Three Story House: A Novel (29 page)

“We’ve got it,” Elyse said, waving Isobel through the curtain.

Before Elyse could start a conversation with Lizzie, T. J. showed up on the back steps. He knocked softly and apologized for being early. They put him to work and as they’d finished their preparations, the bulk of the guests arrived. Elyse was the last to go upstairs.

In all, there were a dozen people gathered to cheer Isobel on during the premiere of the show. Benny had brought one of his daughters along and she sat giggling with two of Lizzie’s soccer players, who’d come with T. J.’s sister. The room was warm, but the sticky heat reminded Elyse of baking bread with her mother when she was a little girl. She hoped Isobel had the same feeling of warmth from the crowd.

“Are you ready?” Isobel asked, her thumb hovering over the volume button on the remote. The room quieted with expectation as the commercials moved from products to hype for the network’s own television programs.

Typical of the format, the first few minutes showed teasers on all three celebrities who would be featured in the episode. In the early moments of the show, stills of Isobel as she had been as a child on the show drew shouts of recognition from the crowd and giggling from the girls, who couldn’t believe that the woman in front of them had ever worn braces or high-waisted jeans. Isobel shot them all down with a calculated look that set the tone. Rosa May couldn’t put down her phone during the entire show. She kept tweeting and reading messages about the show, handing her phone to those around her for their silent reactions to the tweets.

Elyse had started by watching Isobel to gauge her reaction to the show, but it was pretty clear that every millisecond she was the focus of the camera was a moment of pure joy for her. Trying to catch Lizzie’s eye, she got up from the beanbag she’d been sitting in and walked behind the guests. They were all rapt, waiting for Isobel’s segment.

Finally the program went to the last commercial break after teasing the final segment, which would feature Isobel exclusively. “There might be some footage of you two,” Isobel said to the television.

“Us?” Lizzie asked. “Why?”

Isobel didn’t answer. “I dunno.”

The cousins knew that Isobel had already seen the show. Her agent had sent it over via FedEx a few weeks earlier. Isobel had locked herself in her room and watched it obsessively for several hours, then she destroyed the disc—telling the cousins that she wanted their raw reactions to the show when it aired.

The segment lasted eight minutes. It was twice as long as they’d spent on any other celebrity, including the busty teen star who kept running into and over people in her series of increasingly expensive automobiles. They talked mostly to Isobel, following her around the house in a way that made her seem like she was in charge of the renovations and of fixing her cousins. The air was still and silent every moment they were on the television. Occasionally, Elyse looked at Lizzie and they exchanged furtive looks that indicated their outrage. The last shot of the program was of Spite House, a long shot as the camera moved away, held by a man walking backward down the porch steps and down the steep stairs to the street. It lingered on the beat-up historical sign.

“It doesn’t look as bad as all that now,” Rosa May said.

Elyse sensed that she was trying to gauge the mood of the room, which had shifted. People were gathering their belongings and murmuring about how they had to get back home.

“I don’t understand why they said all that stuff about me,” Lizzie said. “I’m not even limping in those shots. That one they showed, where it looked like I fell. My foot was asleep. Besides, do you know how many women didn’t make that team? The game’s changing and not everyone’s positioned right. What they want is less power and more finesse.”

The block of time spent on Isobel had felt more like a teaser for another television show. One in which Isobel moved to the honky-tonk South with her good ol’ boy relatives and tried to save her grandmother’s house. The fact that Mellie wasn’t her actual grandmother didn’t matter. What mattered was that this grandmother had come from slave-owning folk. That was a fact that Elyse hadn’t known. In truth, she didn’t know anything about Lizzie’s side of the family except what she allowed herself to romanticize.

Elyse had come off okay. They made her out to be more Yankee than she was in real life, but they showed her weighing herself and tugging at a pair of pants that were too tight (she promised herself she’d find them and throw them out immediately). The whole time they’d talked about how the failure of the bed and breakfast (who had given them the awful shot of her painting the sign?) was the latest in a long string of failures, and then lingered on her ringless left hand.

“They’re certainly not subtle,” Elyse said.

“I’m not sure I get what the show is supposed to be about,” T. J. said.

Benny, with his hand on his daughter’s back, took his hat off. “At least they didn’t go into the incest stuff about your grandmother marrying her uncle.”

“Incest,” Lizzie said.

“How did they get all that information?” Elyse asked.

Isobel waved off their questions. “It won’t be like that in the show. That’s just hype to get people to watch. You’ll see.”

T. J. hugged Lizzie and whispered a few things in her ear. Elyse was pretty sure he was trying to convince her to stay at his place that night. Since the wedding, Lizzie had just as often stayed with T. J. as at Spite House, explaining her need for a shower and a working bathroom.

“Kisses,” Isobel said to the departing guests. Her cheeks were flushed as if she had a fever.

Not knowing what else to do, Elyse cleaned.

Lizzie slumped to the floor. “Did he say incest?”

The moment after she’d seen the last guest to the door, Isobel had declared the night a success and flung herself across the bed, where she remained, avoiding eye contact with her cousins. “What did you think? Did you love it?” Isobel asked.

“Did you hear him?” Lizzie asked.

Elyse took the greenery, which had indeed turned yellow, from the vases. “I’m sure he didn’t mean incest, incest.”

“Benny’s full of crap,” Isobel said. “Did you like the show?”

“Of course,” Elyse lied. She opened the window and tossed the greenery out into the yard, figuring they were as likely to compost out there as at the bottom of a garbage can. She left the purple snapdragons to stand alone in their containers.

Her cousin had a way of not seeing what she didn’t want to. Elyse didn’t have enough energy to say what she thought so instead she cleaned around her cousins, keeping a close eye on Lizzie, who’d pulled out her cell phone and appeared to be calling her parents. Isobel, oblivious to the unfolding drama, kept chattering about the program and occasionally reading texts people she knew were sending her. Finally, as Elyse grouped the vases on her cousin’s dresser, Isobel finished with her dissection of the show and its possible outcomes. She sat up and crossed her legs in what Elyse thought looked like a yoga pose.

Lizzie let out a long sigh. “Answer the fucking phone.” She hung up and dialed the same number again.

“Enough about me. I’m sick of me. I’m sick of the show. If I never say one more word about myself, I’ll be happy.” Isobel patted her king-sized bed, inviting them to join her. “We can all sleep together tonight and pretend we’re giggling school girls.”

“Not now,” Elyse said, trying to get her attention and direct it toward Lizzie.

“Of course it’s an emergency,” she said in response to whoever had answered the phone. “Wake her up.”

Isobel raised her eyebrows. Elyse joined her on the bed and drew her knees up to her chest.

“Incest?” Lizzie screamed into the phone. “You never bothered to mention the incest.”

“We should go downstairs,” Elyse said.

“Stay right there. You have to listen to what she’s saying.” Lizzie put the phone on speaker and dropped it into an empty glass to amplify the sound of Aunt Annie’s voice, thin and reedy, bouncing around the room.

“It wasn’t incest exactly. Roger was her uncle. He and her daddy were brothers.”

“She married her uncle?” Lizzie leaned forward and pounded on the floor.

“Half-uncle, really,” Aunt Annie said.

“Who else knows this? Does Jim know?”

“Of course. It used to be common knowledge. I mean when I was growing up.” Aunt Annie’s voice quieted, and although Elyse expected her to share her own pain over it, she didn’t.

“There’s got to be more to it than that,” Isobel said. “I mean, did he force her to marry him? Or did her father force her?”

“It’s not my story, it’s my mother’s.”

“You have to explain this,” Isobel said.

Aunt Annie was quiet a long while. Elyse suspected she was trying to find some way out of telling Lizzie this truth. In the distance, Elyse heard the call of a bird.
Tika, tika, tika-swee, swee, swee-chay, chay, chay
. She could hear in its cadence the rhythms of starting a car. She motioned Lizzie to join them on the bed. Then, reaching for her hand, she held it as Aunt Annie told them the story. Isobel took her other hand and they waited, listening to the birdsong and Lizzie’s mother crying. For the first time in Elyse’s life the drama of romantic decisions made her ill instead of elated.

Third Story

Isobel

S
liding on oversized sunglasses, Isobel checked her reflection in the rearview mirror and then stepped from the car. Since her episode of
Where Are They Now?
had aired, she’d taken particular care with her appearance—wanting to look like she belonged, but also needing people to look twice. In Memphis, that meant shades even when it was overcast, a fresh manicure, and lace. Southern women loved a little frill. Each time she went out it felt like a test.
Had people seen the show? Did they recognize her? Did they want to see more of her?
Her years in the business had taught her that what mattered most was attention. She entered the home improvement store and set her purse in the cart. To be a working actress meant the public had to react viscerally to you—it didn’t matter if it was good or bad. The best celebrities evoked the holy trinity of emotions—love, hate, and envy.

Waiting to be noticed, she observed the other shoppers through her glasses. The overwhelming feeling coming from them was one of purpose. These women with lists, these men with broken bits of plumbing, were like determined ants marching from hill to crumb. What they needed was a reason to look up from their busyness. She crossed in front of a young couple striding toward the refrigerators and cut in line at the paint counter. Murmurs of irritation rose behind her. She felt the people in the store turn their attention away from their tasks. The first time she’d felt that lift from having people’s attention was at an audition for a grape juice commercial. She’d been seven and how she’d explained it to her mother was to say she felt like she’d jumped into the air and never landed.

The paint clerk had a sleeve of tattoos. At her approach, he’d crossed his arms showing a small circle of ink-free flesh around his elbow.

“Can you tell me—” she began, dropping her voice to a whisper so he’d have to lean in to hear her.

“There’s a line,” he said, remaining an arm’s length from where she leaned against the counter.

“I didn’t realize,” she lied.

He stepped forward to take a scrap of fabric that an older woman held out to him. Isobel glanced behind her at the line and sighed before moving to the displays of paint samples and fingering the various shades of yellow offered by Ralph Lauren. She eavesdropped on the conversations around her, trying to will someone in the store to recognize her and start the whispered trail that would prove her relevance. She didn’t even want paint. Benny needed industrial-strength solvent to pull the glue off the tiles he’d uncovered underneath the linoleum in the kitchen, and she’d volunteered to go to the store. Standing at the array of vibrant colors, Isobel thought about the kitchen and how much nicer it would look if it were painted a soft butter color with enough gold undertones to deepen as the light changed in the room. Moving on to the other displays, she pocketed samples labeled
Goldfinch, Cornbread, Sweet Chamomile,
and
Beeswax
. Just as she reached for
Butter Cookie,
a woman holding a toddler in a smocked linen jumper caught her eye and then smiled. Isobel took off her sunglasses.

“Are you—?” the woman said, stepping closer. “The Waits, right? No,
Wait for It.
”

Isobel nodded.

“Oh, I loved that show. I had the biggest crush on the guy who played your brother. What was his name?”

Isobel said his name. The guy had gone on to a successful career as a comedic actor—playing the straight man in gross-out buddy comedies. They hadn’t been close and hadn’t kept in touch. He’d been one of those actors who looked young. Already old enough to drink when he landed the role of her fourteen-year-old brother and by the time the show ended, he’d married, divorced, and fathered two children. She assured the woman he was as nice in person as he appeared on the screen. “He taught me how to drive,” she said because it was true and because it would endear her to this stranger.

The woman looked at the paint sample in Isobel’s hand. “I heard you have a new show. Something about fixing up a house?”

“No, that was one special. One of those shows where you satisfy people’s curiosities as to how the famous turn out in the end.” Before she could finish her thought, she felt the presence of another person at her elbow. Turning, she saw an older man holding out a pen and green paint sample he’d taken from the display. She asked his name and signed it. In less time than it took for her to write
Love, Isobel,
people surrounded her, each of them wanting her to do the same. She wrote out autographs until the crowd thinned to a handful of people who clutched already signed paint samples talking about who she used to be. Chatting with the stragglers, she searched their eyes and their body language for some sense of adoration or, at the very least, envy.