[cont.]
Madison texted again, this time with the deadlines for grad school applications. It took Barbara over a year to get as demanding and controlling as Madison was in mere months. What exactly did Maggie need from them? What was the balance here? Was their desire to modify her what she regarded as love?
Madison texted again and again Maggie did not respond. So why does the pattern repeat itself? What am I doing that this keeps happening? What needs to change? No matter how many times she asked herself the same questions, she couldn’t come up with an explanation of why she kept making the same mistake. She would never be happy with someone like her father.
She spent rest of the afternoon analyzing the people in her life, treating them like chess pieces with limited mobility. Regardless of how she moved the pawns, the queen always fell. It wasn’t any more constructive, she discovered, to view them more as characters in an allegory, a medieval morality play in bone and grisaille, a tale of virtues and vices. All of the people she knew reduced into a stiff little figures telling their sad stories, all lining up to form an ever revolving spiral of self destruction. She was no different. What was she doing wrong? Maybe she was condemned to go through the cycle a few more times before she could gain enough distance for enlightenment. Is enlightenment even possible? Is every action doomed to cement the spiral of death and misery?
Stop this mind loop. Just stop it. Odessa would tell her to spend less time locked up inside her head and more time smelling the roses. She sincerely wished that she could but the thoughts never stopped. The doubts, the memories, the small mistakes, all repeated themselves over and over. She couldn’t shut them out, not even in sleep.
In the end, she consoled herself as she locked up the gallery, it was important to keep everything in perspective. Seventy percent of the universe is dark energy; twenty five percent is dark matter. We have no clue how either functions. Ninety five percent of the universe is a complete mystery. Everything we know, have discovered, can understand is a mere slice of the vast number of galaxies, the stars, planets, black holes out there. Combine them with all the light and matter in existence and they comprise only five percent of the universe. And of that tiny percentage, we are even less than a mote of dust. Life really is inconsequential. Odessa was right. It was best simply to enjoy the moment and not get into a tizzy about it. But how?
Thirty Six
Barbara chastised herself. Sometimes her anger got the best of her and she did thoughtless things. Alienating Maggie was one prime example. Now that she was working on the documentary about Larry Cotter, she could use Odessa’s insight. Being so malicious about Maggie jeopardized access to that.
Barbara really wasn’t upset about the rants about Maggie. What she said was true and no one condescended to her without living to regret it. Sympathy, after all, was merely an elevated form of condescension. She made a point of standing up for herself. She was short in stature and people automatically treated her like a child. Her little sister Jenna was well over a foot taller than her. Jenna got offers to model. Probably just as well, since Jenna, everyone’s favorite, didn’t have the brain capacity of the average hamster. Standing around looking tall was about the extent of her skill set.
What she most regretted about the rants was that they weren’t as creative as they could have been. Instead of simply calling Maggie “trailer park trash”, she should have added a “stale cracker best suited for a doublewide tin trailer” or something better than that. Her rants had no panache. She was, however, relieved she hadn’t suggested incest in the postings. Everyone thinks of Southerners as inbred. It actually would explain why Dennis had so readily adopted Maggie, the daughter of his younger sister, but she didn’t think about that slur until the next day when it was too late to include.
But time was on Barbara’s side. Odessa and Larry were still seeing one another. That wouldn’t last. Larry had been assigned a sweet, stupid blonde 22 year old as his assistant by the studio. Larry wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off that cute morsel. And then Odessa would dump him, and in her anger and resentment, would be more likely to speak badly of him.
At that point, Barbara would apologize to Maggie. Maggie would accept the apology. Maggie didn’t like to think badly of people. She liked looking on the positive side. It made her easy to manipulate. With an apology, Barbara could worm her way back into Odessa’s confidences. She would get the story.
She had a plan for uncovering tidbits about Larry and it was moving along nicely. She had already interviewed sixteen of his past lovers. Interestingly none of them were producers or anything connected to film. He tended to troll among ecstatic readers and minor celebrities. The most perplexing part was that fifteen of them still spoke highly of him. The one who didn’t speak highly of him refused to speak of him at all. Barbara really had to work at it to get any of them to say anything which could be spliced into a criticism.
