Mrs. Everything (33 page)

Sarah pressed her lips together as she eyed Bethie. “Do you have any luggage?”

“Just this.” Bethie tugged the embroidered bag more securely over her shoulder. The bag had come from a street vendor in Cherripond, and it currently contained the sum of her possessions: a few pairs of jeans, a few shirts, underwear, and a bra. Her wallet, a comb and a toothbrush, the Swiss army knife that she always kept close, and, most important, two ounces of extremely good hash that she planned on selling to her former Detroit acquaintances.

Sarah scrutinized the bag. Bethie could follow the path of her thoughts, so she wasn’t surprised when her mother asked, “What are you wearing to the wedding?”

“I thought I’d pick something up at Hudson’s.”

Her mother gave a single nod. Her lips were so tightly pursed that they’d disappeared, leaving only a slit in their place. She walked stiffly along the fluorescent-lit corridor, with Bethie a few paces behind her. Bethie wondered if people who saw them even thought they were together, and if Sarah would want them to know. Probably not, she thought, as they pushed through the glass doors and out into the Michigan night.

Bethie breathed deeply, smelling dirt and grass and growing things, the essence of Midwestern spring. The essence of home. Barbara Simoneaux had always wanted to be a June bride, and she’d gotten her wish—her preferred month for the wedding, her chosen man for the groom, and Bethie, her best friend since forever, to stand with her under the chuppah.

Bethie followed her mother to the parking garage and got into the passenger’s side of a car she didn’t recognize, a Buick sedan in an ugly shade of beige. “New car?”

“New used car.” Sarah’s voice was neutral, but Bethie could
remember when their father would come home, every few years, with the new model Chevrolet. They’d pile into the car for a slow ride around the neighborhood, breathing the new-car smell, listening to their father talk about the car’s construction, what made the New Car better and safer than the Old Car. Sarah put her key into the ignition, gripped the wheel tightly in both hands, backed out of the parking space, and said, “You look like that Mama Cass.” Her jaw trembled and her nostrils flared, as if she were preparing to say more, or cry. Bethie checked the dashboard clock and saw that she’d won her bet with two minutes to spare.

“Mama Cass is rich and famous,” she said, trying to keep calm. She did her best to avoid mirrors, and her own reflection, but she knew how she looked, how far she’d come from the pretty, peppy, trim teenager with shiny hair and a big, bright smile. She tried not to let it bother her. A body was just a body, just a vessel for her soul, and she was under no obligation to keep her body looking any certain way, no more than she was obliged to do anything just because it was customary, or traditional, or expected of women in America. She didn’t have to get married, she didn’t have to have kids, and she didn’t have to be thin.

“If you were rich and famous maybe you could get away with it.” Sarah’s voice was waspish. “But you’re not. Unless I’m missing something. Do you have a hit record in Nepal?”

“I haven’t been in Nepal for a year and a half, Mom.”

“You look like a slob.”

“It’s nice to see you, too.” Bethie was determined not to let her mother draw her into a fight, and she’d taken a quaalude an hour before, just to make sure things stayed mellow.

“How long since you’ve been to a dentist?” Sarah asked.

Bethie shrugged.

“I made you an appointment with Dr. Levin for tomorrow morning at ten. And at Mister Jeffrey’s at two o’clock.”

“I don’t want my hair cut.”

“Just a trim, I told him.”

“Mom, it’s my hair. I can do what I want with it.”

“What is Barbara going to think when she sees you looking like this?” Bethie didn’t answer. She’d tried not to think about it. “It’s disrespectful,” Sarah continued. “It’s the biggest day of her life, and you’re going to show up looking like the Wreck of the Hesperus.”

Bethie smiled. She’d heard her mother use that phrase a hundred times, but only about Jo.

“Did you even comb your hair?”

“Leave it alone, Mom.”

Sarah made a huffing sound and gripped the wheel even more tightly. Bethie rolled down her window, feeling the softness of the misty air on her face.
The new world
, the settlers and the Pilgrims had called America when they’d first arrived, and Bethie felt, or imagined she could feel, how it was different from Europe, how there was a fresh, unspoiled quality to the air. Or maybe it was just a lack of history. In Italy and Spain, she’d walked on cobbled streets that had been there for centuries, slept in buildings that had stood when Columbus set sail for the Indies. In Michigan, things were considered old if they’d been around in 1924.

The house on Alhambra Street was unchanged. There was the beige carpet and the boxy television set in the living room, where the couch lived its life beneath a shroud of plastic; there was the worn linoleum and the red-and-yellow tablecloth in the kitchen, and the faded yellow curtains at the window above the sink; there were the twin beds, now covered in white chenille bedspreads, in the room she’d once shared with her sister, although the closet was now filled with Sarah’s clothes.

“Are you hungry?”

Bethie shrugged. It was eleven o’clock at night in Detroit, which meant it was approaching breakfast time in Madrid. If she’d stayed, there would have been strong coffee and crusty rolls with butter and jam, wedges of hard cheese, and ribbony pink-and-white slices of
jamón
. Bethie hadn’t wanted to eat the ham at first—the only pork she’d ever had back home had been at the
Chinese restaurant, and the bacon that Barbara’s mother made when they had sleepovers. Eventually, she’d gotten used to it.

In the kitchen, Sarah pulled two plates out of the cupboard. With short, angry jerks, she opened a can of tuna fish, dumped it into a bowl, and cut a lemon into wedges. Bethie sat at the table, watching, as her mother tore half a head of iceberg lettuce into chunks and spooned tuna on top.

“Delicious,” Bethie said mildly. “Is there any bread?”

Sarah started to cry.

“What?” asked Bethie, even though she knew. Sarah just shook her head, pulled a tissue out of the box near the sink, and wiped her eyes. Bethie ate her lemon-juice-doused tuna and every bit of lettuce on her plate. When she pulled a package of Gitanes out of her leather pocketbook, Sarah set out an ashtray, and when Bethie went to the bedroom, she could tell that her sheets had been freshly washed and ironed.
So there’s that
, she thought, rolling onto her side as the mattress creaked a protest. She’d get tears, and criticism, and probably nothing more than dry tuna and lettuce to eat. Sarah would never say
I love you
. She would let Bethie know what a disappointment she’d become in a hundred different ways . . . but there would be fresh sheets and pillowcases on her bed. A dentist appointment, a hairdresser appointment, and a new dress, in a size larger than Sarah would ever wear, hanging in her closet in time for Barbara’s wedding on Saturday morning.

It had been a long road back home. After she’d stolen her boss’s money, she’d bought a bus ticket to San Francisco, but she’d ended up in New Mexico. There’d been a guy on the bus who’d gotten aboard in Chicago and had taken the seat next to Bethie. For the first hundred miles she’d ignored him, shaking her head in refusal when he offered his flask, pretending to sleep while he read a Raymond Chandler paperback. At some point she’d dozed off, and when she’d woken up, she’d been humming “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Hey, you’re good,” the guy had said.

“I was at the Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan sang it
live.” The dream was returning to Bethie in snatches, the way she’d seen slivers of the glittering ocean when they’d driven into Rhode Island. “In Newport. With Joan Baez.”

“Well, aren’t you a lucky duck.” The guy had introduced himself as Drew van Leer, and said he was meeting some friends in New Mexico, and that they were going to put together a band and that, as it happened, they were looking for a singer. He spent five hundred miles convincing her, and, finally, she got off the bus with him in Albuquerque, which was flat and beige, arid and empty. Bethie felt like she’d landed on the moon.

Drew lived in Santa Fe, and while they waited for the rest of the band, Bethie got a job cleaning up in a fancy Japanese-style bathhouse, and she slept in Drew’s parents’ guest room. Two weeks later, when the drummer still hadn’t turned up, two of the other cleaning ladies proposed a camping trip in the high desert of Taos, Bethie packed Jo’s backpack and tagged along . . . and instead of going back for her scheduled shift on Wednesday, she stayed in Taos, sharing a rented room with a girl she’d met on the camping trip, washing dishes and waiting tables in a diner that sold pupusas and chiles rellenos. Three weeks later when a group of college students came through en route to Vegas, Bethie joined them and moved along.

In Las Vegas Bethie sang sometimes, in bars, with bands, or in parks, with a hat out for money, and when she decided she’d had enough of the heat, she followed a guy to Portland, Oregon. She sang, and he played the violin, and they put together a set of Pete Seeger songs that they performed in Pioneer Courthouse Square. She cleaned houses and hotel rooms. She waited tables. She did the low-pay, low-status jobs that a young woman with no college degree and no fixed address could do. She did acid and mushrooms, smoked pot and hash, but only when she felt safe, usually when she was alone, and never so much that she’d have to worry about losing control. She earned money and sometimes, when she was feeling especially low or especially angry, she stole it. There were always men around, some of them mean and some of them
gullible, men who’d fall asleep after the fucking was done, with their wallets on the nightstand, or in the pocket of their pants, discarded on the floor.

After Portland was Seattle. After Seattle were Barcelona and Paris. Sometimes, in spite of her best efforts, Bethie would catch sight of her reflection, in a bus window or a bathroom, and see how big she’d gotten. Once, years ago, she’d overheard her mother discussing some cousin.
It’s a
shande
, the way she’s let herself go.
Bethie puzzled over that phrase, wondering how you could let your own body get away from you, like it was a car speeding away out of control. Now she understood. You stopped weighing yourself, stopped restricting yourself to small meals and salads, stopped picking French fries off your friend’s plate and started ordering your own.
It doesn’t matter
, she’d tell herself, but she never really felt free of the shadow of her larger body, the irrefutable evidence of her appetites and her weakness, unless she was high, or singing. With her eyes shut and the music all around her, she could give voice to her pain and her sorrow, and imagine herself as pure emotion, not a body at all.

From Paris she flew back to Los Angeles, and from there she finally made it to San Francisco, joining the throngs of hippies drawn there by the Mamas & the Papas song, finding that, instead of a sun-dipped, golden-hued paradise, the skies were gray, the streets choked with trash and glittering with abandoned needles. There were kids everywhere, panhandling, shooting up, nodding out, lining up at Glide Memorial Church on Ellis Street for free dinner at five o’clock every night. Eventually, Bethie saved enough money to fly to London, and from there she’d gone on to Amsterdam and points east. With Jo’s rucksack on her back she traveled the route that Jo had meant to take, making her way through Tehran to Kandahar to Kabul to Peshawar and Lahore. It was easy for Bethie to attach herself to a group of college-age kids, to travel with them for a few days or even a week and then break off from the group, sometimes with some of their money or belongings in her pocket. Every once in a while, she would see a
man, and the shade of his skin or the set of his shoulders would remind her of Harold Jefferson, and her heart would lift, but none of the men were ever Harold. Bethie would tell herself that it was better that way. If Harold could see her now, he’d be disgusted.

She trekked through Nepal with a bunch of kids from Sweden, and slept outdoors, in Chitwan Park, in a hammock, while monkeys swung and chattered overhead. She spent six months at a mandir in Puttaparthi, where Sai Baba himself had paused on his walk through a crowd of a thousand white-clad penitents to place his hand, in benediction, on her head. In Milan, she’d met a guy who’d said he was in the import-export business and hired Bethie to bring leather goods to New York City. Bethie loaded up her suitcase with wallets and handbags, wrote “gifts and clothing” on her declaration form, breezed through Customs, and followed the guy’s instructions. She went to the shop whose address he’d given her and turned the handbags and wallets and belts over to the man behind the fingerprint-smeared glass counter, who gave her a hundred bucks in limp twenties that reminded her of the bills Uncle Mel had paid with. “Your cut,” he said. Bethie flew back to Italy, where the guy was delighted to see her. “I figured you’d rip me off,” he said. “Who, me?” Bethie said. For almost a year, she made the circuit every six weeks, bringing over larger and larger quantities of goods. When the guy trusted her completely and sent her with her largest shipment yet, instead of taking the wallets and purses and bags to the little shop, she’d brought them to a different place, where the sign said
FINE LEATHER GOODS
and the owner didn’t ask questions.

When her mind was clear, which was not very often—pot and hash were cheap and plentiful in the circles in which she traveled, and did wonders when she couldn’t turn off her brain, when she couldn’t stop thinking about that night in Newport—she could understand herself. Every man she stole from or ripped off was standing in for Uncle Mel, for Devon Brady, and for the guys who’d raped her.
Make them pay
, she’d think, and pull her top down a little lower, and smile a sweet, tremulous smile at
some man she met in a tea shop or at a bar or in a park or on a bus, and the man would smile back, happy and oblivious. Even if she was fat, there were men who wanted to fuck her; men she could rob. It was like a game, and Bethie almost always won.