Circles of Confusion (9 page)

As she approached the crest of Capitol, she concentrated on keeping her fists pumping. The trick to taking a hill was to forget about the legs and keep the arms pistoning. For two blocks she was helped by another runner who swung in ahead of her, a tall man who landed on the outside edges of his shoes and barely skimmed his feet along the ground. Claire matched him step for step, mimicking both his pronation and his efficient strides.

Once over the top of the hill, Claire began to lengthen her stride. She imagined herself walking briskly down Fifth Avenue, looking right at home in the crowds. With her legs scissoring past each other and the sweetly rotten smell of the wizened roadside blackberries in her nose, she felt fully alive. Maybe she would be okay in New York. People went there all the time. She was an adult, she was strong, she would have Charlie's advice to fall back on. With a surge of energy, she ran faster.

Claire made it to her mom's in record time. Standing outside her apartment, Claire could hear someone inside chatting away. When Jean opened the door, Claire realized the sounds she had heard had come from the twenty-seven-inch Sony that held pride of place in the living room.

A look of alarm passed over her mother's round face. "What are you doing here this time of day?" She was dressed in a purple velour jogging suit that had never been jogged in. "You didn't get laid off, did you?"

"Don't worry, Mom, I'm taking a few days off and was just out for a run. I'll have that job until I die." Claire said it in jest, but she suddenly had a vision of herself at sixty-five, her age-spotted hands bringing down the Rejected stamp on some twenty-first-century version of ILUV69.

Her mother had already transferred her gaze back to the TV set. A talk show had degenerated to the point where two young girls were toe to toe, screaming at each other, while the audience hooted and booed. "If you stay long enough, you'll have a chance to see your sister."

"Where's the baby?" Claire asked. Her mother, who claimed her bad back had ruled out a full-time job years ago, made a little money under the table watching Susie's toddler, Eric.

"Asleep in the back bedroom. You can take a peek at him if you want."

As she walked down the hall, Claire was lapped by waves of sound, first from the five-inch black-and-white battery-powered Panasonic on the kitchen counter, then from the thirteen-inch Hitachi in her mother's bedroom. At the end of the hall, Claire turned the doorknob stealthily and pushed the door open. Even in here, a TV was on, an old nineteen-inch Zenith that at least was tuned to Sesame Street. Eric, who was just over a year old, lay facedown, fast asleep with his knees drawn up under his chest and his overalled butt in the air.

Her mother's whisper startled Claire. The baby had the power to pull even her mother away from her TV show. "Doesn't he have hair just like Top Ramen?"

Claire smiled and reached out to touch the pale kinked waves. Eric sighed and rolled on his side. She pulled her hand back, afraid of waking him. It had been several months since Claire had seen him, and already he looked more like a little boy, not the baby she remembered.

"I cut out the TV Guide for the day he was born, to put in his baby book." Jean pulled up a blanket to cover him, patted him so softly that he didn't stir. "You could get you one of these, you know. And you'll be thirty-five next week, so it's not like there's much time left. They have stories all the time on TV about women who wait too long and then figure out their body won't cooperate anymore."

"Evan doesn't feel ready to get married, Mom." Claire surprised herself by adding, "I don't know if I would want to be married to him anyway."

"Married? Who says you have to be married? I didn't have to be married to have you and Susie. And Susie may be as good as married to J. B., but she sure don't have the piece of paper to prove it." Susie had been the product of a liaison with an on-again, off-again truck- driving boyfriend who still occasionally showed up to take Jean out to dinner or to give Susie a birthday present two months after the fact. When she was growing up, Claire had actually envied her sister the certainty of knowing her father, and knowing that he loved her, at least in a small way.

Her mother turned and shuffled back down the hall in too-small metallic gold mules. Claire trailed behind her. In the living room, Jean huffed a little as she bent over and pressed a button on the bottom of the TV, flicking past different images until the opening credits for A Better Tomorrow came on.

"The batteries went out on my remote. I have got to get to the store today." Jean tapped on the forehead of a rugged-looking man with a stethoscope around his neck. He was holding an anguished conversation with a nurse while they stood inside a supply closet. "His ex-wife is one of the models on The Price Is Right."

Claire was confused. "The doctor's ex-wife?"

"No, honey, the actor's ex-wife. The character doesn't know that his new wife is really his half-sister, and she has amnesia because of the coma she was in after the car accident that killed his first wife."

To Claire's mother, TV was more than entertainment, it was a family that shared histories and connections. Maury Povich was married to Connie Chung. Mario Thomas, who had been the spunky star of That Girl! years ago, was married to Phil Donahue, who was still important even if he didn't have a talk show anymore. Fred Savage, who had been so wholesome on The Wonder Years, might now be seen beating his girlfriend to death on a "fact-based" TV movie of the week.

Watching her mother stare mesmerized at the TV set's manufactured tribulations, Claire felt a surge of gratitude for Charlie. Even before she had met her, Claire had already been distancing herself from these TV sets, this apartment, this way of life that wanted little and expected even less, but moving in with Charlie had speeded up the process.

Now that Claire no longer saw her mother every day, it was hard not to view her the way a stranger would. For one thing, a stranger would never guess that they were related. Claire was tall and thin, while Jean was short and nearly one hundred pounds overweight. Claire had red-gold curls; her mother's hair was currently dyed a frayed, fried blond. Claire seldom wore makeup. Her mother's mouth was a dark red Cupid's bow, outlined and filled in using colors from a makeup kit brought from a TV infomercial. The pitchster had promised that each kit was specially created for each customer. Jean had had Claire take a Polaroid of her to send to the people who custom-blended each order. The result could sometimes be frightening in the blue glow of the TV set—heavy-lidded eyes, lips so dark they were almost black, stripes of maroon blush that added false hollows to Jean's cheeks. Claire's mother looked less a vamp than an overweight vampire.

"I don't really have time to follow the shows anymore, Mom."

When Claire lived at home, her mother had spent every evening's commercial breaks filling her in on the big events of the daytime shows. The weird thing was that Claire had enjoyed it. "One of the reasons I came over was to ask you about Aunt Cady. I started wondering about her when I was cleaning out her trailer. Like, what did she do in the WACs? And did you ever hear anything about a boyfriend she had during the war? A guy named Rudy?"

"By the time I was old enough to pay attention to Aunt Cady, she was already an old maid working at the bank. No makeup and too skinny. Always so serious, with her nose in a book. Men like someone they can have fun with, someone with a little meat on their bones." Jean looked up at the ceiling, thinking. "Maybe I did hear she had a little something going on before I was born, but by the time she came home he was out of the picture."

"Do you know why they never got married? Or what happened to him?"

"Like I said, I wasn't even born when it happened. I'm surprised that anyone would have looked at her twice. Even as a kid, you heard things about what it had been like, you know, about how the women would do anything for a Hershey bar or a cigarette." She swiveled her eyes back to the TV, where two nurses were deep in conversation. They both wore the starched white caps that Claire knew had been out of favor for fifteen years. "Do you know how many women the average man sleeps with in his lifetime?"

"What? What's your source on this?"

"Geraldo."

"The man who put fat from his butt into his forehead?"

"Seven. The answer is seven. Don't you find that interesting?"

"Very." Her mother didn't seem to notice the sarcasm.

TVZTRU

The sputtering roar of the unmuffled engine of a car pulling up outside was loud enough to make it difficult to hear the TV.

"There's your sister."

A few seconds later, Susie walked in. She shrugged off her rabbit- fur coat, revealing the yellow-, orange-, and brown-striped polyester uniform of Spud City, where she worked as a prep person. Although still as thin as when she was a teenager, Susie now looked hollowed out and haggard.

"Hey, Claire. What are you doing around the old homestead?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned to their mother. "Is Eric asleep?" Her fingers, tipped with cherry-red nail polish, were busy unpinning her hairnet.

"He just went down for a nap about a half-hour ago."

"Then I'm going to take a shower. I can't stand smelling like grease for one more second." She went off down the hall.

"How are she and J. B. doing?" Claire asked her mother. J. B. didn't seem to have a job, although he sometimes worked as a day laborer doing construction. She remembered the last time she had seen him, on the Fourth of July. Hie five of them had watched fireworks on TV while eating a sheetcake her mother decorated with strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip to resemble an American flag. J. B. had worn a sleeveless denim shirt that showed off his heavily muscled arms, which were tattooed with a dragon, a dancing showgirl and a Harley-Davidson emblem. He and Susie took turns going out into the apartment's courtyard to light up cigarettes, as they had both pledged not to smoke around their son. Claire had liked him for that, and for the way he frequently scooped up Eric for a hug.

"They're still together, which gives her a longer track record than practically anybody else in the family. He's different, but I like him."

Jean stopped talking when Susie walked back into the living room. She was dressed in tight jeans, a pair of Candie's mules, and a rhinestone-spangled T-shirt that read Country Blues. A towel was wrapped around her head like a turban. She sat down in the armchair, unwrapped the towel and began to comb her fingers through her shoulder-length hair, still blond but clearly now with some help. "So, Big Sis, what are you up to these days? How come you're not at work?"

"I came by to ask Mom about something I found in Aunt Cady's trailer."

Her mom turned from the TV to look at her. "I thought you didn't find anything but that diary?" Jean had called Claire the day after her return and had been disappointed by her reply. When she had spoken to her, Claire had found herself neglecting to mention the painting and the troubling baggage it brought with it.

"Well, I did find something. An oil painting of a woman holding a letter. It's only about this big." Claire measured the air in front of her with her hands. "I think Aunt Cady got it when she was in Germany. That's why I've was asking you all those questions, Mom. When I first found it, I knew it was beautiful, but I didn't know if it were real. But I've shown it to a few people, and they think it might be very old. Maybe several hundred years, even. So"—she could feel her heart begin to race again at her audacity—"I'm going to take it to New York. That's what I came over here to tell Mom."

"New York?" Jean echoed. To Claire's surprise, she heard envy in her voice. "The Big Apple?"

Susie dropped the towel in her lap. "I don't understand. Why do you have to go to New York City?"

"I need someone to examine the painting, and that's where the world's experts are."

"You mean you have to find out if it's worth money or not?"

Claire couldn't think of a way to describe all her tangled thoughts about the painting. "That, and how old it is, and who painted it and maybe who the lady in the painting was. Mom, how do you think Aunt Cady came to have it?"

Her mother's answer surprised her. "Things go missing, don't they? And somebody has to find them, right?"

It wasn't until after Claire left that Jean remembered she hadn't told her about the reporter from the Medford Mail Tribune who had called two days before. The paper, he said, was beginning a series of in- depth stories on the recently departed, not to replace obituaries but rather to supplement them. Each story would give readers a glimpse of the real person who lay behind an obituary's brief biographical sketch and list of grieving survivors. The articles would profile the dead through interviews with relatives and close friends, as well as photos of particularly beloved mementos. Jean had told the reporter what little she remembered about her uncle's sister, but as for belongings, she had explained to him that Claire had inherited everything. He had been eager to follow up with her, and requested her phone number and her address, so that he could send a photographer—a stringer, he called him—out for pictures. Wouldn't he be surprised, Jean thought now, when he found out that Aunt Cady might actually have had something worth owning instead of just piles and piles of books.

Then the new soap—Sharing—came on and she and Susie settled in to watch. And by the time the show was over, Jean had forgotten all about telling Claire about that nice reporter.