A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [59]
“It is good, absolutely,” Dolly said a little nervously. She’d kept the general a secret from Lulu.
“How long will you be gone?”
“A few days. Four, maybe.”
There was a long pause. Finally Lulu said, “Can I come?”
“With me?” Dolly was taken aback. “But you’d have to miss school.”
Another pause. Lulu was performing some mental calculation that might have involved measuring the peer impact of missing school versus being a guest in someone’s home, or the question of whether you could manage an extended stay at someone’s home without that someone’s parents having contact with your mother. Dolly couldn’t tell. Maybe Lulu didn’t know herself.
“Where?” Lulu asked.
Dolly was flustered; she’d never been much good at saying no to Lulu. But the thought of her daughter and the general in one location made her throat clamp. “I—I can’t tell you that.”
Lulu didn’t protest. “But Dolly?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Can your hair be blond again?”
They waited for Kitty Jackson in a lounge by a private runway at Kennedy Airport. When the actress finally arrived, dressed in jeans and a faded yellow sweatshirt, Dolly was smitten with regrets—she should have met Kitty first! The girl looked too far gone; people might not even recognize her! Her hair was still blond (defiantly uncombed and also, it appeared, unwashed), her eyes still wide and blue. But a sardonic expression had taken up residence in her face, as if those blue eyes were rolling heavenward even as they gazed right at you. That look, more than the first spidery lines under Kitty’s eyes and alongside her mouth, made her seem no longer young, or even close. She wasn’t Kitty Jackson anymore.
While Lulu used the bathroom, Dolly hastily laid things out for the actress: look as glamorous as possible (Dolly cast a worried glance at Kitty’s small suitcase); cozy up to the general with some serious PDA while Dolly took pictures with a hidden camera. She had a real camera, too, but that was a prop. Kitty nodded, the shadow of a smirk tweaking the corners of her mouth.
“You brought your daughter?” was her sole response. “To meet the general?”
“She’s not going to meet the general,” Dolly hissed, checking to make sure Lulu hadn’t emerged from the bathroom. “She doesn’t know anything about the general! Please don’t mention his name in front of her.”
Kitty regarded Dolly skeptically. “Lucky girl,” she said.
They boarded the general’s plane at dusk. After takeoff, Kitty ordered a martini from the general’s airline hostess, sucked it down, reclined her seat to a horizontal position, pulled a sleep mask (the only thing on her that looked new) over her eyes, and commenced to snore. Lulu leaned over her, studying the actress’s face, which looked young, untouched in repose.
“Is she sick?”
“No.” Dolly sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I think she needs a vacation,” Lulu said.
Twenty checkpoints presaged their arrival at the general’s compound. At each, two soldiers with submachine guns peered into the black Mercedes, where Dolly and Lulu and Kitty sat in the backseat. Four times, they were forced outside into the scouring sunshine and patted down at gunpoint. Each time, Dolly scrutinized her daughter’s studied calm for signs of trauma. In the car Lulu sat very straight, pink Kate Spade bookbag nestled in her lap. She met the eyes of the machine-gun holders with the same even look she must have used to stare down the many girls who had tried in vain, over the years, to unseat her.
High white walls enclosed the road. They were lined with hundreds of plump shiny black birds whose long purple beaks curved like scythes. Dolly had never seen birds like these. They looked like birds that would screech, but each time a car window slid down to accommodate another squinting gunslinger, Dolly was unsettled by the silence.
Eventually a section of wall swung open and the car veered off the road and pulled to a stop in front of a massive compound: lush green gardens, a sparkle of water, a white mansion whose end was nowhere in sight. The birds squatted along its roof, looking