Circles of Confusion (6 page)

On my way home, I passed a hill of broken brick and stone, and two shaky old women trying to remove some of the rubble with dustpans into a little wagon. At that rate it will take them weeks to dispose of that mountain.

An elderly civilian was digging up corpses from a makeshift plot in front of what had once been a cinema, I guess he planned to rebury them properly in a cemetery. One corpse already lay on the rubble—a long, clay-covered bundle wrapped in canvas. I was aware for the first time what a dead body smells like. A smell too thick to be inhaled.

The digger wiped the sweat from his brow with his shirt sleeve while he stood half-supported by his shovel. When he looked up, he saw me, and my presence enraged him. Maybe it was our bombers who had killed whoever lay at his feet, maybe he was angry to see an enemy looking so well fed, but whatever it was, he started yelling at me. "How op!" it sounded like. "How op!"

Then he began to rush at me, waving his shovel over his head. My feet were nailed to the ground, but then a man I hadn't even noticed was nearby, an American GI, rushed in and put himself between me and the man. He rattled off a string of German, his hand on his holster, and finally the man dropped his shovel and began to back away.

My savior began to scold me. "You girls are not allowed out of the barracks, and certainly not on your own," he told me. "You could have been killed!"

"All I did was go for a damn walk!" I yelled back at him, and then surprised myself by bursting into tears. And was surprised even more when he took me into his arms and patted me on the back. Strong arms, a rough cheek against my own, the smell of cologne. I stepped back as soon as I could, feeling more than a little off-balance. I'm not like the other girls. I didn't join up thinking it would be a great way to meet men. I'd finally gotten free from my parents—and I didn't feel like cooking or cleaning again for anyone but

myself. But still, this man intrigues me. Rudy. Rudy Miller. He has eyes like silver. And he asked if he could see me later.

The next few entries were again like a schoolgirl's as Aunt Cady began to spend time with Rudy—the man, Claire guessed, from the photos. Rudy said this, Rudy said that, I think Rudy likes me, Rudy kissed me, then more circumspectly, Rudy took me to a room.

***

June 5, 1945

Our cook, Frau Lehman, invited us—me and Rudy, who she slyly referred to as my "beau"—to a little party tonight. They held it in what remained of their house—the cellar. After walking through a wasteland of rocky rubble, the moonscape that was once their neighborhood, I began to appreciate what a miracle it was that even their cellar had survived. We brought wine with us, and crackers, and some American cheddar, which they thought was funny because they've never seen cheese dyed orange. Our contributions turned out to be all the food there was, which may be the reason they invited us. There was plenty of black market booze, though, something that seared the back of your throat. I didn't drink more than a sip, but Rudy had a fresh glass in his hand every time I looked.

Frau Lehman and her friends were quick to reassure us that they had never supported Hitler, and that they had suffered for their beliefs. I have yet to meet anyone in Germany who admits to having been a member of the Nazi Party. They will look you straight in the eye and say that they never joined, when you know they must have. That they hid their Jewish neighbors in their cellars when the truth more likely is that they looked the other way when someone came for them.

But now everyone is in the same boat, desperate, lying and scheming to find work, to find food. The whole economy here is run on cigarettes. For a few Camels, you can buy anything from a cabbage to a painting. It all depends on how hard up the seller is. Rudy doesn't smoke. At first I thought it was because he considered it a vice, since he so clearly looks down on people who do smoke. Then he told me it's as foolish as a man rolling tobacco in a ten-dollar bill.

On our way home from the party, we passed a group of men-—liberated forced laborers and displaced persons—with faces like animals, the skin stretched over the bones, their eyes shifty. They smelled like animals, too. On seeing us, they conferred in a babble of languages—Polish, I think, and French, in addition to German—and then approached us. Rudy pulled his service revolver and they decided to go looking for someone else. One of the men stopped and stretched out his hand to me in a hopeless kind of way. The night was so silent you could hear the sound of the hammer of Rudy's gun being pulled back. They turned and left. I was shaking, but Rudy wasn't frightened at all. I've never seen him scared.

In Claire's dream, Evan had just completed building a new bed for her. In real life, tools were foreign to him. His long-fingered pale hands were meant to be tapping the buttons of a calculator, not being turned to bloody pulp under the missed stroke of a hammer. But in her dream, Evan had become an accomplished carpenter. The finished bed was newly painted a red as bright as blood, the glossy color of Chinese lacquer. Evan encouraged Claire to lie down and try it out. Obediently, she climbed in. But in her dream, the bed seemed to shrink, so what had once been a roomy double now seemed barely wide enough to contain her.

Still dreaming, she rose up on her elbows. The bed had shaped itself around her, angling sharply from her shoulders down to her feet. As Evan approached her, smiling a dead smile, she saw that he carried the missing piece—the lid to the new "bed" he had built her. And now Claire recognized the familiar shape that surrounded her. Evan had built her a coffin.

Waking tangled in ropes of sheet, Claire was relieved to find herself in a real bed. Then she looked at the clock and groaned. It was six-thirty on a Monday morning, time to get up and gird her loins for another week at the Custom Plate Department.

TI—3VOM

***

Claire tried to distract herself from the fact that her week was beginning all over again. As soon as she got into the car, she inserted a Spanish language tape into the cassette player on the passenger seat and began to dutifully echo the instructor. The words rolled off her tongue without engaging her brain. Her thoughts were still taken up with the painting and Charlie's reaction to it. Talking about her past had left Charlie looking drained, reminding Claire of how old her friend really was.

As she drove past the neighbor who lived two blocks away, Claire exchanged waves. The other woman was just getting into her car, a Mazda the exact same model and color as Claire's. They shared this ritual greeting every weekday, although they had never spoken. The woman looked a little like Claire, only Hispanic, with high cheekbones and a halo of wiry long dark curls. Claire imagined that she came from someplace exotic like Costa Rica, perhaps spoke with the same lilt and rolling R's as the instructor on the cassette tape.

At the stoplight, Claire pushed back her cuticles with the corner of the Chevron card she kept in the car's otherwise empty ashtray. It was another part of her current self-improvement campaign. She was going to learn conversational Spanish, get her nails manicured and swear off junk food for good.

Nothing ever quite worked out, though, the way Claire had originally envisioned it. For instance, the Spanish tape seemed to have been designed for some nightmare vacation. So far, she had learned to say in Spanish, "My suitcase is lost," "I have been assaulted," "Why do you wish to search the car?" and "My wallet has been stolen."

The line of cars waiting for the ramp signal to the freeway had already backed up onto Multnomah. Claire inched past the mini- mart, which had a new red banner stretched over the entrance. From donuts to Diet Coke, start your day with 7-Eleven. Claire felt a little sick as she tried to imagine what that would be like. In front of her was a black pickup truck jacked up on huge tires taller than the Mazda's roof. At the wheel sat a tiny blond with a bad perm. On the back of the truck was a bumper sticker saying, Enjoy life! This isn't a dress rehearsal!

Even on the freeway, traffic was still crawling. It thinned only as she pulled out of the Terwilliger curves. With a cough and a jerk, the Mazda finally found fourth gear. "Bump-bump," Claire muttered along with the car as the tires thumped over the same pothole on the Marquam Bridge that she crossed every weekday morning.

Claire's ten-year-old Mazda 323 drove Evan crazy. She had bought it used shortly before she met him, another step on her road to independence, even if she was doomed to always be years behind anyone else her own age. To her, the car's interior, which smelled like the previous owner's Shi Tzu, held the invigorating scent of freedom.

Even when it had been new, the car had been cheap, occupying the lowest rung of Mazda's offerings. It lacked a passenger sideview mirror, and the wipers didn't have an intermittent setting. In the summer, Claire had to peel her thighs from the vinyl bucket seat. The "sound system" consisted of a radio that squawked and squealed when turned up above a murmur. The dash was pockmarked with holes where gauges on the more expensive option package would have gone. There was even a rectangular recess in the center of the dash (helpfully labeled Quartz) meant for a clock—if the original owner had ponied up for much more than four tires and an engine.

But the Mazda did get thirty miles a gallon. And even more important, it was paid for. Claire had spent enough years with her mother to know that debt was a trap. So no matter how much Evan badgered her, she refused to get another car.

To compensate, he seized any opportunity to cushion Claire against the random blows of fate. The car's trunk was filled with his gifts. The first Valentine's Day after they met, he had given her a neon yellow banner that read Call Police in three-foot-tall black letters. Last Christmas, Evan, who knew less than nothing about tools, had taken the advice of a Sears salesman (who must have met his sales goals for the month in a single hour) and bought her a red metal tool chest full of Craftsman tools. She guessed Evan had been seduced by the foldout drawers, by the way the tools marched in silver order from smallest to biggest. Claire, who was just beginning to understand how Charlie's old house worked, had little idea of what to do with these mysterious wrenches and widgets. If she ever did break down by the side of the road and offered her toolbox to the first stranger who stopped to help her, he would probably turn out to be a psychopathic sex killer who would turn her own tools on her in unspeakable ways.

Evan (who had his own set of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maps of the fault lines that ran under Portland) had even supplied Claire with a backpack filled with emergency earthquake rations. In the event of an earthquake, Claire was to find her way to her trunk, shrug on the backpack and stagger to clear ground. The backpack's offerings included plastic pouches of water, a space blanket and a first aid kit with a sticker trumpeting that it contained 137 items. Closer inspection had revealed that 120 of those items were miniature Band-Aids. For nourishment, there was an intriguingly heavy foil-wrapped rectangular package about the size of a deck of cards. According to the label, it contained enough dehydrated food to feed five people for three days. The fine print cautioned that the contents were to be consumed with plenty of water.

Claire pulled into the parking lot and then glanced at her watch.

Two minutes to make it into the building before Roland and/or Frank would note her as tardy. With a sigh, she shouldered her tan leather backpack, left over from years of riding the bus. Then she had been forced to lug around a whole day's worth of needs, instead of using her car as a closet on wheels. The backpack still held every necessity: Band-Aids, Advil, a flashlight, snacks, a toothbrush, foil- wrapped towelettes, a sewing kit, matches. Her co-workers joked that she probably had a hand grenade in there someplace, too, but whenever anyone needed something, they came to her.

Every now and then, Claire tried to imagine herself as the kind of woman who could pare down her needs into a few things that would fit into a tiny sleek evening bag. A lipstick and a gold card, perhaps. But the backpack held more and kept her hands free.

Outside the building's doors a clump of smokers huddled in solidarity. More and more, it seemed to be only the secretaries, security guards and housekeepers who smoked—no suits among them. One plump older woman in a red polyester miniskirt was taking alternate sucks from a cigarette and a purple lollipop. Next to her stood one of the building's security guards, broad, squat and neckless, a blond crewcut young man who obviously lifted weights in his spare time. He looked at Claire with a half-smile, and she started to return it until she realized he was only admiring his reflection in the windowed corner of the building.

In the elevator, Claire pulled out her card key. She hated the picture of herself on it, which more closely resembled a Catholic high school girl gone bad, a schoolgirl's face with one eye half-closed in what appeared to be a slutty wink. She flashed it over the sensor and then pressed the button for the thirteenth floor. When she had first come to work for the state, she had found it disconcerting that the state rented space in a building with a thirteenth floor and that she had to work on it. Now she no longer thought about it.

The doors opened and she stepped out onto the flat orange carpeting that covered the floors of the Portland outpost of the License Plate Division of Oregon's Motor Vehicles Division. While others in the department dealt with the minutiae of ordinary license plates (new, lost, stolen, missing, damaged), Claire, Frank and Lori, and their supervisor, Roland, made up the section that specialized in vanity plates.