Anywhere But Here (69 page)

Driving through the dark city, I saw apartments; old buildings, pretty like New England, turn-of-the-century stone by the river with glass windows and that yellow light. I’d think of coming here and renting an apartment and living. It seemed amazing, how cheap it was. I could easily afford a pretty place, little rooms off a hallway, an old white stove in the kitchen, crannies, closets, maybe a clawfoot tub. But I couldn’t live there, I knew it. The feeling always passed.

Every day, Jimmy got up at eight o’clock the way he had when he drove to the store on Three Corners, ate breakfast and began work at nine. He still took an hour lunch break, the only difference was that now he hiked five miles, doctor’s orders. He had a machine to walk on in the laundry room for days when it was too cold outside. In the same room, Carol kept a machine which suspended her in the air, hanging her upside down on a series of metal tubes and bars. She said it helped with her back.

I sat in the breezeway talking to Mary Griling, who’d grown up to be six feet tall. She told me what had happened to everyone on our road.

Of the Grilings, Mary ended up being the one who stayed at home. She took care of her father until he died. Now she lived in the house with her brother and oldest sister, she worked in a computer shop in town.

She said she might go to Florida. “My dad’s dead, there’s nothing for me here.”

“But you’re close to your family. To Rosie.”

“I am, then I’m not,” she said. “I am and I’m not. Not like it was with my dad.”

After we’d left, she’d had polio. She limped a little and her smile twisted up to the left. She was still very neat, careful. Theresa was the one who’d gone away.

“Coming tonight, Mare?” Jimmy walked through the breeze-way, lifting a tray of chickens for the barbecue. Hal was giving a party.

“Working. But Terry’ll come. She’ll come with the baby.”

“Yah, Theresa’s home,” Carol said. “She was stationed in Japan and she met a fellow over there who can speak and understand Russian. Oh, and a real handsome boy. So he flies one of those planes out of Japan and listens to what they say over there.”

Carol stood on the porch hollering. “Handy! Handy!” She waited, fists on her hips, until the dog came running through the back field. She bent to pat him.

“You know Ralph Brozek, Jay’s brother? Yeah, he was staying at my place, freakin’ out right and left, one flashback after another. He couldn’t get out of my bathtub once, he thought he was in a ship on fire, that’s where all the other guys with him died. I say, ‘Hey, my brother’s dead, too. They’re in the same place.’ But I don’t know one single person who came back from Vietnam the way they started.

“My mom and pop think I got out because of the leg. But that’s not how it happened. Air force was messing with my head. They decided they wanted to operate. I said no, you’re not going to operate. This went on, I don’t know, six or eight weeks. Then I was lying, they didn’t know what I was talking about. I was seeing the shrinkologist. I told them a little fairy tale. Asshole doctors. I told them, I’m going to kill myself. You’re going to find me hanging from the rafters. I sat down. I couldn’t control my emotions. They sent me home.”

We sat on the edge of the patio.

“So what made you religious?” I said.

“I needed more than just what was in this world.”

Theresa and I stood breast deep in the hot tub, leaning against the underwater benches with our hands. Theresa was tall now, a woman, no signs of what she had been. She’d left the baby at home with her brother’s wife, she grabbed my arm and said we
had to talk. We sat for a long time in the hot water, steam rising around us, the party continuing, further on the patio near the pool, a stereo blaring in the solar house.

“I miss the trees,” she said. She was holding her elbows and shaking her head. I recognized the expression. “I miss the open space.”

She lived outside Kyoto and sometimes her husband was gone, flying, for two or three weeks. She took care of the baby herself. She lived on a base, though she was no longer in the army.

“Just a wife,” she said. She told me the Japanese were very good with children, that they revered infants. She said she was studying Ikebana.

I looked at her and understood the crooked smile, the rue. We both sat staring into the dark yards, the old barn a pure black, vacant fields.

“They told me they rented out your gramma’s house,” she said. “That doesn’t seem right.” I shook my head. “They’re putting my dad’s house up for sale, too, and that doesn’t seem right either.”

The pool gleamed turquoise from underwater lights, tropical plants hung in the bathhouse. “It’s so different.”

“I guess when you go away, you want it to be the same, but when you stay you want it to change.”

In the kitchen, before she walked home, Theresa wrote down her address on a square paint-color sample of Jimmy’s. Theresa Lambert, FPO Seattle, 98767, Japan.

“You won’t believe it. I bought a re-yall Seth Thomas grandfather clock,
signed
. Do you know how rare they are now? They’re in museums, you just can’t find them anymore. It’s here already, in the closet for now, I don’t want anybody to see it and get ideas, these doors are like nothing, but won’t that be something when I have my little house? Someday. You won’t believe, Honey, how beautiful it is.”

She called me a lot, whenever she wanted to talk.

Someone from “Santa Fe” had sued, and they paid us all back royalties.

It was easy, sending the check, signing it over—then it was gone and I was only as poor as anyone else in Providence.

I remembered something I’d forgotten for a long time, the job I’d had in a department store wrapping packages. It was like a TV game show, a bonanza, where all around were prizes. My mother had come in on Saturdays as extra help. In three weeks, we ripped them off blind. We stole slacks, dresses, everything.

I still wear some of those shirts. That’s one thing about stealing, you wear something long enough and it seems as though it was always yours. It’s the same as if you bought it. Those years, I never felt scared. Now I think it’s crazy, the risks we took. We could have been in the backseat of a squad car, booked on felonies, both caught. We did a lot for money, things meant so much to us. And it seemed hard for my mother. Since I’ve been gone, money has come to me. People have given me things. I always feel a little bad at how hard my mother tries.

The thing I keep thinking, when I remember my mother, is how young she was.

One day I read it in the newspaper, Buffy died. The girl who was an actress that everyone wanted to be when I was nine. She’d been nine too. She looked younger, she played a twin on “Family Affair” with two high blond pigtails. Mattel put out a Buffy doll and they also made one of Mrs. Beasley, Buffy’s doll on television. Buffy was famous. When I lived in Bay City, I read everything there was about Buffy. I found an interview with her in
TV Guide
. I remember it said she lived in Pacific Palisades. She talked about working, she said once when she came home her brother had eaten all the strawberries. I knew she had a mother and no father, like me. I thought of her now, enormous, full grown, but with the pale thin legs and white anklets, a nineteen-year-old girl in blond pigtails. I kept thinking of paper around her, the long woman’s legs, eerie where they met the white anklets, in a shoe box. She died of a drug overdose in an apartment on the Palisades. I guess she’d never gone too far away.

A while later, my mother talked about a house, how I had to come home and see it.

Finally, I went to LA.

“I have everything,” my mother says, hugging me. “There’s all different kinds of cheese and a salami in the refrigerator. And fruit. I’ve got peaches and plums and watermelon and strawberries …”

She’s still listing fruit as I set down my suitcase and walk over the carpet to the sliding glass doors. We’re on the ocean, in Malibu. Waves unroll below us on the sand, muscular and glassy.

“Kiwi and kiwi and kiwi …” My mother sticks on kiwi when she runs out of fruits. “Oh, and I have white wine and red wine and Kahlua, I remember you like Kahlua, and gin and tonic. And oh, I have limes.”

She is standing behind me, her fingers light on my back. Together, we watch the water. That’s one thing about my mother, her capacity for awe.

“Isn’t it nice?” she whispers.

All her things are here, the things I’ve heard about for years, the grandfather clock backed into a corner, hidden by ferns and a Kensia palm.

“I don’t want anybody to see it and get ideas,” she says.

The pine bench, stripped blond and waxed, stands in front of a couch, antique armoires are set with green Limoges plates, tiny antlers, dried roses and orange peel. She shows me each thing. The Tiffany lamp, its one original petal-glass shade, the other replicated by a glass blower she met in Santa Barbara, every piece collected slowly. I walk around the rooms and touch.

“It’s worth three times what I paid,” she whispers, her eyebrows lifting.

Sometimes when you walk in a house that has been newly, thoroughly cleaned, you feel light. You’re eating, you’re lounging on a couch, spreading open the pages of a magazine, but you are a
small thing, in the rooms. You’re living the way people live inside movies.

The carpet is new and even, the glass perfect. I’m surprised. I guess I’m even impressed.

This is what is in the bathroom: Porthault scallop-edged towels, organic geranium soap, aloe vera shampoo, fennel toothpaste on the spotless counter and a huge shell filled with natural sponges.

I sit on my mother’s bed and let her show me things. The Tiffany lamp, half Tiffany, half Santa Barbara, sheds soft colored light on the wall. My mother’s closet could be a museum. Each article is tended. The floors shine with oil, her shoes hang in felt bags, tucked in French cloth shoe-panels. Her dresses fall perfectly and sweaters, from Chanel to Lacoste, are stacked according to color, each in its own clear plastic zipper bag. She seems to own nothing old. Most of my mother’s clothes are white.

She sits on her bed, next to the lamp, with her glasses on, mending a torn piece of lace on the hem of my skirt. It caught in my heel; the way I live, I would have left it to rip. I idly pull out one of my mother’s drawers. There are rows of unopened Dior stockings, textured, not, sheer to opaque, in all colors, her silk and lace panties and bras. An antique coin silver evening purse, wrapped in a white felt bag, and a sachet, rose petals and orange peel.

“I make those myself,” she says.

I’m thinking, my mother has changed. When I lived with her, she was more like me. She could walk out of the house looking perfect, nails buffed and polished, hands soft, everything on her bright, pressed, falling in gentle ruffles and folds, the patent leather purse dark and shining like a mirror, but she left a million little odds and ends behind. Old things, gray stained sweat shirts in the closet, clothes she kept for wearing when she was just with me. She didn’t seem to own those anymore. She must have thrown them all out, everything stained. She used to have old purses,
each one containing scraps of things, change, matted brushes, pictures, junk. They seem gone now, too.

She must have always wanted to live like this; from one perfect outfit to the next, nothing in between, every day crisp new clothes, nothing to be ashamed of, ever, anywhere. She always loved new things. Someone could always be watching.

The ocean feels so close and loud, I don’t want to sleep. We drink Kahlua in tall glasses of milk and my mother tells me secrets about her clothes.

The next morning, the living room is a cage of sun. My mother stands by the oven, wearing white, poking at bagels with a fork.

“I have lox and cod and smoked salmon, and onion, tomato and cream cheese and, let’s see …”

“You bought this house?” In the daylight, it seems too good. If my mother bought a house with the check I sent her, I imagined it small, a bungalow in the Valley, or towards Riverside, Pasadena. There are a million little LA towns. Tarzana, maybe. But not here.

Her back turns, there is a flinch of movement in her shoulder, under the loose white shirt. She stiffens and pauses a second.

“Mmhmm,” she says.

Late afternoon, my mother sews over the hem of my skirt, all around, not just where it tore, to strengthen it. She is humble before the ancient delicate fabric, the new, Japanese style. A servant to a beautiful dress. It feels quiet in the house. Dim light. She is bent over, feet clumped pigeon-toed on the floor, knees pressed together, biting a thread. I drop down and do pushups. She is all deft concentration. The skills she’s had forever. She studies careful invisible stitches in the weak light. She puts her glasses on.

“Adele, you have enough food for forty,” Daniel Swan says, closing the refrigerator door.

“Here’s the pasta and here’s lemons,” my mother calls.

Daniel unrolls white butcher paper with pink, round pieces of veal on it. There must be thirty medallions.

“That’s okay, whatever we don’t use, we’ll keep.” My mother sighs and lightly claps. “So.”

I cut a lime for my gin and tonic. We’ve been drinking for hours. My mother washes vegetables, individually, in the sink, drying each mushroom with a paper towel. She stops, looks at us and smiles. “If I ever have a man around again, he’s going to have to cook. You bet.”