Imperfect Bliss: A Novel - Softcover

Susan Fales-Hill is an award-winning television writer and producer (The Cosby Show, Suddenly Susan, and A Different World) and the author of One Flight Up and the acclaimed memoir Always Wear Joy. She is a contributing editor at Essence, and her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Town & Country, and Good Housekeeping. Susan lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Imperfect Bliss
chapter two

Closely trailed by Bella, Bliss entered the wainscoted dining room to find her mother at the breakfast table in one of her trademark poses of soap-operatic grief. She leaned back in her reproduction Hepplewhite chair, one hand poised on a bosom so ample it strained the buttons of a peach chiffon peignoir two sizes too small. In spite of her agony, her Eartha Kitt bouffant wig (1980s vintage) was perfectly pinned in place and her “Very Vixen” lipstick flawlessly applied.

“Another opportunity lost,” Forsythia wailed as she handed the receiver to her youngest daughter, seventeen-year-old Charlotte, and grabbed a steaming crumpet from a nearby plate. Harold Harcourt, Bliss’s father and Forsythia’s husband of thirty-six agonizingly long years, raised his day-old London Times—a treasured link to his home country—above his face, a shield against the impending onslaught. Bliss stifled a laugh.

“Hi, grandma,” Bella ventured brightly, but her greeting went unheeded.

“Does the girl think fiancés grow on trees?” Forsythia cried out to no one in particular as Charlotte dutifully slathered butter on another crumpet and placed it in her mother’s plump brown hand with a reassuring smile.

“She discards them like . . . like . . .” the distraught mother of four unmarried girls searched for a suitably dire image, “Fruit pits! Remember the tobacco lobbyist, the venture capitalist, the ‘bean bag baby’ tycoon Missy introduced her to? He had his own plane! The burger bun magnate, the heir to the stealth-bomber fortune.” She rattled off the list of golden chances lost, sinking deeper into melancholy with each one.

“It’s sheer recklessness. And waste!!! Shameful waste!!! Harold, do you hear me?” She shrieked at her better half. From behind his paper fortress came the answer.

“Yes, sadly,” he said.

“What do you propose to do? We’ve lost another one.”

“Another what?” Harold sighed wearily.

“Another one of Victoria’s potential fiancés, of course. The lawyer, Dean Wong. How are we to get him back?”

Harold lowered his paper for a moment and furrowed his brow, as if deep in thought.

“I suppose we should send for the police. No, we can only do that after he’s gone missing for twenty-four hours. Better yet, I shall set out with my harpoon and a net this afternoon.” With that, he raised his paper barrier against his wife once again. Forsythia Harcourt’s face went from cinnamon brown to woman-scorned crimson.

“Don’t you see the gravity of the situation?” She screeched in the lilting cadence of her native Jamaica, an accent that reasserted itself whenever she was angry, out of sorts, or slightly smashed. She shoveled an entire crumpet into her heart-shaped mouth. Charlotte patted her arm soothingly, and pouted in sympathy. The barrier never dropped, the pages merely turned. Forsythia knew she had to wage this battle on her own. Her husband was content merely to see their daughters leave home and earn university degrees. He had no sympathy with her plans to see them married into the best, or at the very least, the wealthiest families in the country. Why had she bothered to fight and scrape her way out of her native Jamaica? Why had he left England if not for the opportunity to raise girls who would marry well, which meant wealthily and hopefully worthily? Feminists and career women could yammer all they wanted about independence and gender equality, but the surest path to financial security for a woman was still through a man. She contemplated her last born, Charlotte, a lithe mocha-hued gazelle in her schoolgirl plaid.

“You won’t disappoint me, will you, my Charlotte?”

“No, Mama,” Charlotte reassured her in a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth voice while shaking her brown ringlets. Bliss rolled her eyes knowing full well the inner slut her baby sister concealed beneath her sweet-as-pie exterior.

Forsythia turned away from Charlotte and finally noticed her second eldest, Bliss, and her only grandchild, Bella, disappointments both. Her light-brown eyes narrowed, her pug nose wrinkled as she surveyed Bliss’s grad-student dishevelment: she wore sneakers, sweats, and her dirty-blond locks knotted in a scrunchie atop her head. Forsythia washed down her bitterness with a swig of Earl Grey tea. Bliss, the lightest skinned of all her daughters had squandered her nearly Caucasian good looks on, of all things, a Cuban. A shudder went through her at the memory of the penniless “activist.” Every time she thought of it, she cringed. Now here Bliss was: back home, divorced, with a child, and eight pounds overweight. Rather than enrolling at the nearest gym and Weight Watchers, as Forsythia had advised her, the foolish girl insisted on burying herself in the library at Georgetown to earn a PhD, of all things. What would that ever do for her romantic prospects? Nothing. One might as well have an unmentionable disease affecting one’s private parts in Forsythia’s eyes. Bliss was a lost cause. Forsythia did her best to ignore her.

“Looks like another happy morning in the Harcourt home,” Bliss said gamely, sensing her mother’s reawakened disapproval and frustration and striving to overcome them.

“Morning,” Forsythia sniffed.

Harold dropped his paper and beamed at his pride and joy, the only one of his daughters who inspired in him anything other than perfunctory affection, pity, and dismay. It was he who had coined her nickname though she had been christened Elizabeth.

“Bliss,” he crowed, warmly opening his arms to give her a bear hug. Forsythia bristled and looked away. Charlotte stared absentmindedly into space, twirling a brown corkscrew curl around her tapered finger. Bliss had inherited her father’s peridot-green eyes and vulpine nose, as well as his sardonic wit. Most importantly, she had his heart and he was her oasis of sanity in the midst of a less than intellectual and sometimes unwelcoming household. Bliss settled Bella into her chair and poured her a bowl of cereal, then grabbed a crumpet and slathered it with jam.

“Should you really be eating that?” Her mother simpered.

“Yes, Blissy, you’re looking ‘vewy wibby’ these days. Moooo!!” Charlotte chimed in, shaking a finger at Bliss.

“Mommy’s not a cow,” Bella protested, sensing her mother was being insulted.

“I like being wide in the beam,” Bliss answered with a smile, while winking at Bella. “It means people leave me alone.”

“You’re a divorced hermit and Victoria’s well on her way to becoming a spinster. Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” Forsythia lamented.

“What happened to Dean? Thought they were serious?” Bliss asked.

“Were, that’s the operative word. She’s done with him,” Forsythia explained, her voice quavering.

“Oh, well,” Bliss shrugged. “He was boring anyway. And did we really want to be related to the lawyer for half the Bush administration?”

“So now you are a judge of suitable men, since when?” her mother asked in a withering tone. Bliss knew she shouldn’t let the dart land, but it did, as usual, even after a lifetime of such insults. Just as she wished her ex-husband would turn up at her doorstep, declare his actions a terrible mistake, and fall adoringly at her feet, she wished her mother would just once look at her with something other than searing disapproval. She felt her mother resented her for some original sin she didn’t recall committing. Of course she knew it was cruel and irrational of Forsythia to expect her daughters to fulfill her striver’s dreams rather than live their own lives. But like therapy, that rational knowledge couldn’t extinguish the longing and the hope that she would see, just once, in her mother’s eyes, that spark of pride and approval that lets a person know they deserve to occupy space on the planet. But she never did. And she had to accept that she probably never would. Girding herself in humor, she began to form a response to the barb. Her father shot her an imploring keep-the-armistice-it’s-not-worth-it look, so she bit her tongue. She needed her mother that afternoon anyway to pick up Bella at day care. She decided to take advantage of the slight guilt she knew her mother felt in the wake of her attack to make the request.

“Mum, I have to meet with my thesis advisor today at three, can you pick Bella up from Bright Beginnings and watch her for the afternoon, please?”

“Everyone depends on me,” Forsythia sighed in a martyred tone.

“I’d ask Dad but he’s teaching today.”

“So am I. Nothing as exalted as the history of the atom, of course,” Forsythia said, in a snide reference to her husband’s field, the history of science.

“Ampère and the discovery of electromagnetism,” Harold grumbled under his breath.

“What are you saying, dear?” Forsythia asked.

“Nothing,” her husband mumbled from behind his paper. Forsythia waited for a moment to see if he would change his mind and explain, but he didn’t. She had kept him on the treadmill of fatherhood, unable to look up for a moment from his work, or the bills, in order to prevent him from realizing she bored him to death. Yet she knew, every time he retreated into his reading materials, that she had failed in the endeavor. She continued, mustering her pride.

“It’s my etiquette group, ‘Little Ladies.’ There are those who still think manners matter.” And there are those mothers who just need a place to park their children for the afternoon, Bliss thought to herself. Then she reminded herself that her own Yale education, and her elder sister Victoria’s years at Smith, had been subsidized in large part by her mother’s earnings leading these anachronistic classes.

“I forgot,” Bliss said.

“No matter, I’ll go fetch Bella and rush back here. It’ll be good for her; maybe she’ll learn something. Perhaps there’s hope for her.” Bliss stifled a retort. How many afternoons had she spent as an adolescent learning to curtsy before the queen (well, a life-size cardboard cutout of her) the only real queen in her mother’s book, Elizabeth of England? One of her mother’s prized possessions was an original coronation mug from 1952. It sat in the corner cabinet, above the large menagerie of glass animals. The closest they’d ever gotten to meeting royalty was seeing the backside of Princess Michael of Kent from behind a rope line in the pouring rain when she’d judged a horse show in Middleburg. Bliss understood her mother’s royalist leanings, though: they’d been beaten into her during a colonial childhood in British-ruled Jamaica. Forsythia’s sense of her own inferiority had been earned ferule lick by ferule lick. Rather than rebel, her mother had chosen the path of many colonial subjects: she lived to out-gentrify the gentry and earn their approval and acceptance, all on her husband’s limited professor’s salary. Bliss did her best not to try to convince her of the absurdity of worshipping a bunch of inbred tax dodgers in borrowed jewelry, especially since she lived in America, a republic. Even Harold managed to remain silent on the point.

Diana, the second youngest, a ripe peach popping out of her pink polo shirt and khaki skirt, ran in brandishing a glossy magazine. “Look who’s in Town and Country,” she chanted in a sorority girl singsong, tossing the once kinky locks she’d ironed into sleek submission. Forsythia eagerly grabbed the magazine from her, hoping by some miracle her garden club event had been featured. When she looked at the open page, she swooned in earnest. There for all America, nay the world, to see were Mr. and Mrs. Herman Hellman, her very best frenemy’s daughter and her new husband, heir to a condiment fortune. She and Mrs. Herman Hellman’s mother had loved and competed against each other for thirty years and now she’d been bested by the plump parvenu.

“Kitty Stump’s wedding in Town and Country. Lord, take me now,” Forsythia cried, tears of anger streaming down her cheeks.

“Mom, this is pathetic. It’s way at the back of the magazine. Next to the ads for gently used designer purses, and psychics. This is the looser section,” Diana sneered, pushing out her rounded chest. “I brought it down for laughs, not to upset you.”

“But it’s Town and Country!!! I won’t hear the end of it.”

“Don’t worry Mum, Diana’s right,” Charlotte insisted. “Who reads that part? Who reads?” At the last comment, Harold lowered his paper long enough to share a glance of disbelief with Bliss. He retreated just as quickly to his paper, forcing Bliss to wonder if his abdication was in part to blame for Charlotte’s ignorance.

“Besides,” Diana said enticingly, her cornflower-blue eyes twinkling, “By tonight, I’ll have news that’ll knock your socks off and blow the Stump/Hellmans out of the water.”

Her mother brightened and leaned forward eagerly.

“Did the Pritzker boy buy you a Diet Coke again?” she asked, practically panting.

“Who needs that geek and his overbite. This is better, much much better. And bigger,” Diana declared with a dismissive wave of her perfectly manicured hand.

“You’ll see.” She kissed her mother’s still smooth, rounded brown cheek. “Big morning: student government meeting, constitutional law class, and more,” she said in the boastful tone of the intellectually passionless but fiercely driven straight-A student/cheerleader she’d always been. In Bliss’s view, Diana had realized at a very young age that she was as bright if not brighter than the children of their far-wealthier suburban neighbors. Innately competitive, she was determined to rectify the accident of fate that had placed her on the less affluent side of life’s Monopoly board. She used every tool at her disposal to “advance.” A racial opportunist, she claimed her color when it suited her, and allowed people to believe she was white with a deep tan when it didn’t. She tantalized young men of all hues with her beauty but never surrendered. Nothing deterred her from her ultimate goal: to outstrip her richest neighbors and enter the exalted ranks of the überwealthy and famous.

“Tootles,” she cooed, flouncing out of the room. Forsythia’s mind reeled. She racked her brain trying to think of what could possibly top a feature, be it postage-stamp size, in Town & Country, the sine qua non of society magazines. Perhaps someone had proposed to Diana. How infuriating not to know. Her Diana was such a tease, but she had raised her to be. It was why she held so many young men in her thrall. She enticed but never gave in; at twenty-one, she was still certifiably virginal. A fact Forsythia knew she couldn’t assert about her youngest, but she refused to dwell on that discomfiting thought.

“Going too, Mum. Chapel this afternoon. I’ll be late coming back,” Charlotte said, also planting a kiss on her mother’s ample cheek.

“What time?” Forsythia demanded to know.

“Not sure, lots of prayers,” Charlotte shrugged wide-eyed, then walked out.

“Charlotte, your books,” her father called after her in exasperation. Charlotte ran back in and grabbed the pile on the table.

“Oops,” she giggled as she ran back out. Her father stared after her, shaking his head.

“Don’t be so hard on the poor child,” Forsythia said, defensively. Harold didn’t bother to answer. He’d given up on the girl who in his estimation had all the brainpower of a goose in heat. An uncomfortable silence settled over the table, interrupted only by Bella’s occasional slurping of her milk. Forsythia was on the verge of pouncing when Bliss locked eyes with h...