"So—?"
"Well, I had this huge collection of Todd Pickett memorabilia. And I want to get rid of it. Then I want to think about selling the house."
"Meaning you'll move in with me?"
"If it isn't too sudden?"
"At our age, nothing's too sudden," Maxine said. "But are you sure you want to go through all that stuff yourself? Can't you get one of the fans to do it?"
"I could, I suppose," Tammy said. "But I'd feel better doing it myself."
"Then we'll do it together."
"It'll be boring. There's so much stuff. And Arnie's been using the house on and off so it'll be a pig-sty."
"I don't care. When do you want to go?"
"As soon as possible. I just want to get it over and done with."
Tammy tried to find Arnie, first at the airport and then at his new girlfriend's house, just to warn him that they were coming into town, but she didn't get hold of him. Part of her was glad that Maxine was accompanying her, when there were so many variables she couldn't predict; but there was another part of her that felt a little uncomfortable at the prospect. Maxine lived in luxury. What would she think when she laid eyes on the scruffed, stuffed, little ranch-house where Tammy and Arnie had lived out the charmless farce of their marriage for fourteen-and-a-half years?
They got an early plane out of Los Angeles, and were in Sacramento by nine-thirty in the morning. Maxine had arranged for a chauffeured sedan to meet them at the airport. The chauffeur introduced himself as Gerald, and said that he was at their disposal. Did they want to go straight to the address he'd been given? Tammy gave Maxine a nearly panicked look: the moment was upon her, and suddenly she was anxious.
"Come on," Maxine said. "We'll face the horror together. Then we'll be out of here by the middle of the afternoon."
Arnie hadn't bothered to mow the front lawn, of course, or weed the ground around the two rose bushes that Tammy had attempted to nurture. The bushes were still alive, but only just. The weeds were almost as tall as the bushes.
"Of course he may have changed the lock," Tammy said as they approached the front door.
"Then we'll just get Gerald to shoulder it in," Maxine said, ever practical. "It's still your house, honey. We're not doing anything illegal."
In fact, the key fitted and turned without any problem; and it was immediately apparent from the general state of the place that Arnie hadn't after all been a very regular visitor here in a while. But the heating had been left turned up so it was stiflingly hot in all the rooms; a stale, sickly heat. In the kitchen there was some food left out and rotting: a half-eaten hamburger, a pile of fruit which had been corrupted into plush versions of the originals, two plates of pizza crusts. The stink was pretty offensive, but Tammy got to work quickly clearing up the kitchen, while Maxine went around the house opening the windows and turning down the heating. With the rotted food bagged and set outside, and bleach put down the sink to take away the stench, the place was a little more hospitable, but Tammy made it very clear that she wanted to stay here for as short a time as possible, so they set to work. Given the size of the collection it was obviously not going to be sorted through and disposed of in a day; all Tammy wanted to do was collect up all the stuff that was personal, and either burn it or take it away. The rest she would let members of the Appreciation Society come in and collect. They'd end up fighting over the choicest items no doubt; all the more reason not to be there when they came.
"I didn't realize you had so much stuff," Maxine said, when they'd looked through all the rooms.
"Oh I was a top-of-the-line obsessive. No question. And I was organized." She went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and fingered through it till she found the file she wanted.
"What's this?" Maxine said.
"Letters from you to me. Usually Dictated but not read."
"I was a bitch, I know. I was just trying to protect him the only way I knew how."
"And it worked. I never really got near him. Nobody did."
"Maybe if I had been less paranoid, he'd have been less paranoid. Then we wouldn't have tried to hide him away, and none of this—"
Tammy interrupted her. "Enough of that," she said. "Let's start a bonfire out in the back yard, and get this done."
"A bonfire? For what?"
"For things like these." She proffered the Maxine Frizelle file. "Things it's nobody's business to ever see or read."
"Is there much like that?"
"There's enough. You want to start a fire with these, and I'll bring some more stuff out?"
"Sure. Anywhere in particular?"
"Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never finished it. We could use that."
"Done."
Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets collecting other files that for one reason or another she didn't want people to see. She wasn't proud of what her over-bearing tendencies had led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up her past a little. It wasn't so much the thought of posterity that drove her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the Appreciation Society who would come in here after they'd gone to cast dice and divide the lots.
When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.
"Is that all?"
"No, no," Tammy said, studying the fire. "There's a lot more." She kept staring. "You know that's what I used to think ghosts were like?" she said. "Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there."
Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the flames.
"Are we ever going to set the record straight?" Tammy wondered aloud.
"Like how?"
"Write our own book."
"Lauper and Frizelle's Guide to the Afterlife?"
"Something like that."
"It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favorite versions."
"You think?"
"For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's embedded. They believe what they believe."
"I'll go get some more stuff."
"Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know that?"
"Probably," Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.
Three or four trips out into the back yard and she'd done all she needed to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she'd always kept her special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room, where—hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills—was the holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of costuming, but not her precious photographs.
She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay hidden. Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box out into view.
The rest could go to the fire or the fans, but this, and this alone, she would keep, she decided. She put it under her arm and went outside to see how her fire-stoker was doing.