The image of little children in bed asleep is always one that pulls on the heartstrings. Like every parent, I was fascinated: all that commotion, all the shouting and running, it was hard to believe the calm. One advantage of all the dolls and animals was that they kept the covers weighted down. When you stopped wearing your sleep-suits with feet, I always put white anklets on you. It is important to keep children warm at night. Not as important as other things, like nourishing food and vaccinations, but still, something I worried about. Perhaps inordinately.
You both liked the window cracked a bit. Was it because in the cold weather, it made you think of summer? I’d pile on covers, then sometimes put on more as an afterthought, tuck another blanket on top, tapping it down around the menagerie. It was rather like fitting piecrust over the top of a pie. Then, leaving, I would take a final look. Just saying good-night and turning and walking away would be as unusual as glancing only once at a Christmas tree. It seemed so perfect: Jane and Lucy, and Jane and Lucy’s mother standing and smiling. The room wasn’t entirely dark because a streetlight in front of the next house shone in. You didn’t want the shade drawn, of course. I left the door open a crack, as well. That was more for my benefit than yours. You had no fear. Because the door was ajar when I left, I still felt connected. There were always those few seconds in which the house seemed so lonely and quiet; it was as though everything had a sound when you were present, and when you went away, silence fell. I believe that in Oriental rugs, there is often an irregularity in the pattern — a key, it is called — woven that way deliberately, to allow the spirit to escape.
27
OF course Lucy never thought that she wouldn’t see Les Whitehall again. From the minute Myra DeVane told her he had written (eventually, she had forced herself to look at the letter), she had to acknowledge that it figured that he’d get in touch when a million things were happening, and she was least ready to deal with him.
The night before he called to say he was coming, she tried to think of good things about Les and the good times they had had. If she could be calm, she would not give in to temptation and ask him what he thought “Love Always” meant. She knew that even if she asked, she would not get the answer she wanted. He would be insincere, he would equivocate, he would lie. He would try to make her look needy and silly for asking. He would pretend — or maybe it would be true — that “Love Always” was a variation of “Yours truly.” The few times she had ever faced him down and won, he had pushed a self-destruct button: he never admitted that she was right; he began smoking or drinking — anything that didn’t require words — or turned and walked away.
It depressed her, sometimes, that since Les she had not had a new relationship with anyone. It had taken about fifteen years for Hildon to really seduce her, in spite of the fact that she had slept with him from the beginning, and now she did count on him, now she did share his philosophy that since you could get away with anything, it was necessary to start your own fun. They knew how to seduce each other so well, knew how to add to the other’s fantasies like children piling one hand on top of the other, over and over, bottom hand pulled out and slapped on top, until it became again the top hand. There was a lot of repetition in what they did. At first her shock had been genuine about Hildon’s redneck slumming, but then she had passed through that, and through amusement, into acceptance. It was just a routine: some people liked to shower after sex; some smoked a cigarette; some people liked music; some people liked the lights on; some people did it in boots with spurs. It seemed incestuous; they were so close and had known each other so long that Lucy couldn’t believe they weren’t related, but they were also attuned to each other’s fantasies in a way no family member would be; they knew not only the person, but the dreams and nightmares as well. They cared about each other so much that they knew to be careful. They knew what would hurt. They were too careful. It was too precise; a shrug, instead of passion. Anything goes, because even that won’t suffice.
Les said that he would be passing through Vermont and wanted to stop — that he had been calling her for days without success. He knew nothing about Jane’s death. He had never met Nicole, and didn’t know, of course, that she was at Lucy’s. Lucy liked the idea of letting him walk into a sad, complicated situation. Only when someone else observed it and said something did she pity herself, and that feeling was a relief. Let him walk into real life and not be able to do anything about it. Let him deal with some situation that wasn’t one he orchestrated in a classroom or took charge of by manipulating her. Of course there was nothing helpful he could say, and no way he could feel comfortable. As Piggy said — more often on the East Coast than on the West Coast, actually—“Welcome to L.A.”
That morning Lucy and Nicole had visited Nata Ballard, who would be Nicole’s ninth grade teacher in the fall. Piggy had arranged for a tutor for the time Nicole would spend in Los Angeles. In September, Nicole would be picked up by the school bus and driven two miles to school, where she would be a student with farmers’ kids and hippies’ oldest sons and daughters. The farmers’ kids would be named Mark and John and the hippies’ kids would be named Ezekiel and Beatrice (four-syllable version). Nicole thought all this was wonderful —“a rip,” as she said — and had returned to her reading of Main Street. Lucy tossed around the idea of telling her that Nata Ballard had spent a year in the convent and another year strung out on dope before she saw the light and moved to Vermont when she decided it rose over the Green Mountains, but decided against it; it would just be another story that made things tenuous and a bit ironic. She didn’t think Nicole needed more of that.
St. Francis had escaped the night before, but they found him before he got into trouble, Lucy driving with her leg shaking so hard it was difficult to apply even pressure to the accelerator, and Nicole screaming, “St. Francis! Here, baby!” out the window, as perplexed people in fields or sitting in lawn chairs looked up and stared at the car. Lucy had been too embarrassed to stop and ask if they had seen the dog. He was in a swamp, not far from the house, and Lucy was so glad to see him muddy instead of bloody that she didn’t even care about the damage to the back seat. Today they had gone to the hardware store and bought a lead, stakes, chains, and a wider, sturdier collar. St. Francis looked manacled. It was the sort of thing, Lucy realized, that she was going to have to explain to visitors.
Life was back to normal. That meant, for example, that in the afternoon, the Federal Express man, with whom Nicole had struck up quite a friendship, had brought a package of drawings of preliminary plans for the Stephanie Sykes doll. They looked like blueprints for the Taj Mahal, filled with numbers and incomprehensible notations — what might have been a transcription of a gorilla’s best thoughts, on acid, of how to navigate through a Skinner box. The figure on the top page looked more like a cross section of one of Piggy’s wife’s chambered shells than a human being. Piggy had gotten a duplicate package, and had called to say that under no circumstances was Nicole to sign the release form — it was obviously a deliberate ruse, to disguise the fact that Stephanie Sykes did not have tits. “What the hell does this mean?” Piggy screamed at Lucy, as if she were responsible. “Under the head …” She told him that she couldn’t make out a head. “At the top, at the goddamn top,” Piggy said. “What does this mean: 8 × 3—what are they doing, grafting Wilt Chamberlain’s cock onto her throat?”