A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [58]
Kitty wasn’t hard to find; no one was putting much energy into hiding her. By noon, Dolly had reached her: sleepy sounding, smoking audibly. Kitty heard Dolly out, asked her to repeat the generous fee she’d quoted, then paused. In that pause, Dolly detected a mix of desperation and squeamishness that she recognized too well. She felt a queasy jab of pity for the actress, whose choices had boiled down to this one. Then Kitty said yes.
Singing to herself, wired on espresso made on her old Krups machine, Dolly called Arc and laid out her plan.
“The general does not enjoy American movies,” came Arc’s response.
“Who cares? Americans know who she is.”
“The general has very particular tastes,” Arc said. “He is not flexible.”
“He doesn’t have to touch her, Arc. He doesn’t have to speak to her. All he has to do is stand near her and get his picture taken. And he has to smile.”
“…Smile?”
“He has to look happy.”
“The general rarely smiles, Miss Peale.”
“He wore the hat, didn’t he?”
There was a long pause. Finally Arc said, “You must accompany this actress. Then we will see.”
“Accompany her where?”
“Here. To us.”
“Oh, Arc.”
“It is required,” he said.
Entering Lulu’s bedroom, Dolly felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz: everything was in color. A pink shade encircled the overhead lamp. Pink gauzy fabric hung from the ceiling. Pink winged princesses were stenciled onto the walls: Dolly had learned how to make the stencils in a jailhouse art class and had spent days decorating the room while Lulu was at school. Long strings of pink beads hung from the ceiling. When she was home, Lulu emerged from her room only to eat.
She was part of a weave of girls at Miss Rutgers’s School, a mesh so fine and scarily intimate that even her mother’s flameout and jail sentence (during which Lulu’s grandmother had come from Minnesota to care for her) couldn’t dissolve it. It wasn’t thread holding these girls together; it was steel wire. And Lulu was the rod around which the wires were wrapped. Overhearing her daughter on the phone with her friends, Dolly was awed by her authority: she was stern when she needed to be, but also soft. Kind. Lulu was nine.
She sat in a pink beanbag chair, doing homework on her laptop and IMing her friends (since the general, Dolly had been paying for wireless). “Hi Dolly,” Lulu said, having stopped calling Dolly “Mom” when she got out of jail. She narrowed her eyes at her mother as if she had difficulty making her out. And Dolly did feel like a black-and-white incursion into this bower of color, a refugee from the dinginess surrounding it.
“I have to take a business trip,” she told Lulu. “To visit a client. I thought you might want to stay with one of your friends so you won’t miss school.”
School was where Lulu’s life took place. She’d been adamant about not allowing her mother, who once had been a fixture at Miss Rutgers’s, to jeopardize Lulu’s status with her new disgrace. Nowadays, Dolly dropped Lulu off around the corner, peering past dank Upper East Side stone to make sure she got safely in the door. At pickup time, Dolly waited in the same spot while Lulu dawdled with her friends outside school, toeing the manicured bushes and (in spring) tulip beds, completing whatever transactions were required to affirm and sustain her power. When Lulu had a play date, Dolly came no farther than the lobby to retrieve her. Lulu would emerge from an elevator flushed, smelling of perfume or freshly baked brownies, take her mother’s hand, and walk with her past the doorman into the night. Not in apology—Lulu had nothing to apologize for—but in sympathy that things had to be so hard for both of them.
Lulu cocked her head, curious. “A business