The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (8 page)

Grandma Sally was fat. We saw her as rarely as possible. Suky could hardly look her. But, thinking back on it now, I don't think it was disgust and embarrassment about Sally's weight that kept her sparrowlike daughter away from her. I think the reason was that Grandma Sally had the full measure of my mother. I remember, on one of her rare visits, Sally followed Suky with her hooded eyes as her daughter sped around the kitchen, sponged down the table, made individually tailored, assembly-line sandwiches for each of her children (none of whom liked the same things), then swept the floor – talking breathlessly all the while. The whites of the old lady's eyes glimmered beneath dark irises; her double chin was cradled in her hands, a half-eaten piece of pie on a plate between her elbows, two thin, blond braids pinned to the top of her head. Eventually, she sat back, crossed her arms over her chest, and drawled in pure Mississippian: ‘You never moved that fast when you were a kid.'

‘Well, Mother,' Suky said with forced cheer, gritting her teeth, ‘when I was a kid, I didn't have five children.'

‘You were a lazy, dreamy kid,' said Sally. ‘Nobody changes their tempo that way. Tempo is tempo. It's one of the basic things about a person.'

‘You and I just have different styles of mothering,' said Suky, smiling coldly and patting her stiff nest of hair. ‘I like to keep on top of things, that's all.'

‘Mmm-hmm,' said Sally suspiciously, shifting her enormous weight on her chair and poking at her pie with her fork. I couldn't figure out what Grandma Sally was getting at – but I knew it enraged my mother. Her anger made my belly tense up and ache.
The discomfort was so intense, I went outside, in order to break the suction between us.

But that December, Grandma Sally seemed to be dying, and in need of her hyperefficient daughter to play nurse. So off Suky went, having left enough soup and lasagna in the freezer chest to last us a month, even though she only planned to be gone four days. The first two days of my vacation from Suky were heavenly. I'd amble home from school with my brothers, stare into the refrigerator, poke around in the cabinets, eat whatever I felt like, turn on the TV. Des spent afternoons in his study, working on his Sunday sermon, or meeting troubled parishioners. One parishioner who seemed especially troubled that week was Mrs Herbert Orschler. I always thought of her whole name when I saw her, because she once dropped an envelope from her purse, and I picked it up. Before I handed it to her, I read, typed out, ‘Mrs Herbert Orschler.' I thought what an odd name Herbert was for a woman and wondered if, nestled beneath her snug dress, was a small, secret penis. Amy, that fountain of information, had once told me there were people who were born both male and female. This disgusted and fascinated me, and I wondered whether Mrs Herbert Orschler was visiting my father so often because of the stress caused by her genitalia. The day after my mother left for Grandma Sally's, I was passing the door to Des's study. It was ajar; I peeked in to find Mrs Orschler seated in an armchair, my father leaning in to hold her hand. This seemed slightly odd to me at the time, but I put it down to the duties of a pastor, which were mysterious and manifold, as my father always said.

It turned out that Suky had to stay away a whole extra week tending to her mother, whose approach to death was as sluggish as her housekeeping. (She would in fact outlive Suky by five years.) Back in the rectory, benign neglect was the order of the day. I didn't do my homework once. We ordered in pizza nearly every night and ate it in front of the television, ignoring
the laden freezer. I don't think I washed much. A pact had developed between us kids and our father: he wouldn't bother us if we didn't bother him.

The caramel colored plastic bottles of pills in Suky's bathroom medicine cabinet and nestled between the nutmeg and the cloves in the spice rack were just part of my childhood, part of the furniture, like the rough cotton drapes in the living room or the one chipped square of brown linoleum in the kitchen. I didn't think about the shiny capsules, one half blood maroon, the other a transparent little dome filled with cheerful red and yellow orbs like miniature gumballs, which my mother swallowed in the morning and the afternoon with a toss of her head, hand to mouth fast as a hummingbird, until I heard the word “Dexedrine” in a cautionary TV movie about speed-addicted beatniks I watched one rainy afternoon with my oldest brother, Chester. The word rang a bell. I stole into the kitchen and checked the prescription bottle. Sure enough, the active ingredient was Dexedrine. Speed! All at once, the manic cheerfulness, the jumpiness, the sudden bouts of deflated disconnection, Grandma Sally's suspicions – all started to make a horrible kind of sense. Even Suky's overwhelming affections seemed like drug-induced delirium. I took the bottle and ran into the living room. Chester was slumped on the couch, his long legs splayed out, a vacant look on his face as he watched TV. I showed him the label.

‘Mom takes that stuff,' I said, gesturing to the television. He turned toward me slowly, irritated by the interruption.

‘What are you doing with Mom's medicine?'

‘It's Dexedrine. See?'

‘So?'

‘So that's why she's so perky all the time.'

‘Oh, shut up. She's not a drug addict. Those people in the movie are taking it to get high.'

‘But what's the difference?'

‘You think companies would sell diet pills full of speed? It's a tiny amount in there. I can't believe you're even saying this.'

I just stood there in front of him until he kicked me out of the way. Maybe he was right. Maybe she didn't need the pills except for a diet. So I took ten of them, just to see.

Whoosh!
Wow
did I have energy! I jumped up and down on my bed for about half an hour, my heart racing, then I ran downstairs and started telling Chester all these really funny things, and imitating our neighbors, and laughing, falling over myself. Des even came out of his study; I was absolutely nuts.

‘What the heck happened to her?' he asked.

‘I'll bet you she took Mom's diet pills,' said Chester sleepily. ‘She was asking about them.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?' Des asked, springing into action. He grabbed me by the arms and pinned me down on the sofa, under the light.

‘Open up your eyes!' he commanded. I couldn't stop laughing.

‘Goddamnit, open your eyes!' He held my eyelid open. I saw his tawny face, with the bluish cast of his shaved beard under the skin, his bushy eyebrows, the dark hairs escaping from his nose, so close it was alarming. ‘We're going to have to take her to the hospital,' he said. I slipped out of his grasp, bolted up the stairs, dove into my room, and locked the door. Then I huddled in the corner, my mind going off like fireworks, my legs twitching. They had to pick the lock. In the end, Des decided against the hospital. I was coming down anyway, and had already started crying and throwing up.

I woke up at 9:30 the next morning. The house was silent. I came down to find Des, sitting in front of a cup of tea and the paper. He smiled at me kindly. I basked in his focused gaze.

‘Sleep well?' he asked.

‘How come you didn't wake me up for school?' I asked.

‘Your body needed the rest, after yesterday. That was a dangerous thing you did.'

‘If those pills are dangerous, why does Mommy take them?'

‘They're not dangerous for her, she takes just a few, and she's a grown-up, not a kid.'

‘But why does she take them?'

‘Her mother got so terribly fat,' said Des. ‘She's afraid the same thing will happen to her.'

‘Is she … an
addict
?' I asked, using the word I'd learned from the TV drama.

‘Oh, for mercy's sake, Pippa, sit down and eat your cereal. Your mother is no more an addict than … that squirrel out there.' I looked out the window. A large gray squirrel was frantically gnawing on a seed dropped from our bird feeder. The creature did, in fact, move a lot like Suky.

When I came home from school the next afternoon, Suky was in the bath. I barged in, opened the medicine cabinet, and took out the bottle of pills. I had two more bottles in my fist: one from the kitchen and another I had found behind the tomato paste in the larder. Suky glared at me, her face tight with anger as I lined up the bottles neatly, side by side.

‘So who are you, really?' I asked. There was a long pause. ‘I'd like to know what you're like without this stuff.'

‘Don't be silly,' she said in a chilly, reasonable tone she almost never used with me. ‘That is medicine. You took enough to kill you.'

‘What would happen if you stopped taking it?'

‘I would get fat,' she announced crisply, arching her back so her pink nipples peeked out of a skin of bubbles, then sank again.

‘I don't care what you look like,' I said softly. She rested her feet on the end of the tub and assessed her glistening, pink toenails.

‘Okay,' she said in an offhand way. ‘Fine.' But she kept looking at her feet with stubborn interest until, eventually, I left.

The next day, the pills were gone. Not a pill in the house. That was her answer to me. She seemed more focused, serene, engaged. I was so relieved. The fact that she was wiping tears away while
she was vacuuming and staring vacantly out the window while she ironed – my gratitude swept it out of my mind. At least she was my real mother. I loved her intensely then, and kept hugging her, kissing her. When I did, she smiled weakly and patted my arm. A week passed, and she started cheering up again. I never saw her take a pill, but she was acting like she'd drunk six cups of coffee, all day. I knew she must be hiding the drug somewhere. Whenever I got a chance, I searched. I found small stashes of pills in Baggies all over the house – in her underwear drawer, inside the freezer, taped under the couch. In the beginning, I would remove them and flush them down the toilet. But it didn't make any difference. She seemed to be taking more and more. Burying the habit had made it more important, the need more acute. Her behavior was erratic. Her pupils were constantly dilated, her reactions to sudden noises, even the telephone, were exaggerated, almost theatrical. She was prone to sudden bursts of weeping.

I tried to talk to Des about it again, but he brushed me off gruffly. They were in it together for some reason. And then I saw it – or I thought I did. With Suky out of her mind on speed, he was free to pursue the spiritual life, including consoling Mrs Orschler, and whomever else he had tucked under his robes of office. But now I think that was unfair. I think he was simply kind enough to accept Suky for who she was, and unwilling to have me insult her with a truth that could only be destructive. Or no. Maybe my father couldn't face that his wife was a drug addict because to face it would be to see his marriage and his life as a lie. So he didn't see it. Or maybe he was just plain lazy. I'll never know.

By the time I was fifteen I could barely look at Suky; her touch made my skin hurt. Each time I pulled away, she lowered her eyes, as if acknowledging her sin. I could see the glimmer of tears beneath her lids. I watched her behavior now with a coldly observant eye. She met my gaze with a strident stare. We had always known what the other was thinking, my mother and I. So, without
having a single conversation, I expressed my disgust and sense of betrayal, and she, in her own way, refused to be controlled. Dinners became unbearable. She would prattle on senselessly from her station by the stove, laughing and blushing or crying and crazy, and I would stare at her, fantasizing about smacking her in the head, till I couldn't take it anymore and had to go into the bathroom, sob, and hit myself in the face. Returning glassy-eyed to the table, I would find my father and brothers eating and exchanging monosyllables, passing the dinner rolls as if nothing was the matter. Suky and I were on our own, locked cheek to cheek, dancing jerkily to a long, long number.

When I was little, I had a bottle, of course, the way everyone does. Suky loved giving me my bottle. I kept it for a long time. When I turned three, four, she still made me a bottle with warm milk, or juice. And it didn't end there. When I was eleven, twelve, if Suky felt especially warmly toward me, or we'd had a fight, she would offer me a bottle. And I loved it. She would fix it for me, and I would lie down and drink, staring out the window like an infant. Even after I figured out about the pills, even once her touch made my skin ache and I had begun to daydream about her death, we could still make up with a bottle. The last one I drank, I was sixteen years old.

By high school, I was angry, and that made me cool. Flanked by a few minions, I terrorized the kids that got on my nerves. Even Amy came under attack eventually. Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes was so pretty, you could eat her. She had the posture of a ballerina, carried her books level in front of her, like they were a chocolate cake. Needless to say, we moved in different circles now. But one day, as I watched her waft out of the girls' room, head held high, it occurred to me that she might tell one of her honor roll friends about our brief trip to the isle of Lesbos. If that got out, I would be ruined. I was seized by an impulse to smash her like a bug. I walked up to her and pinned her against the puce concrete-block wall, my hands squeezing her delicate wrists.

‘If you ever tell anyone about us, I will beat you up,' I hissed. Amy's blue eyes widened; she looked from side to side for help.

‘I won't,' she said. ‘I promise. Please.' I let her go. She ran off. Tears stung my eyes. What the hell did I do that for? I loved Amy. I promised myself that the next day in assembly I would tell her I was sorry. But I was too embarrassed. And the worst of it was, after that day, Amy started fawning on me. She wanted me to be nice to her. She was lying down like a dog, letting me know I had won. She was weak and smart and beautiful and had a future, and I was strong and stupid and wasn't good at anything but scaring people. She would come up to me and make a lame joke, and I would smile with one side of my mouth, letting just a little air out of my nose. Once, I trapped her in one of the big gym lockers. I got a few of my henchwomen to circle her, and we shoved her in. She was screaming, pounding on the metal. My heart was slamming against my chest, I thought I was going to
faint. Afterward, she was angry, but she didn't stand up to me. She just walked away, sniffling.

Horrified at this bully I was becoming, I went to church every Sunday at nine o'clock and prayed to be a better person. My father's gruff, clotted voice ground on like a distant engine as my thoughts kneaded my sins over and over, turning them in my mind like dough.
Please, Jesus, come into my heart and change me I
am begging you I am begging you to make me good, please
.

One summer night, it was so hot, my open window was like the yawning mouth of a dead man, emitting no puff of air. It felt like the oxygen had been sealed out of the world. I slept fitfully, my hair wet with perspiration, my legs flung over the sheets. Every few minutes, it seemed, I woke and looked around me, hoping for the dawn. The night-light emitted a sickly green glow. Each time I woke, I lay and listened to the tree frogs: ribbons of high-pitched sound layered on top of one another to create one pulsating scream that reached into my dreams like a claw, dragging me, time and again, into my room and the heat.

I heard a sound, a fluttering, thudding sound, coming from the open window. A flash of white, and then a clumsy thing, a feathered, heavy animal fell onto my floor and waddled toward me, its belly brushing the carpet. I wanted to scream, but I could not. Its webbed feet and large wings dragged along the floor, as if it was unused to perambulation. It twisted its neck to look up at me, and I saw a broad, solemn, human face, the face of a fifteen-year-old boy. The thing had shapely arms, too, which grew from the feathered trunk. With a sudden, violent flapping of wings, it heaved itself aloft and landed on my bed, its rubbery, black-skinned paddles scrambling over my bare feet. I crept back, terrified and repulsed, shrinking into the corner. The creature settled onto my crumpled bedclothes like a broody hen, then looked at me, somewhat out of breath from its efforts. It had pale, light-soaked eyes. I knew it for an angel, yet it disgusted me. I wondered if I had invoked it with all that praying I'd been doing.

‘I'm sorry,' I whispered. That seemed to cover everything – both the bad behavior and the excessive prayer. The great wings began to spread; the thing extended itself, stood up; it was the height of a small man, towering over me in that bed. The wings were as wide as a canopy above me. One pale, human arm floated down toward me. I felt its hot hand resting on my head. My eyes were so heavy, I strained to keep them open; the eyelids felt glued together. The thing's hand was hot, burning; heat surged through my body, then it felt like tiny insects were crawling inside my skin. When the feeling receded, my eyes snapped open. The angel had vanished. I looked around me, frightened, breathless, ran to the open window, shut it, locked it.

The next morning, I was running a fever. My mother kept me in bed. I wondered what she would think of my angel. Would she believe he was real, and if so, what would his visit signify to her? She would probably think there was something unseemly about it. Suky had a dirty mind. She always leapt to salacious conclusions, about parishioners, politicians, movie stars, using amused disapproval to mask intense interest in anything sexual. Why would my angel be any different? I yearned to tell her, but I was afraid, because I knew she would see my angel as her fault, somehow. My sins were her sins; I was a part of her. That was the way she saw it.