Anywhere But Here (25 page)

She came and told me about Netty’s chocolates; we both felt so bad.

“Pyuk,” she said, holding the bag up and dropping it, with a thud, in the wastebasket. “Mom, you don’t think you could just whip up something chocolate for a cake, so we could take it out and say it was made from Netty’s candies? You wouldn’t have the time?”

“Why sure,” I said, “but won’t Annie expect the storebought? She knows you went to pick it up.” The cake from the bakery was real fancy, I bet she paid quite a bit for it. She’d brought one of
your crayon pictures of a swimming pool and they’d copied that, with the frosting.

She said she’d take you aside and explain. You always were good like that, she could talk to you and tell you the truth. She knew you wouldn’t cry or fuss or throw a tantrum like a lot of children would. You were mature, more than Benny was. Carol couldn’t talk to Benny like that. Your mom talked to you almost like a grown-up.

“We can have the other with Benny and Hal tomorrow,” she said.

And I was glad to do it. When someone dies, it’s like you’ve been hit hard in the stomach; you lose your breath for a moment and everything stops. Then when it all comes back, you have an empty house. I’d made the phone calls first thing in the morning. Now there was nothing left to do. The house seemed so big and quiet. And do you know what I did? I fetched that bag of chocolate from the wastebasket, it was sealed with such a cardboard strip on top, it was perfectly good, just melted, and I used that as the start of your cake. And believe me, I’m telling the truth, did that cake ever turn out good.

I took my time. I had all afternoon. I baked three layers and then while they were cooling on the mangle, I made a filling with nuts and a separate maple frosting. Your mom had the idea to put seven sparklers in like candles, and we lit them just before she carried it out.

We’d set up two card tables in the backyard, and your mom had covered them with paper tablecloths. Red, white and blue. Everything had to match. It was just dusk then and Carol and Hal were there too, and your mom and Lolly and we all sat down and had that cake on paper plates. Your birthday is in June and the mosquitoes mustn’t have been too bad then yet, because we stayed out late and watched while you kids drew with your sparklers on the air. You and Benny played tick-tack-toe, but whichever one won, it always faded before you could draw the line through. Ben was teaching Netty to write her name. She wrote the same letters over and over. She had the letters right, but she was too slow. I went and made a pot of coffee to bring out and we
ladies kept drinking the coffee and eating the cake. Then, one by one, at eight or nine o’clock, the mothers would step out on the porches and call their kids home, and family by family, they’d go. First Hansens, then Stevie Felchner, then finally June came over to get hers. Pretty soon all the mothers had called their kids in, except the Grilings, and they looked embarrassed because they had no mother. That little Mary got the older ones by the sleeves and they said they better go home, too, their father would be missing them. And by the time we folded the card tables up and went in, all that cake was done for.

I’ve thought about that many times. That was good of your mother to think of, on that day when she had so much to do. That Netty went away, I don’t know, a year or two later. I remember when they came and took her in the car. I watched by the window. It was two women with short hair, they looked like church women, and just an ordinary car.

ANN

5
SOUTH OF WILSHIRE

W
hen we moved to California, we didn’t know anybody. For the first three weeks, we stayed at the Bel Air Hotel, but that was too expensive, so we moved to another, smaller hotel on Lasky Drive. Lasky was one of the quiet, mildly commercial streets south of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It seemed to be a clean hotel, inhabited mostly by older single people who rented by the month. Our room in the Lasky House had a double bed with a faded, flowered bedspread, gray carpeting and old wooden venetian blinds.

We went to the same place for dinner every night, the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood, and we tried to sit in the same booth. We ordered the same food every night, too. There was enough else new in our lives.

“Well, it
is
beautiful.” My mother sighed as we drove away from the Lasky House and Beverly Hills and the car coasted down a hill on wide, bright Wilshire Boulevard into the sun. Tall, glorious apartment buildings stood on both sides of the street, their stripes of window catching light from the late, red, falling sun. We saw young boys in huge white leather tennis shoes on skateboards. Two rabbis walked on the sidewalk with a three-year-old girl in a pink dress. A couple in sweatsuits jogged.

We didn’t know how they could do it; live, eat, look like that. For us, it seemed so hard.

My mother was going to be a special education teacher in the Los Angeles Public School District and her classes started a day before
mine. We got up early when it was still dark. She took a long time dressing arid left an hour to drive. As she went out to the elevator, she told me to stay inside our hotel room. I asked if I could just walk around the block.

“Honey, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Just do what I say this once.”

So I made the bed and stayed in the room, watching TV, pretending I was an actress on each of the shows. I kept calling the desk to ask the time. I wanted to go out but I didn’t. Here I was too scared to disobey.

And when my mother finally came back, something was wrong. She knocked things over, moving quickly. It seemed everything had changed. I didn’t even know if we’d get dinner. She exhaled, snapped on the overhead light, kicked her shoes off and began undressing, hanging her good clothes neatly in the closet.

She looked at me for the first time that afternoon. “You won’t believe what I’ve been through today, you just won’t believe it,” she said. Then she went back to undressing.

Except for the overhead light, it was dark in the room because the blinds were down. We never raised the blinds. We didn’t want anyone on the street to be able to see us.

“I can’t teach there, Honey. They sent me to Watts. That car going in the parking lot with barbed wire all around. They have electric fences. I’m telling you, Ann, we’re lucky I’m alive.”

Her voice sounded small. I’d never heard her so scared. It made me feel light in my stomach. I lifted up an edge of the blind. It was reddish outside, dark only in the centers of bushes.

“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.