It wasn’t easy to apply eyeliner with a shaking hand. The face in the guest-room mirror again had prominent cheekbones, but her skin was finely scored with wrinkles previously hidden by fat; poor light was required to see her as the girl she meant to be. At least her new dress fit this girl. She’d asked the dressmaker on Pirsig Avenue for something summery, something of the sort that Sophie Serafimides said lifted a man’s spirits, and she’d delayed the final fitting as an incentive to keep shedding pounds. The dressmaker, declaring that she looked darling, had taken the money she’d earned by proofreading a reader’s guide to Sophocles.
When she’d exhausted the money embezzled from her sister’s estate, and had charged as much as she dared on the family BankAmericard, she’d asked around the church for leads on work suitable for a literate person with no employment history, and a parishioner had connected her to a woman on maternity leave from the Great Books Foundation. The proofreading work was tedious but doable with frequent cigarettes. It kept her mind off food and further limited her interactions with Russ and the kids. In four weeks, she’d made nearly four hundred dollars, enough to pay the credit-card bill, cover the cost of a rental car and Disneyland, and buy sundries like the rolls of film that Judson wanted for their trip. Bradley had once said it himself, in a sonnet: she was capable.
Before going to say good-bye to Judson, she stepped onto the guest-room patio with her purse. It took her a while, after she’d smoked, to notice that she was crossing the lawn toward the parking lot, rather than going back inside. Apparently it wasn’t necessary to say good-bye?
She was too terrified to judge. Her brain felt like a banana in a blender. It was unclear if the source of the terror was the prospect of the freeway or simply the arrival of the moment—the moment when past and present would connect and thirty intervening years would disappear. Obsessed though she’d been with creating this moment, its arrival had caught her by surprise.
She wasn’t capable. She’d memorized the directions that Bradley had sent her, she’d tested herself by reciting them verbatim, and now she couldn’t remember a word of them. She had his last letter in her purse, but she couldn’t read and drive at the same time.
She started the car, which was baking in the sun, and turned the air-conditioning on full blast. The fabric of her dress had sparse green paisleys on a background of ecru that would show her sweating, which was already considerable. She would have to talk to Mr. Shen, the dry cleaner in New Prospect. Mr. Shen was ever pessimistic when she showed him a bad stain, ever able to perform the miracle of removing it. The thought of Mr. Shen returned her to ordinariness. The worst case—that she’d be back in Pasadena in four hours, able to swim in the pool, unphobic, ordinary—wasn’t such a bad case. Tiny treats, an air-conditioned car, a drink by the pool, an after-dinner cigarette, could get a person through her life. Looking forward to treats was a coping skill for which Sophie Serafimides had praised her. It was strange that she’d felt compelled to inflict such terrors on herself.
Another adage of the dumpling: It’s better to function than not function. Once she was on the freeway, she found that she remembered the directions perfectly. The freeway experience was itself a helpful obsession, a state of mind so consuming that the world outside it barely registered. All she had to do was stick to the rightmost lane and attend to road signs. Of the millions of people who drove in Los Angeles every day, very few were killed. When she’d made it past the San Diego Freeway without dying, she had the thought that, if she ended up moving here, she might even come to enjoy driving.
It was a mistake to think this. Only by luck did she emerge from her fantasies in time to take the exit for Palos Verdes. Pushed relentlessly by cars behind her, she drove all the way to Crenshaw Boulevard before she could pull over and collect herself. She angled a cold-air louver at her face, which felt red, and patted her underarms with a tissue from her purse. The haze outside the car had a marine quality, cooler in color than smog, merely dimming, not effacing. A sign on a nearby awning said PERRY SUMMONS REALITY.
The words swam in her vision.
Their reemergence as PERRY SIMMONS REALTY didn’t lessen her fear. Not wanting her dress to stink of smoke, she got out of the car. The air was ocean-cool and sharply scented with asphalt from a repaving job across the street. The words on the awning were too strange, too apt, to be anything but a sign from God. But what did it mean?
She hadn’t had a real talk with Perry since the night of his sixteenth birthday, three weeks ago. She’d detained him in the kitchen, after din ner, and privately handed him two hundred dollars, the same amount she’d given Clem at Christmas. After Perry had thanked her, she’d noticed that someone’s slice of cake had hardly been touched, and he’d admitted it was his. Did he not like chocolate cake anymore? “No, it’s delicious.” Then why wasn’t he eating it? “My butt is fat.” His butt wasn’t fat in the slightest! “You’re the one with the crazy weight-loss program.” She was just trying to get back to her proper weight. “I’m doing the same thing. You don’t have to worry about me.” Was he sleeping? “Sleeping fine, thanks.” And he wasn’t still … “Selling weed? I told you I wouldn’t.” Did he still smoke it? “Nope.” And—did he remember what else he’d promised her? “Trust me, Mother. If I notice anything amiss, you’ll be the first to know.” But he seemed a little—agitated. “Said the pot to the kettle.” What did that mean? “Your own mental health doesn’t strike me as the finest.” She was—it was only some trouble between her and his father. The point here was that a growing boy needed to eat. “What sort of ‘trouble’？” Just—nothing. The sort of trouble that married couples sometimes had. “Does it have a name? Is it Mrs. Cottrell?” What made him—why did he ask that? “Things I’ve heard. Things I’ve seen.” Well—yes. Since he was nosy enough to ask—yes. And, well, yes—it was very upsetting. If she hadn’t seemed like herself lately, that was why. But the point—“The point, Mother, is that you should worry about yourself, not me.”