Ghost Country (2 page)

“You’ve lost your voice?” Becca asked, coming all the way into the room. She was fourteen now, her teeth white behind the barricade of braces, but her hair still a wiry cloud. Instead of Queen Esther’s blue flowing robe she wore layered tank tops over shorts and combat boots.

“Janice? Are you up? We need to talk!” Harry’s blare made her wince.

“She’s lost her voice!” Becca called back, enjoying the drama.

“Then she can goddam find it.”

Harry stomped into the room, but seeing her breasts exposed beneath the draped silk blouse he blushed and looked away. He grabbed Becca and tried to frog-march her from the room.

Becca wriggled free. “Oh, Daddy, you act like nobody I know has breasts. We see each other naked all the time after soccer. I look at my own, for pity’s sake.”

“And don’t talk to me like that: I’m not one of your classmates.” It was an automatic plea, lacking conviction. “Janice, button up your damned shirt and come into the kitchen. We’re going to talk.”

Someone had dumped her jacket and purse on the floor by the dresser. She picked up the jacket and made a great show of arranging it neatly on the back of the chair, pulling on the sleeves to straighten them while Harry snapped futilely behind her. Another show of fussing in her purse for a pen.
Hot tea
, she wrote in block capitals on the back of an envelope that she found on the dresser.
Shower.
She gave Becca the envelope and went down the hall to the bathroom, drowning Harry’s protests by turning on the taps full blast.

When the room was filled with steam she stepped under the shower and started kneading the muscles in her shoulders. She let the spray bathe the back of her throat, gargling slightly, then turned her back to the water and gently trilled her tongue along the edge of her front teeth. Using the trill, she moved up and down a half scale in the middle of her range, barely making a sound. When her neck muscles started to relax, she began a series of vowel exercises, still staying in the middle of her range but letting the sound increase a little.

After perhaps twenty minutes of vocalizing someone hammered on the bathroom door, but there wasn’t any point in responding: it was undoubtedly Harry. Not only did she know what he had to
say, she’d only get a chill and have to start over again if she stopped now. For another ten minutes she eased her voice into shape within the protective steam, until she deemed it safe to get out of the shower and finish exercising in the music room.

She carefully wrapped her throat in a towel before leaving the tub, keeping her neck covered as she dried herself, then kicking the used towels into a pile in the direction of the clothes hamper.

A cotton dressing gown hung on the back of the door. Karen’s, no doubt, judging by the vivid magenta flowers and tiers of lacy sleeves, but no one she cared about would see her in it and it was better than putting on that soiled blouse again.

The gown had a complicated set of ribbons; she tried to tie it up high enough to protect her chest from the air conditioner’s drafts. To be on the safe side she took another clean towel from the shelf and draped it across her neck. She held her silk blouse over the heap of damp towels: surely Karen would have enough sense to dry-clean it instead of throwing it into the washing machine? She’d remind her as soon as she finished her workout.

Of course, Harry didn’t have a real music room, but the family room held a badly tuned piano, the one from her parents’ house she’d used when she first started singing. As she walked back past the bedroom and down the half flight of stairs she hummed, letting the sound fill her head with the tickling that told her her breath was flowing well. Becca ran up behind her and handed her a mug of tepid tea. She didn’t break stride or stop humming, but did nod a regal thanks.

In front of the piano she let the humming turn back into vowels, and then into trills. At the end of half an hour she was sweating freely but feeling pleased with her flexibility. Partway through she had gulped down the tea and held the cup out for a refill. When Becca didn’t respond she turned, surprised, to find the room empty. The child used to like to listen to her practice. Still humming, she walked back to the bathroom and filled the cup with hot water from the tap.

Karen popped out of the kitchen as she passed. “Oh! When
you’re done will you put the towels in the hamper? I’m not doing a wash until Tuesday. Do you want some lunch? Harry had to—”

She turned her back on the nagging voice, not interested in anything Harry might have to do, and returned—still humming—to the family room to finish her workout. In the past she always concluded with “Vissi d’arte’ from
Tosca.
Her own voice, soaring to that final high D, exhilarated her with its freedom and power. But today she knew at some unacknowledged reach of her mind that she would never manage the aria, and that failure to do so would crack her self-control in front of Karen and Becca. She contented herself with a couple of German art songs that did not place great demands on the voice.

Drying face and chest with the towel in which she’d swathed her throat, she left it on the floor by the piano. The mug she took with her to the kitchen, even placing it in the dishwasher. Harry would not be able to say she showed absolutely no consideration for his wife.

Karen had moved to the backyard, bending over in faded shorts and shirt to do something with the garden. A dull vibration overhead meant Becca was upstairs listening to a pounding bass that passed for music with today’s teenagers. The child had actually preferred that to her own workout? She snorted like a high-bred racehorse.

Mercifully, Harry had disappeared altogether. Maybe the mounds of scrap iron called to him even on Sundays. She could eat lunch in peace. Not that there was much in Karen’s refrigerator to tempt her: the remains of the family’s Sunday bagel breakfast, with bright-colored squares of lox that looked like linoleum scraps; leftover roast lamb; cheese—which would produce phlegm in her throat—and iceberg lettuce. Wrinkling her nose she took out a bagel and a grapefruit and put on water for coffee.

Becca thudded down the back stairs into the kitchen. “Did you get your voice back?”

“Well enough to vibrate the glasses.”

Without raising her voice, simply by using perfect airflow, she
threw out a sound that returned a high-pitched whine from Karen’s crystal. It was a trick that had delighted Becca as a toddler, and even now made her grin.

“Daddy’s furious, but he decided not to give up his golf date for you.”

“Harry’s prone to furies. Any special reason?”

Becca hugged her knees. “Because Piero Benedetti called him at two this morning to get you out of jail.”

She felt a jolt behind her diaphragm. Jail? Her hands shook as she picked up the mug of coffee and a large pool slopped onto the table. Becca went to the sink for a sponge and mopped the table.

“Darling, is this what teenagers do for fun these days? Make up stories to shock the older generation?”

“Mom said you’d probably pretend not to remember.” Becca’s green eyes were tinged with worry.

“What am I supposed to have been in jail for? Trespassing on the Minsky scrap heap?”

Years of training allowed her to produce a mocking trilling laugh despite the giveaway trembling of her hands. “And what on earth does Piero have to do with it? The last I heard he was in New York closing out the Met production of
The Ghosts
of Versailles.”

“You called him. Or somebody called him, and he called Daddy, who had to drive all the way into Chicago to get you. Daddy says he should have just let you rot there, it would have done you good.”

“Oh, Jan—oh, good, you’re up.” Karen had come in and was washing mud off her hands at the sink. “We need to talk. About last night.”

“Becca has been spinning me some kind of ghoulish teenage tale,” she said lightly. “But I don’t think you should encourage that kind of prank. And I don’t think you need to involve yourself in my activities.”

“Don’t need to involve myself?” Pots as well as glassware rattled at Karen’s shriek. “Piero Benedetti called us in the middle of the night after you had woken him at home. Don’t you remember any
of it? Look at me, and don’t smirk in that oh-I’m-so-superior-to-you way! You made a spectacle of yourself at
La Bohème
last night. Even without the arrest, two of my neighbors already called to tell me. You hummed loudly throughout the first act, and then, deciding that the poor girl getting her chance to debut in a miserable community production didn’t deserve to be the center of attention, you actually got up and sang over her voice in the third act. And now you sit here in my kitchen, eating my food, after dropping dirty towels all over the house, trying to pretend you don’t remember a damned thing about it.”

“I don’t think she does remember, Mom. We read about it when we covered alcoholism in our health class this spring. You can be so drunk you can’t remember what you did, especially if it was embarrassing.”

“Becca! Are you—is it possible that you are calling
me
an alcoholic?”

“Oh, please!” Becca’s eyes, which used to watch her in adulation, held so much misery she had to look away. “It just makes it so much worse when you lie, when everybody knows that’s why you’re in Chicago instead of New York. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You can’t help it. It’s a disease, and if you could only admit—”

She swept the dishes off the table, enjoying the crash and the alarm in Karen’s and Becca’s faces when they shattered. “If you’ve
quite
finished your
extraordinary
remarks, will you find some clean clothes for me to wear? I’ll call someone to come out and pick me up.”

“Be my guest. But you can’t borrow any more of my clothes. You took my Donna Karan suit the last time you were here and when I finally got you to return it, you’d spilled something on it that the cleaners couldn’t get out.” Karen took a breath. “And Harry wants you to get a job. He’s tired of supporting you.”

“Does he want me to drive a truck at the scrap heap? Now that would be a sight worth seeing.”

“Janice, you can do what every other retired diva does: you can—”

“My name is Luisa Montcrief, and I am not retired!” She wished she hadn’t wasted the dishes on Becca’s childish remark: her fury was real this time, and needed a physical vent. “I am just as eager to leave this town as you are for me to go, but my manager has so far been too lazy to get me the engagements I desire.”

“Well, call him, and take something you
don’t
desire.”

“And have everyone join you in saying I’m a has-been? I think not!”

“Look, even if you’re not retired, would it kill you to give a few lessons? There must be people in Chicago who think you have something worth saying about singing.” Karen’s tone didn’t hold out much hope at the prospect.

“Very well: I will call my manager in the morning and remind him that I’m getting impatient.” She swept from the room, every inch a diva.

“What were you doing making her tea? I thought I told you not to wait on her.” Karen fetched the broom from the utility closet and stabbed at the broken crockery with it.

Becca pulled a strand of hair straight and sucked on it. “She misses all the attention.”

“But it’s not your job, miss, to be her maid-audience-secretary, or whatever it is she thinks she needs at the moment.”

“She made the glasses ring for me,” her daughter offered.

“It’s just like your father to go off golfing and leave me to deal with her,” Karen grumbled. “She’s
his
twin, after all, not mine, I married
him
for better or worse, not her.”

“She’s your worse,” Mom, that’s all. Anyway, Daddy did try to talk to her, but she locked herself in the bathroom for
hours.”

Karen forced her face into a tight smile. “I know, sweetie: your aunt makes me feel helpless and that brings out the worst in me.”

“It was fun when she was famous,” Becca said. “Remember when we got to have dinner with Jackie Onassis? Corie didn’t believe me—I had to show him the photographs. You looked so tough in that red dress. Of course, I looked like a little porker, a seven-year-old porker with an Orphan Annie fright wig.”

“Darling, you looked adorable. As you do this minute, although you know I’m not crazy about those combat boots.”

“So why do you call her Janice when she hates it so much she changed it decades ago?”

“People have been encouraging your aunt to deny reality since she was seventeen. She doesn’t need help from me along those lines—in fact, just the reverse. It’s time she stopped playacting and faced up to her drinking problem.”

“But even before she, well, stopped getting engagements, you and Daddy insisted on calling her Janice. Janice Minsky, what a name. I wouldn’t be a star with that name, either. Not that someone like me will ever be a star. Why couldn’t I take after her, or you, and be tall and skinny? Why do I have to look like Daddy, the short squatty toad side of the family?”

“What is with you and the animal kingdom today? First you look like a porker, and now Daddy is a squatty toad.” Karen dumped the fragments into the waste can with a bang. “Minsky’s good enough to pay for your riding lessons, young lady! If your aunt had been able to accept being a Minsky, maybe she wouldn’t turn to gin to get her through what else she doesn’t like about herself.”

The diva swept back into the room in the rumpled black shantung. Karen tried not to notice the white blouse: it was out of her own closet, but she wasn’t up to fighting her sister-in-law for possession.

“I called my car service. They should be here shortly.”

“Do you have money to pay for that car?” Karen demanded, hands on her hips.

“Don’t worry: it’s not coming out of Becca’s college fund. Someone will reimburse the man when I get back into town.”

Becca sucked in her breath at the sight of the blue Rolls when it pulled into the drive. She ran upstairs to call Corie, to urge him to run over to watch her aunt’s triumphal exit.

But when the diva got back to the city, the man she’d been staying with opened his apartment door only long enough to dump
her suitcases outside. He would not pay for the limo. He would not ‘lend’ her money to pay for it, let alone a hotel room: he knew what a deadbeat she was. And if she could get the money from her brother to pay him back, then she could just go to her brother and get it up front, right now. He had been beaten up by the police last night for trying to defend her honor when she’d made a total fool out of both of them. He didn’t think his kidneys would ever be the same. He did not want to see her again.