Wendy Christensen:
Julie? I need, I need help. I have such guilt over Jason. I should never have let that ride go. You know usually I'm such a control freak but I didn't do enough to stop it, I should have done everything I could to stop it. And I wish I could have another chance, but I never can. I don't wanna someday feel that way about you, Julie. Y'know I can't talk to Mom and Dad. You're all I have left. You think when I get a place you could come stay with me for while?
Julie Christensen:
You know I will! You take this, and I'll come get it when I visit you. And hey, on your end, do you mind if I borrow the school camera for graduation tonight?
Wendy Christensen:
Ah, sure, as long as you promise to bring it back to school on Monday.
Julie Christensen:
Done!
Wendy Christensen:
Oh, the battery is pretty low, so why don't you finish getting ready and I'll charge it up a bit for you.
Julie Christensen:
Cool.
Annie Garrett:
I know why you want Taylor in Denver. But why me?
Bonnie McCloud:
[frowns] That's a silly question.
Annie Garrett:
I don't think so.
Bonnie McCloud:
What's gotten into you?
Annie Garrett:
Just answer the question.
Bonnie McCloud:
Oh for goodness sake's, Annie, stop being melodramatic.
Annie Garrett:
Oh, I have pussy-footed around this for too many years, let's just get it out in the open right now, okay?
Bonnie McCloud:
I don't know what you're talking about!
Annie Garrett:
Katie's ghost. She permeates that house you call home.
Bonnie McCloud:
Why? Because I hang a few pictures of her on the walls?
Annie Garrett:
Pictures are great, but you've turned them into shrines, along with her whole bedroom!
Bonnie McCloud:
The memory of Katie lives in that room and will as long as I'm alive.
Annie Garrett:
You can cite how many ribbons she won and when she won them.
Bonnie McCloud:
Of course I can. I was there.
Annie Garrett:
How many have I won? Huh? I know you've always blamed me for Katie's death.
Bonnie McCloud:
That's a terrible thing to say.
Annie Garrett:
It's true. If I had picked up the ice-cream that night, she would still be alive.
Bonnie McCloud:
I don't blame you for that.
Annie Garrett:
Don't insult me by lying to my face. "She wasn't supposed to be driving, she was supposed to be home". That's what you said to me that night, Mother, and I heard it loud and clear.
Bonnie McCloud:
I had just lost a daughter!
Annie Garrett:
What, and I didn't lose anything?
Bonnie McCloud:
Losing a sister is not the same.
Bonnie McCloud:
Wrong! I lost more than Katie. That night, my mother died too. You emotionally died with her. I am trying to put away the guilt and move on with my life. Go home Mother, bury Katie, and get on with your own life. Taylor and I will be just fine.
Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.
Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.
