Our Town (6 page)

THEY ARRIVED AT
the restaurant and left their Jaguar—Dale’s Jaguar, hunter green with a pale, sand interior—with the valet. Sorry, Dale left it with the valet. Talk about self-importance. Narcissism. Grandiosity. Sheesh. They left the car and walked inside and looked around. Dale signed an autograph for an overweight young woman. Believe it or not, moments like this actually hurt his confidence—his insides spoke to him, fanned him, only if, and when, his fans were actually pretty. Dorothy had become known as “budding star Dale Kelly’s side dish”—sorry girls, he’s married—but she was comfortable in this role. She liked being in the background. The set. The decoration. She liked being the scaffolding that held up Dale Kelly and made him whole. And he liked it, too. For her, that is. He smiled for the camera, and as bulbs cracked and flashed in his eyes he felt alive. This was, in reality, what made his foundation strong. This was his scaffolding. And he’d chase it, and build it, as tall and high as he could, until his days were ultimately numbered, until his book was finally read.

DOROTHY WASN’T
HAPPY when she received her food. She was hungry. They made friends with the maître d’ once Dale slipped him a twenty for the table by the fireplace. Do loved a fireplace. So warm. The maître d’ was an actor, too. He recognized them. Both of them, which wasn’t usual. Dale from TV, he told them. Dorothy because she sometimes came around when Dale was busy shooting. As they finished their appetizers—a cheese plate and charcuterie, with pickled vegetables, olives in a walnut vinaigrette, and garlic shrimp in a sizzling skillet—the maître d’ came back and carried two small envelopes—folded in half and both reading
Preferred Customer
—in his ringed fingers. He removed the plate before Dale and replaced it with one of the envelopes.

“Spread this on a roll,” he said. Then he took Dorothy’s food, as well, and placed her letter in her little fingers. “And enjoy this with your pasta. It’ll pair well with the Bolognese.” And he clasped his hands
together. “Enjoy,” he said and curtsied, long-necked like a swan. “We appreciate your business so.”

So Dale ate his pot butter on a rosemary seed roll and Dorothy swallowed her mushrooms with a forkful of spaghetti. Dorothy’s mushrooms were bitter as she chewed them but she felt their effects fast and smiled the rest of the night through. Dale’s butter, though, was hard to get down—earthy. Gamey—and he didn’t feel it hardly at all. He couldn’t feel anything, he thought. Just fat from eating bread. And butter. He’d spend the rest of the dinner trying to swish the taste from his mouth. That made it hard to enjoy his steak. And Dorothy’s big grinning didn’t help much either.

DOROTHY DIDN’T USUALLY
enjoy dancing. She thought of herself too outside of herself, and then she imagined she looked stupid, usually. That’s what Dale figured, anyway. That’s why she never danced. It must be. But once they arrived home—oh, they lived in Topanga now, briefly, Dale complaining that Dorothy was getting too much sun and looking leathery. Dale also moved when he began to feel unsettled, overwhelmed. This is called a geographic. A series of starting over by which, you hope, the freshness of your new reality will displace your shame and your past and the fear of your present and your reluctance to look into the future. Dorothy, though, hadn’t yet noticed this pattern, distracted by the shininess of all her new things. And, anyway, right now, she could only think of dancing. That’s all she wanted to do. She slid open their glass sliding door and pushed past the screen and started spinning on the patio. The patio floor—gray-slate tiles, still hot from the daytime sun on the bottoms of her feet. She’d already taken her shoes off. She danced with the standing parasols, their umbrella heads still opened from afternoon sunning, now providing temporary reprieve from the moon’s unwavering eye. She spun from one pole to another—swinging from the grounded white aluminum like Tarzan to a vine—before she twisted off the patio and into the yard—short grass, slightly unkempt, a lemon tree, planted by previous owners, and a few corner cactuses. But pretty, still. Right now, anyway.
Dorothy certainly made it look pretty. She opened her eyes momentarily, so as not to fall—she’d stepped on something sliding under her, and her eyes were open enough to see a salamander glide away, hidden almost immediately by a few brown shards of grass. She held her lids open long enough to whisper, “Bruce. Master Bruce,” while he was still in her presence, but then she went back to pirouetting. She put her hands up and her hands down and spun, more and more. Quicker each rotation. She grabbed her skirt and pulled on it. “Dance with me, baby,” she yelled at Dale with her eyes closed as she bounced her head from shoulder to shoulder. “Come on, baby. Please?” She kept her eyes closed. “I love you more than the earth, the moon, the sun, and the stars,” she opened them now, but not to look out, just to flutter her lashes.

“No. I can’t,” Dale answered. He’d followed her out and sat on a lawn chair. “You look too happy. I’ll just screw it up.”

She kept spinning. A top. “Suit yourself,” she whispered with her eyes closed, and she kept on dancing more. She danced like it was just her instincts. Like she was happy—actually happy—and she didn’t care that people saw. Even if it was just Dale. Even with him she usually seemed self-conscious. But not now. I guess that’s what mushrooms are, Dale thought. It just makes you who you wanna be. Not like pot butter. That just made me feel fat. And then hungry. So then I ate more. So then more fat.

“
I CAN’T FIND
my necklace,” Dorothy said as she shook Dale awake. He usually woke before her. But not today. He was up late forcing himself to throw up.

“What do you mean? It fell off?” he answered, pulling sleep from the corner of his eye.

“I guess.” She grabbed at her neck, but nothing. “I don’t know.”

“All right, well.” Dale strained forward then pulled the covers off and got up. He pulled jeans on without underwear. But it was hot so no shirt. “Let’s look in the bed. Start there.”

It wasn’t in the bed.

“Do you think it fell off last night?” Dale asked from his knees, checking under the frame.

“Maybe,” she sniffled. “Yeah, maybe.” She tapped at her neck as though she still might find it dangling against her rib cage. She pulled at her blouse between her breasts. It was a long chain, the kind you could take off without unclasping. It must have just fallen off.

Dale walked to the glass deck door and unlocked it and pulled it open. A car drove through the canyon down the street.

“How you feeling today?” Dale smiled a smug smile.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he slid open the screen. “Aren’t mushrooms supposed to give you a bad hangover?”

“Oh, please. I hardly took any.”

“Really?” Surprised. “It didn’t seem that way. The way you were acting, I mean.”

Dale looked under the folding deck table—a turned-up ashtray. A flip-flop. A deck of cards—then under the hammock.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said and stepped onto the grass, cool on his feet, not from the air but from the sprinklers. He didn’t answer awhile. And then, “You just seemed, like, really happy. Really happy to just be you.”

She was on her knees, crawling, searching in the grass for where it could’ve bounced off. She got up fast when she saw a snake hole. She breathed.

“I think I was just really happy. Actually, you know?” And she thought about what she’d just said. “Yeah. I loved my necklace. And dinner. I was just having fun,” she looked at him in a way she hadn’t in a while. Concerned. “Weren’t you?”

“Yeah. I was,” Dale replied, then looked back to the ground. “I just liked your dancing. I just really liked your dancing.”

DALE DIDN’T REALIZE
he’d never be able to forgive her. At the time, he pinned his anger on her losing the necklace, and it was this lack of care—this callous disregard for his feelings—that allowed his rage
to be justified. From this point forth, he looked back at this as the beginning of the end. How could she care about him—how could she care about anything—if she could lose something so important? What kind of priorities does she have? What in the world is wrong with her? How could she? Just how could she? From this point on, he began to look at her with a certain level of disdain, in that he began to ask what if?
This grass is always greener
, he’d propose, often aloud, attempting to feel better. He didn’t want to feel this way—he wanted to be happy. Happy where he was—but he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d settled. If too early he’d settled. He loved her—or he tried to—but once this thinking—this termite—began to gnaw at the wood of his brain—began to feed on his foundation—he was unable to beat it. He was a winner—he wanted to win—but perhaps this match was already over. Perhaps what they’d been through, as large or small as it seems, to us, was simply too much to bear. Because, how could she? Just how could she? And so it is from here, henceforth, that it isn’t fun anymore. And he began to choke on his own resentment. Resentment is like swallowing poison and expecting someone else to die. And Dale’s particular poison is aged Scotch, and it seems to have gone down the wrong pipe. And now he chokes, and he chokes, until he’s finally forced to spit.

PAPICHULO

B
ut now it’s 1965. The kids are young but getting older. Things are rather prickly. Things are rather thorny. As their son and daughter grow, Dale and Dorothy began to enjoy themselves differently. I mean, if at all, really. Dale seemed rather perpetually annoyed. Dorothy tried as hard as she could to please him, but Dale begrudged her nonetheless. He felt as though she was taking his youth away. Like she was stealing from him. How could she? And almost every opinion she expressed he viewed as disrespectful. And so the space between them grew and grew. You could measure it with a yardstick. Eventually a first down. And they’d moved again. As Dale’s career began truly to bloom—movie offers and the like—he wanted to be closer to the studios. So they moved to Encino: 17801 Santa Rita Street, Encino, California 91316. Just off Ventura. Sometimes, though, when Dale looked at Dorothy, and he saw her shine, he wanted to be with her again, even though that feeling was fleeting. When he saw her glimmer, though, he sometimes attempted romance. He wouldn’t usually bring her places. In his eyes, she’d already begun to decompose, like a corpse would—moments away from rigor mortis. But today she looked shiny. They’d be dead, but then alive again. Alive again all over. But that didn’t usually last long. Until he fucked another hostess, say. But tonight they’d attend a movie premiere. And then the after-party, too.

*
  
*
  
*

Dorothy got ready by the mirror in the master bedroom. The house in Encino—meant to provide a dichotomy to the lush nature of the lot—was modern. Simplicity—bare—and materials meeting at ninety-degree angles abounded. It was colder than before. It was different. Dorothy didn’t want to move. She preferred antique. Something with character. But Dale liked this. It cost more. She’d at least promised herself she’d always, no matter what, have a vanity mirror. A vanity mirror was essential to her as a woman. Essential to womankind.

She applied makeup in front of the bright-white round bulbs, patting a squarish yellow sponge across her forehead, from temple to temple ’til she reached her hairline. Foundation first. Coolly tinted, powder based. Only one thin layer. Otherwise she might break out. Then concealer. And mascara. Dark mascara. The more the better. Persian eyes. With a smoky finish. Like Cleopatra. Liz Taylor. She’d make a statement tonight. This was her chance. Maybe her last one. She’d have to be beautiful. She needed to pop, like the light in a chiaroscuro. So bronzer. And a tight pink lip line, just above the upper lip, which she’d recently gotten fattened. Her lower was full enough. As she finished, she stopped and rested her sponge and compact on the counter to the right of the sink. She looked her reflection up and down in the artificial light. She still had a towel on her head, cream-colored and wrapped up like vanilla soft-serve ice cream. A towel on her head and a towel on her body, nails done, toes done, and a face on—finally a face on. She opened a small drawer with a white handle and found her pillbox—an overused cigar tin that read
Red Cloud—high grade, handmade
—and featured an Indian, smoking, in traditional Confederate garb as he sat on a mare on a beach by the dunes.

When Dorothy first moved to Los Angeles, she was told she was too heavy to compete with the other girls. Thin is in. That’s what they told her. Always is, always will be, they said. You can always be thinner. So they sent her to doctors who gave her things to lose weight, and when those things kept her up at night, they gave her
other things to put her to bed. Then things for if she was anxious, and others for after a long day. Things for going out, and others for staying in. Things for if she felt like crying. Things for if she became frightened, and others for if she felt lost. Things, and more things. Every type of thing. They were all different colors, but, outside of baby blues—which were only for sleeping!—it didn’t matter much. They all helped. She picked up a varied and wide-ranged assortment. She closed her eyes and swallowed the handful without water. She didn’t need water anymore. Then she opened her eyes. Now soon she’d be pretty.