Lucy wrote this week’s Cindi Coeur column:
Dear Cindi Coeur,
I am writing to ask advice about my double life. By day I am a management analyst. I wear silk blouses with floppy bows, gray skirts with a kick pleat, and tiny pearl earrings to suggest conventional femininity. I have taken care to be sure that my hair is shiny and that the leather of my briefcase is not. All day, I go to meetings, talk on the phone, and make graphs. My boyfriend does not know that I work. I have told him that because of all the drugs I take, I sleep all day. At night, Cindi, I am a waitress at his nightclub, Slash. The pearl earrings are replaced by Tampax that dangle from my ears, and my clothes suggest that I have just escaped being torn apart by wild animals. My problem is that while I want to stay with my boyfriend and get deeper into that world, he has been saying that he should sell the business, get married to me, and that we should move to the suburbs and have kids. Should I tell him that I am a more conventional person, already, than he thinks? Can honesty hurt the relationship? How would I get my kicks if we lived in suburbia?
Double Identity Dorothy
Dear Dot,
The child your boyfriend wants may go a long way toward reconciling your two personas. You may still wear many items from your workaday-world wardrobe, which the child will naturally pull, rip, and stain. Give in to your boyfriend. If things go wrong you can, like all mothers, blame both him and the child. Later, if you decide to resume either your business identity or to immerse yourself in punk, your husband will certainly understand why you were driven into such a retreat. Who is not driven into conventionality or total chaos by a child? By capitulating, you can’t lose. It is a short distance, really, from blouses with bows tied under your chin, which are the business world’s equivalent of the cowbell, to the self-congratulatory support group you will find with the ladies of La Leche. Good Luck!
In the backyard, while she had been in California, Don Severs had planted a willow tree. The limbs swooped low, the delicate green leaves blowing in the breeze; a dozen Mylar balloons in the shape of hearts were attached mid-branch, bobbing as the limbs swept from side to side.
She remembered two of her father’s gestures — things he had done to communicate through action rather than words. When Lucy and Jane had told him something he didn’t believe, he had looked them straight in the eye and tipped his head, making a cross over his heart with his first finger. When they did something particularly charming, he tapped his chest, over his heart, with his fingertip, then made a fist with that hand and slapped it into the palm of the other. It was like a catcher slapping a ball into his mitt. Maybe their father had even thought of that, subconsciously; that love was just another game, like baseball. A national sport.
Lucy had thought, from time to time, of trying to get in touch with him, but she always stopped herself: he had betrayed them, withdrawn, disappeared. Jane had kept in contact a little longer than she had. He and his new wife had at least two children, and a house in Maine and a house somewhere outside Boston. A girl Lucy once knew had sent her a picture from the Boston Globe a couple of summers ago, of Lucy’s father standing by a cart in Faneuil Hall, eating some new kind of gourmet hot dog. It was the first picture she had seen of him since he left: the daddy planting the garden, or carrying his daughters on each shoulder, or standing stiffly next to Mommy in evening attire was now a middle-aged man, smiling with a mouth full of food. The college classmate who sent the picture had circled his name and put a question mark in the margin. There could be no question; even if his name was common, he looked very much like Jane and Lucy. Because men’s fashions changed so little, it looked like he was wearing a pinstripe shirt that he had worn when he was their father. He was still her father, but Lucy did not know where he was. What would she tell him if she got in touch? That his daugher Jane, whom he had not known all of her adult life, was dead? She felt tears welling up. That was what always happened — only when she connected Jane’s death with something else that she was angry about did she feel herself about to cry.
Jane’s husband of a little more than a week was the real villain to all of them. He was still in a coma and there had been extensive brain damage, but the family refused to let the doctors take him off the respirator. Piggy, in one of the calls he had gotten from the man’s father, had offered not only to pull the plug, but then to wrap it around the man’s neck, tie it to his fender, and take him for a memorial ride along the same steep road he had plunged off of with Jane. The autopsy revealed that Jane had been two months pregnant. Piggy had told Lucy, but no one else. Lucy wouldn’t give her mother, who had said Jane was self-destructive, the satisfaction of knowing that. She had not told Nicole or anyone else. She preferred to think of it, herself, not as carelessness but as a sign of Jane’s faith in life. Lucy had not shown Jane’s letter to anyone, either. She read it every day, thinking bitterly that if Jane had not wanted to grow old, she had certainly gotten her way. In homage to Jane, Piggy had flown to Virginia to ride the Cyclone. After the funeral, Piggy had said to Lucy that he didn’t see how he’d get over it; every time the breeze blew, he thought of Jane. She liked the wind whether it was on the Cyclone or on a motorcycle — when it wasn’t there, she’d find some way to generate wind. She would not have liked the still, sunny day on which her funeral was held. The stiffly arranged floral displays that so many people sent, instead of the wild flowers that grew in the canyons, rustling in the breeze. Lucy remembered Nicole as an infant, sitting on her mother’s thigh, while Jane said to her, “How does the rain fall?” tapping her fingertips lightly on Nicole’s head. Saying, “How does the wind go?” as she puckered her lips and blew a slow stream of air at Nicole’s hairline, sending the wisps of baby hair away from her forehead.
They had learned to take their cues from Nicole. If she fell, they did not react until she reacted. Most of the time, if they didn’t rush forward, she would just pick herself up and go on. The baby took her cues from the adults; if they weren’t upset, she wasn’t upset. She would look, and with fear or dismay that they projected as a pleasant smile, they would say “Baby go boom!” or something to indicate that what had just happened was of slight importance and rather amusing.
Lucy went to the screen door and looked out. Nicole was on a beach towel, stretching left and right and left and right, listening to an exercise tape on her cassette player. They had talked a lot in California about Jane, and Jane’s death, but since they returned, Nicole didn’t want to talk about it. She wondered if she shouldn’t say things anyway; whether what she was doing now wasn’t just another version, and a potentially harmful one, of what the adults had all done by smiling when Nicole went boom as a baby. Then, of course, they could tell by the surface she fell on, or where she banged herself, or how long she stayed spread-eagled, how great the hurt might be. There didn’t seem any accurate way to predict now what Nicole was feeling. Obviously, when she exhibited bravado, she was only doing it to cover the hurt. Earlier in the day, on the phone, talking to Piggy, she had overheard Nicole saying, “Yeah, well, I don’t think she should have taken chances while I’m still a kid.” Piggy had bought postcards of the Cyclone; he took them out of his pocket and examined them as though they were a family snapshot. He put one in a frame on his desk — his equivalent of a splinter of the True Cross, sunk in a Lucite cube.