Places to Stay the Night Page 9

  “I don’t know why you want to go to school so bad anyway,” Renata said under her breath. Now they were passing familiar houses. Not houses Renata had been inside, but the ones where other girls gathered for slumber parties and postprom breakfasts. She felt a lump in her throat. Why was she back here? This town held no good memories for her, just feelings of being an outcast, of being lonely.

  “Is this the town?” Millie said. She was starting to whine.

  The car stopped, right in the street. Renata pumped the gas pedal. Nothing.

  “Is it?” Millie whined.

  Renata glanced around. Holly looked like any New England town. Not the postcard-perfect ones. She wasn’t sure those existed anywhere. But it had a little village green with a gazebo in the middle, where on summer days bridal parties gathered for pictures. There was a well-kept World War II monument with carefully tended red and white flowers and small American flags. That’s where they were now, in front of the monument. Ahead of them, Renata could see the diner shining silver and bright in the afternoon sun, and the cheap Italian restaurant that served wine in straw-covered bottles.

  “Now what?” Millie was saying.

  “Now we get out and walk to a garage,” Renata said. She stepped out of the car, into the bright day, and held her breath for an instant. Down the road, across from the Friendly’s and the pizza parlor, stood the movie theater where everyone used to go on Saturday afternoons to make out. It was all boarded up now, its marquee shouting FOR RENT.

  “Let’s go already,” Millie said.

  “That’s where I got my first kiss,” Renata said. “The Palace Theater.”

  Millie looked down the road. “Looks like a real hot spot,” she said.

  They started walking again, past the Cumberland Farms and the drugstore where Renata used to buy her mother Jean Nate sets for Christmas.

  “In New York,” Millie said, “movie theaters stay in business. People go to them.”

  Renata paused. The used-furniture store looked even more like a junk shop than it used to. There were a few new stores, but even they looked empty and sad. Renata was starting to feel pretty depressed too.

  “What are we doing here?” Millie said. She looked at Renata solemnly. “Since we left New York, everything has gone wrong.”

  “Millie, nothing has gone wrong until this very minute.”

  She took Millie’s hand roughly and led her toward the garage. Harper’s. Renata frowned. Tom Harper owned a garage? That seemed impossible. She tried to picture him, but saw only a blur of him running bases, or twirling Libby Holliday in a dance. “Here,” Renata said, handing Millie a handful of change. “Get a soda from the machine and I’ll be right back.”

  When Renata stepped into the office, though, she knew immediately that the handsome guy behind the desk was Tom Harper. The blurry image took shape then. He looked up and smiled. It was still the smile of a golden boy, a boy who had everything at his fingertips. Nothing in Holly ever changed.

  Tom was on the phone making up excuses to Dee-Dee Winthrop when the door to the office opened and a big, familiar-looking woman walked in. “Customer,” he blurted to Dee-Dee. Relieved, he hung up, fast.

  “My car’s broken,” she said.

  She was almost six feet tall, with long wild hair all salt and pepper.

  She pushed her face real close to his. “Tom?” she said.

  That took him by surprise. He was so used to being called Harp that the sound of his own name startled him.

  She laughed, a deep loud laugh. “Well, how about that? I’m in town five minutes and already I see someone I know. Things never change in Holly, do they?”

  Oh yes they do, he thought. But he smiled and told her, “I guess not.”

  “We went to school together,” she said, and she thrust her hand in his and shook it, hard. “Renata Handy.”

  Her high school face floated into his mind. Renata Handy was the school weirdo. She used to dress like a gypsy. She claimed she could tell fortunes. She disagreed with everything everyone said. She tried to get the school cafeteria to stop serving meat, then lettuce, then grapes. She burned her bra in front of the school one day and got expelled. Renata Handy used to frighten him, she was that strange. And by the looks of her, she hadn’t changed much herself.

  “Well, hi,” he said.

  “Hello yourself, Tom Harper.” The door opened again and a little girl wearing a Tina Turner wig came in.

  “Mama,” she said, “what’s so funny?”

  Tom tried not to look surprised that Renata Handy was this little girl’s mother. He bent down and said, “I used to go to school with your mama.”

  “The School of Visual Arts?” the girl said.

  Tom looked up at Renata. She must have weighed close to 180, he figured.

  “No, Millie,” she was saying. “Way before that. High school.”

  The girl nodded solemnly. “Oh.”

  Tom straightened up again. “So,” he said, “your car?”

  “I think it’s the muffler,” Renata told him. “My friend just had a new one put in, too. About a month ago at Midas.”

  Tom swallowed hard. Midas. That night back in March with Libby, that had been her theme. The Midas touch’. He thought it had something to do with mufflers; she intended for it to have something to do with turning plain things into gold.

  The house Renate and Millie rented was on the outskirts of town, beside some of those farms they had passed when they came in. It was not in very good shape. The old man who had lived there had been a pack rat. Old bundles of newspapers were stacked everywhere. There was a shelf full of odd teacups in the kitchen and another of thimbles in the living room. But mostly there were boxes—small wooden ones, broken music boxes, tin and plastic ones. Everywhere Renata looked she found more boxes.

  The old man had died, and his grandchildren were renting the house as it was. You just have to put up with the junk, they had told Renata. Someday, they would come and clean the place out. But they lived in Florida and Arizona and California, and they didn’t know when they could get back East.

  “Well,” Renata said, “isn’t this place something?”

  The top of one bundle of newspapers read WE LIKE IKE!

  Millie was scrunching her face up, the way she did right before she started to cry.

  “I guess he had cats,” Renata said.

  She started to open windows. The place had land. Lots of land. In a fantasy of hers, she and Millie were running across a meadow littered with buttercups. The fantasy was actually an old shampoo commercial for Herbal Essence. But she’d made it one of her own. There were no buttercups though, just weeds and overgrown grass as far as she could see.

  Renata swallowed hard. She was thinking of the city too. Of the way the lights looked at this time of evening, slowly blinking on.

  “I hate it here,” Millie said. And she started to cry.

  “What do you want from me, Millie? Huh? What?” Renata wanted to cry too.

  “A family,” Millie said.

  “A what?”

  “A family. One that lives in a real house. A sister and a father and a dog. And a better car.”

  Renata dropped onto the magenta couch. It felt damp. A sister? Where had this idea come from?

  “Honey, you don’t just go and get a ready-made family. It doesn’t work that way. Look at the Ramones. They don’t have those things.”

  But Millie wasn’t listening. “And I want to go to school. I want spelling words.”

  “Okay, okay,” Renata said. She closed her eyes and tried to think of what to do. She tried to remember why this had seemed like such a good idea in the first place.

  Libby prided herself on being practical. She got a job right away, and a small efficiency apartment in West Hollywood. The job was at Von’s, a supermarket chain that just happened to be where Michelle Pfeiffer used to work. There was, Libby admitted, the teeniest part of her that liked that connection, a very small voice that said, If it could hap
pen to her, then just maybe.

  After her first paycheck, she enrolled in acting classes. But she did not pretend she was going to become a star. Once, Libby had read that Marilyn Monroe always went to her classes at the Actors’ Studio dressed down, so for her class Libby wore black leggings and an oversize white shirt. When she walked into that class, the teacher looked at her and shouted, “Housewife!”

  Another woman might have fallen apart at that. But Libby put on her best smile and accepted it. They were after types here. She’d read all about it in a book at the library called How to Make It in Hollywood: A Realistic Guide. Of course she couldn’t help but think if she had dressed up, worn that electric blue spandex dress and high heels, the teacher might have seen her as something very different. Somewhere deep down she was a little disappointed he hadn’t looked at her and shouted “Star!” But she was after all a thirty-six-year-old woman with two teenage children and a husband with the beginnings of a beer belly. At least, she told herself as she took her place in class, at least she was here. Finally.

  After that time she tried to leave with Sue, Libby had never actually attempted to run away again, not physically at least. Instead, she concentrated on making it big right there in Holly. She went to the library and got books like How to Become a Millionaire Without Ever Leaving Your Living Room and Get Rich Now. She was a firm believer in the library system. She had written letters to her senator when they cut library hours, and signed a petition at her branch to open on Sundays. When Dana and Troy were small, she used to take them to the library once a week, even though the books remained on the kitchen counter, unread.

  The first thing Libby taught herself was calligraphy. People were always wanting a professional-looking envelope for wedding invitations. Tom bought her a set of pens, and different-colored inks, gold and silver, purple and pink. The colors most often chosen for celebrations. She hung signs in the Price Chopper, written in perfect calligraphy. Only one person called, but Libby knew that word of mouth was an important part on the road to success.

  The customer was named Sherri, and she was getting married. Libby listened patiently to Sherri’s story. She was seventeen years old and worked at GE. Her fiancé, whose name coincidentally was Tom, had been laid off for seven months and collected unemployment. Libby frowned. What way was that to start a new life? she thought. Sherri told her that their color scheme was lilac. Her aunt was making all the dresses, including her own wedding gown.

  Libby looked at Sherri, who still had a smattering of acne on her forehead and chin, and said, “I can’t do these for you.”

  “I got the money,” Sherri said. As if to prove it, she took out a roll of what seemed to be all five-dollar bills, held together with a rubber band.

  The invitations were lilac, with two teddy bears dressed like a bride and groom and a big poem about true love. Libby was starting to feel nauseous. “It’s not that,” she told Sherri.

  “What then?”

  “It’s against my principles,” Libby said.

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t think you and Tom should get married,” Libby said. “You should wait until he gets a new job. Maybe you should go back to school. Get your diploma. Think about a career.” Libby could see this girl in a white uniform, her hair pinned back, the acne gone. “Maybe you could be an X-ray technician. Or a dental hygienist.”

  “Look,” Sherri said, “all I want is these envelopes done fancy. That’s all. I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to be cleaning some strange guy’s teeth. Or getting zapped with radiation. I just want this.” She slapped her hand down on the stack of invitations.

  She wasn’t unattractive exactly, Libby thought, studying her. She wore her pants too tight, and her eye makeup was all wrong. “You should wear earth tones,” Libby told her. “It would give you a softer look.”

  Sherri started to scoop her invitations into her bag. “Hey,” she said, “fuck you. I mean, who do you think you are?”

  “I’m sorry,” Libby said. “I just can’t do them.”

  Her next venture was giving home parties to sell sexy lingerie. The brochures said she could earn as much as ten thousand dollars a month. There were drawings of pyramids, placing her at the top and all the women who would start to work for her at the bottom. She read a book called How to Sell Anything At All to Anybody, ordered her stock, then invited five women to a party.

  Libby set the mood by burning candles and rubbing perfume on her light bulbs. She made tiny cucumber and watercress sandwiches, cut off all the crusts and cut them into shapes, triangles and circles. She filled bowls with fruit and bought jugs of Glen Ellen white wine. The stereo volume was set low, and Libby selected mood music—Donna Summer and Al Green, albums from the midseventies when disco was big.

  They ate all the food and drank all the wine, but all they did was laugh at the merchandise.

  “Harem outfits?” Dee-Dee had said. “Puh—leeze.” And she’d rolled her eyes and pretended to gag.

  They all giggled at the corsets and teddies and crotchless underpants, even when Libby recited her sales pitch. “Need a little spice in your love life? Tired of your certain someone snoring beside you? Then it’s time for you to enter the world of La Magique.”

  Someone had brought some pot and they all smoked it, laughing even harder, making crude jokes about the lingerie. Alice Rose spilled her wine on a French maid outfit, and Sue, to be polite, bought some flutter-kinis, the cheapest item available. Libby gave each of them a party favor, a small vial of strawberry-flavored lotion, and sent them home.

  Tom came in when he heard them leave. “Are we rich?” he said.

  “The idea is to get them to have home parties too. Then I get a commission off what they sell.” She looked around at the dirty wineglasses, the empty plates, the sexy lingerie strewn around the room. “It’s a pyramid. It can’t fail.”

  Tom picked up a garter belt. “I’ll buy this if you’ll wear it.”

  “You already bought it, you jerk. We’re stuck with all this junk!”

  He tried to put his arms around her. “I don’t mind being stuck with it,” he said. “Hell, let’s use it.”

  She pushed away from him and started to pick up all the bras and panties. “All you can think about is sex. You don’t understand what I’m trying to do here.”

  “No,” Tom said, sighing, as he bent to pick up the harem outfit, “I guess I don’t.”

  For her second acting class, Libby wore the electric blue spandex dress. An actress has to be versatile, she’d read. She wanted her teacher, Carl, to see every side of her, how much of a chameleon she could be. When she walked in, the two young blondes in the class glanced at each other. She hated them. They weren’t even twenty-one, and they always wore tight black things. They had too much hair, gobs of it. And smooth flawless skin. Their names were Heather and Ashley. Libby decided, as she took her place, that they looked like everybody else, nothing special, just two more California girls. In a way, she thought, she felt bad for them.

  Acting class made her feel very self-conscious. They had to do things that seemed irrelevant. Like breathe in a particular way that reminded her of her childbirth classes. Then Carl made them say “Ha.” Then, “Ha ha.” He kept making them add Has until they were laughing like crazy people. To Libby, it didn’t make any sense. Heather and Ashley really got into it, laughing like mad. Libby watched them. Were they really laughing? Or were they acting? Was that the point?

  In the high school drama club, acting had been so simple. Everyone had told her she was a natural. They certainly hadn’t stood around doing this kind of thing, pretending to laugh.

  “Close your eyes,” Carl was saying. “Focus on your center.”

  Libby closed her eyes. Her center? she thought. What was that supposed to mean? She tried to imagine Michelle Pfeiffer doing this. She was sure she never had. Even though Carl’s credentials were impressive, episodes of Kojak, Columbo, Barney Miller and parts in lots of big movies, Libby could
n’t help but wonder if maybe she had chosen a bad acting class.

  “Are you there?” Carl was saying, his voice hypnotic. “Are you in your center yet?”

  Libby opened her eyes and looked around. Everyone else was doing the proper deep breathing, their eyes closed. One guy, George, had even taken off his shoes and socks and was sitting there like a yogi, fingertips pressed together, legs folded like a pretzel.

  “Now,” Carl said, “we’ll go around the room and I’d like you to find a sound that describes your center.”

  Carl’s eyes were closed too. He started by giving a big grunt, as if he was going to the bathroom. Libby tried to think of a sound that wouldn’t embarrass her. She thought of a hiccup, a sigh, a clearing of her throat.

  Heather and Ashley sounded as if they were having orgasms, sighing and moaning and licking their lips. George hummed, one long note that he held for quite some time. And then it was Libby’s turn. She hadn’t found her center. She was sweaty, panicked. Maybe she had no center. Maybe she was completely hollow, not even a housewife, certainly not a star. The very air in the room seemed to be waiting for her sound. She felt as if someone had ripped out her voice box. Nothing would come out.

  From beside her George farted.

  “Good!” Carl said.

  Heather and Ashley giggled.

  “Wait!” Libby shouted.

  But they were already on to the next exercise. Carl was talking in that slow hypnotic voice. Everyone thought she had farted publicly, that her center was that low and ridiculous. Libby wanted more than anything, in that moment, to be back home in Holly.

  They were going around the circle again, this time shouting one word that described their center.

  “Fuck me!” Heather shouted.

  No one bothered to tell her that was two words. Libby felt like crying.

  “Mom!” George shouted.

  They were waiting for her again. She didn’t have time to think. She just opened her mouth and screamed, “Tom!”

  Autumn

  IN MASSACHUSETTES RENATA AND Millie’s routine changed. Now it was Renata who woke Millie every morning, who tugged on her hand and pulled her into the world from her bed. No more Froot Loops for breakfast. No more late nights. They were a mother and daughter living in Holly, Massachusetts—fresh air, long walks, and apple cider.