"Odette," Hennie shrieked. "A man has just died. Hateful though he may have been." She bowed her head toward the kitchen table. "God bless his soul."
"We are talking about a man who walked out and never looked back less than two months after the honeymoon, and the honeymoon wasn’t all that, I can assure you. We’re talking about a man who was stabbed by his girlfriend. By one of his girlfriends. What would you say about a man like that?"
"I would say that maybe he was not the marrying kind."
"Red or white?" Odette asked, ignoring her sister’s comments.
"White I guess," Hennie answered. "White stains less."
Odette had planned to get a divorce, had intended to get a divorce, had even gone to Las Vegas to get a divorce from Perry, but saw Liza at the Sands instead. She did not like that word ‘divorce.’ It sounded cheap. It sounded like a badly dubbed French movie. It sounded like a woman with a poor dye job and a white halter dress walking a poodle down Fifth Avenue.
"Odette, do you believe in God?" Hennie asked.
"Of course I do. Sometimes."
"Sometimes has no place in a question about God. Either you do or you don't. Always."
Odette just stared at her sister.
Hennie lowered her voice to a whisper. "Well, do you believe in the power of prayer?"
"Hen, if you have gone and found Jesus I will kindly ask you to take Him out of my house but immediately."
"I've been praying for the last couple of months that something would happen to Perry. Something, just to get him gone. But I didn't mean this." She again dropped her voice to a whisper. "Certainly not this."
"I have been praying for the last six years that something would happen to Perry. Just to get him gone. And I certainly did mean this." The two sisters laughed. Odette poured more wine into both their glasses.
Hennie had a thought. "Odette, do you think we are wicked?"
"Define wicked."
"Do you think good girls would be celebrating the death of a man?"
"I never think in terms of good or bad girls. I never think in terms of girls."
Hennie had another thought. She opened her eyes wide. "What are you going to say to your parents? Oh how they adored that man."
Which is how they found themselves in Hennie's orange Honda with the hatchback that wouldn’t open, driving to California to visit their parents. Their parents had just recently moved to Los Angeles, after Odette’s father had retired, but Odette wasn’t from Los Angeles, certainly not; Odette had never even been to California before, she often had to remind people. "Just what do you think Los Angles is like?" Odette asked Hennie. Hennie had been their before. "Rats in the palm trees, fur coats over nightgowns, and William Holden floating face down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool."
Hennie drove and Odette managed the map. Odette loved tracing with her index finger the red and blue and green lines on the road map. She loved how I-97 merged effortlessly into Route 6 at Blackguard Bridge and then, if you took the wrong turn at Christendom, which they did, it petered out into something called Peach Cobbler Way where there was neither peaches nor someone to turn them into cobbler, nor even anyone to show them the way, only an abandoned Emerson's Tastee Freezz with a rusted sign swinging from one rusted nail.
Hennie kept her eyes on the road, and her fingers on the radio dial. Hennie flipped and turned the knob like a pro.
"Like a pro," Odette shrieked. It drove Odette slightly crazy but Hennie savored in finding country and western radio stations and singing along to songs about aching, breaking hearts, even if she didn't quite know all the words, and then segueing the radio station into a Beethoven sonata without taking a breath and then flipping to find a talk show and figure out what the topic was before they lost the transmission all together.
"California here I come," Hennie sang in her scratched, but not altogether tuneless, voice. She begged Odette to join in. "Right back where I started from." Her voice sounded like a cross between Dick Cavett and Natalie Wood.
Odette could sing, but she didn't like to. Odette sang like the angels. Odette had sung in the high school choir until junior year when Sister Mary Francis Medina caught her kissing Peter Wexler in the choir loft. Sister Mary Francis Medina was a skinny old nun and mean ("Although," Hennie asked Odette, "were there any other kind?"), and everyone called her Sister Skull. For forty-five minutes Sister Skull lectured Odette and Peter on the sins of kissing. It was enough to make a person stop singing forever. "I didn't know you dated Peter Wexler," Hennie said.
"Just drive Sister of mine, just drive."
--C.K. Kamosis
[End of Installment One] |
