Anywhere But Here (27 page)

“You shouldn’t. I shouldn’t.” Julie slapped a thigh. “Come on, Adele, you
should.”

“Well, a wee bit.”

“So, you’re going to need an apartment.” From her pink lacquered file cabinet, Julie took out a map of Beverly Hills. She squeezed between us on the couch. We each ate our ice cream staring down at the map on the coffee table. We listened and memorized, alert, to all she could tell us.

“The bottom line is you want to keep her in Beverly Hills for the school district. But I think we can do even better than that. In high school—they’re all together. But this year, for seventh grade, there’s four elementary schools. And if you can get her in with a good group of kids, she can just keep on with them.”

“RIGHT,” my mother said, hitting the table. “It’ll just carry over. That’s why I wanted to get her in now, while she’s still in the seventh.”

Julie traced the map and its districts with her pink fingernail. The names enchanted us. Trusedale Estates and all the long, wide streets with palms down the center belonged to Hawthorne School. Canon, Rodeo, North Elm Drive.

“I’d try to keep her in El Rodeo. Beverly Vista is mostly apartments. And see, Horace Mann’s way over here. That gets into La Cienega.”

My mother reached over and ruffled my hair. “We’ll keep you in El Rodeo.”

Julie snapped her fingers. “I have a friend who has a daughter
in seventh or eighth grade in El Rodeo and she’s in with a real chic crowd. She’s the only one in her group who doesn’t live in a house. All the others live above Sunset. Should I call her and ask if she has any advice?”

“Would you?” My mother dabbed the corner of her eye. My mother loved being grateful. She crossed her fingers while Julie dialed. I turned away.

“Okay. Good.” Julie stood on one leg with the other foot crushing down a sofa cushion. “She should. Okay. One sec.” She looked at us. “She says she should work it in the conversation that she’s from Wisconsin. A lot of the new kids are just from other schools in LA and that’s a bore. But Wisconsin’s different, so see if she can mention that.”

Excitement built on my mother’s face. She loved social strategy, careful planning. It was one of her lifelong passions.

“Oh, Annie, I’ve got it,” she said, hitting her hands together.

“What.”

“You can say, how’s this, she can say, Gee, in Wisconsin, where I’m from, by now, by this time of year, I’d be wearing my bunnyfur coat. It’d already be so cold.” One of the great prides of my mother’s life will always be that when I was ten, I owned a real rabbit coat. “Say, Every year I was wearing it by November. Or even October. Say October.”

“I’m not gonna say that.”

“Why not? Or, let’s see, you could say, Boy, is it ever warm here. I wonder if it’ll ever get cold enough to wear my bunnyfur coat. In Wisconsin—”

Julie’s hand slapped over the mouthpiece again. “And she should be a little shy, aloof. Don’t chase them. Let them come to you.

“Yes. Let
them
come to you. Do you hear. Don’t PUSH. Wait. Just let them come to you in their own time. Because sometimes you push.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. I’ve seen you.”

That was a theme of my mother s. She thought I was too aggressive.

She tried to teach me to be feminine. The art of waiting. I thought if she were a little more aggressive, we might know people and have a place to live.

“Why don’t you worry about making friends yourself? I don’t see why you’re so worried about me.”

“Where am I going to meet anybody? You’re the one who can.”

Julie found us a one-bedroom apartment on South Elm Drive, just inside the El Rodeo border. It had nice windows overlooking the street and gold shag carpeting throughout. We lived there with no furniture except a queen-sized Sealy Posturepedic mattress and box spring we’d ordered over the telephone.

My mother was obsessed with paint. The first few weeks, she found spots the painter had missed. She called the landlord, a large-breasted woman who lived north of Sunset and drove down to our building in a brown Mercedes once or twice a week. The landlord had also promised my mother white shutters for the windows. My mother became enraged each succeeding week they were late. She began to doubt that they would ever come. Every day, I arrived home from school before my mother. And when I saw the windows still bare, I got nervous, knowing my mother would yell for a while when she came in from work. She had long, angry telephone conversations with the landlord at night. Sometimes, the landlord put her husband on. I could hear the change in my mother’s voice. She was softer with a man.

Finally, the shutters arrived. The landlord had promised white shutters and they were white, but a shade off from the color of the walls. My mother felt heartsick and furious. After two nights of phone calls with the landlord, the same painter came back to repaint.

“It’s cheap. She got the cheapest bad paint and slapped it on. With all this cheap stuff around not right, I don’t even want to be here. I JUST CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!” my mother screamed.

I stood there. I used to make myself peanut butter sandwiches on toasted English muffins and eat them standing up.

The second day the painter came back to match the shutters to the wall, I stayed home sick from school. I wanted to offer him
something, but we didn’t have the usual things, like coffee. All we had were sunflower seeds and peanut butter and English muffins.

Then the landlord walked in and I hid in the closet. The painter knew I was there, but she didn’t.

“Just impossible,” I heard her say.

“Oh, she’s all right once you get to know her,” the painter said. “I think she’s really a good person underneath.”

I didn’t know if he was saying that because I could hear. He and my mother used to talk, though. She’d cry and tell him how frustrated she was, how hard everything was for us here, at the same time pointing to spots on the wall and saying, “Oh, oh, you missed” or “This little bit looks thinner, would you mind, just to even it? Thank you.”

“Well, she may be wonderful as a person, but as a tenant, she’s a nightmare.”

When my mother came home, the landlord was in the front yard talking to the gardener. My mother bounded upstairs to see the painted shutters and then marched down again. “Well, the shutters are better, it’s an improvement. But now what about the carpets? They were supposed to be cleaned two months ago. I don’t even want to walk around without socks and shoes. They’re filthy.”

I watched from the window upstairs. The landlord dropped the green hose she’d been holding.

“I mean, Geraldine, I JUST CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!”

“Adele, it’s been shampooed twice already and let me tell you something. You say you can’t live like this, with the shutters a shade off color, and meanwhile you can live in an empty apartment with no furniture, with a daughter in school for three months.”

“Well, the furniture’s all picked out, it’s just WAITING at Sloane’s to be delivered. I just want everything RIGHT before it comes.”

They talked a while longer in low voices and then the landlord slid into her brown Mercedes and drove way. But she’d gotten to my mother that time. At dinner, in our booth at Hamburger Hamlet, my mother seemed distracted. I tried to talk about different
things. She had a piece of her hair between two of her fingers and she kept turning it, studying.

“Split ends,” she said, in the middle of my sentence.

I stopped talking and she seemed to notice. She looked up at me. “You know, she’s right, Ann, living all these months with no furniture and I’m worried about the carpets. She’s right.”

I loved her then. I was so glad, that seemed so normal and reasonable. I thought now we might start living the way other people did.

But the next thing that happened was my mother found another apartment. It was smaller, but cheaper and already furnished. “I mean, it’s not great furniture, but it could be cute. I can see already. We could make it real cute with some felt draped and different things around,” she told me.

So maybe that was it all along. Maybe we just couldn’t afford our apartment.

“But she could sue us for the whole rest of the year,” my mother said. She was scared about our lease. So we moved out late at night, carrying all our stuff in bags and suitcases to the car and driving to the new apartment in the dark. “I want us all out of here, before she knows.” Even without furniture, it took hours before everything we had was moved. We left the bare, almost new mattress and box spring. The studio had only one room, with a small alcove to sleep in, and the alcove already had a bed in it.

When we finished moving, we didn’t go to sleep. The new place was still too new and we didn’t want to look around carefully, then. We drove out Sunset in the dark to see the beach. We parked on the Pacific Coast Highway, and sat in the car with the doors locked, looking at the waves. We did that whenever things got too bad. You couldn’t see much, the ocean was just black, but you could hear the waves and sometimes we saw foam. We waited until it was light and the sand changed and then we drove back to town and had big breakfasts at Nibbler’s. My mother called in sick to her school. We were both going to stay home and work on the new apartment.

Then, when it was nine o’clock, we drove right up to the landlord’s
house. We’d never been inside, but we knew where it was, we’d driven by. I pressed myself hard against my car seat. But then we were there parked in front and my mother was taking off her seat belt, saying, “Okay, here we are. Let’s get it over with.”

There was a long lawn in front of the house. The grass seemed wet from the night. It was a pinkish brick house with white statues by the drive. There was a fountain but it wasn’t running yet. The whole house looked closed as if the people inside weren’t up.

“Can I stay in the car?”

“Hon, I think it would be better if we both went. I really do.” Her voice was kind. She was being nice. “Come on, Hon. Let’s go.”

We stood there on her porch, our car far away over the lawn, knocking on the brass knocker. We must have looked like refugees. We’d been wearing the same clothes all night to move, we hadn’t slept. I could feel my hair matted in the back.

A maid answered and then we waited for a long time while she went to get the landlord.

Finally, the landlord walked to the door. We’d never seen her like this, she was barefoot, wearing only tennis shorts and a T-shirt. She was obviously surprised to see us, her eyebrows pressed down, but her voice stayed measured and pleasant.

“What can I do for you?”

My mother started shaking her head. “Géraldine, we have to talk. It just hasn’t worked out for us, the apartment. The rug, the shutters, everything. And I think I have grounds to get out of the lease, given all that’s been done and what was said would be done.”

“You want to get out of your lease? Is that what you want?”

“Well, yes, I think given—”

“Fine. I’ll be happy to let you out of it. No problem. I’ll rip it up right here.”

My mother and I looked at each other, following her into an office. The house seemed large, solidly furnished, quiet. It must have been wonderful to wake up in the morning and walk around heavy things like that.

The landlord scribbled on the lease and attached a note to the top, signing it and stapling the pages. “Fine, just let me know when you’ll be out.”

My mother laughed oddly. “Well, actually, we’re already out.”

The landlord looked at us fast and hard when she heard that, her head steady in one position, as if we really were crazy. “Okay,” she said, slowly. “I’ll write you a check for your deposit, then.”

“Believe me, Geraldine, we left it clean as a whistle. You can ride right down and look.”

Her dark head was already bent down, writing. “I believe you,” she said and handed us the check.

The next place was worse. I never liked it. But we cleaned and then we got used to it. At least there was furniture. My mother had plans; she wanted to make new curtains and slipcover the vinyl couch, but for a while we didn’t do anything.

We had a loud, cheap alarm clock that rattled on the floor when it rang. Every night, my mother sighed as she set it. She sat on her side of the bed, next to the telephone, naked except for a T-shirt, and handed the clock to me. We never had our work finished, so sleep always seemed a small surrender. Our work was as simple as my homework for school, the books piled up on the tiny, wobbly, dinette table and whatever my mother was supposed to do with the stack of manila files she carried in from the car every evening and then brought back the next morning. Our work was simple, but it hung over us so constantly that we lost track of what exactly it was we hadn’t done. We always knew we were behind. So my mother set the alarm for five o’clock. We both felt so tired at night we could excuse ourselves, with the idea of the long empty hours that would hang in front of us when we got up.

I knew when my mother turned and sighed in the night, I had radar for her. I always moved before she inched anywhere near me. I slept with a closed fist full of blankets and sheets. Our life together made me selfish.

We kept the clock by my side of the bed and when it blared
out, rattling, in the morning, my mother would turn and say, “Five minutes. Five more minutes.”

This happened six or seven times. Then at eight or eight thirty, she’d bolt up to a sitting position and say, “Oh my God,” with a low hardness that made my heart stop.

“Hurry up,” my mother yelled while I sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on my knee socks. She stood naked, across the room, pinning her hair up into a showercap. She paced. I just looked straight back at her, pulling my sock on slowly.

“Okay, fine, you can make fun, but I’m leaving without you if you’re not ready.”

I was ready twenty minutes before she was, the same as every morning. I sat on the edge of the bed with my schoolbooks ready on my knees.

“I’m going as fast as I can, Honey.”

“I’m going to be late again.”

“Well, so am I then, and believe me, my job is more important than the seventh grade.”

When we stepped outside, it was already too bright and my mother’s heels clicked on the raked cement going down to the garage. As she drove the Continental up, pumping gas with her shoe, it scraped the cement side of the ramp. The space we had to go through was almost exactly the same width as the car and so, every morning, it made an awful, shrieking noise.