An Affair to Dismember (4 page)

“Maggie had fat from her butt injected into her face. I don’t think we should go by her opinion.”

“And your figure. You know how I feel about the objectification of women, but you have a great bod, Gladie.”

“I’ve gained a few pounds,” I pointed out. Bridget ignored me.

“Sure, your hair has a life of its own, but there’s nothing wrong with frizz. When you talked with your grandma, were you wrapped in bandages from head to toe? Because it sounds like she thought you were the invisible woman or something.”

“I was sort of wearing these torn pants,” I mumbled.

“If I’m not mistaken, Gladie, this is the fourth time this kind of thing has happened to you in the past month.”

“I think this makes five times.”

“All right, I’ll save the protest for another day. We need some inter-female support time. Let’s have lunch tomorrow,” she said. “Lucy is back in town. I’ll invite her, too. Ladies’ lunch at Saladz. Regular time.”

We carried our Bernie’s Rib Shack bags toward the house. “You know,” she said, “your grandmother is right. You
should
be thinking of matching people. The new neighbor is a good start.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t know how.”

“You have to dive in sooner or later.”

I didn’t want to dive in anywhere. In fact, I had a strong desire to run. Three months was the longest I had stayed in one place in years, but I wasn’t going to let Grandma down. I felt invisible strings holding me in place, and she was the one holding them.

I spent the afternoon and much of the evening working in the attic with renewed purpose. I wouldn’t let Grandma down. She was getting on in years, and she was counting on me to take over the business. I had promised to at least try. Maybe she was right and I was a born matchmaker. Perhaps I would bring love and happiness to the masses.

In the office, I filled three large trash bags with ancient index cards and Polaroids, but I was still buried in
paper, and I didn’t seem to be any closer to getting the business organized.

I stretched and looked up from my desk for the first time in a long while. Outside, across the street, the neighbors’ lights were on, and a young man was pulling out the trash can. Damn. I had forgotten tomorrow was trash day. I hurried around the house emptying the wastebaskets, then rolled our large black trash can down the driveway.

The guy across the street stood by his trash can and lit up a cigarette. He wasn’t the Porsche guy, but I assumed he was one of Betty Terns’ many children. What was with this family? Hadn’t they read the warning labels?

I tried to ignore him as I put the trash can in place on the curb, but he waved to me. In my head, Miss Manners badgered me to wave back.

It was a huge, huge mistake. It was a skorts, goatee, shoulder pads, Bay of Pigs kind of mistake. I’ve wondered many times since then how my life would have been different if I had only ignored Miss Manners, ignored the guy by the trash can, and returned to the attic to throw out more index cards.

But I waved, and he waved again, and he upped the ante with a smile. I saw his smile and raised him an “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What?” he called from across the street.

“Your loss. Your father. Sorry about your father.”

“Oh, thanks,” he said. He shuffled his feet and cocked his head to the side, studying me. “You’re the Burger girl, right? I haven’t seen you since you were, you know, little.”

I didn’t remember him at all. Grandma stayed clear of his family, and I couldn’t remember ever setting foot in his house.

“You came and swam here. Your mom brought you,”
he said, as if he could read my mind. “Then your grandma got upset and took you back home.”

The story sounded familiar. “You have a pool slide, right?” I asked. A scene came back to me in a wave of memory. In my mind’s eye, I saw the pool and Grandma’s burly arm pulling me away, her face angry and concerned.

“That’s right,” he said. “You wanna come in? We’re all sitting around, having a drink.”

“Oh, no thanks. I have to get back,” I said, turning.

“Not even for a second? My mom would get a kick out of seeing you. Besides, don’t you wanna see the scene of the crime?” he asked.

“Scene of the crime?”

“Yeah. It happened in the kitchen, you know.” I must have looked a little horrified because he added, “Oh, I guess you didn’t know that. My dad died in the kitchen. Come on in. I’ll show you.”

“Um …”

“My mom sure will be happy you said, you know, that you’re sorry about my dad.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and held his hand out to me. I didn’t feel I could refuse, and I walked across the street to him and shook hands.

“My name’s Rob, if you don’t remember,” he said.

“I’m Gladie.”

“Yeah. Peter reminded me.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“My brother. He’s the smart one in the family. You’ll meet him. Come on in.”

The doorknob hung broken at an angle. “Dad wasn’t much for fixing things,” Rob explained. “The door’s been broken as long as I can remember. Easier that way. Don’t need keys.” He tapped the door, and it swung open for me. I stepped inside.

“Come on in and take a seat,” he said, his voice tinged with uncertainty.

The house was crammed with furniture. How to pick a seat? And how to get to it? I tiptoed around a sofa wedged in the entranceway. Rob waved me into the living room. More furniture there. I counted at least four couches, plus a bunch of chairs and ottomans. There was a sea of knickknacks wherever I looked.

In one of the corners was a curio cabinet filled with little porcelain dolls. On the mantel was a collection of ceramic elephants. The rest of the room was stuffed with shelves and cabinets crammed with figurines. A creepy feeling went up my spine, and I shivered.

Rob looked around for a place to sit, but the furniture was too overwhelming, and it was doubtful there was a navigable path through it all. I was wondering if I was going to have to climb over the furniture to take a seat, when Rob looked at me and shrugged. He’d given up.

“Everybody is in the kitchen,” he said, steering me away from the living room. The house was big, but not as big as my grandmother’s. Hers was one of the first real homes in Cannes, built by a lucky gold miner who spared no expense. But Grandma was right about the Ternses’ house. It was sizable and would bring a pretty penny.

I spied on the rooms as we walked the long way to the back of the house, where I assumed the kitchen was located. Clutter, clutter everywhere, but not a drop of dust. Either Rob’s mother, Betty, was an obsessive-compulsive cleaner or she had a dynamite cleaning lady.

“It’s just a couple hundred dollars, Mom. You act like I’m asking for the world.”

I heard the kitchen before I saw it. Rather, I heard the voices. The first was a woman’s, with the remnants of a teenage Southern California whine. The second was a
woman who was fed up with everything, especially those close to her.

“Grow up, Christy. Jesus, you just got out of jail. Don’t you think you should try to get a job? At the very least, you should kiss Mom’s ass for getting you out of the slammer and not kicking you out of the house.”

It was awkward, to put it mildly, and I was sure that Rob would stop and turn me around, but he acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Before I could fake some sort of ailment and bolt out of the house, I was face-to-face with Betty Terns’ kitchen, a museum piece from the late 1960s in all its avocado-green glory. Wow, there was a lot of linoleum in that room.

At the table were Betty and two youngish women who I assumed were her daughters. One I recognized as the bitch from earlier. She was the one angry at Christy, who had just been released from jail. Rob didn’t introduce me. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten about me altogether. His attention had shifted to the gleaming light in the small room beyond the kitchen. A big-screen TV was broadcasting a baseball game. He walked toward it as though in a trance. I watched in fascination and irritation as he took a seat in a recliner and leaned back, feet up. Obviously Rob was one of the Terns kids who wouldn’t leave the nest.

I stood at the entrance to the kitchen, hoping that somehow the women hadn’t seen me and I could turn around and go back home, but I wasn’t so lucky. The three women were genuinely pleased I was there and gave me all their attention. Even though I had never taken any notice of them, they knew who I was.

“Oh, Miss Burger,” Betty said. “I am thrilled you came by. This is so sweet of you, to give your condolences in person.”

Betty Terns was small. The top of her head reached not far above the midsection on my five-foot-seven
frame, and her hair was bleached blond. Very bleached. Clorox bleached. And she was clearly not averse to wearing as much pancake makeup as she thought she needed. I bit my lip, awash in shame. I was supposed to be giving my condolences, and all I could do was mentally critique the physical attributes of the poor widow in front of me. How would I feel if she could read my mind? Poor lady. She had just lost her husband, for goodness’ sake. I looked at her with fresh eyes.

Geez! She was skinny. Really, really skinny. Clearly the woman hated food. I fantasized a moment about giving her a few of my extra pounds. I could give her five pounds for her rear alone, and then both she and I would look so much better.

“Honey? You went out on me for a moment there.”

I blinked. Betty’s big blue eyes were staring up into mine with concern.

“Sorry. I was just thinking of your husband.” Good save but terrible lie. I was going to hell for sure.

“You are so sweet, Miss Burger. Won’t you sit with us? We were just talking about my Randy, bless his soul.” Well, well. It turned out that I wasn’t the only liar in the group.

“Thank you, but please call me Gladie.”

“And I’m Betty, and these are two of my daughters, Jane and Christy.”

I shook their hands and sat down. Christy smiled from ear to ear, and I noticed she was missing more than a couple of teeth near the back of her mouth. Jane’s smile was more circumspect and a lot more hygienic.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. I had heard the phrase on TV and didn’t know what else to say.

“That’s where he died. Right there,” Christy announced.

“Excuse me?”

She pointed at me. “Where your arms are. His head
hit right at that spot on the table. It split his head open like a melon.”

My arms flew off the table as if they had been electrocuted, and I backed up in my seat.

“His head didn’t split open like a melon. It was dented, like it was bashed in,” Jane the “bitch” added for good measure. “Besides, his head might have hit there, but he didn’t die there. He died on the floor.” She pulled out a cigarette from a pack on the table and popped it between her lips.

We were interrupted by banging from another part of the house.

“There he goes again,” said Christy.

Betty turned to her. “Would you please tell your brother to stop that noise and come here? We have a guest, and he’s being plain rude.”

Christy sighed loudly and shuffled out of the kitchen.

“Peter thinks we might have termite trouble, and so he’s been digging in some walls,” Betty explained to me.

“Yeah, right,” Jane mumbled.

Christy came back quickly with Peter, who turned out to be the Porsche guy, on her heels. He was more disheveled than before, and his suit was covered in a fine layer of white dust. I thought back to Grandma’s comment about Betty’s kids looking in the walls for gold.

“Hi,” he said. He took a beer out of the refrigerator and sat next to Christy, the jailbird.

“I was just telling Gladie that Dad died right where she’s sitting,” Christy said. She was practically jumping up and down with excitement. Where had I landed? I felt that creepy feeling up my spine again, and I racked my brain trying to make an excuse to get out of there.

“Don’t sweat it, Gladie,” Peter said. “They didn’t find any hair or blood or brain bits there, but his head was
bashed in pretty good and there was a huge mess on the floor.”

My eyes were drawn to the floor. It was clean as a whistle.

“Nope. No brain bits on the table. Makes you think,” Peter said.

“Well, it makes
me
think,” Jane added.

Makes them think about what?
I had no idea, and I didn’t want to find out.

“And the acrobatics,” Jane started.

“The acrobatics?” I asked.

“He had a dent in the back of his head, but he fell forward,” Peter said. “Like he was hit, not like he fell backward onto the table.”

“Idiot coroner called it an accident,” Jane added, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “Convinced the police, I guess, but they seemed interested at first.”

Betty stood up suddenly and left the room. I figured all this talk about her husband’s death had gotten to her, but she came back in holding a purse and wearing a scowl on her face. She was followed by what I assumed was another daughter, possibly older than Jane and Christy, her clothes unmatched, like discards from a thrift store circa 1972. “I love pennies,” the daughter said, her voice high and singsongy.

“Don’t you have enough pennies, Cindy honey?”

“I love pennies,” Cindy insisted. She floated around the kitchen like a fairy, searching in nooks and crannies, obviously upsetting Betty’s strict notions of order and cleanliness.

“Oh, Mom. Let her have my purse. It’s perfectly all right with me,” Jane said.

Betty reluctantly handed the purse back to Cindy, who plopped onto the ground and began rooting around in it.

“My sister got a brain injury when she was a kid. It was an accident at school on the playground,” explained
Jane. “She’s got a thing about pennies and looks for them everywhere, especially in purses. It’s no big deal.”

“It is a big deal,” Betty corrected, her hackles up. “It took me three hours to find my keys yesterday. She takes things out, puts things in. It’s a mess.”

It was time to get out of there. I did a big theatrical yawn and stretch. Betty took the hint and walked me to the door.

“Thank you so much for coming, honey. It really did brighten my day,” she said.