Go ask fannie, p.11
Go Ask Fannie, page 11
* * *
• • •
MEANWHILE, THE POLLS were tightening as voters stopped worrying so much about a sex scandal as about the collectively horrific prospect of electing a Democrat. In an effort to discredit Murray’s qualifications for public office, his opponent was relentless. Murray missed a tax payment on the house one year. (True.) He represented the Mafia. (Ridiculous.) He represented drug addicts. (Half true; he’d once defended a junkie and gotten him into a methadone clinic down in Boston.) He comingled his clients’ funds. (False.) Each charge required some kind of rebuttal, which took away from Murray’s dwindling time to talk about the issues that mattered.
On Lillian they dug up more dirt. The Union Leader made a big deal of the fact that she’d been seen leaving the new Copley Place in Boston laden with bags from expensive stores, implying extravagance, implying in turn a lack of connection with Murray’s more blue-collar base. This was unfair; Lillian’s mother had simply taken her shopping for her birthday—and they bought from the sale rack, for heaven’s sake. Another reporter, following up on the story, noted that she’d claimed a home office deduction on her taxes one year. What was her business? She was a writer, she replied. Did he want to come and see her office? Did he want to see her stack of rejection letters?
But nothing prepared her for the next big question. Lillian and the reporter were sitting at a booth in a coffee shop on Main Street in Concord. The reporter opened a manila envelope and slid a folded, yellowed newspaper across the tabletop. It was a copy of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, whose front page showed a black-and-white picture of an amateur but very convincing mural of Fidel Castro, complete with cigar, that had been painted on the southern wall of the Northampton Chamber of Commerce in Massachusetts. “Smith Seniors Arrested in Act of Vandalism,” the accompanying headline read, and the article went on to describe how Lillian Holmes and two other students had been apprehended by the police just as they were filling in the man’s scruffy beard.
“Do you care to comment on this?” asked the reporter.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” said Lillian. “I was twenty-two. It was our senior prank. Why don’t you ask me where my husband stands on aid to dependent children? Or about my volunteer work at the soup kitchen?”
“My, my,” said the reporter.
“Go to hell,” said Lillian, and she reached for the newspaper, but he took it back.
“Did you plead guilty?” he asked.
With her father’s attorney by her side, Lillian had in fact pleaded guilty to vandalism, and she had been sentenced to a month of community service, plus the cost of sandblasting the besmirched wall.
“This interview is over,” Lillian said. “Write what you want. Here’s my statement. ‘As a college student I was exposed to a variety of ideas, some of which can be attributed to youthful idealism. I do not support, nor have I ever supported, the Communist regime in Cuba.’ There. Are you happy?”
The reporter was scribbling furiously.
“I have what I need,” he said.
“Good,” said Lillian, standing up. “Now go fuck yourself.”
She stormed out of the coffee shop. By the time she arrived home she’d calmed down, but she got upset all over again when she saw Murray, because she’d never told him about the vandalism charge. Murray himself had just gotten home and was upstairs in the bedroom, changing out of his work clothes. Lillian sat on the window seat.
“How’d the interview go?” he asked, loosening his tie.
She told him about her confrontation with the reporter.
“Wait—you’re saying you painted a picture of Castro on the Chamber of Commerce building?”
“Mural, actually.” She tried to keep the note of pride out of her voice. Because it had been a very good mural, in her opinion. For someone who didn’t think of herself as an artist.
“And you got arrested?”
“I paid a fine,” said Lillian. “And got the wall cleaned.”
“How come you never told me about this?”
“I should have,” said Lillian. “I’m sorry.”
Murray had had a bad day. A new poll had come out. “Sorry’s not going to save my ass in the polls,” he said. “Not when people find out I married a Communist sympathizer.”
“I’m not a sympathizer!” Lillian exclaimed. “And I never was! Look, I was taking a course on the politics of the Caribbean. And I just thought it would be funny. I was young. I wasn’t really thinking.”
“Still, it’ll look bad,” said Murray. “Joe McCarthy is alive and well in some circles in this state. God damn it.”
He had a way of curling up the corners of his mouth when he was mad, in a grade-school teacher way, and she found it unattractive. She reminded herself that nobody looked very attractive when they were angry, but this went deeper; it was as if a switch had been turned off and she couldn’t remember how she’d ever found him attractive.
(Though she was probably no great shakes to him right now, either.)
Just then there was a knock at the door. Murray opened it a crack. Lizzie reported that George was throwing up hot dogs.
“We’re having a discussion, Lizzie,” said Murray. “Your mother will be out soon.”
“He missed the toilet,” Lizzie said.
“Give us a minute,” Murray said crossly.
When Lizzie had left, Lillian went and sat down on the bed and hugged her arms around herself. “I should have told you,” she said again. “I should have told you way back in the beginning.”
“So why didn’t you?”
She tried to go back in time, to her frame of mind at age twenty-three, when she’d met Murray that summer at the law firm. She must have thought that this young law student would have thought poorly of her. She’d certainly never thought about the ramifications of her arrest record coming back to haunt them in a far-into-the-future political campaign.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Murray glared at her, but then his look softened. “I guess it wasn’t like we had a confession marathon,” he said. “Still. You should have known that someone would have dug this up. We’ll have to tell the children, since it’ll come out in the papers. You can do it. God damn it.”
Chastised, and now in a very bad mood, she left him in the bedroom and went downstairs to fix dinner. They had just had the floor redone in faux-brick linoleum; her whole work routine had gotten messed up, with workers in the house. She turned on the oven, put the pot pies onto a baking sheet, and started making an apple crunch for dessert.
But she was not a happy cook tonight, even making a good dessert. She was mad at Murray and mad at herself and scared that the reporter was going to report how she told him to go fuck himself. Between that and the event with the teachers down in Salem, people were going to think she had a mouth.
She did have a mouth. And to tell the truth, she was proud of it these days. She should have more of a mouth, she thought.
She poured another smidgeon of gin into her tonic and got an idea for a story. Virginia/sex with plumber, she wrote in the margins, next to the recipe for apple crunch.
When everyone was seated around the table, when they had all been served and were intent on tipping their pot pies out of their little aluminum holders without breaking them, she told the children about the escapade.
“Way to go, Mom,” said Daniel.
“You mean you have a criminal record?” Ruth asked anxiously, and then: “Will I have to disclose this when I apply to college?”
“Certainly not,” said Murray. “And don’t let this give any of you children ideas,” he grumped.
“I’m feeling better,” said George, who had been sentenced to chicken bouillon. “Can I have a pot pie?”
“Absolutely not,” said Lillian. She had cleaned up George’s one mess and had no intention of cleaning up another later tonight.
The words of the old nursery rhyme came to mind: She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
As it turned out, the Union Leader did its very best indeed to link Murray himself with Fidel Castro the next day. They did this by publishing the photo of Lillian’s mural with Murray’s name in large bold type, and if you skimmed the article you might even have come to the conclusion that Murray himself had painted the mural just recently. Murray slammed the newspaper down; Lillian got huffy again; Daniel bought an extra copy to bring into Social Studies class; and Ruth wrote an editorial for the school newspaper that focused on how what you did as a young adult could come back to haunt you years later. Contributions to Murray’s campaign dipped, as did his numbers in the somewhat primitive polling that went on in a small-state congressional campaign in 1984. Lillian, who’d been scouring her memory for other things she might have done that (as Ruth pointed out) could come back to haunt her, was too preoccupied to write, and indeed, when she made it up to her office that day, she decided that everything she’d written that past month was garbage. Her characters were all one-dimensional. Her stories were too descriptive; there was no story to them. She cursed the campaign and found herself making no bones about the fact that she wished Murray would lose, so their lives could return to normal.
* * *
• • •
BACK TO THE NIGHT BEFORE, THOUGH: Lillian didn’t forget about the note she’d made in the cookbook about Virginia and the plumber. As with Mr. and Mrs. Klarner, she wanted to know what was going on. Just give me half an hour, she told the family, and strung the rope across the stairwell to the third floor so Lizzie wouldn’t be inclined to follow. Then she went upstairs, sat down at her desk, and rolled a new sheet of paper into the typewriter.
Once Virginia realized that she could sleep with the plumber and get away with it, she scheduled all sorts of household repairs.
She hesitated. Good lord! What if Murray read this? He would think she wanted to sleep with the plumber!
Nevertheless she kept going. She got the gutters cleaned; the gutter-man wasn’t quite as good in bed as the plumber, but he sufficed for one afternoon. Then she got the tile repaired on the front steps, and slept with her first black man. (Lillian wondered if the story was going to be set in a place like Concord. There weren’t a lot of black people in Concord.) She scheduled an appointment to get the chimney swept, but feared at the last minute that the chimney sweep’s soot would rub off on her, and he flounced out of the house a disappointed man.
She sat back, reread what she’d written. Who was Virginia married to? How would he figure in the story? She lit a cigarette.
Hubert, on the other hand, was happy, she wrote. Unbeknownst to Virginia, he had plans to sell the house, and he wanted everything in working order. He gave her a list of more repairs . . .
“Ahem,” said Murray, and she jumped in her chair.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” she exclaimed. Involuntarily she cupped her hand over the page.
“George is throwing up again,” he said from the doorway.
“And you can’t deal with it?”
“Lizzie says she doesn’t feel so good either,” he said. “If we’ve got two kids throwing up, then no, I can’t deal with both of them at once.”
Lillian sighed. “I’ll be right down.”
“I’m sorry,” said Murray.
“Don’t be,” she replied. “I never get any good work done in the evening, anyway.” But this wasn’t one hundred percent true. She was rolling right now. She was cooking. Nevertheless she pulled out the page, wrote “Home Repair” at the top, and placed it in the desk drawer.
“How do you feel?” she asked Murray, following him down the stairs.
“Not so hot,” he admitted.
* * *
• • •
ON THE FIRST Saturday in November, four days before Election Day, Murray’s aides scheduled a large rally on the State House lawn. Murray said he expected everyone in the family to attend. “The campaign’s almost over,” he promised them. “Nobody wants to look back and wonder if there was something else we could have done.”
“I don’t see what having me up there on the stage with you will do to influence voters,” Daniel grumbled. He was so touchy these days. Lillian missed the clown.
“We’re a family,” Murray said. “We stick together.”
“Can I talk into the microphone?” Lizzie asked.
“If anyone gets to speak, it should be me,” said Ruth. “I at least know what the issues are in this campaign.”
“You want to speak?” said Murray. “You can speak if you want to.”
“I can?” Having gotten what she asked for, Ruth allowed a nervous smile.
“Sure,” said Murray. “You write up a little speech and run it by me. No more than five minutes.”
And so Ruth began to draft a speech, practicing it in the bathroom every night. Two days before the rally, she tried it out on the family.
“No comments from the peanut gallery,” Murray warned the other children as they gathered in their cluttered living room. “Respect your sister. She’s worked hard on this, and she’s got to look professional.”
“This is so stupid,” said Daniel, slumping on the sofa.
“What’s eating you, son?” Murray demanded. “Every time we do something now, you act like the wise guy. Something wrong at school?”
Daniel crossed his arms and glared. George came into the living room with a big bowl of popcorn, as though it were movie night. Lillian sat in a rocking chair. She never could relax on the sofa because she always noticed how shabby the chintz fabric was, and felt overwhelmed about choosing something new. It was a sore point.
“Okay, Ruth,” said Murray. “Let’s hear it.”
Ruth stood in front of the fireplace. She was still dressed in her school clothes—a pleated plaid skirt, a white blouse, and a cardigan sweater. Suddenly self-conscious with her family, she splayed her index cards, closed her eyes, mouthed some words, and then began.
“I’m up here because I believe in my father,” she said, addressing the seascape above the sofa. “I believe in the things he stands for.” She went on to touch on all of Murray’s talking points, and it struck Lillian that Ruth had a flair for oratory, something she hadn’t realized. Her mind leapt ahead and she saw Ruth becoming a lawyer in her time, maybe even running for public office herself someday, and she imagined the pride she would feel, watching Ruth speak with the moral convictions that Lillian and Murray had instilled in her since the beginning. She looked at all of her children and despite her sour attitude toward the campaign these days, she suddenly felt such love for them: Ruth up there looking poised and unruffled and so sure of herself; Daniel going through this awful phase but coming out a man who could make people laugh, take them out of their bad moods and inject them with a sillier view of life; George taking care of others, the same way he’d always taken care of Lizzie; and jumpy little Lizzie living outside the mold, doing whatever she chose to do. Her love was visceral; it rose from her gut up through her chest and into her throat, like smoke, and with it came a terrifying sense of loss, because there was so much at stake in the very fact of their lives. She had the sudden conviction that despite all the normal day-to-day discord, her children would one day be as tightly aligned as a jigsaw; that after she and Murray were long gone, the four of them would turn to each other, lean on each other, love each other to the ends of the earth; and that she had had a hand in this, and could give herself a pat on the shoulder for a job well done.
9.
Snow
On the day of the last rally, the Saturday before the election, Lillian rose early to find the lawn frosted over from a cold snap in the night. Her zinnias had turned brown, but the hardy chrysanthemums stood strong, their red and gold blooms tipped in white. She made a pot of strong coffee and stood by the window, appreciating this last bit of color before the long gray New Hampshire winter set in.
She had about half an hour before Murray and the children got up, so she climbed the stairs to the third-floor guest room and sat down at her desk. She picked up the envelope that had arrived in yesterday’s mail: a thin, cream-colored envelope, not one of the 9-by-12 manila ones she was accustomed to getting back, those malevolent packets that contained the story itself along with a rejection letter. This one contained a personal letter on matching heavy-stock stationery from the editor of The Northern Review, one of the many small presses she had been sending her stories to on a regular basis. Lillian unfolded the letter and read it for the fifth, possibly the sixth time.
Dear Ms. Holmes,
We very much enjoyed your short story “Whose Business Is It, Anyway?” and would like to publish it in The Northern Review.
However, there are certain changes that we believe would make the story much stronger overall. I’ve outlined these changes in the enclosure. Please look them over and let us know if you would be willing to consider them.
In any event, we are delighted that you sent us the story and look forward to working with you.
Very truly yours,
Marshall Vaughn
Editor
She reread his enclosure: such simple changes! And they would in fact make the story stronger—so who in their right mind would object?! She picked up her copy of the story and reread the first line. Lucy wanted egg salad but Eleanor was saving the hard-boiled eggs . . . At that point she wanted nothing more than to take up her red pencil and spend the entire morning up in that third-story guest room, producing a clean and much-improved manuscript. But it would have to wait until Monday, when she had the house to herself again.
