He heads out onto the freeway, and when the traffic slows, he regards himself in the rearview mirror. Game so not over, not for this boy. Not by a long fucking shot. He starts to smile, to check out his killer dimples, but his smile becomes a grimace. He grabs at his chest, his hand over his heart and grunts, Unh! Unh! Unh! He manages to pull into the breakdown lane, to put the car into park, call 911 and give an approximate location. Jesus, it’s hard to talk, it’s hard to talk! He snaps the phone shut, then slumps down, closes his eyes, and waits to die.
FIVE
DOROTHY CAN HARDLY DIAL THE PHONE FAST ENOUGH. When her friend Linda answers, Dorothy says, “You won’t believe this! Candy Sullivan is coming to the reunion!”
“Get out,” Linda says. “How do you know?”
“Pam Pottsman called me. Just this very minute.”
“Does Judy know?”
“No, I called you first.”
“Oh, my God. Let’s have a conference call tonight. I’ll send Judy an email and tell her. How’s seven o’clock?”
Dorothy’s favorite television show comes on at seven, but this is more important. She can always watch it with the sound down. She wishes she knew how to use the recording device on her television, but it’s all she can do to turn it on and off. When her husband was moving out and asked if he could take the TV, she had hollered, “No! No! No! You don’t take one thing from this house unless it belongs to only you.” And he hadn’t. He’d left quietly, with a great deal of dignity, Dorothy had to admit. She’d been a screaming banshee, but she is so much better now. Completely recovered. A new person, really.
Hilly said she’d teach her mother how to record shows; it’s easy, she’s said; but she hasn’t shown Dorothy how yet. She hasn’t done much of anything lately but talk about her wedding: Should she wear a necklace with her gown? Drop earrings or stud? Are take-home monogrammed cookies for the guests a charming or a tacky idea? Must the hand towels in the ladies’ room be linen or is high-quality paper all right? Dorothy wants to help, but she’s never been good at this kind of thing. And although she’s never told Hilly this, she doesn’t really like all the fuss made over weddings. She herself had the thinnest of affairs, and it was all she could do to get through that. So far as she is concerned, the whole industry is nothing but a rip-off. Nonetheless, when Hilly told her she was engaged and wanted a big, big wedding, Dorothy ran right over to the bookstore and purchased an armload of bride magazines. But looking at them only depressed her. So many decisions! You see a classic multilayered ivory fondant cake decorated with fresh flowers and wide bands of periwinkle blue ribbon and think, Oh, that’s the one! Then you turn the page and see a tiered silver server loaded up with purposefully imperfect cupcakes and think, Oh, but what fun this one is!
It went on and on. Where to have the wedding? At what time of day? How many guests should be invited? What should the meal be? The music? Open or cash bar? And the choice in bridal gowns! Thank God Hilly pretty much knew what she wanted going in. In less than three hours, she chose a floor-length, strapless confection of a gown with a subtle pattern of seed pearls and other shimmering embellishments strewn across the bottom half of the skirt. She’s wearing a full-length veil, too, a lacy one with the same kinds of embellishments as the dress. When Dorothy saw the price tag, she had to bite her tongue to keep from squawking in outrage. But she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t the one paying the bills, after all. And anyway, Hilly looked beautiful in that dress. She looked absolutely transformed. That was a moment, when Hilly tried the dress on, and their eyes met in the mirror. Dorothy stood behind her daughter, her purse clenched tight up against her middle, and blinked back tears, then let them freely flow. Oh, my love, she was thinking. My little girl. And so much more, she was overwhelmed with feelings, a curious mix of joy and sorrow. And even though Hilly laughed and made fun of her mother, Dorothy saw tears in Hilly’s eyes, too.
Dorothy tells Linda, “A conference call! Great idea. Okay, call me at seven. I’ll be right by the phone.”
“Here’s your assignment,” Linda says. “Start remembering stories about Candy so we can have a really good session. Oh! I just remembered one now! I’m going to go write it down.”
After Dorothy hangs up, she inspects herself in the mirror again. She’s going to have lunch with her daughter, and Hilly can be very critical. Honest, she calls it, and it is honest, Dorothy supposes, but it’s also barbed-wire critical.
It bothers Dorothy how much she wants Hilly to like her. She knows it’s wrong, she knows you’re not supposed to worry about your children liking you, you’re just supposed to raise them right, but from the day Hilly was born, she has always wanted her daughter to like her. Not love her, although that, too, but actively like her. In the early years, it wasn’t much of a problem. Hilly absolutely adored her. Oh, she went through her I-only-want-Daddy! phase when she was a toddler, but Dorothy knew she didn’t really mean it. She came soon enough to the knowledge that Dorothy was the one to whom she should really be grateful.
All through Hilly’s elementary and junior high school years, she and Dorothy had been like best friends. Hilly told her mother everything: what boy she was crazy over, how her breasts were infuriatingly small, how embarrassing it was when she burped during math class. And Dorothy told Hilly things she supposed she shouldn’t: that she sometimes cried in the middle of the day and didn’t know why. That she suspected their neighbor of having an affair with the FedEx deliveryman. That she feared she would be abandoned in her old age. She hadn’t said all the mean things she wanted to say about Hilly’s father; she knew how damaging it was for a child to hear one parent bad-mouthing the other, and besides that, it could backfire and make Hilly move closer to Team Daddy.
But then, right around age fifteen, Hilly had begun preferring her father to her mother. In every way. Since the divorce, which her father had instigated just after Hilly graduated from college because he found someone who appreciated him (God almighty, the woman looks like a frog, plus she’s older than he is!), Hilly has been a bit nicer to her mother. But heaven forbid Dorothy even think a negative thought about her ex-husband. Pops, Hilly began calling him in her senior year of high school, and every time Dorothy hears it, she wants to roll her eyes.
Dorothy told Hilly about what she’s wearing to the reunion: one of those extravagantly ruffled black blouses with sheer sleeves, a black pencil skirt, black nylons, and some heels that will probably necessitate her having back surgery after she wears them. But it’s important that she look fabulous and not a victim of collapsing vertebral disks. After she described her outfit to Hilly, her daughter had said, “Hmm,” and that’s when Dorothy knew she’d done it all wrong. Well, there’s plenty of time to get a replacement outfit. She’ll see what Hilly suggests, if, as she suspects, she nixes her mother’s first choice.
Dorothy hears the front door opening and then the sound of her daughter calling her. “In the kitchen!” she says, and she grabs her purse, a clutch her daughter gave her last Christmas, so she knows it’s right.
She meets Hilly in the hallway, and they give each other a quick embrace. Dorothy doesn’t really like embracing people in this way, but you have to, these days. Everybody does that European kiss-kiss thing now, too, and Dorothy thinks it’s so fake. Why must people touch one another so often? Look at all the germs you’re spreading around for no reason. Oh, touching is fine when it’s for a reason, but when you’re just saying hello? Well, she’d better get used to it. She bets at the reunion they’ll be double-kissing like crazy. She’ll have to remember to get some of that nonsmear lipstick.
“So!” she says. “Where would you like to go for lunch? We can go anywhere you like!”
“I don’t know, Ma,” Hilly says. “You pick. I thought you had a place in mind.”
“I thought it would be fun for you to choose.”
“Fine, Bistro 102.”
“Oh, great idea! They have such good food!”
“Not really, but it’s
close. I need to get over to the wedding coordinator’s office by three; she’s screwed everything up again.”
“What’s wrong?”
Hilly waves her hand. “Oh, a million things. For one thing, the videographer I wanted is moving overseas before the wedding, so now I have to choose another one. And there’s a bunch of miscellaneous problems you don’t want to hear about, believe me. I don’t want to hear about them!”
“Do you need me to help?”
“No, Ma. Thanks.”
“Okay,” Dorothy says, “so we’ll go eat, and then if we—”
“Didn’t you want me to look at your outfit for the reunion?” Hilly says. “I thought you wanted me to come over here so I could look at your outfit!”
“Oh!” Dorothy says. “Right!” She puts her purse down on the hall bench and says, “Come upstairs with me, I’ll try it on for you.” She’s excited; she wonders what Hilly will say.
“Can’t you just show it to me?” Hilly looks at her watch.
For a moment, Dorothy thinks of saying, “You know what? Forget the whole thing. Just forget the whole damn thing! You ungrateful child! I used cloth diapers so you’d never get a rash! Everything I fed you I made from scratch! I stayed home to raise you and I played Candy Land with you over and over when other women were forging interesting careers. Who changed your sheets when you vomited all over them? Pops?” But she doesn’t say that. She says, as evenly as she can, “You have time for me to try it on. You can’t really tell me how it looks unless I have it on.”
She walks ahead of her daughter up the stairs and hears Hilly say something. “What?”
“You have a run in your stocking,” Hilly says. “You know, nobody even wears those things anymore, and that’s why.”
And now Dorothy turns around to speak angrily to her daughter but collapses on the steps, just falls on her butt with her legs spread out like a man’s so anyone who wants to can see up her skirt, as if. Then, to make matters worse, she starts to cry. Hilly’s not the only one whose nerves are on edge. Dorothy has a lot to think about, too!
“Ma,” Hilly says. “Jesus Christ.”
“Just go!” Dorothy says. “I don’t want to have lunch with you! And I don’t care what you think of what I’m wearing!” She kicks her leg out angrily, like a toddler, and her shoe falls off.
Hilly retrieves it and sits beside her mother on the steps. She slides the shoe onto her mother’s foot and then puts her arm around her shoulders. “Ma,” she says, and her voice is softer now. She smells good. She’s wearing a black-and-white blouse and black pants and many silver bracelets. Her hair is done in one of those half-up, half-down styles, and it looks very pretty. She has Chanel sunglasses perched atop her head. “Look,” Hilly says. “I’m sorry. I am just a mess these days. I’m such a bitch I can hardly stand to be with myself, let alone other people. It’s this wedding crap. All these details to decide, it just never stops, it’s like Mickey Mouse in that movie with all the brooms and buckets. I swear, I don’t even want to get married anymore.”
“Don’t say that!” Dorothy says, and hastily dries her eyes. He’s a doctor, for God’s sake, and Hilly is almost forty. This is no time to throw a good fish back into the ocean!
“I mean it, Ma. I don’t want to. I don’t see why I should. The only reason to get married these days is to have kids, and I don’t think I want kids.”
Dorothy looks at her. Blinks. “You don’t?”
“No. I mean… I don’t know.”
“I think you should have children,” Dorothy says. “Oh, Hilly, you can’t know how wonderful it is. You never can know, until you’re in it up to your eyeballs.”
“At which point it’s too late,” Hilly says, ruefully. “What if you don’t like it?”
“You’ll like it,” Dorothy said. Though even as she says it, she recognizes, as if for the first time, the possibility of it not being true. It reminds her of the glib reassurance she was given by a nail tech who talked her into getting those false fingernails. “You’ll love them,” the woman had said. But they were awful! It hurt when you got them put on, and you had to get them filled all the time and they made your real nails a fragile, peeling mess, and you could never keep them clean under there. Oh, how she cringes when she’s handed food by people with nails so long they couldn’t clench their fists if their lives depended on it. Those long nails with things all over them, like hieroglyphics. She herself finally had the false nails removed, and after a few months her own nails were back to normal. She’d only gotten those nails because she had been relentlessly schooled by her mother in what a girl was required to do: Maintain ten long painted nails at all times. Put your fork down after each bite, and make sure each bite is minuscule. Practice walking with a book on your head to ensure good posture. (Dorothy actually did that, up and down the hallway, over and over.) Sit with your knees pressed together and your legs slanted to the side. Cream your face, powder your feet, know when to use “who” and when to use “whom.” Never let anyone see you in rollers; those women who went out with scarves on their heads weren’t fooling anyone.
There were a million rules that Dorothy endeavored to follow and still her mother never seemed satisfied. Or her father. Dorothy’s mother had been a bona fide beauty queen, Miss Ohio, and Dorothy had never lived up to her parents’ expectations of her, she knew it. She would lie in bed at night vowing that the next day would be better, and it never was. She was the worst in dancing class. The ringlets her mother put in Dorothy’s hair were ruined by cowlicks. She fell off her horse the first day she rode and many times thereafter. The one and only time she tried to kiss her parents goodnight, it went so badly, she never tried again. They were not big on touching in Dorothy’s little family, which is to say they did not touch at all. They did not praise or say “I love you”; that was too effusive, utterly unnecessary. But one night when Dorothy was four, a summer night, the sky still blue at bedtime, she was overwhelmed with a desire to kiss her parents goodnight. Dorothy remembers every detail: her hair was put up in bobby pins, and she was wearing a new white nightgown, white ribbons and white lace, a ruffled bottom. She remembers how her mother sat stiffly, her hands clenched, when Dorothy embraced her, and how her father smiled indulgently and then pushed her away, saying, “Now, now.” And Dorothy had felt full of shame. Full of it. She had understood that you do not do that, no matter how your heart may be calling for it. It was yet another mistake she had made. The only thing she is good at is inspiring a certain kind of friendship and loyalty in some people, and she still doesn’t know how she makes that happen.
But children. She recalls a night when Hilly was maybe six years old and Dorothy was tucking her into bed. She pulled up Hilly’s covers and kissed her forehead and said, “Now I’m going to make a magic sign so you will have wonderful dreams.” She made a kind of swirling motion with her hand and Hilly watched solemn faced, believing absolutely in her mother’s powers in the way that children do. Up to a certain age, anyway, after which they believe nothing you say, but never mind. That night, Dorothy had tucked a little blanket she’d made for Hilly’s favorite stuffed animal—a bedraggled Snoopy dog, who at that point seemed held together purely by Hilly’s love for him—around him. Then she’d kissed his nose and said, “Goodnight, Blackie,” and Hilly had said, “Make a sign for Blackie’s dreams, too,” and Dorothy had; and at that point she’d kind of believed in her powers herself. Hilly had sighed and said, “You’re a good mommy.” And something had swelled inside Dorothy’s chest, and she’d thought, If I never have anything else, at least I had this.
But now Dorothy tells Hilly, “You don’t have to have kids, of course. You can enjoy other people’s children. Or live a life that doesn’t have much to do with children at all—what’s important is that you’re honest with yourself.”
Well! She said that and immediately she wanted to lock herself in the bathroom and sit on the floor and think what it meant. What did that mean, to make your own decisions, indepen
dent of all the grabby influences in the world? How did it feel to say, “No, I don’t think that’s for me,” and then simply not do what it seemed like everyone else was doing? She couldn’t imagine. Yet here is her daughter clearly attempting to be in charge of her own life, to be aware that it is created by the choices she makes, and Dorothy wants to weep in gratitude. It is too late for Dorothy to live a conscious life. She never escaped her mother’s iron hand, she had not even tried being a hippie except for one time when she didn’t wear makeup or shave her legs. And even then, she returned quickly enough to her learned standards of hygiene. You did your hair and you shaved your legs and you put your face on, no matter what. But Hilly was out from under something huge. Hilly was able to look up and see the sky. And Dorothy had somehow been a part of making that happen.
“I don’t know about kids,” Hilly says. “But I will get married, I guess. I mean, I kind of have to.”
“You mean because of the money?” Dorothy says. “Because we’ll lose the deposits? Don’t get married for that reason! Who cares about the money?” Especially when it’s your father’s, she thinks. But she feels certain Hilly’s father would offer the same advice.
“No,” Hilly says. “It’s not because of the money we’d lose.” She turns to face her mother. “It’s just that… I don’t think I’ll find anyone better than Mark. If I’m going to get married, I guess he’s the one. But all of a sudden, it feels so… I don’t know. Arbitrary. Dangerous. I don’t see how anyone can ever feel completely convinced that marrying someone is the right thing to do, I don’t see how anyone can not be consumed by doubt. Did you feel absolutely sure about marrying Pops?”