Reunion (3 page)

On today’s show were a sociologist, a high school superintendent, a Christian minister, and three teens—one boy and two girls. One of the girls was eight months pregnant. The topic was abstinence education.

In talking with Peter,
TBRS’s
producer, about this show, Blue had protested his suggestion that she open with an audience poll. Getting the audience involved in hot-button issues had in the past led to a
Jerry Springer–like
atmosphere she had to work hard to redirect. Peter said,
yes, but think of the drama. “We
want
people to engage,” he said. “And not only because it’s good for ratings.” She agreed in part; engagement was the point of it all, or was supposed to be the point.

He continued, “You saw the latest numbers. We’re slipping—just a little, and obviously we’ll bring it back up, but if we lose our edge right now, we lose our contract renewal leverage.” Lower ratings also led to lower ad revenues, lower production budgets, more difficulty in booking guests who had the power to draw viewers—all of which then trickled down to lower salaries for everyone on her payroll. Lower salaries meant good people jumped onto newer, flashier, competing ships. Ultimately, she’d agreed to do the poll.

Standing at the front of the stage, she welcomed the audience. Three hundred faces of all skin tones and both genders watched her eagerly, fans from any and every place on Earth. Beyond, too, she sometimes suspected. While Marcy claimed there was an angel in every audience, Blue rather thought there was an alien, who would inevitably write in to rant about how offbase she’d been on a particular topic, even if that topic was the fifty best uses of phyllo.

“Let me introduce you to some typical teens,” Blue said, and the two teenage girls appeared from the wings to take their seats behind her. Indeed, both girls were typical-looking, with long brown hair and eye makeup and TV-modest clothing bearing popular-brand logos. Both girls were white.

Facing the audience, she said, “Kendra and Stacey—who is eight months pregnant—are seventeen-year-olds from intact middle-class families. Their parents are professionals. Both girls are B-students, involved in extracurricular activities”—this drew a chuckle from some of the audience—“and both have made preliminary plans to attend college. The main difference in these young women’s lives is that one of them attends a high school that follows an abstinence-only curriculum, and one attends a school where teenage sexuality is considered ‘normal’ and the students are educated accordingly. Abstinence is taught as one of several possible choices.”

She stepped down from the dais and walked to the lip of the stage.
“With a show of hands: Which of you thinks Stacey, our pregnant teen, got the sex-is-normal message?”

About half of the audience raised hands.

“Now, who thinks Kendra did?”

Most of the other hands went up, as did the volume of voices, arguments already begun.

Blue waited a beat, resisting the urge to rub her face. Looking into Camera 4, she said, “The answer, when we come back.”

She allowed the rumbling to continue during the break, hoping the audience would get it out of the way now; things were not going to get better.

Taking a seat between the girls, she looked at each of their nervous faces. “Are you hanging in there?”

Kendra shrugged. Stacey shifted in her chair and smoothed her pink maternity top. “I’m okay, I guess,” she whispered.

In a moment, they were on-air again. Blue said, “With me today are Kendra and Stacey, Chicago-area teenagers who, like most of their peers, are dealing as best they can with the pressures of growing up in our increasingly sexualized culture.

“Before the break I polled the audience on which of these girls received the teen-sex-is-normal message from her school, and which was taught to abstain until marriage.” She looked at Camera 2: “Brad, give us that tight view—audience, watch the screen.”

She waited, knowing that on the screen behind her would be a close-up image of a girl’s left hand, on which there was a silver ring. Brad nodded, and Blue continued, “This is known as a purity ring, representing adherence to the abstinence ideal: a vow of chastity, a promise to wait for the right man—or woman, because some young men are wearing them, too—and marriage.

“Girls, raise your hands.”

Of the four hands now displayed, three were bare of jewelry, as they’d arranged ahead of time.

The silver glinted, of course, from Stacey’s left hand.

Amidst the reactions of surprise from many in the audience, and satisfaction
from others, a skinny, dark-haired woman in the middle of the room stood up and yelled, “Sinner! Hypocrite! Take off that ring!”

Stacey’s face crumpled. “It’s not wrong! I love him,” she said, then burst into tears.

And before Blue could stop herself, she did, too.

fter refereeing fifteen rounds between the sociologist and the minister—had Peter chosen such a closed-minded, sanctimonious old man on purpose?—Blue escaped the set the minute they were clear. Reverend Mark Masterson, a tall, self-serious man with heavy jowls and bottle-black hair, followed her backstage.

“Just what do you think you’re going to accomplish by telling teenage girls to go ahead and have sex?”

“Was that what I said?”

“You made that child out to be a hero.”

He’d made no secret of his disdain for the facts and the statistics, which were the substance of her supposed endorsement. Blue looked at him coolly. “And you made her out to be a whore—I’m sorry, ‘whoremonger’ was your word, wasn’t it? I thought you were a minister, but apparently you’re a judge.”

He frowned down at her, his height giving him an illusion of superiority she was sure he made the most of. He said, “When I agreed to do this show, I was under the impression that you had a conscience.”

“And I was under the impression that someone who has committed to serving his community would at least attempt to do so.”

He straightened the lapels of his brown suit jacket and picked off a spot of lint. “These are children we’re talking about. They require firmness and absolutes to shut down ungodly urges. Romans chapter eight, verse thirteen, for example: ‘For if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.’”

“So Stacey must die? That’s a reasonable punishment.”

“Now let’s not be ridiculous. The Bible permits a certain amount of interpretation.”

Blue nodded. “So true. Excuse me.” Giving him no chance to reply, she walked away quickly, shoulders pulled back, chin up, and shut herself in her dressing room. She’d known there would be no easy consensus on such a complex issue, but just once she would have liked to have the kind of powers needed to instantly transform a person like Master-son into a hormonal, love-struck teenage girl.

Blue was pulling off her boots when Marcy joined her, looking as fresh and enthused now, at four-fifteen, as she had at eight this morning. It was more than Marcy’s white-blond hair (“Of course it’s dyed,” she’d told a woman in the audience during a commercial break. “Nature doesn’t make this color …”), more than her flared-leg jeans and gray cashmere T-shirt. Marcy had what Blue’s mother Nancy Kucharski called “a dynamic aura,” grown even more dynamic since meeting Stephen Boyd, an industrial designer who was teaching Marcy ballroom dance. Passion created that aura, Nancy said. “It’s good for the complexion, and not bad for the rest of the body, either!” Blue had to take her word for it—and an experienced word it was.

“Good show,” Marcy said, as though things had gone just as well as the day before, when they’d hosted four champion dog breeders and four captivating puppies.

“Compared to what?” Blue stepped out of her pants and stripped off the substitute Escada blouse (there were two of everything, just in case) then put on gym gear and brown velour sweats. Or rather, a brown velour track suit, as they were being called again. The seventies were back, complete with Barry Manilow and Cat Stevens and Neil Diamond on the radio, which Blue didn’t mind so much. The songs were reminders of a time when she was young enough to believe she knew where she stood.

“I’m serious. Except for that little … outburst, you really kept things under control.”

Blue shook her head, still embarrassed. “I don’t know what that was about.”

“Empathy, maybe.”

“Is Peter having a fit?”

“He’s too busy working on a spin strategy. Stacey’s still a mess though, poor thing.”

“I suspect she’s going to need therapy.”

“You
didn’t.”

“I did. I just didn’t get any.”

Marcy reached behind Blue to straighten her hood. “Speaking of misguided youths, your mother called. She’s not coming to the Keys with us after all; she says she met someone and he wants her all to himself this weekend.”

“Someone named Calvin,” Blue said, more curious than surprised. “She apprised me the other day. He owns a bookstore—not the ‘adult’ type, a real one, but that’s all I know. Did she tell you anything about him?”

“Only that they’ll be by your place for drinks at eight tonight. She said to tell you don’t worry, they won’t stay long.”

Calvin was Nancy Kucharski’s third “boyfriend” since New Year’s. He’d been there at her mother’s place when Blue called last Monday night. The call had been brief, with Calvin waiting and Joni Mitchell crooning loudly in the background. Blue had a strong suspicion that Joni wasn’t her mother’s only throwback indulgence; the last time she’d visited her mother’s apartment, the place had smelled vaguely of marijuana.

Her mother hadn’t waited for the seventies retro movement to catch up with her; she’d continued to march as its poster child these three decades since. Her hair, left alone to evolve to a natural silver-gray, was past her shoulders and often braided. Her favorite earrings were small silver peace signs. She wore vegetable-dyed t-shirts to work in her rooftop organic garden, and she had recently pierced her nose. Probably she’d been smoking pot all along—maybe even grew it, organic and therefore wholesome—and where Blue was concerned was simply following their mutual and long-established policy of Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

Marcy dropped a manila folder onto the countertop in front of Blue. “This has your itinerary and Peter’s final notes for next week. With spring break in progress, we’re sure to have some great crowds. Oh, the
first scuba class is set for Sunday at nine. I know you said you’re not planning to dive, but I think you should. Key West has some of the best reefs in the northern hemisphere and you can’t see them if you don’t do the course.”

Blue removed her makeup with pre-soaked pads—the sort of single-use product her mother hated—while skimming the itinerary. They’d leave Chicago early tomorrow, arriving in Key West at about ten. The whole crew would stay at the Ocean Key Resort, where, for her, a spacious oceanfront suite would make a nice home-away-from-home for the week.

She said, “I’m afraid I’ll get the bends,” a cover for the truth, that she was a lousy swimmer.

“Do you even know what the bends is?”

“Hey,” Blue said, still reading, “now that my mom has bailed, why don’t you bunk with me in my suite? It’s two bedrooms. We can stay up late watching Owen Wilson DVDs. I was so embarrassed when we had him on last time and I had to admit I hadn’t seen
Shanghai Noon.”

“I would … but I invited Stephen along, and …”

“Say no more,” Blue said, closing the folder.

“Besides, you should really get out some, while we’re there. I hear the nightlife is crazy good.”

“Sure. I’ll just hang out in bars and, I don’t know, take home whoever’s willing.”

“If you did a little more of that, then—”

“Then what?” Her own answers: Then she might have had
multiple
fatherless children, as her mother did. A career of cleaning motel rooms and checking groceries and up-selling fruit baskets at a phone bank for catalog retailers every holiday season.

Then she wouldn’t be cloistered in this building, in this life.

Marcy said, “Nothing, forget it. You should just have more fun, that’s all. Life is short, and you’ve paid your dues.”

Blue leaned over and took longer than she needed to tie her sneakers. “So, I’m off to the gym. Guess I’ll see you—and Stephen—at Midway, six-forty-five am sharp.”

“Blue?”

She sat up. “Yeah?”

“What were you doing out there, on the fire escape?”

“The fire escape?” She looked out the window. The snow was still falling with vigor.

“Yeah,” Marcy said, “you know, that steel thing, used for egress in the event of an emergency. Was there some emergency I should know about?”

“Branford called.” The private detective she’d had on retainer for almost four years now.

“And?”

“And he has a lead. I don’t have any details yet.” She looked at Marcy and saw her at nineteen, saw her as Bat, heard her saying even back then, days and weeks afterward, that it wasn’t too late to find the child. She could change her mind, she could track him down.

Now Marcy said, “Ah.” That was all there was
to
say, so many fruitless years into the search.