“Because it’s a three-ring circus with you, all the time, and I didn’t think that would be good for her.”
“I wouldn’t have been in this house. I would have been in mine. I offered so many times.” Some evil thing made me say, “And I notice you were quite happy to take whatever money you needed from me.”
“There it is! The grand lady doling out her largesse!”
“You know that’s not fair. Why are you always so fucking jealous?”
“Jealous?” She stood up, her face bright red. “You’ve always been the jealous one. You were jealous of the Portland house, jealous of my parents, and it wasn’t enough to be jealous of my grandmother, you had to move in here to steal her.”
“I didn’t have to steal her. She loved me! And you know I had to come here to live. There was no other place to go.” Her words were so sharp and painful that I instinctively struck back. I narrowed my eyes. “You’ve always been such a whiner! Poor Phoebe in her big house on the hill, with two parents and a grandmother and a fucking swimming pool.”
“Material things are not the only things, Suze. You’ve never got that.”
“It wasn’t about the material part. It was about you having love and people who wanted the best for you. So what, your parents got divorced. Mine tried to kill me, in case you’ve forgotten, and at the worst time in my life, when I was only a few miles away from you in that horrible unwed mothers’ home, you only came to see me one time. Once! Do you have any idea how awful that time was? How much I needed you? And you just deserted me.”
“I did go see you. You were a bitch to me.”
“Oh, sorry. I wasn’t cheerful enough for you?”
She rolled her eyes. “There it is. You poor, poor thing. Poor Suze. You had such a terrible childhood. So what? You have everything. You got everything. You were born beautiful. You dazzled the whole world. You’re as rich as a duchess and still you carry around that old story like it’s some teddy bear.”
“I do not!” Rage filled every corner of my body, my mind, every organ. My liver pulsed fury, and my veins ran hot. “At least I did something, took action, tried to make things happen, instead of rolling over to kiss a bloody jerk’s ass. You just gave up. Beryl and I were both trying to get you to stay in art school and you flung all of it away with both fists. Here, Derek; take this, Derek. You gave all your power away to a man.”
She slapped me. Hard. It stunned me for the blink of an eye, but my anger burst like a lake going over a dam, and I struck back, feeling a wild relief in the connection of my hand against her face. With a screech, she grabbed my hair. “You think you’re the most important person in the world. I’m so sick of you!”
I was much taller and knocked her down, tears pouring from my eyes, feeling a hundred fights in which I had wanted to strike back. I held her arms, keeping her from hitting me. “I’ve loved you my whole life, you stupid bitch!” I screamed. “You want more, more, more—”
Her elbow connected with my cheekbone and eye. Stunned, I fell back. She stood up. Her face was red. “I don’t love you. You take everything. Leave me alone.”
She stormed away. I left in the morning, and didn’t speak to her again until after the attack by the LNB. I woke up in the hospital to find her slumped in a chair, asleep. It touched me that she came, that she sat with me, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with the fallout right then. When she awakened, I thanked her for coming and told her she could go home.
In the quiet of my living room, I take a sip of tea and run a fingernail along the seam of my jeans. I did have a lot of good luck—the lucky break of being born with the kind of face that was fashionable at the moment I came to the movies, the luck of that particular casting director being at the auditions on Broadway, the luck of a great script that fit me like Goldilocks’s chair.
But I also worked hard. I didn’t take the lucky breaks for granted. I looked for the people who could help me and listened to their advice. I did a lot of learning in public and there are definitely roles from those early days that make me wince now.
Phoebe kept saying that she wanted a big life as an artist, but what she really wanted was to be in love, have a boyfriend, and have sex, and be a part of a couple. Derek showed up and she dived in, headfirst. He was wildly good looking and talented, and in his own way, he loved her, when he wasn’t gaslighting her.
Was it so wrong for her to want that life? Is it possible that both Beryl and I were wrong to try to talk her out of that marriage? By the end, she didn’t like art school very much, and although the marriage ended, she found her career anyway.