Anywhere But Here (36 page)

She didn’t get mad. “Shhh, Honey. Just be quiet a minute. I’ve been working all day and I’m tired.” She put her purse up on the plastic tabletop and unclasped it. “Here,” she said, handing me a dollar. “Go get us french fries. But just a small because we don’t want to spoil our appetites. If this meeting goes well, he’ll take us out somewhere nice. We’ll get you a good steak. Really, Honey.”

We were still eating the french fries, not talking, when Lonnie came in, rubbing his palms on the front of his pants.

“Hiya,” he said to my mother. He did that a lot, acted as if he was with just one person instead of two. He was wearing the same thing he wore every day. A velour pullover and a blue zip-up vinyl jacket.

I looked out the window at the dull field across the highway. Businessmen didn’t look like this. Neither did millionaires.

Lonnie was nuzzling his flecked chin against my mother’s neck. She hummed “mmmmm” with a noise that sounded vaguely electric.

“So, how’s about a little supper?” he said.

“Okay. What do you feel like? Should we stay somewhere around here or head back towards home?” Then, she winked at me from over his shoulder.

“How’s about here? I’d take a Big Mac and fries, how ’bout it. How ’bout it, Ann? Hamburger?”

“All right,” my mother said, sliding back down onto the plastic chair.

There was an apology in her eyes as she turned and held her face in both hands, but she never would have said anything in front of Lonnie.

“Let’s get it to go,” Lonnie said, fidgeting at the counter.

My mother’s car had changed. She never would have let me bring McDonald’s into the cream-colored leather interior. But she let Lonnie. We ate on the way home, my mother asking me to hold her milkshake for her on the freeway.

“So what was the gist?” she was saying in the front seat. I had the ashtray in the back lifted and I was trying to read my homework by that little light.

“That’s one proud man, I’ll tell you,” Lonnie said. He lowered his window so a whistle of air came in and he rested his elbow on the glass.

“So, do you think it’ll go or not so much?”

“Hey,” Lonnie said, beating his hand on his chest so the wind-breaker made a rattling noise. My mother was driving, I held her milkshake, Lonnie’s hands were free. “What kind of guy do you think I am, anyway? ’Course it’ll go.”

“Ann, you can hand me my malt now. Thank you.”

I had my book propped as close to the ashtray as it would go. It stayed steady there as long as the car went straight on the freeway. I didn’t look up until the book fell.

“This isn’t our exit, Mom.” We were past Beverly Hills. The streets where we were driving looked dark and unfamiliar.

“We’re going to stop at Lonnie’s apartment for a second.”

Yellow lights shone from his building. My mother and I stayed in the car while he ran out to get a change of clothes. His apartment building looked very old. We had buildings like that in Wisconsin, the orphanage and paper mills along the river. Dark brick buildings, small windows, built in the last century.

“So what happened to our nice dinner?”

She turned the heat on. The doors were locked and the motor was still running. “Honey, I’m trying to get rid of him, too. Don’t you think I’m scared? But let me do it slowly. I know how to manage this man.”

Someone walked by on the sidewalk, a kid. My mother stiffened,
clutching the wheel, watching him all the way away in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t even like him anymore, believe me,” she whispered. “I think he’s on drugs. But he could hurt us, Ann. He’s in with people who could really hurt us. Do you know what the Mafia is?”

“Some kind of straw?”

“No, no, that’s raffia. Like we had at your birthday party the year with the piñata. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

“I don know what it is then.” The trees here scared me. Otherwise I would have lied. I didn’t like admitting things I didn’t know.

“Well, it’s gangsters. Awful, awful people. Criminals, but whole gangs together. All over the country. They kill, they cheat, anything. And I think he’s part of that. I’m worried for my life. And your life. This other man he met tonight could kill me.”

Lonnie started across the lawn, holding his bag in front of him with both arms.

“What about the police?”

“The police can’t stop them. Nothing can. So just let me take care of it, okay?”

I didn’t say anything, I was too scared. When he came back into the car, with a wash of cold air and the sinister click of the locks after him, it was almost a relief. He was just Lonnie. He’d brought his clothes in a brown paper shopping bag, a white shirt on the top.

In bed that night, trying to sleep, I couldn’t get warm. I thought of the shapes of my crayoned drawings, built, on a field of dull grass. I was scared to be in the same room with Lonnie.

We’d driven by Century City on the way home; a few floors stayed lit in the tall buildings. I thought that in offices there, in rooms with typewriters and metal desks, shopping centers were being planned. I believed and I didn’t believe my mother. I was beginning to distrust her promises but I still believed her threats. I believed Lonnie was a criminal.

I barely slept that night. And in the morning, I got up when the alarm rang. Light was coming in through our faded Christmas
green felt curtains, making delicate lacy patterns over the apartment. My mother and Lonnie were asleep in the middle of the room. Nothing looked so dangerous anymore. I bent down and shook my mother. For once, I wanted us all to be up on time.

“Why don’t you get up already so we can eat some breakfast for a change.”

“Shhh. He’s sleeping. Five more minutes. Please, Hon.”

“Fine, I don’t care what you do.” She turned over and pulled the blanket to her eye.

I took a shower and dressed. Then my mother got up. She stood by the bed, wearing nothing but Lonnie’s T-shirt.

“You know, you’re not the only person in the world,” she said.

“So.” I was buckling my shoes. I picked up my books. “I’m leaving.”

“Just hold your horses. You have time. I’ll be ready in a second. Sit down.”

Lonnie was awake now, too. He looked tiny in his white jockey shorts, the leg holes stretched and bagging. He held his slacks out delicately as if he might trip stepping into them. His hair was a mess.

“I’m leaving,” I said again.

“Just wait.” My mother was yelling. “You’d think SHE’s the only person in the world.”

“I don’t always have to wait for you just because you don’t want to get up on time and eat breakfast and live like a normal person. I’m always waiting for you.” I guess I was screaming, then.

“Oh, you, you—” My mother came at me, tripping over the huge sofa bed between us. She tripped and hit her knee, which made her madder. “I work, I slave, I run myself ragged, so SHE can live in Beverly Hills, so SHE can be a movie star, and what do I get? What do I get for thanks? A whole lot of guff from a stinky mouth.”

“Who’s a movie star,” Lonnie said, one leg in his pants, one not.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Hey.” Lonnie lifted his hand in a grand gesture intended to silence us both. He looked at me, his face slack. “Your mother is
a lovely woman,” he said, his chin weaving slowly left and right, “you ought to treat her with respect.”

My mother was still wearing nothing but the T-shirt, standing with her hands on her hips.

“I’m leaving.”

Lonnie staggered up onto the bed, so he stood there, with his pants unzipped. “Hey,” he said, loudly, raising his hand again. “Everyone quiet.”

He didn’t have a chance. Neither of us paid any attention.

“Oh, ohh, you lit-t—”

I was almost to the door when Lonnie jumped down and caught my arm, hard, twisting the skin. “Hey. Listen. I don’t want to see you upset your mother like this.” He looked back at her, she sat on the bed, crying now.

I twisted away. “Get your hands off me. Don’t touch me. I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”

“You go ahead, you should. Go on and get lost. You don’t deserve your mother. She’s a lovely woman and you’re nothing.”

“Fuck you!”

My mother followed me to the door but I was already outside, down the sidewalk. She stepped for a moment onto the landing, wearing just the T-shirt, the toes of one foot on the other, shyly, shouting my name.

I kept walking. I heard the door slam and then I heard her shrill voice and Lonnie’s low bellow. But they diminished as I walked, replaced by the small sounds of birds, slow tires, the first hammers on a construction site a few blocks away. The air felt kind, mild, windy as it touched my skin. I checked each of my pockets. I had everything I needed for a day. My hair was clean, just now beginning to lift a little as it dried, I had my books, money in my pocket. For once I had left early for school. The clean fronts of apartment houses, cars on the streets, the fountain at the corner of Wilshire and Little Santa Monica, all seemed indifferent and kind.

I’d been taught all my life or I knew somehow, I wasn’t sure which, that you couldn’t trust the kind faces of things, that the world was painted and behind the thin bright surface was dark
ness and the only place I was safe was home with my mother. But it seemed safer outside now, safer with indifference than care.

I decided I could go to Nibbler’s. I had money, I had time. I could eat breakfast and then go to school. But my mother and the apartment had something on their side, a card to play against the bright, moving air: night. I had nowhere to go.

I kept walking. The air was cool on my skin, a leaf dropped on me—it tingled, the serrated sharpness of its edge like a scratch, then softness, a belly. I turned around. I kept expecting someone to stop me. But no one did and so I kept walking, now afraid to look back at the apartment.

Then I came to the street Nibbler’s was on; it seemed large, a decision. I turned. Now if my mother or Lonnie left the apartment, I would be out of sight, gone. I was halfway there when I heard a car behind me that sounded like my mother’s. I didn’t have the nerve to turn around, because it seemed like something I’d made up, but I bit my lip and stood still. The tires sounded like ours. Then a Mustang pulled in front of me, forest green. My heart fell several inches lower.

I started walking again. I could hardly believe this was me. The noise of Wilshire Boulevard came closer. The day seemed to start in many places, like gears catching and moving, a huge machine. Beverly Hills was a city all of a sudden and I had six dollars and some change. I walked past the glass reflecting door of Nibbler’s and stopped at Wilshire Boulevard in front of a purse shop. Then, somewhere behind me a car skidded and I heard heels and my mother was there, grabbing my arm, her fingernails biting my skin.

“Annie, Honey.” She hugged me, her rib cage heaving, I felt her breasts move through her blouse. I just stood there and didn’t say anything and then it was back to normal. “Let’s go and park the car right and we’ll have some breakfast at Nibbler’s. He’s gone, Honey. He’s all packed. I told him he had to get out and he’s gone. So it’s just us again, thank God. I told him when he yelled at you like that, that was the end. No one, not anyone, can get between us.” My mother’s face seemed shallow and concave, like the inside of a pan.
“I’m hungry,” I said. I started walking fast. Now I was thinking of time again, of not being late for school.

“Well, okay, wait a minute.” She grabbed my arm. “We have to go a little slower. It’s these damn heels.” She lifted one foot and pushed something with her hand.

I felt the money in my pockets, the soft paper of the dollars. The buildings were just buildings again, what they seemed, familiar. The city looked beautiful and strong now, bright and silver, like a perfect train, drizzling light off its wheels as it moved. We could hear the fountain splashing behind our backs.

Lonnie was gone and we ate a big breakfast and I still had my money.

She paid.

8
A DOCTOR’S APARTMENT

T
he cake was my idea. Daniel Swan and I were both bad students, underachievers, according to our mothers. Neither of us did any homework. We were weeks late handing in our maps of Johnny Tremain’s Boston. We made the cake with mixes, cut it in the shape of Boston and drew in the streets with a fluted frosting tin. For the first time I could remember, I got an A on something. The class laughed and the teacher left the room and came back with a serrated knife and brown paper towels from the bathroom. She cut the cake in little squares and gave them to the first person in each row to pass back.

They were good. Sweet and airy. That’s the thing about mixes; they are good the first day. After that they get hard.

From then on, Daniel Swan and I baked cakes for all our high school projects. We stopped using mixes. We tried out different recipes and our cakes improved. I kept a notebook and wrote to my grandmother to ask why things turned out the way they did, to learn about icing.

There was an annual high school bake sale and everyone was supposed to bring something. So I was at Daniel’s house, high in Benedict Canyon, making the Milky Way galaxy, all the planets and planet rings and moons in round cake tins. It was a big project. We mixed a different kind of batter for each planet and they’d all have to be frosted. My mother had bought us the ingredients. She’d taken us to the store the night before. Daniel had raised his eyebrows when the checker totaled the bill.