Anywhere But Here (35 page)

Sunday was the date. It was all we did. We woke up early, at six, when the alarm clock rang, for once. We cleaned, then shopped. We bought candy to put out in a bowl and things he could drink if he wanted to. In the afternoon, I sat on the bed, watching my mother dress. She’d already taken her bath. She moved around the small floor space in her bra and pantyhose, running from the closet back to the bathroom mirror.

I picked up a book to read, but every two minutes she interrupted, and I was glad to quit again. This was fun.

“Ann-honey, tell me something. Which way, up or down, what do you think? The hair, come on, concentrate a second. Down? Are you sure? Why?”

“Makes your neck look longer.”

“It does, good. Are you sure?”

It occurred to me that my mother had never been alone. At home, she’d had Lolly, probably even before I was born. Lolly had always been there, bigger, quiet, sitting on the edge of some bed, watching my mother become shinier and shinier, enclosing more and more light in her body on a dull, late Saturday afternoon, getting ready to give herself, brilliant, to one man. For the first time ever, I felt sorry for Lolly. I remembered her scratchy plaid Bermuda shorts, her head bent, looking down at her big hands. At least I was younger. I could still be pretty myself someday.

I was asleep when they came home that night, but I heard the key work in the door and Lonnie’s loud, raucous voice and her hushing him. And then I heard her giggles. That was the worst thing. I was awake then and I waited for it to stop. I wanted him to leave, so it would be quiet again. But he didn’t. He never did. For the first time in that apartment, my mother didn’t sleep with me in the bed. They opened the sofa; I heard the metal mattress frame scraping the floor.

“Shhh, you’ll wake her.”

“I forget you’ve got a child in here.”

We’d never opened the sofa bed before. It must have been a
dusty mess. The dark green vinyl sofa was a problem. At Christmas, we’d tried to drape it with a bolt of green felt, but it had looked wrong and you couldn’t sit on it. We’d finally settled for cleaning it and draping a red mohair afghan over the back.

My mother stood a foot away from me, lifting sheets out of the closet. I held absolutely still. As a child, I’d dreamed of burglars coming in at night from the train. In the dream, I’d have to be still. Later, the burglar lined us up in the cellar. He was stealing our television and my mother blamed it on me. The burglar pointed a rifle at us and Benny saved everything by putting his finger in the hole at the end of the gun.

They must have been making the bed. It sounded like they dropped twenty shoes and tripped over each other each time. It seemed it would never be quiet.

“Shhh,” my mother said and then giggled.

“Hell, I thought you said she was asleep.”

“Well, she is, but she’s a light sleeper.”

Another shoe dropped. For what seemed like hours, layers and layers of time, I thought I heard something; the sheets moving, the metal of the bed. The sound of his mouth-breathing changed the whole air. I didn’t want to close my eyes.

But I must have finally fallen asleep in the morning, because I missed the alarm. I put my hand over the buzzing clock, to stop the noise, but I didn’t reset it. My mother woke up on her own and came and sat next to me on the bed. She moved her hand on the blanket, over my back.

“Get up, Honey. It’s time to get ready for school. Upseedaisey. Really, Honey. It’s time now.”

“Is he still here?”

“He’s sleeping.”

I pulled the covers and bedspread around me, and walked into the closet. I put my jeans and T-shirt on there. My mother stepped in and grabbed my arm. There wasn’t room for two. Our closet was small and full, with clothes on hangers and linens on the shelves.

“Ann, I didn’t sleep with him,” she whispered. “I mean, I slept with him, but I didn’t. He didn’t touch me, we just slept. I swear
to God, Ann, that’s all we did.” She lifted her palm up like a child, scout’s honor.

“I don’t care what you did.” I walked around him to the bathroom. There was almost nowhere to walk. Opened up, the sofa bed took the whole room.

My mother followed me to the sink. “Well, I care. And I didn’t.”

We were alone in the apartment, making my bed. My mother shook a pillow down into the pillowcase. We’d driven to a laundromat in Pacific Palisades. Of course, there were closer laundromats, but my mother had found this one and it was clean and there was a health food snack bar next door. The main thing was my mother didn’t want to be seen in a laundromat. In Pacific Palisades, it was okay. We didn’t know anybody there. And now that I had friends at school, I felt the same way. I didn’t want them to see me doing wash. When we finished my bed, my mother opened the sofa and put sheets on. I didn’t help her with that and she didn’t ask me.

“The tingling is over. What can I say? That real excitement, the fantasizing—I just don’t feel it anymore. So, let’s just hope some money comes in on one of his deals so we get a little something. And soon.”

Lonnie slept here every night now. We no longer pretended Lonnie was an agent or a producer. Now, it was supposed to be enough that he might have money and give us some, to help us out. And it was enough. We adjusted.

“What about all these buildings that say
TISHMAN
on the scaffolding? I saw another one today on the way to school. On Roxbury.”

She sighed. “Could you come and help me here a second? Just tuck the other side.” The sofa bed felt flimsy, metal springs and a three-inch mattress. Sometimes in the night I heard a crash when the metal legs buckled and collapsed. “This man wants to make it on his own. He doesn’t want to just be the son of someone who made it big. But I think if one of his deals comes through, if this shopping center makes it,
then
he’ll go back to his family and say, See, this is what I could do, alone.”

“Are you sure it’s even the same family? There’re a lot of Tishmans in the phone book.”

“Honey, I’m sure.”

“How do you know? Did he tell you?”

“Ann, I just know. Okay? You just have to learn that I know some things you don’t. Okay? I’m a grown-up.”

“At least he could pay rent.”

“Honey, he does pay rent. He pays rent on his own apartment in Hollywood.”

We’d seen his building. It was dark red brick, old, set far away from the street. Once, after dinner, my mother had stopped there, outside his building, so he could run in and get clean clothes. While we were waiting for him in the car she pressed the button that locked our doors.

“He’s never in it.”

“Well, let’s just cross our fingers and hope it comes through soon, okay, Honey? Because I need it too. Believe me. Believe me, I’m getting tired.”

I dropped it.

I developed sores on my head; small red bumps with scabs. My mother thought it was either lice or some weird disease. She decided I’d caught it from Lonnie. She called and made an appointment with a doctor in the Valley, an hour’s drive away.

“You never know, people talk. Word gets around. Beverly Hills is really a very small community. And it’s not the nicest thing to have, you know.” My mother always worried that people would think we were unclean.

After school, we drove to the Valley. Sometimes, I really liked my mother. She drove easily, with one hand, as she pumped the gas with the toe of her high-heeled shoe. We looped on the freeway ramps smoothly. She talked to me and drove almost unconsciously on the six-lane highway with a freedom and confidence anyone at home in Bay City would have admired if they could have seen her. I remembered our first day in Los Angeles, how she’d clutched her whole body an inch away from the steering wheel. Her voice, when she told me to turn off the radio, fell stern
and quiet. She’d been afraid for our lives. She’d driven on the right-hand side, almost on the gravel by the high aluminum fence. Her lips had moved and I thought she might have been praying. Now, she changed lanes and told me to look at the sun, just over a Coke sign on a dry hill. There were things to be proud of my mother for. I doubt she ever thought about it, how she’d learned to drive here.

She knew the Valley; she drove out to work every day. I didn’t know much about her life without me. And my mother seemed shy and a little ashamed of what she did all day. Driving to the doctor, I asked her what she’d done at school. “Oh, nothing. You know. Just the usual,” she said.

I imagined her in a room, plants on the windowsill, with tall boys and fat sloppy girls. With her they would all be timid. I imagined her standing close to them, holding their faces by the chin and looking in their eyes while she said the word. “Say thick. Th-th-th-thick.” Their mouths wobbled crumbled sounds, trying to copy her lips.

We were speeding, my window cracked open, the sun a fuzzy line over the brown hills.

“There’s my exit,” she said, real joy in her voice, as if she were showing me the building where she worked.

The doctor didn’t seem horrified by my head. My mother and I always felt calmed by doctors. They made us feel clean, like everyone else. He diagnosed the bumps as scabies, said I could have picked them up anywhere, probably in school, and matter-of-factly wrote out a prescription for Quell Lotion. He told us to wash my hair every day for eight days and put on the pink lotion afterwards. My mother nodded while he explained this, as if she were receiving critical and difficult instructions. That was all. He let us go. We bought the lotion downstairs in the pharmacy and then went for an early supper at the Van Nuys Hamburger Hamlet. We ordered big dinners and we each had dessert. It felt good to be alone, just the two of us.

We could have gone home after that and I could have washed my hair in our shower, but my mother panicked over anything having to do with uncleanliness, and when she panicked, spending
money made her feel better, so she took me to her hairdresser. The hairdresser washed and blow-dried my hair so it looked thick and good, and then we had to ruin it, rubbing in the lotion, which made it greasy and rumpled.

“Ever hear from that Tishman fellow?” the hairdresser asked my mother.

“Mmmhmm, sometimes.”

The next day she took me to a different beauty parlor.

After my last treatment, it was almost dark when we left the beauty shop. We drove to our apartment to pick up Lonnie, and then we drove farther out into the Valley than I’d ever been. We didn’t have time for dinner because we were late. Lonnie had an appointment to meet someone for a business deal. He was supposed to be building a shopping center.

My mother drove and Lonnie sat in the front seat creating a chain reaction, hitting one hand on the other hand, which in turn hit his knee. My mother let him play the radio while she drove. I was sitting up against the back door with a book open, trying to do my homework. I was trying to improve my life, do what I was supposed to do. My efforts to make myself better never went anywhere. I didn’t really believe they would.

The land changed outside our car windows. It was brown and flat, the hills seemed lower, and buildings were small and scarce. It reminded me of little towns in the desert when we drove into California. We stopped at a light and a man in a cowboy hat crossed the road. There were no sidewalks, just highway and gravel on the sides. There were more trucks than cars on the road with us. Gray-brown tumbleweed dotted the hills above the shopping center, where my mother finally slowed the car.

There was a McDonald’s in the shopping mall and Lonnie told my mother and me we should wait for him there. When we all got out of the car, he walked in the other direction, towards a bar, where he was supposed to meet his partner. He walked away, rubbing his hands on the front of his pants. We stood on the blacktop and my mother seemed distracted until she said, “Wait here a second, stay right here,” and ran up to Lonnie, her purse
hitting the side of her thigh as she ran. They weren’t far away. “She can wait in the car. She’ll study. Are you sure I shouldn’t come along?”

I stood still, growing cold up from my feet.

“Hey, hey, comemeer a second, Woman. Let me give you a kiss before I go.”

They stood there in the middle of the parking lot like two movie stars, her hair falling over her back and her stockinged heels rising up out of her shoes.

I looked the other way, at the window of a closed knitting store. I felt like I was nothing and I never would be. Then my mother came running back. She slapped her thigh when she stopped. “Come on. Let’s hurry it up.”

We sat against the inside glass wall of the McDonald’s. There was a field on the other side of the highway, except for one gas station, nothing. My mother sipped coffee from a coated paper cup. We thought if we were going to sit here, we’d better buy something and we didn’t want to spoil our appetites. My mother pointed on the glass.

“See, over there. That’s where they’re going to put the shopping center.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? So we can make some money, that’s why. And buy a house, maybe. So I don’t have to run myself ragged—”

“I mean, why there?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They know where the best places are. This man is
the
expert on shopping centers. He’s already made millions.”

The sides of the highway were marked with glowing red circles on three-foot wooden stakes. It was just brown field on the other side, nothing, land that could have been anywhere. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe Lonnie being in a bar down the mall with some guy would make a shopping center grow there.

I thought of something I hadn’t remembered for a long time: the city I’d drawn under my grandmother’s kitchen table with crayons. I’d planned houses and swimming pools, buses. I could
easily draw for hours, working on one thing for my city. Now I looked outside and imagined the colored structures I’d drawn, huge and built, on the field across the street.

“But there’s one already, across the highway. This one.”

She sighed, tired and preoccupied. “I don’t know, Honey. I’m not the expert. They are.”

“What kind of people have business meetings at night, in the middle of nowhere, anyway?”