Free The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Page A

just wish I knew how to recognize the right man.’
    â€˜Oh, pish tush,’ said Pippa. ‘You can be married to anybody, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜Pick any man in this room, in the right age range, I could be married to him.’
    Cheered up by the game, Moira surveyed the room, then pointed to a thin man wearing glasses, looking at the menu with distaste.
    â€˜He just needs his routines, that’s all,’ Pippa said. ‘I bet you if you anticipate his needs before he knows he has them, he’ll be docile as a lamb.’
    â€˜What about that one?’
    â€˜As long as you stick your finger up his ass when he’s coming, he won’t give you any trouble at all.’
    â€˜Pippa!’
    â€˜Sorry, it just slipped out.’
    â€˜You make it seem like … so unromantic.’
    â€˜Courtship is romantic. Marriage … is an act of will,’ said Pippa, taking a sip of water. ‘I mean, I adore Herb. But the marriage functions because we will it to. If you leave love to hold everything together, you can forget it. Love comes and goes with the breeze, minute by minute.’
    Moira shook her head, smiling, baffled. ‘I can’t get my head around that one,’ she said.
    â€˜You’ll see,’ said Pippa, amazed at this act of complacent cynicism she was playing. When in God’s name had she started saying ‘pish tush’? When had she even heard it? Did she really believe what she was saying, about marriage being an act of will? Yes, she realized sadly, she did. After all she and Herb had been through together, after what they had lost to be with each other – their very souls, perhaps – being married ended up being an act of will . It made her want to tear through the dull present, claw the vivid past back into herself, devour it like a bear busting into a camper’s stores. She wanted to run out of the restaurant, to find Herb andkiss him violently on the mouth (she could imagine his surprised, bemused expression as she crushed herself on him), to burst into tears, scream even – lose control at last. Instead she waited, smiling, for her lobster sandwich, and wondered if she might be on the brink of a very quiet nervous breakdown.

Pippa Begins
    I emerged from Suky’s womb fulsome and alert, fat as a six-month-old, and covered in fine, black fur. After a brief look round the delivery room, I turned my face to my mother’s swollen little dug and latched on, sucking so noisily that I sounded like a litter of piglets. My mother burst into tears at the thought of having given birth to this beast. The doctor’s reassurances that I had merely been gestating a little too long, and thus had time to grow a dusting of vestigial hair, harkening back to the days when human beings belonged to the ape family, did nothing to calm her down. Being the wife of a pastor, she was ambivalent about evolutionary theory, and couldn’t help feeling that my bestial looks, explicable as they apparently were by science, somehow reflected a basic flaw or sinfulness in her own character. Handing me back to the flabbergasted doctor, she launched herself off the delivery table, her legs still rubbery from the anesthetic, and ran down the hall, slipping on her own blood and screaming ‘ I had a monkey! ’
    It took two nurses and a doctor to subdue all five feet, two inches of Suky Sarkissian. They injected her with a sedative, then gave her a private room, which our insurance didn’t cover, but the hospital threw in for free.
    *
    The sense that her daughter magically embodied all that was wrong in herself never left my mother. Long after I had lost my furry coat and grown into a pretty, chubby little girl, she thought she discerned in me a deviousness, a lustiness, a general badness , which was, in secret fact, her own. At the age of two, I would clamp myself to her leg like an