Acts of God (7 page)

“Of course, dear, I saw lots of people and we did lots of things.” She sighed and I realized this wasn't the kind of answer she wanted to hear. She wanted to know that something exciting had happened in my life, that I would be a different person now that I'd been away for a few days. I was afraid that once more the ordinariness of my life was a disappointment to her. Jade was young enough to still believe that you can walk into a room and a sea change will occur; that the earth will move.

I'm the one who named her Jade. The Orient had once been a passing interest of mine, one of many passing interests, I might add. A place I wanted to visit. When I was younger, I'd sit for hours looking at pictures of those fine carvings out of stone. Rocks that contained an entire world. Swans, flowers, villagers going about their daily chores. Delicate, miniature universes imbedded in stone.

When I told Charlie that I wanted to name her Jade, he said, “Why don't you call her Sunset or Aurora? Give her a real California New Age name.” I'd told him for years I really liked the name. Except that now all her friends called her Jaded. She got a kick out of the grimaces I made when a friend called and asked, “Is Jaded there?”

“Well, did you have any
fun?
”

“Yes and no,” I said thoughtfully. Jade rolled her eyes as we munched our sandwiches. The sea crashed below. White spray blew up against the rocks. “It was interesting,” I told her. “It was nice to see everyone.”

“Mom,” Jade leaned over, squeezing my hand, “aren't you ever excited about anything? Doesn't anything get you going?”

“Yes, dear, you do.” I patted her cheek and she dropped my hand, determining me to be a hopeless case. With a sigh she handed me the keys to the car. “You drive,” she said, and she slept the rest of the way home.

*   *   *

When I pulled up in front of the house, gawkers lined the driveway. There were ten or twenty cars. More than I've seen in a long time. “What're they doing here?” I asked her.

“I'm not sure,” Jade said, “they've been staked out for days.”

The house I live in was built by the poet Francis Cantwell Eagger on a plot of land where nothing would grow. A farmer sold it to him dirt cheap and Eagger spent half a century building his house. When he died, I bought it from his son, who had many debts of his father's to pay off. He told me I was doing him a favor, taking that wreck off his hands.

Of course it needed work, which it still does, but I couldn't believe my luck. To buy a poet's house, built stone by stone, at the edge of the sea. The son said he hated that house—resented it deeply—because when his father wasn't writing, he was piling stones. That is what his childhood was, he told me as he handed over the keys, a pile of rocks.

How was I to know that Eagger would get famous again? That some small press in Minnesota would reissue all of his books in special editions and pilgrims—true believers in his words—would come and stand on the road and stare at me and my children and the house for hours at a time. Still, I had been here over a decade and, despite the oglers and devotees, the constant knocks at the door from readers who want to see the vistas that inspired such poems as “Coastal Views” and “Water at My Window,” I have never wanted to leave.

In my living room I have the complete works of Francis Cantwell Eagger. The books have nature titles like
Along the Rocky Shore
and
Rock Climbing in Yosemite.
Sometimes I take down the volumes and read verses such as “The sea pounds the shore/shattering my dreams/like the morning alarm/I wake, unsure of where I am/or ever have been.”

It wasn't clear to me why his work was having such a resurgence but Jade told me it was because he wrote about darkness and mortality. I argued that every poet writes about that, but Jade said there was a drunken edge to his. Sometimes he wrote about drinking and Jade, who was contemplating writing a book about the poet (she wanted to call it
Living on the Edge with Francis Cantwell Eagger
), said he drank himself to death in our breakfast nook.

One of the gawkers—a young man who wore jeans and a tweed jacket and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses—who was standing dangerously close to the house (I had warned them that I'd get a court order to keep them off our property) approached me. “It's an anniversary,” he said. “Eagger's centennial; he's a hundred years old this month.” I'd seen this young man before, as he strode beside me, trying to take my bag with his fleshy palm and convince me to let him inside.

Sweat ran along the side of his brow and he looked as if he had just begun to shave. “Please, Mrs. Winterstone,” he said, “couldn't I just see the views from the inside? It's for my doctoral dissertation.”

“We'll have to charge admission,” I said to Jade, shaking my head as I made my way to the house.

“Mom, why don't we let them in?” Jade pleaded. “They just want to look. Then they'll go away.”

“Because it's my house,” I said, grabbing my bag from the young man and heading toward the door.

When I walked in, I found everything much the same as I'd left it. Even the coffee mug I'd left as a little test for my children was still in the sink. Ted was sitting, bare chested, listening to ska music in the living room. When he rose and hugged me, I could feel the ring through his right nipple. Every time I saw this ring I cringed. When he was a baby, I used to rub that nipple to soothe him back to sleep. Now someone had pierced it with a staple gun. When he turned his back, I tried not to look at the wing tattooed on his shoulder blade either, the one he said proved he was an angel.

Though he had promised he wouldn't maim his lips, his nose, or his tongue, the rest of his body was off limits to me. Things could be worse, I told myself; he could have purple hair in spikes the way his friend Chuck had. On the other hand, Ted could have a job, as could Jade, since they were both, at least for the summer, out of school. In Ted's case, I believed he was permanently out. They could help me make ends meet, which appeared to be the constant struggle for which I was placed on the planet Earth. But they preferred to be home, hang out at the beach, cruise the highway.

It wasn't that they hadn't tried to get summer jobs. Jade, a politics major at Berkeley, had landed one for a time at a fish-and-chips place near Santa Cruz, but then she told me jokingly one day that she had other fish to fry and had been home ever since. Before I left, I saw a copy of
What Color Is Your Parachute?
lying around, and the makings of a résumé, so I was hopeful. Ted, who for a short time had worked at a bungee-jumping tower where he'd put a halter around young girls and shout, “One, two, three, bungee,” had larger ambitions (film, TV), and his father—his dear father—kept promising to set him up for a big one soon, but I had been married to his father and so I knew what I could and could not expect from that man.

“Hey, Mom,” he said, picking up my bag. “Did you have a good time?”

“It was all right.” A girl with beautiful cheekbones and green streaks through her hair sat on the couch. “This is Cherri.”

Cherri smiled but made no effort to rise. She gave me a little wave, though. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Winterstone,” she said, her tongue ring clicking against her teeth. She spoke in a voice so soft that I felt like a judge asking her how did she plead. When I took my things to my room, I had a feeling they'd been sleeping in my bed. A little while later when I came out, Cherri was gone and no mention of her was made, as if she hadn't even been there.

That night as the gawkers drove off and Ted and Jade sat in front of the TV, watching various evening specials, I rinsed out the coffee mug and other dishes that had been left in the sink. After the dishes were washed, dried, and put away, I wasn't sure what to do with myself. I thought I could go into the den, read, pay bills, but the television was too loud.

I made myself a cup of mint tea and settled into the breakfast nook with my mail. The breakfast nook has been my preferred place to sit since I bought the house. From here I can gaze down at some pine trees, and then at the drop into the Pacific. It's a pretty sheer drop and when the kids were small, I worried a lot about them falling off that cliff.

Now I sat in the breakfast nook, listening to the surf. Canned laughter came from the living room as I sifted through the pile of mail, bills that awaited me, the note from the insurance appraiser concerning the slippage on the northeast corner that needed to be shored up. I calculated how much this would cost and how long this would be my house. Month to month I was having trouble making ends meet and Charlie was already hinting, now that the kids were technically out of school, that his support would end soon.

Not that I lived off my ex, though I had gotten some things that I felt were owed me. I had seen him through two professional schools by working odd jobs. I'd raised our kids more or less without him so I'd felt some help was due to me, but now the kids were older and I knew that the time was coming soon when I'd have to find the way to really support myself. I couldn't do it just by handling seasonal rentals and time-shares.

I looked at the kids sitting there, the remote between them. When the phone rang, they both jumped. I picked up the phone and heard voices already speaking. A man said, “I just don't know what it is. I don't know what I should do.”

“Well, maybe you should tell her,” the woman replied. “I think that's always best.” The voice of the woman was slightly familiar to me. I wanted her to talk more so I could place it.

The man paused, taking this in, then said, “Well, I know it's best. It's just that there's so much I still like about her.…”

“Like what?”

“Hello,” I shouted into the phone, “excuse me. You're on my line.” I shouted two or three times, but they couldn't hear me so I hung up.

The kids stared at me from the couch, both waiting to see if the call was for them. They had that eager, slightly sad look of pets thinking they might be fed. “It's a crossed line,” I said and they settled back down.

Though Jade was basically just veging, Ted wasn't actually watching TV. He was studying it. His eyes stared into the tube and, if I didn't know better, I'd say he looked like a supplicant before an altar.

Of course, Ted, like just about everyone else we knew, wanted to be in the movies. It's the new immortality, he liked to explain to me; it used to be heaven, now it's celluloid. He was a good-looking boy and he believed he'd get his break. Or at least he believed his father would introduce him to the right people. Charlie made commercials and directed reenactments, so I wasn't sure who the right people would be that he knew. But, of course, once Charlie had his own dreams, so I wasn't too hard on him, except where my kids were concerned.

The phone rang again and this time the kids got it. I could hear them talking to Charlie in the somnambulant way they had when the TV was on between them. “Sure, Dad. Uh huh, Dad.” Monosyllabic sentences.

“Mom, it's Dad,” Jade called from the living room so I picked up the phone.

“Hi, there,” Charlie said, his voice perky. “I had the hardest time getting through. Line was busy forever.”

“That's funny,” I said, “no one was on.” But then I thought about that crossed line problem we were having. “Oh,” I said, making a mental note, “I better call the phone company. I think there's a problem with my line.”

“So how was your trip?” I chatted about the reunion and he chatted back. He had stuff to discuss with me. A trip he was thinking about taking with the kids. His concern, which I shared, that they weren't working. Then I heard someone calling him in the background, the woman he lived with, Luci, whom I'd never laid eyes on, and before I could ask for money, we were off the phone.

Basically Charlie and I had always been friends. When I met him in an art history class at Berkeley twenty-some years ago, I'd liked him right away. I liked his big bear body and his green eyes. He laughed about all kinds of things. We'd only known each other a few weeks when we drove up to Alaska—a long, tedious drive of landscapes moving past us. Yet I loved the sensation of just being beside him for miles and miles of road.

Charlie was writing a paper on outsider art. He drove around the country in search of the primitive, the folksy. We found people with giant bugs made out of wire on their lawns, others who'd turned their yards into a series of pulleys, homemade amusement parks. One man had a spaceship in his yard, the lights of which had caused the air force to make several impromptu inspections of his property.

Charlie loved this stuff and he could talk to anyone: a gas station attendant, a survivalist out in the woods, or some guy with a lot of money who wanted to make a movie. He had planned on writing a book about all of this, but got sidetracked with the costs of raising a family and the desire for money, which moved him into more commercial ventures. He'd had a fair amount of financial success setting up multimedia trade shows. His biggest success, though, had been in reenactments. For various centennials he'd done Washington crossing the Delaware, the arrival of Coronado into Santa Fe, the California gold rush.

In that trip up to Alaska we stayed in cabins that had what we called “outs” with no houses. We showered in ice water until we learned we could bathe at public showers in local Laundromats. In the morning we found bear scat around our cabin. Charlie thought all this was great. He made love to me three times a day and when we were finished, he cradled my face in his hands and told me how much he loved me.

It usually took me a moment after I spoke with Charlie to catch my breath, as if I'd been punched hard in the gut. When I married Charlie, there had seemed to be something that stood between us. I wish it hadn't been that way, but it had. For months after we separated, I thought about what he'd said. How I never gave anything away. I remembered when I was a kid there was a toothpaste that had this active ingredient, Gardol. In commercials on TV Gardol was an invisible shield. When it came down over your teeth, Mr. Tooth Decay, a hideous black creature with nasty jaws, couldn't get through.