It certainly sounded harmless enough. So why had Iso lied about it?
“I didn’t think you would give me permission,” Iso said, her eyes focused on a spot on her bedroom wall, somewhere between her parents’ heads. The wall, by Iso’s choice, was a pale, pale lavender.
“We certainly won’t now,” Peter said. “You know how we feel about lying, Iso.”
She sighed. “Yes, it’s the one thing we must never do.” Parroted back in a tone that bordered on mockery, as if it were ridiculous, this mania for truthfulness.
“Why did you think we would prohibit it?” Eliza was genuinely puzzled.
“Because you’re always blah, blah, blah, shopping is evil, the more stuff you buy, the bigger your carbon footprint, blah, blah, blah. And when I want to go to McDonald’s, I have to hear the whole Fast Food Nation thing, E. coli and worms in my stomach, whatever.”
“It’s true, shopping for shopping’s sake is a bad habit,” Peter said. “As for hamburgers, I think if you’re going to eat one, you should eat a really good one.”
“The really good ones, the ones you like, are at restaurants and cost eight dollars. At McDonald’s, I can get a full meal for less than five dollars.”
Eliza did find this amusing, father and daughter in a discussion over relative economics, the cost of values. Peter was willing to pay for taste. Iso wanted quantity. It wasn’t that far removed from Peter’s work at his firm, where they were banking on the idea that people with certain values would be drawn to their investment tools, even if they could get faster, better results through other companies.
“Let’s not get derailed by hamburgers,” she said. “The fact is that you lied to me, Iso, and we can’t have that. You have to be punished. By the way, if you had asked me, I probably would have been okay with you going to the mall. My own parents were very strict about that when I was young. They had a lot of blanket rules about how I was allowed to spend my time, and I resented it. You couldn’t pay me to go to a mall now for recreation. But when I was fourteen, it was all I wanted to do.”
“Really? Granny I and Grampy M were strict?” Eliza no longer remembered how her parents’ initials had become affixed to their names, or why.
“Not about most things. They merely hated the idea of the mall.”
“But things were safer when you were young, right? You had a lot more freedom.”
Iso’s comment wasn’t meant to provoke. She was just repeating something she had heard or intuited. The world used to be so safe. No, that wasn’t a sentiment she was likely to have picked up at home. Eliza found the current culture of paranoia a good cover for her. She could be careful about her children without anyone thinking she was odd or strict.
“Iso, you’re grounded,” Peter declared. “For two weeks.”
“What does that mean?”
Several days in, they were still trying to figure that out. Could Iso walk Reba? That was a tricky one. It was nice to see Iso taking an interest in the dog and volunteering to do an essential task, but also unusual. “If you take Albie,” Eliza had decreed. Iso decided she didn’t want to walk Reba after all. Could she call a friend about homework? Only if she did it from the kitchen telephone, within earshot. If Albie was watching television and Iso joined him in the family room, could Iso at least mention to him that there was probably a better program? No. Because Albie would give Iso anything she wanted.
It was true, Albie was a completely indiscriminating television watcher. Today was Sunday, a gray, drizzly one that managed to be at once humid and chilly. Peter had gone into the office, and Eliza was trapped in the house with Albie and Iso. That was the problem with having a child under house arrest. One had to stay with her. Early in the afternoon, the three found themselves in the family room, regarding one another warily. A game? They couldn’t agree on one. A jigsaw puzzle? Iso couldn’t be bothered with anything that uncool. Books? Even Albie seemed to find this appalling. Eliza grabbed the remote and turned it to the only channel she really liked, TCM. If she could design her perfect cable system, it would have only TCM and maybe AMC, although she hated the way the second network edited films and inserted commercials.
Mist-shrouded mountains, clearly a set, rose into view. Gene Kelly, Van Johnson—“Oh, it’s Brigadoon,” Eliza said. “That’s a wonderful movie.”
Albie, who probably would have watched a test pattern without complaint, crawled onto the sofa and nestled into Eliza’s side, and she tried not to show how overwhelmingly happy this made her. Iso lay on the floor, chanting, “BOR-ing.” But eventually Gene Kelly caught her attention.
“I don’t get it,” Albie said. “How does the town sleep for a hundred years?”
“It’s magic,” Eliza said.
“But that funny man said they worked out a promise with God. Is God magic?”
Big question. Eliza and Peter had not given their children much of a religious education. Part of her, the reflexively honest part, wanted to say, “Yes, religion and magic are pretty much the same thing.” But she imagined Albie carrying that wisdom to school, the hell to pay later. Instead she said, “God is always seen as an all-powerful entity, whatever religion you believe.”
“That doesn’t really look like Scotland,” Iso complained. She spoke on some authority. The family had taken a driving trip through the Highlands the summer before last. “It doesn’t look real.”
It didn’t, and Eliza missed Gene Kelly’s usual archness, that slight smirk of ego he brought to most roles. Here, he was just a straight-up romantic, while Van Johnson got to be the dissolute wisecracker. Still the movie was marvelous and so romantic. Except, of course, for the character of Harry Beaton, who had to watch his true love marry someone else, knowing all the while that he must stay in Brigadoon or the village would perish. Brigadoon’s bargain with God was fine, if your true love happened to be there already. But what was a Harry Beaton to do? He really had drawn a tough hand.
Eliza’s sympathy for Harry vanished when he attacked his true love at her wedding, lashing out: “All I ever did was want you too much.”
Of course it ended happily—at least for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. But what of the other Brigadooners—Brigadoonites?—who might not meet their true loves in the small village, or who might not love with a ferocity that awakens a town that otherwise would slumber for a century? What would happen over the years, as the town’s residents became more connected by blood?
A phone rang. A single phone, up in her bedroom.
“The security phone!” Albie sang out, thrilled to be here to witness the mysterious instrument in action. Her instinct had been to ignore it, but now she would have to go answer it, refuse Walter’s charges, and tell the children that it was just a test, like the test of the Emergency Broadcast System. In the case of a real emergency…
And as Eliza headed to the stairs, she was reminded that Iso was not the only liar in their family.
By the time she reached the phone, it had stopped. She glanced at her watch: 2 P.M., on a Sunday. She did not think Walter would have broken the rules, at least not so quickly. Over time, she could imagine him becoming careless, forgetting what he was supposed to do, or no longer caring. But not on this, his third call. A wrong number? How could one know unless the phone was answered? Why hang up?