Anywhere But Here (62 page)

“Will she kill herself?”

He shook a little, wincing, I guess that I surprised him. He frowned. “I don’t think so. Your mother hasn’t shown signs of a suicide.”

“Oh.” I looked at him, grateful for that. “Could you see her one more time and tell her you’re not going to marry her? Just once.”

I sat there with all the crinkled money from my pockets and straightened the bills on my thigh. I offered to pay for one more time. I guess that got to him. He shook his head again and said
he wouldn’t take the money. He said the appointment my mother used to have was already filled but when there was a cancellation, he’d have his receptionist call.

I didn’t go home. On the high school track field, kids from the four classes competed against each other in sack races and egg relays, an athletic carnival. I found Leslie on the top bleacher, drinking coffee with our sixty-two-year-old French teacher, Madame Camille. Outside the announcer’s booth, there was a five-foot stack of white pie boxes, from the House of Pies.

My mother had been so enchanted when we’d first moved to Beverly Hills and driven around at night. In Bay City, every block or two had a tavern, an old house with a sign outside. “Here, you don’t see the taverns, they all go out for dessert,” she’d said. We had marveled at the House of Pies, Lady Kelly’s, all the ice cream stores. My mother felt she was finally in her element.

Exhilarated, sick of being goody-goods, Leslie, Madame Camille and I stole a pie and sat on the bleacher sideways, eating it with our fingers, half watching the colors move on the field below.

Later, an announcement blared over the loudspeaker.

“The junior class is disqualified because several members of that class—you know who you are—stole one of the prizes. It’s too bad that just a few people ruined the whole class’s fun.”

We stood up, stunned. Madame Camille walked precariously on the bleacher in her high heels. “I will buy another pie,” she said, lifting her white patent leather purse over her head and moving as fast as she could to the control booth. “I will pay.”

I didn’t tell my mother I’d seen Dr. Hawthorne. We went out to dinner that night, the same as always, and after, we drove to Baskin-Robbins. Now, the furtive run inside with the five-dollar bill moist in my hand and back to the car parked in the dark, under the trees, carrying the two cones like torches and eating them in the front seat with the heat turned on, listening to my mother sigh and talk about what we’d have in the pretty-soon future, acquired a settled sadness. Those trees dropping blossoms on the car top and my mother not taking them for real because
she was waiting, waiting to be married and to see them as a wife, a doctor’s wife. I knew that I would leave her here, still waiting.

When we called home to ask for money, my mother always had me talk first. My grandmother asked me questions about school. Then, I had to stay near the phone, so close we touched, while my mother begged. My grandmother would ask if we really needed it and I would have to say yes. We’d already gone through the green book of my grandmother’s account for me.

Ellen Arcade finally called us. She screamed into the phone. “You didn’t
tell
me you knew Cassie Swan, we were talking the other day, and your name came up for this commercial, but we have something even better, there’s a series and with the influx of the Iranians, oh, you know, Adele, you read the papers,
any
-way, Ann is just perfect, with her coloring. I want her to read next Wednesday …”

My mother held out the phone and we both listened. I scribbled notes of the time and place. It was an address in Westwood on the seventeenth floor. An audition. My mother and I wheeled around the room, falling down dizzy, when we hung up the phone, and I stopped eating for the next five days.

The morning of the audition the phone rang while I stood in the shower. I hadn’t washed my hair for five days. I’d noticed if I let it get totally horrible first, it looked better after I washed it. My mother was talking; I thought I must have heard wrong. “Two o’clock, okay, let me ask you one more thing,” she said. “Not one question? Oh, okay.”

I bent over, shaking my hair dry upside down to make it straight. My mother knocked on the door. “Hurry up in there. I need a shower, too.”

An hour later, she was dressed. “I’m sorry, Ann, but my work is just more important than your audition. We have to live and you don’t even know if you’d get the part. It’s your first one, you probably wouldn’t. Let’s face it, you don’t really look Iranian.” She stood by the door, her purse over her shoulder.

“You said you’d take me.” My face fell loose. “You haven’t worked for months.”

“Well, Honey, I’m sorry, but something today came up and I just have to go.”

“You’re not going to take me?”

“Try and call and ask them if they’ll schedule it an hour later, and I’ll come pick you up if I can when I’m done. But I’ve got to run. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to do what’s best.” Her polished purse, her heels, the patent leather gleamed as she tripped to the car. I heard the gate slamming. I ran outside undressed, banged on the car windows. She opened her door. “See if you can change the time.”

“I can’t,” I screamed.

She shrugged, looked in the car mirror, frowning, then smiling again, arranging her face. Then I guessed. “You’re not going to work, you’re going to go see Leonard Hawthorne, who doesn’t even want to marry you or anything; that’s where you’re going! It’s not to work for money. You promised!”

She shrugged again and started rolling up the window. “I’m not going to talk to you while you’re like this,” she said and drove away, out of our alley.

Peter Keller was in Massachusetts. I called Daniel Swan, but only Darcy and the twins were home, she didn’t know where Daniel was. I even called Leslie, but her mom said she was out taking her tennis lesson and I wouldn’t have ever said anything like this was important enough for her to hurry and call me back, I never would have done that. When you called Leslie’s family, they answered in another zone and you had to kind of respect their slow time. Then it was a half hour to three o’clock and I stuffed my dress and makeup and hair things and all the money I had in bags and ran down to the corner, stopping every few feet in the alley to bend over and underbrush my hair, and when I came to Elevado, I hitched and a milk truck picked me up. This was 1975 and there weren’t milk trucks any place in the country anymore, except Beverly Hills had these stores called Jurgensons and for
about three times the price of anywhere else, they delivered your food in these white, old-fashioned trucks.

The guy drove me to Wilshire, two blocks from the place, and I took my Korkease off and ran. Then, just before I went up in the building, I was sitting on the curb, buckling my shoes, and I saw this orange, flowered baseball cap with a big bill in the window of a jeans store, on a ladder actually, and I liked it and on a whim, I just went in and bought it for six dollars. It was something I would have never done if my mother had brought me, I would have been checking my makeup in the car, all perfect, and this seemed like something just personally me, and I slammed it on my head and went up the elevator.

I thought once I got there, I could check in with a secretary or casting girl or I didn’t know what and then I thought I’d find a ladies’ room and go and wash up and change and put on my makeup and everything. But when I walked in, it was this ordinary, glass-doored, impressive-looking office, with a big desk, and a big, manicured blond secretary, and when I said who I was, she said my name into an intercom and in like a second, they showed me into this enormous room with windows and striped thin blinds and a view of the whole world and two men were sitting in chairs, leaning back with shirts and ties, saying my name.

They motioned me over to an empty part of the room and I stood there with all my bags just on the carpet and they were laughing, one of them smoked, he leaned down to light his cigarette again, and said, “So, okay, what have you got in there, in all those bags.”

And I don’t know what happened, I went dark. Pigeon-toed and knock-kneed, I bent down and started pulling things out of my bags. “A dress, a ladies’ room, please. Just because I want to clean up a little doesn’t mean I don’t, I have Dignity. Yes Dignity, with a capital D. I may not have money, but class.” I was tripping, leg over leg, and it went on a long time, I put on makeup without a hand mirror, I changed without a bathroom, pulling my dress over my head, I faked those air machines that blow your hands dry. “There,” I said, landing on the floor, my stuff a strewn pile, my makeup smeared, hair two panels in front of my face. “Don’t
you feel better clean? Yes, I do, much, much, better. You can seat us now, please.”

I’d mimicked people all my life, but that was the first time I’d done her. I looked up again. My legs felt like Gumby. The men had been quiet, both of them, and now they were laughing. One clapped. I had screamed. I thought they must have felt terribly sorry for me. But I was a little elated, too. I knew there was a chance I’d done something good, good enough to change my life. “Okay,” the one with the cigarette said, taking out a gold case, lighting another. “Do they teach you to read, too, over at Beverly Hills High?” The whole time there, I forgot I was wearing that orange hat.

When I came out of the building I spent the whole three dollars I had left on a hot fudge sundae at the Westwood Will Wright’s, and I ate it in about a minute, standing at the takeout counter. I was so hungry all of a sudden. Then I went to go home. Nobody picked me up on Wilshire, this time, when I hitched. I stood at the corner of Westwood Boulevard, in front of two huge office buildings at a bus stop, still carrying my bags. About fifty people in gray business suits milled, waiting for the bus. I went up to each one, I swear, each one, I said, “Excuse me, I live in Beverly Hills, I go to the high school; I lost my wallet and I don’t have any money. Could I possibly borrow forty cents for the bus and if you give me your address I’ll send it back to you?” I got two nods, fast, flickering, almost like sleights of hand. Other people just looked away, into the hills you couldn’t see for the smog, as if they didn’t hear me. I ended up walking home. I got there at eight o’clock and stood looking in the refrigerator. It was empty. My mother must have thrown out all the food.

After a while, I knocked, lightly, at her door. “Mom, are we going to get some supper?”

“Leave me be, Ann. Just go away.” Her voice was flat and totally different. I scuffed up to the Kellers’ and went in the back and the cook fixed me a ham sandwich.

What I was afraid of never happened. My mother just talked about Dr. Hawthorne less and less. In the evenings, she still wore her peach-colored robe, but she tended to lie on the couch flipping through magazines. I didn’t find any more red envelopes in our mail. I’d been walking around waiting for the day she’d fall apart. But she didn’t. She hadn’t with Josh Spritzer, either.

One afternoon, late, she rushed in dressed up, her white lab coat over a pantsuit.

“Well, I’m back at Palm Manor and guess what? They gave me a party, they were so glad to get me back. They said no one else they’d had in either convalescent home was good with the people the way I was.”

A tear formed on the corner of one eye.

“Control yourself, Mom.” I could be such a pill.

She dabbed her eye with a sleeve. “Well, I suppose I understand these old people. A lot of them are out here from the midwest or somewhere else, you know, and here they are in a home. All alone.”

“I’m glad you’re working again,” I said. I was so cold. I walked away to my room. She should just work and make money to pay for my school and clothes and for college. For me to go away. I didn’t want to hear about it, about her trying, how she felt. She should just do it and make it look easy.

“’Course I suppose they’ve got it pretty good there. There’s a lot worse, I’ll tell you,” she said, mostly to herself.

The gas and electricity was cut off again and I stayed home from school to pay the bill. We both did it rotely, something we were used to. Now, the people in Pacific Gas and Electric knew my name.

“I’ll catch a father for you yet, Ann, you just wait.” My mother patted my knee. We sat parked in front of Baskin-Robbins and she sighed.

“Not for me, anymore. You should look for a husband for you.
But I don’t need a father anymore.” We both knew I would go away in one year.

My mother sat up straighten “Well, sure you do. For when you’re in college, you can have parties and bring your kids home. And just to have a man you can look up to a little and talk.”

“Even if you marry someone, he won’t be my father. I had a father.”

“Yeah, well where is he.”

I shrugged. “Anyone else’ll just be your husband. I won’t really know him that well.”

“Just wait and see. You plan too much. You’re thinking and analyzing, you’ve got to learn to just be. And besides, you might like to have a man to look up to, to ask for advice once in a while.”

A piece of my mother’s hair hung near her ice cream cone. I reached over and hooked it behind her ear.

“I have you.”