Best Friends (54 page)

“Good,” Sally said, “now I don't have to wake up to nurse her.” And she was gone, leaving me and Peter to the tiny world.

“ I WAS THINKING OF our wedding. Remember that guy with the pickup?”

“The one who brought the flowers.”

“He said he was good luck, remember? He said no wedding he'd delivered flowers to had ended in a divorce. I guess we cooked that, huh?”

“Why were you thinking of our wedding, Ted?”

“I don't know. A sentimental moment. I was thinking of your collarbones and that necklace you wore. . . .”

“I was an idiot, Ted.”

“What do you mean? Are you saying you're sorry we ever—?”

“No, no. Later. I was an idiot to ever hurt you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean that?”

“Oh, God, do I mean that.”

“Okay, make it up to me.”

“Right now? Right here? Like this?”

 

 

 

“ YOU HAVEN ' T GOT JUST yourself to think of,” my mother said. “There's Aury, and need I mention Ted's other children. And his wife.”

“I know.” In six months Ted and I had met alone only three times, at the seminars where he was a lecturer, on nights it was logical for him to be away.

“You say you know, but do you know? You act as if you don't.”

“We have a special bond, Ted and me.”

My mother bounced a gaze off me in an exasperated way. “When did you get sentimental? ‘Special bond.' You have a special bond with a man who fathered your child, but you never picked up the phone to tell him he had a daughter? What's wrong with you? You think I don't notice your moony look? Tell me, does Ted have a ‘special bond' with his wife too? Do you have a ‘special bond' with me and Aury? Or are your only ‘special bonds' adulterous ones?”

 

 

 

“ WHY DON ' T YOU BRING Aury over Christmas break?” Sally said. “You know I'd love to see her.”

“How's your business? You keeping busy?”

“Busy enough. Has Aury been to Ted's again?”

“Twice. She goes again after Thanksgiving.”

“You and Ted still getting along okay?”

“Oh, sure. I like Ted. We're friends.”

“I can't believe how mature you're being with all this. I'd be a wreck if I had to pass my kids off to someone else, and you're doing it voluntarily!”

“I don't know. You and I are just different that way. And Ted's her father.”

 

 

 

“YOU'RE HOME,” my mother said flatly.

What a day. Hospital rounds, clinic hours, a noon meeting with the clinic nurses, credentials committee at six, back to the hospital to see an inpatient whose lover was threatening to sign him out, a stop at hospice on the way home to get my visits in before Christmas, another stop at the twenty-four-hour Everything Store to buy amaryllis bulbs as presents for my nurses. “Whew,” I told my mother, “I'm beat.” I headed for the refrigerator. “Anything left over?”

“Oh, I didn't much worry about your dinner,” my mother said.

Peculiar. Something eating her.

“Where's Aury?” I said. “Did she go to bed already?”

“It's after nine.”

“Look,” I said, irritated, “I didn't have time to call. Every minute,
every minute
I was busy. And normally I would have called from the car, but the cell phone's broken, you know it's at the shop being rebuilt. I'm sorry, but I don't think you have any idea what my life's like.” It's not normal, I was thinking, to be thirty-eight years old and still have to answer to your mother. Is it my fault she gave Eric her life savings? Am I really my mother's keeper?

“I used to work,” my mother said.

“Not like I do.”

“Maybe not.”

I was opening a can of pop from the fridge when my mother sprang her question. “What day is it, Clare?”

“You're doing the mini-mental status test on me now? You think I'm losing my mental functions? It's Monday, that's what day it is.”

“And what's the date today, Clare Ann? Did you write it on any of your charts?”

“The date is December thirteenth.”

“December thirteenth.”

“Oh my God.” Aurelia's birthday. I had forgotten my daughter's birthday.

She was still awake, lying in her narrow bed. It made it worse that she didn't seem angry. “Mommy!” she said, in her high, thin voice. “I'm seven years old now!” I sat on her bed, and she hugged me. “Is your emergency all better?” she said.

The next day, I got off early and took her out for pizza, to Captain Crawdad's to play video games, on a long drive to look at Christmas lights. “This is a fun and rainy birthday,” Aury said from the backseat of the car. “I'll tell Daddy we had lots of fun.”

I twisted my head to look at her face, dappled with the shadows of rain-drops on the window. She was smiling maybe a hint too broadly, her right hand, the hand with the tremor, clutching a plastic bag filled with prizes from Captain Crawdad's. “I love you, Aury,” I said. “You're a wonderful girl. But you don't have to cover for me with Daddy.”

“A fun and rainy birthday,” Aury repeated, and I understood she'd never tell.

The wipers smeared my windshield more than they cleaned it. I blinked and peered through the streaks. “You're too good for me, Aury,” I said.

 

 

 

“LOOK,” Sally said over Christmas. I hadn't brought Aury.

I knew it was going to be bad because she'd taken me upstairs into her office, late at night when the kids were sleeping, and unlocked the dreadful door.

A Crown Communications product. A magazine, one of her father's. One of hers. Why was she doing this to me? Was it revenge for the way I'd shocked her years before?

She wasn't opening the magazine to the centerfold, but to a side pictorial. At first I was simply relieved. Sunny, bright photos. No violence. The photos seemed to have been taken at a playground. A girl wearing a Peter Pan shirt and no bottoms leaned over a tire swing, or hung upside down on a monkey bar with her pubis exposed, then peeked around a wooden tower, breasts revealed.

“Did she have some botched plastic surgery?” The nipples looked even to me.

“How old do you think she is, Clare?”

“I don't know, eighteen?” She did look young, come to think of it, and when I thought about it more, the playground setting must have been an intentional attempt to make her look younger.

Sally seemed disconcerted by my response. “She is eighteen, I looked into it, she's definitely eighteen, but—Clare, who does she remind you of? Look at her, who does she remind you of?”

I looked. There was no one I knew who looked like her. I realized her hair was done in pigtails. They did want her looking young.

“Who does she remind you of?” Sally's voice was insistent, almost shaking.

“I don't know.” I cast my mind about wildly. “Margaret?” I seemed to recall she had occasionally worn her hair in pigtails.

“Margaret!” Sally almost shrieked. “Does everyone remind you of Margaret? Doesn't she remind you of Aury? Or of Barbara? Doesn't she look like a child? Can't you see what they're doing with her? They're making this young woman into a child, and they're making a child into a sexual object of desire. Doesn't that disturb you?”

I felt like an idiot. I'd missed the whole subtext.

“They're” I realized. Sally had said “they're”—as if the photos had nothing to do with her.

“It certainly disturbs me,” Sally said. “I saw this two weeks ago. The photographer had been phoning me about it, he wanted me to see it, it's in his portfolio. Said it was ‘tasteful.' I just want you to know I can do tasteful photography, he said. His name's Derek Winslow, he's been working with us for two years. He's sleeping with the girl. She's eighteen according to her driver's license, that's a legal thing, you can't knowingly distribute adult literature with a subject under eighteen. But that's a legal nicety here. Derek clearly wants people thinking she's younger. He must imagine her younger.”

What kind of a mother was I? I glanced at the cover of the magazine, which wasn't a name I recognized. “Is this a popular—?”

“This issue sold out. Look.” Sally flipped the pages. The playground pictures got more graphic. Another girl, this one wearing only barrettes and patent leather shoes and anklets, appeared. The second girl's pubic hair was pale, her breasts tiny buds. The two girls interacted.

It was interesting, there really was something sexy about these photos. The girls seemed real. The photographer seemed as excited as they were. He must be crazy about her, I thought. And that, of course, was why the pictures were so disturbing.

“Every person in these magazines is someone's child,” Sally said.

“Or someone's parent,” I said, thinking of Sara the Countess of Come.

“Yes,” said Sally distractedly, not seeming to take in my comment. “Who would raise a child to be part of this?” She leafed through a few more pages, segueing into the next feature, two women playing with penis-shaped lollipops. Pedestrian, I thought.

“I'm out of this business,” she said. “I'm out. I know you think I've been waffling, but I only wanted a better deal. Daddy was always a businessman, and I wanted to be a businessman too. But this is the final straw.”

I was shaking my head. “And not only this, but the violent stuff.”

Sally waved her hand dismissively. “Noise. The violence is theatric. I don't worry about the violence.”

I knew that was a lie. This was a woman so disturbed by violence that she'd never seen a James Bond movie. She'd convinced herself, I realized, that the violence portrayed in the products was fake. She ignored it on those grounds. But the reality wasn't my point. “Sally, if the violent stuff makes people associate violence with arousal, then maybe in real life people will—”

Sally brought her hands up to her ears. “Clare, I don't need this. Didn't I tell you I'm done? I'm done I'm done I'm done.” To my astonishment, she started crying.

I didn't know how to deal with a crying Sally. I stood there like a lummox. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, her face was deformed. What had she been doing? Why had she been deluding herself? What would she tell her children? All she'd been trying to do was honor her father, and look what she'd done to her kids.

“Sally, Sally,” I said. I patted her on the back. “Sally, your kids will never even realize.” Then I asked gently, “Do you have buyers?”

Sally sniffed. “So-so buyers. I don't care what I get now. I just want out.”

“It'll be all right, Sally,” I said. “It's wonderful, really. It's over.”

She broke into a fresh keen. “It'll never be over, there'll always be that”—I remember the pause so clearly, that sliver of abeyance as I waited for what she'd say—“
meat
on my hands.” She threw her arms around me then, and as I held her, I cried too. She was right, there would always be that.

 

 

 

“ I FORGOT AURY'S BIRTHDAY, ” I told Sally later that night, as we sat with our mugs in her deserted kitchen.

“What?”

“I did.” I told her the story. “I haven't let my mother say one thing,” I finished. “I won't be around her unless Aury's around.”

“Your place isn't that big.”

“Big enough.”

Sally sat for a moment looking into her cup of tea. “You're hiding behind Aury,” she said quietly, raising her eyes to meet mine.

We both smiled. “She protects me,” I said. There had been so many tears that night. I felt as peaceful as I had in years.

“We all protect you,” Sally said.

 

 

 

THERE ' S THIS LOONY IDEA—American, Christian—that what you do doesn't ultimately matter, that anything can be forgiven and redeemed. I don't buy it. Nothing disappears, nothing is canceled out. A stain in the wood, meat on the hands, a virus in the cells. These things don't go away. In the end, imperfectly but largely, you reap what you sow. I think in my life that's all I've learned.

 

 

 

“GONE,” SALLY SAID . “Totally. Up in smoke. Peter drove by to look. I can't believe I forgot to tell you.” She was talking on the phone about Sid's hillside house, bought by an insurance executive after Sid went into the nursing home and destroyed in one of the fires that had beset Malibu back in November. “I bet the owner's not too torn up about it. He'll probably rebuild bigger.” So Sid's house had burned, not slid into the sea. I wasn't sure which end would have been more appropriate.