snap her attention back to the road.

Just then a Hummer—the model they make in case you have to take out three family cars at once instead of the usual one or two—slowly pulls up on our right. Inside, a gang of photographers lean from the windows, whistling and calling to us. Allison gets distracted by their snarking.

—I can’t believe how many are keeping up! she says over her shoulder in an almost buoyant voice. —Look at them. This is all about you, Lynie.

And I’m certain I hear a sense of loss under the elation, a regret that this isn’t all about her. Then I see where we’re headed.

—THE WALL! I scream.

She swings away, narrowly missing the underpass and almost hits the Hummer.

—Woo! Did you see that? she laughs, her manic side in full bloom.

I’d offer to take the wheel, I’d insist, but there’s no place to pull over. Besides, I don’t think she’d let me, she seems so empowered. She cuts the Hummer off when she shifts lanes suddenly. The horn on that thing has the power of a paint stripper.

When it gets blocked in by a slow-moving taxi, Allison pulls ahead and things get quiet for a little while and we listen to the sound of the tires bumping over the steel bands in the road, the rhythm working like a prayer on my scattered thoughts.

Emerging from the tunnel suddenly, we bear a quick left and then U-turn in traffic—completely ignoring the recalculations of the GPS—and I realize we’re driving to Tommy’s athletic club. We’re in the palm of the city, as she calls it. That place where gold freely changes hands. Allison loves Newbury Street. She pulls into the parking structure and swipes Tommy’s card. The gate goes up and we pull in without the paparazzi. We drive up a couple of levels, circling, circling, and she drops us at the entry on the third level.

—I’ll get a parking spot. You take Thad inside, she says.

I’ve only been to the club a couple of times. It has that postmodern suffocating-to-death-in-affluence-and-status feel to it. Lots of blue glass and steel, and in the women’s room the faucet handles are embedded in the mirror and the sinks look like delicate bowls ready to shatter if you drop a bottle of makeup the wrong way.

Caesar’s likes its top players to join this kind of club, invitation only, of course. So Tommy went along, though he was more comfortable in a Quonset hut with a bunch of iron pumpers—nothing but free weights—no music, no towels, water fountain busted, just a steady flow of sweat, the occasional grunt or life-affirming 
oof
. But the good thing was he brought Thad down here a couple of times a week to build a little strength with a personal trainer, have a light massage and some lunch. Thad is crazy for all the televisions—the way they’re lined up, the images dancing together.

It seems our mother intends to carry on the tradition, at least until Caesar’s yanks the plug. I’m relieved when she walks through the entry. Not that I actually thought she’d drive away and leave us exactly. As she approaches, she wipes her fingers under her eyes to remove her melted eyeliner but she’s not quite getting it. I never know if I point this kind of thing out, if she’ll be grateful. So I let her go ahead and check in at the desk. She comes back to where I’m thumbing through 
W Magazine
, cracking up over the way they keep adding gladiator items to their fall collections.

—Thad does his routine with a guy named Ira. He’s very nice. Young, sweet. You’ll see, she says.

The tension in her face is still there from the drive, the way Silly Putty holds a comic-strip image as long as it can.

Thad can’t sit still, he’s so happy to be here. I can tell because he paces by one of the ceiling-to-floor windows, looking down at the paparazzi—back and forth like a boy looking at lions in an arena. Then Ira comes out, shiny black hair, clear brown eyes, a small yin/yang tattoo placed on one shoulder. I think it’s a fake but no one’s perfect.

Ira greets us and starts talking about all the fun things he has planned for the afternoon. They’re going to hang upside down like monkeys and play on the balance beam and lift some two-pound weights, and pretty soon Thad has taken his hand and they’ve passed through the swinging doors of the men’s locker rooms. Of course no one has to convince me: exercise is sanity. It always calms Thad down, certainly does me, I wish Allison could find more time for it, though sometimes she gets on the elliptical trainer in our basement in long, intense spurts like she’s drunk for exercise and then I worry that she’ll never get off.

We take the back stairway, slip down an alley, and head out onto Newbury Street to shop. I really want to tell her about the dark smudges under her eyes, but now she’ll be really annoyed that I didn’t tell her right away, so I have to let it go. She puts her sunglasses on and lights up a cigarette.

It’s very humid out and the smoke clings to us in low clouds before it dissipates.

—I’ve talked with our accountant and Al—you remember Al, our family attorney? I’ve read through all the correspondence, the stuff Caesar’s has sent out since Tommy’s death.

—You’re scaring me, I say, as I try to catch up. She loves to cross on the red lights.

There’s something about the tone of her voice. She looks steadily at the shops now, devising her plan.

—There’s a semiprivate home we might be able to get Thad into, just until we get settled in a new place. It’s state funded but I’m told it’s cheery. There would be other kids his age.

The words catch like fish bones in her throat, which she tries to clear by taking another drag of her cigarette.

—We could visit him every day and he’d be with other kids. I guess I said that. You and I should be able to afford a studio apartment in our neighborhood for a year, maybe a little longer, after I sell anything we have left to sell. Which means you’ll be able to go to a regular university if you get scholarship money. We just have to get through this rough patch. You know what they say, no pain, no...

Her voice sounds like so much helium and I’m choking down tears and I’m trying to think of some way to dissuade her as we dodge and weave in the foot traffic.

—I’ll talk to Uber, she says. —I was the one to encourage things. I must have been out of my mind. Shock makes us... irrational. You understand that, don’t you? But if you think it would be better coming from you, I’d be happy to suggest some tactful ways to put things to him. I have the feeling he’s a rather sensitive young man. So we don’t want him to feel rejected.

—I intend to follow all of Caesar’s guidelines, she continues. —It is, after all, the life we’ve chosen, well... I’ve chosen for us. I know, maybe not the best decision in hindsight. If I tell you this in strict confidence, you can never tell anyone I’ve said this.

She lowers her voice. —I think what they’re asking of you is insane. I’m sorry I was in such a crazy place that I couldn’t see things clearly. I told myself Tommy could die, a million times over. But then when it happened... But I’ve talked with our accountant and our attorney—you remember Al. Did I already say that?

I grab her arm so she’ll stop walking.

—We can’t put Thad away.

—Of course not, she says. —Not away. They said it would be nothing like putting him away. You have to know how painful this is for me, Lynie. Thad’s my baby. But while he’s in a temporary living situation, just for a few months, I’ll be able to put our financial life together. I was thinking, and don’t trash this idea until you’ve heard the whole thing out, but I was thinking that I could start a consulting business. You know, for young Glad wives—how to dress, how to hold an interview, how to negotiate with non-Glads in the trades. I mean if there’s one thing I know...

I don’t say that if I reject Uber she will be shunned by those bright young GSA wives for all intents and purposes, because she knows this already. She just doesn’t want to accept the idea that the body she looks at in the plate glass windows is the one she inhabits. And I don’t remind her that her course list is right out of the curriculum of the ridiculous college she wanted me to go to in the fall, because she knows that as well.

—You wouldn’t be able to cope an hour if you institutionalized Thad—and you and I would never speak again. I hope you get that.

I see how small the corner is—the one she’s backed herself into. Her nose turns red and I’m afraid she’s started to cry under her Jackie O sunglasses. I know the next thing she’ll do is sit down on the steps to some fancy shop and tell me how sorry she is again. And then I’ll be up for nights worried about her. I want to tell her how much I love her even though I have to keep pulling away, but lately everything is jammed up inside me. So I say the only thing I can say at this point.