Mercury in Retrograde (6 page)

“He treated your two-year marriage like he'd treat a two-week hookup,” Sally said months later. “What a sociopath.”

“What are you guys doing out here?” Lena said, dropping the knife onto a patio chair. “You scared the hell out of me! I was about to call the cops.”

“Don't talk to your mother that way,” her father, dressed in his usual navy suit and tie, said, trudging up the steps with her mother and striding past Lipstick into the kitchen. “We were just checking on our investment.”

“What?” Lipstick asked, coming in from the cold and locking the door behind her. “Your investment?”

“The apartment. It's ours, you know. We paid for it, and my name is on the deed, not yours.”

“Oh, right,” Lipstick sighed, rolling her eyes. Every couple of years her father got this way. Martin Lippencrass, the “King of Distressed Debt,” according to
Business Week,
was a self-made man, having “pulled myself up from my own bootstraps and got myself out of Brooklyn to the Upper East Side by my own wits.” What Martin always edited out of the so-called rags-to-riches
story was that while he did grow up in Brooklyn, it was in the upper-middle-class area of Brooklyn Heights, and when he went to Harvard, his parents had been able to pay for it.

“Lena, dear, we're worried about you,” her mother, an older, more sophisticated version of her daughter, said, stroking Lipstick's hair.

“Why?” Lipstick asked, brushing aside her mother's hand. She sat down on one of the stools around the kitchen island while her parents remained standing. “I'm fine. Great, actually. Except for some reason my credit cards won't work. We have to sort that out.”

“I'm glad you brought that up,” Martin said.

“Me too—Bergdorf won't hold those dresses forever.”

“What dresses?” Lana asked.

“Oh, Mommy, they are fabulous! There are two Chanels, one Allessandro Dell'Aqua and two Pradas. You'll love them!”

“Oh, that does sound nice—are they formal or casual?”

“Formal! Nan Thrice is out of intensive care and the May gala season is in hyperdrive.”

“I'd heard that—”

“Enough!” Martin said, slamming his fist on the kitchen counter. “We are not here to talk dresses that I am expected to pay for.”

Lipstick and Lana stopped talking and looked down at the floor like chastened children.

“Well, then, what are we here to discuss?” Lipstick asked. “And what are you doing snooping around my apartment while I'm not home? That's not cool.”

“It's actually our apartment, dear,” Lana said. “Although you insisted on getting an apartment down here—and without a doorman, I might add—we did pay for it.”

“I know,” Lipstick said, “you keep reminding me.”

“Lena, your cousin Max has decided to come home,” Mar
tin said. “And we've decided to let him stay at the apartment.”

Lipstick's twenty-four-year-old cousin Max—who'd been practically adopted by Lana since his mother, Lana's sister, died five years earlier due to complications that arose after an experimental cosmetic procedure involving fat transfers had gone awry—considered himself something of a modern-day Vasco da Gama with a touch of Mother Teresa. After four years at Brown, he decided to trek the Himalayas and spent a year in the Annapurna base camp “communing” with Sherpas and various monks. Max left Shangri-la after a physical altercation with some local Gurkhas for a two-year stint at the Peace Corps camp in Namibia, teaching locals English. “I already
have
money, Lena, thanks to the family,” he told Lipstick. “I need to use my life to do good and explore.”

It seemed he was finally ready to come home.

“Oh! That's great!” Lipstick said, clapping her hands. “Maxie's back! He can have the second bedroom.”

“Well, actually, no.” Martin said. “We've decided to give him the
entire
apartment. He's bringing some of the local African children he taught with him to study actual Americans—he calls it ‘complete culture consumption' or something like that—and they'll need the whole place. You'll have to vacate, I'm afraid.”

An hour later Penelope was back home but Neal hadn't returned her “urgent! SOS!” messages yet.

Omigod, omigod omigod, omigod,
thought Penelope as she climbed the three flights to her apartment in shock and opened the gray metal front door.

Penelope made a beeline for the freezer, where she took out a bag of frozen peas to put on the angry red throbbing lump that was growing like a horn out of her forehead and attached it to her head via a black elastic headband. She then flung herself fully clothed onto the bed facedown and moaned, “Isshhhhhtarrrrrr.”

The box-office bomb had, over the years, become a euphemism Penelope used to describe anything akin to hell. Penelope's mother, Susan Rosenzweig Mercury, had a lifelong crush on both Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty and, in 1987, had been thrilled when the planets finally aligned to put her two
dreamboats into the same big-screen comedy. While the critics had rightfully railed against the flick—which posed the affable odd couple as bickering lounge singers “hilariously getting caught up in a CIA drama on their way to the Ishtar Hilton”—Susan loved it with such fervor she'd insisted Penelope watch the dreaded flick with her at least once a month on their aging Betamax player for all of 1988. The movie left such an impression on Penelope that she'd since used the film's title as an adjective to describe the worst horrors imaginable. And now was very Ishtar.

Ishy ishy ISHTAR!
she thought.
You have no job. Not only did you not get the promotion, you got fired. Or did you quit? I think you quit first. It sounds better, either way.

But, oh no, you couldn't just stop there, could you? You lit the
Telegraph
on fire. And threw up on your boss. To top it all off, you'll probably die from pneumonia by morning, looking like the demon in
Hellboy.

Five minutes of self-pitying cow moans later, Penelope rolled over and blindly fished her phone out of the pink puffer coat's pocket and, as she usually did in times of unexpected distress, called her mother.

“Are you
nuts
?” Susan cried after Penelope blubbered out the details of her horrific day. “Rule number one—
one
!—and this is important: never,
ever
quit a job without having another one! How are you going to pay the rent?”

Penelope's mother loved rules almost as much as she loved the movie
Ishtar
. Rules made her life orderly. And there were a lot of them, a side effect of being a primary-school teacher who was inexplicably still married to someone with whom she had almost nothing in common, namely Penelope's born-again, slightly paranoid, right-wing father, Jim Mercury. She felt rules provided stability to a world she often found dangerous and disappointing. They were her safety blanket.

Susan Mercury also liked to number the rules to give them added authority. When Penelope was a child, there were the obvious rules: “Rule Number 4: no cursing at your mother—I don't care what you say to your sister or your father but do
not
curse at me or I will smack that ass,” “Rule Number 15: No TV until after dinner—
M*A*S*H
or
Taxi.
Not both—TV rots your mind!” and “Rule Number 32: All boogers go in the
trash can
!” (as opposed to “booger alley,” which Penelope and her older sister Nicole had created in the space between their twin beds in the shared room). Later came rules like “Rule Number 214: Never date a man who is mean to the waiters, because that's how he will eventually treat you,” “Rule Number 237: Never date a man with a van—only thieves and rapists drive vans!” and “Rule Number 112: Whoever makes dinner doesn't have to do the dishes—so start washing or you're grounded.”

Back on the phone, Penelope, still sniffling and in full-blown flu mode, said hopefully, “Well, baybe you could load be sub bunny?”

It was a futile question.

“Penelope, even if we did have the money, you know damn well I wouldn't give it to you. Rule Number 21: We'll never give you a cent, but there's always a plane ticket home so you will never be homeless. Would you like a plane ticket home?”

“Doh,” Penelope said, “I'd like sub bunny.”

“You know your father and I don't have any money,” Susan snapped, “especially since he joined that new church last month that insists on tithing—
tithing
!—as if, on your father's university salary and my teaching pay, we can afford to give ten percent to anything…Jim, stop that! Take that Jesus statue away, it's freaking me out!”

“Oh, ogay,” Penelope mumbled. “Thangs eddyway.”

“Now, you go back in there tomorrow and beg for that job back!” Susan ordered her.

Susan, unlike Penelope, had a fatalistic view of life and always chose the safer option when coming to a fork in the road. Even if the safer option was illogical or inane and made her miserable. Like her marriage.

Susan, a tiny Jewish woman from Queens, resembled Rhea Perlman from the '90s sitcom
Cheers.
Jim was a six-foot-three, Catholic-turned-Protestant blond redneck with a comb-over from Butler County, Kentucky. The two met on a blind date during both of their saner days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had been together ever since, despite Jim's being born again several times after the marriage and Susan's voting for Carter—twice. They had not really spoken
to
each other (as opposed to speaking
at
each other) since a fight in 1982, when, as Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes were warbling “(Love Lifts Us) Up Where We Belong” over the radio, Susan called Jim a Nazi for voting for “that damned actor” again (
“Love lifts us up where we belooong…”
) and Jim called Susan a “pink-blooded commie” for her Dukakis vote (
“Where the eeeeagles cry—on a mountain hiiiigh…”
). But neither believed in divorce and so they stuck together through the years in an uneasy partnership based on that one belief they still had in common.

And they wonder why I can't find a date. Ha! As if I'd had a normal relationship to learn from…

Penelope's father had started to yell in the background, “Jesus loves a working woman, Pax Christi, baby!” followed by her mother's, “Jim, shut up and get rid of that goddamn Falwell poster!” when Penelope decided it was time to end the conversation.

As her parents continued to bicker, Penelope said, “Well, ogay, I'b goig dow, byeeeee!” and hung up the phone, sighed, and blew her nose.

After padding into the tiny kitchen to down three Sudafed, a mug of TheraFlu, and two Tylenol PMs, she passed out cold
for twenty-four hours with the bag of defrosting peas strapped to her head and her pink puffer coat still on and the small green Pakistani flag Ahmad had given her earlier that day for good luck poking out of the pocket.

It wasn't going much better for Lipstick. Her parents had threatened to cut her off before, but this time was…different. Like they were serious. Martin was insisting she move out and work at his company. And he wasn't budging an inch.

“But that's not fair! It's
my
apartment!” Lipstick cried in desperation.

“Our apartment, actually, dear,” Lana said.

“Whatever! That's ridiculous!”

“What's ridiculous is that at the ripe old age of twenty-seven you're wasting your life,” Martin said. “Last month I got a credit card bill from you for fifty thousand dollars, which seems to be the norm these days. I indulged you and your mother during that damned debutante phase—but, young lady, I didn't pay full-price for Princeton for nothing! You studied art history yet you work at that…that
fashion
magazine?”

“I like it,” Lipstick said, picking at her split ends.

“You may
like
it. But how is it making you a fully fledged member of society? It pays you a meager annual salary—which you spend in a month. It would be different if it were
Forbes,
or the
Wall Street Journal.
We humored you while you dated the Newton boy. Granted, his family has no money, well not like
our
money, but they have a name and a family crest dating back to Napoleon. Since then, well, you seem to have lost direction. I had higher hopes for you.”

“Mom! Can you help me out here?” Lipstick cried.

Lana looked away. “I'm sorry Lena, I have to agree with your father on this one. Did you know Jonathan Framberg is now a partner in his father's law firm? Wasn't he in your class?”

“Lena,” Martin continued, “we are giving you two months to clear out and come home. I want you under my eye. You can come work at my company in the real world. I'll show you the ropes—it'll be just like old times. You'll love it! And you'll be making your own money.”

“But I don't want to!” Lipstick said, starting to cry.

“Well, you either come home and work with me—and I will turn your credit cards back on—or you're on your own. See if you can live on forty thousand dollars a year instead of forty thousand dollars a month.”

Lipstick, wiping her eyes on her sleeve—ruining her blouse, she was sure—was quiet for a minute.

“Well?” Martin asked, walking over to the hall closet and handing Lana her coat and purse before putting on his cashmere overcoat.

“Oh, honey, this is so exciting!” Lana said, clapping her hands. “We'll have so much fun! The house has been so empty since you left.”

“I'll call the movers tomorrow,” Martin said, putting an arm around his wife and leading her toward the door.

“No, wait,” Lipstick said, sniffling.

“What?” Martin asked, turning around.

“
I'll
call the movers.”

“Taking responsibility for your own actions already—see, Lana, I told you she just needed to be shaken up a bit!” Martin nodded with approval toward his wife.

“No,” Lipstick said, raising her head and shaking with fury. “I'll call the movers and move to my own place. I'm not coming home, and I'm certainly not working for you!”