The Elizas: A Novel(95)

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“We’re having fun,” he answered.

He bought us tickets for the rides, and we went on all of them, which sounds dreadful with a hangover, but somehow, combined with soda fountain Coke and two huge, steaming-hot pretzels, made the headache and nausea evaporate. We held hands on the Ferris wheel, screamed on the roller coaster, threw darts at balloons and won a giant Scooby-Doo. By the end of the day, we were tired, we were laughing, we were talking about normal stuff. It was his way to cover up a night he feared had been laced with duplicity. It was his way of saying, Whatever that shit was, it was adult and weird and I’m not ready for it. I still want to be a kid.

I want to be a kid, too, even now. With my childhood tumor memories returned to me, I feel like I never got to be a kid, not even for a day.

? ? ?

After Albert and I straighten out reality, we straighten out the truth, especially the unraveling of what was tumorous inside of me and what was brought on by Eleanor’s wild, sick head. I’d had a tumor, yes, when I was young, but it had been benign. My mother was busy with work, even more stressed now because there were hospital bills to pay. Eleanor volunteered to hang out with me while I recovered, and my mother begrudgingly said yes—she didn’t have money for a nanny, and Eleanor seemed okay. Well, sort of okay. “I mean, yes, she’d had a son who killed himself, and she’d had mental issues years ago, but she seemed recovered,” my mother admits one day, when she and I are in a joint session with Albert. “And she was always lying to you about who she was when she was young, but I didn’t see it as dangerous, really. Just sort of . . . childish.”

I demand to know what she means. Apparently, Eleanor’s fabulous New York youth, how she worked at a circus, how she was a spy in DC—they were just tales. “All her life, your aunt wanted to be fabulous, but she was mostly on the fringes of things,” my mother says. “She might have been acquainted with some interesting characters in New York, for example—our mother certainly was, and Eleanor idolized her. But she was always too needy, too desperate. That was a turnoff to most people. Even I saw it, as a younger sister. She required too much. She needed so much hand-holding and attention. She was never let into the group. Some people rejected her very viciously—it was almost bullying. But she continued to try. She was so desperate to be loved.”

There hadn’t been a Contact Lens Baron or a DC spy. Eleanor had moved to California with us once my mother married my father. She met her husband out there, but he’d been a construction worker, not something more fabulous. Shortly after she had Thomas, her husband died in a freak accident on the job site—an I-beam disengaged from a crane and fell from a great height, crushing him. With the insurance settlement money, Eleanor bought the beautiful house in Hollywood—the house I grew up in, though it had been excised from my mind that the house had once been hers. But of course it had been hers! Who else would have written those crazy death facts on my closet wall?

“She tried to ingratiate herself with the neighbors when she lived there, but it was clear she wasn’t one of them,” my mother continues. “So she sold the place to us for a steal and moved to the suite in the Magnolia because she was sick of feeling like a social pariah. At a hotel, she could pay people to make her feel like the star.”

I’m stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? Why didn’t you correct me when I went on about how great she was?”

“Because you loved her,” my mother answers simply. “And when your child loves something like that, you don’t want to be the one to burst the bubble. I thought you’d blame me. Besides, you two had so much in common. She delighted in you, and you delighted in her. I didn’t want to be the one to end that.”

I feel sad about this new version of Eleanor. The truth doesn’t come as so much of a surprise, but I hate that everything I’d adored about her was fiction. When Eleanor couldn’t impress her peers, she turned to an impressionable child. I suppose I should find it flattering that I was her audience, but I see it all as a big, complicated sleight of hand.

But there was more to this, a complicated question of identity. So much of my personality was based on Eleanor. Playing Funeral in her suite stoked my love of death. Playing Oscar Night in her gowns convinced me that only melodramatic people were interesting. Would I have attempted to write a novel if she hadn’t paved the way first with Riders of Carrowae? It wasn’t that I regretted who I turned into, but I couldn’t help but get trapped in a solipsistic quandary about the way fate slides and shifts. If I’d known the real Eleanor, who would I have developed into as a teenager and adult? A different person? I might have ended up like Gabby, working in an office, grabbing smoothies after work, driving a PT Cruiser. It’s not likely, but maybe. Maybe any of us could be anybody. Maybe it just depends on who we surround ourselves with.

I wonder if Eleanor thought about it this way, too. I might have been a nine-year-old, but I was a nine-year-old she could unquestionably shape. How powerful that must have felt! How deity-like! I saw her as an icon. Which was better than being a mother, because I didn’t notice her flaws. Until it was too late.

Of course, if that’s the way Eleanor saw it—if that’s what she understood she was doing—then why the fuck would she poison me?

“After you recovered, I assumed you knew more than you let on,” my mother says in another session. “I figured you knew that you were poisoned, and you were furious at me for letting Eleanor handle your care for so long. I thought you’d decided that I’d let it happen. Which was untrue, of course, but I didn’t know how to explain to you that I had no idea without getting into what she actually did.”