Garbo Laughs (6 page)

Already, at five, Harriet considered this a real mistake.

At the age of six came the strange set of circumstances that led to her first disaster as a writer. A Hallowe’en double bill on Saturday afternoon, and her mother allowed her to go for the simple reason that admission was free if you presented six Pepsi-Cola bottle caps at the door. She and two of her older brothers scoured every back alley in town – a small town on the water, where the baker sometimes stood in the back door
of the bakery and tossed them balls of dough, as if they were stray dogs, and in a way they were, roaming freely until their mother stood on the porch and blew a whistle either at noon or at six o’clock sharp.

They found enough bottle caps and paid their way in to see, first, giant footprints on a back road where lovers were kissing in cars, and then the giant itself, amid screams, planting his foot on top of those very same cars. At intermission Mr. Pepsi stood in the aisle, while everyone stayed in their seats, and he called out the numbers of several winning tickets. Small Harriet, looking down at the red stub in her hand, saw her number correspond to one of them. She made her way past knobby knees to the aisle, showed him her ticket, and heard him say, “You can go down there and choose anything you want.”
Down there
was the front of the theatre where a long table was covered with prizes. She walked by herself down the aisle to the table and chose a blonde walking doll in a blue satin dress, and held it in her lap during the second movie, the story of two sisters who wanted the same handsome man. First, he married the good sister, but she drowned while he was away and while the bad sister watched in apparent helplessness because she couldn’t swim. Then he married the bad sister, who fell off the dock one night as she tried to rescue her cat in the middle of a storm. Having come home without warning, the handsome husband tore off his jacket to swim to the rescue, only to stop dead: for there she was, the evil one, swimming perfectly well to shore. The look on his face, and then the look on hers as she rose out of the water and saw his horror and repulsion – those looks constituted the final moments of the movie.

Harriet walked home and said, “Look at what I winned.”

The next morning she took out a black ballpoint pen and wrote in indelible ink on the doll’s neck her own name. Harriet Lily Browning. A long name. A long ink-necklace. She took her handiwork to her mother, still in bed on that Sunday morning, expecting her to be as thrilled as she had been the day before. Her mother took one look and said furiously, “You’ve ruined it. You’ve completely ruined it.”

Harriet has had trouble writing ever since. Stubbornly, she ruins perfectly good things by writing about them. Her mother wishes she would stop. “Why does she do that?” Gladys will say to Martin. “Is she
so
unhappy?”

But Harriet can’t resist. Why did she write about Leah? Because she couldn’t resist.

T
he letter lay untouched on the blue kitchen counter for several days. Harriet covered it with other mail, so that its brightness wouldn’t hit her eyes so hard.

“You open it,” she said to Lew when he discovered it among the bills. “I’m afraid it will blow off my hand.”

“She’s not so bad,” said Lew.

“Just tell me she’s not coming to visit.”

“She’s not coming to visit,” he said as he read it, “she’s coming to stay.”

Harriet sank to the floor.

Lew looked down at his wife. “So is Jack.”

“Jack?”

“Jack’s coming first. Any time now.” Perusing the letter. “Leah’s not coming till January.”

“You mean John the Baptist, and
then
the Crucifier?”

He read to the bottom of the page and turned it over. “They’re researching and writing a book together.”

She found the butcher knife in the kitchen drawer. She pointed the blade at her chest. “I’m going to kill myself,” she said.

“They’re not so bad,” said Lew.

“I’m going to kill you,” she said.

She walked over to Dinah’s to be reassured. It was November 19, and there were traces of snow in the air. Earlier in the day, at the corner store, the man behind the counter whose hair was very thin on top said this was his wife’s first Canadian winter. They were married in India nine months ago, and she thought it was cold, and he told her: You haven’t seen anything yet. Ahead of Harriet, as she waited, was a thin, dark-haired man with many unbrushed teeth who said that in Italy thirteen was a lucky number; he had a gold 13 hanging from his wristwatch. Harriet thought, So maybe bad luck isn’t bad luck, after all. Maybe, under certain circumstances, it’s good luck. But she thought it without conviction.

She knocked on Dinah’s door and heard bristly old Buddy start to bark. Buddy was the sort of dog you take a child to see to
dissuade him from getting one. Or take yourself to see, if you feel yourself weakening.

To be reassured. Such a miserable business, this one of needing reassurance.

“An egg,” she said, “on my window. That’s why Lew was washing it.”

“Kids,” said Dinah. “Boys out larking around.”

“How bad was what I did?
How
wrong was it to write about Leah?”

“You changed her name?” asked Dinah.

“Yes.”

“You changed her appearance?”

“A little.”

“You changed the geography?”

“No.”

“Next time,” said Dinah, “change more. In the meantime, stop worrying.”

Harriet shook her head in despair. “I really think that egg was meant for me.”

Dinah took her into the kitchen and passed on the secret of good cappuccino, something she learned not from the Galloping Gourmet, whom she interviewed at home one morning years ago – he came downstairs at nine, lit a cigarette, then made himself a cup of instant coffee – but from her Italian teacher, who paced the classroom in red pumps. “Pina was her name. You bring milk nearly to a boil, then whip it in a blender, let it sit for sixty seconds, then swirl it around as you pour it into the coffee and that way you get creamy coffee and good froth. What they make in this country is so
bitter.”

“Yes.”

“Canada,” said Dinah. “Where taste buds get buried at birth.”

Harriet stared at her cup. She saw her taste buds six feet underground. They were pink. She said, “The phone rings and nobody’s there. It happens two or three times a week.”

“It happens to me too.”

“But why?”

“Who knows? Think about Friday. Our Sinatra double bill.”

“Yes.” Harriet stirred herself. “That’s something to look forward to. I think.”

“I’ll bring the pizza.” Dinah pronounced it
pee-zab
.

Harriet had to laugh. But then she said, “I haven’t told you the worst thing. Do you want to hear the worst thing?”

Dinah watched the worried blue eyes look away – Harriet always looked away when she was thinking – the angular jaw and cheekbones, the soft, blowy, nondescript hair, the skittish, shy, serious and determined-to-be-less-so manner of a writer-in-trouble who looked, thought Dinah, like Paula Prentiss on a bad day.

“She’s coming in January. She says she wants to move here, though she’s probably just trying to scare us.”

“Then she’s not mad at you.”

“She’s going to tear me limb from limb.”

It wasn’t my fault, thought Harriet, that Leah climbed into bed with me.

But it
was
her fault that she had written about it. You betrayed me, Leah said on the phone after the book came out. I trusted you and you betrayed me. You don’t understand a thing about being old and lonely.

Oh, drop dead, thought Harriet after she hung up.

But then, on a Friday night a few weeks ago, in an old Frank Sinatra movie called
Robin and the Seven Hoods
, she saw a character, a fleshy man who drank cocoa out of a teacup, who reminded her physically of Leah, the fleshy face and smile, the fleshy wiliness and hurt. And it was his image more than Leah’s actual call that upset her. Aunt Leah, her father’s sister who ran away to Hollywood and married a famous man.

A
grey-and-black hat sailed past Harriet’s head. She stooped to pick it up and recognized it as the second one they had bought for Kenny in as many months. When she turned around she saw him – red-faced and braking at the sight of her – tall and skinny, hair in need of a cut, pants that were too short, and no mittens. He came up to her, took the hat, and said quietly, “Thanks.”

“Where are your mittens?”

He reached inside his coat into one of the deep inner pockets that were among the greatest joys of his life and pulled out lined leather mittens, inherited from his dad. Then, “Bye,” he said, and ran to join the other boys, some of whom were huge and others quite small in the varied way of adolescence, but none of whom looked at her. She thought, Did they take his hat and throw
it, making mean sport of him? It was his first year at this school.

Kenny caught sight of her looking with concern, and turned his back. He wanted her to move on, and she did.

Into her mind as she walked to the fruit store came sad-eyed Buster Keaton, who wore the clothes of an old man “and always felt old,” even when he was a boy. And no wonder. By all accounts his dad was a lout and their vaudeville routines were extraordinarily violent, starring Buster the human mop. As a grown man he hated quarrelling of any sort, at the first sign of conflict muttering, “No debates, no debates …” She hadn’t been able to get his films in Ottawa, apart from
The General
. Yet on the strength of Pauline’s capsule reviews, she felt she almost knew him. That morning she had looked up every entry under his name. Then her eye kept going, from movie to movie, and an hour had passed before she’d raised her head. It was like eating chocolates on a treadmill.
You’re very tough. I have to hear pleasant and unpleasant things about my favourite actors. In general, though, we like the same ones and some of your phrases I know by heart: Cary Grant’s “hooded eyes,” Sean Connery’s “virile manner.”

In the afternoon, when Kenny got home, she asked him how school went and he gave her his customary high-pitched
great?
Then he brushed aside any farther questions. But at least she managed to pin him down on the matter of his haircut.

“You have hair like Harold Ross,” she said, getting him to sit on a stool with a raincoat over his shoulders.

“What movie was he in?”

“He wasn’t. He was a famous editor at
The New Yorker
. Ina Claire, the actress who married John Gilbert after Garbo ditched him – I’m talking about the 1920s – Ina Claire said she wanted to take off her shoes and walk barefoot through his hair. Everybody
thinks Dorothy Parker said that, but it was Ina Claire. His hair stood straight up.”

“Ouch!”

“Like yours. I want your hair.”

“And my brains.”

He squirmed and complained so vigorously that out of desperation she began to ask him questions. “What’s the funniest movie of all time?”

“The Life of Brian,”
he answered promptly. “Keep going. I like this. Ask me what’s the saddest movie.” Suddenly he was perfectly intent and still.

“What’s the saddest movie?”

“The movie that overall depressed me was
My Life as a Dog
. That’s my favourite foreign film. Saddest ending?
Cinema Paradiso
. Poor Alfredo. It isn’t the best movie but the ending was so sad I cried.”

For once movies and movie talk were serving a practical purpose. She was cutting his hair rapidly now. “What was the ending?”

“You don’t remember?” He was incredulous.

Jane sang out from the living room, “
West Side Story’s
a pretty sad movie.” By this time she was home too.

Kenny said, “When he put together all the kisses he had to censor from the movies.”

“I remember. Well, I always thought Alfredo was just a vehicle for a lousy filmmaker’s vanity and sentimentality. What’s the most romantic movie?”

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,”
he said. “And
The Russia House
. That’s a thinking person’s spy movie.” Competitive and serious, and not to be derailed by his mother’s bad taste.

From the other room Jane said, “Do you mean erotic or true love?” This was the girl who, at the age of three, saw Marilyn Monroe in
Some Like it Hot
and said, “I’m her.”

“Romance,” yelled Kenny, and Jane came into the kitchen, furrowing her brow and asking herself, “Which movies had a lot of chemistry in them?”

Kenny said, “Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in
Woman of the Year.”

“You think Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy had chemistry?” Utter disbelief from the big sister.

“Oh yeah. Sparks flew.
Casablanca’s
pretty romantic too.”

“Let me think!” said Jane.

“Ask me the best musical,” said Kenny.

“Go,” said his mom.

“The one with the best songs is
Fiddler on the Roof but
the one with the best dancing is
West Side Story.”

Jane snorted. “You’re crazy. The best musical is
Singin’ in the Rain.”
And she wouldn’t hear otherwise. But then she had always known her own mind: sitting self-contained and erect at a friend’s dinner table, after all the other children had run down to the basement, chewing the steak she didn’t get at home. And this at the age of eight.

“Scariest movie?” asked Harriet.

“Most suspenseful movie,” he corrected her. “That has to be
Charade.”

“Movie with the worst ending?”

“The Lady Vanishes
. I hated that ending. Everything was so good, the way Hitchcock set it up, and then he ruined it at the end.”

“Movie with the best beginning?”

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,”
he said, giving her a look, since that’s what she herself had said only days before. Then, “Or
Get Shorty
. I love that beginning, when he puts on his gloves and knocks on the door and punches Ray Barboni in the nose.”

Harriet was sweeping up Kenny’s hair and remembering Lew’s lament the last time he saw these beautiful, almost coppery locks spread across the floor. But now Kenny wouldn’t leave. “Ask me another one. Ask me the best baseball movie.”