Only this one was obviously a real harpie. A pouty face, a voice too loud, and the parents all aflutter trying to placate her. "We just want you to be happy, dear," said the mother.
"You told us to help you watch your waistline," said the father.
Could these people hear themselves? They sounded like some movie star's toadies.
"Well I didn't mean ice cream, did I?" said the girl, as if her parents were the stupidest people who had ever lived.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with a little Ben and Jerry's, do you dear?" said the mother. "It doesn't have as much fat as the Häagen-Dazs, does it?"
"Whatever," said the father. He, at least, seemed to understand what a monster this child had become. How weak they seemed, to let her manipulate them like this.
All at once a memory flooded back—lying in the grass, Dad's body pressing down on his. Dad getting angry, and Mom suddenly being conciliatory, and Quentin getting away with something. Just as he had done a dozen times before.
So what? So all children are manipulators—at least he had always had the decency not to humiliate his parents in public like this little dipwhistle.
Of course that could also be taken to mean that he was a hypocrite while this little girl was simply open about what all children try to do and all but a few parents are too weak to stop them from doing.
Thank heaven I never married or had kids, thought Quentin. Who needs to get into a lifelong power struggle with your own kids?
He had all the pies he needed for a couple of weeks—all that the freezer in his rented townhouse would hold. He wheeled the cart down the aisle past the girl and her tame parents. He made a point of not looking at them—why not let them pretend that nobody noticed their humiliation? But he couldn't resist a long hard glare of contempt at the girl.
She met his gaze with a saucy look; but there was a twinkle in her eyes that surprised him. Could it be irony? Could it be that she knows exactly how bratty she seems?
Well what if she does? Knowing you're a jerk doesn't mean you're any less a jerk; probably the opposite. Lizzy never looked like that. She had too much pride to act like this girl, or look like her, or talk like her. This girl was alive and Lizzy was dead and all of a sudden it rolled over him how many years of life she had missed and how much better she would have lived those years than this snotty little girl. Better than Quentin, too. She wouldn't have found herself thirty-four years old and sick of the emptiness of her life. Because her life wouldn't have been empty. She would have loved somebody and married him and had children. And they wouldn't have been children like this, they would have been good kids, decent kids, kids you could be proud of. She would have made her life mean something. While Quentin had—what? Money? And this girl... she had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me.
He stood in the checkout line. The clerk bantered a little with the dressed-for-success woman in front of him. Quentin gazed around the store listlessly, seeing everything, noticing nothing.
Until he saw a woman in the express line, bent over her purse, digging for coins or a pen, and there was something about her, about the way her hair fell, about the slope of her shoulders, the clothes she wore. He knew her, absolutely knew her, only it couldn't be her, but she was so perfectly like his memory of Lizzy that he couldn't breathe. And when she stood straight and handed money to the cashier, she did it with that straight-armed, elbow-locked movement that was Lizzy's own.
"Sir?" said the clerk.
The woman ahead of him was picking up her bags and leaving. Quickly Quentin finished moving everything from his cart to the conveyor belt, glancing up as often as he could to see if he could catch a glimpse of her face. Not that there was any hope that it could be Lizzy, but if this woman really was somehow Lizzy's double, then maybe he could see her face, see what she would have looked like grown up, only that was crazy, all he would see was that it wasn't Lizzy, and it would hurt him all over again that she wasn't there. Already it hurt him. Already something deep and long denied was stirring inside him. The grief that he had never expressed except on one miserable afternoon of throwing jars on the floor and pulling up plants.
She turned around just as he was bending down to get the last of the pies out of the cart. When he looked up again she was almost at the door, but he caught a glimpse of her face and gasped aloud at the face, at the exact, the perfect copy of...
"Sir, where are you—"
"Just ring it up, I'll be back in one second—"
But she was gone. Standing there at the railing that kept carts from going out into the parking lot, he scanned for her, for that walk, that hair, that light spring sweater, walking to some car, walking to another store, but she wasn't there. No sign of her.
He pressed his hands to his face. The woman couldn't have looked that much like her, it was just his mind playing tricks on him. He returned to the store, to a clerk who was looking annoyed, to a line of shoppers—refugees from the DC rush hour now—who seemed about one step from a lynch mob. He swiped his card through the machine, signed the slip, gathered up his frozen food and headed for his car.
The one thing I can't have in all this world is Lizzy. But she's what I've wanted, all day, all month, all these years. Coming out of that bad movie today I wanted to jammer to her about how stupid the science in it was, how pathetic it was to see Dustin Hoffman in a role so dumb, a Stallone castoff. She would have laughed and quoted some line from The Graduate, which of course she had snuck off to see even though Mom and Dad declared it a dirty movie and off limits. "It wasn't dirty to me" she said. "I just came home and proved that it takes bigger boobs than these to do that tassel thing." And the yogurt place, it was Lizzy he wanted to tell his diatribe to. And in the store, he needed Lizzy beside him so they could laugh about that bratty little girl and then hatch some bizarre plot to kidnap her and then see how low the ransom would have to go before her parents would finally pay it and take her back.
But I can't have Lizzy.
And as he plunged his car out into the heavy traffic of Elden Street, it occurred to him for the first time that even if Lizzy hadn't died, he couldn't have had her with him at age thirty-four in Herndon, Virginia, in the spring of 1995, because she would have been thirty-nine years old and undoubtedly married and probably she would have had a couple of kids in high school by then and a husband who adored her because she wouldn't marry anybody stupid enough not to adore her and he would have been the one talking to her and listening to her and sharing jokes with her and inflicting his diatribes on her. Not me.
If she had lived, she would have gone away to college before he even got to high school. The closeness between them would have faded. He would have grieved a little, maybe, but he would have turned to his friends then, the way other people did. He wouldn't have kept comparing every girl he knew to his perfect image of Lizzy because Lizzy would still be home for holidays and he wouldn't be so needy for her; some other girl's fresh and un-Lizzyish style or look or attitude would have intrigued him instead of putting him off. He would have fallen in love the normal dozen or so times and right now if he had these millions of dollars he wouldn't be wandering North America borrowing other people's dreams, he'd be at home, and everything he did and made and built and won would have been for his wife, his children, their future. Together they would have invented dreams of their own, dreams to spare, enough dreams that they could freely share them with strangers instead of his having to go shopping for them.