Somebody Else's Music(14)

“You’ve got it backward,” Maris said. “She can take George Stephanopolous or leave him, it’s us who still get to her. And that gives us our chance. If things go on the way they’ve been going on, something will happen. You know it will. And it won’t be good for us.”

“Maybe it won’t be good for her, either.”

“Don’t bet on it. She’s got Jimmy Card to run interference for her. Christ, Belinda, aren’t you sick of it? All those stories in the magazines, making it seem like we were all a bunch of brain-dead hoodlums, torturing the poor genius throughout her whole blameless childhood. That last story in People damn near made me throw up. And now she’s here, and you know what? Within twenty-four hours, at least two reporters are going to be here, too—”

“I don’t understand all this about the reporters,” Belinda said querulously. “It’s not like she’s Julia Roberts. She’s not a movie star. She’s just on all those news shows and you know nobody pays any attention to the people on those news shows. Why do they pay attention to her?”

“Because they think she’s going to marry Jimmy Card,” Maris said patiently, “and because she’s got a hot-selling book and looks like she’s going to have another. Everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame. This is Betsy’s fifteen minutes. Does it matter why?”

“I never got fifteen minutes of fame,” Belinda said.

Maris considered the possibility that Belinda had never heard the phrase before, or even that she had never heard of Andy Warhol, and dismissed it. Belinda read Vogue the way fundamentalists read the Bible, and had, for forty years. The problem with Belinda was that she never remembered anything. Maris knew enough to realize she had only a small window of opportunity. If they started to doubt, it would all fall apart, and in the end nothing would happen but a dull month’s visit, with Betsy speaking at the library and the high school and going back to New York to write an essay for Dissent on the death of small-town America.

Maris looked up and out the window again, and all of a sudden, there she was: Betsy, coming out of English Drugs’ front door, holding Geoff ’s hand while Mark followed close behind, carrying an enormous brown bag. Belinda moved closer to the window to get a better look, and as she did, old Mrs. Cardovan stopped at the side of the Mercedes to talk. Maris couldn’t hear, but she could see what was going on. Betsy and Mrs. Cardovan were exchanging greetings and introductions. The boys were being made to prove that they had been well brought up, and knew how to shake hands and say the right things to older women. Mrs. Cardovan was very, very old. When they were all children, she had been the chief salesgirl at Noe’s Dry Goods, which is what Hollman had had for a basic clothing store until the big discount places opened up in the new shopping center out on Route 6. She was as tiny as a dwarf, and hunchbacked. All the girls had wondered how she’d ever been able to get somebody to marry her. Now her gnarled olive-skinned face was beaming under her Darth Vader helmet of white hair.

Betsy was shooing the small boy into the back of the car. Then she turned and shook Mrs. Cardovan’s hand, and Mark shook it, too, as if they had all just met in some big crush of a cocktail party. Betsy got in behind the wheel. Mrs. Cardovan waved a little and started to walk again along the sidewalk. The Mercedes kicked into life and edged out onto the road. There were other Mercedes in Hollman these days—no place was as provincial as it had been in 1969—but this particular Mercedes looked bigger than the others, or shinier, or more intimidating.

“Well,” Belinda said when the Mercedes was out of view.

“Exactly,” Maris said. “You’ve got to see what I mean, right? We can’t just let it go.”

“Maybe,” Belinda said.

Maris drank down the last of what was in her coffee cup. It was nearly straight gin. She bit her bottom lip to keep herself from heaving. The muscles in her arms started to twitch. She could see the green glint of the car’s roof far up on Grandview Avenue, past the place where Noe’s had been, past reality. Belinda was staring in the same direction.

“Well,” Belinda said again, still sounding uncertain.

“We’ve got to do something,” Maris said, getting up to go back to Belinda’s kitchen counter. She put her cup down next to a ceramic spoon holder with “Home Sweet Home” painted on it in yet more ornate purple script, next to yet more ornate purple violets. She wanted to pick the silly thing up and smash it into shards.

“We’ve got to do something,” she said again, instead. “If we don’t do something, this whole situation is going to jump right up and bite us on the ass.”