The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (16 page)

A month before the wedding, Herb convinced me to invite my parents. He thought if they weren't there, the marriage might not seem as real to me. I hadn't spoken to Suky in years. I had cut her off completely, and, though I thought she was secretly grateful for it, initially I still dreamed that she would find me somehow, turn up at my apartment clear eyed and dope free, ready to go shopping, or out for a milk shake. But it didn't happen that way. Any news I had from the family came in the form of fact-filled letters from my father, who told me of all the plumbing and boiler repairs, my brothers' exploits, and other local items of interest. They always ended with ‘Your mother sends you her love.' This sentence read like a taunt; Suky had made her choice, and she hadn't chosen me. Kat's advice, to forget the past, to look ahead, only ahead, turned out to be very effective in the long run. Gradually I stopped crying about my mother. I bled the emotion from her memory until it hung lifeless in my mind, like a pig on a hook in a butcher shop window.

My oldest brother, Chester, called me every now and then to make sure I was all right, and we met in the city occasionally. Sometimes he gave me a little money. After I disappeared, Chester had gone to medical school. He was a doctor now. He still had the somber, disaffected delivery of his youth, but now it made him seem authoritative, a man you could trust. I was surprised to hear his voice when I finally got up the courage to call my parents' house.

‘She's in no shape to go to a wedding,' he said.

‘What do you mean?' I asked.

‘She's sick.'

‘Sick how?'

‘It's complicated.'

Herb and I drove up to Connecticut the next weekend. Des did what he could to discourage me from coming, but now I had to see her. As we drove up to the Green, I noticed that the paint on the house was flaking off. I wondered when my father would have to retire. We rang the bell at the front door, which felt odd; I had never used the front door growing up. But I was a stranger now. Chester came to greet us. I hugged him. Behind him, Des stood, smaller now, it seemed, the pouches under his eyes reddish, his hair gray. He had always been a calm man, but now he seemed resigned. He kissed me on the part of my hair and led me into the living room.

She was sitting on her favorite little armchair, in a quilted pink bed jacket and a dress so big for her it looked like it belonged to someone else. She had shrunk to a sliver of her former size. Always petite, she was tiny now, a wilted little thing with ankles like wrists, her thinning Lucille Ball hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, eyes glittering. She looked like an object to me. My mother was nowhere. Herb was shocked, I could tell. It took a lot to knock the wind out of his general air of removed amusement; Suky did it without trying.

She smiled politely as we walked in. Her teeth had been capped. ‘Would you like some tea, you two?' It was still that voice, that high, squeaky southern voice, with a slight whistle from the foreign teeth. The twitch in her cheek had become a violent, spastic tug. I felt like running away.

‘I would love some,' Herb said. He sat on the edge of the sofa and admired Suky's home. She beamed at him graciously as Chester poured the tea, then trembled uncontrollably as she tried to take a sip. Herb turned to Des and asked him about the real estate prices in the area. Had they gone up? How much? And his parish? Shrinking? Growing. How interesting. They kept that conversation up for about five minutes. Then, there was a pause.

‘I have been very lucky,' Suky said. ‘I have four wonderful children.'

‘Five, Mom,' said Chester.

‘Five children,' said Suky in mock disbelief. ‘What was I thinking?' Then she chuckled, looking at me, I thought, with a sly expression entirely devoid of warmth. It seemed impossible that she no longer loved me. I had been the passion of her life! Was it possible that I looked as empty of meaning to her as she did to me? Where the hell was she? Where was my mother? I was leaking tears through the whole visit, but no one seemed to notice, and I rubbed them away like itches in the corners of my eyes.

Later, as Des helped her upstairs for her nap, Herb and I stood in the front hall to wave her off, as though she were boarding the
Queen Mary
. Halfway through her slow ascent, she stopped, her back very straight. Des looked at her expectantly. I knew she would turn around and look at me. She had to. And when she did, a shard of feeling, sharp as glass, cut through her absent stare and pierced my heart. I wanted to run up the stairs and hug her that minute. My muscles began to move. But something stayed me. I couldn't do it. The moment passed. She turned and made her way up the rest of the stairs, Des holding her wasted arm with the tips of his fingers, as if it were the fine stalk of an orchid.

Back in the living room, I slumped down on the couch, my legs weak. Chester told us in hushed tones that he was injecting her with small amounts of amphetamine combined with vitamins every few hours. The injections were keeping her alive at this point. She had been starving herself for years, he said ruefully, shaking his head. I thought about fat Grandma Sally. And about Suky, always standing by the stove eating a cup of rice pudding, never sitting with us at the table for a more than a few minutes. She started taking the drug so she wouldn't want to eat, so she would have all that energy, so she could be the perfect mother, the perfect wife. Then the drug became her personality. And I had been so mean to her.

I would come back next week, I told myself. I would come back and sit with her and talk about this and that. I would hug her then. I just hadn't been ready yet. It wasn't the right time. As it turned out, I was so busy with planning the wedding, I had to put off my visit. I never saw her again. She was dead within a month, found lying on her bed, I am told, a plate of uneaten toast perched on her sunken belly. And now, if I could have one thing, one single thing, I would ask for an afternoon with my mother. I would like to let her know how much she is loved, in spite of everything, because of everything. I would like the chance to be kind.

My wedding dress was very light pink. I thought of it as white, with one drop of Gigi's blood in it. In the photographs of our wedding day, I look like a child beside him. We were married in a church. I can still smell the dust in the air, see it swirling in the orange and blue light filtered through the circular stained-glass window behind the cross. I felt like a novice taking my vows. Marrying Herb was a new skin on me, my last chance at goodness. I knew if I fucked this up, I would be fallen forever.

In the seven years Gigi had been married to Herb, she had never bothered to change her will; upon her demise, her millions reverted to her parents and their Italian pharmaceutical empire. Herb was both relieved and puzzled to learn this. It would, of course, have been outrageous for him to inherit his spurned wife's fortune – yet why had she never changed her will? ‘She was always paranoid' was Herb's answer. Maybe she'd been right to be.

Not one of Herb's friends abandoned him after Gigi killed herself. Only her own old cronies, a handful of Europeans whom Herb had always deemed too boring or pretentious to socialize with, stayed away from him now – not that they were missed.

Just about everyone Herb knew had thought that Gigi was a head case, as it turned out, and, though all of them saw what had happened as a tragedy, they were also relieved that Herb was no longer encumbered by an erratic and increasingly embarrassing wife. What they thought of me – Well, they folded me in, like raisins in a cake recipe that doesn't call for them but won't be ruined by them, either. Herb could have married a llama and his circle would have accepted it. He was a truly charismatic man. He had some power in the publishing world, but it was his dynamic charm, his ferocious appetite for existence, his connection to a bigger, Titanic, preneurotic period in American literary life, when people drank Scotch with dinner and wrote unapologetic sentences and ruined each other's lives unconsciously, with the ignorance of children, that held people in his sway.

I clutched at marriage, held it like an infant, fed it, pampered it. No man was loved the way Herb was. He marveled at the genius of his choice as I fetched him his slippers, massaged his
temples with scented oil, spent half the day cooking. I did not yet know how to truly be this new person. I did not know how to run a house, take care of a man, be faithful. But, like a dancer learning a new routine, I relied on repetition to teach my brain. At first I was lost in my role, feeling like an impostor as I forged checks with my new name, chose a décor for our new apartment, sold the house in a house and found a humbler place farther inland for weekends. I didn't really know how to shop for clothes or plan a dinner party. I just kept pretending, kept playing dress-up, answering the phone in a singsong voice, as I had when I was ten and married to my invisible husband Joey. I worked at my new identity for years, until the motions of everyday life as Herb's wife were as natural to me as walking.

It wasn't until I became pregnant with the twins, though, that I really believed my own act. These two creatures squirming inside me were facts. They had blood, eyes, destinies. Unlike me, they were born perfect, male and female, complete. I thought there was something magical about boy-girl twins. It was a gift, a sign. I gave myself to them with the joy of a penitent. And gradually, through the nights lying awake between Ben and Grace as they clutched at my hair in their sleep with their warm, soft hands, sniffed my neck, held me fast with their chubby arms, strong legs clamped over my abdomen, I began to change in a deeper way. My children's limbs grew around me like roots; I became a part of them. I began to want what I felt they needed. Using Suky as an inverse model, I made myself eat proper meals, seldom drank, took no medication.

As the twins grew up, it became clear that they had opposite personalities. Ben was kind, curious, intelligent. He loved all sports, was a good student, worked after school in the mail room of Herb's publishing house by the time he was thirteen. He was a responsible, sensible kid.

Grace was high-strung, fierce, a leader. She had strong vigilante tendencies, which became troublingly apparent at the age
of five, when she knocked a boy unconscious with a softball bat for stealing her brother's SweeTart candies. As a toddler and very young child, she refused to wear clothes. I still have a scar on my wrist from a bite she gave me while I tried to wrestle her into a party dress – we were going to a wedding. In the end, I had to hire a babysitter and leave her home, because all she would wear was a string of beads. All the combs in the house had teeth missing from ill-fated attempts at taming the thick, tangled fair hair that grew in stubborn spirals around her shining, intelligent face. Grace felt everything with almost alarming intensity. She could be so possessive of me that at times I felt her affection like a plastic bag over my face. I have to admit, my feeling for her could be just as violent, and sometimes it frightened me, because I remembered Suky and the rigid clutch of her embraces, the way she held me down to kiss me, making me laugh so hard I ended up crying, feeling crushed, feeling that she would actually kill me. With Ben, it was effortless. I adored him, he adored me, that was that. But with Grace, it was a love affair, complete with sudden flashes of dislike, tearful fights, and sweet reconciliations.

One night when Grace was eight, I spied on her. I had put the twins to bed an hour before and tiptoed up to check on them. The door was ajar, and I peeked in. Ben was fast asleep. Grace, however, had secretly put on the reading light and was dancing. Her white nightgown and crazy nest of blond hair glowed in the incandescent light. The dance was both savage and graceful. She was whispering a song, or a spell, as she whirled like a dervish, round and round, her hands carving the air into arabesques. As I watched her, spellbound, through the crack in the door, I thought, What would it take to turn this feral little creature into someone who would let herself be whipped? In that instant, I realized that all I wanted for my daughter was that she be as unlike me as possible. I had to protect her.

Silently, I walked away, stealing myself for the coming sacrifice. From that night on, I began to both keep her at arm's
length – trying with all my might to maintain some neutrality, force the drama out of our relationship, be as little as possible like Suky – and at the same time spoil her systematically, in a deliberate, thoughtful fashion. I discouraged her from helping in the house, pushed her to play competitive sports, encouraged her tendency to dress like a boy, play like a boy. I wanted her to be like a man – to have the expectations of a man – that sense of being heir to the world. I wanted to break the chain of servitude that linked the women in my family.

My system worked. Grace grew up with arrogance, charm, optimism, and total belief in herself. The fact that she came to despise me was a sad side effect of her upbringing, but I guess it was inevitable. She saw me as pathetic, a slave, a flop. I was at the kids' service day and night. I had no job, and very little help in the house aside from the cleaning. Throughout Grace's adolescence, I hoped the day would come when she realized what I had done for her. She would then look at me with radiant love once more, as she had that afternoon long ago, when she'd taught herself to read and asked, ‘
Now
do you love me more than Ben?' But that moment never came. Her need for me had evaporated.

When the twins were small, I had a recurring dream that I was served up on an enormous platter and my children ate me. They had always loved ribs; they snapped mine off with strong, greasy fingers and consumed them voraciously, with barbecue sauce. The strange thing was, I was conscious in the dream, and I was smiling. All I could think of was how much protein the kids were getting.

In spite of all my devotion in the early days of my marriage, there were moments when, like a wolf domesticated by humans, I caught a scent of my old ways and felt hemmed in. A beautiful young man walking by on the street, the sight of teenagers high in the park, sometimes threw me off balance; I could feel myself teeter on the edge of my new existence and imagined the thrill of kissing a man I barely knew, or the sharp kick of amphetamine between my eyes. But I never strayed. Herb felt the solemnity of
our vows, too, but he refused to cast a shadow of guilt on the marriage, doggedly seeing Gigi's suicide as the natural, almost inevitable, flowering of her illness. He savored his second dose of fatherhood. He had failed his first kids, angry mediocrities in their thirties by now. I was his shining ticket to happiness, new life, a second chance at youth. The fact that we had built our bliss on another person's despair – we forgot it eventually. We lived as if we deserved our luck.