Geoff Ryman - Was

When was the last time I was able to do that? Ethel thought. She sat for a few moments with her eyes closed, just listening to herself breathe. Actually, she thought, this is rather nice. A whole hour just to myself. She took a deep, soothing breath and opened her eyes. I might even get used to this when I retire. I deserve it. But knowing me, I probably won't stop till I drop, just like Mother.

I can do my makeup, she remembered. Do it properly for a change, like in the old days. The visor was already down as a defense against the low California dawn. Her soft, sagging face stared back at her from the mirror. Her face was flushed. She looked, she thought, surprisingly healthy. Nothing like an early morning crisis to get the blood moving. The light showed the damage the years had done around the eyes, and neck and mouth. I have to smile all the time, she thought, smile just to stop looking like I'm frowning.

Still, can't show up for work looking like this.

I still have my old kit in the glove compartment, she remembered. It's like in the old days, before going on stage. You start with the base.

With a professional's jaundiced eye, Ethel began to pat on the foundation. All those years I did this for the stage, she thought. Who would guess I was ever on the stage now? All that time I spent, year in year out, up and down in that car, going into offices, negotiating contracts, doing all those things a man should have done. All of that.

Don't get bitter, she told herself. She managed the different parts of her personality as if they were a family or a team of performers. You can't repent what was done for love. And if your daughter doesn't feel she owes you anything for all your love and care, so be it. Your conscience is clear.

Your pocketbook, too, came another voice. You'll be in harness all your life.

The reply came: So who said life was going to be any different? Life was a harness. We knew you had to get on with it, do things; that was the way we were brought up. In those days. We'd rather die than take charity.

And I can see her point of view, Ethel told herself. She was the one who did all the work, after all. It was her singing, her voice that earned the money. Why should she support her old ma? Parents are there to support the kids, not the other way around. If she is prepared to see her old ma living in a Santa Monica bungalow on sixty dollars a week, what can I say? I can't prove to her that love and respect might indicate what the law cannot enforce. Maybe she has no love and respect.

Her hands stopped applying makeup. They sank to her lap. Face it, Ethel. Your daughter hates you. Everything's gone wrong for her, and she needs someone to blame. So old Ethel has to carry the can again. I have been carrying that can all my life. It might be nice if somebody else did, for a change.

And it was a mistake to go and sue my own daughter. It was undignified. It was a public squabble. I was the loser, in every way. People know about stage mothers, or think they do. What they don't know, they can make up for themselves. Suing my own daughter for support.

Ethel shook her head at herself. What would my mother have said? she thought. Well, Mother, Ethel thought, remembering her mother's face, I'm afraid we live in a colder world. Life was hard in your day, but other people made up for it. These days, it's just the reverse; we have our cars and our Frigidaires, but we don't have each other.

Ethel sighed and looked back into the mirror. Now. A bit of color on the cheeks. Her hands rattled through the assortment of compacts and lipsticks and old dried tubes of greasepaint. Her mind was not attending. The containers turned over and over in a jumble.

Suing was so messy. And vengeful too. All right, I was angry. I was appalled and angry and I really did need some help and I couldn't believe after all I'd done for her that she would treat me this way. Just cast me off, like I was a piece of stale meat. A dog or a cat would have had better treatment from her.

Another part of Ethel intervened, broke off the thought.

She isn't the same girl, Ethel told herself, she isn't my little girl anymore. My little girl is dead. Instead, there is some fat, shambling woman who can't control her hands. Someone who is, for want of a better word, a junkie.

People warned me. They told me Hollywood kills. They didn't say how, and I didn't see how it could reach right into someone and destroy her, how it could take everything and leave a desert.

She became a horrible person. My little baby, my sweet little Frances. She grew up so selfish, so mean. On another planet. My lawyer shows up to serve a writ and she bounces up to him and says, "Come and hear me sing." Takes him by the hand! Like he was a family friend. Like we were all still a family. She just did not understand what she had done. Those lies she told about me, those viperish lies. I read about myself in the paper, she tells reporters how awful I was. When all I ever did was try to help her, try to protect her, to get her away from what I knew was coming. It would be Grand Rapids all over again, only with my little girls old enough to understand.

Ethel Gilmore thought of Frank Gumm. She thought of the sweep of her life.

She no longer hated him. She thought of him infrequently now that she had remarried and divorced again. When she thought of him at all, it was with a kind of understanding. It must have been awful for him, too. I suppose he wanted to become normal, poor man, and couldn't. And I have to suppose that he loved me a little bit. I guess he loved playing piano with me. Like he loved playing a husband and father.

She dimly saw the little theater in which they had met. A memory of hands on keys. A memory of him leading the audience in song. "Follow the Bouncing Ball." Gosh, that was a long time ago. With me young and pretty with long hair wrapped around my head and thinking the world was foursquare and simple. I thought you fell in love like walking into some kind of mist, and something happened in the mist that you couldn't quite see or feel. I'd hardly even heard of what Frank Gumm was.

Pretty little lady with the pretty little hands, that's what Frank Gumm would call me when we were on stage together. I'd stand up and give a little smile; he'd take my hand; we'd bow. What a con artist. Both of us.

And everyone knew. Everyone in Grand Rapids, then everyone in Lancaster. I had to walk down the street and feel people's eyes on my face. What a world he pushed me into.

The pretty little lady cut her hair and became modern. The things I found myself doing because of Frank Gumm. I nearly didn't have Frances. I can remember driving to see Marcus, Marcus our friend, our doctor. It was like being in a dream, my husband driving the car beside me, looking like such a man, being so gallant and soft-spoken. I couldn't put it together. It didn't make sense. A husband and wife driving off like dirty strangers to kill their child, as if they were two kids who had been caught

Sitting in Marcus's office. Trying to find a way to tell him, a way to begin to ask him. We both sat grinning and coughing. We didn't even know what to call it. An abortion.

Frank kept smiling. His whole life was a smiling lie. I was the one who had to say it in the end, I was the one who always had to do everything.

"What my husband means, Marcus, is that I am with child and we don't want it and we were wondering if there was some way in which we don't have to have it."

Marcus paused and looked back and forth between our faces. Frank's fat, sweaty face all queasy and cheesy and I hated him then. It was all starting to come out in his face. He was becoming a weaselly little man.

Poor Marcus, what was he to say? "Um. There are some ways, yes, but none of them anything I'd like to associate with you two. Do you mind telling me the reason?"