Julia and the Art of Practical Travel Read online

  On the lawn in front of us sat a bunch of men with long hair. I’d never seen men with long hair before, except for pictures of Jesus. One of them was playing a guitar, and they were passing around a skinny, funny-smelling cigarette, and some of them looked pretty dirty. Aunt Constance slowly walked up to them, and I could practically see her heart beating in her chest.

  I’m terribly sorry to bother you, she said, and she fished my mother’s picture out of her basket purse and handed it to the men. Have any of you seen this lady? she asked, and added: Her name is Rosemary Lancaster, of the Hudson Valley Lancasters.

  The what? asked one of them.

  The Hudson Valley Lancasters—is that a butter company or something? snickered another.

  Why, no, said Aunt Constance, and faltered. It’s just a … family.

  The long-haired man who was holding the guitar smiled a wicked smile that reminded me of the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and then he began to strum his guitar. He sang:

  “A lost little lady

  Named Rosemary,

  Once docile and sweet,

  Now out on the street.

  No more pearls, no more gloves,

  Only grass and free love.”

  Aunt Constance turned bright red and gasped.

  We have a child with us, she said. Please mind your manners.

  You’re right, said one of the other men with long hair; he had on sunglasses shaped like little perfectly round mirrors over his eyes. Where are our manners? Little girl, would you like some? Sharing is good.

  And then he held out the skinny cigarette to me.

  No, thank you, I said. Lancasters don’t smoke. Grandmother always said that it’s unladylike.

  They all laughed.

  You’re both from a different planet, one of them said to us. You should go back to the mom-and-daughter knitting club or Junior League, and bake some cakes together or something.

  She’s not my mother, I informed them, and went on. My mother is the lady in that picture with the pearls and she’s missing. This is my aunt Constance, and she never had any children. Belfry says she’s an old maid, but I told him that she’s not that old.

  Joooooolia, thundered Aunt Constance. That’s enough; follow me this instant.

  She grabbed my shoulders and marched me away, her hands trembling. We were almost out of the park when one of the long-haired men caught up to us.

  Hang on, he told her. I think that I know where that kid’s mom might be.

  Where is that? asked Aunt Constance warily.

  A house on Waverly Place, he said. Look for a pink brick place with black shutters.

  Thank you very much, Aunt Constance said, and I could tell that she didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  Anyway, there’s a lady there who looks just like that little girl, the man said, pointing at me. But she’s been on a long trip, so be careful. Who knows what shape she’ll be in when you get there?

  Well—a trip, said Aunt Constance to me after we’d walked away. She was looking for Waverly Place on a map, and while she looked, she continued in a very distracted way: I wonder where she went—maybe Nantucket. Your mother always liked Nantucket. And a pink house—that sounds quaint.

  But when we got to a pink house with black shutters, it didn’t look all that quaint. Paint hung in peels off the front of the little brick building, but there were some pots of brightly colored flowers on the front stoop. A dirty dog lay on the front landing but didn’t even raise its head as we walked up the stairs.

  This doesn’t look too horrible, said Aunt Constance in a crackly voice, and she knocked on the front door.

  Yoo-hoo, she called. Rosemary, it’s Constance. I’m here with Julia. Are you in there?

  The front door opened, but the woman standing on the other side wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t carrying lilies and she wasn’t wearing pearls.

  In fact, she wasn’t wearing anything but a headband over her long, stringy, unwashed hair.

  Aunt Constance quickly covered my eyes with her hand and shoveled me back down the front stairs. Before I knew what was happening, we were in a taxi back up to Tipsy Lipps’s apartment. Aunt Constance held her throat with her gloved hand and stared out the window the whole time, her eyes glassy with tears.

  That was the last time she took me along down to the Village to look for my mother.

  Once, when we were studying geography together, my governess taught me about the hottest places on Earth. Like the Sahara Desert or the jungles at the equator. And, of course, the hottest part of all is inside the earth, at the core, where it’s all lava and fire and swirling steam.

  But I really can’t imagine that any of those places is hotter than Tipsy Lipps’s apartment in the summertime. First of all, she kept baskets of potpourri everywhere, and every time you opened a window, those smelly petals would blow all over the place, getting stuck in her shaggy fur rugs. So the windows stayed closed at all times and fans were obviously out of the question too.

  There was nothing to do but sit around and drip, drip, drip like an old faucet. Every day, Aunt Constance would put on her hat and gloves and disappear into a yellow taxicab, and I knew that she was heading down to Greenwich Village again to look for my mother among naked, headband-wearing ladies and men with Jesus hair. But I would stay put with Tipsy Lipps instead, because Aunt Constance didn’t want me to get exposed to any more “morally dissolute persons.”

  That’s how I learned that all of Tipsy Lipps’s foot-high hairdos were really wigs, because the moment Aunt Constance left each day, Tipsy Lipps would take her wig off and lie on a gold chaise longue, waving a feather fan over her face. I wished that Belfry could have seen that: she looked just like an old buzzard, if old buzzards wore lipstick and fake eyelashes.

  One afternoon, there was a knock at the front door, and then a bunch of movers came in carrying splintery crates with the words WINDY RIDGE stamped in red letters on the sides.

  Oooo, the Windy Ridge loot! yelled Tipsy Lipps once the workers had opened the crates with crowbars. She went on as she pawed through the boxes: Oh, how marvelous it all is.

  Then she scowled: Of course, it all needs to be cleaned. She turned to me and said: Come here, Julia, and help me get all of this silver and china out of the boxes. How could your aunt and grandmother let all of this get so filthy?

  I don’t know, I told her, and added: They just didn’t use it as much anymore once Grandmother went upstairs into her bedroom and stopped coming down.

  Well, said Tipsy Lipps, you can bet your boots that it’s gonna get used now. Oh yes, oh yes. You know what? I’m going to throw a big dinner party to show off all of my new, shining Lancaster loot. Everyone will positively drool with envy! I simply can’t believe that this all belongs to me now.

  She pulled a skinny little fork out of one of the boxes.

  What’s this used for? she wondered, and turned to me for an answer.

  I don’t know what came over me then. It was an oyster fork, plain as day, but instead of telling her that, I said:

  It’s for scratching your head at the dinner table. Grandmother always told us that it’s very bad manners to touch your hair with your fingers in the presence of guests.

  Tipsy Lipps studied the fork carefully. I suppose that makes sense, she decided.

  And what about this? she asked, holding up a silver candle snuffer, which is a little cap dangling from the end of a silver stick; the cap goes over the candle flame and puts it out.

  That, I told Tipsy Lipps, is a little hat. You put it on top of your head as everyone’s taking their seat at the table, and tip it forward with the stick every time someone sits down or gets up.

  Aunt Constance and Grandmother would have been shocked at these whoppers I was making up. Even I was surprising myself, lying to a grown-up like that. Maybe it was seeing Tipsy Lipps pawing through all of our things and calling it loot that made me do it. But it was also kind of fun.

  You are going t
o help me with this dinner party, Tipsy Lipps told me after rummaging through the rest of our Windy Ridge silver. I need to know how all of these fancy things work—every fork and spoon and bowl. None of my guests will ever have seen such a glistening spectacle before. Marie Antoinette herself would be jealous.

  I didn’t know what this meant or who Marie Antoinette was, but I realized then that I’d backed myself into a corner with my whoppers. Now I’d have to come up with stories about all of that stuff, and I didn’t even have Belfry to help me. He was the king of making up whoppers. Tipsy Lipps was staring at me in a way that made me feel like I was a dusty painting she’d found in the attic that was secretly worth a lot of money.

  The dinner party was set for exactly a week from that very day.

  I barely got a lick of sleep that week. Tipsy Lipps meant business with this party that was supposed to make Marie Antoinette jealous. Sometimes she would even wake me up in the middle of the night to ask questions like, What did your grandmother use to cover tables at big parties? I told her that no one in their right mind would use the fine Lancaster linen tablecloths that she’d bought as part of the “loot.” Instead, I said, Lancasters always used plastic tarps, the kind that painters use on floors and roofs. She looked surprised but didn’t question me. Another Tipsy Lipps question: What did the Lancasters serve at the cocktail hour? Oh, Kool-Aid and gin, with lots and lots of sugar mixed in, I told her without even opening my eyes this time.

  Usually she whispered these questions to me in a hissy sort of way, so she wouldn’t wake up Aunt Constance. Because that was another thing: Aunt Constance was not allowed to know that I was helping Tipsy Lipps get ready for her big party. It was a big secret. Tipsy Lipps wanted everyone to think that she knew how to entertain like a Lancaster on her own, and she wanted Aunt Constance to be as impressed as Marie Antoinette.

  Not that Aunt Constance was paying attention to anything that Tipsy Lipps was doing anyway. She didn’t seem to be having any luck finding my mother down in the Village, despite spending every day questioning the morally dissolute hippies there. Instead of having dinner with Tipsy Lipps and me, she would go right to her room and lie on her bed with a washcloth over her eyes.

  The night of the big dinner party arrived at last. Tipsy Lipps had closed the doors to the dining room so no one could behold it before the right moment, and she was so nervous that I thought her buzzardy head might shoot right off her shoulders.

  I will just lie on the floor and die if anything goes wrong tonight, she told me.

  Apparently all sorts of terribly important people were coming, around twenty of them. As they arrived, my job was to stand at her front door and, every time someone came in, I would give them a goblet of bright red Kool-Aid gin, curtsy, and say:

  How do you do, sir? How do you do, madam? I am Julia Lancaster. Welcome to the well-appointed residence of Mrs. Tipsy von Lipp. Please do enjoy your evening.

  Aunt Constance was aghast when she saw me greeting the guests this way. She pulled me behind a potted palm tree and demanded to know what on earth I was doing.

  I’m helping Tipsy Lipps, I told her. She wants to impress Marie Antoinette with her party.

  And before Aunt Constance could say another word, Tipsy Lipps teetered into the middle of the room, holding the candle snuffer on top of her head like it was a little hat. Around her neck dangled a fur stole with about ten little fox heads stuck onto it. (Naturally I’d told her that important hostesses always wore fox-fur stoles with the heads still on them, and Tipsy had bought a bunch of them from a taxidermist downtown and even sewed them on herself.) She raised the snuffer into the air and stood there with her arm up like the Statue of Liberty for a minute before declaring:

  Darlings, I welcome you to my table.

  And with that, she ran over to the dining room doors and threw them open.

  All of the guests gasped. The room had been made over to look like the inside of a circus tent—which is exactly how Grandmother used to decorate for all of our summer soirées, I’d told her. Bales of scratchy hay had been stacked up against the wall. An old monkey wearing a little red hat and jacket stood miserably in the doorway, holding a bowl of olives. It screeched when Tipsy Lipps tried to pat it on the head.

  Has she gone mad? whispered one woman to her husband.

  This is without a doubt the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen, whispered another.

  Darlings, Tipsy Lipps sang out. Tonight is a very special occasion. I’m not sure if you know this, but I have been such good friends with the illustrious Lancasters for ever so long. Why, we go back simply ages. As you may have heard, the family has fallen on hard times.

  Aunt Constance’s face flushed a deep red.

  Well, I was absolutely in despair when I heard that they were being forced to sell their ancestral home, Windy Ridge, Tipsy Lipps went on. So I swept upstate and bought it, to help my dear, treasured friends.

  It was the Christian thing to do, she added solemnly, and conjured up a modest blush.

  Tonight’s party is in honor of poor, dear Constance Lancaster and poor, dear little Julia Lancaster, she proclaimed. Windy Ridge lives on, dears—here in my apartment. So take heart—and she gave me a couple of hard pats on the shoulder. Then she tipped the candle snuffer off her head and bid us all to take our seats.

  The moment everyone sat down, the monkey threw the bowl of olives into the air and everyone got sprayed with olive juice.

  Bad monkey! Bad monkey! cried Tipsy Lipps.

  Why do you have that putrid animal here in the first place? one of the guests demanded, wiping olive juice from her eyes.

  Why, all of the finest society hostesses have monkey servers at their supper parties, said Tipsy Lipps, but she gave me a terrible look when she said it and I could tell that she was beginning to suspect that I’d been pulling her leg all along.

  Just then two servers wearing clown costumes lugged an enormous pie into the room and heaved it onto the dining room table.

  Oh, wonderful—the main course, croaked Tipsy Lipps.

  I sat straight up on my chair; my heart pounded. I had told her that Lancasters always serve songbird pies at their parties, but I didn’t think that old Tipsy would actually go ahead and have one made. Boy, was I wrong. She took one of our long silver Lancaster knives and slit the crust down the middle, and suddenly a flock of birds shot out of the pie and flew like a swarm of bees around the room. All of the ladies screamed their heads off. Then the birds really went crazy and one of them even got caught in Tipsy’s wig, lifting it right off her head and dropping it back down again sideways.

  Well, it’s awfully late, yelled one man even though it was only seven o’clock. I have to be going. Thank you for a lovely evening, he added, and practically ran out of the room.

  All of the other guests stood up and followed him. Poor Tipsy Lipps tipped the candle snuffer from her head over and over again as each person escaped her dinner party, and when the last one left, she flung open the window and shooed all of the songbirds out into the city sky.

  You are a ghastly child, Julia Lancaster, cried Tipsy Lipps, and then she ran out of the room too.

  Aunt Constance and I were the only ones left sitting at the table. She stared at me and I knew that she knew what I’d done, and I squeezed my eyes shut and cringed, waiting for her to really let me have it.

  But when I opened my eyes a crack, I saw that she was trying not to smile.

  Well, Joooooolia, she said finally. At least you know what it takes to make a memorable dinner party. Not everyone has that gift.

  And we went off to bed.

  Two things happened after the Tipsy party:

  1. Tipsy Lipps didn’t come out of her bedroom for three days. And when she finally did come out, she told her servants to pack up the Windy Ridge loot and send it to Sotheby’s auction house, where it would get sold to somebody new. Then she told Aunt Constance that she’d decided to redecorate her entire apartment and that there wouldn’t be room for u
s anymore, so we would have to find someplace else to stay. She wouldn’t even look at me.

  2. That same day, Aunt Constance came back from Greenwich Village very excited and told me that she finally had a lead. A non–morally dissolute hippie had recognized the picture of my mother at last and told Aunt Constance where we might be able to find her. The good news: it was not in Greenwich Village. The bad news: she had apparently gone all the way down south with a bunch of other hippies to a city named New Orleans to learn about something called voodoo, so we would have to get back into the car with our trunks and practical-travel things and go down there to find her.

  As we drove out of New York City the next morning, I asked Aunt Constance what voodoo was. She gripped the steering wheel extra-hard and said we’d find out soon enough.

  Somewhere along the way, I think in New Jersey, we stopped at a gas station and bought a map of the United States of America. It practically covered the whole hood of our car when you opened it up, so Aunt Constance would only let me open it a little bit at a time while we were driving. When I got tired of looking out the window, I looked at the map instead and made a list of the funniest town names. Some of my favorites:

  • Hot Coffee, Mississippi

  • Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

  • Mischief, Texas

  • Gunslinger, Missouri

  • High and Mighty, Oklahoma

  • Loveless, Arkansas

  When we got to Maryland, Aunt Constance let us stop at a Howard Johnson’s to have strawberry ice cream and I wrote down some of the best town names on a postcard with a picture of some crabs on the front and mailed it off to Belfry:

  Soon we stopped going through cities and started going through fields and forests.

  We’re in a state called West Virginia, Aunt Constance told me.

  It’s pretty, I said, looking out at all of the pine trees.

  No, it’s a beastly place, said Aunt Constance, who added that she was very keen to get through it as quickly as possible, and that’s when she drove right over a big hole in the road and black smoke started to come out from under the hood. After a while, a tow truck came and dragged our car into the nearest town, which was called Paw Paw. By then it was too late to put this name on my postcard to Belfry—I’d sent it already—but I swore to remember it and add it to the next one.