Notes about: Suzanne O’Toole Sullivan
Born: June 09, 1966 Died: April 29, 2007 5:22 pm
Holderness, New Hampshire
Her house was filled with pink—ribbons and hats and sashes—and she faithfully wore the Red Sox cap her son gave her when she first got sick. She talked nonstop—telling stories and laughing or belting out a song—so that everyone in the room was put at ease. She had two young children and her bedroom was filled with their cards and drawings. She said that her husband didn’t know what to do, was not able to talk to her, and could only hold her hand in the most courteous way. He kissed her head as he did those of their children. They had not made love since her diagnosis and she suspected they never would again. Instead he brought her flowers every day and her first request when I arrived was that I please remove the dead and wilted ones. “I wish he could be himself again,” she said.
She grew up just an hour away and was a speech pathologist. She said she loved her work and had missed it. She grew up in a big family—the baby of six—and so she was used to lots of noise. Noise and sound were a comfort to her, but every now and then she liked to be all alone. She liked to be underwater—loved to scuba dive—and as a kid she had loved to hop bareback on her horse, Charlie, and ride and ride until all she was hearing was hooves and her own heart. She said her own children have no speech problems that she had heard but that her husband was someone who always tripped on Rs with a W sound if he talked too fast, which lately—ever since she got sick—he had done constantly.
On this day, as soon as Michael (four) and Clarissa (seven) left the room, she began to let go. I reached for the phone to call her husband—it was time for him to get home—but she put her hand on mine and shook her head no. We could hear Bugs Bunny in the next room and she smiled when Elmer Fudd said “you wascal wabbit.” Her eyebrows lifted as she listened, the cartoon, the laughter, and finally there was the sound of the front door and a chorus of the kids running to greet her husband.
“I’m home,” he called. “I’m here,” and with the sound of him rushing to her, and the shrill laughter of their children, she let go.
And I let go in a way we are not supposed to do. I was so aware of myself as an outsider as I watched the three of them hover beside her, the children studying me the way they might an animal at the zoo. I was so aware of how this experience separated them from the rest of the world in a way that could not be touched. It just had to be sealed and, when possible, set aside in a very safe place. And heaven help the bighearted soul in their future who might be able to come in and fill the space and be a part of their lives. That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking too much about myself and so I failed the assignment. I broke so many rules. I got personal. I got attached. And what’s more, Suzanne Sullivan knew this; she was the person in control the whole while. She was the one protecting the rest of us. Bugs Bunny will always remind me. Bugs Bunny and red roosters and the high-pitched squeals of excited children, and if I ever again make love in a way that means something to me, I will be so grateful. I will not take it for granted.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Suzanne Sullivan
Eh, what’s up, Doc? You wotten wabbit you. She doesn’t want to go. She does not want to go. She thinks of the sound waves words and laughter out of the television, through the doorway and down the hall, bending around the corner and into her room where the woman sits so fearfully you can smell her anxiety, you can hear it, a dull dreading, a dull thumping, rhythmic and deep like music. She hears the Beatles and Vivaldi and the Sesame Street song, jump rope rhymes and hymns and wind against the chimes hanging on their porch. Their porch. This is their house and they have children and a dog and Bugs Bunny has been there her whole life, never aging, never letting Elmer win, always fading out in that circle at the end of the show. The red rooster ran down the road. The wed woosta wan and wan and wan, birds and wings and keys and hooves, thumping and pounding, Charlie’s body wet beneath her as she races home, that glorious horse smell rising up, lingering when she leans forward and hugs his big strong neck, and all she can see is the green of the fields and the wide open sky and all she can hear is the pounding of hooves, galloping and galloping and galloping.
Rachel
RACHEL SILVERMAN HIT A point in her marriage when she knew that it was her only chance to leave. It was that clear to her, a passageway closing like an artery constricting or a door swinging and locking in place. It was only a matter of time before age and retirement, illness and diagnosis and necessary care, would shift the whole world like those here at Pine Haven who get moved into another building or wing—from living to assisted living to nursing care or the memory unit where they wander within the safety of a confined space. All of life builds and grows and then you hit the peak—often unaware that you have reached it—and then you start thinking about downsizing, down down down. One day you are independent and thriving and then you are bedridden and surrounded by the smells and sounds of those who will never venture outside again and all that falls between the two blurs like the view from a passing train. It’s why she wanders down the halls of the nursing unit every day, responding to the hands that reach for her, the cloudy tearful eyes, the cries and murmurs of nonsense, the stench of what’s left in a body and the sounds of medical equipment, bells and buzzers. This is also life. She comes and walks these halls to remind herself. This is life.
One day she was leaning out that apartment window, smooth young arms waving to acquaintances on the street below, and then there was an emptiness that she filled with Joe—years when she felt on the verge of leaving, changing, starting over—but then didn’t. She had missed her chance; one minute it seemed like there was plenty of time to decide and then there wasn’t.
She and Art were in the city, picking up groceries, getting things from the cleaners, chores they had done together for years and she saw it there in his stooped profile and sluggish turn. It was coming—something was coming—and her thoughts of how she would someday slip away and into another life were gone. Joe was already in her past; life had taken him back to his wife and children and there was no room for her. They had promised that they would keep meeting, stay in touch, but of course that was not possible.
But that day in the grocery, she glimpsed the end. It was one of those times in life when everything comes clear like a spotlight turning on. Art was not healthy, and though they had not made love in years, she did love him as a friend and as a human. She was a lot of things, but unkind was not one of them, and how could you leave someone in a weakened state. And sure enough she was right and then she was there—the doctors’ appointments and procedures and medicines, a long slow decline into those final days when it occurred to her that the window was about to fly open again. She had forgotten it could or that it ever would again and as people came to tell Art good-bye, cars lining the blocks surrounding their home in Lexington, the thought started to burn and glow every time someone whispered, “What will she do? Where will she go?” Interesting what feels like home. Nothing had felt right since that very first apartment in the city, and when Sadie suggests that they imagine themselves back in a place they used to inhabit, this is where Rachel goes first. She opens the windows of that front bay, hears the noises in the street, smells the river.
So the window was about to fly open again and then she knew. When Art died, she would leave and move as close to Joe as she could get. She wouldn’t care what anyone chose to do with her body or ashes at the other end, it was now that mattered, and when Art died, it was already decided what she would do next. He told her she had been a good wife and of course she resisted the urge to confess all the ways she had not. He told her he was sorry they never had children, sorry to leave her alone with no family whatsoever, and she didn’t scream about adoption as she had so many times through the years, didn’t remind him that he was the one who prevented a child coming into their lives. The fights and resentments of their whole marriage went away then, as if dissolving in the air around her, and she did feel the air change, just as the young woman who often sits bedside with the dying told her it does. Though Rachel would never tell a living soul, she booked her flight to North Carolina that very same day.
She went out for coffee and all the rest she would need to sit shiva and while she was out walked right into a travel agent’s office and made a reservation. It was a crazy thing and it made her feel both guilty and wonderful, but she’s sure to this day that was when her spine began shifting and dissolving, osteoporosis settling in. Punishment for her hurry? Punishment for not waiting until after his burial when she had carried out his last requests? He had told her very specifically what he wanted—the briefest time of shiva but within that time full observance of those rituals his parents and grandparents had honored. She draped the mirrors and removed her shoes. She left the door unlocked for friends and neighbors to come and go without knocking. Art had talked about how historically the death of someone presented a new way of telling time, a before and after; it was a time to catalog that life and ponder emotions like guilt or shame or regret or anger. It had been hard to look him in the eye as he said those words and it was even hard to recall them without flinching because already everything had shifted even though she cautioned and reminded herself how foolish it was to feel this way. After all, Joe was dead, too, yet in her mind it was like he would be there to greet her, that somehow the light and air of his childhood world would once again let her see and touch him. And though she also would hate to cave to superstition, it was hard for her not to believe that some foul joke had been played on her, weakening her spine in such a way that in a few more years she would likely be misshapen like so many others, left bent and staring into her own heart. All her life she was independent and proud of it, standing tall with her head held up high, and now she is rapidly being forced inward. For all of her outspokenness she had lived a lie and still is.
And now she is here: Fulton, North Carolina, and sitting beside his grave. He’s in the newer part and except for morning and late afternoon, his grave bakes in the summer sun, the grass around him and Rosemary all scorched and dry. When she arrived last fall, mere days after the unveiling of Art’s stone and the closing on their house, there was a plastic pot of yellow chrysanthemums that dried up and then sat there dead all through Christmas and spring. She finally moved the pot and hid it up under a big shrub, but she didn’t feel she could replace it with something pretty, not yet. One day soon, she will, though. She even has a fantasy of sooner or later running into one of his children and explaining that she is an old friend of his and would love to help tend his grave if that is okay with them.
It was hard to talk in the beginning because Rosemary was present, too, but then Rachel finally decided that if indeed Joe and Rosemary are out there watching and listening, they know that she is here with the best of intentions and with genuine love. Joe had told her that he’d like to be cremated and half of him—she remembers his very words—put in the Saxon River down at Mulligan’s Beach where that old pavilion had been and the other half taken and thrown off the end of Johnnie Mercer’s Pier down at Wrightsville Beach where I once caught an enormous cobia, so big they took my photo and put it in the paper. But he is here, under the hard-baked dirt, with a very modest headstone beside the wife loving and devoted. Rachel has noticed that people get lazy about death and the wishes of their loved ones. A standard routine run of the mill funeral instead of all the sorts of special requests like those Toby and Sadie talk and laugh about many evenings. Sadie wants everyone to sing “We Gather Together” because it reminds her of the last time she stood beside Horace and held his hand. They were standing in the same church where they got married and the only difference, Sadie said, is that the church had gone modern with big new furniture and some suspended microphones. “But Horace looked exactly the same,” she said. “He needed to trim some fuzz around his ears, but otherwise he looked exactly the same.”
Toby said she wants everyone to recite a line from a piece of literature they love and that fool Stanley said he would be quoting some erotica. “In fact,” he’d said, “why don’t I begin practicing by reading a little to some choice damsels this very night.”
“Whoa, now,” Toby had said. “You aren’t getting rid of me that fast! Hold your horses there, big fella. Besides, good chance I’ll be the one burying you.”
He said that in that case she could read erotica for him. It made Rachel laugh in spite of herself. She tries to ignore him, but it’s hard to do a lot of the time. Such a fool. Handsome and still quite fit but an absolute fool.
Now Rachel tells Rosemary she’s sorry if she ever hurt her. “I was like a trapped bird in those days,” she says. “I was beating my wings and the window was closing, you know? I didn’t realize how panicked I was until I met Joe that summer and everything changed. I had gotten used to living in the dark when suddenly the drapes swung back and I felt young again. I did think of you and I felt guilty, just not enough to sacrifice and give up what I was finally feeling. It’s a terrible admission, but there it is. I hope you had a secret, too, Rosemary. I like to think you did. I wish we could zoom from our lives and see the great big picture. It might make more sense.
“I was foolish in many ways though I thought I was so smart and sophisticated. I fancied myself a Katharine Graham type. That’s the kind of woman I aspired to, which my husband appreciated. He admired strong, intelligent women. And then, Joe, well, you know Joe. He was a wave of testosterone, something I had never encountered. In fact, I was ashamed that I found him so attractive.
“A big change I notice in myself now is that I have no fear and it feels good. It is comforting. It is as close to religion as I likely have ever been. This readiness, this satisfaction, this love. Dear God, sweetheart, look at me, sitting in the cemetery talking like we were back in our dark corner in the Clover Den. I doubt if Rosemary ever went there—she was in Boston for such a short time, but I suspect you would have liked it, Rosemary. I suspect I would have liked you and you, me. Isn’t that odd to imagine? And you both would have liked Art. He was a fine man. I think what makes me so unafraid is that most everyone I have cared about is gone. My parents died long ago and my brother has been gone for over a decade. So many of my colleagues are gone. In many ways, I am more with the dead than I am with the living. It’s why I need to hold their hands and seek their eyes. And yes, it smells awful and the equipment noise is a cacophony that sticks in your head and makes you want to scream. But I am so drawn to them, drawn to the descriptions I used to hear young doctors joke about—their bodies reverting back to fetus position, mouths permanently fixed in an O, their feces-stained hands curled into fists as they call out names of those lost to them. Art and I had several young doctor friends who talked about those circling the drain. I laughed along with the others. But I don’t laugh now. Now I try to uncurl their stained fists and rest my hands there; I try to make contact, and the times I do, I am filled with a sense of love and purpose. I am a sister, a mother, a child. I am someone who cares.
“You know more than anyone, Joe, that I have never been religious. The closest I came to religion was my brother’s bar mitzvah—they didn’t do that for girls like they do now. He practiced and practiced, and by way of that, I memorized his parts, too. Remember, Joe? I did it for you one night when we drove down to Gloucester? I had to teach you how to say it—Glosstah. I could do my brother’s whole haftorah, though I’m not sure I could do it these days. There is a lot lost in my head that I can’t locate, but it was from the scripture about Miriam getting leprosy as a punishment for asking questions and I remember being disgusted by the way the men always got the good parts like taking dictation from God and parting the Red Sea while the woman gets leprosy for being curious and seeking justice. Still, my brother did a good job and my parents were very proud and we feasted afterward. I had a new dress for the services, navy voile with a white lace collar.”
She stretches her legs out and leans against a neighboring headstone so dark with mildew it’s hard to read the name. She tells him how she can’t wait to see his childhood home, how like an archaeologist she is hoping to find a trace of him. She is telling how glad she is to have moved near him when she looks up and sees the pedicure girl, C.J., standing there watching her.
“Hey.” The girl blows a stream of smoke off to the side.
“Hey yourself.”
“Were you talking to those people?” she asks, and Rachel shrugs. C.J. steps closer, tosses her cigarette and grinds it out with the toe of her big clunky boot. Eighty degrees and she’s wearing what look like combat boots. “You know, Shark, you’re different from all the others here.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. You’re not so polite.” She pauses and then laughs. “I mean that as a big compliment—I think that polite and hypocritical often go together.”
“Well, then compliment taken.”
“It’s a southern thing.” She pulls another cigarette out from the pocket of her baggy jeans. “‘Why, thank you, sugah pie,’ you might say, even if what you really mean is ‘go to hell.’”
“It is southern,” Rachel says, finally recovering from the surprise, aware that there’s a part of her still believing Joe and Rosemary might join the conversation. “But it’s also a human thing. Just more noticeable here because everybody talks too goddamned much and wants to be sweet.” She lets her voice get loud so as to reclaim her dignity.
“Ha, be sweet,” C.J. says. “My mom always said that.” She nods her head in the direction of deep shade, a hedge of wax myrtle shading another, older section of graves.
“Where is your mom?”
“Right over there in the low-rent district,” she points. “You know a long time ago they used to always throw the suicides in a far corner. Suicides, slaves, Jewish people like yourself.”
“Is that what happened?” Rachel asks. “Your mother, I mean.”
“Yep—the ultimate f*ck you. No offense,” she says, and then while still looking over to the shade, mumbles, “Thanks, Mom.”
“I’m so sorry—was she sick?”
“Isn’t anyone who does that?”
“A lot of answers to that question I suppose and all very complicated.”
“I still come see her.” She shrugs. “When my son is older, I’ll bring him over here.”
“Where is your son?”
“Day care. My friend, Joanna, who works as a volunteer here made that happen. She’s like my fairy godmother—jobs when I need them, a garage apartment. Free babysitting.”
“Your dad?”
“Now there’s a long story.”
“All I’ve got is time,” Rachel says. She watches C.J. staring off at a sound in the undergrowth—a bird or squirrel. She’s a pretty girl under all that dark makeup, especially pretty when she smiles. “Are you still up for taking me for a ride around town? Tomorrow, maybe?” Rachel asks. “I’ll pay the big bucks.”
“Sure. I can do that if you don’t mind a baby in a car seat and a rotten muffler.” She steps so close Rachel can smell the patchouli as she leans in to read. “So who are these people, Joe and Rosemary Carlyle?”
“He was a friend years ago. “ She pauses. “A friend of my husband’s really. I never knew the wife.”
“But you talk to them.”
“Sometimes.”
“That’s cool. No different from writing in a journal really or talking in the mirror like this one woman over in nursing does all day long. I mean I write letters to my mom sometimes and I tell my baby all kinds of things, you know? It’s probably why a lot of people have pets.”
“Maybe so.”
“Well, that’s my break. I’ll find you before I get off to figure out a time for tomorrow.” She turns to go and then pauses. “Listen, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. I might look like a druggie or that I’m irresponsible or something, but I’m not. I smoke cigarettes, but otherwise I’m pretty damn virginal. I work hard and I take good care of my son.”
“Is his name Jesus?”
“What?” She stops, laughs. “Oh, I get it. Ha. I’m not that virginal. No, his name is Kurt after a really cool guy who also offed himself. I really like talking to you. See ya.” The girl doesn’t even wait for Rachel to reply, just turns and moves away as quietly as she appeared. Rachel sits and waits, takes a deep breath. She wishes she could start talking again, but something is different; something leaves her turned inward and speaking to the Joe there. Good-bye sweetheart, she says, I’ll be back later, and to Rosemary she says, I am sorry. I truly am sorry. There is a warm breeze, tendrils of ivy and vines swinging like a curtain over the passage back into the open daylight and parking lot and there is a mockingbird doing a car alarm—over and over and over again, just another sound trapped and repeated with no sense of time or meaning.
Kendra
KENDRA HAS FINISHED PLACING stickers on everything worth having and now is trying to decide what she will wear to Abby’s party tomorrow. It has to be something that really showcases her figure in the sexiest way possible. She is determined to leave Ben Palmer on his knees and begging just because he deserves it after all the ways he has misled and disappointed her. She will probably wear that short Boho miniskirt that leaves people amazed that she is over forty and has a child, and her hot pink Juicy halter top. She loves shopping in the teen department when Abby needs something. There aren’t too many women her age who could do this. Flat stomach and abs. She was so glad when Ben stopped begging for a second child and left her alone. She didn’t want another one; he wasn’t the one who had to go through absolute torture and feeling like an elephant. And he wasn’t the one who had to get up in the middle of the night to feed her that first month she actually tried to nurse. To this day when she tells people what a difficult time she had, how she just was not someone able to nurse, he has an expression that suggests otherwise, that she didn’t want to nurse and therefore was not a good mother like all those people he held up to her as good examples. Some people just can’t nurse. It isn’t meant to be, and if this weren’t a truth, there never would have been such a thing as a wet nurse.
Truth be told, she had not been ready to have a baby—it was a total accident—but of course she would never say that to Abby or how she spent a lot of time crying and saying she didn’t want a baby at all since she was practically a baby herself and had never gotten to spend a whole summer in Europe the way she had told him she wanted to. And now of course she does want Abby and wouldn’t trade her for anything under the sun, but at the time what she had really wanted was a career and a body that made people stop and look. She had been hired to do the local traffic report over at WSPR and it was just the beginning. She knows that had she not left when she did, replaced by someone who could not even hold a candle to her, she would likely have made it right into an anchor chair and God knows where she’d be. Oprah started that way. They all did. But, no, thanks to dear unambitious Ben, she was knocked up too soon and the rest is history. Of course people do still stop and look.
She has always been able to do that, always been proud of how foolish some men look when she saunters by, a swish of her hips at just the right time. She once even sawed the heel off one shoe just a fraction like Marilyn Monroe had famously done and it really does work. Kendra can also still wear things that cling, thanks to Pilates and a good genetic composition. She loves that most of the women she gets put with on various committees and things at Abby’s school are so much younger than she is and still there is not a single one of them that can compete with her. Of course, they really can’t hold her interest either, but very few people can in this shitty town. The work she does would make a lot of money in a big city where people are interested in art but around here the best you can do is an occasional craft fair where no one knows anything. People will buy doorstops that are nothing more than a brick wrapped in felt, but no one wants to see her display of miniature sushis, carefully shaped and baked and painted, fragile and delicate and no two the same. If only she lived elsewhere, but she lives here in Shitville with a husband who is as ambitious as a newt. He’s smart enough to do so much, but just to spite her he doesn’t. Ever since he said I do he’s been saying I don’t. I don’t like that, I don’t want that, and she knows it is out of pure spite. Well, he will see who is the best at being spiteful. When Andy watches her walk by, he all but licks his lips and she does everything she can to keep him on the line, closer and closer each time.
“Shake it, don’t break it,” he whispered the other day when she ran by his office on the pretense of collecting for a charity and got two seconds alone with him in a hallway. She could feel the heat coming out of him, especially when she told him how if she broke it, then she’d need to come to him to fix it. “Isn’t that what you do?” she asked. “Fix people?”
“I cure the heart,” he said, and laughed, though by then he was backing away from her, his neck a little flushed.
“Exactly,” she said, and pushed past him so he could get a good look as she walked. She knew if he weren’t so turned on, he would have been mad that she crossed the line of his workplace. She would have to make a point of telling his wife she had seen him. “Your husband works so hard,” she will say. “I think you need to take him on a little vacation.”
“What about he takes me?” his wife says in this version. “I deserve that.” And Kendra smiles and pours the idiot some more wine. “Of course you do, dear. Bless your heart.”
Kendra tried and tried to get Abby interested in some of the new looks that girls her age are wearing, but she said the only thing she wanted for her birthday was a phone and now all she wants is for Dollbaby to come home. “Honey,” she said, and handed her some jeans. “Just try on a few things. You need some new clothes.” Abby needed an eight in the same jeans Kendra got in a four and she had to spend the whole ride home reassuring her that most girls do have a little plump phase, that once she starts her period and starts growing breasts it will all get much better.
“Stop!” Abby screamed so loud Kendra almost wrecked the car. “I hate when you talk about all of that. I hate you,” she screamed again when they stopped in the driveway. She jumped from the car, and instead of running up on the porch where Ben was working on that stupid disappearing chamber, she went tearing off toward the cemetery and the old folks’ home where she spends way too much time.
“Why can’t you just take her shopping?” Ben asked later when he came into their room where she was trying on her new things. “Why can’t it ever just be about her? Buy something for her and for once leave yourself out. She is the kid, after all.” Oh, how insightful. He has had just enough therapy to start to notice a few things, now.
“It is about her,” she screamed. “Just because I happen to find something for myself, too, does not mean I am not a good mother. I am a good mother. I am a great goddamned mother!”
“That’s what you keep saying.”
“I am!” She kicked that big red rubber toy that Dollbaby used to leave in the middle of the room all dirty and slimy. No matter how many times she collects all those things and puts them on the back porch, Abby goes and gets them and scatters them back around all the different rooms, like it might bring Dollbaby back. “But she might come back,” Abby had said, Ben of course agreeing with her, and Kendra wanted to scream and stomp and say impossible.
Ben leaned down and picked up the toy where it had bounced against the wall and set it back on the beach towel Abby had left in the corner, under a photo she had taped to the wall. Dollbaby with angel halo and wings, the first Halloween they had her.
“Just be a good mother,” he said, and looked at her with those tired red eyes. Was he crying? Was he stoned? Did she give a damn? “Just do something just for her.”
“This party is just for her,” she said. “I am about to throw the best birthday party that any girl in her class has ever had. I can guarantee you that every mother in town will be calling me up afterward to try to get answers and copy it.”
“I rest my case,” he said, and she bit back what was the true and best thing to say to someone who said he was going to be a lawyer and then never got there.
What a loser. Kendra does not want a situation of till death do us part alimony. She might if there was more to get, which once upon a time she was led to believe there was. It would mean she wouldn’t ever be able to get a real job (fine with her) but also that she couldn’t have a live-in lover, not that she isn’t crafty enough to figure all that out and get away with it—she certainly is!—but all it would take would be for Mr. Sleight of Hand to hire the right lawyer who might hire an investigator and then that would be embarrassing.
Till death do us part alimony is a great way to stick it to someone for sure, but given she’s the one who is having an affair, it might be hard to do. And this is a topic that will divide a room full of women in a hurry. She heard one woman saying how such an agreement is a step back for women everywhere. That a smart woman should just get a chunk of something right up front and not live as a dependent. Well, Kendra has never been into all that feminist bullshit although she likes to appear that she is. Truth is that she is perfectly happy to be totally dependent on a man and never work at all and she is sure many women share this. Of course, they are also probably the boring housewife types she would never want anything to do with, but still.
She pretends to be a feminist just like she pretends to be compassionate when someone is struggling with her weight or blood pressure or bad permanent even though she really doesn’t give a damn. But why not lie? She does it all the time. Why not lie and create a whole new history for yourself, especially if no one ever takes the time to investigate and catch the lies. She has told that she once designed a costume for Bernadette Peters and that she once had dinner with one of the Bee Gees—she can’t remember which one—who insisted she stopped waitressing and join their table. He propositioned her and then sent her postcards for years that said he couldn’t forget her. It is amazing what people will believe. She has told that she is a descendent of both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant. I embody the whole Civil War right here in my own little body, she has said numerous times to great reaction and applause.
“Where are the postcards from the Bee Gee?” that awful Linda Blackmon asked. Linda is the one who copies everything Kendra ever buys and wears, and then Benjamin said “good question” and looked at her with hands up and eyebrows raised as if to say, Well?
“Burned, of course,” she said without batting an eye. “Why tarnish his image with what was really kind of pathetic?”
“That is so considerate.” Ben clapped his hands. “That’s my wife, the most generous and compassionate human walking the planet.”
Ben Palmer will deserve whatever he gets. He has practically ruined her life. He is the reason she has migraines and low blood sugar and likely what is called fibromyalgia. She gave him a baby and she has spent the best years of her life with him and for what? Did he ever take her on that cruise she wanted? How embarrassing was it when this one went to Rome and this one went to Hawaii and this one summers on Martha’s Vineyard and drops celebrity names all the time. Kendra deserves that, too and she is goddamned going to have it. She puts a sticker on the bottom of the big heavy Victorian sofa the woman with the birthmarked daughter left behind and what does she find but another goddamned chew toy. Chew toys and screws from that goddamned box he’s building. It’s all a mess. And she can’t wait to get out of it. She is hoping that she can keep her strength up until it is all behind her. Meanwhile, she is getting sick and tired of all the phone calls. I think I saw your dog on the playground, but I couldn’t catch her. I think I saw your dog two days ago at the Tastee Freez. The messages keep coming. I am so sorry to hear about Dollbaby. I hope you find her soon.
Wouldn’t she love to scream impossible! That is impossible. Dollbaby is gone and never to be seen again. Dollbaby took a little nap and never woke up. Kendra spent quite a bit of money for that little naptime, including a hefty tip for the long-haired solemn-faced kid who didn’t want to believe her story about why this dog had to be put down. “She practically bit a child’s nose off,” she told him. “Twenty stitches and who do you think paid for it all? We’ll be lucky if they don’t sue us for all we own. What do you need, the court order?” She finally convinced him even though the idiot dog was on its back and wagging its tail the whole time. “Appearances are so deceiving,” she told the boy.
Now she has to practice looking sad and work some tears into her eyes, because as soon as Abby walks in she will have to tell her the sad sad news. Someone called from way out in the country—Dollbaby got hit by a car. Oh, if only that fence your father built had not been so easy to get out of. Oh, if only the dear sweet thing had not gotten out and run away from home. If we ever get another dog, we will hire someone who knows what he is doing and can build a real fence. Poor, poor Dollbaby. Let’s try to picture her in heaven with a mountain of bones and beautiful fields to run through. Let’s give her a Persian rug to piss on all day long.