A Mother's Love (20 page)

I arrived at Mike's, said hello to Alma and Suzette. “So how's the little man?” Alma said.

“Oh, fine, fine.” I sat down to work—a pin that needed to be reset. But it was an ugly, foolish piece and I couldn't imagine who would wear such a thing. Someone who had to have things they didn't really want or need. The pin would probably just go back into the jewelry box, never to be worn again. As I worked, my mind wandered. Did Viviana look both ways before crossing the street? Would she go down the wrong street and get caught in crossfire? Perhaps I should have checked her out further. Blood test. Police record. She could just walk out the door and disappear. I had no home address for her. I had no way of finding her.

I picked up the phone and dialed but there was no answer. I waited a few moments and tried again. Then I phoned Mara, thinking I could ask her more about Viviana, but she wasn't home. Mike came into the workroom and saw me on the phone. “Ivy,” he said, “it's a beautiful day. They've gone for a walk. Anybody in her right mind would.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing he was right. Smiling, I settled back to work. The pin was a circle of
diamonds and sapphires with a ruby center. Past its prime, if it ever had a prime. I envisioned it worn by someone's great-grandmother, a frigid, meddling woman who damaged all who came within her grasp.

Picking at the setting, I contemplated the properties of stones. Diamonds and sapphires, purple onyx and mother-of-pearl. The ancients believed that some could cast a spell and others, like crystal, could heal. Ruby cured inflammation and flatulence; yellow sapphire was an antidote to poison. For Emerson the ruby was a drop of frozen wine. The Holy Grail was carved from emerald. Emeralds predict the future; diamonds protect against evil. It's not for nothing that they're a girl's best friend.

What you look for in a diamond is clarity. The hardest mineral of all, unlike gold, which is the most pliable yet the strongest. Only a diamond can cut itself. So how did the first carver cut the first diamond, I wondered. In the refractions of diamonds I've seen the faces of the miners who pull them from the earth. I cannot work with these stones and not think of the men's toil. In books I've seen the dark, despairing faces of the men of South Africa, men who often die—if not in the mines then in riots outside the mines. They riot because the conditions they live in are horrible and because they are separated from family and home. When they go to see their children, they are
docked their pay. I wish I had another way of earning a living.

I went to the phone again, but there was still no answer. Even though it was a beautiful spring day, shouldn't they be home by now, getting ready for a nap or a bath? Where could they have gone for so long? I wish I had checked her references. She'd offered them to me, but I had refused. I'd just believed what she told me. But I didn't know her at all; she was a complete stranger. I had entrusted my flesh and blood to a stranger. I told Mike I had to go. I had an emergency. I had been there only three hours, but already I was out the door.

I raced home and walked into an empty apartment. It was neat, the dishes put away. Everything smelled fresh and clean; the bed was made, the laundry done. But there was no sign of them. I have been here before, I told myself. This isn't the first time I've come home and found everything gone. I rushed back into the street and walked up and down the block, wondering whom I could turn to, whom I could call. Mara had recommended Viviana, but, then, how well did I know Mara? And how well had she known Viviana? I walked across the street and buzzed Mara, but she still wasn't home. I headed over to Riverside Park, where I could clear my head and think. I'd figure out what to do.

In the park the dogwood was in bloom. Pink-and-white blossoms fluttered down. First I walked
north, toward 116th Street. The park was full of joggers, prams, dog walkers. But Viviana and Bobby were nowhere to be seen. When I got farther north than I thought they'd be, I turned south. I passed the same joggers, the same prams, the same dog walkers. Still no sign of them. How far could she have gone? I began to think about how I'd track Viviana down. Mara would give me the name of the friend for whom Viviana had worked, and she'd know how to locate her. Eventually I would find them.

I was approaching Ninety-sixth Street when I saw a bench lined with nannies. There sat Viviana in the shade with Bobby. He had balloons tied to his stroller and was laughing. Viviana was singing to him. She looked up and saw me standing there. “What are you doing here? Why aren't you at work?”

“I called. There was no answer. I got worried. I came home.”

“Good, now go back to work.” She spoke with annoyance. “Haven't you got better things to do?”

M
Y MOTHER took a job at the At First Sight marriage chapel. It wasn't on the Strip, where the rows of marriage chapels were like the Hitching Post and Cupid's Arrow. The At First Sight was located a little way outside of town, along the desert road coming into Vegas on a dry dusty lot surrounded by scrub cactus and piñon. It took me a while to understand that the name didn't have anything to do with the fact that the chapel was one of the first things you saw when you entered the Valley of Fire.

My mother got mostly the in-transit trade. The ones who on impulse zipped off the highway, got married, gambled away what they had in their pockets, and hopped back into the car. Nine out of ten times, she said, they were heading west. Not many people heading back east stopped to get married. People heading east, my mother said, had no more illusions.

Business was very good when she went to work there because of the nuclear tests at Yucca Flats. Often the tests were delayed due to weather, and the soldiers, dying of boredom, came into Vegas, met some girls at the casinos, and got married, just like that. At times I suspected that my mother herself left town with one of these men.

Getting married on the Strip was more exciting than painting rocks—an assignment one of their commanding officers had conceived for them, one of the soldiers told my mother on a day when I was there, helping her fold bows. The officer had them paint the rocks brilliant shades of glacier blue, autumn bronze, and harvest gold. Make the desert beautiful, he said. One of the soldiers complained to my mother that Korea had been more interesting than this.

But the nuclear tests were good for business. The town went all out. There were atomic hairdos (beehives for women), atomic burgers served with lots of mushrooms, mushroom cakes, swimming pools filled with mushrooms. Miss Atomic Blast was crowned. Couples liked to be married during the blasts. They liked the light. They'd stand outside and at the exact moment of the explosion, the minister declared them man and wife. I assisted at such weddings. We watched the great glare go up in the sky and I'd be momentarily blinded. Then my mother would nudge me to toss the rice.

My mother was a dour woman when she went
to work at the marriage chapel, bitter with her lot. She might have done better directing a funeral home. But she liked her job. It gave her something to do. She talked to me about the couples who came to her. She had a lot of responsibility there. She made the arrangements for the flowers, procured licenses, and even helped trembling lovers who were running away, or who had met only the night before, write their own service.

On days off from school or on weekends, she made me come with her. She worked the midday shift, and I hated to go because it meant I couldn't go with my father when he drove for Lucky Cab. I sat all day long in this dry patch at the edge of the desert and watched couples come and go. She assigned me tasks. I folded colored ribbons for the bouquets and lined them up on a rack like a rainbow; I made sure that the green Tupperware pitcher that read
RICE
wasn't empty; I dusted and vacuumed, though this was pointless in such an arid place. Then we'd sit and wait for a couple to show up.

Sometimes two drunk people who'd been gambling staggered in and, even though we knew they'd probably just met, my mother made the arrangements. I used to wonder—as she showed couples floral displays or musical arrangements—why they didn't run screaming into the desert. But they always seemed relieved inside the cool chapel with the soft yellow walls, and for a few moments
they were at peace while the minister, the Reverend Remlow Blevins, performed the ceremony. Sometimes Indians stopped. We had a special outdoor chapel for them, complete with a painting of the sky and a wooden eagle with chipped beak and broken wing. At other times a couple clutching a small baby would come in, looking weary and blank. And when the ceremony was done, I'd toss rice and shout congratulations as the dumbstruck pair got back in their car and headed west at breakneck speed.

I would watch as the Reverend Remlow Blevins married people in his perfunctory, dispassionate way, and I thought to myself even then that he knew something about life that I didn't know. He knew how it could lead you astray, how a mistake could throw you off for a lifetime. He was a pasty-faced man with slicked-back hair and dead gray eyes, and it was hard to believe that he lived in this heat; his complexion was more like that of a shut-in than a man who baked in a marriage chapel in the middle of the Mojave. I wondered why he didn't terrify his clients, as he liked to call them, with those dead eyes.

The worst time for me was those days when the dust blew or when a winter's freeze set in and customers were few. On those dreary days, when all I wanted was to be moving through the dark, timeless, womblike space of the casino, dropping slugs into one-armed bandits or watching my father's
smooth movements with the cards, I'd have to sit with my mother, stringing bows for bouquets, with Remlow Blevins staring out at U.S. 91, searching for trembling couples who wanted to be married.

My mother sat with her thick black hair, putting rice into the Tupperware pitcher or wrapping ribbons around the stems of the bouquets, cursing my father for the life she led. She cursed him for having swept her away, though it seemed to be the one fond memory of him she had—the way he married her. Perhaps it was this memory that led her to work in a marriage chapel in Vegas. I knew my parents almost as long as they'd known each other. That is, she accepted his breathless proposal in a hot-air balloon three weeks after they met, and they were married a few weeks later. I was born nine months from the date of their marriage. Their love affair, from all I can gather, was an impassioned fling that managed to extend itself through eight years and the birth of two children before my mother took off.

The hot-air balloon belonged to a friend of my father's. My father was a handsome, compact man with a powerful way about him, but my mother, though not exactly virtuous, came from old religious stock and would not easily give in. The balloon he borrowed that day was yellow and red and green; the colors, when my mother spoke of them,
made me think of the confetti of the losers' tickets from the track that my father threw in my hair.

It was a clear Saturday afternoon in the Los Angeles basin in the mid-fifties when my parents stepped into the small basket under the giant balloon and my mother looked up at all those colors set against the sky. My father's friend released the sand bags before my mother could protest, and they sailed away. She told me how smooth the lift-off was, how effortless the balloon's steady rise; she said she thought that life could be like this and they'd just go up and up forever.

Then the balloon sailed over what had once been an unsettled land of relentless sun and barren earth, a land of boiling tar pits and hellish marshes, filled with animal remains. They sailed west, out to sea, toward Catalina, and then the winds brought them back, carrying them along the edge of the land and up the coast along the Palisades and out across to the Hollywood sign. They skirted the desert where purple flowers bloomed, and skimmed above Wilshire Boulevard, looking down on mansions with swimming pools, ensconced in cooling palms. They sailed the emerald cliffs of Malibu and above a turquoise sea until, when my father asked if she'd marry him, there was nothing my mother could say but yes.

A
T SEVEN O'CLOCK on a warm summer's night I rang Mara's bell. She opened the door, dressed in a short black cocktail dress, black stockings, and heels. She had her hair down but pulled softly off her face with gold clips on either side. I wore a black skirt and a white blouse, but Mara was much more dressed up than I. “I don't think I can go out with you,” I said.

She looked me up and down. “You look fine.” I pushed Bobby's stroller in and Alana and Jason raced to take him. We had hired Viviana for the evening to baby-sit for all three children at Mara's. She was already there, getting the children's dinner ready. Mara leaned over and whispered to me, “Her hair is green.”

“I know,” I told her. “It's all right. I think I should go put on a dress.” It was months since I'd gotten dressed up. Mara had phoned a few nights
before to say she'd been invited to a party for a friend of hers—a TV producer—who was giving a dancing party at some celebrity's loft. A good band, Dead in the Water, was playing, and Mara had asked if I'd be her date.

“It's going to be pitch black in there, with loud music. No one's going to care what you're wearing. And besides,” she said, looking me up and down once again, “you look fine.”

I went into the kitchen with Bobby, and Viviana whistled. “Don't you look nice, um-huh. You might not be coming home tonight.”

“I'll be home.”

“Stay out late. I don't want to see you before midnight.”

“What time do you want us home?”

“You put me in a cab, I don't care if it's daybreak. Just don't come knocking on this door early, because I won't open it.”

Mara looped her arm through mine. “Let's go.”

“Everything'll be all right?” I asked Viviana.