Golden States (10 page)

“The same. Rob and David, two lost boys.”

“David? Are you out there?” Mom asked.

He paused, thinking of self-sacrifice. But he knew Rob would get in, one way or another. “Yes,” he said quietly, and said, “Yes” again.

Mom opened the door. She had on her white robe, and held an unlit cigarette between two fingers. She looked first at David, blankly; then she looked at Rob. Her face worked a beat too slowly into an expression of cordial surprise.

“Rob,” she said. She put the cigarette in her mouth and stared at Rob’s black eye.

“How are you, Beverly?” Rob said, extending his hand. “They still let me run around loose.” Mom put out her hand and let it be shaken. Rob squeezed her hand with quick gentle pressure, assuring her there was no danger anywhere. “Surprised to see me?” he asked.

“Oh no,” Mom said. “First I’m going to pour us both a cup of coffee and I’m going to light this cigarette, and then you can tell me how a man who lives five hundred miles away happens to show up at daybreak on my doorstep with my son.”

“David and I already had our first cup,” Rob said.

“Sure. He’s been drinking coffee ever since he turned twenty-one. Come in.”

The three of them walked through the dusky hallway to the kitchen, which was full of new light. “Janet’s still sleeping,” Mom said, “and Lizzie’s deciding on today’s outfit.”

“The house looks good,” Rob said.

“Still standing,” Mom said. She took the steaming kettle from the stove, took cups from the shelf.

“I don’t drink coffee anymore, Beverly,” Rob said. “You wouldn’t have any herb tea, would you?”

“I think the best I’ve got is Lipton’s.”

“That’s fine.”

Rob walked a slow circle around the kitchen, hands in his pockets. He paused before the refrigerator, and frowned over the cartoon held there by the plum-shaped magnet (an old man sitting dejectedly in a room full of balls, thirty or more of them, while his wife says, “Maybe you’re trying to juggle too many at once”).

“I hope you’ll pardon my appearance,” Rob said. “I didn’t have time to wash up.”

“What did you do, drive all night?” Mom said.

“Pretty much. I slept a couple of hours in my car out front, waiting until you all woke up.”

“Were you lurking in my garden last night?”

“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“Never mind. Here.” She handed him a steaming cup of tea, its string and paper tab dangling over into the saucer.

“Thank you, Beverly,” Rob said. “You’re all right, you know?”

“Sure, I’m the Fourth of July. Why don’t you wait down here a minute and I’ll go wake Janet up. Cream’s in the refrigerator if you want it, and sugar’s in the little canister that says ‘Sugar.’ ”

“Thanks,” Rob said.

Mom left the room, taking her unlit cigarette with her. On her way she brushed David’s shoulder with her palm, tracing its shape, to remind him she remembered he was there.

“She’s great,” Rob said.

“I know,” David said. He went to the stove, poured himself a cup of hot water, and scooped freeze-dried coffee into it.

Rob looked over at the table in the breakfast nook, and seemed to consider sitting there, but didn’t. David leaned against the sink and sipped at his coffee, which was getting easier to do.

“How’s the sixth grade?” Rob asked him.

“Okay,” David said. Rob looked so strange there in the kitchen, in his suit and his bruise and his day-old whiskers, like an important man and a bum at the same time. David knew this was the moment for confessing. Soon Mom would come back, then Janet would come, and the world would go rolling lopsidedly along with his lie stuck in it. But one moment stretched into the next, in the liquid way they did when he had something to do and didn’t want to do it; each idle moment was so silver and fine, even just standing there with a coffee cup in his hands and Rob bouncing slightly on his heels, working for something to say. David let another moment and another go by, and then Lizzie came into the kitchen, dressed for school.

“Well Lizzie,” Rob said. His face lit up with more than ordinary polite good cheer. He looked as if he expected Lizzie to rescue him.

Lizzie, who had not spotted Rob right off, stopped short and stared at him. “Hi, Rob,” she said, as if finding him here in the kitchen was just what she’d expected.

“Surprised to see me?” Rob asked.

“Yes,” Lizzie said. David had slipped his coffee cup into the sink, to avoid stupid questions. Lizzie walked around Rob and opened the refrigerator door with a firm sense of destination, as though there were a staircase hidden inside. She brought out a carton of milk and put it on the table, where it was never put.

“How’ve you been?” Rob asked her.

“Okay,” she said, watching the milk. “What happened to your eye?”

“Well, I had a little fight.”

“Oh.” She positioned herself a little differently inside her shirt, a fake leopard skin she’d gotten after two months’ steady insistence. David considered insulting her; he could think of ten things off the top of his head. Instead he kept quiet, and watched Rob watching her.

“Have you heard the new Michael Jackson album?” Rob asked. At Christmas, he and Lizzie had based their relations on a shared love of Michael Jackson. They danced to “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” over and over, Rob swinging his hips and arms in massive gestures that filled the living room.

“I’ve
got
it,” Lizzie said. “I’ve had it for a month.”

“What do you think?” Rob asked her.

She narrowed her eyes in her suspicious, finicky way. “I like it,” she said tentatively, in case of a trick.

“Me too,” Rob said. “I play it all the time.”

Lizzie nodded, tight-lipped, pleased. David longed so to insult her that he had to hold his breath. He wouldn’t do it with Rob there. It would be showing him too much of the family.

Mom came back, saying, “Janet will be down in a minute.” She had lit her cigarette, and smoked it halfway down. “Good morning, Sparkle,” she said to Lizzie.

“Don’t call me that,” Lizzie said.

Mom picked up the milk carton, glancing at it with accustomed surprise (things turned up in strange places with humanlike obstinacy; it was the way of the world), and put it back into the refrigerator.

“Rob, what about some breakfast?” she said.

David thought, Don’t feed him, so hard he checked around to be sure he hadn’t said it out loud.

“That’d be great,” Rob said. “I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.” He smiled his proud smile, showing gums.

“I will make the toast,” Lizzie said with gallant resignation.

“You’ve never made toast in your life,” David said. He couldn’t contain himself.

“Yes I have,” Lizzie said.

“She never makes toast,” he told Rob, helpless in his frustration over Lizzie’s conceit, her
wrongness.
“She never does anything. I’ll bet she doesn’t even know where the toaster is.”

“I’ve been hearing about Lizzie’s toast ever since we first met, David, my friend,” Rob said. “I’m told she only makes it on special occasions.”

David had blundered. Now it was Lizzie and Rob against him.

Lizzie took bread from the breadbox and said, “David sticks his boogers under the table. There’s one there right now.”

“More than enough, little darlings,” Mom said.

Mom cooked the eggs and bacon, Lizzie made toast, and David set the table because he didn’t want to do nothing. Rob leaned against the counter, drinking his tea, talking to Mom and calling her Beverly.

“Well, Beverly, even a bathrobe becomes you,” he said while she turned the bacon. She didn’t laugh.

“So how goes the practice?” she asked.

“All right. Fine. I seem to be passing for a real attorney. The suit and tie help.”

“The first time I met you you were wearing overalls. I thought you were a farmer.”

“Overalls and Birkenstocks,” he said. “One uniform traded for another. I still meditate.”

“Well. That’s nice.”

“If I have to work late I lock my office door and take the phone off the hook for half an hour,” he said. “I never skip meditating. And I can tell you with absolute certainty, Beverly, that it’s made me a better lawyer. So my hippie days paid off.” “Good,” Mom said.

“How’ve you been?” he asked.

“Me? I’m always the same.” She stirred the eggs and with her free hand held her robe closed over her chest.

“Maybe you’d like to try meditating someday,” Rob said. “I’m always looking for converts.”

“Do you think it would make me a better assistant administrator of schools?”

“It might make you a more relaxed one.”

“If I was any more relaxed I couldn’t stand up. Why don’t you tell me to run away to Brazil? That’s more what I have in mind.”

Rob smiled and sipped his tea, his one eye shining.

They had just sat down to eat when Janet came downstairs. Her footsteps were audible on the treads, and a quick silence stitched the air before Mom resumed her story about Buzz Sorely, her boss, who in Mom’s stories was a combination of menace and fool, dangerous in the way of a brontosaurus, which might crush you out of simple disorganized stupidity. She was still talking about him when Janet appeared in the kitchen doorway and stood there, as if waiting to be asked in.

She wore jeans and an old checkered shirt. Her hair was tied up in a knot. Rob had been watching the empty doorway and now he looked at Janet with only a small change in hisface, a certain deepening of his eyes that reminded David of the remoteness that came into a dog’s eyes when you scratched it in just the right place.

“Oh God,” Janet said. “Did I do that?”

“Yes you did,” Rob told her. “You did a very nice job.”

“Did what?” Lizzie said.

“Shut up,” said David.

“Gave him that eye,” Janet told Lizzie. “I didn’t think I hit him so hard.” She made a fist, and looked at it with surprise and satisfaction.

“You
hit
him?” Lizzie said.

Janet nodded, looking at her fist. Then she looked up at Rob. “I just can’t believe you,” she said.

“Why did you hit him?” Lizzie asked.

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” Rob said.

“What do you think? I thought you had more respect for me than this.”

“Did you hit her back?” Lizzie asked Rob.

“How about some breakfast, Janny?” Mom said. “Lizzie’s made her special holiday toast.”

“No thanks. I’ll just have some coffee.” She went to the stove to pour it, but stopped halfway and planted her hands on her hips. “Were you the Peeping Tom last night?” she asked. “No,” Rob said. “What, did you have somebody out there?” “What Peeping Tom? Where? Here?” Lizzie said.

“The police were here last night,” David told her. “They walked all over the house with flashlights. They even went in your room. You slept right through it.”

Lizzie’s jaw quivered in disbelief. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” she said to Mom. Her voice was quiet; she didn’t have enough power in her lungs for a shout big enough to match the offense.

“David thought he saw someone,” Mom said. “There was no point in having any more excitement than we had already.” Thinking of Rob as the man in the yard altered the quality of last night’s fear. The event itself changed: David had not been endangered but just comically put out over a silly character sneaking through the flower beds. It had a parallel cartoon version, with David a short, brave animal, a sort of beaver-bear, and Rob a goggle-eyed human with stork legs and a plumed hat, tiptoeing around on his oversize feet while ghostly hearts and exclamation points rose up out of his head.

“I told you to always wake me up,” Lizzie said. She settled peevishly into herself.

Janet brought her coffee to the table. Rob half stood, and she motioned him to sit down again with a single, flat-handed command. David was impressed by the gesture. He would use it himself someday. Janet stood by the table, between David and Lizzie, across from Rob. She was wearing perfume.

“I still think it was you,” she said. “The minute I heard there was a man outside, I thought of you.”

“It could have been any of your boyfriends.” Rob smiled.

“Anyway, we all lived through it,” Mom said. “Clear light of day, and we’re all in one piece.”

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” Janet said to Rob. “I’m standing here trying to remember what I could have told you to make you think it would be a good idea to hop in the car and drive all the way down here and stand outside my window.”

“I guess I didn’t think about it at all,” Rob said. He checked Lizzie, briefly, for sympathy.

“Oh, I can appreciate it in a movie sort of way,” Janet said. “That’s how you expect me to appreciate it, isn’t it?”

Rob gave an elaborate shrug and crossed his eyes. Lizzie giggled.

“I’d just like to think you had more respect for my decisions,” Janet said.

Rob turned serious, chin lowered, and said, “My being here doesn’t have to affect your decision in any way, shape, or form. I’m just somebody having breakfast in your kitchen. If you tellme to, I’ll get up after breakfast and drive right back to San Francisco.”

“Good,” Janet said. “Finish your breakfast, and go back to San Francisco.”

He looked at her in his doting, doggish way. “Really?” “Really.”

“Well, all right.”

“All right.”

“Maybe you should sleep a couple of hours first,” Mom said. “No thank you, Beverly. I’ll be all right.”

“He could take a nap in my room,” Lizzie said.

“No thanks, I’m fine,” Rob said. “I’ll stop somewhere on the way and meditate.”

“It’s a long drive,” Mom said.

David could see that things were turning against Janet. She seemed to know it, too. She shook her head, and the smell of her perfume, still too fresh to have settled into her body, swelled in David’s nose.

“I’m sorry, Rob,” she said. “But it was a bad idea. Do you see that?”

“Yes,” he said gravely, though he didn’t sound convinced. Janet kept on shaking her head. “It’s just the worst possible time for me to see you. You know that. It isn’t fair—shit, I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m going to go upstairs. Call me when you get back to the city, so I know you’re safe, okay?” “Okay,” he said.