“It’s better if he gets a stimulating call right off,” his wife said. “He does better when he’s catapulted into things. Piggy needs a little prodding to seize the day.”
Piggy came out of the kitchen. He was holding a bowl with a bunch of grapes in it, which he did not offer to anyone. He sat down, letting his wife get the next phone call. It was Hildon, wanting to talk to Lucy. She realized when she stood how little energy she had, how tired she was. Hildon was taking care of St. Francis. There was no Cindi Coeur column this week. Hildon acted as if just talking to Lucy, she might crack. He lied and told Lucy that everything was fine. He told the truth, that he missed her. St. Francis was holding his own. What he did not tell her was that his wife had left him and that she had decided to sue for divorce and name Lucy as corespondent. If he had ever had the ability to talk her out of this, he didn’t now; she had come back to the house, not knowing that St. Francis was there, and he had bitten her on the leg. She had found out that St. Francis was Lucy’s dog. This had delighted her lawyer. As Hildon rattled on nervously, she realized, suddenly that she had inherited St. Francis.
“Piggy making everything worse for everybody?” he said.
“Not really,” she said.
“You get some sleep?”
“I’ve had about five hours sleep in the last three days,” she said.
“Still coming in at the same time?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Hildon was picking her up at the airport. She decided that she and Nicole should go to Vermont rather than Philadelphia. When she was better able to deal with it, she would see her mother. It really did not seem possible that she would never see Jane again. It had taken Jane awhile, but finally she had figured out what she could do that was too dangerous, and she had done it. None of that silly hot-potato game they had played when they were children, both of them so fearful that it became fun, scalding their hands tossing a hot Idaho back and forth in the kitchen. Early on, Jane had convinced Lucy of the rewards of acting-up: everybody turned their attention to them, their mother doubted her ability to raise children, chaos resulted in later bedtimes and in rewards being proffered if they would only calm down. Maybe, Lucy thought, if Jane was in Heaven, she was enjoying looking down and seeing Piggy Proctor slumped over his bowl of grapes, his wife nervously blowing on seashells, Lucy in a state of shock. Dealing with hot potatoes was much easier than taking the torch when it was passed: now she was a mother; now she was Jane.
Lucy realized what a coincidence it was that nobody in the family had a father. Or not for long, anyway. They were women who raised women. It might explain why they were all half crazy.
No it didn’t. Everybody was half crazy. She was being as self-indulgent as Noonan, who pretended to understand the world in terms of heterosexuals’ ideas of the way things should be. She had to fight this: it was not going to be the case that Jane, even in death, could still manipulate her so that she seemed to be an arch conservative.
It was far from true. She was only conservative in comparison with Jane. Conservative wasn’t exactly it, either; she had always had an advantage. She had always known something that Jane didn’t know. When they were teenagers, she had not told her because she wanted to protect her. As they got older, there seemed no way to capture the moment again, to explain.
When she and Jane were little girls, they had played in a backyard smaller than, but almost as congested as, Disneyland. They had been watched over by a woman named Miss Maybel. Miss Maybel was round and smooth, with skin the color of cocoa. She was from Jamaica. In retrospect, she must have been their father’s mistress. On Lucy’s sixteenth birthday she had been taken into New York alone for a grown-up dinner with her father. The dinner was so grown up that not only did he order a bottle of champagne, but after she had drunk half of it, one of the waitresses joined them at the table. “I wanted you to meet some real women — women who don’t act like your mother and all your mother’s friends,” he had said to her.
“Hey,” the waitress had said. “I’m meeting your kid. It wasn’t part of the deal that I had to hear about your wife.”
“You’re used to a bad deal,” Lucy’s father had said. “Isn’t that what you always say?”
Lucy had understood it all in a flash, and for some reason she had been terrified — terrified of both her father and the waitress. It was a rotten thing to have done to her — more punishment in the guise of pleasure — but if he hadn’t been so outspoken, and so harsh, what happened next might not have happened. Her father had started to order Beefeater martinis made ten to one. She must have looked miserable enough to have softened the waitress’ heart. She no longer remembered how they got from the table to the bathroom, or why she would have gone, but she did remember the waitress drying off the formica counter at the side of the sink, and the two of them sitting there moments later, swinging their legs like schoolgirls. “Nobody is any one way,” the waitress had said to her. “I’ve got a lot of talent. Don’t look at me and just think I’m some waitress. Your father has a good heart. He’s also got a mean streak. You’re not just sixteen years old, right? You’re full of energy, like a kid, but another part of you can sit still in a restaurant and sip champagne with the best of them, right?”
Lucy nodded. She had gone into the bathroom afraid of the waitress — she supposed she went because getting away from her father seemed more important than avoiding the woman — but suddenly something about the way the waitress smoked her cigarette and slouched as she talked made her feel sorry for her, sorrier than she felt for herself. She had asked what the waitress did when she wasn’t a waitress. The waitress had hopped down from the counter to tap and twirl, and as she did, Lucy had felt happy and then almost elated. The waitress had freed her with the kick of her foot, in a way: if people weren’t any one thing, then of course situations weren’t. No one ever again changed quite so abruptly in her presence, but that was irrelevant: Lucy believed that the potential was there, and from then on she became the Lucy who was involved in something, and the Lucy who watched herself and the situation from afar. She felt sorry for all the people who didn’t realize that their world could change in a second.
It was Jane’s beauty and her craziness that made her attractive to men, but it was Lucy’s personality that attracted them. Ever since that night when she understood everything differently, she didn’t judge people in the same way. When they put on a performance to impress her, she was pleased that they had made the effort, if she liked them. Pleased but restrained, because it was likely that the opposite was also true. And when men she did not care about put on a show, she was dismissive but polite, assuming that, of course, they were also men who were potentially interesting and attractive. Simply because she would not pass judgment, men became more and more fascinated.
This approach took its toll, of course. When doors were left open, it could get drafty at night. Endless opportunities were extended merely because she did not rule out possibilities. And since there were no particular ground rules, even those who were malicious couldn’t zip the rug out from under and topple her, because she had made no firm assumptions about where she stood to begin with. Sometimes, like today, what she was most sure of was fatigue. She could see the attraction of winding a turban around her hair, putting on a white robe, and marching off to meet her fate in crumbling Earth Shoes. As Nigel, at the magazine, was fond of saying, “Set the camera on infinity and you’re bound to get the long view.”
She went back to the living room. Piggy’s wife was no longer there, and Piggy stood with his back to her, reading letters and telegrams, head bent. PP was embroidered in elaborate letters on the back of his robe. He was as much of a father as any of them had. She might have thought of him as old, standing with his head bent, but instead of an old man’s scuffs, he had on blue Nikes, black knee-high executive socks, and two-pound ankle weights. That took care of that.