Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“Now, Perry, you look after your cousin Barbie.” That irritating command had echoed through the first ten years of his life, and the next ten were worse. As soon as he was in junior high Aunt Myra began demanding that Jacko partner Barbie at dancing school and take her to movies and the prom. Later he was pressured to invite his cousin to college basketball and football games and introduce her to eligible men from his fraternity.

“It’s not really much to ask, darling,” his mother (weakly parroting Aunt Myra) would say. “It’s not as if you had a steady girlfriend.”

Though Jacko liked or at least tolerated most people, this long forced association had turned him against Barbie Mumpson, especially after he began to suspect, in his last year of college, that Aunt Myra was scheming to marry them off. The idea terrified him, not least because he knew from experience that Aunt Myra usually got what she set her mind on. The dread of her somehow succeeding was one of the things that had driven him to leave Tulsa and move to Key West.

“So where are you staying?” Jacko asked Barbie as they waited by the baggage inlet.

“Gee, Perry, I d’know. Mom figured you could put both of us up in this house Aunt Dorrie says you’ve like inherited. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m sorry too,” Jacko lied. “I’m living in the gardener’s cottage, same as always. Alvin’s house is rented until April.”

“Aw, I didn’t know—” Barbie’s voice trailed off, or was drowned in the sound of baggage being thrown into the luggage trough. “Maybe I can find a room somewhere. I don’t need anything fancy; I can sleep on somebody’s sofa—”

You’re not going to sleep on my sofa, Jacko swore to himself as he carried his mother’s two small bags toward his truck, leaving Barbie to drag her big one across the parking lot. I’ve got to have some privacy, for Christ’s sake. Jacko’s cottage contained only one large room, with an open sleeping loft above the far end and a kitchenette and bath below. Though he never shared it with anyone for long, he had occasional overnight or weekend guests.

Okay, Jacko told himself. You’ll have to find someplace for Barbie to stay. Maybe Lee has a vacancy. His spirits sank as he contemplated the unlikelihood of this at the height of the season; the unlikelihood of finding a reasonable rental anywhere in Key West at eight-thirty on a weekend night. And if he couldn’t find any place, tomorrow he’d have to buy a bed and move it into the other dressing room of the pool house.

Could it be that after all this time Aunt Myra was still scheming to throw him and Barbie together? She had known for fifteen years that he was gay, but Myra Mumpson often refused to recognize facts that did not fit into her system. No, he remembered with a sigh of relief, Barbie was married now; she’d been married for at least two years to some politician. His mother sometimes sent him clippings from the Tulsa newspaper showing Barbie and her husband campaigning or at official functions.

But if not that, what? Aunt Myra hadn’t sent Barbie here just to look after his mother, for sure. Mumsie wasn’t as hideously efficient as her sister, but she was certainly capable of flying to Florida on her own. So what the hell was his cousin doing in Key West?

Late the following morning Barbie Mumpson wandered out of the guest room of Molly Hopkins’s Victorian gingerbread house in Key West, looking blurred and untidy, but better than she had the night before when Molly had taken her in. The weather had turned damp and drizzly, and the accompanying humidity had already given Barbie’s blonde curls more bounce; her face, scrubbed of its chalky foundation, was agreeably freckled. Instead of the hideous beige polyester suit and spectator pumps in which she had arrived, she wore a plain pink gingham dress and sandals. Why, she’s really quite pretty, Molly thought.

“Oh, hello. I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I guess I overslept.”

“That’s quite all right.” Molly suppressed a sigh that was almost a yawn. She was tired and painfully stiff this morning—the result, no doubt, of having stayed up past her usual bedtime to wait for Jacko and Barbie. At her age, loss of sleep told on one. “Would you like breakfast?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, if it’s no trouble.”

“It won’t be any trouble,” Molly said. “You can make it yourself. I’ll show you where things are.”

“I’m sorry.” Barbie trailed after her into the kitchen. “All I need really is a cup of coffee. And maybe some cornflakes or something?”

“There are no cornflakes,” said Molly, who detested dry cereals of all types. “But there’s coffee already made, and bread for toast in the fridge, here.”

“Oh, thank you. I’m sorry, I’m so stupid. I meant to get up earlier, honestly.”

“Why?” Molly asked, wishing her guest would stop apologizing. “You’re here on vacation, aren’t you?”

“Yeah—No—” Barbie took a loaf of raisin bread and a butter dish out of the refrigerator. “Well, I guess I am, sorta. But really I’m supposed to be thinking things over.”

“Ah.” Molly recalled what Jacko had said over the phone last night: “Hey, it’s really great that you can put her up. But listen, I should warn you: Cousin Barbie can be a real drag. My whole life, till I got out of Tulsa, she was following me around whining. Everything always goes wrong for her, and if you give her the slightest encouragement she’ll tell you all about it.”

“It’s, well, my marriage,” Barbie continued without further prompting.

“Ah.” In spite, or perhaps because of Jacko’s warning, Molly felt a flicker of interest. “Would you like some juice?”

“Oh yeah. Thank you.” Barbie poured, spilling a little, and drank, leaving an orange rim around her soft, rather large mouth.

“Here.” Molly held out a paper napkin.

“Oh, thanks. I’m sorry. I’m not usually this helpless, really. It’s just that I’m kinda in a state about Bob and everything. I mean, like Mom says, it’s a serious responsibility.”

“Marriage can be difficult,” Molly remarked neutrally, though she had not found it so; rather, she and her husband had regarded it as a happy alliance against the world.

“Yeah—No—I mean, sure, I guess it is for everybody. But for me it’s a public responsibility too. I mean, my husband is Bob Hickock.” She paused, obviously waiting for recognition. “Wild Bob Hickock, they call him.”

Molly frowned. A country-rock star? A sports figure?

“Wild Bob Hickock the congressman,” Barbie explained. “He’s only in his first term in Washington, but he’s already making a big name for himself. I kinda thought everybody—”

“I don’t really follow politics these days,” Molly said, suppressing the additional phrase Thank God. Not having to read the Times seven days a week, with emphasis on the editorial and op-ed pages, was for her one of the very few (perhaps the only) positive results of Howard’s death.

“See, Bob’s going on to big things. That’s what Mom says, and she knows, ’cause her family has been in politics for like forever. Bob could go real far, she says. He’s a natural. When he gets in front of an audience, they just about love him to death.”

“Really.”

“Everybody. Businessmen, or Boy Scouts, or old folks in a nursing home, or whatever.” Barbie, who was still holding two pieces of raisin bread, looked round dimly.

“The toaster’s over there.”

“Oh, thanks.” She fumbled with the controls. “See, the thing about Bob is, he’s really good looking. Six-five, and he’s got this great deep voice. And real curly hair and these sexy eyebrows, sorta like two blond caterpillars. That sounds dumb. I mean, caterpillars aren’t sexy, but you know, on Bob they are, believe me.”