Work Text:
i.
The last day of June that year was humid, storm clouds so heavy and gray that they almost turned black hung over the ocean. Lucille stood on the back porch, letting the wind blow against her face, pull a few strands of hair loose from under her headband, when she felt the muscles in her stomach tighten, aching and sharp, and then release.
She looked down at her swollen belly, uncomprehending for a moment, or perhaps in denial. Because this couldn’t be happening, not while she stood alone in the big house her husband built and then never came home to.
She still had two weeks. Two weeks to feel the summer air on her skin, to wander through the house drinking martinis out of the shaker, to catch her reflection in the panes protecting the newspaper clippings she had nailed to the wall.
Bluth Stock Goes Public. Bluth Among California’s 30 Under 30. Inside the Bluth Beach Front.
She wasn’t ready to add Bluth Welcomes First Child to the wall. She never even put up their wedding announcement.
She needed those two weeks.
Another contraction hit, and she lurched forward, gripping the railing so tightly her knuckles matched the white of the fresh paint. Cold drizzle off the Pacific started to blow in her face.
“I am not doing this sober,” she mumbled. Out on the horizon, lightning cracked against the waves. She turned away, back through the French doors to the living room, but she didn’t make it to the drink cart, sinking instead onto the loveseat with it’s back to the ocean.
“Elena!” She screeched, waving her hand in the air for the maid, for any other living person. She didn’t know any Spanish, had been deliberate in choosing to study French in school because that’s what rich, sophisticated women spoke.
M'aidez. It’s where the distress call “mayday” came from, she knew. Help me.
The rain came down harder and harder, Lucille could feel it on her bare shoulders. She undid her scarf and piled all her hair to the top of her head before tying it back up. She was starting to sweat; not perspire like a lady, the disgusting, panicked sweat like that of a day laborer. She shouted again for Elena, who mercifully came down the stairs just as the power cut out.
In the dim afternoon light still fighting it’s way through the clouds, Lucille knew she must look pathetic, clutching the arm of the couch, red-faced and barefoot.
“Don’t just stand there, you ingrate!” It came out as a shriek, and not a scary one. “I’m in labor!”
“Yes, Mrs. Bluth,” Elena said, wide-eyed and terrified, and ran for the phone Lucille knew had just lost connection.
Her mother told her once, a long time ago, that the first labor is always the hardest, the longest. “Your body doesn’t understand the attack,” she had said in between long drags of her cigarette. “An attack, by a thing it created. Isn’t that poisonous, Lucy?”
“Children are poison,” Lucille gasped to Elena, who nodded silently the way she always did, the way Lucille’s mother used to nod at her employers, as she dabbed her forehead with a cool cloth.
But her body must have been too toxic, her baby didn’t stand a change in any sort of fight. The thoughts in the back of her mind, the small part not blinded by pain–the power will come back on, I’ll phone George, I’ll phone an ambulance or Dr. Hartz, there’s still time to do this right–became very quickly irrelevant.
In barely ninety minutes, without her water breaking with a big show the way everyone always talked about, in a flash of pain so intense her vision went blurry, there was crying in the room.
“The baby, Mrs. Bluth, the baby–” Elena, near tears.
Cries that weren’t coming from her or Elena.
“Mrs. Bluth, it is a boy!” Elena hastily grabbed one of the patterned shags Lucille artfully threw over the couch and wrapping a tiny, shriveled red thing in it. “Here, here.”
It took Lucille a minute to realize Elena is telling her to hold him. This him. This baby boy. This son of hers.
She let her head tip back against the top of the loveseat, tried to catch her breath. “That blanket is cashmere. Were you raised in a barn?”
ii.
“Gob! Stop that, you’re scuffing the walls!” Lucille intercepted her three-year-old on his sixth consecutive sprint up and down the stairs, dragging a piece of driftwood he’d found on the beach against the wall as he did. He screamed when she scooped him up, but she carried him all the way down the stairs before releasing him to his nanny.
“Why the hell do you keep calling him that?” George said, not looking up from his paper.
“God knows you barely answer to George, I’m not giving you an excuse to ignore it further.” She hadn’t realized she’d given her son initials that were also an acronym until a few months before, but after seeing it on a form for his preschool, she found it slipped out easier. It certainly fit the scrappy, hyperactive child more than his borrowed, formal name.
George shifted, turning a page. “Maybe your voice is so shrill that it reaches a pitch unheard by humans!” He bellowed the second half of the sentence unexpectedly, and Lucille sat down hard on the couch, crossing her ankles.
“I was unaware you were a scientist, not an overblown realtor.” She said, recovering before there was a stunned silence.
She beckoned the nanny from the other room, watched her carry a still kicking and squirming Gob to his mother’s feet.
“Gob, come freshen Mommy’s drink,” she calls. Gob likes this ritual, plopping ice cubes into the tall, thin glass. She even lets him take a few sips of scotch if he’s particularly well behaved.
Gob bounced up, making a beeline for the drink cart, and for a minute Lucille almost loved him, the way he has her hair, her brown eyes that only seem to focus when toys or treats are involved.
But he turned with the handle of the ice bucket gripped in his pudgy hands, tripped–he has horrible coordination, even for a toddler–and the ice cubes fell to the carpet, where they dissolved into tiny wet dots all over the floor. Gob started screaming again and Lucille felt a headache blooming behind her left eye.
“Honestly, you cry more than Michael,” she said, standing up. Where was the baby? Probably still in his nursery, awake but strangely quiet like always.
Michael. That’s why you always gave a child their own name. There was inherently less disappointment with who they turned out to be.
Gob wailed more loudly. Lucille looked anywhere but at his face.
iii.
Lucille Bluth was not about to become a grandmother at thirty-eight.
She especially wasn’t becoming a grandmother at thirty-one, which is the age she told everybody she was. She had a little red notebook in a cabinet at the beach house, with all the fake names, birthdays, and lineage of her family printed in neat rows.
Narratives are important. The right kind of story is important.
Her idiot son knocking up Eve Holt before he’s even out of high school is not the right kind of story.
She sat in silence on her throne in the living room, lips pursed, as Gob blurt it all out, voice wavering like his coward father’s, words like accident and she said and catholic rolling around on his tongue. Lucille didn’t hug him, didn’t get up to sit beside him on the couch. She merely listened as he lay out his desperate plea, head in his hands, fingers tight around his own hair.
Only when he stopped giving her information and started hyperventilating did she finally speak.
She poured Gob a stiff scotch and pat his cheek. “Drink the whole thing and get ahold of yourself. Mother’s going to fix everything.”
M'aidez. Her oldest son takes French too.
Lucille stretched the corded kitchen phone as far as it could go, the curly wire getting caught in the door as she sat down on the balcony. She called Barry, arranged for him to wire $10,000 to Ms. Holt under the condition she never tell anyone who the baby’s father is, and that she never contact the Bluths again.
“As far as the world is concerned, this is a goddamn immaculate conception.” She lit a cigarette and turned to yell at Gob to go to his room, but he already disappeared. God knows where that boy went. If Buster wandered off like that her heart would stop. “I mean really, Barry,” she sighs. “The Catholics aren’t going to get this Gob.”
“I don’t follow.”
She hung up and found Gob in his bedroom, lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. An old record player one of his nannies bought him as a child, with Snoopy painted on the side, was playing right next to his head. Hello darkness my old friend…
“Your skull has already been shaken enough,” she said. Gob didn’t respond. His jaw vibrated. “Use a condom next time.”
“I know, Mom,” he spit.
She let out a ring of smoke, a trick she learned as a waitress to entice men. She was just like him at sixteen, jumping into bed with anyone who flashed her a smile, who could take her out of her life and mind, if only for a few minutes. And then; a lie about a diaphragm to the smarter of a pair of twins, the one who was going to be rich and influential, and here they all were. “God knows I should’ve.”
iv.
“Why does Gangy keep calling you Lucy?” Buster asked. He was clutching her leg as they stood in the hallway, even though he was about five years too old to be clinging to her like that. She doesn’t mind, though. His weight is steadying on her.
“The years of inhaling cleaning chemicals have scrambled her brain.” Lucille flexed her fingers, stared in the dark crack in the door. The hiss of the ventilator, the musty smell of age and decay escaped through the door. Her husband and daughter were nowhere to be found, even Michael had conveniently found himself too tied up at college to keep coming back, every time they thought Lucille’s mother was about to go.
Lucille didn’t have that luxury.
“Lucy?” Mrs. Ryan called again, like there weren’t people around, like she wasn’t smack dab in the middle of Lucille’s new life, her real life, the one that was always waiting for her if she peeled back enough layers of grubby wallpaper and second shift waitressing jobs.
“Yes?” She forced out, and moving slowly, shuffled into the room, Buster still clinging to her.
Down the hall, Gob fiddled with the piano, the one they paid to have tuned and moved to the beach house, back when Mary Ryan was still well enough to play. All the Bluths learned to play piano, with real lessons from a professional, not like Lucille. Her children wouldn’t pluck out songs in stolen minutes on a rich family’s baby grand, taught by ear by their mother. But Gob had a special knack for it, he seemed to take to anything that gave him attention, an audience. He was certainly better at it than at his ridiculous magic tricks.
Now, though, her twenty one-year-old son, degreeless and jobless and worst of all, the wrong kind of ambitious, was banging out what sounded like “The Final Countdown”, ten feet from his dying grandmother.
“Is that Georgie?” Mrs. Ryan asked softly.
No, it’s Gob, Lucille almost said before she remembered once upon a time they had called him Georgie, back when he was a toddler, the last time her mother had been in town.
“Yes.” To Buster, she whispered through clenched teeth. “Tell Gob to stop that or I’ll slam his hands under the lid.”
Mrs. Ryan touched Lucille’s arm. Her hands shockingly warm, somehow. “No, I like it. Talented boy.”
“Why is Gangy being mean about Gob?” Buster whispered, brows furrowed in confusion. Lucille absently smoothed down his hair. She thinks her mother might be serious. Clearly going senile, losing her mental facilities along with her physical ones.
“Get some rest,” she managed. “Rosa will bring you dinner when you wake up.”
Mary nodded, closing her eyes. “Georgie sounds lovely.”
It’s all Lucille could do to keep from running from the room.
Buster followed at her heels, and pointed like a pirate spotting land when he caught sight of Gob slumped on the piano bench, still playing.
“Slam his hands!” Buster commanded. Gob flinched, but didn’t remove his hands from the keys. He tilted his head up, looked his mother in the eye defiantly. Clearly hungover, barefoot and wearing a Hawaiian print shirt with all the buttons open. His bare chest mysteriously bruised purple on the right pec.
Lucille rolled her eyes and gently tapped Gob’s shoulder. “Play something from your lessons, none of that party music the homosexuals blast downtown.”
Gob turned pink under his freckles, but Lucille swore she caught him fighting a smile as he started something slower, sweeter. She and Buster were almost out to the deck when she realized he was still playing “The Final Countdown”, just at half tempo.
“God help me,” she mumbled, turning back to make a fresh drink. God M'aidez. God help them all.