van. The girl seemed blithely unaware of such dangers and, as evidenced by the trembling of her lower lip, was apparently singing again at top volume as she jerked back and forth on the heavy chain.
Peppy Normal took a spread-eagled stand in front of the judge’s fold-out table with her hands on her hips. Her mouth unfolded into a glossed, yellow alligator-smile.
“She nailed it, didn’t she. You know she nailed it.”
“We have a lot of kids to see before we decide anything, Mrs. Normal.”
“Boys, for Chrissake, it’s a TV commercial, not a goddamn Nobel Prize. Just cut to the chase and tell me: did she nail it, or what?”
The colorless klatch of balding men looked at each other helplessly and squirmed in their orange plastic seats. The bravest among them spoke candidly.
“The spokes-child that the Otter World Fun Park is looking for… how can I say this… we were maybe thinking of a kid who is a little less sophisticated.”
“You wanted Shirley Temple schtick? I thought you were looking for talent.”
Liza had given up trying to swing on the sunbaked chain and was now pressing her nose and forehead against the tinted window. Peering in, she could make out her mother violently gesticulating at the cringing group of men. Two of the judges glanced miserably out the window at her; her Nude Beige pancake makeup had made a small figure-8-shaped smear on the smoked glass. Liza saw her mother grab her oversize, gold-buckled handbag and storm out of the room. Knowing her cue, Liza smiled and waved goodbye through the window again and tottered through the grass toward the car.
Peppy drove angrily, her long brown cigarette pointing out of a crack in the window.
“You were great. They were shoe salesmen. They didn’t get it.”
“I ate a plate of dicks again, Mom.”
“No you didn’t. And don’t say that, say you ‘ate the midget.’ You’re too young to use nightclub slang, it makes people uncomfortable.”
“You make people uncomfortable.”
“They were uncomfortable in their own asses. They exploit otters, for Chrissake.”
Liza’s brother was already visible at the bus stop in front of the shopping center, because his silver ersatz car-racing jacket (selected by Peppy because of the word LANCIA written down one sleeve) made his chunky, fourteen-year-old upper torso look like a Mylar balloon. Ned stood alone with his heavy bag from the hardware store, outcast from the summer cliques of wealthy, mall-wandering Marin County teens, who dazzled the eye in erotically tight designer jeans, sun-bed-tans, gold anklets, frosted hair, and top-dollar orthodontics… all the pro-creative bounty of sustained wealth-eugenics; the attractive rich exclusively breeding with the attractive rich for at least five generations.
“Where are your sunglasses?” Peppy screeched as the guano-battered Honda Civic jerked to a stop against the curb. Ned, releasing a sigh of infinite pathos, produced the mirrorized aviator frames and wrapped them slowly onto his wide, flat face. It was sadly amusing to Ned that his mother would want him to wear the glasses in order to disguise the fact that he had a lazy eye, but she felt no compunction about picking him up in a birdshit-encrusted economy hatchback while the glamorous kids were slinking into the leathery backseats of gleaming BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes.
“You nail it?” Ned asked Liza.
Liza shook her head.
“You eat a plate of dicks?”
Liza nodded. It wasn’t painful anymore, she was used to rejection. In the last three months, Liza had botched commercial auditions for Tender Vittles, Silly Sand, and The Colorforms Barbie Sun n’ Fun Gazebo and failed to impress the casting agent for a horror movie entitled Suffer the Children, yet another in the long line of Omen and Rosemary’s Baby knockoffs wherein innocent youngsters parented by the Dark Lord telekinetically cause the head-exploding death of nannies, bus drivers, and priests. It barely occurred to Liza, at this point, that she was auditioning for anything; the evening gown, fishnets, and sky blue eyeshadow had become her uniform, inasmuch as any soccer girl donned shin guards and cleated shoes.
“What’s in the bag?” Liza asked her brother.
“Science,” Ned whispered cryptically, squeezing the bag more firmly shut.
(A note to the Reader:
In the beginning was the word, and the word was written according to certain unimpeachable rules and formats.
Flashbacks are to be avoided if it is at all possible. Exposition is painful enough all by itself; but to then be enshrouded in the horrible spectacle of the same actors playing heavily filtered, pressed-powdered, and pigtailed versions of themselves is just too disturbing—it threatens the suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, you are being asked to plummet uncomfortably backward in time. Prepare yourself for the ugly g-force as we slam on the retro-jets.)
BACKSTORY:
Penelope “Peppy” Normal, née Pinkney, had been married to Ned and Liza’s father, Hal Normal. Hal had been dazzled by Peppy’s topless juggling act (“Best Juggles in the Business”— Reno Nitewatcher) at the Lady Luck casino in Reno, NV, in May 1965. It was a low point in the life of Peppy, who at twenty-two had been living with her mother following a daring period of LSD experimentation, which culminated with her boyfriend, Chet Borden (who had Seen the Light and changed his name to Blessed Ram Baku), fatally swan-diving off the roof of their Oakland apartment building in a rapturous hallucinogenic brain-rage. A month later Peppy found herself grieving and half-naked before the Reno multitudes. Her act culminated in juggling four pins with tasseled pasties to “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. She was a “good-looking chick,” five foot two, freckled and curvy, who was partial to wigs, because she had suffered the charring effects of a bad perm after cutting off her waist-long, ironed hippie locks. Even though her hair (light brown, a noncolor) had grown back, the wigs were easier to put on for work, and they made her feel as if she was in costume or disguise; eventually she wore them all the time.
The “Dentist from Duluth,” as Hal Normal signed the cards on the single red roses he sent backstage (“cheap,” she thought, “romantic,” he thought), seemed to Peppy as good an escape route from her mother as any. He was a good height, anyway, and had most of his hair, and she had always wanted capped teeth. Sharon, a topless, redheaded magician’s assistant whom Peppy had befriended at work, said he looked like a younger version of Karl Maiden. After dinner dates at various Denny’s-esque restaurants every night of his National Dental Workers conference, Hal proposed, and Peppy, figuring she must either escape her current situation or risk murdering her mother with a serrated steak knife in a Southern Comfort-induced tussle, agreed to marry him the next day in the “Little House of Love” twenty-four-hour chapel, a tiny, shingled building built to look like a gingerbread house, replete with footstool-size concrete “gumdrops” studding the Astroturf lawn. It was all over in fifteen minutes. Sharon, who had only known Peppy for four months, had the dual job of being the wedding’s only witness and covering Peppy’s mother’s Ford Country Squire station wagon with shaving cream and novelty condoms. Peppy regretted the marriage with a stomach-dropping certainty immediately afterward, especially during dinner at her mother’s house later that evening, when Hal pontificated at length about the nauseating new developments in hydraulic flossing.
Peppy had insisted that Hal move from Duluth to Reno; he realized the wisdom of this decision, knowing that his Minnesota Methodist crowd would not warm to a new female who looked like the cartoon lady in the champagne glass from Playboy. They moved into a new, three-bedroom tract home in southwest Reno with a chimney pressed together out of concrete and large flat rocks.
The stressful demands of baby rearing while trying to establish a newlywed life were enough to keep the poorly matched couple distracted from the fact that they loathed