Party Doll

“Well for Chrissake! Buddy!” Shirleen said. She embraced him and wept.

Bernard patted her shoulder absently, but it was my mother he looked at. He said only, “You wanted to kill me, Jo?”

“If she wanted to kill you,” Edward said, “you’d be dead.” He reached for the gun. Josephine held on to it tight, and he unpried her fingers. He put the gun in his pocket.

“There’s gravy on my ear,” Bernard said. “If you hadn’t jogged her wrist at the last minute, it would be my brains.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Bernard, don’t be such a baby,” Edward said. “I can’t believe a grown man is making this fuss. Why, Joey’s father used to test our nerve by shooting apples off our heads. He would have considered a turkey more or less the side of a barn.”

My mother said, “I’ve had such a bad time, Eddie. He hurt me so, and there was nobody—it seemed as though the only way to get back—”

“Hush,” he said loudly, speaking over her voice. Then, for the first time I could remember in my whole life, he put his arms around her. “It’s over,” he said. “Things happened because I was gone. Now I’m back.”

Edward wasted no time in getting my mother warm and sober. “Coffee,” he said coldly. As Shirleen made it, he swathed Josephine in every cashmere throw and afghan he could find. I had drunk a lot of wine and could hardly make sense of the march of events. Ten minutes before, Josephine had been in despair, icy-fingered, gutted. Now she was a cherished little prize, her rosy face and tumbled curls rising from the most luscious fabrics, the tender belly hairs of royal white goats. Bernard looked at her as though he could hardly believe his eyes. Edward stood over her while she drank the coffee, every drop. He put his hand to her flushed cheeks and brow to make sure she was warm. Then, imperiously, he stripped the afghans away, letting them lie where they fell. He wrapped her up in his big old woolly coat and buttoned it right up to her chin. She looked like a darling little bear. He wrapped his six-foot muffler around her and put his heavy gauntleted gloves on her little hands.

Josephine turned to me and put her arms around me. “Come see me tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be at Eddie’s.”

Bernard and Edward exchanged their last words.

“Hot Springs tonight, hey?” said my father. “Well, it only took you forty years.”

“I always detested you, Bernard,” Edward said.

“Oh, that’s all right. I always detested you, too.”

“I guess this means we won’t have to spend Thanksgiving together any more.”

“I guess not.”

Edward said to me, “See you tomorrow, Rochelle.”

I grabbed a wine glass off the table and lifted it to him.

In the hall, Josephine noticed Bernard’s fine long scarf hanging from the hat tree. She pulled it off and put it around Edward’s neck. Then she turned to go outside. As she walked past Bernard, he said, “Try not to blow anybody’s head off on the way home.”

“Yeah,” Shirleen chimed in supportively, “don’t whack anybody unless it’s absolutely necessary!”

Edward stopped dead in the doorway. He said to Josephine, “What’s that quote I’m thinking of—you know, Omar Khayyam—something about hounds, curs—”

“‘Dogs bark,’ ” Josephine said clearly, “ ‘but the caravan passes on.’ ”

Regally, they flung their mufflers about themselves and departed.

After the door closed, I wasn’t sure what to do. It seemed as though everyone had already used the best lines and exits. Shirleen had disappeared into the kitchen. My father got a sponge and began cleaning the turkey off the wall and floor. I was surprised at his calmness, until I remembered some of the places he’d worked. I sat down close to him. I watched him for a while, and then I said, “You really are the most awful man.”

“An awful man? Why? We were happy for a long time. Runtkin and I—” he fell silent, and after a minute, pegged the sponge into the bucket. “Besides, I never said I was running for pope.”

Just at that moment Shirleen shouted from the kitchen. “Rochelle!” Her voice held some quality that made the short hairs on my neck stand up.

Shirleen was standing at the kitchen table, my open portfolio before her, looking at a cartoon. It showed a strange couple at an auto showroom. The man was a mass of decay with my father’s face. The woman was an infected-looking wench, wearing practically nothing, with Shirleen’s face. The car salesman pointed toward a superb old Mercedes whose quality, in every nut and bolt, produced a visible shimmer around it. I’d given the Mercedes my mother’s face, with tears on the hood. The disgusting husband was saying, “But I don’t want some dumpy old classic! I want a ride that’s fly and baa-aaad!”

We both stood there looking at the cartoon. After a long moment, Shirleen closed the portfolio. She said, “What do you think I am?”

I wasn’t quite drunk enough to say Whore. So I said, “You’re a party doll.”

“What?”

“You were on the cover of Vixen.”

“Vixen? Hell, I was on the cover of Players. So what? They’re just pictures.” She spoke in honest puzzlement. Her serious eyes confused me. She said, “Did you think I was a hooker? I was a model, very successful. I did a hundred of those covers.”

I said, “Doesn’t it bother you that maybe twenty million people in this country know what you look like with your clothes off?”

“Give me a break!” she said. “It’s like I said, they were just pictures. Just a job. As for twenty million people, big deal. I look good with my clothes off. I eat right, I exercise hard. I’m not ashamed of it.”

“But those magazines—the shurroundings—” The wine, or my confusion, slurred my words. I tried again. “Like, what did your job involve?”

“Oh,” she said, “you mean the editors, the photographers? No, they never dared. I would have broken anybody’s arm who tried. Well, wait a minute.” She thought. “There was just one photographer, near the beginning. He said he was arranging my pose, but he grabbed a handful. I hit him just once,” and she raised her strapping right arm, the hard blue jewels of her eyes on me, “and he bounced off every wall in the studio. I lifted him off the floor by his hair, I slammed him up against the door, I looked him in the eye and I said, ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t think about touching me. Don’t touch yourself and pretend it’s me. Nothing!’ ” She opened her hands suddenly and I seemed to see the photographer sag to the floor, a few of his moussed curls drifting down after him. “Then I stood over him and said, ‘Because if you do, I’ll bash in your ugly little face, you’ll be looking for your rib cage up a tree, do you understand what I’m saying?’ He never bothered me again.”

“I believe you,” I said.