The Exene Chronicles

Chapter 6

Ryan remembered smashing the antique lantern in the catalytic moment that drove her family out west. She had never been a tidy, picturesque type of little girl, but was always chubby and a bit disheveled, with wisps of hair hanging all around her face and falling into her eyes.

“It was an accident. I’m sorry, Mommy.” Ryan buried her guilty face into small, plump hands, white knee socks soiled with dirt and sunken down around her ankles. Her lavender polyester dress—a frock one of the Brady girls might have worn—stretched tight around her belly.

Karen Green hunched over the coffee table chain smoking, her face bruised with dark emotion. She couldn’t have cared less about the lamp. “So long as you haven’t cut yourself, sweetie,” she muttered. She stashed the bottle of gin beneath the table, taking aimless swigs when Ryan’s head was turned. Drinking in broad daylight in front of a first grader felt wrong—unseemly.

“Never mind the lamp, just go and get yourself a dolly to play with,” she whispered before crashing face-first onto the couch drunk. The neighbors in their modest apartment complex smelled smoke and called the fire department.

Karen Green, morose and worked over at twenty-eight by fatigue, the taste of dissatisfaction thick inside her mouth. Exhausted by the fact that whatever was supposed to have happened—the culmination of some unspoken dream—never had.

She had lived her dream of being a stewardess, sort of. She’d never flown to Paris, Milan, or even New York. For some reason her supervisor always selected her for the domestic, Midwestern shifts. Minneapolis to Chicago, Milwaukee to St. Louis. Instead of a handsome pilot with whom to fall in love, she was routinely paired with Mr. James, a belligerent captain. She’d met Bruce, a computer technician, and had been three months pregnant with Ryan on her wedding day, and that had been that.

In the way children filter and store odd tidbits of old wives’ tales and garbled information, cobbling together their own encyclopedias of knowledge, Ryan believed coffee was good for a variety of things, including the revival of a mother passed out on the sofa at 1 p.m. She’d fiddled with the stove and a tea towel caught fire. Too panicked to move, she watched—a plump and well-meaning little girl, both haunted and seduced by the flames illuminating her face. The paramedics busted through the door and carried Ryan and Karen to safety.

For a time, Bruce Green had applied himself, stroking Karen’s hair in the hospital, where they’d kept her and Ryan under observation for smoke inhalation. Recklessly, like diamonds after a fight, Bruce proffered California. They’d discussed it before, but now was the time to go. Sunshine, beaches; they’d teach their kids to surf. California might be her last shot—at glamour, adventure, the acquisition of some vague success, Karen reckoned dimly at the time. Out of the hospital and sober for a week, “We’re moving out west,” she announced triumphantly at the salon as the girl filed her nails. Similar declarations were made at church on Sunday and over the telephone to sisters, cousins, and friends.

In the end, it had been just what they’d called it and nothing more. A move. A change of geographic location. Ungirded, removed from extended family gatherings and potluck suppers at church—in some way, things simply got worse. The Greens were not wealthy; they were neither tanned nor thin. They did not own tennis rackets or move in the type of circle that brunched at the Hotel Del or went sailing at the weekend. Their California dream: so close at hand, yet impossibly out of reach.

In 1975, Ryan Green broke a lantern in Palatine, Illinois. Long before Christie Brinkley ever appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan in a high-cut swimsuit, Ryan knew she had failed. In the seven minutes it had taken for the firemen and paramedics to arrive, she’d gathered new data and collected new facts for her encyclopedia.