Anywhere But Here (57 page)

But even though we both had jobs, we were never good with money. The first time we couldn’t pay the rent, my mother called Mr. Keller on the telephone and cried and sent me up to the front house carrying mixed flowers and a check they couldn’t cash until two weeks from Wednesday. Mr. Keller was a kind man. He looked at me, put his hand on my arm, his Adam’s apple bobbing up over his collar, and said, “Okay, Ann, tell your mother thanks. And don’t you worry, huh?”

As I turned to go, Mrs. Keller called, “Bert, ask Ann if she’s had anything to eat.”

I was standing at the back door of the kitchen, the door that led to the fenced tennis court, which separated the big house from ours. A cake, with a third cut out, showing its layers, was standing on a cake plate. The smell of roast beef lingered on its tin foil, left, wrinkled on the counter.

I hadn’t had anything to eat yet. My mother was so upset about
the rent, we hadn’t gone to get dinner, but I just said, “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

Not that I was any saint. I scuffed my feet along the tennis court and when I walked in, I plopped down onto the sofa, my hand on my belly.

“What did he say?” my mother asked.

“I’m starving,” I said. “My tummy hurts.”

“Ann, just tell me what Mr. Keller said. Then we’ll get something to eat.”

“He said okay.”

My mother began to beat her chest with an open hand, like a pigeon preparing to take off. “Oh, thank God. Thank you, God,” she said, her head tilted up to the low ceiling.

I groaned. It made me sick when she got grateful. Everybody else had a place to live and you didn’t see them thanking God for it.

“Okay, okay. Let’s go. You’re just not sentimental, are you? Well, I am. I’m thankful when people are nice like that. Get your jacket.”

We had the half-sized refrigerator but we never kept much food in it. Every night we went out for dinner.

“Brrr, come on, hop in,” my mother said. We parked our car in the alley, behind the backhouse. She stood staring up at the sky. I walked around to my door with my fists jammed in my parka pockets. My mother kept quiet because she was making her wish. Forty-four years old and every night of her life she made a wish on a star.

“It’s clear tonight, Ann, look at those constellations.” My mother clapped her hands. “It’s going to be a great day tomorrow.”

A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
. Many of my mother’s enthusiasms could be traced. We turned up the heat full blast in the car and I looked out the window, dreaming to myself. I was always dreaming to myself in those days. I wanted so many things. We drove, slowing the car in front of Josh Spritzer’s old house in Beverly Hills and then, not finding his Thunderbird in the driveway, my mother headed towards his apartment in Century City.

“What are you thinking, Bear Cub?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, you can tell me.”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You know, you could say something once in a while, have a conversation.”

It was hard to find restaurants that time of night. Usually, we didn’t have cash and not too many places took checks. But we’d go into one of those restaurants with the little metal “No checks, please” plaques over the cash register and sit down and eat a whole meal. At the Old World on Sunset, there was a bulletin board in the back of the restaurant, with all the bounced checks pinned up on it. Two of ours were there. You passed it on the way to the bathroom. When my friends from school wanted to eat at the Old World, I didn’t have the nerve to say no, but I sat scared, extremely conscious, the minutes any of them left the table to go to the bathroom.

When the bill came, at the end of a meal, my mother would start writing a check. The waitress would usually look flustered and say, “Oh, but we don’t take checks.”

“You don’t! Why not?”

“We just don’t. Restaurant policy. There’s a sign there, right where you come in.”

“Well, this check is good, I can assure you.”

“I’ll have to ask the manager.”

“Please do get the manager.”

My mother would fold her arms and smile at me over the table. I’d shove my chair back and put on my jacket. “I’m going outside.”

“Okay, Hon,” she’d say. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Then I’d wait for her, leaning against our car. I let her do it alone.

We didn’t say anything about it, but we knew we had to avoid the places we’d ever bounced a check. My mother had two dollars in change and she just shrugged.

“Let’s go and see if that little French place is open.” There was a place on Pico we liked, a small restaurant, that served food like
my grandmother’s; sweetbreads and pork roasts. “You get your little soup and your salad and a little dessert. I could just go for that tonight,” my mother said. But the windows looked dark when we passed. She sighed. “Should we drive over and get ice cream?”

Some nights we skipped dinner and just ate sundaes. We were usually on diets, so it seemed all right. My mother parked under the trees in front of Baskin-Robbins and felt around the bottom of her purse for stray dollars.

“Here, you run in,” she said, pressing three damp dollars into my hand. She would wait in the car with the motor running. I knew which flavors she wanted and extra nuts and whipped cream.

Tonight, though, I minded. “You go in and get them. Why should I always go in?”

“I can’t, Ann.” There was real panic in her voice. “Someone could see me like this.” She was wearing a terry-cloth jogging suit and tennis shoes. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail.

“Someone could see
me.”
I had on sweat pants and a T-shirt and sneakers. My hair was wet because I washed it every night.

“At your age it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyway, you look cute. At my age, they expect a woman to dress up a little. Remember, I’m the one who has to catch a father for you.”

“I already have a father.”

“Yeah, well, where is he?”

She had me there. “Hell if I know.”

“Come on, Ann. Please. Just this once. Run in and get it quick.”

“No.”

We sat there under the trees. “Please, Honey.”

I shook my head. My mother started the car with a jolt and we drove home. For a while, she didn’t speak to me, but when I came down to the living room later, for a glass of water, she was standing by the open refrigerator, eating crackers and sardines, wearing the sweat shirt she slept in.

“Want some sardines?”

I shook my head and went back to my room.

“Ann, come and try some. Come on a second. It’s good.”

I heard her lift out the milk carton and drink from it. I hated it when she drank from the carton. I couldn’t stand the idea of her saliva in my milk.

“I don’t want any,” I yelled. “And I’m trying to sleep.”

“Okay,” she called back. The crackers made crunching noises. “But it’s very good. Very, very good.”

I was hungry. My stomach seemed to acquire consciousness. It wanted things. Steaks with melted butter. Fresh rhubarb pie. Being hungry made me cold and slightly dizzy. I remember that feeling of going to bed hungry and waking up light as if it happened more often than it really did. Most of the nights we didn’t eat, we could have. We were on diets. We were always on diets and neither of us ever got skinny. But years later, it’s hunger we remember.

That night I woke up to find my mother sitting next to me on my bed, looking down at my face. “I was just thinking to myself how lucky I am to have a daughter like you.”

None of the rooms in the backhouse had locks. After she left, I got up and shoved my dresser against the door.

My mother’s room was right next to mine and the construction of the backhouse seemed flimsy. Even with the door shut, I could still hear her breathe on the other side of the wall. I imagined her curled up, pushing into the plaster, trying to make a cave and bore through.

She knocked on the wall. “Good night, Sweetie.”

I slept on the outermost edge of my bed.

Josh Spritzer seemed to be dropping my mother. Her dates with him were down to once every other week. Even now that she had better clothes. And he seemed to be taking more out-of-town vacations.

“I think I
will
call his psychiatrist,” my mother said one morning, while I ironed my jeans before school.

There was another man who asked her out. His name was Jack Irwin and his head was flat and bald as a nickel. He lived with his mother, who was almost a hundred and who had lost control.
When we went to visit in their apartment once, she wobbled in her chair, her face jiggled, her eyes loose, wandering, her hands opening and closing, roaming the air for substance, finding nothing, and, at the end, her mouth opened to about the size of a penny and she left it there and said, “Eh,” not like a question but like a word.

My mother had met Jack Irwin in the convalescent home. His mother had broken a hip. Since those days in Palm Manor, Jack Irwin talked about Solvang all the time. “Lovely little village. Rollicking, rolling green hills. And the Swedes. Everything maintained by the Swedes.” Apparently, he’d been there with his mother in 1961.

“He wants to take me there,” my mother said, one night. She’d come home from a date with him and she sat on her bed, curling off her pantyhose. “For a weekend. I can’t even kiss him. Could you come here a second, Ann, and undo my bra?”

“I’m in bed.”

Then there was the slam of a drawer. “’Course I suppose he could do a lot for us, with all his money.” She sighed and I could hear her sit down again on the mattress. “He always asks about you, Ann, he thinks it’s great you’re doing so well in your school. He wants to talk to you about your college.”

I heard her settle into bed. “Well, at least it was a good dinner,” she said through the wall. “And he’ll take us out to breakfast on Sunday.”

The weekend they went to Solvang, my mother seemed very grown up. She snapped the buckles of her suitcase shut when she heard his car in the alley. She seemed older. She wore a suit, with her hair pinned up neatly in a bun.

“Here,” she said, pressing a twenty-dollar bill in my hand and closing my fingers around it. “That’s for food. Call Leslie and go out.” When she opened the sliding glass door and Jack was there, we both felt disappointed. He stood, hands at his sides, wearing a plaid jacket and a white turtleneck sweater. Every time, we couldn’t imagine beforehand how ugly he really was.

“All set,” he said, clicking his heels together.

“I’ll try to get you a present,” she whispered. When she hugged me good-bye, for some reason I didn’t know, I started crying. I wetted my mother’s collar.

“Sshhh,” she said, kissing me next to the eye. “I’ll be back on Sunday.”

They both looked slow and proper getting into the car. He lifted the trunk and put in the suitcase and opened her door first. She sat in the passenger seat and folded her hands. I threw myself on the couch and pulled up the mohair blanket. And it was me who usually never cried.

The next morning, Saturday, Peter Keller called me on the telephone from the front house. “I want to kiss your lips,” he said.

Peter Keller was a year younger and we rode to school in the same carpool. He wasn’t the kissing type.

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, not if you can’t think of a better reason than that,” I said and hung up.

An hour later, he called back.

“I thought of another reason. I’m wild about your warm lips and I want to squeeze you tight.” I heard pages moving, but it didn’t sound like a joke.

“Yeah?” I was eating a carton of ice cream from the freezer. My mother had stocked up before she left.

“I want to part your lips with my tongue.”

“Yeah?” I dragged the phone to the couch and lay down. “And then what?”

“Can I come over now?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t even think of changing my T-shirt, which was spattered with chocolate ice cream. When I came home from school every day, I took my good jeans off and hung them up in the closet. Peter was one of the kids I played with in my old clothes. If another friend of mine called on the telephone, I’d get rid of him fast. I didn’t feel bad about it. He was a grade lower.

When he came to our sliding glass doors, he looked the same as always, his hair capping his face. But he squinted and his hands were opening and closing at his sides.

“So?” I said.

“Maybe we should go out some night?”

“Go out some night? What about what you were saying on the phone? Where did you learn that?”

“From a book,” he admitted.

“No,” I said. “We’re not going to go out some night. Come in. Lie down over there and undress.”

I hadn’t planned anything, I was making it up as I went along. I felt taller and powerful, like a teacher, reaching up to the top of a clean blackboard.

“All right,” he said. He untied a sneaker and held it in his hand. “Don’t you want to talk first? It’s not even dark out,” he said, looking at the doors.

I shook my head. It was a spring day. The wind moved in the tops of the palm trees outside. No one was around. Peter undressed, holding his shirt and pants balled up in his hands, as if he were afraid I was going to take them. His arms hung pitifully at his sides.

“Aren’t you going to take yours off, too?”

His underwear looked white and new as a child’s. One of the things that amazed us when we’d cleaned the big house was the Kellers’ surplus. They all kept drawers of new underwear, some in the packages, unopened. In the bathroom closets, there were rows of soaps and shampoo, more than one of everything.

“You first,” I said.

He sat down on the old blue and red striped couch and pulled off his underwear. Guys are so shy, I was thinking.

“Okay,” he said, looking up at me. He took in a breath and held it. He seemed scared, as if I would hurt him. He was very thin and almost hairless. He seemed frightened, like a woman.

I kicked my tennis shoes off with my heels.

“Lie down,” I said.

I sat next to him on the couch. “Okay, you can kiss me, but
not my face.” He fumbled, trying to take my shirt off, so I stood up and pulled it over my head. I unzipped my jeans and dropped them on the floor. Then I sat on top of him.