How Perfect is That Read online

  “Brakes, Blythe! Use the brakes!”

  Still the agent bears down. The road dead-ends straight ahead.

  “Hang on.”

  “Blythe! Turn! Turn, you—!” Millie’s first-ever verbalization of truly vile cursing ends with a tooth-loosening scream as I pilot us straight into the curb designed to prevent wheeled access to the park.

  Ooomph.

  And we have liftoff.

  I cannot imagine that the landing does any more for Millie’s spine than it does for mine. The Hummeresque tank of a bike, however, doesn’t miss a beat, and we tear overland, plowing though the park like a runaway locomotive. I glance behind to see the agent in his car, marooned on the far side of the curb, and I thank God for Sanjeev’s Industrial Revolution–quality construction.

  “The creek!” Millie screams.

  I spin back around to find Shoal Creek looming dead ahead and grip the hand brakes until tendons pop. The wheels stop turning, but the bike, now a cast-iron toboggan hurtling downhill, only picks up speed. My admiration for Sanjeev dims.

  “Lean,” I order, and Millie, a perfect little luger, heaves to the left just enough to tip us onto the trail, shooting a dramatic rooster-tail spray of rocks and rubble into the creek below. The brakes grab and hold the instant we are on flat ground and no longer need them to avert death.

  “Well, that was invigorating.”

  Millie slowly faces me. If we had been in a cartoon, pinwheels and symbols from the top of the keyboard would have been flying out of her mouth. Since she is a well-brought-up Southern girl and Christian to boot, she gasps eloquently, squeezes her eyes shut, and shakes her head. Hoping to put this unfortunate incident behind us, I pedal on.

  A second later, we are in the leash-free zone of Dog Crap Lane. Happy pooches, the usual Animal Defense League rescue assortment—knobby greyhound, three-legged black Lab, black-tongued chow, misunderstood pit bull, several genetic experiments gone horribly awry—romp about. The jolly band catches one glimpse of the Dorkocycle and merges instantaneously into a murderous, slavering pack. Millie’s terror-whitened face is at eye level with the blood-crazed curs’ fangs.

  Female owners shout frenzied high-pitched commands at the killer canines. “No, Xena! Bad girl!” “Martina! Billie Jean! Get back here!”

  The dogs hear only high-pitched frenzy and interpret their mistresses’ commands to mean Death to the invaders! Yes! By my insane and pointless shrieking you know that I am as alarmed and outraged as you are! Kill the terrifying two-headed, four-legged, red-tailed invader! Kill! Kill! And kill again!

  I put on a massive burst of speed and leave the ravening pack in a spatter of their own doggy doo. The instant we are out of reach of the pit bull’s orca array of teeth, Millie loosens her death grip on the side handles, snakes one hand up, clamps on the brakes, and brings us to a shrieking stop. She jumps up, trembling with something that I pray is not fury. My prayers go unanswered.

  “You are crazy. You are a lunatic. You have been lying to me. Lying about everything. I didn’t want to believe all that stuff Juniper has been saying about you—”

  “Juniper! I can answer every charge. Juniper is clearly—”

  “Shut up.”

  I do simply from the novelty of hearing such an order hurled from Millie’s soft, pink lips.

  “I didn’t want to believe that you have really changed so much. That you really are a bad person—”

  “‘Bad person’? What about casting the first stone?”

  “Shut. Up. If you say one more word, I’m leaving you here.”

  I glance around. “Here” turns out to be the end of the trail in so many ways. The rocky path comes to an abrupt halt at the foot of a rubble-strewn incline. A wisp of smoke draws my eye up to the wooded area above. Through a screen of brush and scrubby trees, I make out the orange patches of a nylon tent, the silver flash of a shopping cart, the slink of a dog tethered to a rope settling itself onto bare ground. Only gradually do several figures camouflaged by whiskers and dirt emerge. I can barely make out the hill phantoms as they shift around, poking at the thin fire, eating from a can, sleeping beneath a compost heap of old blankets.

  “Here” is a hobo camp and I am one crucial conversation away from being abandoned to its tender mercies. I shut my mouth.

  “I didn’t want to believe what Juniper has been saying. That you cheated her and Sergio, Olga, and Doug out of their wages. That you are a drug abuser. That you left half a dozen women unconscious at your last party. That you put Crisco in the pâté.”

  “This all sounds so much worse than it actually—”

  Millie silences me with one finger pointed up to an avenging God. “Blythe Young, you are not the person I once knew.”

  Well, duh.

  “What happened? What happened to the person I used to know?”

  As the bums above press their lips to forties of Colt 45, I fish for an answer but only come up with “Life.”

  “Life happens to all of us if we’re lucky enough. It’s what you do with it that counts. The choices you make.”

  “Yeah, but for some of us the choice of having housemates, of sharing a bathroom, of eating Boca Burgers”—the full range of Seneca House horrors presents itself—“in our midthirties is just not a viable option.”

  “There are worse things. Like lying, cheating, drugging—”

  “Unless you have been dragged through the mud in a divorce court, you will never know what things a person has to do just to survive.” Not that I ever made it to divorce court. Peggy’s cursed prenup foreclosed even that option, but this is not the time for such technicalities.

  “When does a person ever ‘have’ to drug people?”

  “Could I just say, Millie, that however you’ve managed to maintain all your ethical proprieties, however you’ve been able to remain a moral colossus in a world where most of the breaks are handed out at birth, whatever accommodations you’ve made, they simply are not in my repertoire.”

  “I am no ‘moral colossus.’”

  “Maybe not. Maybe you just had normal, caring parents who sheltered you and provided for you instead of an MIA mother who threw you to the wolves.”

  “I guess you think that makes you a victim of circumstance.”

  “And you think I’m not?”

  “I believe that God always gives us a way to act on our free will.”

  “Free will? That’s an expensive illusion. Jesus, Millie, wake up and smell the dividend tax cuts. The game is so rigged in favor of the rich that any ‘cheating’ the rest of us do doesn’t come close to evening up the odds.”

  Millie shakes her head in a sad, love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin sort of way that creeps me out.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. You’re so different now. It would help to know why.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “To see if you’re redeemable.”

  “Redeemable? That is unbelievably insulting. You should be worried about redeeming Tree-Tree Dix and his whole family. Or those rich bitches in Pemberton Heights who stop payment on checks I need to live on. Or…what are you doing?”

  Millie is turning the bike around.

  The smell of unwashed bodies, Sterno, and despair wafts down. No matter how Tough Love she pretends to be, I am certain Millie will never abandon me. Certain. Millie thrusts her foot down on the pedal and starts the contraption rolling.

  Millie is leaving.

  Leaving me here on Dog Crap Lane. It is a such a nightmare moment, so much the worst thing I can imagine, that I can’t make myself believe it is happening. Suddenly all the hoboes lurking in the hill above coalesce into an army of depraved lechers ready to pounce upon me. They stare down with hungry eyes. I try to move, to run after Millie, but, just as in a horrible dream, I remain frozen.

  One of the bums calls down in a malt-liquor-slurred voice, “Hey! Miss Millie! Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be back later, Curtis!” Millie
yells back at the bum. “Alone!”

  I unfreeze and run after the bike disappearing from view. Fortunately, the trail is a rutted mess. I catch Millie easily and make her stop. “You weren’t going to leave me there? Were you?”

  The preferred answer would have been a mischievous laugh at this naughty prank. Instead, Millie pierces me with a damning glance and I settle for hopping back onto the front seat. Before she can protest, the hellhounds of Dog Crap Lane set upon us, and our attention turns to protecting major arteries and favorite limbs.

  At the intersection of Lamar and Twenty-fourth, we wait for the light to change. I almost ask Millie outright if I can stay a few more days. In the end I decide not to risk it. I’ll just have to leech on to her for as long as she will tolerate it. The rule at Seneca House is that guests can stay as long as a resident wants them to stay. The light changes and we huff up the long, steep hill at Twenty-fourth.

  It is a lot harder going back up than it was coming down. And a whole lot less fun.

  Gravity Lost Its Hold

  OVER THE NEXT ten days, I slump into a lethargy of a profundity known only to French existential philosophers and tweakers after the meth lab has been busted. I haunt the house like a ghost wanting to converse with the other residents just slightly less than they want to converse with me. Most of our interactions consist of them yelling at me through the bathroom door, since the single solitary place where my body doesn’t feel as if it were made of garden mulch and wire twisties is fully submerged in the big claw-footed tub in the downstairs bathroom.

  Which is where I am when I recall how my problems with Peggy Biggs-Dix all started. After Trey and I met at the wedding, we kept bumping into each other at different events I’d been hired to photograph. These meetings invariably ended up with us making out in various cloakrooms, boathouses, and one particularly memorable rendezvous in a billiards room that left me festooned with a necklace of hickeys and an invitation. “Slim,” Trey broke suction long enough to ask. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. Wanna come to the cabin next week?”

  “The cabin” turned out to be a beach estate situated on the only privately held parcel of land on Padre Island National Seashore. Trey flew us down in his private plane. The whole mob was there, all “the bros,” wives, girlfriends, offspring, an assortment of attractive cousins, their attractive dates, and a drooling pack of golden retrievers forever dropping slobbery tennis balls on my foot. It was a hectic and energetic crew, with most of the tumult rotating around Peggy. I was worried about what she would think of her son dating someone who’d worked for her. But Trey introduced us knowing exactly what his mother’s reaction would be: She had absolutely no recollection of having ever set eyes on me.

  Trey had trailed dozens of girlfriends through the premises, and Peggy didn’t waste valuable reconnaissance time profiling them unless they were “serious.” Since I didn’t appear to be “serious,” she favored me with a smile and a warning, “Don’t mind us. We’re crazy. If the gossip columnists could see us now. Just regular people.”

  This illusion of regularness was sustained among the Dix clan through sacramental wearings of old T-shirts and ancient deck shoes patched with duct tape. Apparently, donning a tattered jersey left over from prep school canceled out ownership of private planes and beachfront estates.

  Out of this whole cast and crew, I was the only one who found it odd that all the males slept apart from wives and girlfriends in “the bunkhouse.” It was explained to me that when they came to “the cabin” the Dix men liked to fart and pee wherever and whenever the urge hit, and that just wouldn’t be possible in “mixed company.” Somehow this was accepted as a medical need up there with insulin shots.

  So, I was quarantined in a harem with the all other non-Y-chromosome cases except for Peggy, who slept in the bunkhouse. That night I learned that Tree-Tree, as his family called him, had received an ultimatum from his mother: The family needs a lobbyist. A lobbyist needs a wife. Settle down and get married or else.

  The “or else” was being unplugged from the family’s financial life-support system.

  “And the Chancellor will do it, too,” Kayla, the new wife of the youngest brother, assured me. “Whatever the Chancellor wants, the Chancellor gets. They’re all scared dickless of her.”

  “Is she called the Chancellor after Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor?” I asked.

  The other “girls” in the dorm blinked until one of them answered that no one in the Dix family ironed. This was not what you’d call a bookish crowd.

  “You do know,” Kayla confided, “that Tree-Tree told the Chancellor you crewed with me back at Brown.”

  “What? No. When did he tell her that?”

  “After dinner. She saw the way he was looking at you and started asking questions.”

  “‘Way’? What way?”

  “The way that makes the Chancellor wonder about breed lines.”

  Breed lines? My heart leapt.

  “Just thought you should know,” the newest Dix told me. “Tree-Tree’s not great on giving the whole story.”

  Something else we have in common.

  Our tête-à-tête was interrupted by a panty raid. Dix brothers, male cousins, and friends poured in the windows. Apparently, a major side benefit of the sleeping arrangements was that they conjured up old frat boy memories. This had an invigorating effect on the otherwise unexceptional Dix libido, which tended to lose focus as soon as assignations in boathouses and billiards rooms ended. Tiptoeing past the Chancellor’s bedroom door and sneaking out of the house like teenagers seemed to be a big part of the aphrodisiac package.

  Trey was at the head of the mob. He swept me off with a piratical fervor, spiriting me away to a secluded patch of beach where we watched feathery clouds scud past a full Texas moon that poured a boulevard of silver across the rippling waves. Double T made up for a certain lack of finesse when, my head nestled on his chest, we studied the vast and starry sky, and he shared his dreams. The Chancellor wanted him to channel his gift for socializing into a career where his talents for schmoozing and boozing would do the Dix family the most good: lobbyist at the Texas state legislature.

  “But,” Tree-Tree said, accentuating his Texas drawl to comic effect so that the words which followed could be taken as a joke, “I need me a helpmate or the Chancellor won’t set me up. Lot of entertaining involved in lobbying. Didn’t you say you used to be a caterer?”

  I assured Trey that before the bubble burst I had been much more than a mere caterer. I was an event coordinator; I made dreams come true. He liked the sound of that.

  That night, back in the girls’ bunkhouse, I thought long and hard about how to impress Trey and, far more important, how to impress his mother. Since my success as an event planner had always hinged on tapping into the deepest, most secret aspirations of my clients, I devoted myself to parsing the Dixes.

  Early the next morning, certain that I’d broken the Dix family code, I suggested to Trey that we organize a lobster boil on the beach. This involved Dix brothers hopping into their private planes and scrambling to acquire crustaceans and other Hyannis Port–type edibles. The entire clan loved the affair. Eating lobster boiled on a beach took the brothers and Dix père back to their days at East Coast prep schools and affirmed their belief that they were now America’s golden family.

  After all the shells, cobs, and empty beer bottles had been tossed in the fire, Trey and I snuggled in front of the blaze. As his pyromaniacal brothers stoked the flames to bonfire levels, we basked in the glow of our success. The Chancellor confirmed it with these words to her oldest son: “Well, numb nuts, for once you didn’t screw up royally. This one”—she pointed a lobster claw at me, the “rowing friend from Brown”—“just might be a keeper.”

  Trey wrapped his arm around me possessively while his brothers yelped about PDAs, the public displays of affection frowned upon within the heterophobic family. As the brothers kidded Trey about being a “major horndog,” the Ch
ancellor’s gaze, like a queen recognizing service to her royal family, fixed on me.

  “You don’t look like you row,” she said in her preemptive foghorn voice.

  I tensed my spindly biceps and said, “Been a while since college.” My comment, while not an out-and-out lie, did nothing to bring the Chancellor any closer to the truth about my humble, Ivy-free identity.

  “Boom Booms!” Trey hollered, changing the subject back to the family’s favorite topic: drinking. The bros hustled to start concocting their preferred cocktail, shots of tequila and beer, slammed onto a bar, then chugged in one bubbly, burp-inducing gulp. A piece of driftwood served as the bar. I was crowned Boom Boom Queen for tossing back the most Boom Booms and belching the loudest.

  To complete the Kennebunkport-meets-Matamoros beach fantasy, all the brothers expressed their thanks for the lobster fest by throwing me onto a blanket and tossing me skyward. Trampolined up, I soared into the night sky and gravity lost its hold on me. I froze, weightless for one glorious millisecond at the top of the arc, suspended in midair. And took in the enchanted circle below.

  Their handsome faces, each smile a triumph of orthodontia, beamed up at me. In the golden glow of fire and friendship, their strong arms rose as they waited to receive me into the family. In that same instant, however, recognition registered on the Chancellor’s face. She remembered where she’d seen me before, and it wasn’t sculling to victory for the old red and brown. She raised her hands as if she were holding a camera and pretended to press the shutter.

  The Iron Chancellor had me frozen in her sights.

  Click.

  Gravity reclaimed its hold, and the long descent that finally ended at Kippie Lee Teeter’s garden party began.

  A Simple Majority Vote

  ARE YOU PLANNING to come out of there anytime this century?” Juniper punctuates her testy question by hammering madly on the bathroom door.