Follow Me (38 page)

Of course not. He loved her, and she loved him. She didn’t think of herself as his mistress; rather, their relationship was
a secret treasure to protect, for others would covet it. Sally deserved Arnie, Arnie deserved Sally, and they never ceased
to be grateful for the affection they shared.

Over the course of several months they established a comfortable routine. They learned to communicate their intentions through
glances and scribbled notes (
meet me at…
) and took delicious pleasure in the subterfuge. They made sure to give no reason for anyone in the office to suspect what
they were up to. In public, they were convincingly indifferent to each other. But oh how that man adored her, he couldn’t
contain himself, whenever they were alone he grabbed her, spun her toward him, kissed her, told her she was beautiful. This
woman who stared back from the mirror: this woman was beautiful, and she stirred in Sally a distracting pride.

Who could blame her for forgetting the conference with her daughter’s teacher? She tried to make it up to Penelope by ordering
a banana split for them to share.

But Penelope hated bananas.

Since when did she hate bananas?

Ever since right now.

Ever since she was eleven years old and one week. At eleven years and six months, she still hated bananas and would not forgive
her mother for forgetting to pick up fresh milk at the store. By her twelfth birthday, she was even angrier. Sally kept trying
to pretend that she was a devoted mother, though she was always late coming home and when she was home she was either vacant-eyed
or absorbed by some soap opera magazine, leaving her daughter to sit in front of the TV watching show after show — that’s
if Penelope wasn’t banging on the top of the old black-and-white RCA, trying to stop the spill of horizontal lines that kept
filling the screen. Nothing worked properly anymore; her mother couldn’t be bothered to repair anything that broke because
her head was stuffed with thoughts of her lovey-dove boss, who wouldn’t marry her or even come visit her at home. And now
and then there were those embarrassing nights when Sally couldn’t stand being alone in her bed. She’d go out with her girlfriends
and come home drunk and belt out those syrupy songs for all the world to hear. Such a foolish mother was hard to endure month
after month, year after year, and by the time she was thirteen, in the summer of 1966, Penelope Bliss announced that she couldn’t
stand it anymore and was moving to Litchfield, Prospect County, to live with her father.

Penelope’s dad had a color TV. He had a big plastic bowl of a swimming pool in his backyard. He liked fried foods, hot weather,
and arguments. He hated Commies and David Frost. But the worst was that pussy heavyweight Muhammad Ali, who was too much of
a coward to put on a uniform. This grand old U.S. of A. was going to the dogs. And for those in doubt about the merits of
the electric chair, let Benny point out that taxpayers would be covering the Boston Strangler’s room and board through his
life sentence — and he was only thirty-five!

But gosh he loved his little girl,
Benny’s Penny,
as he called her when he was introducing her to his friends. He had a bedroom done up special, painted pink, with stenciled
ponies on the walls. So what if she considered herself too grown up for stenciled ponies? He was glad she’d chosen to live
with him. He’d bring her out to dinner, and boy oh boy would the waitresses fawn over them both. He even took to going to
church once in a while so he could show her off. That’s how he met Harriet Sullivan, who worked as an aide for an elderly
woman. She was wheeling the old woman into the sanctuary, the front wheel of the chair got stuck, and Benny was there to lend
a helping hand.

Maybe it was having his daughter in the house that prompted Benny to decide that it was time to settle down, or maybe he just
realized he was getting old. He courted Harriet Sullivan and early in 1967 asked her to marry him. She was eager to escape
the irritable old woman she worked for, and she accepted Benny on the spot. They were married within the month at the church
where they’d met, and after a two-day honeymoon in Niagara Falls, Mrs. Patterson arrived in Litchfield with just three small
suitcases, which she unpacked slowly, over a period of several weeks, sorting into piles the clothes she wanted to keep, to
store, and to give to the Salvation Army. And once she calculated her wardrobe needs, she began to shop.

It was shopping that Penelope would remember best from these years she lived in Litchfield — shopping by mail order with a
checkerboard of catalogues laid out on the kitchen table. Shopping in Fenton, until her stepmother decided the stores there
weren’t ample enough. And then driving the whole long way to shop in the city of Tuskee.

Thanks to her stepmother, who needed to shop, fourteen-year-old Penelope returned to the city where she’d been born. Though
her memories were vague, she hadn’t forgotten how her mother would just start singing in public wherever she was, and people
would gather to listen. She remembered feeling that she could never get enough of her mother’s singing, and the memory of
her pleasure made her wistful as they drove into the city center.

Trailing behind her father and his new wife after they’d parked her car, she studied the face of every passerby wondering
if she’d once known them or if they’d possibly remember her. She thought she recognized a smell in the damp air similar to
the fragrance she imagined burning raisins would give off. She wondered if she should try to find the woman she’d been named
after, her mother’s friend Penny. She only vaguely remembered her and didn’t even know her married name. Anyway, it would
be awkward to appear at her door without notice. The premonition of awkwardness, once it came to her, became more insistent
with every step she took. She’d never understood why they’d left Tuskee in such a hurry, but now, knowing her mother as she
did, she could fairly assume that Sally had been involved in some kind of foolishness. Her mother couldn’t help but make a
mess of things. Her mother had dropped out of school at the age of twelve. She had never heard of Boris Pasternak or Fletcher
Knebel, and she was amazed that Penelope could count to ten in French. She shamelessly wore hand-me-downs given to her by
her boss’s wife. She hadn’t been able to keep straight where her daughter was supposed to be and when. They might have had
a nice life for themselves in this sweet river city of Tuskee if her mother hadn’t been so foolish.

And here was Penelope retracing her mother’s path, walking in her muddy tracks, returning to the place of her humiliation.
Suddenly the air seemed unbearably thick at the furrier’s where Harriet wanted to browse. Everywhere you looked there was
a dead animal hanging from the rack. Harriet went ahead and picked out a fox stole, one with its silver tail jammed between
its teeth.
Please please please couldn’t she have it?
Benny grudgingly obliged, and while the proprietor was drawing up the bill, Penelope snuck away to wait outside.

The first thing she noticed was a large spotted cat sitting on the windowsill of the brownstone next door. The cat’s spots
were uneven, pumpkin-colored, and blended at the edges into darker fur; he rested on the excess of his body as if on a cushion.
He blinked slowly, with obvious arrogance, when Penelope approached. Why, this cat reminded her of the cat she’d once had
named Leo, a fat cat with orange spots and a superior manner, yes, just like this fat spotted cat.

As she reached out to pet the cat, she was jostled accidentally by a woman hurrying past, who offered a quick
pardon me.
But then she was jostled again — deliberately this time, with a jam of an elbow — by the small boy the woman tugged along.
The child smiled wickedly at Penelope and then broke into a trot to keep up with his mother, who yanked at his hand. But it
wasn’t the boy’s malice that surprised Penelope. It was the song he sang, a loud, almost tuneless song.

Grinning his grin and fading away,

Grinning and fading away, away, away.

Penelope stared at him in furious shock. She knew that song he was singing. It was her mother’s song. It belonged to her mother,
only to her mother, not to anyone else in the world. How did the boy know it? He might as well have snatched her mother’s
purse from out of Penelope’s hands. The little thief. She wanted to give him a good slug, but he was gone around the corner,
and when she turned back to the brownstone the windowsill was empty, the cat had disappeared into thin air, and there were
Mr. and Mrs. Patterson coming out of the store, holding hands, Harriet already wearing that stupid fox stole, Benny trying
to fold his wallet around a wad of bills.

Seeing how smug he looked with his overstuffed wallet and a fancy new wife at his side, Penelope wondered if she’d made a
mistake choosing her father over her mother. Secretly, she was angry at both her parents for making it necessary to choose
between them. She wanted to go home, but not to either of the homes available to her.

She felt better after her father bought her a new pair of pink Keds sneakers, and she felt even better when he bought a phonograph
for her to keep in her room. She was in a good mood up until the end of the day, when they were driving back to Litchfield
and she asked how much Harriet’s fox stole had cost. Instead of answering her question, her father instructed her to call
Harriet
Mom.
She refused, of course. She already had a mom. Think again, Benny’s Penny. As long as she was living in her father’s house,
her father’s wife would be her proper mother, with all the authority that went along with the title. Harriet tried to be gently
encouraging and promised to spoil her stepdaughter rotten. Benny promised that there’d be no spoiling if Penelope didn’t do
what she was told. He searched the rearview mirror for her response. It was then that she experienced the faint awareness
of his potential for meanness. But she would have to wait several years before she could come right out and accuse him of
trapping her.

Penelope lived in Litchfield for three years, convincing most everyone that she was as average as the next girl and could
fit easily into small-town life. She played first string on the girls’ field hockey team at her junior high school and second
string on the basketball team, she sang in the school chorus but was never chosen for a solo, she earned a solid B in all
her classes, she auditioned and got the part of one of the dancers in the high school’s production of
Oklahoma!
but missed the performances because she fell and sprained her ankle during dress rehearsal. She had friends and went out
on dates with boys, she babysat for her half brothers, a pair of twins born in 1968, she talked on the phone for hours while
her father and her stepmother shouted at each other in the kitchen, and on her sixteenth birthday she got her driver’s license.
It was her stepmother who drove her to the county motor vehicles bureau, not her father, because by then, the spring of 1969,
Penelope and Benny could hardly stand talking to each other, having learned through their three years in the same house that
they disagreed about any subject that came up, from the bombing of Hanoi to the message of the book of Revelation. They got
worked up before anything was even said, so useless and idiotic did each find the other’s opinions, with Benny increasingly
convinced by his daughter’s leather skirts and low-cut blouses that she was just like her mother —
that goddamn whore,
as he didn’t hesitate to point out — and Penelope recognizing that with the birth of his two sons, her father didn’t want
her around anymore, she was just another mouth to feed,
no more the cute little girl who idolizes you, nope, she’s all grown up, a young woman now and you don’t know how to talk
to a woman, not even to your wife, all you do is yell at her like you yell at me, you can’t stand it when anyone gives you
shit, you and your fancy car and your Brylcreemed toupee, you hate it when I won’t do what you say, you hate it that you can’t
get a decent job without a college education and now with money drying up you hate it that you have a daughter to support,
you hate having to do anything for me, you hate watching me go out the door with my friends while you sit around doing nothing,
you won’t even change a diaper, that’s woman’s work, isn’t it, you hate women, you hate your wife, you hate me and I hate
you so there’s no reason for me to hang out here for another fucking minute, keep my stuff, you paid for it, it’s yours, so
long, and I’ll see you in another life.

The first time he slapped her for her insolence was at the dinner table; in a fury, she knocked over her chair as she stomped
from the room. The next time he slapped her, she warned him that she’d kill him if he did it again. So he did it again, right
there standing in the kitchen, boxed her hard on the ear before she could stop him. Instead of killing him, she walked out
of the house.

Penelope was sixteen, it was the summer of 1969, and she believed not only that she bore no resemblance to the sluttish girl
her father made her out to be but that she could be much better than she already was. She agreed with her friends, who in
the spirit of the times insisted that they had infinite freedom to choose their own fate and liked to sing together —

Mystic crystal revelation

And the mind’s true liberation…

She wouldn’t let the fact that she had no money of her own deter her. She walked along the shoulder of the road, turned when
a car approached, and stuck out her thumb. She ended up hitching a ride with Mrs. Peabody, the cafeteria aide at Litchfield
High School, who was driving up to visit her daughter in the city of R.

“That’s funny. You’re going to visit your daughter, and I’m going to visit my mom,” Penelope said. She’d slipped her feet
out of her sandals and was resting them on the dashboard, absorbing the coolness from the vinyl.

“We can keep each other company,” Mrs. Peabody said. She lifted her sunglasses and gave Penelope the same look she offered
when she ladled out soup.