Anywhere But Here (26 page)

“They have a big wire fence around the school, it’s like a prison. They give you a card you put in to open the gate. And Annie, those kids were like this, taller than I am.” She was standing in just her bra and underpants. She whispered, “And all black. I can’t go back there, Ann.”

“Don’t other people go, too? I mean, what about the other teachers? It couldn’t be that bad.”

“With this car? Wait’ll you see. They scratched it. Somebody scratched it with a piece of broken glass. He must have taken something and gone all the way down the side. One day there and
the car’s ruined. You’ll see.” She sat on the bed and turned off the overhead light, even though it was only five o’clock and reddish outside. We could still hear the day from the sidewalk below, other people’s day.

“Won’t they send you somewhere else, somewhere safer?”

“I doubt it. They’re probably all booked. School’s started. They’ve got their staffs lined up. See, that’s how they get you. That’s what this school system does. They get the poor person from out of town and stick them there in the ghetto, where no one else will go. And I suppose they can get away with it. People come all the way out here, and then what are they going to do? And if it’s a man and he has a family to support? But I’m too old for that, Honey. I’m sorry, Honey, but that I just can’t do for you.”

I remembered how we were the day we found out. We whirled around in our stocking feet, our hands together in the middle, screaming “Weeeeeeeee!” We’d been alone in the house on Carriage Court, skidding on the black and white checked kitchen floor, no one heard us. When we stopped, she had looked shy. “You don’t know, Annie, but there aren’t many women my age who have an MA,” she’d said.

She probably remembered that too, and it made everything worse. We felt like dupes now, for having been proud. And she probably went back to thinking what she usually thought about herself, that she wasn’t quite right in the world.

“We’ll have to go home if I can’t get another job. I can’t work in that school, Honey. I’d get hurt. I wouldn’t get out alive.”

“Are you just not going to go tomorrow?” Tomorrow was my first day of school. I didn’t even know if we were having dinner. I started to hang my clothes up, too, neat in the closet. I always get neat when I’m scared.

“I’m calling first thing in the morning, believe you me. We’ll set the alarm. But the other teachers said, sure, they wanted to leave, too. Everyone wants to get out of there. I’ll tell them I just can’t teach there and see what they do. And otherwise, I guess I’ll look for another job.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

“I don’t even know where to look here. I mean the LA School
System is it, they’re all over. I don’t know, but I need to make money. We have to live.”

It was still only afternoon, but I pulled on the T-shirt I slept in and crawled under the covers. My mother sighed and sat down next to me. We had the one double bed and I always stayed on my side, near the edge. She shook my foot through the blanket.

“Come on. Get up, Honey. Let’s go get a bite to eat.”

I had to know. “Do we have enough money?” I asked. “If you’re not going to have a job?”

“Well,” my mother tried to laugh. “We have enough for one dinner, silly. Don’t worry so much. Come on. It’ll work out. I don’t know how, but it will.”

I felt something like a metal bar in my chest as I stood up, going from my heart to my neck.

But outside the Lasky House, there was a breeze. The air was bright and cool. I looked at the other people walking on the sidewalk. They seemed amazing to me. Then, I saw the scratch on our Lincoln. We both looked away from it.

“Should we try somewhere new, closer, or would you rather just go to the old place?”

“Hamburger Hamlet,” I said.

We ordered sunflower sandwiches, the same thing we ate every night. They were cheese, tomato, and sprouts on wheat bread with little porcelain dishes of sunflower seeds on the side. They had always enchanted us. We knew from the menu that the mayonnaise was safflower. But tonight the sandwiches weren’t wonderful. They were food. When we’d finished the sandwiches, we ate every sunflower seed from the small white porcelain bowls.

We drove past the long strips of park in Beverly Hills, lawns that separated the commercial district from the lush, residential streets above. Papery late summer poppies bloomed, red and tall, moving in the little breeze.

“One of these nights I’m going to come with a scissors when it’s dark and cut a bunch of those.” My mother laughed a little, mimicking the mischievous vigor she’d always had, effortlessly, in Bay City. It was a weak try. We were both far too afraid to do anything like that here. And if we did steal the flowers we would have no
vase to put them in, nothing but the paper-wrapped water glass in our hotel bathroom.

The next day was my first day of school and I had to go anyway, even knowing we might not stay. My mother was driving to the Los Angeles School District office to try and talk to someone. We both wore our best clothes. My best dress from Wisconsin was navy blue wool, with a red belt, a little hot for this weather, but my mother said to wear it anyway. “They always remember what you wore your first day.” While she dabbed makeup on in the bathroom, I pulled up my first pair of navy blue nylons. At home in Bay City, we girls all bought our own nylons at K-Mart down the new highway. We hid them in our school lockers, changing out of our knee socks from home every morning. When my mother finished her own hair, she braided mine and tied on a red ribbon.

“Are those kids going to
school
like that?” My mother peered over the steering wheel to get a better look. We were early, parked across the street. “They look like they’re going to the beach.”

They wore long, wide-bottom jeans, ragged at the ends from dragging on the ground, leather sandals and T-shirts. The girls’ hair fell down over their faces onto their arms and backs, thinning to points at the ends like vines, as if it had never been trimmed.

“I have to change,” I said. “I want to go back to the hotel.”

My mother shook her head slowly. “We don’t have time, Honey. I have to get going and, anyway, you’d be late. You don’t want to be late your first day. And I wouldn’t send you to school looking like that, I wouldn’t.”

“I’ll walk back.”

“There’ll be the nicer kids and those girls will be wearing dresses. Believe me, Annie, I know. Go on, you look real cute. Really, or I wouldn’t tell you.”

I got out, carrying my clean new notebooks. It was nothing like schools in Wisconsin. It was old. The plain stucco walls were painted pink. All the roofs were red tile. There was a square steeple, as if it had once been a church.

Everything seemed strange: the small, old desks, the pale but
bright blue walls. I thought it might always seem odd to me; I might leave before it ever grew normal. From where I sat in the class, I could see a palm tree, its huge leaves fluttering a little near the window.

Two girls in my class wore dresses, but I could already tell that they weren’t the ones I wanted to know. I liked the thin girls with long panels of hair like curtains on both sides of their faces. They smiled and laughed, knowing things. But I wasn’t even sure if I’d come back here tomorrow. I thought of my mother somewhere asking the LA School District for a different school. I imagined her in the district office like a court, pleading her case. She was asking for our two lives. The person who decided was a man. He sat and listened behind a large, wooden teacher’s desk; he played with a pencil between two fingers. She was standing in high heels, pacing, occasionally running her hand through her hair, pushing it back. She moved precariously, in those heels. He deliberated, listening. The sleeves of his judge’s robe dragged on the desk. She talked on and on, a whine in her voice. At moments, she broke into a cry, while he sat calmly looking down at his clean hands.

The teacher asked me a question and I said, I’m sorry, I lost my place.

She moved on, kindly, to the next person. Finally, the lunch bell rang. I followed behind the crowd down to the basement cafeteria, but I didn’t have any money, so I walked around to some trees in front of a smaller playground, with low gym equipment for the little kids. The air was hazy, hot but not clear, and cars moved on Wilshire, a block away. I didn’t know if I would ever like it here. It wasn’t the way I’d imagined.

I stood there, looking at the empty painted playground toys. I was thinking of my mother, where she was. Two girls walked up in front of me. One was tall and messy, messy hair, knee socks too thin for her legs and a large mouth. The other was small. They were the two girls wearing dresses.

“You new?” the big one said.

“Yeah.”

“Where do you live?”

I knew the right answer. But I didn’t live on Roxbury or Camden or Rodeo, or on any of those streets with the pretty names. I didn’t live anywhere.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember the name of the street.”

The big girl bent over her open palm, concentrating. “Is it above or below Santa Monica?”

I shrugged. She used the lines on her palm as a map. “Say this is Wilshire, the next big street is Santa Monica and above that is Sunset. You don’t know which one you’re closer to?”

“I think Sunset, but I’m not sure.”

The bigger girl looked down at the small one. “She probably lives near Sunset.”

A bell rang then and we moved towards the door.

“What does your father do for a living?” the taller girl said, her hand on my arm.

Two answers came to me. “He’s a doctor,” I told them. The first thing I’d thought was, He’s dead.

The teacher stood drawing a map with colored chalk on the board, her dress lifting to show her strong, tan legs as she reached, and outside, a buzz saw tore the air. I read the part in the book and I liked it. School was so easy. I had darker things; the judge’s sentence on my mother and me, the word no. I would have given anything that day to be twelve and I was twelve.

The two girls in dresses turned up next to me in the hall, after the last bell rang. Now that I’d lied to them, they bugged me. I wished they’d go away.

“You know what you could do to be really pretty? I think you’d be really pretty except for your teeth are crooked. You should get them straightened.” She looked at the smaller girl. “Don’t you think she’d be pretty with even teeth?”

The smaller girl nodded avidly.

“You should go to an orthodontist and get braces.”

In the surprise of sun, I was wondering where I could walk that wouldn’t show I was going south of Wilshire. I’d never thought about my teeth before. I’d always thought my teeth were fine. I’d looked at my face hundreds of times in the mirror, looking at it
different ways for when I would be on television. Always, the best angles were ones only I saw. When I was alone and no one else could see. Now I worried about my teeth. I made my mouth go narrower.

Then my mother’s car pulled over by the curb and I was so glad to see it, I ran and got in and she started driving before she even said anything. It was something she’d picked up from the summer. She drove to relax now, just anywhere, just to drive. We rode through the quiet residential streets with big houses and green slatted tennis courts. We both liked to look at those houses. What my mother had thought before in Bay City was true; it helped to have a car we weren’t ashamed of. There was so much else we had to hide.

“Well,” she sighed. “It looks like we can stay. They gave me another school in West Covina. I went out there this afternoon and saw it already. It’s in the Valley, it’s a long drive every day, but it’s a white school, middle-class, all houses. So, I guess we’ll have to really start looking for an apartment.”

“Isn’t that good? Aren’t you happy?”

“Well, I’m tired. It’s an hour and twenty minutes there, and another hour and a half back. I’ve been driving all day. Let’s go get an ice cream cone.”

We parked in front of the Baskin-Robbins and my mother gave me five dollars to buy our cones. She would never go in herself. At night, she said she wasn’t dressed well enough and she didn’t want to run into anyone. As if we knew anyone to run into. But today she had on her best suit.

We tried to meet people. My mother asked about kids at school and about their parents, but nothing seemed to come of it. We called a family named the Flatows, who’d moved from Bay City a few years ago, when Mr. Flatow’s company transferred him to Beverly Hills. In Bay City, their family owned an expensive children’s clothing store. I remember shopping there with my mother when I was little. The saleslady would take out a drawer full of
socks which were all your size and they would be folded up so they looked like colored eggs.

My mother and I sat in their apartment for an hour, having tea. They lived south of Wilshire, too. They had a daughter a year younger than me, but she left to go to a dog show a few minutes after we arrived. Her parents asked my mother about news in Bay City and my mother told them what she could, but they didn’t seem to know the same people. They praised the Beverly Hills High School, where we kids would all eventually get to go, and encouraged us to drive by. “It’s like a college campus,” they said as we left. Nothing came out of that visit, either. We didn’t see them again.

We met Julie Edison the way we’d met other real estate agents. My mother called and said we were looking for a house. Weekends, we toured Beverly Hills mansions for sale. We saw houses with five bathrooms and only one bedroom, houses with tiny kitchens and ballrooms, a house that had once belonged to William Holden. We saw where the Monkees lived for a while. We walked through houses with more than one real estate agent. That was when we were living at the Bel Air Hotel. When we moved to the Lasky House, all of them but Julie stopped calling. She kept showing us houses, and the places she took us to were smaller and smaller. Finally, she showed us a house we really liked.

It was a normal house, with two bedrooms, just above Santa Monica Boulevard on an old, unimposing street. None of the houses were big or fancy. This one was white brick with a red chimney and bushes out in front. It had two stories, a fireplace, a nice kitchen with windows looking over the backyard. We fell in love with the house.