Ten Days in the Hills (66 page)

Isabel had a skeptical look on her face, but she had stopped humming.

“Of course, she was no dummy, and she knew the difference between Lena Horne and rock and roll. When some guys at my school asked me to be in a band in Miami, she let me, and she let me wear the Rasta locks and the tank top and everything, but, Isabel”—Zoe made sure that Isabel was looking her in the eye, which she was—“she sat in the audience every night, and when Terry McFadden, who had the van, took me home after a show, he was taking my mom home as well. Every single time. The guys thought it was a joke, but it was okay in a way, too, and, frankly, their own parents liked it, so I put up with it. Our life was not about rebelling, it was about making it. Always had been and always would be. And when we got to California and I met your dad, she orchestrated that, too.”

“So you’re telling me you were in purdah or something? You were the virgin sacrifice in an arranged marriage? Oh, please, Mom.”

Zoe refrained from rolling her eyes, which Paul said was a contemptuous and alienating gesture,
the
contemptuous and alienating gesture, probably even among chimps, and went on. “Why do you think of us as not working-class? Why do you think she didn’t put me to work doing what I could do best? The plan was never for me to have a childhood, Isabel, and then rebel and find myself and realize my inner nature—it was always to sing and dance instead of peel potatoes and weed the vegetable patch, and it was also to avoid the occasion of sin, because the big problem with having a baby if you are working-class is that you can’t keep working. Didn’t any of your economic-theory professors tell you about these things?” That was a good one, thought Zoe.

She leaned forward expressively, and Isabel, perhaps without realizing it, leaned backward. Zoe knew she could probably get out at this point, but she chose not to, as Paul would say. “Max fell in love with me. I knew that. I saw that he liked me and he was good-looking and important, but Mom said, ‘Zoe, he is very much taken with you.’ Do you think I loved him, or that I knew what love was, or that I was prepared in any way to reciprocate? I was used to doing what I was told, and usually what I was told to do was fun or rewarding. So I thought what I felt for Max was love, and then I got pregnant, and there you were, and I had a movie to be in while I was pregnant, and another movie to be in after you were born, so it seemed perfectly natural that you would be bottle-fed and that Delphine would do most of the baby care. She wanted to do it. It was easier for her to maintain your routine than for the two of us to pass you back and forth, and anyway, the doctor said that the most important thing was a stable routine. And
anyway,
and please pay attention to this, Isabel, for your grandmother, child-rearing was not about Mom and Dad and the baby in their little nest, it was about whoever has the time and the space to do it, does it. That’s the way they do it in Jamaica—”

“I’ve heard this excuse before,” said Isabel, in a sullen and dismissive tone of voice. “And I know most of this stuff.”

“What’s the difference between an excuse and a sequence of events?” said Zoe.

“An excuse lets you off the hook,” said Isabel.

“Even so, I think that, for once, you should hear about this ‘sequence of events’ from my point of view.”

Isabel did make a face, but she still didn’t move. Zoe stared at her. Her temper was beginning to spark again, even though while she had been relating this information it had soothed her and distracted her from thoughts of Marcelle. For a moment, she paused and did what Paul suggested, imagining dowsing, dripping—the coals and fugitive sparks and occasional explosion being hit by sprays of water. Finally, she said, “Here is what Max said to me. He said, ‘I want you no matter what happens.’ It was very romantic. I believed him. He was almost twice my age. I thought that all Mom’s hard work and mine was paying off at last. I thought it was the American dream.”

“Didn’t you want to be with me?”

Zoe took a deep breath and decided, after all these years, to be honest, because clearly she had nothing to lose. She said, “I didn’t know.”

“How could you not know?”

“How could I know? You were a six-and-a-half-pound baby; you scared me because you seemed so fragile, and then, when you were old enough to hold out your arms, you held them out to my mom. When I held you, you cried, and it seemed sort of natural that way. Now, you can go ahead and say that was my fault, and I’m sure it was, but it takes more courage than you think to be a mother, and when someone is always around, giving you an out, and the baby seems to prefer that person, well, you don’t really necessarily develop that courage. That’s my opinion. Think of it this way, Isabel: when I was your age, you were three and a half years old. You may not remember that you had a point of view, too, but you did, and your point of view was that I was not the preferred person, that I was not really the mom. And that was my point of view, too. Just giving birth didn’t actually make me feel like the mom. In my mind, your grandmother simply defined what a mom was, and she seemed to define what a mom was for you, too. I was that young. Now, you tell me, what could I have done about that?”

“You’re blaming a baby?”

Isabel could not really
have said what she thought of this story, because, unfortunately, she was too well educated in sympathizing with working-class women of color not to respond in spite of herself, but though she was accustomed to sympathizing with Delphine, it was novel to be sympathizing, even remotely, with Zoe. It was unfortunate, as well, that Zoe’s take on the whole thing was so believable that you could write a paper about it—“Working Girls: The Sociology of Female Stardom in the Hollywood Movie Industry, 1940–1990.” Still, she said, “You’re blaming a baby?”

Zoe looked exasperated now. She exclaimed, “I’m not blaming you, Isabel. I’m saying that you came into the world with a strong personality and that I was surrounded by strong personalities. Do you think I’m lying?”

Isabel resisted, but then she admitted, “No. But you have a strong personality.”

Zoe leaned back and then leaned forward again, which seemed to push Isabel back no matter how much she wanted to hold her ground. Zoe said, “Do I? I have no idea, actually. To me, it seems like I just do as I am told.”

In fact, Isabel could not have said exactly how or why she had entered into this conflict at this moment, in this place, on this day. An hour and a half ago, she would have said she was content with things, practically happy. She wanted to go back to her own bright fire-lookout of a room, and she was about to. She wanted to have a really good talk with her dad and actually work out what her next life-step was, and she was about to. Stoney and Simon, in their different ways, had been entertaining, and then—admittedly, stoned—she had slept well. When she woke up this morning, the Iraq war and global warming had actually seemed to be problems she could deal with. But she’d overheard Zoe in the hallway, tossing off that meaningless but intrusive and unwarranted remark, and then she’d been in the dining room and Zoe had come in with that self-satisfied look on her face.

Zoe said, “Anyway, you know she lost a baby when she was in Jamaica.”

“I know that.”

“So you can imagine that she was obsessed with safety.”

“I know that.”

“So she kept me absolutely safe.”

“I know that, too.”

“Well, then, when you came along, and you were premature, though pretty big and healthy, it was automatic for her to decide that my expertise and commitment to safety, at the age of nineteen and having had no real child-care responsibilities in my life, left something to be desired.”

“But you didn’t have to move out.” And now here she was, thought Isabel, saying this utterly obvious and mistaken thing; her line for years had been, Thank God she moved out and took her entourage with her! Just last night, she had remarked to Stoney that it was a shame they couldn’t stay here for a day or two without Zoe and Paul and Charlie and, yes, Simon, and even Elena (because, though she liked Elena well enough, Elena was incredibly, though subtly, ubiquitous). Even Cassie could go. Stoney had said, “I’m not sure I’m ready for the unadulterated scrutiny of you and me if we were here with just Max and Delphine,” and she hadn’t had an answer for that, except, “It’s going to happen sooner or later.” Her arguments with her mother seemed to have a rhetoric of their own that never, ever truly reflected the complexity of her feelings.

“You and Delphine came to the set with me every day until it was time for you to go to school. You remember that time we filmed in North Carolina? And that time in England? That was part of the contracts. I had those two trailers, and you and your grandmother occupied one and my junk occupied the other, and that went on for five years, and you remember that, right?”

“It was fun.” Isabel didn’t say that going to the set when Zoe was working was more fun than staying home when she wasn’t working, which had seemed utterly dull and isolated by comparison. She didn’t say it because it didn’t seem to suit her argument, and it did seem as though, with everything she did say, her argument kept dissipating and transforming into something she herself didn’t understand.

“Well, you were a cute kid, and everyone always made a big deal of you, and you liked it when the girls would do your hair and put makeup on you and dress you up—”

“And there were horses and other animals sometimes. It was fun.” She stressed the “was.”

Zoe seemed to ignore the stress. “Well, you were no trouble, except, once, I had to do a scene where I fell in a river and had to drown, and you started screaming and wouldn’t stop until I came out and got dried off and dressed and you were sure that I was all right. Delphine actually made the director stop filming for an hour so that you wouldn’t have permanent emotional scars. We never let you watch after that, because we weren’t sure what you were making of things. But then it was time for you to go to school, and of course that made it different, so you started staying home, and Mom was staying home with you, and it was more like regular people, with me going out to work and coming home at the end of the day.”

Then she said, “So the first movie I did that you stayed home from was
Something Good,
that movie with Nick Nolte, did you ever see that? It was something really bad in the end, but we had fun on the set, and that was the first time in my whole life that Delphine wasn’t around for some reason.” Isabel felt herself go on the alert. She could not have said why, but she wasn’t exactly surprised when Zoe continued: “The first time! Isn’t that amazing? So of course I fell in love.”

Now, as familiar as she was with theories of female sexuality, Isabel moved aside. It was like magic. All her mother had to do was say the most horrifying words, and the key was turned and the door was opened. It would be good, Isabel thought, to leave right now. It would be an exit. She could move gracefully, smoothly. She thought of the girls she had known at school whose mothers, they said, talked to them frankly and openly about sexuality. She was not one of those girls. Nor had she seen any of Zoe’s famous sex scenes with Russell Crowe or the notorious almost-nude rooftop scene with Dennis Quaid. (She had seen Zoe shoot plenty of people, though—John Hurt, the old English guy; also Laurence Fishburn; Winona Ryder, on TV; and Faye Dunaway. She had seen her run Gene Hackman down with a car and throw Laura Dern off a bridge, as well as drop suddenly to the floor so that Alan Alda could fall out of a twenty-story window.) The only movie of Zoe’s that she actually liked was
Wanda Rossini,
and that was because of the music, of course, but also, she often told people, because at the end of it Zoe had died tragically of a brain tumor.

Zoe went on. There was no stopping her. She said, “The guy who wrote
Something Good
was named Justin Merrill, and he was about a year older than I was, and he was fun. His father was a novelist, and his mother was an artist, and he himself had gone to Amherst, which was better than Harvard, he said, because more exclusive, and I have no idea how he ended up writing that movie, because he never wrote another one, but he was a very naughty, naughty boy, tremendously good-looking, with a drug habit and a car habit and a girl habit.” Now Zoe seemed to be positively enjoying herself. “He was every single thing that Delphine hated, and he was so funny that I was falling down laughing every day. I don’t know why they had him around on the set—usually the screenwriter is only there if he’s rewriting pages—but Justin did whatever he wanted to do. He didn’t recognize rules or impossibilities or the desires of others, and he made up his mind to get me to fall in love with him, and I did.”

Jason Proctor, Isabel thought, in spite of herself, recalling a guy she had dated for a month between the two halves of Leo, but she tossed her chin in a challenging way and said, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, Max never knew and Delphine never knew. Now you know. That was my first taste of having my own life, and after that, everything else was broken. I’m sorry it was, but it was. I didn’t want that other life back. I couldn’t have it back. Once I knew I could have a secret and keep it, and do what no one else knew I was doing, then that’s what I wanted to do. It took a few years for me to act, but…”