The House on Olive Street (13 page)

She had to ring and ring. Elly wasn’t answering. Finally, she saw a shadow cross over the peephole and the door came cautiously open. She waved off Jeff and entered. Elly was in her robe.

“Oh, Elly, you were asleep? I’m sorry! I should have called. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Sable? Isn’t it a little late?”

“Elly, they know. Actually, that’s the least of it. They embellished horribly. You can’t imagine what they’re saying about me! It’s simply unbelievable.”

“They
who?
”

“The tabloids. I was the subject of a television tabloid show tonight. You didn’t hear about it? I’m surprised someone hasn’t called…”

“Elly?” a strange voice called from the bedroom. There was a shuffling sound. “Is everything—”

A squat, bald man appeared in the foyer. He wore hastily drawn-up brown pants with an untucked fuchsia shirt. His feet were bare. His belt was open. Little wisps of hair stood out around his ears. Sable looked between Elly, who wore a robe, and the man. “Oh my God,” she said in a breath. And then, idiotically, “Elly, do you
know
this man?”

“A
ll this time you’ve hidden him!” Sable exclaimed to Elly when Ben had finally gone.

They were putting fresh sheets on the guest-room bed for Sable. “It’s nothing to what you’ve hidden, so don’t get started on me.”

“But why, Elly? He’s so wonderful!”

“You’re hysterical,” Elly accused. Had Sable met Ben under any other circumstances, she might not have noticed his finer qualities. But Sable had been in trouble; her life was unraveling in the most grotesque manner. Once everyone was clumsily introduced—and dressed—Sable had asked, “Can I talk in front of him? Will he take my story to the press or something?” Ben had offered to leave, but it was Elly who insisted he stay, vouching for his integrity. And then Ben wound his charm around her, as only Ben could do. It broke his heart to think what was happening to Sable; it wounded him personally to witness the cheap voyeurs we’d all become. “My daughter watches that program,” he had said. “I’m going to insist that she stop!” There was not an ounce of recrimination from Ben for the young girl who’d lived shabbily and married stupidly and suffered unimag
inably. Just his straightforward kindness. “Some people can be so cruel. How do they sleep, do you s’pose?”

“I’m not hysterical about him,” Sable assured Elly. “Are you sure it’s okay if I stay here?”

No one had spent the night with Elly in over three decades. She was already feeling claustrophobic. “You have to stay somewhere,” she said.

“Do you think I brought this on myself, Elly?” Sable asked.

Eleanor was struck by the childlike quality of Sable’s voice. She sat down on her side of the guest bed. She thought for a minute. “Your story, the true version,” she said, “is not very different from what is often used as the inspirational fodder of political speeches and religious reformers. You grew up under the oppression of every social disadvantage and you somehow saved yourself. You overcame. The only problem I see with the image you created for yourself is that it consistently hid your strength. But I sympathize. Those things that are personally humiliating to us rarely have the expected effect of shock and disgust on others. People are remarkably sympathetic and forgiving. When we open up, we become more human. We’re easier to relate to. Opening up about the secrets frees us from our false pretensions and people usually respond.”

“That hasn’t been my experience,” Sable said. “I feel like there’s an army of people out there who will be thrilled to find out I’m not such a class act after all.”

“Well, I’ve been to a lot of AA meetings. My dear, you can’t even compete.”

“I’ve never heard any of your revealing, human stories, Eleanor.”

Elly stood. “Well, that’s the most dangerous part of
my disease, Sable. My personal shame. I seem to run into it every time I turn a corner.” She thought about Ben, of whom she had been ashamed, though she loved him and knew that he was inherently so good. She gave Sable a pat on the head. “I didn’t change my name, that’s all.”

Sable wasn’t her usual chic self. Her clothes were wrinkled, for one thing, because they’d been hastily packed. And the water in Gabby’s house was slightly harder, which caused her hair to fall differently, and her makeup didn’t go on as smoothly. Then she had to eat Eleanor’s bran cereal for breakfast, which was a lot like eating a cardboard box. She’d find a way to get the right food in this place, if she was going to stay.

Although Barbara Ann and Beth had not phoned Elly, both arrived at the house early, bursting with the news. Neither had seen the program. Barbara Ann was called by several of her cronies after it aired; they were filled with questions, ripe with curiosity. Barbara Ann had called Beth, but Beth knew nothing about it. She rarely turned on her television before 8:00 p.m. They had both tried to call Sable, but of course she didn’t answer. And both were astonished, but greatly relieved, to find her at the house. Of course, they wanted the factual details.

“I think in a heinous sort of way, I owe that program a debt of gratitude. They might have ruined my career and cost me millions, but they made me out to be so much worse than I really was, that the truth isn’t as terrifying anymore. Not that I’m blameless. Not that many people will be interested in my version.”

“You had a catastrophic childhood,” Eleanor said. “There’s no blame in that.”

“I was twenty-two when Tommy was killed,” Sable reminded her.

“As I said,” she insisted.

It was almost like old times, though Gabby was missing. The sky was clear and the morning cool, so they positioned themselves on the deck with steaming coffee cups in their hands. Sable didn’t realize that she’d practiced a bit of this telling exercise with Jeff and then with Elly and Ben. But this was the first time she was willingly going over all the grim details with an honest desire to unburden herself of the load.

“I have vague memories of my mother dressing me in little tennies that matched my outfit. I remember her singing to me while I was in the bathtub. I think that when I was small, she wasn’t as far down the bottle. I think maybe she loved me. I think she had some self-esteem then.

“Of course, I also remember the men. Oddly, my mother was never a prostitute. I say oddly because she was very critical of hookers—that women would take money for it! But my mother used to pick up men in bars and bring them home for the night. When I was little, she would take me with her. When I was older—four or five—she would tuck me in, warn me not to get out of bed or open the door for any reason, and leave me for several hours. Sometimes I’d be so scared, I’d lie there and just tremble. And then when I heard her come stumbling in, giggling and knocking things over, I could finally relax. Once, one of her men came careening into my room. I’m amazed it was only once. And my mother went crazy. At the time I couldn’t imagine what had caused her to lose her mind like that—screaming, throwing things, hitting him, shoving him. Later I understood. That was when our life together changed, and she started leaving me alone too much, probably to avoid bringing men home so often. Shortly thereafter, when I was six, I was put in my first foster home.”

“Was there no family to take you in?” Beth asked.

“There was family somewhere, but I don’t know who or how many. My grandparents threw my mother out when she got pregnant and she moved in with Helmut Gobrich, who she said was my father. She later said he wasn’t my father after all, but he believed he was and that was good enough for her since she had nowhere else to go. I have no idea what happened to that relationship. He might have been a loser who walked out on her. Or, she might have told him the truth and left him. We never heard from him. When I asked if my grandparents were dead, she said, ‘No, Helen. I am.’”

“I can’t believe no one would want to adopt you! No family would come forward and take you! Even this Gobrich guy!” That came from Barbara Ann, who won the prize for having the most people to care for in her life, immediate and otherwise. It brought a smile to Sable’s lips because just considering the number and variety of doomed pets her sons had rescued over the years virtually guaranteed that Barbara Ann would not have left little Helen to flounder untended, had she but known. You had to love her for that.

“I wasn’t a cute little girl, Barbara Ann.”

“That’s hard to believe. I mean, look at you.”

“You’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of orthodonture and plastic surgery. I was ugly as a stump.”

“That’s not true,” Elly said.

But it was. Ironically, that was probably the hardest part of the story to tell. Much of her early abuse derived from her looks. She was called the Ugly Duckling by her own mother. If that wasn’t hard enough, foster families and schoolmates followed suit. If she’d looked then like she looked now—slim, blond, pretty—maybe parts of
her life would not have been so difficult. Or, giving the human race the benefit of the doubt, if she’d had anything to smile or be perky about, maybe things would have been smoother. But added to her disadvantaged looks were downcast eyes, a grim mouth and withdrawn or skittish behavior.

“There was a social worker, when I was nearing eighteen and about to be dumped out of the foster care system. He was this nerdy guy named Boyd. He gave me some tests and I passed….”

“She excelled,” Elly corrected.

“I did okay. He helped me get a GED and a scholarship and off I went to college, where I really didn’t belong. But that’s where I met first Gabby and then Elly.”

“Didn’t belong? Ha! You cannot imagine what she studied, this girl who hadn’t finished high school,” Elly said.

“You can’t imagine what this woman threw at me. She tossed nine-hundred-page volumes at me and said things like, ‘If you had earned your place in this class, you would have read this two years ago, so read it now.’ It was so much bullshit. Most of Elly’s students hadn’t read that shit in the first place and she knows it.”

“They were supposed to have,” Eleanor said, but her lips curved slightly. She had never before had a student like Sable. It had been intoxicating.

“Gabby had taken me under her wing and was pretending to ask me for help with her psychology course. She was studying me like a lab rat. When she thought I was interesting enough, she shared me with Eleanor, who then took over the grooming of the poor kid. Elly was wearing those tweed skirts, flat-soled brown shoes, and she even had that huge purse back then. She’s been
chain-smoking for forty years. She felt sorry for me, I think, sitting in her class day after day, auditing.”

“That is categorically untrue. You fascinated and impressed Gabby, then me.”

“I fascinated you? Impressed you? You never said that.”

“I didn’t think I had to,” Eleanor replied, but inside she suddenly felt a huge stab of regret. Could things have turned out altogether differently had she outrightly praised Helen? “I should have.”

“No, Elly, I liked you the way you were. I wouldn’t have believed you any other way. The problem was mine. I was still mired in the old life. I couldn’t believe I was really smart enough to be there, to do anything significant with my life, therefore I didn’t. I went back to Fresno when my mother got in touch and said she needed me. My return was so ambivalent. I resented that she would draw me away from my one chance to have a life, but I was relieved to go back to a place I felt I belonged. Or deserved.”

She didn’t drag it out. She spit it out fast, sharp and clear. For a writer capable of dynamic, moving description, she stuck to the facts, which were bad enough. Stuck with a sick, drunk mother. Finding some solace in Butch. Having the baby. The death of the baby. Her near death from grief. Escape to L.A. Escape into women’s fiction. Writing and working like a woman who had nothing to lose, because…

Beth was staring down into her coffee cup, her fingers tightening and relaxing around it at intervals. Barbara Ann got up from her chair. “Stop a minute,” she said weakly, softly. She turned her back on Sable and walked to the edge of the deck, looking out at the trees. “Give me a minute,” she said.

“Please don’t cry about it,” Sable said. “I can take anything but pity. Really.”

“I’m not crying out of pity,” Barbara Ann said, turning back to Sable and revealing the wet streaks on her cheeks. “I’m… You can’t believe what I’ve thought of you. All these years.”

“I know what you thought. I know what everyone thinks.”

“No, you don’t. I’ve been so jealous. I didn’t want to be—it was at least as hard on me as it was on you. It just seemed that everything in your life went your way, no matter what! God, you designed the perfect life for yourself and pretended to be living it!”

Sable laughed hollowly. “Right from the time my surgeon father and designer mother took their fateful trip to Alaska and died in a plane wreck?”

“Even that sounded romantic. I gotta admit, Sable, you sure can tell a story.”

“The critics don’t agree,” she dourly replied.

Barbara Ann wandered back, sitting down. “You were so hard to love sometimes. You were so—”

“But you see, that’s what makes this even worse! Are there people out there who will be able to treat me with respect now? Because my life was such a disaster? Because I grew up as bad as any dog? How the hell is that fair?”

“That’s not what Barbara Ann means, Sable,” Elly said.

“Don’t tell her what I mean,” Barbara Ann protested.

“I’d better, because you’re going to fuck it up. It wasn’t your constant good fortune that made you distant, Sable. Nor does revealing your many hardships make you more lovable. There is a place between the truth and the lie where you became untouchable. Your life hasn’t been
perfect since you started making millions, but you didn’t trust anyone enough to tell the truth about that either. You had problems. You’ve covered everything up for long enough.”

“Are you suggesting that if I’d complained about business problems—like my tax bill—I’d have gotten
sympathy?
”

Elly sat forward and sighed. “Do you miss the point intentionally, or are you dense? I think it’s pretty well established that money—taxes included—is not one of your problems. But you reveal
nothing
about your real self. And since you don’t, I can’t elaborate.”

“Now, Elly, you have a nerve—”

“We’ll expose my secrets another day!” she snapped. “This is about you! Do you want to understand this, or not?”

“Jeez,” Sable said, taken aback. “Don’t get huffy.”

“Is there anything imperfect about your life? Do you sweat? Get pimples? Have hemorrhoids? Secretly take Valium in amounts not particularly recommended?”

Sable was stunned. She felt turned on. Cornered.

“Elly, that’s not what I meant,” Barbara Ann said quietly.

“Yes, it is, you just don’t realize it yet. Well?” Elly said, looking at Sable.

“Of course there’s stuff about my life that’s hard. You know that. I get trouble from fans sometimes. That prison guy had me pretty scared.”

“You threw money at that problem; Jeff is taking care of it for you. He’s in touch with the prison, correct? What about the way you live, Sable? What’s going on inside your personal life?”