Double Happiness Read Free

and I offered again to recite my story. Sweetness, they drawled out in tandem, then collapsed into giggles. Unstoppable giggles, they bent their sculptural coifs over slim, extended legs and roared. Oh god. Darling, my mother tried, and then waved her swollen hand quickly as if shooing a mosquito, and Faye laughed harder still. Finally, Faye stood and coughed to say she’d handle this. Though her eyes were stillweeping with laughter, her mouth looked somber. My angel, she addressed me, and my mother kept her face tilted down. Don’t you think your mother has had just about enough literature for today? I’d say, really, enough for a lifetime? Yes?
    Oh, Faye, stop, my mother said. Sweetie, I’ll hear your story in the car tomorrow, um? Faye, stop it. Then I can really concentrate. Okay?
    That’s okay.
    Good girl, said Faye.
    Sweetheart, my mother sighed.
    Don’t worry about it.
    Well, maybe when it’s a little longer than a paragraph you’ll send it to me and I can take a good hard look.
    It’s supposed to be a paragraph.
    Faye smirked, and now that it was really dark outside, my mother took off her sunglasses and gave her a serious look. But that communication was lost because my mother’s eyes were so swollen, so deeply purpled and bruised even in the dim light of the tiki torches, that Faye stopped laughing and put down her stem glass.
    I’m calling Lou, said Faye. Lou was her scum of an ex-husband. But he was also an orthopedic surgeon. My mother said, Absolutely not. But Faye plugged her ears with soft-looking fingers and marched straight into the guesthouse. Lou arrived within fifteen minutes. He and Faye were surprisingly cordial for two people who hated each other’s guts. Lou rememberedme fondly from golf-club brunches when I was a child and then forgot me completely while he dressed my mother’s wounds in the surgical light of Faye’s guest dressing room. He gave my mother a sedative. In the morning she was very tired, so Faye drove me to the bus.
    I had to work that afternoon at the movie theater and my mother had urged me to go. Don’t worry, my mother said. She was incredibly sleepy. Don’t worry, Faye said. Don’t worry, said the painter when I told him on the phone.
    Soon after that, my legs began to give out spontaneously; I didn’t even have to think about my mother. My legs would wobble out of the blue and then hip, knee, ankle would collapse in a ripple. It made it tricky to walk. The steps down to the subway, which I was obliged to take from Gramercy Park to the movie theater, became a challenge. This wouldn’t have been that big a deal, since I was already making the transition from modern dance to fiction writing, but I did have one last performance scheduled at the famous White Columns. My “Pelican Song,” old Sven had called it over the speakerphone at Christmas. His last pronouncement, as it turned out. My mother and her husband had always planned to attend. They’d sent a giant check to the choreographer during his holiday fund-raiser. And he’d tacked on a three-minute solo at the end of the piece, “Wings of Love,” for me. Now the performance was minutes away. And my sudden leg-melts were trying the patience of even this well-funded choreographer.
    I decided to address my condition by writing about it. Master the problem by making it conscious. So I began work on a full-scale paragraph to describe what I understood about my mother and her husband. This was more difficult than I’d guessed. In my mother’s husband’s novels, the women, I knew from several brief glances over the years, had fabulous, surprisingly active nipples, and insatiable appetites for very straight-ahead penis-worshipping sex acts. In my paragraph, there was sex, certainly, but of a different order.
    The two weeks between my Mother’s Day visit and the performance were terrible. The worry, the rehearsals, the