Anywhere But Here (55 page)

“We’re going to a movie, Mom.”

“Oh, all right.” She rubbed her hands together. “I just thought it would be a nice night for a little something hot. Brrr.”

“Actually, I think we missed the movie,” Ronnie said, lifting his sweater and looking at a watch. “It’s starting now.”

The three of us lifted the tree onto our shoulders. We stood it up next to the glass doors. The branches trembled and then fell into place. It was a huge, beautiful tree.

“So, what do you say? Should we go out and grab a bite to eat? I could go for a little something. It’s up to you kids. Whatever you want.”

Ronnie and I looked at each other.

“Okay with me,” Ronnie said, his hands jammed in his pockets again.

I said, “Sure.”

“Let me just change my clothes and we’ll go.” My mother ran up the stairs, clapping.

We both leaned against the car door, shuffling our feet on the curb. Ronnie’s Porsche was down the block. It gleamed under the streetlamp.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” I said.

His lip lifted in one place, as if pulled by a string. It was a kind look. “Is something the matter?”

“My dog died,” I said. I didn’t have one. “His name was Danny. He got run over.”

“You should have told me,” Ronnie said.

I bit my lip and my cheeks started shaking. I felt it starting. He stepped closer and rubbed my hair behind my ears.

Then my mother called. “I’m coming.”

We climbed into our car, the three of us in the front seat.

“Should we have a little music?” my mother said, her hand on the knob.

“No!” I shouted, much too loud. I tried to laugh. “I mean, not now.”

Ronnie looked out the window. His face seemed chiseled, set. I knew I’d blown it for being his girl friend. This whole night was too weird. It would be even worse, when he was home, away from us.

But right then, driving, the dark glass on three sides of us, I leaned my head back on the leather seat, it was one of those times I felt like driving all night. A clear sky, stars, the three of us could drive to Michigan or Canada maybe. Somewhere it would be cold.

12
A BACKHOUSE ON NORTH PALM DRIVE

N
ot too long after Christmas, we ran out of money and moved. My mother quit her job during the fall teachers’ strike and took work as a maid for an entertainment lawyer. We moved on a week Josh Spritzer was away, skiing in Colorado with his children, and we managed to keep the same phone number, so for a while Josh didn’t know. We would be working for the Keller family, who lived on North Palm Drive, and we moved into their backhouse, behind the tennis courts.

My mother knew the Kellers because of me. Peter was a boy in my high school, a year younger, who asked me over a lot. Sometimes, his mother offered my mother mineral water when she picked me up, and that gave my mother a chance to talk about Josh. In a way, Nan Keller had been in on my mother’s romance with Josh Spritzer from the beginning. The first time she dropped me off at Peter Keller’s, we were all standing in the hallway and my mother had said, “Do you think I should have braces put on her? What do you think, Nan, aesthetically. You’re the artist.” I’d stood there like a horse while the two women pulled at my jaw and examined my teeth and gums. Nan Keller had decided we definitely should.

During the teachers’ strike, I told Peter my mother was worried about her job, and that if she was laid off we’d have to move back to Wisconsin. In school the next day he said I could eat dinner at their house whenever I wanted. As if that would help our finances.

I suppose along the same idea, Peter called me up and invited me to his house for Thanksgiving. I said I didn’t know, I’d have to ask my mother. When I walked into her bathroom, she was sitting on the rug, polishing her toenails, a magazine propped open against the tub. She clapped her hands when I told her. “He did? Great! Definitely we’ll go. What do you mean, say no? We haven’t got anything else to do.” Josh Spritzer planned to take his children skiing, that time in Canada, Lake Louise.

“I don’t know. He didn’t mention you.” That was hard to say.

But my mother didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, well, she must expect me, too. She knows we wouldn’t separate on a holiday.”

I called back and asked Peter if he meant my mom, too. He said he didn’t think so. I yelled upstairs. Now she was running water for a bath.

“Well, tell Peter you’d like to, very much, say, but that you don’t think you can because you wouldn’t want to be without your mom on Thanksgiving. So you’ll have to go with her somewhere else she was invited. Say that.”

“Did you hear?” I said.

Peter ran to ask. “Okay,” he said, when he came back, breathless. “It’s okay. Your mother can come, too.”

It was always like that with the Kellers.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving, my mother and I arrived and stood in front of the huge door, checking each other over before we dropped the knocker. “You look really great,” she mouthed to me. We both pulled up our pantyhose, still standing there on the porch, hoping none of the other guests would come and see us. Then my mother took a deep breath and knocked.

A maid in a short black dress led us to the drink room, a room entirely paneled in salmon suede. About a dozen people stood eating scampi out of little white ramikins. Only Peter walked over to us. He offered to take my coat.

“Should I give Peter your coat, Mom?” I whispered.

She pulled it over her shoulders. “No, Honey, I think I’ll keep it.”

Peter’s grandmother lounged in the corner, talking about grilles on Rolls-Royces between the years of 1957 and 1970. She had a habit of marrying millionaires, who then died. She’d lost the last one recently, so she was wearing red. Peter told me she always wore red when she was in mourning. She wore black when she planned to leave a man. She believed Rolls-Royces hadn’t been the same since 1970. She had three of them, each belonging to a dead husband. She herself drove a Bentley Silvercloud.

Peter also told me that she disapproved of Mr. Keller for being a lawyer, and for being a Russian instead of a Viennese Jew. Not that she herself admitted to being any kind of Jew. Whenever the Kellers fought, Peter’s grandmother offered her daughter immediate and lavish refuge in her house, three blocks away on Elevado.

A famous movie star leaned on the salmon-colored wall as Nan Keller talked to him about mineral water.

Mrs. Keller had once been a painter. She sometimes spoke, romantically, of San Francisco, and the Art Students’ League. It seemed she remembered painting on the sidewalks near Ghirardelli Square. But her mother, not Bert Keller, had come to fetch her home. Through the suede drink room’s archway, we could see several of her recent paintings, standing in the living room. She painted with acrylics on clear huge stretched pieces of lucite, so the paintings served as room dividers as well. They seemed mostly abstract. She favored colors in the family of red. What was recognizable tended to be bloody.

“We bottle our own from a little island we found off of Panama,” she was saying to the movie star. “Tell me what you think, Tony. It’s not too bubbly. We like it clear.” Tony Camden was the movie star’s name.

“I’m in speech pathology,” I heard my mother say next to me at the table. I noticed she was staring at the movie star, four people removed on the other side. Before I could stop her, she leaned forward, almost knocking over Mrs. Keller’s centerpiece, made of bones, goat skulls, orchids and tall, burning beeswax candles.

“May I ask you a question?” she said to the movie star. “Your skin is so wonderful. Is there anything you do for it?”

But the movie star seemed pleased. He looked down at his young wife and she smiled back, lifting a piece of her hair behind an ear. “We have a little secret in our house,” he said. “Every morning, Jan squeezes our own fresh orange juice. And we drink it with a tablespoon of cod liver oil and a tablespoon of wheat germ oil.”

“Really,” my mother marveled. She fumbled in her beaded purse, an heirloom. Then she had a piece of paper.

Mrs. Keller engaged the movie star’s young wife in a discussion of tennis, how no one could ever be good unless they’d learned their form when they were seven years old and that’s why she told Peter, every day, he should be out there with the machine, hitting balls, he’d be sorry later, he’d grow out of those political tracts he stayed inside reading and then he’d wish he’d learned tennis.

“Excuse me, would you mind saying that again,” my mother asked. “I’d like to write it down. Now, it was
one
tablespoon of wheat germ oil,
one
of cod liver oil and that’s
in
the orange juice? I see, mixed in the orange juice.”

“As Winston Churchill said, anyone who isn’t a Democrat before thirty hasn’t got a heart. And anyone who’s a Democrat after thirty doesn’t have a brain.”

Mr. Keller, a dark, lean man with a prominent Adam’s apple, was roaming around his living room. He had a hard time sitting still at meals, so he tended to roam, with his pipe, through the house. Odd lamps pointed out at weird angles in the living room, highlighting some object or another as if it were a sort of store window.

“Oh, Isabelle,” the movie star’s young wife said. “She’s not sure if she’s a girl or not.”

Mrs. Keller shrugged. “I don’t know why, she looks great as a girl.” Mrs. Keller kept a crystal bell next to her water glass, which she rang to call the maid. “Do you like pumpkin pie?” she asked, suddenly, after the maid had been told to bring out dessert and to corral Mr. Keller back to the table. It was the first question she’d asked my mother all evening.

“Oh, yes, I love it!” my mother cried, believing, as she had all her life, that in situations of some awkwardness, it was best to be enthusiastic.

“Do you,” Mrs. Keller said, as the maid wheeled the dessert cart beside her. “Thank you, Marie. Because we honestly don’t. All three of us just hate it. And we don’t like mince either. Can’t stand it. So, I found this recipe for a Portuguese ginger pudding that we serve with a hard sauce. Please tell Marie how much sauce you’d like.” She turned up to the maid and spoke to her in Spanish.

My mother waited to start eating her pudding, watching her hostess’s spoon, the way she’d been taught when she was a girl. Unfortunately, Mrs. Keller was fussing with the coffee service on the second dessert cart. My mother looked to her right and her left, where people sat eating, and she smiled with anticipation, fanning her dessert napkin out over her thighs and folding her own hands politely on her lap.

Outside, in the open air, walking down the street to our car, my mother grabbed my arm. “Did you
see
Tony Camden, how he kept looking at me? I’d turn the other way and then I’d peek back and he’d look again. This dress was really great. You know, it was expensive when I bought it, but boy, every time I get looks.”

“Mom, he’s married.”

I kicked a wheel of our car, hands in my pockets, stamping. We were shouting because my mother walked eight feet away on a driveway so she wouldn’t wet her heels on the grass.

“Boy, he sure is and did you catch how much younger? But I’ll tell you, he was attracted to me, Ann. And does HE look great for his age. I’m going tomorrow and get us some wheat germ oil and cod liver oil and we’re going to start. Now, what did he say, a tablespoon of wheat germ and a teaspoon of, or no, was it the other way around? Anyway, I have it written down.”

She opened her side of the car. We both stood there a second. “Honey, look at the stars. It’s a real clear desert night. Dry. Feel that air.”

“Mom, open my door. Let me in.”

“You’re really not romantic, are you?” she said, looking at me, perplexed.

“Just cold.”

She shuddered loudly, sliding in the car and turning on the heat. “Brrr. Me, too.

“I’ll tell you, Honey, that Peter is in love. The way he looks at you.”

“Do we have to drive by Josh Spritzer’s tonight? You know he’s gone,” I said.

“Oh, let’s. I feel like a little ride, actually.”

The next time I saw Peter Keller in school, he told me, “They all liked you. They didn’t like your mother, they thought she was strange, but Tony Camden said you were cute.” Peter looked at me with a tilted face, as if he were offering something. I felt like pushing him so he fell hard on the concrete floor of the hallway.

But I didn’t. I was scared of them, too. I smiled back and made polite conversation.

I probably picked the wrong time to ask. It was a weeknight and my mother seemed tired. We licked our ice cream cones, driving past Josh Spritzer’s apartment. He’d been home from Canada four days and she still hadn’t seen him.

“When are we going to call that boy’s agent?” I was trying to sound casual. I remembered the boy’s name perfectly well. Timmy Kennedy.

“Well, Honey, to tell you the truth, you’ve got to take off about ten pounds.” She slapped her thigh. “Right here. I’ve been kind of waiting to see when you would, but you just gobble down the milkshakes.” That night we’d eaten dinner at the Old World, which claimed to make milkshakes with entirely natural ingredients.