The House on Olive Street (3 page)

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“Starting now, Dorothy,” Sable said.

“Goo…Good morning, ma’am.”

“You can call me Sable, you know.”

“Good morning, Sable,” she said.

There, Sable thought. We’re making progress.

B
arbara Ann’s pulsing brood did the best they could with her delicate condition of grief. They restrained their voices to some degree, erupting now and then out of pure habit. Mike and the boys knew Gabby, but they weren’t exactly close, so the loss was not theirs by any means. It was hers and hers alone. And none of the other women would ever know how much she had lost. Maybe
loss
wasn’t the right word.
Ended
was closer. They would never know all that had ended today.

She cried through the afternoon and then at four o’clock, like an automaton, she zapped a roast and then threw it in the oven to finish cooking, boiled potatoes and carrots, heated buns and tore up lettuce, all through the narrow slits of her swollen eyes. Barbara Ann had the survival skills of a mother of four wild boys; she could do everything fast and many things at once. She could condense the cooking of a four-hour meal into forty minutes, and while the microwave purred, she collected a pile of dirty clothes. On her way to the laundry room, she wiped the hair and spit out of a bathroom sink with a T-shirt. On her way from the laundry room back to the kitchen, she picked up seven pairs of shoes and tossed
them into their respective cages, then caught the potatoes before they boiled over.

Once everyone was informed as to the reason for her pain and tears, all she had to do was lift her chin with that injured air and purse her lips tightly together, and the din would subside.

For example, when Joe came home from basketball practice, about the time everyone else was going for their second helpings—

“Jesus Christ, get outta here with those feet, buttface.”

“Bite me! This is my house, too!”

“Not when you smell like bad cheese, it ain’t!”

“Matt!” in a desperate whisper. “Mom!”

And then, warning taken, in a much smaller voice, “Sorry. His feet smell like goat shit. Jesus.”

While Sable sipped her vodkas in her sterile environs and cautiously took herself back through the hard days before she was rich and famous, Barbara Ann Vaughan took a cup of coffee outside to the patio of her two-story home in search of peace. She had to kick aside a pile of wet towels to pull out a chair from the patio table. It wasn’t yet pool season; they couldn’t be there from last year! Car washing, perhaps. Used her good beach towels to dry off a greasy, tar-spattered car. She removed jeans and a T-shirt from the chair so she could sit. She pushed aside the mess from a partially constructed, radio-operated model airplane so she could put her coffee down. The craftsman, Bobby she thought, had probably lost interest by now; she’d been complaining about it for two weeks.

From the house she could hear her little darlings, the smallest of whom was six feet and a hundred and ninety pounds, and her loving spouse.

“Way to go, dickhead. I was gonna eat that!”

“It wasn’t that great anyway.”

“You wanna shut the fuck up, I’m on the phone here.”

“Hey! Watch your mouth! I don’t want to be hearing that shit outta you! Got that?”

“Got it.”

Eat what? Barbara wondered. She’d just thrown a slaughtered cow at them. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, an odd habit she’d acquired somewhere, and felt the tears begin to trickle from her eyes again. She particularly loved it when her husband, Mike, disciplined the boys with statements like, “I don’t want to hear that swearing shit outta you, asshole.” There was a time, long ago, when his failure to see the irony in such a statement seemed precious in its simple, straightforward way.

Gabby, Gabby, Gabby, how could you leave me to this! I’ll disappear into a blot of grease and never be seen again! I’ll fall down the toilet in the middle of the night!

The sliding door opened and Joe and Bobby, seventeen and nineteen, spilled outside with their fight, a dish towel-snapping tussle. She splashed over some of the hot coffee and groaned. She glared at them meanly. They didn’t see her right away, hidden as she was in the deepening dusk, alone on the patio. When they stopped long enough to take notice of her, they suddenly relaxed their weapons.

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Yeah, sorry, Mom.”

This was not the life she had envisioned when, twenty-three years ago, Mike Vaughan begged her to marry him and send him off to Seoul, Korea, as a fulfilled helicopter mechanic. “Marry me, Barbara Ann, and I’ll come home, I swear to God, in one whole piece, and give you a shitload of kids.” She had been twenty—barely. A naive, only child who had not done anything
for herself since birth. So naive it never crossed her mind that there was no war in Korea in which Mike might be injured or killed, but Vietnam was fresh in her mind and she didn’t take the time to differentiate between military bases and their functions. She married him to keep him safe. She had worked in a Realtor’s office, answering phones, until he returned. Ten months after Mike came home, Matt was born. Then Bobby, then Joe, then Billy.

“As long as you make them comfortable, they’ll stay,” Eleanor said of her sons.

“Don’t fight it, Barb. Just use your book money to get a small, tidy apartment nearby to write in,” Sable advised. “And stop indulging them in everything. Force them to make their own lives. At least two of them are over eighteen.” Sable—the voice of parenting experience.

“I would do anything to have four sons,” said Beth, who’d been trying to get pregnant for years.

“You can change your life in many ways, Barbara Ann,” Gabby said, “but people are permanent. And you have blessings in Mike and that half a baseball team of yours.”

But people aren’t permanent, are they, Gabby? she thought, tears running over.

Barbara Ann loved Gabby deeply and her feeling of loss was incredible, but the emotion that was pouring down her cheeks was combined with something else.
My God, I could die before I’ve done what I want to do! Gabby was only fifty, healthy as an ox! I could die before I make any real money on a book, before I succeed at this, before I’m known at all, before even one of these louts gets a life of his own! Before I ever live in a house where a single toilet seat is down!

Barbara Ann was so disappointed in her life. Not that she didn’t love her family. She must, she put up with a lot from them. Mike, though older and a little thicker around the middle, was still a handsome and lusty man. He could still get to her, easily seduce her, make her feel like a girl again, even with some of his inept flattery like “Honey, you’re just pretty as shit.” And the boys, each one of them damn good-looking, were just like their dad—rugged, masculine, athletic. Men’s men. Romance-novel men. Rough, loud and big. God, were they big. They took up so much space; the smallest shoe she ever tripped over was an eleven.

It seemed to Barbara Ann that her life kept expanding without getting much better. The boys grew into men and required more space; they were in need of an awesome amount of fuel; their possessions became larger and more complex. She and Mike bought a five-bedroom house to accommodate them, but they kept adding on to it, in search of places to put people and things. They doubled the size of the family room. At least the result included an expanded master bedroom upstairs, a sitting room and dormer in which Barbara Ann could work and store her writing business. They built a detached garage—the original two-port garage barely kept the rain off their bicycles and athletic gear. Now they were a six-car family. Her driveway and the street in front of their house looked like a used-car lot. The boys had inherited their father’s flair for mechanics, so every vehicle but hers was in a constant state of repair or improvement. They put in a pool and laid a slab of concrete for a basketball hoop. There was a lawn mower motor that Mike had been meaning to repair all winter sitting in her bedroom, for God’s sake. Every dime of her book money went to household improve
ments to make it seem as though they weren’t stuffed into this large house.

Her income had grown without her work going better, without her feeling more successful. She had entered the business on a wild lark nine years ago. A friend of hers had taken up writing category romances and miraculously sold a book. Barbara Ann followed, quite literally. She joined a writers’ group, attended several seminars and conferences, read dozens, if not hundreds, of romances, set up a typewriter in the bedroom and took on the challenge. Within two years she sold her first book. She sold a second before the first was out. Her income in three years’ time was seven thousand. In four years it was twelve thousand. In five years it was twenty-two and in six years it was forty-six. Now, soon to release her twenty-sixth novel, her income this year would be in the neighborhood of sixty-eight thousand.

Wasn’t that a lot of money?

Not for all that had gone wrong. Or, rather, had not gone. She had a twenty-seven-year-old editor who had insisted she revise and rewrite her last proposal twice, taking her three months to get a final, twelve-page draft that they would accept and pay her the first half of a ten-thousand-dollar advance. She was averaging three paperbacks a year and the woman who was accepting or rejecting her work was an art major who’d worked her way up to editor nine months ago. In her nine years of writing, struggling in this business, Barbara Ann had watched several acquaintances shoot past her, personally knowing too many who’d signed million-dollar multi-book deals. Their writing was no better than hers! Their books were not that much different! And Barbara Ann was still toiling, writing her ass off at least forty hours a week, and begging for these ten-thousand-dollar advances.

“You haven’t developed a strategy yet,” Sable had told her.

“Great. Give me a strategy. Tell me how you did it.”

“You’re missing the point, Barbara Ann. There are fifty reasons why the way I did it won’t work for you. Some of the things I did twelve years ago don’t work now. The trends change too fast for you to catch up with them. The people in the business are all different. It’s not as though you can write the same type of book I write and get rich and famous. There are already a million books like mine that aren’t doing much.”

“Then how the hell do you expect me to develop a strategy?”

Heavy sigh. “Everyone has a personal version of success, Barbara Ann. Are you sure you want the same kind I have? Maybe true success is a happy family?”

“Don’t be patronizing, just tell me how. Please!”

“Well, I’ll try, but it’s just not the same for everyone, you see. You have to uncover what it is you can do better than anyone else, that hasn’t already been done to death, and then you have to find the right people to help you do it and then you have to go about selling it in ways that haven’t already been tried by every other midlist author. It’s very cagey and creative and above all, individual. Plus, it is loaded with risks. You have to decide if you like where you are—which brings in dependable, if not incredible, money—or if you’re willing to risk it all by walking away and hunting the big cats. It’s a huge gamble. It doesn’t always work. At the very least, it doesn’t work fast.”

Barbara Ann pushed Sable into going over all this again and again and she never quite followed it. It was too ambiguous. It might work for a certain type of author to fire five agents, change publishers, piss off a lot of
people and stage a veritable raid on the publishers and finally get the money she wants. But another author could try it and find themselves disliked, avoided and basically out of work. One type of author with a certain type of book might be able to sell copies by developing a massive marketing campaign on her own while in another case it would only serve to bankrupt the author, annoy the marketing department and make the next book even harder to sell. It was all
individual,
Sable kept saying. Your strategy must exactly fit your ability, personality, type of work and potential.

Why the hell wouldn’t Sable admit she’d just been lucky? And console Barbara Ann that she had not been?

“Of course there’s luck involved in publishing, Barbara Ann,” Sable relented wearily. “Lots of luck. Bestselling authors are always lucky. But they’re not accidental.”

Barbara Ann did
not
understand.

And then there was Barbara Ann’s dirty little secret. She had conquered their group. She had pushed her way into Gabby’s life because Sable was there and she needed what they had. It hadn’t mattered to her whether or not she
liked
these women. She wanted Sable’s help and influence because she wanted her own phenomenal success to come to her. She had too many obligations to take all these risks Sable talked about even if she could figure out what they were.

Nine years ago, in the very beginning of this writing endeavor, Barbara Ann had taken a short workshop course from Gabby because she heard that Gabby hung out with Sable Tennet. In fact, the little writers’ group she belonged to kept trying to get Gabby to get Sable to come and speak to them. Sable was not easily got. She was very particular about where and when she was seen. Sable was
single-minded; there had to be something in it for her. She drew a fee—something not many writers’ groups willingly paid. They’d let you autograph books and they’d fuss over you. What more should you need? But Sable didn’t hang out with other writers, unless they were sensationally famous. Her only regular friends were Gabby and Elly.

So Barbara Ann put the rush on Gabby. She phoned her, invited her to lunch, asked her many questions, made herself available. Gabby, being the friendly, approachable woman she was, gave in to the prospect of friendship. Barbara Ann knew that success was imminent. Before long she met the famed Sable, and Sable impressed the hell out of her. She was chic, elegant, arrogant and sought after. Sable would get important business calls while she was hanging out with the girls at the Olive Street house. Barbara Ann would eavesdrop as Sable went through various stages of wheedling, throwing a tantrum, cajoling or threatening, and everyone would eventually come around, give Sable what she hankered for. The advance would be upped, the advertising promised, the cover changed, the tour accommodations improved or the special invitation provided. Sable was psychic. She knew when to suck up, when to whine, when to scream. She always got what she wanted. Barbara Ann wanted that.