The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [11]
Maintaining the room was not easy. Pictures dropped from the walls, dust gathered in the batik. Phoebe knocked it into clouds with a broom, then vacuumed it up from the rug. Twice she’d taken down the batik and washed it by hand, hung it in the yard to dry, then reattached it exactly as it had been, or close. But despite her best efforts, there was a kind of erosion in the room, a sagging and curling and fading she was powerless to halt.
Phoebe rarely had friends to the house, aware that in most people’s eyes she would look like a nut. Yet this mystified her—for how was living in your sister’s room any crazier than surrounding yourself with life-sized posters of Roger Daltrey hollering into a microphone, as her friend Celeste did, or following the personal lives of Starsky and Hutch, or sleeping on a street curb overnight to get decent seats to a Paul McCartney concert? Being obsessed with total strangers was considered perfectly normal, yet on the few occasions when outsiders came into Faith’s room, Phoebe glimpsed herself through their eyes and was terrified. So she kept them out.
Barry had this same effect. Much of what he’d said was true—detritus from their mother’s brief courtships filled their house, weird breakfast cereals from a man in market research, record albums by someone’s punk rocker son, their grim mechanical sound suggestive of auto assembly lines. But these dates were little more than anecdotes for Phoebe and her mother to laugh about, how one man had confessed to a previous life as the lapdog of the British Queen Mother—“Can you imagine?” Phoebe’s mother cried, flinging off her pumps as Phoebe writhed on the bed, shrieking in horrified delight. “A dog? And he tells me this?” By ten-thirty she was usually back at home listening to Phoebe talk about the quaaludes and LSD she’d seen people take, how her friends had raced cars on the Great Highway and had sex among the cattails beside the school playing fields. For with each revelation Phoebe also was saying, I didn’t do this—they did, but not me—assuring her mother that she was careful, separate, likely to live forever. Phoebe often sensed that she and her mother had struck a kind of bargain, each gaining something crucial from the other by keeping her outside life at bay. They often spent Saturday mornings together at her mother’s office, Phoebe doing homework at the boss’s big desk. Afterward they would eat a late lunch somewhere fancy, each drink a glass of Chardonnay, and as they walked to the parking garage through the oceany wind, Phoebe would feel the magic of their lives—what spectacular things awaited them.
It was a mystery: what throbbed up from the basement, what rang in Phoebe’s ears, alone in this room. Something had happened to Faith.
The sixties had been named and written about. In the public library Phoebe had spent hours poring over old Oracles, leafing through scholarly and journalistic accounts of the “Love Generation.” But she read with a restless, uneasy suspicion that these analyses were leading her further from the mystery’s core, not toward it. Often she found herself drifting instead to the fashion magazines, leafing through Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar where models lazed in their inadvertent beauty, Lisa Taylor and Patti Hansen, Janice Dickinson glancing furtively over one shoulder while being yanked down a narrow street by a small black schnauzer on a leash. Where was she going? Where were all of them going, so gorgeous and distracted, the trees grainy—Yes! Phoebe would think, her breath quickening as she flipped the pages. Yes. Another world gleamed through these images. Phoebe searched the pages half expecting to find a picture of Faith.
She curled on the bed and closed her eyes, longing for sleep, but the chimes distracted her. Barry was wrong, she thought, he was wrong and she was right, she and her mother