Of course, I didn’t know any of this that first afternoon. In fact, I wasn’t even positive I knew my own name as I rode next to Jade, the very disturbing person who only two days prior had maliciously directed me toward the Demonology Guild.
I’d actually assumed I’d been stood up again; by 3:30 P.M. there’d been no sign of her, or anyone. That morning, I’d hinted to Dad that I might have a Study Group later that afternoon (he’d frowned, surprised I was willing to subject myself again to such torture), but in the end, there was no need to give him a lengthier explanation; he’d disappeared to the university, having left a critical book on Ho Chi Minh in his office. He’d phoned to say he’d simply finish his latest Forum essay there—“The Trappings of Iron-Clad Ideologies,” or something to that effect — but would be home for dinner. I’d sat down in the kitchen with a chicken salad sandwich, resigned to an afternoon of Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Faulkner, 1990), when I heard the extended howl of a car horn in the driveway.
“I’m appallingly late. I am so sorry,” a girl shouted through the inch-opened, tinted window of the blubbery black Mercedes beached at the front door. I couldn’t see her, only her squinting eyes of indeterminate color and some beach-blond hair. “Are you ready? Otherwise I might have to take off without you. Traffic’s a bitch.”
Hastily, I grabbed keys to the house and the first book I could find, one of Dad’s favorites, Civil War Endgames (Agner, 1955), and ripped a page from the back. I scrawled a terse note (Study Group, Ulysses) and left it for him on the round table in the foyer without even bothering to sign it “Love, Christabel.” And then I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer trembling toward 80 mph, her lazy manicured hand slung atop the steering wheel, her blond hair in the cruel bun, the sandal straps XXXing up her legs. Candelabra earrings broadsided her neck every time she took her eyes off the highway to survey me with a look of “corroding tolerance.” (It was how Dad had described his mood waiting for June Bug Shelby Hollow tending to her acrylic nails, creative half-a-head highlights and pedicured feet—“With bunionettes,” Dad noted — at Hot-2-Trot Hair & Nails.)
“Yeah, so this”—Jade touched the front of the elaborate, parrot-green kimono dress she was wearing; she must have thought I was silently admiring her outfit—“this was a gift to my mom Jefferson when she entertained Hirofumi Kodaka, some loaded Japanese businessman for three grisly nights at the Ritz in 1982. He had jetlag and didn’t speak English so she was his twenty-four-hour translator if you know what I mean—Get off the fucking road!” She leaned on the horn; we veered in front of a lowly gray Oldsmobile driven by an old lady no bigger than a Dixie cup. Jade craned her neck around to give her a dirty look, then flipped her off. “Why doncha go to a graveyard and kick the bucket, old bag.”
We darted down Exit 19.
“That reminds me,” she said, tossing me a look. “Why didn’t you show?”
“What?” I managed to ask.
“You weren’t there. We waited.”
“Oh. Well, I went to room 208—”
“208?” She made a face. “It was 308.”
She wasn’t fooling anyone. “You wrote 208,” I said quietly.
“I did not. I remember perfectly—308. And you totally missed out. We had a cake for you and a lot of icing and candles and everything,” she added sort of absentmindedly (I was bracing myself for tales of hired belly dancers, elephant rides, whirling dervishes), but then, to my relief, she leaned forward and with a haughty, “God, I love Dara and the Bouncing Checks,” turned the CD way up, a heavy metal band with a lead singer that sounded as if he were being gouged by bulls at Pamplona.
We drove on, not a word spoken between us. (She’d resolved to shake me off like a hit funnybone.) She checked her watch, winced, huffed, damned stop lights, road signs, anyone abiding the speed limit in front of us, proudly surveyed her blue eyes in the rearview mirror, brushed specks of mascara off her cheeks, dabbed her lips with glittery pink lip gloss and then more glittery lip gloss so some of it started to ooze off the side of her mouth — a detail I didn’t have the guts to point out. In fact, driving to Hannah’s made the girl so apparently restless and anxiety ridden, I couldn’t help but wonder if at the end of this nauseating parade of woods and pastures and nameless dirt roads, and shoe-box barns and gaunt horses waiting by fences, I’d find not a house, but a black door barred by a velvet rope, a man with a clipboard who’d look me over and, when ascertaining I didn’t know Frank or Errol or Sammy personally (nor any other titan of entertainment), would declare me unfit to enter, by inference, to continue living.
But at last, at the very end of the twisting gravel road was the house, an awkward, wooden-faced coy mistress clinging to half a hill with bulky additions stuck to her sides like giant faux pas. As soon as we parked by the other cars and rang the bell, Hannah swung open the front door in a wave of Nina Simone, Eastern spices, perfume, Eau de Somethingfrench, her face warm as the living room light. A pack of seven or eight dogs, all different breeds and sizes, crept nervously behind her.
“This is Blue,” Jade said indifferently, walking inside.
“Of course,” said Hannah, smiling. She was barefoot, wearing chunky gold bracelets and an African batik caftan in orange and yellow. Her dark hair was a perfect swish of ponytail. “The lady of the hour.”
To my surprise, she hugged me. It was an Epic Hug, heroic, big budget, sprawling, with ten thousand extras (not short, grainy and made on a shoestring). When she finally let go, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it the way people at airports grab the hands of people they haven’t seen in years, asking how the flight was. She pulled me next to her, her arm around my waist. She was unexpectedly thin.
“Blue, meet Fagan, Brody, he’s got three legs — though it doesn’t stop him from going through the garbage — Fang, Peabody, Arthur, Stallone, the Chihuahua with half a tail — accident with a car door — and the Old Bastard. Don’t look him in the eye.” She was referring to a skin-and-bones greyhound with the red eyes of a middle-aged, midnight tollbooth collector. The other dogs glanced at Hannah doubtfully, as if she were introducing them to a poltergeist. “Somewhere around here are the cats,” she continued. “Lana and Turner, the Persians, and in the study we have our lovebird. Lennon. I’m in desperate need of an Ono, but there aren’t many birds that show up at the shelter. Want some oolong tea?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Oh, and you haven’t met the others yet, have you?”
I looked up from the black-and-tan Chihuahua, who’d snuck over to me to consider my shoes, and saw them. Including Jade, who’d flopped down onto a half-melted chocolate couch and lit a cigarette (aiming it at me like a dart), they each stared with eyes so immobile and bodies so stiff, they might have been the series of paintings Dad and I had scrutinized in the nineteenth-century Masters Gallery at the Chalk House outside Atlanta. There was the scrawny girl with brown seaweed hair, hugging her knees on the piano bench (Portrait of a Peasant Girl, pastel on paper); a tiny kid wearing Ben Franklin spectacles, Indian-style by a mangy dog, Fang (Master with Foxhound, British, oil on canvas); and another, a huge, boxy-shouldered boy leaning against a bookshelf, his arms and ankles crossed, brittle black hair sagging across his forehead (The Old Mill, artist unknown). The only one I recognized was Charles in the leather chair (The Gay Shepherd, gilt frame). He smiled encouragingly, but I doubted it meant much; he seemed to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken costume distributing coupons for a free lunch.