Anywhere But Here (54 page)

My mother hollered from the tub. “And who do you think’d take care of you here? Your grandmother’s in the hospital, she’ll probably die, Carol and Jimmy are being nice, sure, but they’ll
get over it with their money and you just watch now that they’ll have something, they’re not going to give it to us. You’d think they’d help me after I’ve been alone all these years, but will they? No.”

“You’re selfish.” I said it quietly, in the kitchen, but she heard me.

“Oh, I can see, it’s you too now. All my life, all I’ve ever done is give to you and do for you and now you go against me with them, too. Well, I can see from now on, I’m going to give to ME.”

I was tired. “I’m not going against you, so let’s just be quiet.”

“I’m not going to be quiet,” she yelled. A second later, she stood dripping in front of me, her face crumpled. “You know I’ve given you everything I could,” she said. She was looking at me, pitiful, I can’t describe it.

“I know,” I said. It was true.

We left the next morning, days earlier than our tickets said. We all seemed subdued when Carol drove past the Oneida land to the airport. I kept thinking that they’d paid for our plane; we were leaving so soon, they might feel like they paid for a convenient divorce. But then again, Carol seemed tired. She probably wanted to be by herself. She was getting like my grandmother. When something was wrong, they wanted to be closed up in their houses, alone.

Carol drove very carefully and slow. Her lips wove, she kept licking them, and her mouth constantly rearranged itself as if any position felt uncomfortable. We wanted her to just drop us off, so she could drive right home, but she wouldn’t, she parked and waited until we boarded the plane.

Once we were in the air, we felt giddy. We both loved airplanes; they were like doctors; they made us feel rich and clean. We were dressed in our best clothes and new stockings charged at Shreve’s. No one seeing us would know anything true.

In Chicago, we bought magazines. We drank Kahlua and creams. We felt like busy celebrities rushing home to our lives. And that’s the way Carol must have seen us, too, as she lugged our big suitcase up the ramp, while we held our short dresses
down, walking onto the plane. But when we landed at LAX, no one was waiting for us and we had to find our own car parked in the ridiculously complicated system of lots and after we got home, scraping the car so it shrieked against the concrete embankment of our driveway, my mother said she didn’t want to call Josh Spritzer, that she’d wait for him to call her. And the phone didn’t ring at all that night or the next night either.

Once that fall, my mother drove with the Witch to Palm Springs. They came back with bad sunburns and three hundred dollars’ worth of dates. Dates and figs and other dried fruits. Daniel Swan and I sat on the porch steps of the San Ysidro house, watching them haul the bags in.

“Come on, kids, give us a hand,” my mother called.

“We’re absolutely broke.” I turned to Daniel, my cheek on my knee.

He laughed. “We can beat you there. We’re in debt.”

Halfway between home and Palm Springs, a place called Hadley’s sold discounted desert dates (and figs and other dried fruits). My mother decided they were a savings. She and the Witch said they’d freeze them all, then fix them in cellophane and fancy baskets at Christmas and give them as presents to the people they worked with.

“Listen, that’s part of your job,” my mother said, later, as we unpacked the plastic bags into our freezer. “And you don’t know how much things cost around Christmas.” The new apartment had a clean, large refrigerator. We’d moved not long after we came back from Wisconsin.

My mother got home late that winter, sometimes at nine or ten on school nights. We never had much food in the house, so we went out to dinner. Sometimes, when we felt too tired or broke, we’d skip supper and just go to bed.

I started breaking into the stash of frozen dates. I tore open the plastic bags and stood by the freezer when I was hungry, eating handfuls of them, frozen. My mother began to do it, too. We’d stand in our clean, empty kitchen, the freezer open, chewing hard. It was just something we did in that apartment. Every
household has its habits. The dates were good but tough. We worried about chipping our teeth.

By November, all the bags were torn open. Sometimes my mother would shake her head. “A hundred ninety dollars on
snacks,”
she’d say and sigh.

But we kept doing it anyway. She did it too. We were hungry a lot of the time.

Even though we both liked that apartment, everything went wrong in it. I invited three girls from school over for dinner and when I put the chicken in the oven, we discovered the gas was turned off. My mother had to go knocking at neighbors’ doors until she found one who’d let us cook my chicken. She had to do it, I was too embarrassed.

And around Christmas, the day I had my first real date, my mother called, falling apart, somewhere on the highway.

My date was with an older guy named Ronnie. Daniel Swan and I—kids our age—couldn’t drive yet. This guy had a blue Porsche and he skied, he had that white-eyed, raccoon tan. He’d run for school president and I’d worked on his campaign. His mother’s greatest ambition was for all her sons to be admitted to Stanford. She’d hired a rock band to play at his campaign parties and she liked me because I’d drawn his campaign poster, a huge oil pastel on butcher paper. Probably as compensation, he’d asked me out.

It was a dark day, cool, even for winter. I rode my bike home right after school and washed my hair, taking an hour to blow-dry, curling it under. Then my mother called.

“It’s me, your mother,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the highway, can’t you hear the cars?”

I touched a wall. “Where are you calling from?”

“Boy, are you dumb sometimes. I just told you. I’m at a filling station out in the middle of nowhere. Listen to me. I’m not coming home.” Her voice was odd and flat. I tasted metal in my mouth.

While we were quiet then, it came over the phone—the roar of trucks and cars.
“Now, listen. When they call you, I want you to say you don’t know anything. And I’m going to tell you now about the insurance policy. The papers are wrapped in tinfoil at the bottom of the freezer. Underneath the dates. You’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars for me. So take care of yourself, sweetie. You’re going to have to from now on. ’Cause I won’t be around. But I know you. You’ll manage fine.”

I couldn’t talk at first. My lip was flickering.

“I’m going to have an accident.” Her voice sounded make-believe and serious at the same time.

“Why, Mom?” That was all I could choke out. I looked around the room, the empty walls, the dark windows.

“You don’t love me and so I—”

I whimpered. “Mo-om, I do, I love you.”

“No, you really don’t, Ann. I know. And I’ve tried, believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve done all I can do. And I can’t help you anymore. You’ll be better off without me. You’re strong, you’re stronger than you think. I know you. I tried to get us a Christmas tree, I got this huge, big beautiful tree. It was expensive, but I thought, Well, this once we’ll really have something nice. At least I can do that for her. Don’t you think I’ve felt bad that I couldn’t have furniture for you and give you clothes and money like other parents give their kids? But I couldn’t, Annie. I was all alone. I didn’t have any man to help me. And I said to them at the lot, I said, Tie it on tight, because I’ve got a long way to drive. And they said, Yeah, yeah, sure they would. Sure. Well, they didn’t. Here I’m driving on the freeway and it falls off. This big beautiful tree bounces on the road and it splintered into a million pieces. And that’s where it is, all over the highway. A million smithereens. I paid my last money for it. That tree was forty dollars. I couldn’t even do that for you. I couldn’t even get you a Christmas. I’m giving up. I’m driving up the coast and off the cliffs at Big Sur. It’s supposed to be pretty there. Remember I always wanted to see them? I’m just going to have an accident.”

“Mom, please, don’t. Please come home. I need you.” My voice wasn’t the same either. I’d never heard it before. I sounded like her.

“You’re just scared,” she said. “You don’t know what you’ll do without me. That’s why you think you love me now, but you really don’t, you’re just scared to be alone.”

That stopped me for a second. It seemed true. Then I lost some grip and it started again. I sounded like a baby. “Mom, please, no, no, come home, I’ll be good, whatever you want, just please—”

She hung up.

I opened the freezer and grabbed dates from the bags, the biggest, most expensive kind, medjools.

I paced the apartment, eating, watching the phone. I expected her to call again. Ticks of the minute hand followed me, pinpricks on my back. Then I sat on the floor and dialed the highway patrol. I waited a long time for them to answer. A man told me he couldn’t say anything for twenty-four hours. “You call the hospitals, they’ll tell you the same thing,” he said. “But if she ends up there, in Emergency, they generally call you.”

“I haven’t heard anything.”

“No, huh?”

“But she should be home by now. Usually.” I obeyed what she said. I didn’t tell him she’d called.

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “’Course a lot of them they can’t identify right away. You say a white Continental? What does the driver look like?”

“Oh, well, she has …” My voice went dry. It was very hard, all of a sudden, for me to talk. “Blond hair. Freckles. Blue eyes. She’s, I don’t know, small. And pretty. She’s real pretty.” I felt like I was giving him what he needed to take her away from me.

There was an awful pause. “I heard about a Continental and something like that on 1 tonight, but I think it was a redhead. You’re just going to have to sit tight and wait. Don’t worry, if something’s wrong, they’ll call you.”

I climbed upstairs and took off my new pantsuit. I pulled on a nightgown and crawled into bed, but I couldn’t get warm. The alarm clock sat on the floor next to me. It was almost seven and
Ronnie was coming to pick me up for the movie at seven. I just waited in bed. I didn’t know what would happen.

At seven, I went to the window in my mother’s room and looked out over the front door. All the lights were off. I was wearing my nightgown and knee socks and my running shoes. I knelt by the window, listening for the Lincoln. Then I heard a door slam and I knew it was Ronnie’s. I would have recognized the sound of ours.

I watched him walk up to the door. He was wearing boots that seemed to bind his legs and turn his feet out. He stood there on our doormat, and with both his hands, he rubbed down his hair; for a moment I felt elated; he liked me. But then the bell echoed through the wall and I ducked down under the window ledge. I didn’t move, as if I could be caught.

There was a long silence, but I didn’t hear footsteps. It was excruciating. He still stood there at the door. I thought in a panic if the door was locked; it was, I’d checked. He would just stand there and then he would leave. He would have to leave.

I felt like we were breathing together, on opposite sides of the wall. He didn’t move, I didn’t move. I didn’t dare peek out anymore. The doorbell rang again, a long ring, making me shudder.

Then something horrible happened. I heard my mother’s car screeching to a halt on the street. I knew it was ours. Suddenly, I felt absolutely furious at the way she drove; she never could learn to use a brake. She’d careen along, looking at everything but the road, and then, a second before a collision, she’d say, “Whoops,” and smash on the brakes.

I heard the quick nervous clatter of her heels on the pavement and I crawled fast, galloping on the carpet, to my room to put my clothes back on. My hair was a mess, there wouldn’t be time for makeup. I flipped the light on and opened my algebra book. I was zipping up my jeans when I heard the key turning in the door downstairs.

“Uh, Ann. Ann? Where are you, Honey?”

“I’m up here, Mom.” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful. I brushed my hair furiously. Then I bent down to buckle my shoe. I went downstairs holding my open book in one hand, I must have
looked about as casual as Hamlet. Then I stopped, halfway down, and said, “Oh, um hi, Ronnie.”

He jammed his hands in his parka pockets and smiled up at me. He really is cute, I was thinking to myself, and just then I remembered that the entire apartment was empty. I’d thought of that before, this morning, which seemed like years ago now. I’d planned to meet him at the door, dressed and ready, smiling, sailing out with one line, like “We just moved in and our furniture’s not delivered yet. Such a pain.” But here we were, looking down at the expanse of beige carpet. No furniture, with the exception of Ted’s big radio. And that was a danger, too. I could sense my mother veering towards it. I thought I’d die if she turned it on to her easy-listening station, I’d truly die. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” with orchestration, or “The Impossible Dream.” This night was already way too weird for Ronnie. And his parents owned a rock ‘n’ roll record company.

He was looking around at the bare walls. “Did you hear me, Ann? I rang the doorbell.”

“No,” I said. “Just now?”

“Yeah. I rang it twice.”

“I don’t know, I was studying.”

My mother smiled, radiant. “You must have just nodded off for a second. Well.” She clapped her hands together. From a life of working with children, my mother believed in applause. “You kids won’t believe the tree I’ve got.” She winked at me. “It’s more gorgeous than the first one even. But I think I’m going to need some help getting her in.”

It felt good to be told what to do. We followed her outside. It was cold, a clear black night, with a few rare stars. I stood on one side of the car and Ronnie leaned on the other. We started untying the ropes. I was just following along. The air seemed tender. I felt so, I don’t know, grateful. Like Ronnie and I were still just kids.

“Isn’t she a beaut?” my mother said, and looked at me, smiling.

I shrugged and looked down. “It’s tied to the fender, too.”

My mother sighed. “Gee, I wish I had something in the house. Some hot chocolate or cider.” She clapped again. “Say. We could all go out and get a little something. I’ll take you kids out for some dessert.”