She Matters (32 page)

When her father played concerts in New York, she took us to see him. “He's sold out Carnegie Hall. Isaac Stern is coming.” She'd sit between us and squeeze my hand so I couldn't let go, tears on her face as he played “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Summertime.” I watched her. Although she hardly mentioned him when he wasn't in town, she was overcome during the performances. “Isn't Daddy the most extraordinary musician in the world? Gershwin wrote for him, you know.” Our grandfather still lived in London, married to a different wife. They had a daughter born in 1966, one year after me. This fascinated me, that I was older than my own aunt, although I only met her once or twice and don't remember visiting his flat. In New York, he didn't stay at our apartment, didn't take us out to dinner. Shyly we talked to him backstage and stood at attention for his renowned comic anecdotes. He gave me and Penelope tiny harmonicas, his autograph etched on the top. On the way home our mother told us he'd had them made for us.

Patsy lived in New York at the Osborne. She was also married again. “He's the love of her life,” my mother said, though she didn't get on with her stepfather, who disapproved of her behavior. “Oh,
fuck
off!” she'd yell when they fought. Patsy took us to Bonwit's for velvet party dresses and Mary Janes, to Broadway musicals. She was proud of her own applause. “I can clap louder than anyone else!” I loved her fur coat. “I don't feel the wind at all,” she'd say as we waited for her town car after the performance. “I could leave this to you in my will, if you like it. Although I think Penelope wants it.” When she and her husband bought their flat in London, an entire floor of a former embassy, we went. Our mother bought us matching hats at Biba. The chauffeur took me and Penelope to Hyde Park. My grandmother and her husband bought an apartment in Monte Carlo. We went. “Stand on the balcony, darlings. You can look right down on the route of the Grand Prix.” Patsy took us to the Ballets Russes and for dinner to the Hotel de Paris on the Place du Casino. “Won't they even try a taste of caviar?” she'd ask my mother fretfully.

• • •

My mother visited John Cheever where he was “drying out.” We knew the family. My mother taught reading to inmates at Sing Sing, and she gave some of them our phone number “to cheer them up.” When we went to the movies she always knew somebody in the credits, people she'd grown up with or known in England. As the movie started, she'd give a satisfied laugh and then say, “Old Jenny!” or “Caw! It's Richard!”

My mother said, “Children, this is a detective with the narcotics division of the New York Police Department. Remember yesterday, the brown paper bag from the Optimo, all those little blue pills that spilled out? I had to involve the police. Imagine what could have happened had Penelope eaten them—you thought they were candy, didn't you?—she'd have died! This man is going to help us arrest the drug dealers.”

She dated a New York Giants quarterback. “You should see the way he's battered from the game,” she told us. “Every inch of him.” We asked him to show us scars, and he did. A director, a writer from
The New Yorker,
a big executive at the BBC, the head of a
Times
desk. A Broadway actor appeared from under her covers as we brought in coffee one morning. One of her men made documentaries, heir to the something fortune; another one ghostwrote political memoirs. “If anyone knew the truth about Kissinger!” At a party at our house, a TV actor wandered into my room and saw my prized photograph of Farrah Fawcett, black-and-white and unpublished, a present from the photographer boyfriend, the one who did the
top
magazine covers. The actor said, “I'm doing a movie with her. I could get you her autograph.” When the oversized envelope came, I pulled out my picture. Farrah had written in immense ballpoint loops, “Susy, Can't wait to meet you!” I believed her.

• • •

My mother needed painkillers. It was because of that mean boy at her boarding school, she always said. He pulled the chair out from under her as she was sitting down, and she landed on her tailbone, and that was that, the reason she had slipped disks, the reason she had to have back surgeries. “Blame him,” she said. “And that's why you must never play that joke, not ever. Look what can happen.” She pointed out that I had the same tailbone as she did, an extra long one. “Your coccyx,” she said. “Right here.” I was at risk, too.

She lay in bed. “Don't bump the bed,” she warned as we entered her room. Don't bump the bed. Don't bump the bed. While we told her about school, sometimes her face contorted, and we had to stop talking. Then she'd say, “I'm all right, just a spasm.” I was shocked the first time I heard someone else use “spasm,” her frequent word. She went to the hospital. She came back with narcotics. “If the pain weren't so bad I wouldn't have to take so much,” she said. With a needle she sucked the clear liquid out of a glass vial into the body of the syringe and showed me how she'd been taught to give herself injections. “This way we don't need to hire an expensive nurse.” She was proud she could do it. “In spite of my fear of needles,” she said.

The household adapted. I was ten and got used to her bottomless sleeps, the uncapped needles in her washbag, the tiny bottles of Demerol lined up on the black glass shelf in her bathroom. I felt sort of friendly toward them, little soldiers helping her fight off pain.

One day from the kitchen I heard a faint, thin name, over and over. My name, or something like it. I went to her, and she lay naked on her side, her hips oddly raised, arms extended.

“Sh-shwip-sh-sh,” she whispered.

I came nearer and saw the syringe planted in her thigh. “What? Can you say it again?”

With great effort she pointed to the needle. “I need—need— push it in.” Her eyes rolled up. “You. Push.” I couldn't. Then I grabbed the syringe and used my thumb to press down the plunger. Her body didn't resist. Almost immediately she opened her eyes. “Thank you, darling.”

One morning she wafted into the kitchen, the nightgown a sliver on her. Her hands reached for the table. I was deciding about breakfast in front of the open fridge.

“Hi,” I said. It was a giddy surprise to see her upright, to have her come in, but I didn't want to make a fuss in case that sent her back to bed. I just wanted her to stay. I could feed her. “I told Penelope to get dressed,” I said, school mornings my responsibility. My mother stood next to me, the fridge casting light on her nightgown. The two of us looked at the shelves, sharing a concern. We were out of milk.

“Well, there isn't much,” I said. “There's Jell-O. I made it last night. You just pour boiling water in. The mandarin oranges sank to the bottom, though. How about Jell-O for breakfast?” I wanted to make her laugh. She made up voices for turned-down TV commercials, and I hoped never to be sent to bed, never to stop laughing like that. I wanted to be funny the way she was.

I pulled out the platter and started to jiggle the green mound. “
Jell-O for breakfast,
” I sang. I held the plate up to her face, making the Jell-O dance. Her eyes fixed on it. She started to quiver and jiggle, too. I thought she was playing, and I was still laughing when I realized something was not right. Her jiggling was not like the Jell-O's. Violent convulsions shot down her body, and as I watched her I couldn't stop shaking the Jell-O, unable to break the live current between me, her and the plate. She sputtered for a few steps until she seized. Then she dropped, and I let the plate drop, too.

Her tongue was swelling where her teeth had snapped together, and blood pooled in her mouth and ran down her chin. I wiped the floor with a paper towel and her chin with my hand, listening for my sister's approach. I didn't want her to see our mother with her face slack or smell the dead smell of her breath. This was our intimacy, me so necessary.

“Get up, get up, get up,” I said, and forced her to answer me. I'd done that before, other times she'd passed out. She focused her eyes and gripped my arm as I stood her up. “Go get into bed,” I said, and made sure she went. She limped across the living room.

“I'm sorry, Sue,” she said.

“It's okay,” I said, but I was afraid. Her pain ruled us. “Don't be scared,” I told Penelope. “She'll be okay.” We were late to school. My hand still vibrated. When I looked at it, the scene replayed. If only I hadn't. My teacher asked if I was okay, and I said no, my mummy's sick. I pictured a caricature of the plate, the frantic shoving, my grotesque hand, and I didn't say more. I didn't want to surrender my crucial knowledge of crisis, and I was on top of it.

Throughout the day, each time memory roused the image, the picture grew stranger and uglier. When school ended I hurried Penelope to the subway entrance. We'd be home soon. Our mother would be in her bed, safe under blankets. If she was awake I'd bring her coffee.

I listened for her voice as we unlocked our big door and swung it open. We left our coats on the antique chair in the hall. We wanted that sound, her voice like a bird caught in the apartment, bright, wings beating. She was on the phone, and we stood in her doorway and waved, and she waved and put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Your father,” and kept chatting. Things were okay. She needed nothing from me. Penelope and I settled in the brown love seat with frozen yogurt bars and tried not to shed chocolate on our clothes as we watched
The Partridge Family.

• • •

She could pull herself together. And she was very beautiful. Everyone said that.

In restaurants. In airports. On Madison Avenue. At Sotheby auctions. During her marriage to Colin she developed the habit of attending the big sales, and I went with her sometimes and sat straight and solemn on the chair, listening to the murmur of faintly English voices, to the approving hum as a painting or sculpture sold. She'd write the prices down feverishly in the catalog. Sotheby Parke Bernet.
The
auction house. We scoffed at Christie's. We often ate at Les Pleiades, where a lot of Sotheby's people went. She hugged and kissed the maître d' after we'd given our coats to the coat check girl.

Patsy and her husband had a house in Barbados, and we went several times a year. Everyone remembered Daphne. At Christmas, the boys from Monty Python were staying at the next beach. Mick was at a party, and I danced near him. “Star-fucker,” my mother cooed in my ear. Claudette Colbert had us over “for luncheon.” “I think the old dyke wants me,” my mother said. Lauren Bacall came for dinner, and we called her Betty.

In Barbados my mother met the very famous lyricist. “
Everyone
has heard of him, and he isn't even
in
the band.” He was English, agreeable and unkempt with denim sleeves too long over his hands and his jean cuffs frayed over pretty shoes. The famous lyricist came back with us to New York. His cigarettes smelled of fake mint. “They're mentholated,” said my mother. “It hides the revolting odor.” It didn't, but I liked it. The sickly smoke made its way across my face as the famous lyricist tucked me in at night, telling me about his mother tucking him in, about his nearly ex-wife. He kissed me on the forehead and went to my mother in the living room, leaving his smell behind.

The famous lyricist rented a house in Barbados and invited the three of us for Easter. Our mother said we weren't to tell our grandmother. “She'd be hurt if she knew we were on the island and didn't call.”

“Here's your bedroom, girls, and he and I will sleep here.” She lowered her voice. “Although no one actually sleeps except you two, ha ha.”

We stayed ten days, and Penelope and I had new headbands and new bathing suits. We played backgammon, Penelope winning again and again. I was never certain of the houseguests. Band members wandered through. People appeared beside the pool. Someone might sit at the grand piano and plunge into an elaborate riff for a minute, then stop to sip his drink. The grand's glossy top was strewn with toffee wrappers, crumpled cigarette packets and the cellophane that my sister and I liked to peel off the Benson & Hedges boxes the way we peeled skin from our sunburned shoulders. Once, the lead singer dropped by, his rented house some distance away, and a couple of skinny women who'd been hanging out on the couch sat up taller, pulling at their macramé bikini tops. The adults were always quiet during the day. They were waiting for the coke to get there, wrapped in tiny packets called sno-seals, which were squares of slick paper cleverly folded to make a miniature envelope; or they were waiting for the hour when it would be time to leave for a party. Penelope and I stashed Cadbury Fruit and Nut bars, which got mealy in the heat. We collected the tortoiseshell guitar picks, scattered throughout the house, sorting them into who-gets-what on our twin beds. People left empty sno-seals in the pantry and the bathrooms, wings opened, on stucco ledges out by the cars. In the evening lots of formal settings appeared on the table, and the butler announced dinner. Penelope and I sat down amid empty water glasses and lined-up silver. My mother was so skinny and never ate but would sit with us sometimes. She wore halter dresses and Charles Jourdan high-heeled sandals with gold under the sole of her foot. She'd pluck a grilled cristofene from my plate, and the smell of her tea rose perfume overwhelmed the fragrance of the food.

One night my sister was whining for a present so the famous boyfriend unclasped his gold chain, slid off the chunky gold charm and handed it to her. He was wearing it in all the inner-sleeve photos. She closed her fingers so I couldn't see. “Can I have the chain, too?” she said. I wanted something but didn't want to ask. I wasn't a baby. He ruffled her hair and handed over the chain, and I fastened it around her neck.

Later she and I turned up in a song. My mother said, “There you are! In the song about me!” Our brief mention— “daughters”—came at the end, and we made our friends listen all the way through.