Laura Lippman - Life Sentences

Later, at a brunch in her mother’s house, Cassandra ventured to her father, ‘Nonnie said I didn’t know the truth of the things I wrote, that I got them wrong.’ They were alone, by the buffet table, and she was struck by the novelty of having him to herself.

‘Nonnie was the queen of the mind-fuckers,’ her father said, spearing cold cuts. ‘Do you know why she was so angry at your uncle Leon?’

‘No, she would never tell me.’

‘That’s because she couldn’t remember. He did something thirty years ago that pissed her off, but she would never tell him what it was. Then she forgot. She forgot the precipitating incident, but she never forgot the grudge. Your uncle Leon was desperate to apologize, but he never knew what he did. Your mother used to go visit her and try to guess what Leon did, so he might make amends, and your grandmother would say, “No, that’s not it,” like some Alzheimer’s-addled Sphinx or a Hungarian Rumpelstiltskin, forcing the princess to guess his name when he didn’t know it himself.’

Could it really be? Cassandra decided she believed him, although her father had never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

‘Those are your mother’s people, Cassandra,’ her father said. ‘Thank God you take after me.’

Now, more than a decade later, her mother was saying, ‘Thank God you take after me, Cassandra. In your resilience. You’ll come back from this, I’m sure of it.’

‘From what?’

‘Well—I just mean that I think you’re right, this next book could be something special.’

Her mother did not mean to suggest Cassandra was a failure. Lennie simply couldn’t escape the context of her own life, which she saw as a series of mistakes and disappointments. Yet she had actually enjoyed a brief burst of local celebrity when Cassandra was in high school, appearing on a chat show as ‘Lennie the handywoman’, demonstrating basic repairs. That was when she had started to wear overalls and painter’s caps, much to her teenage daughter’s chagrin.

A more ambitious woman might have parlayed this weekly segment into an empire; after all, the cohost of People Are Talking was a bubbly young woman named Oprah Winfrey. Years later, when Cassandra took her place on Oprah’s sofa, she had asked during the commercial break if Oprah remembered the woman who had provided those home repair tips, the one with the short sandy hair. Oprah said she did, and Cassandra wanted to believe this was true. Her mother had always been easily overlooked, which was one reason she had been enthralled with vivid, attention-grabbing Cedric Fallows.

Cassandra had always thought her mother’s transformation would be the focus of the second memoir. But sex had taken over the second book—her first two marriages, the affairs in and around them, a bad habit she had renounced on the page, if not quite in life. Her mother’s cheerful solitude had seemed out of place. In fact, it had been embarrassing, having her mother in proximity to all that sex. But her mother’s story, alone, was not enough to anchor a book. It was too straightforward, too predictable. ‘It’s a little thin,’ her first editor had said. ‘And awfully sad.’ The second part had surprised Cassandra, who thought she had written about her mother with affection and pride.

‘Does it bother you,’ Cassandra asked Lennie now, ‘that I never wrote about your life in the same way I wrote about Daddy’s?’

‘Oh no,’ her mother said. ‘It’s the nicest thing you ever did for me.’ Recovering quickly, she said, ‘Not that it’s bad, what you do. It’s just not my style, to be all exposed like that. That’s your father. And you.’

‘You just said that I take after you.’

Lennie was at the sink, her back to Cassandra as she rinsed dishes. Lennie had a top-of-the-line Bosch now, but she hewed to the belief that dishes had to be washed before they could go in the dishwasher. ‘You take after me in some ways, but you take after him in other ways. You’re strong, like me. You bounce back. But you’re…out there, letting the world know everything about you. That’s your father’s way.’

Cassandra carried her empty mug over to the sink and tried to quiet the suspicion that her own mother had, in her polite way, just called her a slut and an exhibitionist.

Stove hot.

Baby bad.

Stove hot.

Baby bad.

Stove bad.

Baby hot.

Stove bad.

Baby cold.

Stovebabyhotcold. Stovebabyhotcold. Stovebabyhotcold. Cold stove. Cold baby. Hot stove. Hot baby. Bad stove. Bad baby. Babystove, babystove, babystove.

She awoke, drenched in sweat. Supposedly part of the change, but she didn’t think that was the whole explanation in her case. After all, she had been having this dream for more than a decade now. Although it wasn’t exactly a dream, because there was nothing to see, only words tumbling over each other, rattling like spare change in a dryer.

But even if the nondream dream caused tonight’s bout of sweating, she knew menopause was coming for her. Up until a year ago, she had really believed there would be time to have one more child, to grab the ring that had been denied her repeatedly. First with Rennay, then Donntay. She wanted so little. Sometimes, she thought that was the problem. She had wanted too little. The less you asked for, the less you got. The girls who had the confidence to demand the moon got the moon and a couple of stars. They never cut their price. A man bought what they were selling or moved on. As soon as you began to bargain, the moment you revealed you were ready to take less than what you wanted—no, not wanted, but needed, required—they took everything from you.

The flush had passed, but she couldn’t go back to sleep. She changed into a dry nightgown, put on her robe, and went out to the glassed-in porch, which overlooked her neat backyard, her neighbors’ yards beyond it. It was a house-proud street, not rich, but well tended. Pretty little house, pretty little town, pretty little life. Bridgeville, Delaware.

She would rather be in jail.

She was in jail, actually, only this time, there was nothing to sustain her, no hopes or dreams or promises. No, not jail. Hell. She was in hell. Which was not, as it turned out, a place of fire and brimstone, of physical discomfort and torture. Hell was a pretty little house in a pretty little town, with plenty of food in the refrigerator and enough money in the bank. Not a lot, but enough, more than she had ever known. Her mind free from workaday worries, she had all the time in the world to dwell on what had gone wrong and could never be made right. What if she—? What if he—? What if they—? Bridgeville, Hell -aware. Most people would think it was a better fate than she deserved.

They would be right.

I was five when my father decided that I should start studying Latin and Greek. No one found this odd. He was, after all, a professor of the classics. He had named me for Cassandra, the ignored prophetess. This was after my mother refused to consider Antigone, Aphrodite, Andromeda, Atalanta, Artemis, any of the nine Muses, or—his personal favorite—Athena. After all, Athena sprang, fully formed, from her father’s head, while her mother, Metis, remained imprisoned inside. My father admired this arrangement.

My mother would have preferred to call me Diana, as Artemis is known in Roman mythology. But my father hated the Roman names and often railed at their primacy in our culture. When I had to learn the names of the planets, I couldn’t rely on mnemonic devices— My very elegant mother just served us nine pickles —because I had to transpose them in my head: Hermes, Aphrodite, Earth (‘Gaia!’ my father would correct with a bark), Ares, Zeus, Cronus, Uranus (‘The one Greek in a batch of Romans, that sly dog, and incestuous to boot,’ my father liked to say), Poseidon, Hades.