Liberating Paris Read online

  Only six years with maybe the most important person in your life and for two of those you’re barely able to walk and talk—it wasn’t fair. Mavis closed her eyes, the way she had all through her childhood and tried to picture him. But too often, she knew she was picturing snapshots of him, instead of the real, warm, flesh-and-blood him—bending down with his arms around her at Busch Gardens—no, that must be a photograph, because he’s posing—here’s one! Daddy clapping as she wobbles toward him on her bike. No, that’s a movie her mother made—how about leaning over her bed and saying, “Goodnight, Miss America. Sweet dreams.” Wait! Stop! That’s a real one! Nobody ever made a picture of that! Stay right there! Wait! Daddy, please, don’t go. You’re getting fuzzy. This is the part where Mavis squints her eyes tighter and tighter trying to keep the picture inside. But, eventually, he always leaves.

  That was another reason Mavis wanted a baby more than anything. She liked the idea of another person in this world who would share her father’s genes and characteristics and who might even help bring him into focus. Maybe that wasn’t a very good reason for wanting a baby. She had some others that were better. But that was the one that made her fall asleep feeling easy.

  She was upstairs trying to find something to wear—not the paisley skirt. Mavis always felt she had to back out of the room in that. Anyway, now all she needed was a sperm daddy. After two years of trying to adopt, after all the near misses—“I’m sorry, but two-parent families take precedence”; “If only you could get your congressman to call our embassy”—she and Dr. Mac had decided sperm banks were definitely the way to go. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to wait until she found the right partner. That was about as likely to happen as her mixing Velveeta cheese with canned chili for a party dip. The truth was, Mavis was no longer looking for nor believed in the ridiculous notion of a soul mate who miraculously fills all your empty places. She didn’t need “Mr. I’m the Other Half of You” to finish her off. And she was sick and tired of townspeople asking when she was going to find someone and settle down. Were they kidding? Were they insane? She was as big as a barn and forty years old. What did it take to discourage these people? But what really rankled were all the women who complained about their own husbands. How this one or that one was cheating on them or never paid any attention to them. Then they would turn right around and tell Mavis that she needed to hurry up and get her one. “Better stop playing hard to get and let one of these men around here catch you. Ha-ha.” Oddly, almost no one seemed to think Mavis was too old or too fat to get married. The general opinion was that she was too uppity and too set in her own ways.

  Okay, how about long denim skirt with light blue shirt hanging loose? Yes. When in doubt, always go with your fat-girl uniform. Anyway, right now, she had to get her story together for Elizabeth—how to tell her about whatever it was that had gone on between her fiancé’s mother and her dad. It was just like Milan to stick her with this. And then have the flat-out balls to suggest that she also make it funny! “Hey, kid! Congratulations on getting married! And here’s some more good news. You don’t have to worry about all the in-laws liking each other. They’ve already slept together!”

  Maybe Elizabeth wouldn’t even care. Mavis was in her car and wishing she didn’t feel so nauseated from all the fertility hormones. Anyway, who even knew what the deal was between Wood and Duff? I mean, in high school it had seemed pretty damn steamy, but everything feels steamy in high school. Not that Mavis would have any first hand knowledge about that. She’d had a couple of boyfriends, like Ricky Starkweather, but he actually had seemed more dirty than steamy.

  Anyway, here’s how it happened. After several years of going together, Wood and Milan broke up because Kathleen Duffer had finally managed to turn Wood’s head. The date was February 12, 1979. Mavis remembers, because that was the day senior pictures were being made and she and Milan had locked themselves in the largest stall of the girls’ bathroom while Milan, who almost never cried, sobbed barrels of Maybelline mascara all over Mavis’s shirt and sweater. You can see the black on Mavis’s collar in the yearbook. The second thing Mavis remembers about the breakup is that there is no sadder picture in all of human history, well, at least not human social history, than the one of Milan standing next to Victor Lee Sayres at that year’s prom. By the time Wood and Milan had broken up, the best people had already been taken and Milan had been left with Victor Lee and his cheesy string tie and Hitler mustache. Of course, Mavis’s own prom picture with Ricky Starkweather, wearing his Elvis sneer and pink ruffled shirt, was not something you would save for the mantel, either. Especially not after Ricky, having failed to graduate, robbed the prom the following year. But poor Milan! Mavis had seen happier looks on the faces of POWs. And all the while, Duff and Wood, who were too cool to have their own picture made, had danced circles around her. Mavis remembered how those two were always in their own little world, reading each other passages from Thoreau, feeding each other french fries, riding for miles in Wood’s Austin-Healy with the top down—unlike Milan, Duff loved getting her hair mussed. The “I just fell out of bed” look and wearing Wood’s shirts became her trademarks. You might think because he fell so hard and so fast that Wood was a young man who liked to play around. But Mavis couldn’t remember him having any other serious girlfriends, ever, besides Duff and Milan, in spite of the fact that there were plenty waiting in line for their crack at the town prince.

  After graduation, Wood burned up the interstate between Duke (where he was in premed) and Atlanta, where Duff had gone to study art. Milan was on scholarship at Arkansas State Teachers College but spent most of her time putting her broken heart on paper in letters home to Mavis. Then one day, only a few months after Tom Lanier shot himself, a breathless phone call from Milan—she and Wood were getting married! Apparently, he had been burning up more interstates than anyone knew. “We’re going to have a baby, Mave! We’re on our way to New Orleans and this is the happiest day of our lives!” That was pure Milan. Putting the best face on everything, including the very baby that Mavis was now on her way to try to explain all this mess to—What mess? Was there already a mess? She turned on her blinker and began changing lanes, getting ready to make her turn at the new Fed-Mart Superstore exit. A short distance beyond would be the Motor Harbor. She hated driving all the way out to a truck stop for breakfast, but Elizabeth liked to “go slumming” when she was home from college.

  Suddenly, Mavis was seized with a real sense of dread. Wasn’t living in the present hard enough without digging up all this cargo from the past? That’s why Mavis had not even bothered to tell Milan what Wood had said about Duff when he was drunk—how she was the only girl he had ever felt he could be himself with, how after all these years he could still smell her hair—yeah, yeah, yeah, you don’t need to relive every word, Mavis; anyway, how he knew that was wrong, but there it was—things Wood would never say if he were sober. And it had shocked her to see that kind of pain could be caused by someone who was essentially a stranger to all of them now.

  Mavis circled the gigantic parking lot and finally pulled into a space about a half-acre of cars from the restaurant. As she spilled out of the Cutlass, gathering her coat and overflowing purse, she reminded herself that people do and say all sorts of stupid things when they’re drunk. Mavis struggled into her coat as she headed out, her purse leaking Kleenex. Hell, she had almost married her Cuban baker’s assistant in order to get him a green card. But fortunately they had both sobered up in the backseat of a cab on the way to Hot Springs.

  Now Mavis was walking just ahead of two truckers, moving toward the entrance. She tried to appear businesslike, lest they mistake her for some easy loser fat girl who was looking for a ride somewhere. Mavis always assumed men thought overweight women were desperate for sex. She could feel their eyes on her backside. They were probably thinking the best sex she’d ever had had been with herself. Anyway, despite numerous warnings, Mavis had dismissed the whole Duff-Wood affair from her mind until Eliza
beth announced her bombshell and Milan had shown up last night to pitch a hissy fit in her kitchen. Mavis had tried her best to act nonchalant, but the truth was, by then, the high piercing violin stabs that dominate the sound track of Psycho were already going off in her head. She and Milan had seen it on cable TV at Claire Cutsinger’s house when they were eleven and it had scared the hell out of them—so much so that it became the music Mavis always hears as the accompaniment for any dramatically bad news. Or news that seems on its way to becoming bad. And this latest news seemed to have that kind of potential. Yes, now there were just too many coincidences (not unlike the unbelievable happenstance in her own life involving lightning, a flat tire, and one inch of water). A married man yearns for his lost love. His daughter goes away to college and, out of twenty thousand students, falls in love with the woman’s son. Can romantic chemistry be inherited or, even more incredibly, seek itself out? Yearning married man and lost love are reunited. Oh, yeah. This will have a happy ending. The violin strings of Psycho began pounding Mavis’s brain again at the exact moment she saw Elizabeth, smiling and waving in the truck-stop window. Mavis smiled and waved back, something that was not easy to do in the middle of so much noise and confusion. As she entered the door, the violin stabs were slowly swallowed up by Tracy Byrd lamenting, “Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo.” Mavis gathered herself and crossed toward Elizabeth, feeling grateful for the first time in her life for country music.

  CHAPTER 8

  All the breakfast dishes had been cleared at the Pleasant Valley Retirement Villa, and most of the residents had assumed their stagnant positions for the day. A canned instrumental version of “Knock Three Times” played over and over on the loudspeaker. People who had once been loving, talkative, vibrant, annoying, dazzling, deceitful, and sexy were now, for the most part, quiet. Except for two or three holdouts, they had no more battles to fight, no hearts to win over. And at night, they lay in their assigned beds facing heaven, as though waiting for the final note of an old movie score that now hung expectantly over their rooftop.

  Mr. Henry Dill, who was a hundred and two years old, had been wheeled to his spot by the window, where he would spend most of the day, head down, like an old blue-rooted tree, occasionally drooling sap. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Chapman, dressed as always in their Sunday best, held hands on the sofa, neither quite sure of who the other was anymore, but somehow still knowing they belonged to each other.

  A few feet away, Jeter was being spoon-fed his morning Rice Krispies by Rudy Castenera, a sharp-talking, fast-moving Cuban man in his twenties. Jeter often got up late. At first, the staff had tried to enforce a curfew, but after learning that he would not be as pliable as some of their more elderly charges, they had given up—sometimes even allowing him to sit up all night sleeping in his wheelchair. On the evenings when Rudy worked until midnight, he would find extra chores to do, so he could be there to put Jeter to bed when Jeter was ready. As repayment for this kindness, Jeter had been responsible for teaching Rudy, a Cuban refugee, English. Rudy’s parents still ran a dance school in Havana. The rest of his story involved a rickety fishing boat and a cousin in Little Rock whose medical-supply company went belly-up. Rudy had embraced all things American, including the belief that anyone who works hard can achieve something called The American Dream. That’s why he almost never slept and why he held down two jobs, the other as a baker for Mavis at Doe’s.

  Not far from Jeter, Miss Lodusky Phipps, ancient and tiny, sat playing canasta. A retired first-grade teacher, she suffered from dementia as well as inexplicable bouts of blinding coherence. Miss Phipps had recently had a long, interesting conversation with Rudy. Then a few minutes later, she had asked him who he was. He had reacted, confused, until she had clapped her hands and exclaimed delightedly, “Oh, I know you! You’re from America, aren’t you?” Rudy, being both tickled and flattered, had repeated this story to everyone.

  The worst moment of Miss Phipps’s life had occurred when her husband and little boy had been killed on their way to buy a package of walnuts. If she had made a different cake that day, they would probably still be here. Even now, within minutes of meeting someone new, she will have her old tattered wallet out showing their pictures, telling the story. She always tells it flatly, without emotion, as though she knows to tell it any other way would be the end of her.

  Miss Phipps was a stickler for perfect social behavior. She wrote flawlessly in the old-style Palmer script. And she cared deeply about each of her students, having once even given a month’s pay to have a little boy’s enormous ears surgically pinned back. She had also kept a snapshot of each of her first-grade classes. Milan, Jeter, Wood, and Brundidge had all been in her class together. In the picture that showed the class of 1968, Jeter and Milan have their arms around each other.

  Miss Phipps had often recalled to Jeter that Milan was one of the loveliest children she had ever taught—how Milan had given her a gold cherub pin with blue sequins glued where the eyes might have been and a childishly scrawled note that said, “To Miss Phipps. So cool. So in the groove. I love you. Milan.” It had touched Miss Phipps because she knew the family had no money. There was even a winter when Frank Lanier had to attend school wearing his sister’s shoes.

  She also remembered that Earl Brundidge had been a very nervous little boy. He got upset and cried when the other children wouldn’t form a straight line or someone stole his pencils. And he refused to leave at the end of a school day until Miss Phipps had given him a kiss.

  Miss Phipps was never shy about reminding Jeter that he and Wood had been a handful, first graders who read on a fifth-grade level and were overly curious about everything. She had decided early on against sending them off to the library to read alone, where they might have come up with the unfortunate notion that they were gifted. Instead, she had discreetly provided them with more difficult books, while giving them the responsibility of reading stories to the other children every day. To Miss Phipps, the life lessons involving volunteerism, selflessness, and courtesy were every bit as important as test scores.

  As her memories faded, Jeter had become the chief reservoir for all her knowledge and insights regarding the one thousand nine hundred and fifty students she had taught over a period of forty-eight years. He also happened to know the sort of people most of these children had become. It was useful information, one of the few advantages settled on a writer who ends up living in a nursing home with his first-grade teacher.

  Miss Phipps’s card partner was Margaret Delaney, a renowned teacher of literature. Miss Delaney had never married, but had instead devoted her life to putting words and scenery inside of young people and changing them forever. For her trouble, she was now a legend to several generations of Parisians. And she considered the class of 1980, the last one she presided over before retiring, the one that included Wood, Milan, Jeter, Brundidge, Mavis, and the unspeakable her, to be one of the finest of her career. Miss Delaney’s body may have grown old but her mind had remained as bright and independent as when she was teaching. And that was why she deeply resented the new owners of the Pleasant Valley Retirement Villa. The first thing they had done was change their name from the Old Folks Home of Paris. Miss Delaney felt it was the business of language to reflect reality, not manipulate it. Perhaps that was why she had gotten off on the wrong foot the very first day the supremely confident Ms. Judith Nutter had arrived from Los Angeles, California, and begun to oversee things. Ms. Nutter had made the mistake of saying that Miss Phipps’s loss had occurred so long ago, she should surely have experienced closure by now. And Miss Delaney had told her, “Just so you know, we don’t have closure here in Paris. People die. Some people get over it. Some people don’t. Some people don’t want to. And that’s all we have. Just so you know.”

  After that, Judith Nutter, undeterred, had decided to change the names of meals. The noon meal, which had been called dinner for as long as anyone could remember, was changed to lunch. And supper, which had always been the final meal of the day,
turned into dinner. Residents immediately became confused. Some thought if they were eating dinner, it must be noon. Others didn’t show up for dinner at all because they insisted on waiting for supper. Then Judith Nutter, on a roll, began eliminating favorite menu items like chicken and dumplings and replacing them with healthful but idiotic entrées like Vegetable Burrito Olé and Tofu Surprise. A majority of the residents at Pleasant Valley had already lost their spouses, their jobs, and many of their friends. For the most part, they were through with life. At this late stage, they did not want to be surprised by tofu or anything else. The one thing they had to look forward to each day was supper or dinner or whatever it was called. And now that had been taken away by Judith Nutter—a person who somehow was allowed to boss people around who had been alive for eight or nine decades, people who in all those years had never even heard of her.

  Even worse, Judith Nutter and her associates had affected a phony cordiality with the old folks. Miss Delaney especially hated the way they had hooted and hollered when the Chapmans kissed, making inappropriate insinuations, pretending the old couple was still in the game. It was all so condescending, a mockery of the genuine affection that existed between them. So this is how it ends, with some cheesy California cheerleader acting as though they’re hot? It was even worse than people saying elderly people having sex was repulsive. Anyway, Miss Delaney knew something about that. Not only did she get cable, but she’d had two lovers in her lifetime and had enjoyed them both. It had not been as romantic as poetry had led her to believe it might be, but it was still more than satisfactory. And now that she was old, she wondered what was so offensive about a couple with sagging skin and wrinkles making love? Did these fornicating youngsters on her TV set really not know that sex is in the brain? Had they never read the passages where Heathcliff makes love to Cathy without ever touching her? It genuinely puzzled Miss Delaney that twenty-year-olds who had known each other for less than ten minutes and who were on all fours exchanging bodily fluids with their legs apart and their tongues hanging out and nothing more interesting to say than “Fuck me. Fuck me hard” had the gall to think that old people were repulsive.