The Private Lives of Pippa Lee Read online

  ‘I’m Lucy Childers,’ said the woman who had answered the door. ‘This is, let’s see … Emily Wasserman, Ethel Cohen, Jean Yelding, Cora O’Hara, and – Where’s Chloe?’ Just then, the other ‘young one’ came out from behind the bathroom door. Chloe was of an indeterminate age; her taut face was frozen in a semi-smile, having been ratcheted up several notches and enhanced by prominent cheekbones that looked like Ping-Pong balls under her skin. The two swollen halves of her upper lip drooped suggestively, like a set of red velvet curtains tied at the corners of her mouth, Pippa thought. The tip of her nose was pinched, as though a pair of fingers had squeezed a clay sculpture as a prank. Her eyelids seemed Krazy-Glued open a little too wide. She spoke in a very quiet, level voice, as one might speak to a child having a tantrum.

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ she said, her startled eyes staring out of that approximation of a face like a prisoner peering out of a chink in a stone wall. Pippa said something polite and looked away, feeling a mix of pity and repulsion.

  ‘This is Chloe’s last meeting with the club,’ Lucy Childers said. ‘Her husband has recently passed and she’s moving back to the city.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered Chloe.

  Lucy Childers perched herself on the edge of the couch, back straight, her small feet in their white leather nurse’s shoes lined up beside each other neatly, and opened the discussion with her own erudite thoughts, one tiny, stiff hand chopping the air each time she made a point, then moving it swiftly to the side, as though scraping peelings off a table. Lucy admired the symmetry of the book, the careful pacing, the slow but steady drip feed of information – not too much, not too little; she called it a ‘mystery of character.’ Then she turned to Chloe, who murmured, ‘It’s a mean book, but I liked it.’ Pippa tried to shrug off the unwelcome mix of dread and kinship she felt with this person.

  The oriole flew off. Pippa moved the binoculars down a bit, found Herb’s red Converse sneakers. She followed his brown, skinny legs, the little hill of his belly, until she came to his rugged face, lower jaw clamped over front teeth in a grimace of concentration as he read a four-inch-thick manuscript on the lawn chair. The truth was, Herb hadn’t retired. He was running the company from here, buying manuscripts, making deals.

  A household list filed through Pippa’s mind on an endless loop, the way the breaking headlines run under the TV news: dry cleaning … toilet paper … plant fertilizer … cheese … She had been lying in this luxurious position dreamily for half an hour, having cleaned the house and planned dinner by ten. The circle of the artificial pond, Herb’s legs, the brilliant, green lawn … Pippa wished she could paint it. It was an odd desire for her; she always said of herself, almost proudly, surrounded as she was by creative folk, that she had no talent of any kind.

  The buzz of the doorbell startled her. She sat up and swiveled around to see Dot Nadeau waiting behind the screen door. Dot was a bleach blonde with leathery skin and a sultry, New Jersey voice. She lived just across the artificial lake, in 1272. In their late sixties, Dot and her husband, Johnny, were among the younger residents. Pippa, at fifty, was practically a child bride.

  ‘Do you have a minute?’ Dot asked in a muted tone. She looked harried.

  ‘Sure. I’m supposed to be doing errands. But who cares,’ said Pippa.

  They sat down in the kitchen. Pippa poured out a cup of coffee and handed it to Dot. ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, we’re fine, but … my son, Chris. Remember I told you about him?’

  ‘In Utah?’

  ‘Yes. He’s thinking of relocating and … he might be coming east.’

  ‘Oh, well, that would be nice, if they would move near you.’

  ‘The thing is, he’s having trouble … It’s just a mess, Pippa, a real mess.’ There were tears in Dot’s eyes. Pippa checked to see that Herb was still ensconced on his lawn chair and fetched Dot a Kleenex.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Pippa. She felt awkward. She didn’t know Dot very well. They’d had coffee a couple of times, but they’d never gotten past the pleasantry stage.

  ‘He’s had some kind of crisis with his wife, and he’s left her, and he’s lost his job – it wasn’t even a real job, he was working in a men’s shelter. How do you lose a job like that? I think he’s living in his car. Thank God there are no kids. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Well, he’s an adult, I mean … what can you do?’

  ‘He was always sort of half-baked, you know what I mean?’

  Pippa wondered what Dot meant. Was the boy retarded? A drunk? Stunted in some way?

  ‘It’s painful, but sometimes you just have to accept that they are who they are. I mean, I feel that about mine.’ Tender Ben and tyrannical Grace. Now and forever. Nothing to be done. As if on cue, Ben walked in pulling a well-worn seersucker jacket over his sloped shoulders. Whenever Pippa saw him, she was amazed he was no longer a boy. ‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘Dot, this is my son, Ben.’

  ‘The lawyer!’ said Dot, gazing at him admiringly.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Ben.

  ‘Columbia, right?’ asked Dot. Immediately Pippa felt a pang of guilt for having a son in law school when Dot’s boy was unemployed and possibly homeless.

  Dot turned to Pippa. ‘You’re right,’ said Dot. ‘I knew I should come to you. I had a feeling. I’m just going to let him cry it out on his own. He can’t come running to me every time his life falls apart. It’s no favor to him.’

  ‘Of course he knows if he’s ever really in trouble …’

  ‘He has me.’ Dot hugged Pippa and left.

  Ben bit into an apple. ‘What were you right about?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Pippa. ‘She said her son was half-baked, and I said sometimes you have to accept things the way they are.’

  ‘Well, she left satisfied, anyway.’

  ‘Half-baked?’ said Herb, who had come in when he heard Ben’s voice. ‘Is that code for half-wit?’

  Pippa took a blood pressure cuff from a drawer, Velcroed it onto Herb’s arm, and started pumping it up. Ben stood to read the dial with her.

  ‘Since when are you two on the staff of Mount Sinai?’ asked Herb. ‘Don’t get mad,’ said Pippa. ‘Your blood pressure goes up.’

  ‘How about if I hang myself?’ said Herb with a grim smile. ‘What happens then?’

  ‘A little appreciation for your ministering angel, Dad,’ said Ben in a jocular, warning tone. Herb slid the local paper across the table, scanned the front page, grimacing. He hated having his blood pressure taken in front of people, even the kids. Pippa could feel his petulance rise up in her like a tide. She should have waited till Ben had gone. Shit, she thought. Oh, well. She poured Ben a bowl of Grape-Nuts cereal and listened to the swift animal crunch his teeth made when he ate it, the same crunch they had made when he was five. She loved that sound. ‘Oh, by the way,’ Ben said. ‘Stephanie brought a cat home from the pound.’

  ‘Another one!’ she exclaimed, laughing. Ben’s girlfriend couldn’t resist lame animals. She was a dear, earnest person. Pippa was sure they would produce a fine family, as long as Ben didn’t get distracted by someone more exciting. But he didn’t seem to crave thrills, strangely enough.

  Ben stood up. ‘Back to the salt mines,’ he said.

  ‘Are you still working on that same paper?’ she asked.

  He nodded, pushing his glasses back up his nub nose. ‘The paper that ate Ben Lee.’

  ‘You’re just thorough,’ Pippa said.

  ‘I actually think I might be onto something,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t that great,’ she said, beaming. As she walked him out to his car, he put his arm around her.

  ‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Come to the city next week and we can have lunch. Or dinner. You can stay over.’

  ‘We’re having lunch with Grace on Wednesday.’

  ‘Oh. Right. If you want to get together another time, call me, okay?’
/>   ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Of course I will. Stop worrying about me, will you?’

  ‘I just want you to have a little fun,’ he said.

  After Ben drove off, Pippa stood quietly staring after him. The list, which had rolled by under Dot a couple of times while she was talking, came into full view now: cheese … dry cleaning … plant fertilizer …

  It was only three minutes to the mini-mall. Pippa drove over, picked up all the things she needed at the grocery store, dropped off the dry cleaning, then eased herself back onto the searing car seat and started creeping through the parking lot. She was in terror of mowing over one of the aged people, dressed in pink and pistachio, their tanned faces collapsed, shriveled skin coming away from knees and elbows.

  *

  The relentless buzzing of a lawn mower dragged Pippa from a black sleep like a body from a river. As she opened her eyes, she felt a dull pain in her temples. She wanted water, and coffee. Sitting up in the bed, she glanced at Herb. As a rule she tried not to look at him when he was sleeping. Eyes shut tight, mouth slack, he looked like an ancient, fragile old man. She turned away and stood. She knew that when his icy blue eyes, with their conquering stare, opened, she would feel reassured again. She loved this man so much. It was a condition she had tried to cure herself of many times; the symptoms could be painful. But she’d given up the fight long ago. She was the woman who loved Herb Lee. Oh, and many other things besides, she thought to herself as she pulled on her cotton robe the color of new leaves. Mother. Two decent, productive human beings living in the world because of me. That’s not nothing. She walked into the kitchen, squinting in the blinding light. Everything was white. Formica table, counter, tile floor, lost their edges, bled into a field of light, their perspective flattened. Shadows from the window casings threw a blue grid over the room. With her vision blurred from sleep, the effect was so dazzlingly abstract that she had to take a moment to get her bearings, and when she did she was so confused by what she saw that she questioned her own memory.

  The table had been set chaotically, plates scattered at random, as if tossed by a furious domestic. Some of them had chocolate cake on them. Others were bare. Pippa noticed something the color of peanut butter spread on one of the slices of chocolate cake. She sniffed it cautiously. It was peanut butter. Yet she distinctly remembered sponging down the table the night before. The place had been immaculate. A chill went up her spine, and she swiveled around, imagining a malevolent pair of psychotic eyes staring at her from the living room – some escaped lunatic, brandishing a dirty cake knife. Seeing no one, she went to the kitchen door, tried it. Locked. She walked around the house, checked every door, every window. All locked. No one had come in. It must have been Herb. But they had gone to bed together at eleven. Herb had fallen asleep first. She tried to imagine him getting up to let people in, after midnight, for chocolate cake and peanut butter. It was out of the question. Then how had the cake gotten there? She cleared the table, scraped plates into the garbage, and stacked them in the dishwasher. Made coffee.

  She was sitting at the table drinking a cup when Herb walked in, opened the front door, and dragged the local paper off the mat.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you had a party and didn’t invite me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he said, putting on his reading glasses.

  ‘You left all the plates out.’

  ‘What plates?’

  ‘Herb, there were six plates with chocolate cake on the table this morning. Or there were six plates. Two of them didn’t have any cake on them. One of the slices had peanut butter on it.’

  Herb sat and looked at her. ‘Have you gone stark raving mad?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘At first I thought someone came into the house, but the doors are all locked.’ There was a pause as this sank in.

  ‘Does anyone else have a key?’

  ‘Well, I guess the maintenance people. And Miss Fanning.’

  ‘The cleaning lady? She lives in New Milford. Why would she drive all the way over here for chocolate cake? We better check if anything is missing.’ Nothing was missing. Pippa called Miss Fanning and pretended she was confirming her for Monday. Then she casually asked her what she’d been up to the night before. There was a pause. ‘Bowling?’ the woman answered tentatively. Herb called the administrative offices to register a complaint. They asked if he wanted to call the police. Herb declined. ‘I suppose you could call it a victimless crime,’ he said, his nostrils expanding slightly. The man on the other end of the phone chuckled politely.

  Pippa called a locksmith, had the locks changed. This time, they gave no one a key. A week went by. Pippa kept thinking about the cake. It had to be Herb. He had forgotten. He was losing his mind. Pippa watched him with special care now. Every time he misplaced his glasses or forgot someone’s name, she felt her suspicion grow. Then, the next Sunday morning, she walked into the kitchen and found carrot sticks planted in a bowl of vanilla frosting. A frying pan with the remains of fried ham cemented to the bottom. More dirty plates. This time she woke Herb and showed him. They looked at each other.

  ‘Maybe you should see a doctor,’ she said.

  Herb was furious. ‘Okay, if I have Alzheimer’s so be it, I’ll kill myself. But first I need to see the evidence.’ He drove straight to the electronics store in the mini-mall and bought a small surveillance camera with a wall mount, then paid the man from the store to install it in the corner, where the wall met the ceiling. The guy was up on a ladder, sweat pouring down his face. Pippa turned on the air conditioner. ‘This must seem a little strange to you,’ she said.

  ‘You’d be surprised what people do for entertainment in this place,’ said the man.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve never seen it in the kitchen before.’

  ‘Oh. No. It’s not – it’s –’ Pippa let it go. She’d rather have him think they were filming themselves humping on the kitchen table than chronicling her husband’s descent into inanity.

  An hour later, Pippa was straightening out the living room when she looked out the plate-glass window. Across the pond, in the Nadeaus’ driveway, a U-Haul was hitched up to a bright yellow truck with an orange shell clamped over the bed. The shell had windows with ratty blue and red gingham curtains pulled shut inside. Pippa could see Dot gesturing to a dark-haired man who was carrying a cardboard box. Pippa picked her bird-watching binoculars off the coffee table and trained them on the young man. He had a T-shirt with ‘What?’ printed on the back of it. So the half-baked son was moving in after all! It was funny about Dot, she thought. It felt so natural, talking to her. It made Pippa feel like a different person. Dot knew her out of context. A few months ago, in her old life, she would no sooner have had a friendship with Dot Nadeau than flown around the room. Their friends were editors, novelists, critics, poets. Yet Pippa had never felt fully at ease in their hypercivilized company. Only with her twins, when they were young – only then had she felt fully secure in who she was. Grace and Ben had looked up at her with such certainty in their little faces, and called her Mama. They knew, so she knew. Now her babies were gone. They called sometimes, came home to visit. Occasionally they all went out to lunch together. But they didn’t look at Pippa the way they once had. Ben was still so sweet to her. He had always needed little, expected everything, received what he expected. He was born thoughtful, but secure. Pippa’s feeling for him was simple, ample, easy. But Grace – that was a real fuckup. Pippa felt stupid and bumbling in her daughter’s company, and somehow guilty, as though she had let Grace down by amounting to so little. And there was something more.

  As a very young child, Grace had been needy, clutching at her mother like a baby monkey. Her love for Pippa was possessive and competitive. Though she adored her twin, she tried to edge Ben out of her mother’s embraces, desperate to bask in her love alone. The day after her fourth birthday she sat down at Pippa’s feet, opened a book, and read the whole thing out loud. Pippa was astounded;
the child had been completely intractable when it came to reading, refusing to sound out letters at all. Little Grace looked up at her mother then and, with furrowed brow, asked, ‘Now do you love me more than Ben?’ Pippa swept the girl up into her lap and hugged her, feeling a sting of guilt like a poisoned needle in her sternum. Because she knew what Grace was getting at. There were flashes of jealous intensity in her daughter’s love that Pippa found domineering, devouring, even repellent in moments that came and, mercifully, dissolved again into the otherwise sunny landscape of their daily lives. Once, watching a ship disappear over the lip of the ocean, Grace said to Pippa, ‘I own you as far as the eye can see.’

  Though she did not recognize it, in some secret part of Pippa’s mind, her daughter’s wish to possess her utterly echoed another love, a deadly, sweet, and voracious passion that had all but suffocated Pippa in her youth.

  Yet, never mind, in spite of it all, now that Grace was grown she was a triumph! So sophisticated, so courageous. Pippa found herself watching her sneakily, out of the corner of her eye. And occasionally, in her daughter’s recklessness, her lust for adventure, her desire for experience, she recognized herself, a self that had vanished long ago. How had it happened? How could she have changed so much? She remembered the morning she looked in the mirror and saw three white, bent hairs sticking out of her head. They had looked obscene to her, like stray pubic hairs escaping from the crotch of a bathing suit. Now, beneath the reddish blond tint, her hair was white. Pippa was a placid, middle-aged woman. And Herb was eighty years old. The thought of it made her laugh. Life was getting so unreal. More and more, the past was flooding into her, diluting the present like water poured into wine.

  Herb walked in then. Pippa turned. ‘Do you need anything?’ she asked.

  Herb sat down and patted the pillow beside him. ‘How’s my pal?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sad that you’re living in Wrinkle Village?’

  ‘I have to fill up my days more. But I’m not sad. I think it’s sort of romantic, starting again like this, with so little stuff.’ Herb smiled sadly and lay back on the cushions. His skin, bronzed from all that time on the patio, was creased like a rock face, his eyes points of light.