Live a Little (24 page)

“So don’t go.”

“It’s just . . . part of me wants to go.”
Because I’m finally a

successful artist. And wear a not-too-sausagey size ten. And have two great kids. And a regular newspaper column. And my own online stalker. And am in negotiations to launch my own TV show aimed at homemakers thirty-five to fifty who have sex with their husbands twice a month and make their own low-glycemic preserves.

“So go,” Sue says.

“You’re so helpful. Your advice is so incisive. Maybe you should replace Dear Abby.”

“Something tells me Dear Abby wouldn’t let herself get knocked up at forty-two and a half.”

“Something tells me Dear Abby hasn’t gotten laid since 1935.” I chew the rim of my nail off. It has white spots on it. I dredge up a memory of a magazine article that mentioned white fingernail spots as a symptom of some heinous disease. Cancer?

“Did you tell him yet?” I ask her.

Sue sighs, a long, earthy exhalation that speaks volumes about her reluctance to talk to Arlo. “We’re going out to dinner Saturday. I got a sitter. We’re going somewhere busy and bright so he can’t freak out on me. I’m going to tell him over dessert.”

“Arlo’s going to be there for you, Sue. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, and cocoa butter prevents stretch marks,” she says.

CHAPTER 18

Go Jump In a River

Fifteen stories below, the water churns itself into angry hillocks, the tips peaked like frothy meringues. The river looks black and cold and slightly oily, cut with iridescent puddles of sage and purple that shouldn’t be there. On the left-hand bank stands a thicket of fans. At the moment most of them are silent or murmuring softly to one another in their puffy parkas, their frivolity tamped by dread.

“Remind me why we’re doing this?” I try to sound jokey. Below, an ambulance pulls up. A medic gets out, wrestling with one of those wheeled stretchers, as if death is a foregone conclusion.

Laurie smiles tightly and glances back at the coterie of producers and lackeys who are charging around in a dither, trying to look preoccupied and important. I can only imagine the tactics discussed at the pre-event strategy meeting:
So, it’s pretty straightforward: Lauren and Mrs. Rose are going to leap off the bridge into space and hurtle toward the icy water at sixty miles per hour. Camera one—if Lauren is unable to maintain eye contact through the apex, then cut to camera two. And for God’s sake, shoot her from the side. We don’t want a repeat of the chunky-thighs incident. Now, I want the background music to kick in just as Raquel’s screams crescendo.

No, don’t worry about which side you shoot her from, just make sure somebody brings the heavy powder for her T-zone.

I spy Cleo and Jonesie behind the barrier and give them a thumbs-up. Shiny Pony stands off to the side, alone with her trusty clipboard, eyes glistening behind her standard-issue rectangular hipster glasses. I’m sure if something horrible happens—if Laurie’s cable snaps and she plummets into the rock-strewn river, floating away like a broken doll—Shiny will plod onward in Laurie’s memory. I can see her wielding the microphone—with its untouched commemorative Laurie lipstick marks—like a consummate professional, ascending the dais with the hushed reverence my sister deserves.

“Can’t we just use stunt doubles, like on TV?”
Where’s my Chardonnay now, Shiny twit?

“That wouldn’t inspire people, would it?” Laurie leans over and allows a slightly homelier Shiny clone to clip a small microphone to her chest. “Just remember, we’re doing it for a good cause. I think pledges hit two hundred and fifty thousand dollars this morning. It’s a show record. And it’s all going to the Bay Area Breast Cancer Alliance.” We are into round two of our ongoing BC fund-raising effort.

“What if something goes wrong?” I mutter.

We interrupt this programming to inform you that the celebrated Schultz sisters, TV host Lauren White and artist and breast-cancer activist Raquel Rose, died today from multiple injuries sustained in a bungee-jumping accident. The sisters, who attended Bella Sierra High School in Santa Clara, though only Lauren served on the cheerleading squad, are survived by their mother, Ma; their stepfather and family asshole, Eliot Abramson of Abramson Integrated Foods; their husbands, renowned plastic surgeon and hottie Ren White and cheating Ph.D. dropout Phil Rose; Mr. Rose’s mistress, Hilary Swank butt double and Botox addict Tate Trimble; and Mrs. Rose’s children, number one and number two. Bob “Iceman” Gundershmoover of Grungy Bungee attributes the tragic accident to human error. “We calibrated their jump cords to the women’s weights,” he told us from his office in Dixon’s Smitty’s Bar. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Rose underreported her total body mass by an estimated forty-five pounds, causing catastrophic equipment failure. It’s the saddest day for us here at Grungy. Our deepest condolences go out to the women’s families and Mrs. Rose’s creditors . . .”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Laurie tells me. “Don’t be negative.”

Before I can retort that somebody has to be negative to balance out her excessive optimism, the bungee guy, a scrawny fellow whose John Deere cap and grease-grooved knuckles convey the impression of a moonlighting farmer, gives our harnesses a final once-over and goes over procedures with us again. Laurie asks smart questions while smiling gamely for the cameras. She looks good in her gray jumpsuit, sexy and vaguely scientific, like Laura Dern in
Jurassic Park.
Due to the unfortunate combination of larger proportions and surplus bronzer, I, on the other hand, resemble a beefy Latino sanitation engineer. I twine my legs together and try not to pee through my panty liner, an accessory I cannot seem to do without since the last baby popped out in 1989.

“Great,” says Bungee Farmer. “Let’s rock and roll!”

He leads us to the edge of the bridge. Cameras one and two follow us. I pray for two things: one, that the cables do indeed hold; and two, that I, too, benefit from the kindness of diagonal shooting. If a misdirected camera could make my sister’s Gabrielle Reece legs look chunky, mine could be declared an endangered tree species under the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act.

Laurie steps out onto the diving platform. My sister closes her eyes and whispers something in Mandarin. That and the wind ruffling her honey mane with cinematic precision cause the paparazzi to go into a feeding frenzy. She extends her hand to me. Like everything else about Laurie, her manicure is perfect: short, pale pink, and classy. I grasp her hand and feel my ass draw involuntarily back toward land, issuing my own prayer—for a well-timed natural disaster or fan heart attack that requires an immediate cessation of this endeavor.

Laurie leans forward with smile intact. “Quel, come on! We have to jump
now.
”

“I think I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just, you know, watch you do—”

Before I finish my thought, I am hurtling toward the water. I don’t know if Laurie pulled me off the ledge for ratings or if I tried to run and tripped. What I do know is that somebody’s going to have to pay to put my internal organs back in their rightful spots, and it’s not going to be me.

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” I think I yell. The world around me is a kaleidoscope of sound and light. I am vaguely conscious of my feet flying above my head, the wrong place for them, in my humble opinion.

Just before my face smashes into the water, a giant hand yanks me back, and I shoot upward. To my horror, a thin stream of vomit flies out of my mouth before I even decide I’m nauseated. Next to me, Laurie is a dark blob with Goldilocks hair, shooting upward like a human javelin. After repeating this exercise five, six, a hundred times, we settle at the bottom, swinging gently over the river, which smells earthy and moist, like the rabbit-pellet-sprinkled mud pies we used to make when we were kids.

“Smile!” Laurie says. “Over there. Look over there!” Being upside down doesn’t prevent her from waving cheerfully at her onshore fans. Except for a hint of voluminous bedhead and an excited flush in her cheeks, Laurie looks completely

normal. I am sure the same cannot be said for me.

I am about to issue a retort when the bridge breaks.

No fucking shit, people. One minute we’re rocking like babies on the bough; the next, a slashing groan emanates from the bridge pillar we’re attached to, and we drop precipitously closer to the seething current.

Several things occur in quick succession. A couple of people scream. Bungee Bob starts yelling orders at people. Shiny Pony keens out something that sounds like “Nooooo!” The medic plunges into the river, managing to drop his emergency kit, which bobs once, then twice, before disappearing into a froth of rapids. Defeated handily by Mother Nature, he staggers back to shore, leaving us without a clear savior.

“Oh my God!” Laurie yells.

“Are we still supposed to smile?” Ever the quipper.

The plank of metal holding us up creaks down another foot. Being taller, I hit the water first. The icy cold kisses my forehead, ruining my spiky gelled bangs, which have just grown long enough to style. I have to hunch upward in a curl to keep from going under. All I can say is, I hope I have the abs to show for it when they cut us down.

“Oh my God,” Laurie says again, this time a little more plaintively, as if the Supreme Being she is imploring is no longer an intimate.

“We are so fucked. I can’t believe this,” I manage to grunt as I count off the equivalent of my hundredth crunch.

“They’ll get us down in a minute. See? Bob’s on it. I know he’s on it. That’s him on the bridge, right?” Laurie attempts to peer upward at the monstrous jumble of creaking metal from which we are swinging. Bob can actually be seen quite clearly at the top. In a mysterious manifestation of riverside acoustics, we hear him say, “Whaddaya mean they ain’t got a crane?”

This development causes Laurie to change her Pollyanna tune. “God, what an idiot! This is outrageous! The station’s going to sue Bob’s ass!”

The supporting beam busts down another notch. In a flash, regrets pour through my mind, paramount among them that I’ll never get to secure proper birth control for Taylor, meet my grandchildren, or sit astride Viggo Mortensen in an abandoned grain elevator.

“This reminds me of
The Crucible,
” I say as we dangle. “Don’t you think? We’re being punished for not knowing our place. I’m Winona Ryder and you’re Joan Allen. She was the judgmental one,” I add unnecessarily.

“Raquel.”

“Yeah?” My abs are really hurting now, and I don’t think I can hold myself in the air much longer.

“You have to tell me something.”

I turn to look at Laurie, inadvertently working my right oblique, which issues a loud shriek in protest. “What?”

“Did you ever sleep with Ren?”

In the distance, sirens pierce the air. From this unique position, I am able to see that a chunk of vomit is clinging to my shoulder harness. Damn.

“Raquel! Did you? Please, I have to. . . I just need to know.” Laurie, a begging novice, sounds eloquent and human, good at it just as she is everything else.

“Uh . . .” I swipe at the vomit. It smears.

“Quel, we could die here. I can deal with it if it happened, if you and Ren were together that way. I’ve
been
working on it. I know it was a long time ago. But I just need to know the truth. I think it would be better for all of us. I’m sure—my therapist is sure—that we’ll all feel better afterward. Just tell me what happened, okay?”

It would be simple if I could just say yes. Part of me wants to say yes (yeah, that part). The truth is substantially more embarrassing. The truth—honest to God—is that I don’t know if I slept with my brother-in-law. Officially. Perhaps he doesn’t, either. Maybe that’s why, as we dangle from a bridge, Laurie is asking me instead of tying Ren to a chair at home and threatening his elegant surgeon’s hands with a claw hammer.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Set the scene. College. Southern California. Early eighties.

The summer of 1982 is giving in to the approaching fall, crisp green leaves slowly crinkling into papery oranges and reds. Like most college campuses, U.C. Santa Barbara pales into an off-season version of itself during summer session, students sprinkling the vast lawns and cavernous lecture halls like ghosts.

Rachel Schultz is nineteen years old. She is taking two classes, Physiology 10 and Rhetoric 1B, both to satisfy general education requirements. Although she has found a social niche with a ragtag group of friends from the dorm (Sue) and class (tattooed, bodacious Tawny Schuessler, who later marries an astonishing series of four minor rock stars), Rachel doesn’t want her college experience to spill toward the now standard five years. She has a feeling her life won’t begin in earnest until she is living in the city on her own, sculpting. She has a feeling of her life being on hold. Also, the job she planned on at a gallery in San Francisco fell through, and she couldn’t imagine herself spending the summer at home in Santa Clara, being dragged around to high school senior Laurie’s preseason cheerleading practice or track meets, arguing with Ma about whether frozen yogurt was or wasn’t fattening, helping Dad mow the lawn down to pristine lushness. So she enrolled in summer school. And got a cashier gig at the Meat Shanty, where she had to sling burgers only when both Octavio and Martin, the cooks, had the night off.