Five Women (8 page)

“Well, I try,” Billie said. She got up without saying goodbye and went to greet a party of four that was coming in.

“She should send
us
a free hot fudge sundae,” Eve said. “For the free advice.”

“Just don't ask for it,” Gara said, but they all knew what was coming.

“Pete,” Eve called to the waiter. “We get a hot fudge sundae too, and don't put it on the bill.”

“No!” the other three groaned in unison.

“With four spoons,” Eve said. “I'm still hungry.”

“You can't do that,” Gara said.

“No?” Eve said in the brusque, belligerent tone she took on whenever anyone criticized her. “Why not? I can do anything I want.”

The sundae arrived and only Eve ate it. Kathryn didn't like ice cream, Felicity was always on a stricter diet than the rest of them, and Gara was embarrassed. She also knew it would no doubt appear on Eve's check and if she took even one bite Eve would demand that she split the cost. That was Eve. She wondered if Eve was really that hard up for money, or if she just liked wheeling and dealing and getting something for nothing. Eve often said she had always had to take care of herself. It must have taken courage for Eve to tell her ex-husband she didn't want any money or help from him. Not that a kid his age would have had much cash to contribute, but still . . .

Eve licked up the last drop of ice cream. Felicity looked at her watch and pulled out her cell phone again and called Russell.

“I'll be home very soon,” she said to him, reassuringly. “I miss you, too, Slugger.”

“Check!” Kathryn called.

When Pete brought the bills they looked them over. The hot fudge sundae did not appear on either of them. “Free!” Eve announced triumphantly. “I told you I can get anything I want. It just takes the power. You all should listen to me.”

“I like the power of cash,” Kathryn said.

“I like
my
power,” Eve said. “The power of belief in myself.”

Can anyone really be that confident? Gara wondered as they paid the bill and prepared to leave. What must she think when she's all alone?

Chapter Eight

E
VE
B
ADER WAS BORN
on a small, struggling chicken farm twenty miles outside of Miami. She literally
was
born on the farm, since her mother went into labor early and her father had taken the truck into town to get something fixed. It was 1950, and her parents had gotten the money for their house and their dream from the G.I. Bill. The house was falling down when they got it and the dream collapsed soon after, and by the time she was five her parents were divorced.

She was an only child in a neighborhood overflowing with postwar fecundity. Everybody had brothers and sisters and friends, a mother who stayed at home and car pooled, and a father who went to work. She had a father who was absent, a mother who could drive a tractor, a neurotic tabby cat named Mayhem, and a black and white TV that showed a test pattern most of the day.

When Eve wasn't helping feed the chickens or clean the house she was watching the test pattern blankly, lying on the modern brown and orange tweed couch, stroking her cat, and wondering if it could be possible to send oneself right through that geometric design on the little screen to the world beyond where the people who would fill the screen at night originated. The yellow school bus stopped on the corner to take her to school and brought her home, she did her homework, and that was her life. The other kids didn't seem to like her, but she didn't know why. She wondered whether it was her personality or her clothes. She was the only girl at school who arrived in jeans, like a boy. It was just easier that way, her mother said.

“The kids make fun of me,” Eve protested. “They don't like anybody who looks different.”

“You'd better be different,” her mother would say. “Do you want to grow up to be like me? You don't want to get married; men are no good. You have to be independent and be somebody.”

“Be what?”

“Pick something.”

When she was seven Eve decided she was going to be an actress, go to New York City, and be on
Playhouse
90. The programs changed and went off the air, a lot of the television shows began to be seen in color, and she had new, alternative dreams of stardom. Maybe she would go to Hollywood instead of New York. Maybe she would be on a soap opera and wear those gorgeous clothes. It was a good thing, not a bad one, that she had grown up different. You had to have your own style to become famous. She set out to develop one.

She was always in the school play. In high school it wounded her to have to be the Nurse, not Juliet, because everyone knew that the girl who played Juliet was prettier, and more delicate, and more tragic; but Eve got to be Lady Macbeth. That was her finest hour. On stage she had heat and intensity. When she did the blood-on-my-hands scene some of the kids in the audience tittered, but she knew it was because they were stupid. Her mother had told her to pick, and she had picked. She knew her destiny.

When cute John Hawke, who was in her class and who did lighting on that production of
Macbeth
, became her boyfriend, Eve never for an instant thought that she'd spend her life with him. It was nice to have a good-looking boyfriend, to experiment with sex, to have someone to hang around with, to seem popular; and that was enough, that was normal, that was for now.

When she got pregnant she was stunned. Everyone was afraid of pregnancy, but still, when it happened, there was something unreal about it. She was only seventeen years old! Abortion was illegal, and she didn't even know where to go to get one. There were only two choices for her: go away to a home for bad girls and then give the baby up for adoption, or marry John. Eve didn't want a baby, but she certainly wasn't giving away any child of hers to be raised by who knew what.

It was humiliating to have a rushed and almost secret marriage to a boy she didn't love, with his parents glaring at her; worse to have to leave school because she was showing; and worst of all to have to live with him in her mother's house, in her childhood bedroom with the pictures of movie stars on the walls, because there was no money for them to be independent and his parents hated her too much to let the young couple live with them. She didn't know if she was a kid or an adult. She wished fervently that none of this had ever happened. She was fat and ugly and tired and lonely, and to make matters worse, he was madly in love with her and thought all of this was real life. His parents and her mother insisted John finish high school, but he kept making plans for the job he would get after he graduated and where they would live when they had a place of their own.

Eve didn't tell him that she had been planning the divorce while she was standing in front of the justice of the peace.

When their daughter, Nicole, was born, Eve had to wait almost a year for the sake of propriety before she told him she intended to get divorced. You couldn't break up too soon after the baby came because it made the forced marriage so obvious you might as well not have gotten married in the first place. She had never been particularly happy, but she thought that was the worst year of her life. John was in his senior year of high school, having a good time the way she should have been, and her mother had to work. Eve had hoped her mother would help her with the baby, but everything fell to her. The infant was constantly demanding. She realized she was not maternal, and somehow that did not surprise her. Maybe those feelings would come later. Right now she was exhausted and miserable . . . and bored.

She never did go back to school, but that didn't really matter, since the public library was well stocked with what she wanted so she could read plays at home; which she did, hungrily, imagining herself on stage in various leading roles, the rapt audience out front sending her a generous wave of admiration. She wondered if she needed acting lessons and, if so, who would pay for them. She read biographies of actors and actresses, was particularly taken by the ones who hadn't needed lessons to become stars, and decided she was a natural too.

It was oppressively hot and humid most of the year in Florida. The heat started in March, and went on until something even worse—hurricane season—came in the fall. Even the winter, when the tourists came pouring down to stay on Miami Beach, was too tropical for someone with Eve's intrinsic heat of body and personality. The sweet-rotten smell of chicken shit, of the birds themselves, which she had taken for granted and ignored in her childhood, now nauseated her. The dry flapping of wings, the greedy clucking, the tiny, almost prehistoric heads with mean beaks and stupid eyes mocked her. She dreamed of her career, of escape.

John's parents refused to come to see the baby whom they felt had ruined their son's youth, if not his life. They were hoping he would come to his senses and get divorced when a suitable time had passed, he told Eve. They had made him apply to college. He told her this not to hurt her but because he thought his parents were acting unnaturally, and he wanted her to agree with him that their marriage would only get better as time went by, and to stand by him. Eve didn't reply. She was secretly glad they were on her side.

No, she knew she was not maternal. There were girls only a little older than she who had married their high school sweethearts after graduation and were happily anticipating their first babies, surrounded by the love and approval of their family and friends. There was the crop from the year before, their infants in canvas carriers attached to their own bodies, wheeling their carts down the aisles of the supermarket, looking proud, buying paperback books on how to feed your baby while they scooped up jars of baby food and gallon jugs of milk. Those girls smiled shyly when people stopped to tell them their babies were cute. They would bend to kiss the downy head between their breasts, and then they would glow. When people told her Nicole was cute, and they always did, Eve just kept hoping they worked for a modeling agency so she could get the baby a commercial and make some money.

She had already started sending Nicole's pictures out to the local modeling agencies. A couple of them wrote back telling her the baby was very promising but too young, and to send photos later on. She filed the letters and called an employment agency about getting a job as a cocktail waitress in one of the big hotels on the beach, since she had been dieting and had her body back. John had been accepted at three colleges, but he was looking for a job instead. Eve knew she couldn't wait any longer.

“I want a divorce,” she told him. “I want you to go to college. I'm leaving this town anyway to get on with my sidetracked career.”

He was appalled, upset, confused. He offered a compromise. He would go to the University of Miami and get a part-time job on the side so that nothing much would change. He couldn't understand how she could give up so easily when they had a future together.

“No, we have a future separately,” she told him. “Go to college. You deserve it. Forget me.” She did not add, although she thought it: I intend to forget you.

He begged, reasoned, even wept. Eve was adamant, and finally he caved in. His parents were happy. She got complete custody because she was the mother, and didn't ask John for anything because she didn't want him to hold it over her. She told him if he didn't come around butting in about her child care it would be easier for everybody, and to her surprise he agreed. Eve realized it had been her he had loved, not the idea of their little family. Another life lesson, she told herself philosophically.

Her mother was concerned about the divorce, but understood. After all, she had encouraged her daughter's independence all these years. She was only sorry Eve hadn't asked John for money. She herself had nothing much to contribute financially, but she agreed to act as a part-time baby-sitter now that Nicole was older and not so much trouble.

Every afternoon Eve left her mother with the baby, walked a mile and a half to the bus stop, rode the twenty miles to Miami Beach, put on her sexy little cocktail waitress uniform, and worked at the Queen of the Sea. It was a tourist hotel a little past its prime, where most of the male guests were too old and too married to pinch her, but rich enough to tip. This was God's waiting room, someone told her. Mine too, she thought, but I'm not going to die.

She kept a strict budget and stole whatever she could from the kitchen to take home. The money she would have spent for food went into her bank account, along with the remainder of her salary after minimal expenses and what she considered an unjust withholding tax. Nobody dressed nicely anymore, so she didn't have to buy many clothes, and what she did buy came from thrift shops where she was able to cultivate her offbeat image. In a year she had enough saved for the down payment on a car.

“I'm going to drive to L.A., Mom,” she said one day.

“For how long?” her mother asked, thinking she meant it was a vacation.

“I don't know. I'll send for Nicole.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm going to get established in Hollywood and then you can put her on a plane.”

“She's too young to travel alone, and you know it.”

“She won't be when I send for her.”

“Are you out of your mind?” her mother exclaimed, upset.

“Maybe I'll be rich and then you can bring her out. Wouldn't you like to see the studios?”

“I don't want to take care of my grandchild full-time at my age.”

“You're young.”

“What happened to your job?”

“It served its purpose.”

“But what about your plans for Nicole to model?”

“She can model in L.A. later. I can't just sit around here.”

“You never were a natural mother,” her mother said. “You never picked her up when she cried, you never played with her. You liked to fuss with her hair, but that was it.”

Eve shrugged.

“I understand your ambition, Eve, but this child is your responsibility. I took care of you, now you have to take care of her.”

“It doesn't sound like you had too much fun taking care of me, either,” Eve said matter-of-factly, but she was a little hurt.

“I never had that luxury.”

“Well, neither do I.”

“It didn't mean I didn't love you,” her mother said.

“I love her,” Eve said. Did she? She wasn't sure. She didn't feel the way other mothers did, that she knew. She wondered if her mother was just saying it, the way she was.

She looked at her mother: a strong woman in overalls with her gray-streaked hair cropped short, a baseball cap on top of her head, steel-rimmed eyeglasses, no makeup, her skin leathery and wrinkled from years of smoking and being out in the blasting Florida sun, looking older than her years. She was a no-nonsense woman who had done what she had to do, but she still had dreams, if not for herself then for Eve. Eve had never given much thought to whether her home life was less loving than anyone else's, or the same; it had always just been what it was. It was hard to blame her mother for much. She thought about her own nature. On the outside she seemed like a volatile and passionate person, but inside there was a core of coldness and probably it ran in her family. Her father had never even tried to keep in touch with her after the divorce except to send her a Christmas card with a dollar bill in it every year. He had obviously never heard of inflation. She got tips better than that. He also sent her a birthday card, but it usually came late. Everybody knew when Christmas was, but he couldn't remember her birthday. They were well rid of him.

“I promise it won't be for long, Mom,” Eve said. “Just till I get an apartment and a job that pays enough for me to hire a baby-sitter. I know I'm going to be a star.”

“I hope so too,” her mother said.

The next day Eve left.

It was an exciting adventure driving to Los Angeles, and when she got there she was very busy just trying to survive, as she had known she would be. She found a waitress job at the Confident Onion, a health food restaurant on the Sunset Strip, she rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, she got lost and angry on the freeways, she went to open casting calls, and she tried to meet influential people, or just anybody. She had been prepared for hard work, but what she had not been prepared for was the terrifying, gut-wrenching loneliness. She had never lived alone before. She had thought it would be a wonderful relief, but to her amazement, it wasn't.