It’s quiet, as if you’re part of nature and the other part of your life—your work, your commute, your worries—is simply something you do during the rest of the day before you come back and do something really important, like watch the blue heron sail over the water.
Later, as I drove between the pink tulip trees lining the drive that would soon bloom into pink miracles, I missed The Lavender Farm already. That’s what our momma had named it, as a girl, because she loved the purple flowers. She and Grandma used to place colorful marbles between the plants for fun, as Annie and I did. I looked back at my grandparents’ house, the apple orchard behind it, the forest behind that, a hint of the hills, the blue purple coast mountains, and felt . . . sadness. Deep, aching sadness.
This happens every time I leave, every single time.
I focused on the road ahead. Our past was chasing us as if we were prey. Annie didn’t know we were being chased yet. I had hoped to hide it from her, to protect her, but I knew I couldn’t for much longer. Annie would feel as if she’d been hit with cinder blocks when she heard about Marlene and her article. My grandma was losing Grandma in the dusty labyrinths of her dying mind, my granddad is losing the love of his life, and I am two people in one, pretending to be someone that I am not, pretending I don’t have secrets, pretending that I am not living a lie, every day, a lie.
I thought of that reporter talking to people from my past, the kids, who are now adults, whom I used to run around with in my childhood.
He never knew exactly what was going on until it was over.
I wish I could live with the blue heron.
4
Momma was born in France and plied her magic in Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor. Decorated in pink, with pink tile floors, light pink walls, and pink swiveling chairs for the ladies, it was the most popular parlor on Cape Cod. “Women like pink. It’s feminine and sweet and reminds everyone of pink cupcakes. Come and give your momma a hug. I love you so much, Pink Girls.”
There were four crystal chandeliers, lots of mirrors, and a wall full of those dryers that women drop over their heads—all in pink. A large back room with pink fainting couches, called the “resting room,” was always filled with women “gathering their womanliness back together and filling themselves with pink strength,” my momma said. Coffee and tea, lemon water, pink lemonade, pink divinity cookies, and pink mints made women feel a bit pampered. Momma looked away when the ladies passed bottles back and forth and cackled too loud.
She always wore pink, maybe not all pink all the time, but her outfits always had pink trim, pink lace, a pink collar. She believed in “embracing my womanly femininity.”
“Frumpiness is another way of giving in to life, and ladies should never give in,” she warned, spraying rose-scented perfume. “Act like a lady who has balls, Pink Girls. Never give in. Fight. Fight with everything ya got, and wear your heels. There’s nothing like a pair of black stilettos that says you mean business.”
Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor was on the same property as our white house by the sea so it also had a view of incoming weather, a variety of boats, gold and purple streaked sunrises, and moonlight pouring into the waves. It was a miniature of our home, except it had a wraparound front porch painted pink and pink Adirondack chairs. My dad, who everybody called Big Luke, had it built for her. “Your momma wanted to work, but she always wanted to be close to her girls. We love you two most of all.” He sniffed the air, the sun glinting off his red-gold hair given to him by his Irish ancestors, the same ancestors that gave Annie and me a red sheen, too. “You both smell like peppermint, did you know that?”
My momma sauntered onto the porch about one second after the peppermint comment in her yellow dress with the wide pink belt, and smiled at him, special-like. When she sashayed upstairs to their bedroom, her hips swaying, our dad made a beeline to follow her, and Annie and I were allowed to watch TV the rest of the night and eat the chocolate mint brownies our dad made for us.
Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor was open Monday through Saturday. Three other women worked for Momma: Carman, Shell Dee, and Trudy Jo.
Carman was a widow. Her husband, Roy, was killed by a train. We did not talk about why Carman’s husband did not get off the tracks with a train screaming its whistle at him. All I know is that they found his arm about a mile down the way by a hardware store and he had gambling debts. I heard her talking to my momma one day.
“He owed Joey Bonnata money, and after he died Joey came to my house with a couple of other men who looked like their faces had been attacked by meat cleavers and told me I had to pay. I poured myself a tequila, sat down on my couch, and told them to take a look around and tell me if they thought I had any money. There were three pails catching the rain that night, a rat ran across the floor, and part of a wall had crumbled down. The four of us ended up talking about what a shit Roy was and Joey gave me three hundred bucks for rent, then sent a team over the next day to fix my roof and my wall. He was a pleasant guy, when he wasn’t threatening to shatter my knee. They loved my lemon cake, Marie Elise. You remember my great aunt Tuti? It was her recipe, extra powdered sugar on top, and they loved it.”
Carman also likes singing love songs while drinking champagne, and bodice ripper romance books to “put my mind at ease and my libido on fire.” It seemed like a good blend to me.
Shell Dee and Trudy Jo are sisters. Their grandmother was a recluse who threw rocks at people if they got too close to their house. She lived to be 104. Other than the rock throwing, the woman was sweet as could be.
Shell Dee was interested in the human body, and we were constantly learning about things we did not need to know, like, “Your small intestine is four times as tall as you. Rest your brain on that one for a while!” or “Your eye only weighs about twenty-eight grams. The weight of paper clips, paper clips! Inhale that tidbit of anatomical knowledge and sink your teeth in it.”
Trudy Jo memorized large swaths of Shakespeare and regaled us with miniperformances while wielding hair dryers and rollers. She believed he was the sexiest man who ever lived. “What a piece of work is a man!” she intoned, and “If music be the food of love, play on.” On Shakespeare’s birthday, she had a party where we all had to wear Shakespeare-like hats and tights. We toasted William and each took turns reciting parts of his plays.
Shell Dee and Trudy Jo both had husbands and four kids, two of each sex per family. When I knew them, all eight kids were teenagers and hung out like a gang, thick as thieves. Shell Dee said she always knew when her teenagers were lying to her. “Any time they butter up to me, I know they’ve done something bad and I send them to their rooms immediately until they tell me what the hell they’ve done and when I can expect the police at my door.” Trudy Jo said, “God gave parents teenagers to punish them, so they would be brought to their knees in prayer and would repent for all their own evildoings.”
Their kids were always nice to Annie and me and we were in awe of them and their coolness. But they had their quirks. Galen had a penchant for practical jokes. One time he let a pig loose in school, another time a cow. (He later became a clothes designer with his partner, Mark.) Martin had an unhealthy interest in his nose (politician), Steph got into fist fights (state supreme court judge), and Margaret staged a strike at the high school cafeteria because she didn’t like the food (famous chef).
Derek, a very clever boy, one time handed out those cardboard placards at a basketball game in town against our chief rival. At his signal, all the kids turned their cards over. They thought they were spelling out “Go Cougars!” Instead, the giant sign read, “You Raiders Have Small Penises!” It caused a riot. (Stand-up comedian. Trust me. You’ve heard of him.)
Jules was sleeping with her boyfriend by the time she was sixteen, and no matter what her mother did, she “could not control that girl and her libido.” Later, Jules married that boyfriend. They’re still married, had six kids, and she became a sex therapist. Justin was a top jock and played football
(college football coach, who occasionally throws impressive fits on national TV), and Ellie, the baby, was a total math and science nerd and made experiments with beauty parlor lotions and creams combined with dynamite (rocket scientist with NASA).
Annie and I would hang out on the pink fainting couches in the back of the parlor overlooking the sea and do our homework, or sometimes we’d sit in the parlor and listen amidst the clouds of hair spray, the clipping of scissors, the rush of dryers, the chatter of women, the scent of perfume. There was a sign on the pink front door that said, “Marie Elise’s is full of secrets. If you share any secrets you’ve heard inside, you will not be allowed to return.”
Secrets stayed inside that pink parlor . . . unless they were already stuff of legend.
Take, for example, the question of who murdered a man in Cape Cod ten years ago. Gordon Annaed was a terrible, obnoxious drunk who groped the ladies and periodically beat people up. He was found with two bullets in his head in the middle of a cornfield one September morning. The ears were ripe.
“Gordon committed suicide,” was what people said to the outside investigators who came through asking questions after the local police gave up trying to solve the crime. “He killed himself.”
“He was sneaky like that,” Rudy Shwindt said, chewing his tobacco and aiming maybe a little too close to the investigators’ shoes. “He was the kind of guy who could put two bullets in his own head.”
Recently divorced Develin McKinney said, after she adjusted her blouse to let a bit of cleavage out for the investigators, “Nah, no one murdered that son of a bitch. He had quick fingers. He did it to himself. Boom, boom, boom, like that, two shots, then he died.”
The investigators shook their heads, but what could they do? No one talked. Even my friend Carole, who was eight years old, told them, “I saw Mr. Annaed rip off both tails of his two-tailed dog and eat them.”
And her sister, Sandy, who was a friend of Annie’s, said, “Mr. Annaed had two heads. One comes out in the day, one comes out in the night. That’s how he got two bullets in there.”
Their brother, Thad, was not to be beat. “I saw the devil go inside him the day before he shot himself. Mr. Annaed stood there and the devil shrieked and poked him with his sword, until his body swallowed him up and he became the devil. That’s why his nose was so red. The devil was inside him.”
The investigators stared, mouths open, until Thad leaned in super close and yelled, “Boo!”
I heard the investigators jumped back at that, but I don’t know if that part is true.
And guess what? No one ever told who killed Mr. Annaed. But I knew. My parents knew. Annie knew. A whole bunch of people knew, including all eight of Trudy Jo’s and Shell Dee’s kids.
I knew who Lacey Bea Darling was secretly married to, too. One of the ten most wanted men out of Canada, that’s who. Apparently he had a love of robbery. No one ever got hurt. They never caught him, but every couple of months Lacey Bea had a bearded visitor for a few days and did not leave her home. We never said anything about it. After all, Lacey Bea runs the annual charity drive for needy families and contributes twenty thousand dollars of her own money. Or his. We didn’t know. But it was for the poor! Twenty thousand!
“We need Lacey Bea,” my momma told me. “She is the sweetest woman I have ever met.”
Who knew that behind that prim exterior and those buttonup sweaters lay a woman who loved a convict?
Amidst the secrets, my momma gave advice. I grew up listening to that advice. She never wavered in what she believed was best. She was never vague, she never wobbled, she never hemmed and hawed.
“For heaven’s sakes, Marigold. Go back to school and become an accountant.” She put the dryer on full blast in front of Marigold’s face, her hair whipping back. “You love numbers and money. Now go make some money doing something you love. Quit making those lame, nauseating excuses! Do you want a valuable life or not?”
“Don’t be weak about this, Shirley. Stand your ground or your face will soon be ground into the ground. See, like this.” My momma lay straight down on the floor in her pink dress, nose to floor. “Don’t be ground, Shirley!”
“Why do you always chase bad men, Amethyst? I know why. It’s because you don’t feel good about yourself. You don’t feel good about Amethyst. You don’t think you deserve better. You do. You deserve more. Now I am going to spray you with this hair spray until you scream, ‘I love Amethyst!’ ”
“If he hits you again, Tracy, leave. If he comes after you, shoot him.” Momma climbed up on a chair and pulled out the ladies gun she kept in a box on a high shelf. “You point it, you shoot. It’s that easy.” She got in position and Tracy leaped out of her chair and ran to the resting room. Momma shrugged.
The ladies came to Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor because Momma and crew could transform the frumpiest woman into someone beautiful. They cut, they dyed, they highlighted, they blew it dry, and honestly, sometimes you could barely recognize the lady that came in and the lady that left. Invariably, the ladies had their chins up higher. Magic. Momma’s magic.
But those ladies came as much for the advice, yes, ma’am, they did.
No one would have guessed that my kind, passionate, smart, loving momma would be capable of what she did.
But then no one knows what they’re capable of doing until their child’s very life is at stake.
That is when all mothers fall into themselves and become someone else they do not recognize.
5
When I arrived in the office at eight in the morning, wearing an expensively tailored, deadly dull suit, Georgie was already there, as usual. She was wearing a Japanese-style kimono wrap, jeans, and a peacock feather sticking out from the back of her head.
I wish I could dress with style like Georgie, but then I’d lose my armor.
“I told May to wait for you in your office,” she said. “I told her to power up.”
“Good. Thanks. I like your peacock feather.”
She stroked it. Stanley barked at me. I shook his paw and hugged him.
“The peacock feather reminds me of my particular love of birds,” Georgie said.
I could not help but wonder what she would wear if she had a particular love of dolphins.
“The gals who are arranging the Rock Your Womanhood conference in Portland called and they want to talk to you about your opening and closing speeches. They’re all atwitter about you being there. I can feel their almost oppressive, hysterical-cheerful dolorophak around me when I talk to them.”
I did not know what a “dolorophak” was. I would ask later.
I nodded. I’d been asked to speak at this conference months ago. I agreed to do it. It was a conference for women, with lots of classes and speakers on everything from medical advice to nutrition and exercise, money, emotional health, travel, fashion, career building, starting your own business, makeovers, journaling, crafts, everything. I was the headliner. At first it was going to be held in a conference room downtown, but the number of attendees grew too high. Then it was going to be in a hotel, but that didn’t work because more attendees signed up. Now we were at a convention center, huge, with three levels.
“Tell them I’ll call soon.”
I would call them back and tell them about my speeches. My speeches are filled with lies, as I do not even follow my own advice, which makes me a hypocrite. I know what to tell women to do with their lives, but I have no idea what to do with the workaholism, the fear, and the scraping memories that drive my own.
“So you’re still using sex as a weapon, May?”
“Yes, I am,” May said. She sat up straight and proud in my leather chair, chin tilted up. “It’s a good gun to have in your Vaginal Arsenal.”
I nodded, tried not to laugh out loud.
“I have other guns, too.” She pointed to her boobs, which had been surgically enhanced—not too much, but enough so that she could “swim in her own sexuality and float through her raging hormones.” S
he calls them The Bouncers.
I stifled another laugh.
“The only way to manage men is through sexual blackmail,” she said.
May Shenecko looks like your stereotypical white, blond, wealthy, country-club-attending woman.
She is not stereotypical.
May owns an electrical company. May’s Electrical Company: We’ll Get You All Charged Up. She employs three other women. They all look about like her. Blond, stacked, sexy. Needless to say, business is booming, and it’s not all because of the sexiness. They’re good at what they do. They know their electrical stuff.
“You know I’m a life coach, right, May? Not a marriage counselor, not a sex therapist. We’ve been over this.”
“I know. You’re a hellaciously good life coach, Madeline. The very best, and you specialize in relationships, so here I am.” She saluted me. “I owe my company to you.”
“No, you owe your company to yourself. You built it.”
“But you showed me all those nature pictures, and I was attracted the most to the picture of the lightning obliterating a tree. We talked about why I liked lightning, and you told me I should be an electrician and it was like I’d been electrocuted in my own head. I’ve always liked sparks, fire, wires, that sort of stuff. I knew that being an electrician was what I’d want to do for the rest of my life.”
I nodded. She had a liking for that photo. I e-mailed it to her and she had it blown up to a five-by-four foot photograph, framed it, and hung it in her office.
“I was about three months from being homeless before I came here, you know. After I finished my schooling and my apprenticeship, I had to work with a bunch of sexist, hairy men with slow-firing brains. Three times The Bouncers and I got into minor fistfights with them, twice I was fired.”