Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

At least they weren’t the kids of a matinee idol or screen siren, which would have been worse, according to Jessica: you’d have to watch your parents necking with all kinds of strangers and family friends. That was before Rocky cooked up a romance for me on the radio show: he decided that we’d invite on one of his fake sisters, Ida, who’d always been described as the beauty of the family. (My own Ida was vain, and I’d hoped she’d like this piece of flattery.) The Professor would develop a crush on her from afar: “Tell me, Rocky, is she single?” he’d ask.

“Is she ever!” Rocky would answer, and then, when she showed up (according to the script) she’d be so fat I’d say that calling her single was stretching the truth. Rocky wanted a fat actress, so that the moment she stepped onto the stage the folks in the studio would start laughing, which would set off the audience at home.

“You know someone?” Rocky asked me. “Someone who needs steady work? Could be a regular character. Here’s your chance to cast your own Heloise, Abelard.”

I didn’t.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Rocky, who usually left everything up to the writers and studio bosses. “Someone good,” he mused. “Someone funny and fat.”

Well, of course he was playing a trick on me. I’d show up, and there he’d be in drag — that would make perfect sense, of course. In a movie, who else would play Rocky’s sister but Rocky? Not much of a joke, sure, but he and I were busy married men these days, and we’d take our laughs when we could.

But when I arrived at the afternoon run-through, there was Rock in his street clothes, and, with her back turned to me, a terrifically fat blonde. She was shaped like a fir tree, fatter the farther down you looked. Her ankles seemed to almost cover her tiny black pumps; her hair was platinum, nearly translucent. She and Rocky were reading from the script already, and I could hear that her timing was good, that her voice could go from sultry seductive purr to angry foghorn blare in the same sentence. I felt even worse than usual that we’d given Rocky’s sisters my own sisters’ names.

I walked across the stage to introduce myself. Rocky said to the woman, “Don’t take it hard, Ida honey, you’re just too much woman for a guy like the Professor.”

“No, I’m not, I’m just enough .”

“Hello,” I said. The woman turned and looked at me. She was younger than I’d expected, and her face wasn’t as fat as the rest of her. I couldn’t decide whether this was lucky or a mean trick. “I’m Mike Sharp. Your love interest.”

She laughed, and set her hand on my arm. It reminded me of something. “Is that what you are?”

“So they tell me.”

The woman flexed her eyebrows at me. She had a thin nose that sprang from her face like a swan dive. Otherwise, she looked like a giant, bratty, lovable baby. “Mose,” she said. “Mose. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me.”

And at that I almost fainted like my on-screen self would have, to be reunited with someone he’d thought dead. It took some looking, but there she was: Miriam, Mimi, my giant bratty lovable lost child.

Still, I was the real Mike Sharp, not the celluloid one, and I had my wits about me: I kissed her cheek. I tried to get my arms around her, but I couldn’t. I felt like crying.

She said, “You probably didn’t recognize me because I got my nose fixed.”

“That must be it,” I said gallantly.

She burst out into her beautiful raucous laugh, and that was the moment I did fully, completely recognize her. “ Must be,” she said, “because I can’t imagine how else I’ve changed.”

I looked at Rocky, who was beaming, either evilly or paternally: I couldn’t tell. “She’s got the part,” I told him.

“Of course she does!” he said. “Let’s go out to lunch!”

“Sure,” said Mimi.

Her curls were a parody of her old blond wig; I could see how short hair would no longer have suited her. All I could think was, Is lunch a good idea? But I offered her an elbow and said to Rocky, “You’re not invited.”

“No?” Rocky thought he was invited to every meal in the world. “Oh, okay. Old times. I understand.”

“Good,” I said.

I took her to Musso’s, my favorite spot, to a table up front.

“So,” she said, as she struggled into the booth, “I don’t have to ask what you’ve been up to.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio.”

“Carter’s hijacked your sisters, has he?”

“For the time being. Listen, I’m a smart date. What have you been up to?”

She set her fingers on the table. The backs of her hands were dimpled like a baby’s. “Radio work. In New York, mostly. I moved here a few months ago. Carter recognized me on the street. How about that? Saw me play Boston twenty years and a hundred pounds ago, picks me out walking down Sunset, comes up with a role for me. I don’t usually play fat women, so this is a stretch. You’re married,” she said.

“Is that a question?”

“Of course not. Can’t I read the magazines? You’re married.”

“You?” I said, though I’d already noticed her ringless fingers.

“Not anymore. I was married to Savant for a while.”

“You mean a new Savant.”

“Same old Savant.”

“I thought he liked the saxophone player.”

“Did. Does. All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time. He was a good husband, but a lousy lay. According to me, I mean. The saxophone player might think he’s a great fuck.”

I’d forgotten how she could scandalize me, and how much I liked it. All though our conversation, I kept losing the thread of her, of my Miriam, until she did something in particular — laugh, bawl me out merrily, touch the bottom of her hair with her fingertips — and then I’d recognize her, and then I’d lose her again. It was like hearing slightly familiar music coming from another room and thinking, Oh , that’s what the song is. . hold on, no, it’s not . I couldn’t decide what made me sadder: all the weight or the butchered nose. The surgeon had just scooped out the center like a grapefruit.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “Look at me, and then look at you.”

“What?”

“You haven’t changed! We’re both eighteen years older, and you look exactly the same! And you’re older than me. You still’re older than me, aren’t you?”

“I’ve changed,” I said.

“You haven’t.”

And so, sitting in Musso’s, I dipped my fingers in my water glass and put them to my hairline and softened the glue, and took off my toupee. I dropped it over the bread basket. Surely I looked like hell, bits of glue still stuck to my scalp.

“Well,” I said, “I haven’t changed much,” but Miriam couldn’t hear me, she was laughing so hard. God knows I was ready to drop my pants to keep her laughing like that, to hear that wonderful mocking noise.

She applauded me, as though she was — well, what she really was: my first teacher, pleased that her student has finally extravagantly succeeded at his course of study. “Jesus, Mose,” she said. “Jesus Christ. Look at us!”

She was wonderful on the show that night, eerie though it was to stand next to her on a stage. We were cheek to cheek at the same mike, though this time she played voracious and I played prim. She seemed taller to me. Her current boyfriend, a nice-looking man with a hysterical infectious giggle, sat in the audience, good as gold; I don’t know when we got bigger laughs. Back during my old days on the road, I thought any girl I’d ever slept with was mine to sleep with forever, so long as I charmed her, and I could see that the statute of limitations might never have expired. If I wasn’t married. If I wasn’t a father. If she wasn’t so heavy. If I wasn’t very, very careful. She had the same charismatic crackle as always, the same perfect unlined skin, the same pink round cleft tongue that flashed when she spoke. When Ida embraced the Professor over the air, Miriam embraced me in front of the audience, and because of her size and a well-deployed script, nobody could see her proprietary upstage fingers and where, exactly, they tickled me. She wore the same sinful cologne she’d favored as a teen, and she’d grown into it.