And When She Was Good, page 6
“She doesn’t see what she doesn’t want to see when it comes to him. So no, she doesn’t see that he likes a girl who is much too young for him. And too good for him, but there’s not a girl on this earth who’s not too good for him. She doesn’t see that he has nice clothes and a nice car, better than he could afford on the allowance that she gives him.”
“Allowance?”
“Yeah, she calls it a salary, but it comes out of her pocket, so what would you call it? An allowance, like children get, only he is a man. And he’s stealing from me. I want you to tell him to stop.”
“But—why me?” She was thinking that no one could be more formidable than Mr. Gus. There was no doubt that Billy feared him. Whereas she seemed to have less and less control over him. A cynical person would say that was because she had given in to him, that he’d gotten what he wanted from her, but Helen believed it was more complicated than that. Her mother couldn’t get Hector to do anything, whereas Barbara, his first wife, occasionally wangled money or gifts from him. It had something to do with those rats that Helen had learned about at school and the little lever they pushed for food. Her father always got the pellet from her mother. Not just sex but wholehearted approval, constant, cringing affection. Barbara blew hot and cold. She didn’t like him, and Hector wanted to be liked.
But Helen couldn’t hold anything back from Billy, didn’t want to. It felt good to love someone.
“Why don’t I talk to him? Because if I tell him, he will go to his mother and cry, and she will make my life a misery. But if you tell him that he must stop or you will lose your job, then he cannot cry to her. He will have to choose.” He gave her what he seemed to think was a sympathetic look, although even Mr. Gus’s sympathetic looks were a little scary. “If you’re lucky, he will have you fired.”
“I don’t see how that would be lucky. I need this job. I’ll have to get another one if I lose it, and there aren’t many good restaurants in town.”
“If it comes to that, I will help you. Gladly. You’re a good girl—or were, before him. But you have to know he’s no good. What kind of person steals like that, from family? I’ll tell you—a drug addict.”
“Oh, no, Billy doesn’t use drugs.”
Mr. Gus snorted. “Good luck,” he said, showing her the door.
Billy said it was lies, all lies. That his stepfather was jealous of him and trying to get rid of him. That he once or twice made change from the cash register but had never taken so much as a dollar. He said Mr. Gus was sleeping with Rhonda and they had cooked up this plan to get rid of both of them. But he wasn’t an addict. He was going to be the manager of Il Cielo—how could he stay away? But for her he would.
And he did, for almost a month, a month in which he became increasingly jumpy and paranoid. He knew things about his stepfather, he said. Things that could get him arrested. His stepfather knew he knew and was going to make Billy disappear, make it look like an accident. He needed to blow town, but he didn’t have the funds. Besides, how could he leave her? He loved her. He had abandoned his own future for her.
“I have money, Billy,” she told him. “Not a lot, but I’ve managed to save some.”
“No, I couldn’t do that to you.”
His initial refusal made him seem trustworthy.
“I want you to. I want you to be safe.”
“There’s no life for me without you.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“Okay, but only if we get married. You can do it fast, down in Baltimore, without a blood test. We could be married tomorrow.”
Marriage. She had never thought about it. She had thought about going to college, getting a job. Marriage. Her father had refused to give that to her mother, so it must be a precious thing. Yes, she would marry him. That wouldn’t keep her from doing anything else. She was already working and going to school at the same time. She could do that in Baltimore, too.
“Yes,” she said.
“When you come to work on Saturday, bring your money—and a suitcase, with as many clothes as you can manage. Stash it behind the Dumpster, and I’ll put it in the trunk of my car.”
He showed up that Saturday in a suit, presiding as manager. He ignored Helen so thoroughly that she began to wonder if she had imagined his instructions. At closing he chewed her out, said one of her tables had complained about her attitude and that he was going to make her stay late and start inventory as punishment. Once everyone was gone, he showed her the night’s cash receipts, waiting to be deposited. “Going to be deposited straight in our account, baby.” They headed out of town in his car, not the sports car he had once driven but a plain, boxy old Datsun. “Gotta keep a low profile,” he said. “He’ll be coming after us.”
They would get married the very next day, he promised. Well, not the next day, but Monday, at the courthouse. They were going to start over. Billy was going to open a real restaurant, a good one, where the desserts weren’t made of Marshmallow Fluff.
She fell asleep in the car. The next thing she knew, they were in a motel room outside Baltimore, Maryland, which turned out not to be the place that one could get married right away. That was a different county, back in the direction they had driven. Here, in the city, there was a forty-eight-hour waiting period after taking out the license, a fact that threw Billy off. Plus, he was annoyed at the cost of the license. And he was out of drugs—not that she understood that yet—and he was getting irritable, and it turned out that maybe he had taken some things from his stepfather that weren’t his to take—not just that night’s receipts but all those other shortages, the booze, jewelry from his mother’s bedroom—and maybe there were other people, less forgiving, who wanted money from him, too. See, Billy didn’t use drugs, but he sold them, and there had been some bad luck, someone had stolen his stash, which he hadn’t exactly paid for, but how could he pay for it if he didn’t have the drugs to sell? They needed fast money, cash money, and the best place to make that, Billy had heard, was on the Block, where Helen would make great tips just for dancing. Just dancing! And what did it matter if men saw her naked? She was beautiful; men should see her and admire her. They wouldn’t be allowed to touch her. Other men could look, but only Billy could touch.
Things didn’t happen as fast as Billy thought they would. But they happened as he said they would. She got a job dancing. She made slightly more than she’d made on the good shifts at Il Cielo. She brought it all home, and Billy, instead of paying the debts he owed, put it up his nose.
She started bringing home a little less, hiding money as she had hidden it from her father. She started doing extras, to make a little more. Lap dances. As Billy had promised, no one touched her. Nothing touched her. He no longer touched her. She seldom seemed to catch him in the right phase of his chemical arc for sex, and she didn’t want it much either.
So this is it, she thought. I fell in love with the wrong guy, an addict, and this is the life I get. Going home didn’t seem to be an option. She had called once, to say she was in Maryland and planning to get married, and her father had called her a whore and slammed down the phone. Prophetic Hector. How could I be such a dope? She didn’t think she could feel anything, ever again.
She was eighteen years old.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7
Heloise is having dinner with Scott when the home phone rings. She lets it go to voice mail. Calls to the landline are almost always telemarketers, although girls have started calling Scott, who does not have his own cell phone and is not allowed to chat on Facebook. And even if tonight’s call is something uncharacteristically urgent, it can wait. Almost everything can wait. It’s funny how few people figure this out, how they allow their phones and their BlackBerrys and their computers to enslave them. Heloise can’t completely leave work behind on the nights she doesn’t have appointments—there are almost always girls out on call, although Fridays tend to be slow—but she leaves it to Audrey to monitor the office, checking the GPS program from time to time, making sure everyone is where she’s supposed to be. The ritual of the meal with Scott is important to her, even if she has never learned to enjoy food. She blames her father, the way she had to rush through dinner in order to escape him.
Food has never mattered that much to Heloise. Her mother was too exhausted to rise above the cheap conveniences she could afford—frozen vegetables and waffles, Hamburger Helper, casseroles made with Campbell’s chicken soup. Heloise’s experience behind the scenes at Il Cielo, her memories of being up to her elbows in Marshmallow Fluff, left her skeptical of all restaurants. Even when she dines in celebrated places, she finds it hard to have much of an appetite. During the years with Val, that cocaine-addled household had huge quantities of food, but it tended toward junk food and doggie bags from high-end chains, Styrofoam containers of unfinished sandwiches. Val didn’t believe in wasting food. He was thrifty about everything. Even human beings. He squeezed every ounce out of them. Val was the person who could always get one more dab of toothpaste out of a spent tube, one more trick from an almost-done hooker.
Yet Scott, completely on his own, has become a little foodie. He bakes, he knows what an emulsion is. Heloise thinks his fascination with food must have started when he began watching cooking shows with Audrey or a previous baby-sitter. The cooking shows were probably an accident, sandwiched between the hideous reality shows that Audrey loves. Heloise cannot understand this. Audrey, whom she introduces as her au pair—her odd speaking voice makes her sound as if she’s from some unplaceable foreign land, although she grew up in Wilkes-Barre, then moved to Aberdeen, Maryland—has had more reality in her relatively short life than most women could stand. Married at eighteen, she was abused by her husband for several years. One of the beatings resulted in a partial hearing loss, which is what makes her speech sound odd. Then, after catching The Burning Bed in a rerun, she decided that the old television film was meant to be instructional, that God wanted her to watch it and learn from it. Audrey doused her husband’s bed with lighter fluid and set him on fire. The thing that troubled prosecutors was that it had been months since she’d been beaten. “But it was only a matter of time before he hit me again,” Audrey told Heloise when they met. “And those were the worst times. The waiting. The best times were immediately after the beating, and not just because he was nicer. He wasn’t, not always. He would apologize, but in that lame way where you say you’re sorry but make it clear that the other person is at fault. Sort of like, ‘I’m sorry that you behaved so badly I felt I had to hit you. I’ll try to do better, but you have to try, too.’ Although at least I wasn’t wondering when he was going to hit me again.”
Heloise understood. The prosecutor did not, nor did the police, and Audrey was convicted and imprisoned for manslaughter.
Five years later, pardoned by the governor, one of a group of women released for their violent crimes after the circumstances were shown to be connected to domestic violence, Audrey had somehow come across the Women’s Full Employment Network and taken the firm at its word. She was a woman. She needed full employment, and no one would hire her.
Heloise was touched, but Audrey was not suitable for one of the six positions she kept on her roster, all of which were labeled “legislative liaison.” It grieved Heloise to judge another woman this way, but Audrey was unattractive, with thick glasses and hair worn in the most unflattering braids, crowning her head. In a film one would take off the glasses, release the hair, and a beauty would be revealed. In real life, Audrey without her glasses had the sleepy, unfocused eyes of a newborn kitten, and her hair, when loose, was a Medusa-like mass. There would be no transformation.
Not that it mattered. Audrey disapproved of adultery. She had been faithful to a very bad husband. Certainly, more fortunate men and women should be able to maintain their vows. So when Heloise softened and decided to give her a job, it was simply as the “au pair,” although Scott was in grade school and needed little supervision. The whole point of Heloise’s job was to work a schedule that allowed her as much time with Scott as possible.
Audrey was sheltered. Audrey was a small-town girl. But she was not stupid. She sussed out Heloise’s real job just as she sussed out everything else in life—by watching television. All it took was one Tori Spelling movie on Lifetime and Audrey had figured it out. A straight shooter, she came to Heloise the next day and said, “You’re running an escort service, aren’t you?”
“I am running a lobbying firm dedicated to women’s issues, primarily pay equity.”
“Do the girls who work for you—do they have sex for money?”
“That’s illegal, Audrey. My girls meet with men who have the power to change things and use their best persuasive skills to convince them to introduce legislation that could help us toward our goal.”
Audrey’s eyes, behind her glasses, goggled. An old cartoon jingle flitted through Heloise’s mind. Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes. She flinched at the memory, then pinned down the reason: Hector Lewis used to sing it, tunelessly, when tending to some small chore. He did only small chores.
“Heloise, please don’t lie to me,” Audrey said. “I owe you everything. You gave me a job when no one else wanted to hire me. You trust me with your son. Trust me with this.”
But Heloise couldn’t, not right away. She told Audrey that WFEN was highly specialized, that it might seem to be similar to an escort service, but it was serious. Deadly serious. She said that Tori Spelling movies were not very realistic, in her experience. (She was right about that. Later she caught the film that had sparked Audrey’s curiosity, and it had much more in common with the turn-of-the-century melodramas about virtuous young things who can’t pay the rent and fall into bad company. She gave Audrey a copy of Sister Carrie, hoping to improve her mind.)
Still, Audrey had put her finger on something key: Heloise trusted her with the most precious person in her life. But that was part of the problem, too. Audrey had to be Scott’s buffer. It was dangerous for anyone close to Scott to know everything about Heloise. Compartmentalize, compartmentalize, compartmentalize. Sometimes she felt that her entire life was about creating boxes and storing pieces of herself in each one. She never got the boxes mixed up, but it required ferocious concentration on her part, an eternal vigilance. How could she trust anyone else to keep it straight? No one else had as much to lose.
A few months after their conversation, Audrey was driving Scott home from school in Heloise’s car, a nice SUV but not particularly extravagant or in demand. They were waiting at a light, making idle conversation, when a man opened Audrey’s door and told her to get out. Scott was probably too small to be seen in the backseat, but perhaps the would-be carjacker didn’t care. He jabbed something pointed at Audrey through his Windbreaker pocket.
He hadn’t counted on dealing with someone who was done being bullied.
“No,” Audrey said. “Show me your gun. I don’t believe you have one.”
The would-be carjacker reached across her and unfastened her seat belt, even as Audrey pulled hair from his scalp. Screaming in pain, he threw her to the ground and took her place behind the wheel. But before he could close the door, Audrey was up and on the running board, clawing at him with one hand, straining for the panic button on the keys, trying to stomp the emergency brake, yet somehow maintaining a completely calm tone with Scott all the while.
“It’s okay, buddy, it’s all okay. Don’t worry about a thing.”
The man stopped the car, pushed Audrey out of the way, and took off on foot. He was arrested at the local ER several hours later, where he went for treatment for a scratched cornea. He also had scratches all over his face. But it was the bald patch that gave him away.
Such an incident would have attracted a lot of attention anywhere, but in a suburb such as Turner’s Grove reporters slavered for the story. The world’s bravest nanny! Television news crews converged on Audrey from both directions, Baltimore and D.C. The local papers dispatched their best reporters. The Today show sent her a fruit basket. Heloise declined to speak to anyone, using the credible excuse that additional exposure could endanger her son. But she knew she could not keep Audrey from enjoying the attention, the prospect of which was heady.
Yet Audrey also told the press, through Heloise’s lawyer, that she had no desire to be interviewed or photographed. She said no over and over, for about three days, and then a new shiny toy of a story came along to distract the media types. Heloise understood that Audrey had done this to protect Scott and, by extension, Heloise.
The cliché was inevitable: “How can I ever repay you, Audrey?”
The reply was unexpected: “By trusting me.”
So she did. She let Audrey in. Into her confidences, her world, and, ultimately, her office. Audrey was the only person allowed to inhabit the two spheres of Heloise’s life. After the years of strict compartmentalization, it was a relief to have someone who moved back and forth between the two worlds as Heloise did. A relief to have someone with whom she never had to be guarded. As Scott required less attention, Audrey asked for more responsibilities at WFEN. Over time she became Heloise’s office manager. The euphemisms of Heloise’s inventory list were helpful to Audrey, who still did not approve of what these men were doing, of what Heloise was facilitating. And her fierce maternal instincts were perfect for the task of ensuring the girls’ safety.
So Heloise forgave and even indulged Audrey’s terrible taste in television. Having Scott be a little foodie wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Heloise even learned to cook, after a fashion. She was too impatient to be a truly good cook, and she had horrible knife skills, but she became good at simple sauces and began to glimpse why some people cared passionately about food, although she would never be one of them. Scott was the far better cook, if spectacularly messy and very hard on the cookware. Tonight, for example, he has made a shrimp stir-fry, and Heloise’s heart sinks a little, looking at the splattered grease, the scorched pan, the odds and ends scattered along the counter, the dusting of cornstarch and five-spice powder across the floor. She will need an hour to restore the kitchen to order.
