Fiction Friday

(Note from Opus: I’m running this excerpt because it’s one of my favorites, and because it’s almost Spring. A little background for those of you who haven’t read the manuscript: Frankie’s Hollywood life has collapsed, and now due to a mudslide, her house has collapsed too. Before the timbers even settle, she gets into the only possession she has left – a cherry-red Corvette convertible- and heads east to her family’s B&B in Woodstock for some R&R and TLC. But it dawns on her somewhere in Texas that she might not be welcome. Her sister Jude has moved into the B&B to take care of their ailing mother, and thinks she needs to be placed in a nursing home. Frankie has been ignoring Jude’s phone messages for weeks.)

------

When I finally pulled into the B&B’s gravel parking lot, there was no room at the inn. The lot overflowed with old Volvos and such with bumper stickers like “Free Tibet” and “My Other Car is a Broom.” I had to work the ‘Vette into a muddy patch of grass between an old maple tree and the Hoffman’s fence. I almost left, to hang out in town for a few hours until Jude’s aging hippie friends had skedaddled. But I was exhausted and road-ugly and didn’t want to explain to anyone who might still recognize me what I was doing here and how had I escaped from that mudslide?

So I snuck in. Not hard, I’d done it so many times as a teen. I knew how to open the door with nary a squeak, how to slip unnoticed up the two flights of stairs to my room.

But this was no longer my parent’s bed and breakfast. I didn’t remember the smell of incense from any of the nice Jewish families we boarded in the 70s. Or the sound of New Age music, like whales calving in a sea of oil. Then I spotted Jude. She was in my mother’s living room, sitting on the floor in a circle with a dozen or so other fiftyish women, wearing nothing but flower garlands and beatific smiles.

--------------------

There’s an unwritten law in Hollywood that if your flesh is less than perfect, you’re supposed to keep it to yourself. No thong bikinis, no plunge-to-Tijuana, and no sitting around my mother’s living room naked with a dozen of your closest friends gloriously doing the same.

After so many years of exposure to nothing but firm flesh or surgical approximations thereof, I wasn’t prepared to see so much of the natural aging process at work. Especially not at ten AM on a Saturday morning, after I’d driven two thousand miles and had several sleep-deprived nights without a single alcoholic beverage to alter my reality.

Besides the incense and whale tunes and naked women (some diving for cover at my entrance), it was still my mother’s living room. Lace doilies on the arms of pea green velour sofas. Fussy lamps and uncomfortable ladder-backed chairs festooned with the same hand-needlepointed pillows she’d had since our split-level in North Babylon.

Although it had all been pushed aside to accommodate Jude’s tribe of middle-aged wood nymphs.

My mother would have plotzed. Put some clothes on, for God’s sake, you’ll all catch your deaths!

Often morphing into Sylvia Goldberg under duress, I might have done the same, but several factors stopped me. One, I was an uninvited intruder upon this unusual bit of New Age self-expression and had no right to claim indignation; two, I was damned tired; and three, Jude beat me to the punch with a single withering look. A look burned upon my retinas as a toddler when I’d toddled into rooms I wasn’t welcome in and caught her in a variety of compromising positions. A look that clearly said, “tell anyone about this at your own peril.”

“I’m sorry for the interruption,” she told her minyan in a lilting tone while untangling herself from the floor. “This is a safe place. Focus on your breathing. Bathe in the life force.”

Meanwhile I hid in the kitchen, where I hoped Jude had some coffee. Although with her rapidly evolving political stances, what she had in the cupboards was anybody’s guess.

Jude burst in, tightening the belt of an unbleached cotton robe. Her large, soft body had grown even more Rubenesque since my last visit; had to be riding the scales at somewhere close to Einstein’s IQ. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to hug me or slap me. She settled on neither. Just stared, stared, stared, with those deep-set judging eyes.

“You look terrible.” She pushed back a cascade of salt-and-pepper curls. “Are you in trouble?”

I smiled sweetly. “No. Just thought I’d dress up like Martha Stewart and drop in for a visit.”

She gave me a look that knew better. Our visits were carefully orchestrated diplomatic events, often initiated by my nephew. The UN had an easier time getting people to the table.

I relented. “OK. A little trouble. But nothing major. I didn’t kill anyone. I just need a place to stay a while and regroup. And, you know. See Mom, of course.”

“Of course.” She nodded, brows still furrowed with suspicion. “All right. We’ll talk. But this is really not a good time.”

She leaned toward the living room. “Deep breaths. Feel the warmth of the sun penetrating your skin like Goddess Earth.”

I cocked my head at her. She nodded, waving a hand. “We’re welcoming the vernal equinox and the renewal of the earth. It’s a goddess ritual weekend.” As nonchalantly as Mom would have said, “just me and the neighbor ladies exchanging recipes.”

Although I doubted that Sylvia Goldberg ever had a coffee klatch with the local women in the nude, doing deep breathing exercises and letting the sun warm their tired old bones. But what did I know back then? I was in school six hours a day. All I saw was a proficient but slightly tired and menopausal Jewish mother at the stove, in her garden, behind the sewing machine. Pushing up her reading glasses and yelling at my father. But it was Woodstock in the 1970s. She could have been selling pot out the back door for pin money for all I knew.

“Basically it’s friends letting me practice on them.” Jude switched to a buddy-buddy tone. “After this, we’re hitting the sweat lodge. You’re welcome to join us. You look like you could use it.”

I didn’t care for sweating with strangers, especially not in the hut Ethan told me that Jude had set up in our tick-and pricker-infested woods. “I think I just need some sleep.”

“Take Sylvia’s room,” she said. “It’s the only one vacant.”

Vacant. “You already moved her.”

Jude blinked at me like I’d just teleported in from Mars with a brand new invention called the wheel. “Yes, Frankie. I already moved her. You apparently didn’t think it was important enough to get involved in choices we should have both been making about our mother’s health. If you had seen her, if you had any inkling of what Ethan and I have been going through, you would have known I had no other alternative.”

Vacant. I knew that. Jude told me. On the answering machine. I hadn’t called her back. I hadn’t wanted to know.

“We can talk about this later,” Jude said.

Vacant. My mother in a nursing home. It weighed upon me like a tribe of fat naked women. Smothered me.

“Honestly I didn’t know what to think when you stopped answering your messages. I’m relieved to see you, at least. I was worried that you’d dropped off the face of the earth.”

And then she returned to her charges, shedding her robe as she walked. Huge dimpled rump welcoming the return of spring.