Ray calls her that night to check in on her. She is feeling ever so slightly better, even if only from the placebo effect of one pill and being freed, at least for the weekend, from the monotony of the glove department. Still, she sits essentially motionless through Monday morning, separated from suicidal thoughts by only a thin veneer. She struggles all weekend to keep it from cracking.
Weeks later, Mirabelle doesn’t know if she is feeling better naturally or because the Celexa is working. It feels like a natural lift, and she wonders if she needs the pills at all. But she isn’t stupid, and she recalls hearing that this is a common feeling, so she keeps taking the pills daily.
vermont
CHRISTMAS IS APPROACHING AND SHE is making plans for travel to Vermont. She will leave on one of the worst flights imaginable, the red-eye to New York on Christmas Eve, connecting to Montpelier on a commuter flight at 8 A.M. on Christmas Day, and then take a bus 150 miles to home. Ray gives her the cost of the ticket east, as he figures Christmas is going to strain Mirabelle’s budget and why not help her. He also slips her an extra $250 so she won’t be a pauper in front of her friends. She already knows what she is going to give Ray for Christmas, the nude drawing she made of herself the night of her Thanksgiving despair, in which she is suspended in black space. And he knows what he is going to give her, a hand-picked blouse from Armani, which he bought for her knowing she would be absolutely crazy about it.
Mirabelle begins the nightmare of holiday travel with a phone call from Ray wishing her well, and a black sedan he sent to take her to the airport. Even flying at these inhuman hours, the sedan is the last sanctuary of calm before the holiday crowds engulf her. After several hours, the 747 to New York stinks from the perspiration of 400 passengers being rocked and rolled in the uneasy Christmas air. She transfers at JFK and finds herself aboard a prop plane that sits on the runway a full hour before takeoff. On descent to Montpelier, the plane bounces through a snowstorm and scares even the pilot. Mirabelle has to comfort the twenty-five-year-old, six-foot-four footballer who sits next to her, who quakes with every engine downshift and every crank of the flaps. Mirabelle herself is not nervous; it just doesn’t occur to her that the plane can do anything but land, and she alternates between soothing the athlete next to her and reading a book.
By morning, after retrieving her luggage without help and hauling it to a shuttle that takes her to the bus station, she looks like a college student bound for home, or a ragamuffin. The bus, warm and cold at the same time, heads through the light snow. The riders are equally divided: some of them are like Mirabelle, exhausted travelers who had bumpy naps on interminable night flights, while the others are wide-awake conversationalists on the first leg of their exciting Christmas journey.
When the bus pulls into Dunton at 11:30 A.M., Mirabelle can see her older brother Ken standing inside the depot, wearing a bright red parka the size of an oil barrel. They say quick hellos as she runs from the bus to the car wearing her skimpy L.A. jacket; the freezing wind tells her that she has been in L.A. too long. Her brother shifts the lime green Volkswagen into gear and mutters a “hey kiddo,” and then drives about five miles an hour on the icy roads. Ken is a policeman with an uncanny knack for tracking down criminals in his small town, mainly because he knows everyone and has a sixth sense for adolescents who might be headed in the wrong direction. She feels deep affection for her brother, although this has never once translated into honest conversation. She asks him how Mom and Dad are, and he answers truthfully, which is that they are unchanged.
Unchanged means this: Mom cannot imagine in this world that Mirabelle is having sex, and Dad ignores the subject entirely. Even though Mirabelle is twenty-eight years old, her status as a child in the house has never changed. Father to daughter, daughter to mother, the relationships are frozen in time, and it is this containment she felt nine years ago that squeezed Mirabelle out of the house and into California, where she could start digging in fresh dirt for her real personality. California doesn’t matter, though, once she walks through her parents’ door.
Moderation in all things, including success. Her dad supports his family well but has not succeeded past that. The house is small and paper thin; they have two old cars, but currently her father is on a rampage of relative success selling home products a’ la Amway. The extra income means a few things are being refurbished, and a plastic sheet covers the entire roof of the house waiting for dry weather so it can be repaired.
Catherine and Dan have been married for thirty-five years, and the stoic construct of their relationship has been broken only once, when Dan revealed his seven-year affair with a neighbor. Catherine collapsed, then fought, then resurrected the marriage with a quiet power and sophistication that she had not shown at any other time in her life or has ever shown again. The one who was broken, who did not recover, who did not understand, and who saw the image of her father crack and shatter, was Mirabelle.
Mirabelle did not know how to rebound from this betrayal, and Dan did not know that while he was cheating on his wife, he was cheating on his daughter, too. But she still needed to be loved by this man who had committed the unspeakable, and the push/pull she felt toward her father confused and stunted her.
Even before this episode, Mirabelle had feared her father, but she could never remember why. She does remember a shift in his manner, sometime after he returned from the war. She remembers a loving, even jovial man who became sullen and removed, and whom she learned to be cautious around. With quiet pervading the house, Mirabelle would retire to her room and read, thus beginning a lifelong relationship with books. But now all that is years ago. Now her father is much more congenial, as though something has softened, as though his resolve to be unreachable has eroded with time.
“So how’re you doin’ out there?” Her father sits in the easiest chair in the living room, and Mirabelle sits on the sofa, verging on relaxed.
“I’m fine, I’m still working at Neiman’s.”
“How’s your art coming along?” Dan never sees her endeavors in art as frivolous, and as much as is possible for him, gets it.
“I’m drawing, Daddy. I’ve even sold some.”
“Really? That’s great, that’s just great. What do they sell for?”
“The last one brought six hundred dollars, split with the gallery.”
Mirabelle’s mother brings a tray of Cokes into the room and just catches her daughter’s modestly expressed boast. She looks askance at her, as if to say, “Can that possibly be true?” For some reason she feels the need to fake naïveté about this art thing that Mirabelle is doing. She pretends she doesn’t get the preoccupation with it, that it is all beyond her understanding. The source of this self-deception is a mysterious and arbitrary decision to place certain arenas outside her realm of understanding, like the man of the house being simply unable to comprehend how to wash and dry dishes. The woman who had become a firewall of protection around her family when it was threatened now feels the need to play dumb.
The three talk on, then Dad suggests the family take a walk around the neighborhood, which they do. He leads her by certain houses so he can call out to neighbors and show off his daughter, and Mirabelle becomes the daughter she was to him prior to the revelation of his affair. She hangs back behind her dad. Her pose becomes awkward, her voice weakens, she shyly says hello to familiar neighbors, and none of what she has seen and experienced in California is present in her demeanor. Catherine stands by, in wife mode, and Mirabelle looks at her and wonders where her own deep eroticism could possibly have come from.