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Holly sees him to the door. He looks at the china figurines and smiles. “My wife loves stuff like this,” he says. “I think she’s got every gnome and pixie-sitting-on-a-mushroom ever made.”
“Take a few for her,” Holly says. Take them all.
Emerson looks alarmed. “Oh, I couldn’t. No. Thank you, but no.”
“At least take this one.” She picks up the hateful Pinocchio and slaps it into his palm with a smile. “I’m sure the estate is paying you—”
“Of course—”
“But take this from me. For your kindness.”
“If you insist—”
“I do,” Holly says. Seeing that poopy little long-nosed fucker going away will be the best thing that’s happened to her since arriving at 42 Lily Court.
Closing the door and watching through the window as Emerson goes to his car, Holly thinks, Lies. So many lies.
Holly goes back to the kitchen and gathers up her copies of the legal papers. Feeling like a woman in a dream—a new millionaire walks into a bar, so on and so on—she goes to the second drawer to the left of the sink, where there are still Baggies, aluminum foil, Saran wrap, bread ties (her mother never threw them away), and other assorted rickrack. She roots around until she finds a big plastic chip clip and attaches it to the papers. Then she takes a teacup—HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS printed on the side—back to the table. Her mother never allowed smoking in the house; Holly used to do it in her bathroom with the window open. Now she lights up, feeling both residual guilt and a certain naughty pleasure.
Once she sat at a table very like this one, in her parents’ house on Bond Street in Cincinnati, filling out college applications: one to UCLA, one to NYU, one to Duke. Those were her dream choices, worth every penny of the application fees. Places far away from Walnut Hills High, where she had never been known as Jibba-Jibba. Away from her mother, father, and Uncle Henry, too.
She was accepted at none of them, of course. Her grades were strictly mediocre and her SATs were abysmal, possibly because the day she took them she had a migraine headache up top and menstrual cramps down below, both probably brought on by stress. The only acceptance she got was from State U, which was not surprising. Getting accepted at State was like striking out the pitcher in a baseball game. And even from State there was no offer of scholarship help.
Your father and I certainly can’t afford to send you and you’d be paying a loan back until you’re forty, Charlotte said. Back then it was probably true. And if you flunked out you’d still owe the money. The subtext being that of course Holly would flunk out; college would be just too much pressure for such a fragile child. Hadn’t Charlotte once found Holly curled up in the tub, refusing to go to school? And look what happened after she took the SATs! Came home, had a crying jag, spent half the night throwing up!
Holly ended up working for Mitchell Fine Homes and Estates and taking community college classes at night. Most of them were computer science courses, although she snuck in an English class or two. All was going pretty well—she was often unhappy, but had come to accept that, like a birthmark or a turned-in foot—until Frank Mitchell, Jr., the boss’s son, began to bother her.
“Bother my fanny!” Holly tells the empty kitchen. “He hounded me! For sex!”
When she told her mother some of what was going on at the office, Charlotte advised her to laugh it off. Men were men, she said, went through life following their peckers, and they never changed. Coping with them wasn’t pleasant, but it was part of life, you had to take the bitter with the sweet, what could not be cured must be endured, so on and so on.
Dad’s not that way, Holly had said, to which her mother waved one hand in an airy gesture of dismissal that said of course he’s not and he wouldn’t dare and I’d like to see him try it. A lot to convey in a simple hand gesture, but Charlotte had managed.
What Holly didn’t tell her was that she had almost given in, had almost given the bulgy-eyed trout-faced son of a so-and-so what he wanted. Nobody likes you here, Junior Mitchell said. You’re standoffish and you do substandard work. Without me you’d be out on your ass. So how about a little payback, huh? I think once you try it, you’ll like it.
They went into his office, and Junior started to unbutton her blouse. The first button… the second… the third… and then she slapped him, a real roundhouse, putting everything she had into it, knocking his glasses off and making his lip bleed. He called her a useless bitch and said he could get her arrested for assault. Gathering courage she hadn’t known she possessed, speaking in a coldly certain voice that sounded nothing like her usual one (which was so quiet that people often had to ask her to repeat herself), she told him that if he tried that, when the police came she’d tell them he tried to rape her. And something in his face—a kind of instinctive grimace—made her think that the police might believe her side of the story, because Frank Jr. had been in trouble before. Trouble of this sort. In any case, that was the end of it. For him, at least. Not for Holly, who came in early one day a week later, trashed his office, then curled up in her shitty little cubicle with her head on her desk. She would have crawled under the desk, but there wasn’t room.
A month in a “treatment center” followed (her parents had found money enough for that), then three years of counseling. The counseling ended when her father died, but she continued to take various medications which left her functional but seeing the world as if through a cellophane wrapper.
What cannot be cured must be endured: the gospel according to Charlotte Gibney.
4
Holly puts out her cigarette under the tap, rinses the teacup, sets it in the drainer, and goes upstairs. The first door on the right is the guest room. Except not really. The wallpaper’s wrong, for one thing, but it’s still creepily like the room she lived in as a teenager in Cincinnati. Charlotte perhaps believed her mentally and emotionally unstable daughter would come to realize she wasn’t meant to live among people who didn’t understand her problems. As Holly steps inside she thinks again, Museum exhibit. There should be a sign saying HABITAT OF A SAD GIRL, TRISTIS PUELLA.
That her mother loved her Holly still has no doubt. But love isn’t always support. Sometimes love is taking the supports away.
Over the bed is a poster of Madonna. Prince is on one wall, Ralph Macchio as the Karate Kid on another. If she looked on the shelves below her tidy little sound system (Ludio Ludius, the little sign would say), she’d find Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Wham!, Tina Turner, and of course the Purple One. All on cassettes. The tartan coverlet, which she always hated, is on the bed. Once there was a girl who lived among these things, and looked out the window at Bond Street, and played her music, and wrote her poems on a blue portable Olivetti typewriter. What followed the typewriter was a Commodore PC with a tiny screen.
Holly looks down and sees she is holding those red tags with SAVE printed on them. She can’t even remember picking them up.
“I’m glad I came here,” she says. “It’s wonderful to be home.”
She goes to the Star Wars wastebasket (Bella Siderea, the little sign would say—how the old Latin comes back) and drops the tags into it. Then she sits down on the bed with her hands clasped between her thighs. So many memories here. The question is simple: face or forget?
Face, of course, and not because she’s a different person now, a better person, a courageous person who has faced horrors most people wouldn’t believe. Face because there is no other choice.
5
