Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (23 page)

“We need a cabin at home, we decided,” Clara said. “We love it.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes. Clara’s body was bigger than Laura’s in every dimension—she was taller when they were both in bare feet. Her breasts were larger, her thighs rounder, her cheeks fuller. Clara looked like every girl in Door County: raised on cream and butter. It was no wonder she would feel so at home. Sometimes
Laura felt aware of Clara’s size at home in Los Angeles, when they went shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. She would watch Clara try to squeeze into dresses that would have glided over her own frame. Zippers got stuck, shoes pinched in the toe. If Clara had been an actress, Louis Gardner and Irving would have put her on a liquid diet for three months, but she was his daughter, and so he passed her the ice cream instead. It amazed Laura how different the girls could be: She knew that Florence thought no one noticed how little she ate, how she considered every morsel of food that went into her mouth. Laura would never bring it up, never mention it to Irving. Instead, Laura just watched as Florence’s bones rose to the surface of her body like driftwood in the ocean, plentiful and pure. Sometimes she worried that one daughter was getting too fat and one was getting too thin, but Laura thought a mother’s voice might push them both farther toward the edges—wouldn’t it be better to let them sort it out on their own, their tender hearts mending as they got older? Sometimes Laura worried that she was a bad mother for keeping so quiet with the girls, for giving them so much space on both the inside and the outside, but it was exactly the kind of thing her own mother would have railed against, and so she thought it was the best way.

The cabin seemed smaller also, which didn’t surprise Laura. Everything she’d seen and touched as a child was going to have shrunk in her absence; she was expecting it now. The planks of wood that made up the ceiling and walls had weathered with age, and there were holes here and there from when actors had hammered things in over the years. Florence and Clara had strewn their clothes around the whole place, though they’d been there only a night, and Laura had to step gingerly in between the items on the floor.

“This is a mess,” Laura said, though she couldn’t muster the disdain needed.

“Oh, we’ll clean it all up,” Clara said, flouncing back and forth.
She seemed to have forgotten that they had come to Wisconsin for a funeral, and that their mother was likely to be sad, and that the flouncing should be kept to a minimum. Laura felt her anger rising closer and closer to her throat. No one yelled at the Cherry County Playhouse except for the actors on the stage; if she raised her voice, her mother would hear it in the kitchen. The trees would sway and fall. Irving would pick up his son and go. It might not have been true, but Laura believed it.

“We’re leaving at one o’clock,” Laura said. She wanted to add, “For the memorial service,” but found that her tongue was too heavy to form the words. Without the windows open, the air was stuffy and thick with the bodily smells of two teenage girls. Hildy had been a teenage girl in this room too, and had stripped down even more than Clara had, until she’d had nothing on at all. Laura didn’t want to think of her sister naked inside these walls, that lumbering creep moving on top of her, crushing her delicate bones into the mattress, but it was too late. She began to cry softly, and covered her face with her hands. The girls didn’t know about Hildy, not really. They knew that she was beautiful, and vivacious, and they knew that she was dead. Their brains were too busy to process more than that, to understand that she had been their mother’s
sister
as if they were each other’s sisters, that Hildy had been as real as they were, as alive. By the time they were old enough to know the truth about her death, Laura felt like it was too late. She had died in an accident; that was what they were told. Was it a car? A horse? Laura couldn’t remember. They were small, and hadn’t asked questions. Now all that they remembered was that she was gone.

“We’ll be ready, Mom,” Florence said. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her knobby knees pointing to either side of the small room. An open book lay in her lap. The eighth grade at Marlborough was reading
The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer
, a book that Laura herself
had never read. There were so many things to be sad about at once, Laura didn’t know which to choose.

“Thank you,” she said, and tiptoed back out the front door. Laura kept walking away from the main house until she found a felled tree close to the ground. She lowered herself down until her head rested on the tree trunk and her body was on the forest floor. The sun was on the other side of a thousand leaves and branches, just poking through here and there to reassure Laura that it hadn’t gone away. In Los Angeles, the sun was always right overhead, perkily asserting itself. It was nice to remember that there were places in the world that were harder to reach. Laura closed her eyes and let the rustling of the wind be the only sound she acknowledged. Her own breath ceased to exist; there was only the sound of air in motion, a sound that no one could touch.

T
he memorial service was held at the Trottman Funeral Home in Egg Harbor, the only full-service mortuary on the peninsula. Laura rode with Irving and the children, following her mother and sister in Josephine’s truck. Florence and Junior were quiet, and stared out the window at the passing scenery, which mostly meant cows and docked boats and houses much like Laura’s parents’, only smaller. Clara was gushing, suddenly, about a classmate’s older brother named Theodore with long eyelashes and a dimple in his chin.

“And then
he
asked
her
about
me
!” Clara said to no one.

Laura couldn’t summon the energy to pretend to follow along, as she sometimes did when she’d had a long day,
mm-hmm
ing at every pause in each of Clara’s lilting sentences, even when she wasn’t sure whom the object of Clara’s affection was. Her firstborn daughter was pure Los Angeles, conceived under the aegis of Hollywood’s hope and
glamour, weaned on sequins and sunshine. Laura wondered how different her family would be if she had taken the girls and raised them in Wisconsin, whether their laughter would be different, their dreams, their hearts.

“Marjorie told me that Theo’s been telling his friends that he’s going to ask me to the homecoming dance. She says it’s for sure, a hundred percent. He said that he already has his license and everything. That’s okay, right, Poppa? If Theodore takes me to the dance? Florence would be there too, and everybody else from school. We wouldn’t be alone at all, and I’d dance with other people too, so it’s really more like it would just be calling it a date.”

Irving coughed into his shoulder, silencing Clara, and then reached over and took Laura’s hand. The funeral home was a fifteen-minute drive, but Josephine was driving twenty miles an hour, even on the stretches of road that were completely empty.

“Isn’t this supposed to be how we drive from the service to the cemetery?” Laura asked in a low voice. “I think Josephine is trying to drive me insane. I honestly think that my throat is going to close up and my eyes will fall out of my head if this takes a minute longer. I’m so sorry, my love, for making you come here.” She started to breathe heavily, as if she’d just run up seven flights of stairs and was going to vomit.

“Here,” Irving said, letting go of Laura’s hand and shoving it into his coat pocket. He pulled out two small pills: the blue ones, for anxiety. “Take these.”

Clara remained completely silent long enough to watch Laura drop the pills into her mouth and swallow them dry. There was a brief chalky taste in her throat, but then it was gone. By the time they arrived at Trottman’s, Laura was able to smile at her mother and sister, and the hard edges around their faces began to blur. The three women walked into the funeral home together, their arms linked like
debutantes. When people started to approach them, Laura realized what she had to do: pretend it was all happening to someone else, to Elsa Emerson, who’d loved her father to pieces and had never left Door County. Laura Lamont floated away, up toward the ceiling, and needed neither food nor drink nor a bathroom break for hours and hours. Strangers kissed her on the cheek and she kissed them back, thanking each one profusely for coming in her family’s time of need. Laura was aware, vaguely, that her children were still present and accounted for, and when she saw Clara slink off with a group of boys, her daughter’s soft body slouching playfully against one of them, she didn’t make a stink. Elsa Emerson was a wall of kindness, and nothing would make it fall. When Laura heard someone tap her fork against a glass in anticipation of a speech, she was surprised to realize that it was her own fork and glass, and that she was able to say several words about her father without once bursting into tears. Irving stayed as close as she would let him, his thin frame coming in and out of her peripheral vision. “We’re going to need some more of those little blue pills,” she said, patting him on the arm. It didn’t matter what anyone in Door County heard her say: She wasn’t Laura Lamont here, even if people were staring, which they were. Every word that came out of her mouth would be buried with her father. That was how it was done here; it was called respect. The casket was closed, and sat at the far end of the long room.

Laura shook off whoever was holding her elbow—it was Irving, of course it was—and staggered in the direction of the casket. Her father had wanted it closed; he must have said so. Josephine probably had stacks of legal documents saying exactly what her father wanted to happen to his body. He wouldn’t have left it up to them, the three women still standing. No, John had always been good at making decisions. Laura ran her hands over the smooth wood of the casket. It was nearly as long as the width of the room, but even so, it seemed
too small to hold her father’s entire body. Hadn’t they shown the body before it was closed? Surely her mother and Josephine had seen him. It wasn’t as though John had suffered from an illness for many years and everyone had seen his body shrink down over time, as the cells on the inside ate up the ones on the outside. No, his death had been sudden. A heart attack, simple and decisive. Laura supposed it happened all the time. She’d heard about a man who worked for the studio—a big guy, a gaffer—who’d fallen dead while walking down the street. Her father had been lucky that way, if death could ever be lucky; it had happened at home, in the barn. A few of the actors had seen it happen: Laura could guess which ones they were, huddled there on the folding chairs, still in shock. One of them had run into the house for the phone, and to find Mary. By the time the ambulance came, it was too late, but they’d hooked up all the wires just the same. Perhaps every profession required a bit of acting, just to make sure the grieving wife didn’t have to be grieving just yet. Was it so wrong to give people hope?

Laura let her hands run down the side of the casket until her fingers gripped the lip of the lid. The wood was heavy and dark. She turned to look over her shoulder; Irving had his eyes trained on her—she could feel it, accustomed as she was to his watching her most minuscule movements—but no one else was paying attention. Josephine was the sister everyone wanted to console. She and her housemate, the nurse (was it the same nurse? Laura didn’t think so—Josephine had gone through a few already), sat at the far end of the room, greeting mourning neighbors and friends as they came in. The housemate wasn’t as dowdy as Josephine. She had sturdy bones but a pretty face, with her hair pulled back into a neat braid. They held hands, as primly as two girls could. How stupid everyone in Door County was! Laura couldn’t believe it. Josephine could parade around, rubbing her lesbianism in everyone’s face, but her mother didn’t want to talk to
her
? The daughter who had given her three grandchildren? The one who’d won an Academy Award? Laura laughed. Her father had always loved her best, even counting Hildy. Laura gripped the lid tighter and flexed her arm muscles. In one great push, Laura hoisted the lid of the casket until it was all the way open and leaning against the wall.

Her father’s eyes were closed; the Trottman brothers had done that. They’d also put him in his best suit, the one he’d worn to the awards ceremony. His hair had been combed and his cheeks daubed with rouge. He looked as if he were taking a nap. There were rustling noises behind her, but Laura didn’t turn around to see who was whispering. For almost a full minute, Laura stared at her father’s clasped hands. Her mother hadn’t taken his wedding ring; why was that? Laura wanted to wear it on her thumb, to have the metal rub against her skin. The absence of fear, of anxiety, felt like skating on fresh ice. She could have looked at him forever.

A tall man with broad shoulders—a Trottman, she guessed—came up behind Laura and eased the lid of the casket back down.

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” he said, now holding Laura firmly on the wrist, as though she might try it again. “But this is a closed-casket service. It’s what the family requested.”

“Ha!” Laura’s voice rang out; she could tell she was being too loud for the room, but it was too late. If they’d been on a set—some sad film about a dead father, a weepie—the soundproofed walls would have absorbed the sound of her voice, softened its jagged edges. She pulled her wrist out of Trottman’s grip. “This is my father,” she said, no longer sure whether she was speaking as Elsa Emerson or Laura Lamont, or both. She’d come down from the ceiling, and the only thing floating in the air above her head was her too-loud voice, still ringing.