Just then the phone rang. Laurie smiled at Harmony before she picked it up. Harmony thought Laurie probably grinned to reassure her that she wasn’t disturbed by Neddie’s refusal to eat the knishes. After all, everybody’s relatives were a little bit out of the ordinary—Jimmy Bangor had had a sister who was quite out of the ordinary: she weighed four hundred and sixty pounds and wore see-through nighties.
“Hello,” Laurie said, picking up the phone.
“Oh my gosh, is this a joke?” she said, looking nervous all of a sudden.
“Oh my gosh, I guess it isn’t, Mr. President,” she said. “He’s right here.”
Then she offered the phone to Eddie.
“It’s the President,” she said. “He wants to talk to you and Iggy.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. “I guess he heard about Iggy on TV.”
“The real President?” Pat asked.
“It’s the real President,” Laurie said.
“Hello, thank you for calling,” Eddie said, in the new, brisk voice he used now that he was an experienced talk show celebrity.
“Iggy’s fine,” he said, listening a moment. “He’s right here but I don’t know if he can talk because he’s a dog and he might not feel like yipping.”
The President spoke again and Eddie listened.
“Well, I could come to see you because we have a school bus,” Eddie said. “But I don’t know where you live. I’m with my mom and my aunts and some friends, and I have to be on TV today. So I could come later, if I knew where you live.”
Everyone was gathered around the phone, listening to Eddie talk to the President, who was puzzled by the reference to G. He asked for clarification.
“G. is his name!” Eddie insisted. “He’s a turban man and he has a beard and it’s black.
“Well, where is she?” he asked, after another pause. “I don’t know if Iggy will yip at her, either—he’s not very yippy today, although he usually yips when he’s on TV.
“Mrs. President wants to talk to me,” he informed the eager crowd, after the President had signed off.
“She’s not Mrs. President, she’s the First Lady,” Otis said, quickly assuming the role of chief of protocol.
“I call her Mrs. President,” Eddie informed him, firmly. “Because he’s Mr. President and she’s Mrs. President.”
“Okay, Ed,” Otis said.
“Hi,” Eddie said, when the First Lady got on the line. “Thank you for calling.”
Then he listened a moment.
“Well, he’s an orphan,” he said. “Somebody put him out on the road and I found him when we were up high on the mesa.”
Harmony thought how strange life was. Her son, who was only five, had just talked to the President and now was talking to the First Lady. Her sister Neddie had just refused to eat any food whose name started with a k. She herself had just told her oldest friend, who was gay, that she wished he wasn’t, so they could marry. Four men with turbans were there, and two black teenagers who lived in a Dumpster in New Jersey. She herself had no job and no prospects and her brother was in jail in Tarwater for making obscene phone calls. Pepper, her daughter, was dead of AIDS.
It was a lot to adjust to, if adjust was the right word. Harmony had the fear that maybe she wasn’t capable of adjusting to so much. Even at that moment she wasn’t really taking part in any of it. She had just sort of faded into the background and let people who were more connected with life figure out what her son should do. She had always been an active mom, too, but now she was just sitting in an apartment in New York, not even that eager to know what the First Lady was saying to her son. She could tell that Otis and Sheba and Laurie and even Neddie and Pat were really excited that Eddie was talking to the White House. Eddie was just being friendly and informative, he might have been talking to Gary or his friend Eli or just someone he met in a store about Iggy’s amazing fall.
“Okay, I’ll ask my mom, and I’ll ask G., because he’s the man who drives the bus,” Eddie said. “Maybe we could come and see you and Iggy could run across the lawn. There wasn’t much grass for him to run on in Arizona—there were cactus and he had to watch out for prickles.”
Then he listened a little more.
“Somebody has to write down the number so we can go visit Mr. and Mrs. President,” he said. “Laurie, could you please do it?”
Laurie took the phone and wrote down the First Family’s phone number.
“Wow,” she said, when she hung up. “I never thought I’d be chatting it up with Hillary. I sure have led a more interesting life since you came into it, Eddie.”
“Wait till they hear about this in Tarwater,” Neddie said. “When Mom and Dad find out Eddie talked to the President it’ll get him off the hook for not believing the whale ate Jonah.”
“Why don’t you believe the whale ate Jonah, Bright?” Sheba asked.
“Whales don’t eat people, they eat plankton,” Eddie said, matter-of-factly.
“Well, but maybe this was an old-timey whale that didn’t know about plankton or whatever it is,” Sheba said. “Maybe it ate Jonah before it knew it wasn’t supposed to.”
“No, it didn’t eat Jonah!” Eddie said, with great emphasis. “Mrs. President says they have a very big house and it has a fence and if we come see them Iggy can play on the lawn. Don’t you think he’d like that, Mom?”
“I’m sure he’d like that,” Harmony said.
Already she was nervous about not having anything to wear. She didn’t own any clothes except the clothes she had on and two pairs of slacks, two bras, and two blouses that she had bought at a Kmart in Albuquerque. They weren’t clothes she could show up at the White House wearing, although she knew the Clintons were from Arkansas and weren’t that different from people who lived in Tulsa or any other place in that part of the country; but they weren’t living in Arkansas anymore, they were living in the White House—just from watching them on TV now and then, she could tell that they dressed nicely and probably didn’t buy their clothes from Kmart anymore.
“So can we go, Mom?” Eddie asked. “Mrs. President wanted me to decide if we were coming. The reason we have to decide is because Mr. and Mrs. President are going on a trip to China.
“They want to fit us into their schedule, if they can,” he added, coming over and taking a knish, which he ate with a good appetite.
Harmony didn’t answer. She felt totally incapable of making a decision about whether they should see the President and the First Lady. In the normal part of her life she would have thought it an exciting possibility—in her younger days she had always loved to meet celebrities. Not all of them were nice but still they were celebrities; it was interesting just to see what kind of clothes they wore, or if they used cologne or aftershave if they were guys, or how they did their hair if they were women. After meeting a celebrity she would sort of have the feeling that she had added something interesting to her life; at least she would have an anecdote or two to tell the other showgirls—about whether the guys behaved like gentlemen or whether they dressed tacky and hadn’t bothered to shine their shoes, things like that. It did seem to be true that a great many celebrities didn’t bother to shine their shoes.
But that had been in another time—for herself she couldn’t work up any interest in meeting the President or the First Lady, or visiting the White House; but she was a mother still, and it would certainly be a fine opportunity for Eddie. She knew she had to try and think of it that way. Her son shouldn’t have to miss exceptional opportunities just because his mother had stopped being interested in anything.
Once Eddie got on a subject, he liked to stay on it until he got it resolved.
“We have to decide soon, Mom,” he said, after finishing his knish. “Mr. and Mrs. President are going to China very soon, and they were just hoping to meet Iggy before they go.
“Mrs. President said it wasn’t a very far drive to where they live,” he went on. “She said we could make it in one day if we had a good school bus.”
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Then Eddie got an impish look in his eye.
“Uh-oh, I don’t like that look,” Sheba said. “That’s a bad look. What you thinking about now, Bright?”
“The Washington Monument,” Eddie said. “I’ve seen it on TV a million times. What if we went up it and a sea gull flew by and Iggy jumped off the Washington Monument and he fell all the way down and landed in some very soft grass and he still wasn’t deaded. Then we’d have to go on one million TV shows.”
“Eddie, that’s a horrible thought,” Laurie said. “You don’t want Iggy to be taking that kind of chance. You want him to be safe from now on.”
“Well, but if he fell into some very very soft grass he would be safe,” Eddie insisted. “He wouldn’t be hurt at all.”
“Let’s not push our luck, Eddie,” Pat said.
“You should just think about him being safe, Eddie,” Laurie said. But she didn’t say it in the same voice. There was a catch in her voice, this time, and before anybody could say anything else she began to cry. At first it was silent crying, just a few tears running down her cheeks.
Eddie was appalled that something he had said made Laurie cry. He went right over and began to pat her on the knee.
“I was just joking, I’m very sorry,” he said.
“Oh, Eddie,” Laurie said. “The creatures we love don’t live forever, honey. We should always just think of what could make them safe.”
“Well, I will try to make Iggy be safe,” Eddie said. “I won’t let him go up on anything high where there could be any sea gulls. I promise, I promise, I promise.”
Despite Eddie’s promise, and his pats, Laurie lost control of her sorrow and began to sob so hard that she had to run out of the room. She went into her bedroom and closed her door.
“Poor thing, she’s been shouldering a big load of grief,” Neddie said.
“I guess she really loved that Pepper,” Sheba said, quietly.
“Mom, I really didn’t mean to make Laurie sad,” Eddie said.
“I know, honey,” Harmony said. “Laurie knows you really don’t want Iggy to fall off the Washington Monument.”
Still, they could all hear Laurie sobbing, through the thin door of her bedroom.
“Mom, can’t you go make her better?” Eddie asked. “I feel very bad now about what I said.”
“You could go give it a try, Sis,” Neddie said. “It’s you and her who have had the worst loss.”
“Mom, go on,” Eddie insisted. “I don’t want to hear that bad crying.”
“Sometimes people just need to cry, Eddie,” Pat said.
“No they don’t, they never need to cry! Don’t say those words to me!” Eddie said, crying himself.
“I’ll go,” Harmony said. She got up and knocked gently on Laurie’s door.
“Laurie, can I come in? Eddie’s very sorry,” Harmony asked.
There was no answer from Laurie. Harmony looked around, at Eddie and Neddie and Pat and Sheba and the turban men, all of whom expected her to make Laurie feel better, even though Pepper was dead and Laurie couldn’t really feel better. Harmony knew she couldn’t, it was impossible; but her son expected her to try, so, after a moment, she opened the door and went in anyway.
BOOK THREE
1.
“She slept with some dirty little boy,” Laurie said, once she had cried herself out. “All she had to do was step outdoors and she’d be infested with them. If she walked to rehearsal she’d pick up three or four, and she wouldn’t stop sleeping with them. If a guy looked at Pepper and got a hard-on she felt she owed him sex.
“I gave up arguing with her about it—I just gave up,” Laurie said.
Harmony felt a throb of guilt, remembering how many times she’d ended up in the sack, with a guy she’d just met on top of her, for no better reason than that the guy had managed to make her feel responsible for the fact that he had a hard-on.
“I mean, we had a sex life and it was plenty okay with me,” Laurie said. “I wasn’t cut out to be celibate, any more than anybody else. I wanted so badly to be enough for Pepper—I can’t tell you how much I wanted that. But I never was enough.”
“Laurie, it wasn’t your fault,” Harmony said, disturbed by the hopeless look on Laurie’s face.
“It wasn’t my fault but it was my life,” Laurie said.
“We were together three years and she was my life the whole time. I don’t know how many times I came home and found Pepper fucking some boy. She wasn’t careful, either. For Pepper safe sex was sex you might as well not be having.”
Then she bent over, pressing her hands against her head as if she were about to break into sobs again—but she didn’t. She just rocked back and forth on her knees for a minute, taking deep breaths.
“But my God, you raised her,” Laurie went on. “I just can’t imagine how it would be to have Pepper for a daughter and then lose her.”
“I wish it was just something I had to try to imagine,” Harmony said. Though Laurie had cried a long time, and was very sad, Harmony was still glad to be alone with her finally, and glad to be having a talk about Pepper, even though what was being said was not happy stuff. It couldn’t be happy stuff, and yet talking to Laurie about it—even though Laurie was desperate—seemed more right than trying to talk to her sisters about it, or even Gary, usually a good person to talk to about any problem.
The difference was that Laurie had loved Pepper enough to put up with the fact that she slept with guys; fine people like Laurie gave up on perfection without giving up on hope, or the possibility of good times and things that were worth sharing. It didn’t always have to be sex that was worth sharing.
The fact was, Laurie was the person who had been closest to Pepper, not only in her last years but in all her years—in her whole life. Mel, her husband, hadn’t been that close to her; Harmony didn’t even feel that she had the right to claim that she had been that close. Mainly, Pepper didn’t want people close, though there had been exceptions. When Pepper was about nine or ten Myrtle had been an exception.
Mainly, though, Pepper just hadn’t been the kind of child it was possible to be very close to. She kept her thoughts for herself, and her feelings for herself, too.
“You know what I’d like?” Laurie said. “I’d like for all the people in the other room to just go away for about eight hours, so you and I could be together. We don’t have to talk, if we don’t want to. There may not be that much to talk about. I’d just like them all to go away so we can have a day of privacy. Maybe later you’d feel like taking a walk around New York.
“It’s not a bad place to be if you’re grief-stricken,” she added. “If you want to talk to people about your grief, they’ll talk, but if you don’t want to talk, they’ll definitely respect that and leave you alone.”
Harmony didn’t answer. For the moment she was as afraid of New York as she had been of the great Hopi mesa. She had the feeling that she might get sucked into the crowd, or maybe the subway or something, and just vanish. She knew it was a silly feeling—it had been silly on the mesa too. But it was still how she felt, silly or not.
“I haven’t eaten in a long time,” she said. “Maybe when they all leave to take Eddie to his TV shows, I’ll feel like having a sandwich.
“But what about the President and the First Lady?” she asked. “They invited us. What do we do about them?”
“You don’t have to mother the President and the First Lady,” Laurie said. “They can take care of themselves. If it works out that we can visit them, we will. But you don’t have to decide the fate of the world right now, Harmony. Just let it go for a day. Stay with me.
“I need you,” she added. “I need you just to be with me. Okay?”
While the others were getting ready to leave, Harmony lay on Laurie’s bed. At the bedside was a picture of Pepper in her dancing leotard, just standing on a stage somewhere, smiling. Harmony put a pillow under her head and stared at the picture for a long time. Looking at the picture was a way
of looking back through time, to the years when Pepper had been a dancer in New York. Only, once she began to look back through time it was like she was on a fast rewind or something, she went far back in her memory, rewinding through Pepper’s life, to her childhood—to the years, just three years, when Pepper had been a very little girl and they had lived with Ross, in a little apartment just off the Strip, a few blocks from the Stardust. Pepper was just a sweet, normal little girl then. It was long before the stage of keeping her feelings to herself. Then she was always hugging her mom and her dad, whispering secrets in their ears, eating cereal, watching cartoons, and doing all the other things normal little girls did.
For three years Ross tried to be a normal father to Pepper, too. On Saturday mornings, even if he’d worked the late show at the Trop, he would make an effort to wake up early, so he could watch cartoons with his little daughter. Often he would fall back to sleep, while the cartoons were running, but at least he was there on the couch, so Pepper could sort of crawl around on him and color in her coloring books while she watched cartoons. One of the reasons Harmony had always felt sympathetic to Ross, even to the point of sleeping with him again after quite a few years of separation, was that he had at least made the effort to be a good father. The effort fizzled—in the end adult responsibilities that went beyond the level of maybe reading a story now and then or maybe watching the cartoons on Saturday morning left Ross exhausted. He simply wasn’t up to continuous parenting, or continuous husbanding either—not for long. One day he got up from the breakfast table, where he had been quietly eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, and walked up the street to the Sandy Scenes Apartments, where he got his own place.
When Harmony asked him why—was it something she did, or something she didn’t do?—Ross very sweetly took all the blame. He explained that it was probably genetic. In his family, situations that required continuing along, day after day in a responsible pattern, just didn’t survive. In his family, work came first, as Ross put it. He couldn’t afford to get so tired from watching cartoons with Pepper that he couldn’t get the spots on the right performer at the right time. Mr. Sinatra or Elvis or Liberace needed to know that whoever was working the spots was reliable—Harmony was a performer herself, she understood the requirements for being a light man for the big floor shows at the casinos. As a top showgirl for many years the spots had often been on her. So when Ross went up the street to the Sandy Scenes, Harmony tried to be understanding. Mainly she got sad about it on Saturday mornings, when there was no Daddy there to watch cartoons with Pepper or help her color in her coloring books.