All My Relations (12 page)

“Thank God,” Leah said. “I'm the Toymaker.”

To celebrate our new stage careers we ate brunch at a trendy cafe. Leah complained about Eskison, who had been out past three on successive nights. She set a curfew and locked the door, but he pounded and rang. “‘I don't have to be here.' He keeps saying it.”

“Junk him,” I said, snapping my fingers.

“Of course. Why didn't I think of that.”

I spilled sprouts down my chin and front, and laughed and
laughed. It struck me as so funny that after a lifetime in men's company I had spent the morning among generations of women. It was like slinging aside a backpack at the end of a hike, the hard scrunched muscles loosening, expanding.

The recital clearly haunted Madame Rifi. Already in February she began teaching the class our dances. She devoted herself to the main parts, particularly the leads, a brother and sister played by the two oldest girls, who marked the choreography with spindly, clockwork competence.

Leah and I were expected to coach the Junior Corps, youngest age four. I'd not had to mind little girls since our family Thanksgivings and Christmases fifteen years before; Dad had withdrawn from holidays once he was sick. Simply trying to form the children into a line was impossible, their elbows and hips sticking out every which way. While Leah guided one at a time through the basic steps, the rest sat cross-legged, chewing their feet, or rolled, crashing into each other, giggling.

“Keep your places,” I yelled, clapping my hands. Openly defying me, two ran across the studio and hid behind the water cooler.

Suddenly I was trembling, my concentration blacked out. I felt alone in the room, the rebellion inside my own head. The scattering children were parts of myself getting away from each other. And I was chasing, grabbing their arms, shouting, “What the hell do you think you're doing?” They burst out crying.

Over salad at our cafe I told Leah I was too ashamed to go back.

She shook her head. “Smile and nice them up, and they'll forgive. With little ones you can get away with murder, frankly. It only comes out later. Twenty years from now they'll snap and gun down a touring Swan
Lake.”

“I'm not myself. I think my brother's on drugs,” I said, feeling
again the bewilderment as I described the fallen chair, the mute legs poking at me. And it was Valentine's Day, I said, when Jim would have taken us to Mexico for our annual shrimp feast.

“Dear,” Leah said, “you're one person I don't worry about. That's what's so wonderful about you.” Everybody took drugs, she continued. “When I was Rick's age, I pickled myself in everything conceivable.”

I admitted experience in that area myself.

“And here we are,” Leah said. For that matter, she continued, Eskison dealt seasonally, to pay his tuition. Not that he'd go so far as to contribute toward rent. Last summer she'd made him get a job, and he drilled a hole through his hand.

Eyebrows raised, Leah stared over her fork at me. I challenge you to accept a fool like me, her expression said. So naturally I did.

I was sorry I yelled, I began. I was in a bad mood, I said, making a ridiculous mean face, pulling down my eyes and spreading my mouth with my fingers. The Junior Corps laughed, except for those two. I was extra attentive to them, manipulating their little hinged knees, rubbery arms, supporting their tummies on walkovers.

Leah, I noticed, treated rehearsal as playing. Demonstrating a step, she'd incorporate an outrageous error, snarling her legs, hopping on one foot. “No,
no
, Lili,” the Corps howled—and performed the move flawlessly. Leah designated me the model of correctness. “Show her, Claire,” the Corps insisted, cheering when I did, joining me. When the girls finally swarmed us, overexcited, punchy, hugging us, someone pushed, crying. Leah sat us down for circle games.

“You're incredible,” I said later, as we ate.

“Experience. I raised three.” Currently with their father, in Oakland. “After years of his hounding me, I said, ‘O.K., you've got your chance. Take them.' Face it: He's remarried, dual-income
family. This was before Eskison, I was loose ends. I was kind of moody, at the time, for being a parent.”

Only once, weeks after, Leah flipped open her wallet snapshots. From under Leah's thick lustrous hair gazed Leah's intelligent brown eyes in a young woman, teenaged boy and girl. “The father must have no genes,” I said. Leah smiled infinitesimally, for a second.

To reward their progress, Madame Rifi allowed the Junior Corps to rehearse in costume. But the starched chiffon skirts were a failure. During their big number, the March of the Toys, the material snagged, the Toys becoming entangled. Unaccustomed to their new dimensions, the girls constantly bumped, knocking the smallest down.

“The hell with it,” Madame Rifi said, unpinning the skirts. And she redesigned the entire production. The Toys would wear plain black leotards. The March would progress from a serpentine meander across stage to a revolving circle. Then, single file, the Toys would stretch up their arms and sink to the floor.

“Toys are totemic,” Madame said. “Beneath the surface, the March of the Toys has the ritualistic validity of anything in ‘Le Sacre du Printemps.'”

Leah, the evil Toymaster, barelegged in sleeveless black leotard, would register ambivalence toward her misdoings by socking herself in the gut. As Mother Goose, I summoned nursery rhyme characters with alarmed twisting leaps.

Though Madame Rifi was a clown, her choreography for me was intuitive, a physical struggle with my anxieties, my chest and neck straining for height against the sideways wrenching of my arms. I practiced at home until completely drained.

“Babes in Toyland” was a smash. Brother and Sister whirled crisply. The Toys, in floppy yellow headpieces sewn by Leah in homage to youth's imperishable frivolity—so she convinced
Madame Rifi—toppled on cue, in rippling cadence, like dandelions before a mower. Leah gesticulated and doubled over. I sprang, adrenaline lifting me like a hand, my arms ricocheting around me like tetherballs, grunting.

At curtain call Madame Rifi kissed everyone, presenting not only the leads but Leah and me with bouquets of roses. The cast party disbanded quickly since most members were up past bedtime.

Leah and I drank sombreros. “These totemic straws stir with ritualistic validity,” she said, and we laughed, but irresistibly we began moving on our barstools, tossing back and forth bits of our routines. We toasted each other—the Toys had come through. I kept my bouquet long after it dried, and so did Leah.

I wrote Rick during the spring, urging him to visit. I received a postcard of a pig with tricolored Mohawk slopping from a toilet. From library research Leah fed me articles and monographs on depression in ALS families. But all recommended counseling, and Rick would sooner have gone Moslem. Our whole family is that way.

Madame Rifi's disbanded for the summer.

Early on a Saturday Leah called, distraught. Eskison hadn't come in at all. I prescribed a hike. When I arrived, Eskison was on the line. “He's blubbering and stammering,” Leah said. The new lover was his lab partner, nineteen years old. While I packed water and lunch, Leah kneaded her fingers on the couch.

The trail followed a canyon into the mountains. The June morning was deceptively mild until we switchbacked out of the streambed, and the heat turned Leah purple. At the first widening of the path she flagged me for water.

“I was teargassed in People's Park,” she said aggressively, as if I were responsible. At my uncomprehending look, she said, “Berkeley, 1969. We were a mob, we had broken loose and the fences were going down. We were dangerous. Ecstatic.” She
paused. “And then the gas and clubs came in from the other side, and we were smashed into these knots of people. Beaten. Weeping.” Her husband had been an organizer. “Good, dull man. Still at it, runs a co-op in Oakland. Good father. I'm a shit mother.”

I croaked an obligatory dissent, and we trudged upward. On the loops below others toiled under colorful backpacks.

Leah kicked stones off the edge.

“Are you crazy,” I yelled. The avalanche trickled downhill, missed.

“I'm such an asshole.” Leah sat on a rock, slapping her face.

I grabbed her wrists. “Listen,” I said. “You march up this mountain behind me and don't say one more fucking word.”

It took hours. Emerging from the canyon, the trail bumped over hard, flat tableland, scented with juniper, before ascending through rhyolite pillars and Ponderosa. The last half mile was practically vertical. Our thigh muscles burned. We halted every few dozen yards for water. Finally we flung ourselves on the grassy summit.

Cloud shadows floated over the hazy pastel desert, which met billows of clouds at the horizon.

Leah shook her head, making awed noises in her throat. “You take such good care of me,” she said, throwing her arms around my neck.

Astonished, I stroked her awkwardly. She was musky with fresh sweat, a smell I like.

“He'll be back, no question there,” she said.

“No,” I said, full of benign power. “He doesn't get the chance. I'll help you. You hold to it. Jim doesn't even know my address or phone.”

Leah sat up. “Not everyone has your guts of steel. I'm a dry old stick. Who's got time to go looking?”

“You're so ridiculously beautiful,” I said. The color in her cheeks had subsided to ruddy. Her damp bangs curled across her forehead. Despite threads of gray and lines at her chin, her
skin was milky smooth, legs firm as a girl's, not a vein. She was the healthiest-looking miserable person I've met.

“He fucks a teenybopper now and then, what do I expect?” Leah said.

Lunch hit us like an anesthetic. Flattened on the warm grass, we slept.

We woke with cloud in our faces, thunder booming. As we stampeded down the trail, the downpour veiled us from each other, but I heard the sliding rattle of Leah's footsteps. Plunging out of control, yet charmed, I dodged boulders, leaping logs and roots. Ponderosa stands cut the pelting rain. The path turned to mush. We splattered around switchbacks, alongside gorges, not breaking stride until the parking lot. We had run continuously over an hour. Staggering rubberlegged, we whooped hoarsely, arms upraised.

Leah ripped open her shirt. Her small, perfectly round breasts streamed water. “Claire, I do. I feel cleansed of him,” she said.

She refused to snap up for the ride home.

“What if a cop stops us, or a bus goes by?” I said.

“What if!”

I unbuttoned, too. Wipers singing, arms out the windows, shirts flapping, we cruised the drainage rivers that Tucson streets become. When we rounded the corner to Leah's block, dusk, Eskison's truck wasn't in the driveway.

“Please come in.” Clutching her shirt together, Leah ran for the door, I behind her. After a quick ransacking for signs of his return, she said, in a small voice, “Well?”

I was shivering, from exhaustion mostly, though the cooler had chilled the air. “Come on,” Leah said, leading me into the bathroom. We stripped and wrapped in towels. Sitting me on the edge of the bed, she brought us mugs of brandy. “Can you stay?” she said.

“I can't move.” In a stupor I crept in beside her, skin to skin, and conked out.

When I woke, Leah's leg was draped over mine, hot and humid. Identifying the tickle of her pubic hair against my hip, I felt as if I were in a dream. While I was lifting off her leg, her eyes opened. Momentarily startled, they focused on me. Instead of separating, I rolled toward her, laying my arm against her back. Leah's eyes closed and, arms hugging her chest as they had while she slept, she squirmed hard against me, as if hollowing a place for herself. I soothed her with my hand. Her shoulder-blades were so delicate they reminded me of fish bones. I rubbed in widening circles.

Jim's buttocks were smackable hairy islands. Leah's squashed in my hands, clenched into mounds. I ran my hand flat over her ass. With a little hitch in my stomach, I grooved my fingers, from behind, into the hair and cleft, brushed her thighs with my nails.

Leah's mouth pressed against mine, and the sensation of dream returned. We kissed so long, hardly moving our lips, that I became conscious of my neck, which seemed incredibly elongated.

Breaking apart, legs still entwined, we looked at each other. Eyes half-lidded, Leah traced my nipple with her pinky, thoughtfully joggled my breasts in her palms. Fearing the loss of what was happening, I drew her close, feeling her all along the front of me. We wriggled together. Sweat greased her body, and my hands over her were a blur. When our sweat-glued stomachs unstuck with a farting noise, we laughed only briefly. Leah's hand slid purposefully between my legs, but its movements there were a languid dragging back-and-forth of the knuckles. I came in waves that emptied me of everything. The brown tinge of the room was from inside me.

When I reached for her, Leah clamped her thighs around my hand, grinding herself against it. She twisted her hips toward me, pushed, arching her back. Struggling, head in the crook of my arm, she came, too.

We kicked off the sweltering sheets and lay legs apart, toes pointed out, so nearly identical: belly-button pools of sweat, pale bellies, clumps of pubic hair.

Leah got up, belted her robe. I found her in the kitchen, cracking frozen blocks of leftovers into pots. She plaited and undid the ends of her hair, spoke in sideways snatches. I read my signal to leave.

For an afternoon I was in love, with the ease of it all, remembering Jim, his bulky hurlings and our straining together, breathing like air pistol shots, his conscientious manipulations. Love, it suddenly seemed revealed, was the absence of heaviness, complication, dread. I was comfortable with what Leah and I had done. The moment of Leah's deciding to make me come was sweet to think about. I sunned in the lounge chair, dozing.

With the coolness at sundown fell the certainty, based on Leah's nervous, evasive send-off, that our lovemaking wouldn't be repeated.