As the years passed, one by one the Gray Ladies stopped coming. First it was Vidalia, with her antique wigs and her eternal scent of apricots, which lingered for days after the meetings she attended. Her disappearance was the source of endless, hushed consternation in the group, which Swanny strained to hear because she sensed she was not supposed to. But all she could decipher were a handful of troubling phrases: “listened to the rumors,” “no time to sell,” and “soil testing here—imagine.” The next to go was Nanette, who according to Pippi had not worn the same pair of earrings twice in twenty years; later, Swanny would struggle to recall her face, but only an unbroken parade of pearl clusters, teardrop diamonds, and tasteful emerald studs would present themselves. Her departure was met with more sympathy, and with speculation about whether it would be appropriate for the group to attend her son’s funeral. It was around this time that Pippi and Swanny began bathing in bottled spring water, heated by Corona in enormous kettles on the stove, rather than in the faintly metallic well water that poured from the house’s taps.
By Swanny’s ninth birthday, there were no more meetings of the Gray Ladies of Wonland County. There was only Pippi, paying stacks of bills at the immense mahogany table, and Swanny taking tea with her dolls beneath it. Once, Swanny asked why the other Old Moms had gone.
“I wouldn’t hazard a guess. They sold in a buyers’ market.” Pippi rapped more numbers into her adding machine. “Do you know what estates like ours once cost? To buy outright, then restore? One doesn’t simply abandon such investments in a panic. The market has a way of correcting itself, you know.”
The dentist tuned up Pippi’s face from time to time: he used that phrase, “tune up,” because the fixes were minor. She’d had her Major Work done the year before Swanny was born, the year she’d retired, the year that she and “Chet” (as she called Swanny’s father) had moved out here to “the boonies.” Once, and only once, with an air of decided confidentiality, she told Swanny that this had all happened the year she turned fifty-five. Because of this secrecy, the number took on talismanic significance for Swanny. She often wrote it in the soot on the chimney ledge while she watched the dragons. It seemed unlikely to her, at age six or nine or eleven, that anyone could ever be so old. It seemed even more incredible, however, that her mother had once been young.
Before she relocated to Wonland, Pippi Dahlberg had been Prime Mover of McGuffin-Stork, one of the city’s leading content firms. Sometimes she told Swanny stories of those days: the time one messenger, scorched and roughed-up but still alive, had glided up to her window on his HowScoot with the necessary contracts, just barely in time for an important meeting; the afternoon she recalibrated the projection settings on a competitor’s LookyGlass so that all the models in the other woman’s presentation appeared to have sickly green skin and gowns the hue of toxic waste; the diamond brooch her mentor had made for her when she was finally promoted above him that spelled out the words EAT SHIT & DIE.
“The city was glam in those days, glam and dangerous. The dragons separated out the wheat from the chaff. Either you were in it to win it, or poof, off you went! I was just an assistant then: what a time to be starting out. But now I’m dating myself.” Pippi, scrutinizing the mirror, deftly swabbed lipstick off her teeth with a handkerchief. “I remember the Strike Ums account. Selling lighters to a city on fire, can you imagine? But we did it. We had content for any product, any day—and subliminals every night. Always onward, always ‘What’s next?’ Powdered Zip to keep you going—I never ate. Well, you’re only young once, darling. Besides, the world has changed.”
Pippi’s stories made little or no sense, but Swanny just liked to hear her mother talk. It was far better than going through the old purse of foreign coins, or sketching pictures by herself. Pippi’s voice echoed through the empty house in a kind of song.
“What career will I have, Mother?” Swanny asked one afternoon, obediently holding out her nails for Pippi to paint. Pippi frowned at the cerise polish she’d just applied to her daughter’s pudgy fingers.
“Go, go, go, it’s no life for a little girl,” she said at last. “Now, don’t blow on them, that makes ripples.”
“But I won’t always be a little girl. I’ll be a Prime Mover and then an Old Mom like you.”
Pippi shook her head slightly. Swanny looked at the little seam by her mother’s ear, where the dentist sewed the skin back during “tune-ups.”
“The better firms have all shut down, dear,” Pippi said. “Too many people have gotten burnt, in every sense of the word. Now it’s all shilling on the streets. Tawdry.”
“So I won’t have a career?”
“Stop crying.”
“I’m not crying.”
“Well, you mustn’t, because there’s no reason to. There’s investing in your future, and that’s nearly the same thing as a career.”
“Can I wear the diamond brooch?”
“Yes. When I’m dead.”
* * *
Now, a decade later, the baroness, age eighteen, is packing her hope chest, pausing, every now and then, to visit her vanity mirror and fret about her chins. This morning, over brunch, Pippi commented on those chins, on their plurality, and though Swanny’s usual response would involve the defiant consumption of bon bons, today she feels apprehensive. It’s begun to occur to her that her meeting with her fiancé, in the flesh (oh the troubling carnal frisson of that phrase!), is no longer a distant hypothetical, but a reckoning soon due. And though she hardly doubts her own beauty, the thought of her body so near his fills her with uncertainties.
Meanwhile, up in the sky above Empire Island, Duncan Ripple might as well be a world away. He wipes jizz from the steering wheel with the elbow of his hoodie. He yawns. Stroking off reminds him of deleting the junk folder on his ThinkTank. It clears the memory, sure, but you have to reboot right after. Otherwise you crash.
Ripple zips up, shifts back into DESC, eases the HowFly down a few hundred feet. He wishes he’d thought to bring a few brewskis. The camera crew used to keep a cooler of them under the craft service table and looked the other way when he and his friends helped themselves. It made for better footage. Now, having a brewski at home usually requires chugging it in the walk-in fridge so his parents don’t notice, and he fucking hates shivering. Of course, he could always take the elevator up to the library to see his uncle, who keeps his old-timey icebox full of Bog Peat Stout or Lantern Oil Bock or some other bitter sludge in jugs he calls growlers. But that means having to deal with his uncle, who re-learned English as a second language so he could talk with a British accent whenever he wanted, and who’s lately taken to wearing caftans with tassels that snag in the gears of his wheelchair. Ripple really just needs to get a glove compartment chill bin installed, like his friend Kelvin did.
Ripple flips on the left engine, just to try it. More grinding, a hint of fumes—he shuts it down in a hurry. To the shop it goes. He’s hungry. He wonders what Hooligan’s been up to, if he’s eaten any more of that unicorn hide rug Ripple’s mom just put down in the third-floor den. Probably did, little stink goblin. Next time the pooch stays in his cage.