Pontoon (8 page)

“I
hear Debbie Detmer is finally getting married to somebody.” “I heard that.”

“Well, she tried out enough men, let’s hope she found a good one.”

“I suppose it’ll be quite the deal.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me at all. She’ll probably put on a parade with a marching band and guess who gets to ride on the float and wave?”

“Think she’ll invite us?”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I’m busy Saturday anyway. Got to take Lily to volleyball.”

The ladies of the Bon Marche Beauty Salon could’ve written the book on Debbie Detmer. You can run away from home, but don’t assume that your secrets are safe out there, honey. We know people in California and they know other people. Word gets around. People talk. The walls have ears. You were named in a divorce suit brought by that landscape architect’s wife in Berkeley who alleged that he did your yard and garden and did you too. You were seen drunk at an Indian café, yelling at the waiter that
there was cardamom in your
jhimmi-jhammi
though you had specifically said you didn’t want any and you stood up and lunged at the manager when he tried to calm you down and in the end your gentleman friend had to shovel you into a cab. He took a different cab. Your cleaning lady, whom you fired, told people that you talked to your stuffed animals and you binged on TV soap operas all day. Also, that you hired female masseuses with crew cuts. You were once seen sitting at a stoplight in your BMW, with your right index finger two inches up your left nostril. Not pretty.

Myrlette and Luanne and her sister Lois felt terrible about Evelyn on Saturday. She was dead. Sonya had seen her body being hauled away. Luanne called Florence. Florence was crying so hard she couldn’t talk. Myrlette and Luanne and Lois went in the toilet and cried on each other and then went back to work. What else could you do?

Six ladies sat under the beehive dryers dozing or reading
Show
& Tell
(“Angelina: Brad Won’t Do It Anymore”), the smell of permanent and bad coffee in the air. (“Have a cup of Luanne’s coffee, you won’t
need
a permanent,” said Myrlette.) Luanne snipping and razoring, Lois washing, Myrlette blueing and highlighting, but Evelyn was on everyone’s mind. They had taped to the mirror—next to a snapshot of Lois’s daughter Mary who married the periodontist and son Todd whose greenhouse in Tulsa sold 60,000 poinsettias last Christmas—a big photograph of smiling Evelyn, a rose taped below it and over it, in crimson lipstick, “Our Angel”—a terrible shock, a tragic loss, and yet—“It was how she wanted to go, in her sleep,” said Myrlette, and they all knew that was true. No sickness, no decline, no hobbling around the Good Shepherd Home looking cadaverous and dribbling coffee down yourself, peeing your pants, rocking back and
forth, a caged animal in the zoo, your mind turned to sawdust and your hip shooting with pain at every step—not for our Evelyn! A rousing good time at Moonlite Bay, a couple of drinks, some laughs, come home, wave good-bye, go to bed and don’t wake up.

At Moonlite Bay, they served slabs of pie the size of trowels and the drinks are all doubles and triples. Some people finish dinner and drive off in the wrong direction. Like Evelyn. Instead of south, she went Up.

“It’s what she wanted!” cried Luanne. “Bless her heart, she didn’t suffer one bit. She got out of this world the easy way.” Luanne’s parents wound up in wheelchairs, looking like two mummies, no idea who they were or why. Every hour somebody would haul them off to pee, what was called “timed voiding,” so life was just waiting for lunch and waiting to tinkle. Her mother didn’t speak to her for months and then she said, “Tell Papa when he’s done putting up the horses, we kept supper for him.” Golden years.
Ha
.

“And she didn’t have to be here for Debbie Detmer’s triumphant homecoming,” said Lois. “There’s a bonus.”

Evelyn was not fond of Debbie Detmer, especially after she wrote to Debbie and asked her to contribute to the Lutheran church, whose education wing needed major repairs after a tree fell on it, and Debbie sent a check for $100. The woman could afford a Frank Gehry beach house on stilts with a curving glass front and a fifty-foot redwood deck (featured in the January 2001 issue of
Luxury
Home
) but she couldn’t pony up serious money for the church that taught her about the Good Samaritan, Daniel in the lions’ den, the prodigal son, etcetera. One hundred dollars! She paid more than that for her toilet seat cover! Myrlette was Mrs. Detmer’s cousin
and she knew the inside story of how Debbie had broken her parents’ hearts. An only child who was given everything. Her father worshipped the ground she walked on, her mother waited on her hand and foot. And then somewhere around age fifteen, the princess had turned cold and cunning and spiteful and foulmouthed. A demon entered her body, and she told her mother she hated her. She went to parties and stayed out until 2 a.m. and came home drunk. She totaled the car, twice. She actually joined the Communist Party USA. She proudly announced the loss of her virginity (to the football co-captain Kirk) in his parents’ laundry room on a pile of old drapes. She openly campaigned for Homecoming Queen and was elected senior-class attendant and was so miffed at Mary Ellen acing her out for Queen that when Kirk (who was Mary Ellen’s steady boyfriend; Debbie was only an adventure) presented the bouquet of carnations to Debbie at the ceremony, she stuck her hand down the front of his pants.

In his pants. In the gymnasium in front of the entire student body. A wave of shock swept the crowd, amid some tittering and whistling from the boys. Kirk dropped the flowers, mortified. Mrs. Hoglund sent Debbie to Mr. Halvorson’s office. Mary Ellen burst into tears, her big moment destroyed. Mr. Johnson the band director struck up the band and they played “I’ll See You In My Dreams” and the ceremony was all over. Mr. H. told Debbie that he didn’t know what to do with her and suspended her from school for a week. She didn’t care.
She didn’t care!

At the prom, she wore her bra outside her dress and carried a pint of vodka in her little silver lamé purse and she was sent home, but she caroused in the parking lot with some boys who nobody had seen before and danced around singing “Roll me over in the
clover, roll me over, lay me down and do it again.” Her father had to come get her and she said something to him that made him put his head in his hands and weep. Typical.

At graduation (people said) she was buck naked under her blue gown, and when she left for Concordia College in August, people thought that now maybe she’d settle down. She got into choir, which was bound to be a good influence, and her roommate was a nice Christian girl from Bemidji, so Mr. and Mrs. Detmer were hoping for a turnaround. Mrs. Detmer was a saint. She was ready to forgive. She felt that Debbie was only immature and needed to impress other girls with her wild ways but now she would realize her innate gifts and become a teacher. Mrs. Detmer asked the Ladies Prayer Circle to uphold Debbie in prayer, and they did, and her second semester Debbie took a philosophy course and read Kierkegaard who fired up her jets and convinced her that she was not the person other people thought she was, she was a pilgrim and an artist and a free spirit and she headed for California. Mr. Detmer braced himself for a call from the Coast saying she’d been found dead in an alley.

She drove west with Craig who thought she loved him but he was only her ride. She dumped him three days after arriving in San Francisco. She took a room at the Sam Wong Hotel off Broadway and hung out at City Lights bookstore and worked in a topless bar. A good Lutheran girl and now she served drinks to old men who ogled her tits. But she loved the city. Men could wear cheery pastels there and people seemed not to brood over things that happened in the past and the climate was gentle and misty. And a pretty girl can make friends easily. A month later, tired of old men and their needs, she hitchhiked north to Bolinas, a last
outpost of hippiedom, home of a Lutheran ashram run by a guru from Fargo, the Rama Lama Rasmussen, which met in a large yurt, and the Sunday sermon was about mercy, and the service was celebratory, with dancing—also it was clothing optional—Scripture said, “Think not what ye shall wear” and the Bolinas Lutherans didn’t think about it at all—some dressed in shorts and T-shirts, some simply wore palm fronds loosely around the waist, some were buck naked. It was fun for a while and then she got herpes and that took some of the shine off it. She joined an alternative dance collective called the Day Star Tribe and she became Solar Lily Daystar in a self-affirmation ritual at dawn on the beach, members of the tribe running and leaping lightly and rolling and whanging on little drums and playing their rain sticks. She lived with a man who believed in multi-headed deities, and also that dyslexic children could be helped by having them read aloud to cats. Then she got into meridians. She studied with a medium named Hadley and was in love with her for six months and then the meridians changed and she went up the coast to Eureka College to be a dorm mother, though the dorms were wide open, no restrictions, and some students kept snakes for pets, and cooked in their rooms, and held witchcraft ceremonies; filled their rooms with bizarre artifacts, boulders, neon signs, stuffed raccoons, and it was all good. Eureka banned the study of colonialist literature—all fiction and poetry by authors living in countries that exploited other peoples—and every May Day they all ran nude through the campus, and that was where Debbie met Dawn. They were naked and running and stopped to chat about yoga and it turned out that Dawn was a veterinary aromatherapist—she owned All Creatures Wellness Center in a strip mall in Petaluma—and Debbie, who was tired of listening to rich kids pour out their troubles, asked
Dawn to teach her the business of treating puppydogs and kitty-cats with eucalyptus and peppermint and chamomile.

“Smell is a primary sense for animals. Pets are forced to live in an alien olfactory environment of powerful chemical odors and the result is illness and suffering. Eighty-five percent of dogs suffer from depression caused by the psychological stress of alien odors triggering the flight reflex in animals imprisoned indoors, and what we’ve developed is a whole schematic of cleansing natural aromas put into a mister and the animal lies on a bed or on our lap and inhales the aroma and we cure animal depression. You can see the difference. It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. Making happy animals is good karma. Tail wagging doesn’t mean happiness, just neediness. A dog who sleeps all day is depressed—cats overeat because of depression. We make a difference.”

Dawn was the daughter of an Army colonel. She became a cat wrangler for movies, training professional cats, keeping them calm, which was how she discovered the power of aroma. Vicks VapoRub spread on the inside of the elbow: it was magic. So Debbie moved in with her in Petaluma. Got a job at Spice ’N Everything Nice. A fabulous shop where there wasn’t just one of everything like back home but twenty different kinds of oregano, Mexican, Turkish, Egyptian, Moroccan—for cinnamon, there was Samoan, Sri Lankan, Slovenian. Tired of boneless breast of chicken? Put some Mexican oregano on it, some Slovenian cinnamon, why not?

She cooked for Dawn and boned up on chemistry and animal psychology. Dawn was a true idealist, but she also experienced big mood swings. Lavender made her moody. Mimosa made her lose
all sense of personal boundaries. Too much of it and she’d sit on the laps of strangers on buses or in cafés. She’d go to the library and snuggle up next to men she’d never met. She was a compulsive hugger. And a strong one. She’d walk down the street and grab hold of strangers and squeeze them so tight they panicked and started flailing at her and then she hugged harder. She hugged milkmen, clerks in stores, panhandlers. She always had a bad cold. She always was late to things. People avoided her when possible. And her arms ached. Once she drove through a grove of eucalyptus and into the ditch, got out, took her clothes off, and when the highway patrol found her, she could not tell them the day of the week or the name of the President. She was ticketed for Driving While Dazed.

Eucalyptus also affected her depth perception. Six months after Debbie joined All Creatures as a therapist, Dawn swerved to avoid hitting a deer and her car plunged off Highway 1 and over the cliff into the Pacific two hundred feet below and she was killed instantly. Debbie took over All Creatures in Dawn’s memory and grew the practice, as people who’d been put off by the hugging returned. She was a professional in white smock and pale green slacks, no longer the anguished pilgrim. She was earning money and enjoying it. She loved her Wednesday massage with Lala and she loved shopping for Julianne O’Connell clothes and Lauren Thavis shoes. She loved her Lexus with the three-thousand-dollar sound system. Business boomed. And then one day Tom Cruise dropped in with a big fat furball of a cat in his hands—Tom was on the verge of panic, weeping, panting—he confessed he had sat on the cat during a very intense phone conversation—and Debbie took Mumbles into the back room and gave her a dish of water and blew in her ear and the cat was fine. She sent Tom
home with a chamomile-scented chew toy. But after the story appeared in
People
with a picture of Debbie in her white outfit and a grinning Tom Cruise (“There are little miracles in life that validate and center us, when suddenly we see over the edge and into the heart of things”), business boomed; she opened a branch in Westwood and another in Mountain View. She was besieged with clients. Bentleys and BMWs double-parked out front and the personal assistants of VIPs sat in the waiting room, with dogs and cats huddled in luxurious carrying cases, and others flying in from Dallas, Palm Beach and the Berkshires. In certain circles, if you were not aromatizing your dog or cat, your friends would give you a pamphlet, “Pet Stewards, Not Owners,” and expect you to do the right thing.