By the time Ned was six and Liza almost five, Hal had been permanently barred from the nuptial bed with the white headboard, on which two carved swans kissed in a heart-shaped symbol of lifelong monogamy. Peppy had a new, Osmond-size set of blue-white upper teeth and an impressive aptitude for painkiller consumption. Hal had a string of dental assistants named Kim, Wendy, and Lois, each of whom was persuaded to inhale balloons full of nitrous oxide after office hours and let him have sex with them in the reclining dentistry chair, in exchange for his looking the other way on their moderate embezzlements.
It all came to a head when Peppy was roused from her pill slur at the sight of one of Lois’s hickeys on Hal’s abdomen when he stepped out of the shower. It was the moment Peppy had been waiting for: a True Crime on which to hang the demise of the loveless marriage, which, due to the presence of toddlers, she would have felt too guilty to leave otherwise. Hal lied with loud indignation about the mouth bruise, but it was all over, and both were relieved.
After a hi-speed divorce (forty-eight hours to Nevada residents with children and property, 192 times the length of the marriage ceremony), Peppy was legally free, Hal having expressed virtually no interest in custody of the children, and having agreed with surprising ease to sign over the new family car and the equity on the house in exchange for Peppy releasing all future claims to alimony or child support. The divorce cost $270. Hal paid; Lois was waiting for him in the parking lot with a bottle of pink champagne. “Woo woo, lucky you,” Peppy cracked at Lois, packing the children into the conservative new 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado. Afterward, the children only saw Hal for their annual checkups. They dreaded his guilty nervousness far more than the tooth cleaning, but he always gave them $50 each to compensate for the birthdays and Christmases that he routinely ignored.
The three-bedroom Reno house was rented out; after paying the mortgage, this provided Peppy with a moderate monthly income. Peppy and the kids moved back in with her mother. Grandma Noreen babysat while Peppy played the field, the field being Bil’s Red Turkey Tavern, where Beer Nuts were sold, beneath a mirror covered with Bil’s favorite bumper stickers:
Free Mustache Rides
No Laugh-a, My Car, Eh?
You’re Goin’ To Hurt Its Feelings
HEY PAL, Watch My Tail….Not HERS!
Peppy was often the only woman in the bar, which made her virtually irresistible to the pockmarked clientele.
Noreen couldn’t understand where the daughter had gotten “the Look-At-Me bug,” as she called it. Peppy eventually called it “artistic flair” and claimed it came from the father she’d never known. Noreen had known WWII veteran Clemont Pinkney less than a month when they were married in 1946, and wasn’t prepared to say whether he was inclined toward fits of exhibitionistic dancing and loud show-tune medleys or not, since he was found dead a mere five days into their honeymoon, wearing her store-bought wedding dress and hanging by the neck from a coat hook by a pair of ruined nylons she’d thrown away earlier that day.
Naturally uncomplicated, hardworking, and less vain than her female counterparts of the time, Noreen went back to wearing her wartime combat boots during her pregnancy. She would never wear dresses or girdles or marry again, choosing instead to live modestly off of Clem’s navy pension, and repress the unwanted remains of her sexual energy through vigorous, tight-mouthed housecleaning.
From the moment she could voice her wants, Peppy had always craved tap-shoes, ballet classes, tutus, mirrors, cosmetics, and pink tinselly things. She lit up at the prospect of being photographed and went into swooning deliriums at the movies, moving her lips to the dialogue with her eyes locked on the lead actress, genuflecting weirdly in the dark. Strangers pointed at her, laughing. She didn’t notice. She was a girl who would buy anything advertised with a kiss, and who never questioned the benevolence of Hollywood Magic. The movies were the home of her heart, where she relaxed, opened like a flower, and let any suggestion float into her unchecked. (In short, she was doomed to lifelong consumer slavery.)
In 1955, after weeks of hysterical pleading, Noreen reluctantly allowed her daughter to enroll in Miss Marquette’s School of Photographic Modeling and Acrobatic Dancing for Young Ladies, where Peppy learned the elements of tumbling, baton twirling, and how to smile with her lips slightly parted, her eyes open wide, and her upper teeth freshly glossed with saliva. Noreen had imagined that Peppy would learn how to be charismatically adorable, like Shirley Temple, or perhaps adorably wisecracking, like Jackie Coogan. What emerged instead was a pocket-size version of Gypsy Rose Lee. Like many fatherless young girls, Peppy was man-crazy and through osmosis somehow picked up her mother’s abandoned sex drive from its cold storage locker and sashayed around in that sublimated man-fever like a lynx G-string. Her mother found Peppy’s dance numbers disturbingly burlesque. “Throw a man in the room, any man,” Noreen lamented, “and that child will put on a bathing suit and do exotic backbends.” Confused insurance agents or dishwasher repairmen shuffled nervously as the preening child wantonly grabbed their attention by doing the splits on the area rug; they often gave her a dollar to go away, creating in Peppy a Pavlovian template for her future employment.
Grandma Noreen’s stoic road through single motherhood made her largely unsympathetic to Peppy’s freewheeling, drunk style of child rearing, but she took Peppy’s evening absences at the Red Turkey as an opportunity to carve Proper Moral Understandings and A Respectable Work Ethic into the little kids, who, she secretly vowed, would never want for respectable, nontopless employment. She taught Ned to stuff and lick envelopes, she taught little Liza how to bag groceries, beer cans first, bananas last. The children slept in Noreen’s small sewing room beneath a framed copy of a silent film poster, the 1917 melodrama Babes in the Woods; Noreen had picked it up at a rummage sale to spruce up the bare wall. It was a rather chilling illustration of a pudgy boy and girl, pinkly angelic and barely past the toddler stage, clutching each other at the foot of a large, threatening black tree. The boy is trying to be brave as his little sister weeps tears of terror; the tangled and sinister woods behind them seem to be conspiring to eat the innocent tots like succulent capons. The poster gave Liza nightmares. She did not want to be abandoned in the woods with Ned, who would think it futile to intervene and probably just watch with scientific curiosity as badgers dragged her by the hair into a dark, wet hole.
In 1976, during this period of Noreen’s regular babysitting, the Montreal Olympic Games were on television; the children, now eleven and nine, were mad for them. They tried to reenact various gymnastic events on Noreen’s living room settee; knees were pressed through the cheap pink cloth of nightgowns; rug burns bearded little chins. Liza was especially affected, particularly in her vivid mental moments before sleep, during which she had a rich and ego-gratifying fantasy life. Liza, at an age when every glory in life seemed possible, would beat out Nadia Comaneci, in slow motion, for a gold medal in the floor routine, to the haunting strains of Nadia’s Theme (Theme from The Young and the Restless) every night. The fantasy expanded during the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, with Liza taking to the ice and beating Dorothy Hamill for more gold medals in figure skating. Everyone would be watching—Peppy, Noreen, Ned, her kindergarten classmates, her teachers, the president. Everyone would clap and cry as she swirled beautifully, her legs in the splits over her head in any direction, her arms swanning upward. As adoring fans wrapped her in an American flag, she would drift into a giddy, love-filled, and triumphant slumber. That is what it will be like, when I am fourteen.
Liza’s waking hours, however, were not spent backflipping over gym mats, or gyrating in empty skating rinks. After school, Liza and Ned watched six to nine hours of television