Three Quarters Dead (10 page)

The whole school came. Hundreds. Cars backed up for blocks. SUVs parked in ditches. It didn’t matter that it was Saturday. Everybody came. Tanya’s dad and Joanne. Her aunt Lily in the big black hat. Natalie’s parents. My parents, together with me between them—me, stoned on some medication the doctor prescribed. Three pills. I needed more. The school chorus sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” How wrong they were.

They
weren’t there. Not their . . . bodies. It wasn’t a funeral. The funerals had been private or graveside or something. Makenzie had been cremated, and her parents had taken her ashes back to England. The Kemps weren’t at the memorial. Probably a community-wide memorial service was too public for them. Too American.

I never saw their bodies. Never. You don’t see dead bodies in Westchester County, except on TV. What made me so sure they were dead? Who did I think I was? I ought to get over myself. They’d always been above the law, those three. They’d made their own laws. Tanya had.

The school orchestra played “When You Walk Through a Storm, Hold Your Head Up High.”

And that was probably a sign. They’d probably just gone for a walk.

I OPENED MY eyes, and everything was clearer than before. The room was brighter, and the colors stronger, even on the fading walls. Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie popped out of the scene, realer than before. I saw what they must have been up to.

They’d spent the afternoon making themselves up with Aunt Lily’s cosmetics. I’d been in her bathroom at Christmastime, so I happened to know: She’d cornered the world market on paint, powder, moisturizer, liner, and blush. She had enough pore filler to grout this building. They were ready for their close-ups. They were on stage now, and this apartment was the perfect setting.

“Yes, that sounds fine,” Tanya was saying. She could sound exactly like a grown woman on the phone. She was as adult as she needed to be. “Dinner for four, and you can surprise us with the dessert. And Miss Garland would like it as soon as possible. Her party is going out later.”

Natalie drew in her cheeks at that, showing her killer cheekbones. Makenzie grinned. We were going out later? Really?

“And add the usual tips for yourselves and the deliveryman,” Tanya said, very brisk, snapping my phone shut, not handing it back to me.

Time narrowed and widened. Then in no time at all the doorman was buzzing up the word that the dinners were here.

“Kerry, go to the door and bring it all in. Deal with that.”

And of course I did.

THE DIAMOND-PANED windows of Aunt Lily’s long dining room looked out on the nighttime glitter city. The curtains were taffeta in faded pastels, swag over swag. Fringe. Tassels. Dust hung in the swing of the swags. The chandelier over the table was filmy with gossamer cobwebs. Nothing had changed in this place for years, decades. Time had stood still.

We dimmed the chandelier and dined by candlelight. We unfolded the damask dinner napkins and settled around the silvery table in this grown-up room for our grown-up dinner. The four of us, having another adventure, around the table again like on Halloween night. In business again in these pools of candle flame. They’d pulled up the drawbridge, and I was on their side of the moat.

Was I still being nagged by doubts? Not this minute. You didn’t have doubts for long around Tanya because she was always so certain. Tanya never let doubts in the door.

We took turns being the maid, bringing in the courses from Aunt Lily’s huge institutional kitchen. We all played maid except for Tanya, who sat at the head of the table in a high-backed chair with arms. What was she like, there on her throne? Like always—the Mistress of Whatever Was Happening. The Queen of Now.

Makenzie was the soup course, a cool soup with a floating island of cream. She brought it in on one of Aunt Lily’s dented silver trays. Natalie was the main course. Mahimahi, a fish flown in from someplace where A-list fish live—some turquoise sea. The fish was on a bed of something with whipped squash in a shape and a spray of asparagus Hollandaise.

It was truly adult food, and some of it went over my head. Besides, I kept snatching glances at the others, just to prove they were there, I suppose.

Makenzie was tucking in with knife in one hand and fork in the other, the English way. Natalie picked delicately through the sauces in case of clams. I’d forget to eat for watching them. I had this history of watching them, trying to be them. Tanya had to tell me to go to the kitchen for the desserts.

A swinging door led to a long butler’s pantry lined with endless glass-fronted cupboards. Then a vast kitchen opened up—an acre of black-and-white linoleum and tiled walls and hanging on them blue-bladed knives of every size. A truly historic refrigerator up on legs. The lighting was ghastly, from fluorescent tubes.

And just as I walked into the glaring kitchen, somebody walked out of it.

I stopped dead. I couldn’t scream, or budge.

Somebody had been in here, over by that door to a back hall. Someone had been right there. Just a flash, a glint of ceiling light off of glasses. An apron? Then nobody, not even footsteps.

I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. What was I supposed to do—grab a bread knife off the wall and light out down that hall, wherever it led? No way.

I found my breath and yanked the desserts out of their insulated bag. My hands were all over the place, but I was in a big rush now. The desserts were true artworks, spun sugar curlicues poking up out of chocolate-encrusted ice cream bonbons. Whatever. I slapped them on a tray and got out of there, heading for the dining table voices. And believe me, I didn’t look back.

Later, after dinner, when we were loading the dishwasher, I made sure I wasn’t by myself. We bustled around the kitchen before we went to get dressed. And I kept right in the middle of the bustle. But I didn’t tell the others somebody had been there. I just didn’t, for some reason. Now, maybe I wasn’t that sure I’d even seen anything, or anyone. Maybe it wasn’t anybody real. How many kinds of
real
are there?

THERE ARE CLOSETS. Then there are walk-in closets. Then there are dressing rooms. Then there was Aunt Lily’s entire ecosystem for her clothes, makeup, jewelry, her whole history. It was a vast windowless space the size of Costco.

And it went all the way back to her ancient childhood. She’d grown up in this apartment. There were drawers full of Raggedy Anns and roller skates and Shirley Temple books.

But most of it was like forever Fashion Week, crammed with discounts and freebies from the last fifty years or so. And mirrors everywhere you looked. There you were in every closet door. Parts of yourself.

“Check this out,” Tanya said, throwing open a pair of doors. Inside were shoe racks to the ceiling, two hundred pairs of shoes, at least. Then that rack pulled out, and another rack behind it had two hundred more—every open-toed, slingback, platform, ankle-strap, wedgie, spectator style since 1950 or whenever.

“Look.” Tanya pulled out wide drawers that unrolled themselves. Inside against plush black steps was Aunt Lily’s jewelry, a treasure chest of retro-bling. The whole room flashed with emerald and sapphire and ruby lights. Natalie sighed. Makenzie stared. The earrings hung on earring trees, three hundred miniature chandeliers, at least.

“This is just the costume stuff,” Tanya remarked. “She keeps the hard rocks in the bank. And the furs in storage. But look here.”

Behind more doors were shelves full of bags, silk and paper with grosgrain ties in designer colors. They were the freebies you get at fashion shows, mostly Paris and Milan. And the main source of Aunt Lily’s cosmetic supply. The mother lode.

“Look at all this stuff,” Tanya said. “It’s like . . . plunder.” She handed me a swag bag from Chanel. Inside, it was all there: the square bottle of Chanel No. 5, a lace fan, a dried-out bottle of Ultra Correction Cream, a compact with the Chanel logo. Crumbly bath salts, an evening bag on a long silk cord. All of it from probably 1964.

“Aunt Lily is such a squirrel,” Tanya said. “Will she ever need this stuff? Or use half of it up? Even she doesn’t need this much pore filler.” Tanya looked in a mirror at Natalie and Makenzie. “But she won’t put it on eBay either. You don’t just give everything up and . . . walk away, do you?” she said to them. “Do you? You hang on to your life.”

There was silence then, echoing like a bell that hadn’t rung. Time teetered and stood still again. Then Tanya was throwing open more doors, and racks of dresses slid out—burst forth. “Frocks,” Makenzie called them. Their hangers were on motorized carousels that revolved in the room, making the turning dresses and skirts whisper and caress each other. They sighed to be worn.

How long did it take to see even a little of all this? Even a fraction? Aunt Lily was the goddess of the goodie bag and the give-away. Forget the scarf and handkerchief drawers. Never mind the glove stretchers and a bin full of squirmy objects labeled: “Playtex girdles.”

But time didn’t matter, and we had to see everything—check everything out and try on everything but the girdles. We had to go through everything before we could decide what to wear. We had to put together outfits that worked for us out of this landfill of vintage outrageousness. We were going out. We had to look good, and a little older than we were. Because getting dressed together is the best part of going out. “Like who doesn’t know that?” as Tanya always said.

Hair, of course, was major. Makenzie’s haystack with her glasses embedded in it had to be jelled into semispikes with a subtle swirl of color not from nature. Nothing pink, nothing punk. Just a nod in the direction of pastel punkery to go with Aunt Lily’s waspwaisted lace dress Makenzie wore over leg warmers. It was hard to get Makenzie out of her favorite fringed suede boots. But tonight below lace and leg warmers she wore spike-heeled pumps. Patent leather. She had to pad the toes with tissue paper because her feet were so tiny.

“I feel reasonably sure I won’t be able to walk a step in these shoes,” she remarked. “I should think I will sit down suddenly on the pavement and break my little—”

Natalie chanted, turning in the dressing space, seeing several thousand of herself merry-go-rounding around. She’d found shoes like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, but with platforms. They turned and turned and pointed in every direction on the snow-white rug. Aunt Lily’s underwear department was itself the size of Switzerland. Natalie had raided it for a totally crazed strapless black bra to wear under a 1950s off-the-shoulder red satin number. And long black satin gloves that reached up her arms, over her elbows. Her hair was perfect as it was. It was never not perfect, and blue-black in this light. She pinned a jewel or two in it, out of the plush drawer.

My hair was a toxic area. “You have so let yourself go lately, Kerry. Honestly, you look like you teach math,” Tanya said, and everybody agreed, even me. What my hair needed was blow-drying and styling and anything to give it some life, some light, some lift. They did what they could. They performed an intervention. I wanted mine exactly like Natalie’s, absolutely as smooth as falling water. Though my hair wasn’t blue-black. My hair never could decide what color it was.

We were all in the bathroom now, the one off the dressing area. Kind of a 1920s bathroom with a tub up on claw feet. They’d spent the afternoon, maybe longer, making themselves up. Now they started over. Tanya was working foundation or something into her face. “Botox and soon now,” she said.

“So soon?” Natalie murmured behind her. “When?” This apartment was a house of mirrors, but we all four were bunched before this one, over the marble sink.

Botox? I barely knew what it was. Wasn’t it needles full of stuff old ladies shoot into their foreheads to smooth out the lines? And into their withered old cheeks? Maybe even into their—