Golden States (4 page)

That was before Dad pushed him down the stairs. He knew because he remembered looking up at these same stars when they brought him home from the hospital with the stitches in his head. Dad and Mom had been fighting in their bedroom, and David had stood in the hall listening. He remembered something being said about Janet. Dad threw open the door yelling, “Stupid goddamn lies.” David screamed and then he was falling down the stairs. His forehead when it hit the banister made a sound like biting into an ice cube.

That had been years ago. After school got out next month, David and Lizzie would fly to Spokane to spend another three weeks with Dad and his new wife, Marie. Dad was kind to them when they visited. He wore plaid shirts and blue jeans. He had a new laugh, sudden as a spring popping out of a box. David treated him with the wary respect he’d show to a piece of large, dangerous-looking machinery, the precise function of which was unknown.

Time passed. David knew he should be doing homework. On the top of his desk sat a map of California, made of papier-mache, yellow-green in a brilliant blue ocean. He had become famous with his sixth-grade teacher for his elaborately illustrated book reports and minutely detailed maps and was currently in the process of gluing on cotton balls, real kumquats, and the bearded heads of foxtails to represent crops. With each success, he worried more deeply that the next project would be a failure.

Instead of working on the map he lay listening, aware of his heart and his breathing. He unzipped his pants and started to beat off. When he beat off, his brain shut down completely, and after he finished it was like coming out of a tunnel back into daylight. It left him dazzled and disoriented. He didn’t really like doing it but he started doing it now; then he stopped for fear Lizzie might hear him. He lay with his hands folded on his chest, listening to the night. For years he had thought of the map on his ceiling as a map of the universe, until Janet told him that it only charted the galaxy, one tiny piece of all there was. Although he didn’t doubt her word, he still thought of it as a map of the universe.

Finally he heard something at his window, a sound so faint it was hardly sound at all but more an agitation of the air, like the whirr of a moth’s wings under a lampshade in the next room. He got up to look out the window. Janet sat in the backyard smoking a cigarette, a small ember that flared and subsided.

He walked out of his room and went downstairs. Mom and Lizzie were in the living room watching “Diff’rent Strokes.” David walked by unnoticed, went through the kitchen and out the back door.

Janet was sitting in one of the redwood lawn chairs, facing the house, on the thin band of grass that lay between house and pool. Behind her the pool stretched motionless, silver, giving back the sky and the scalloped top of the fence that separated the Starks’ property from their neighbors’. The tip of Janet’s cigarette hung suspended before her mouth.

“Hello,” she said, exhaling a stream of luminous smoke.

“Hi,” David said. He went and sat in the empty chair besideher. The slats were damp and pulpy, and he ran his fingernails experimentally along the arms.

“I was looking up at your window and thinking about you,” she said. “And here you are.”

“Did you go for a walk?” he asked.

“Well, I didn’t manage the walk after all,” she said. “I got about two houses down and I came right back here to our own backyard. I’ve been listening to the phone ring.”

“He’s called four times,” David said.

“I know. He’ll call all night if I don’t come and answer it. I will, the next time it rings.”

“Okay.”

She stubbed her cigarette out in the grass, and put the dead butt into her shirt pocket. “I’m not a very good example to you, am I?” she said.

“Yes you are,” he told her.

“Sitting out here like a refugee. It’s a good thing I brought my cigarettes. You must never start smoking, David, because if you do it will ruin most of your best exits. Half the time you’ve left your cigarettes behind, and you’ve got to go back for them”

“Oh,” he said.

“Don’t mind my blithering. It’s nerves, is all.”

“Uh-huhDavid said.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and dug at a kneecap with her thumbnail. “I’m just afraid I’m going to lose my mind again, is all. I’m making it my spring project not to lose my mind.”

“Are you still worried about Ray?” David asked.

“Well, I’d damn well better get over it if I am. It’s been fourteen years. And three psychiatrists. You don’t have bad dreams anymore, do you?”

“No,” David said. Back when he first heard the story of Ray getting hit by the van, he’d had dreams so strange Mom and Dad took him to a doctor, a woman with her hair pulled back in a thick gray braid. He didn’t remember much about the doctor. He did remember that her office was in a children’s hospital, where he saw kids no older than he being wheeled down the hallways on carts. He had worried ever since about getting sick.

“Good,” Janet said. “You shouldn’t even
know
about a thing like that. It isn’t fair, a kid your age.”

This turn in the conversation made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like people talking about taking his knowledge away.

“Look up there,” he said, to change the subject. “There’s the Great Waldo.”

This was an old game. They made up constellations because they didn’t know the real ones. “Where?” Janet said. “See that bright, bright star over there?”

“Which one?”

“Over there.” He pointed, squinting one eye and laying his finger on the star.

“Okay. I think I know the one you mean.”

“That’s the tip of his hat.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Then his body kind of curves around.”

“To the left. I see it.”

“No. To the right.”

“To the right? There’s a tree in the way.”

“Are you sure you’re looking at the right star? His hat isn’t by the tree.”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m not. I’m going to smoke a joint, do you mind?”

“No.”

She took a joint from her shirt pocket and lit a match. Her face in the match glare was like an old photo in an album, and he could imagine himself as an elderly man, looking at Janet’s picture and saying, “Wasn’t she beautiful?”

“Mom could see us from the kitchen,” he said.

“She’d just think it’s a cigarette.”

He could smell the sweet smoke and see the pale gray thickness of it, drifting over her head. “Can I have a hit?” he said.

“Do you smoke dope?” Her voice was pinched, from holding the smoke in her lungs.

“Yes,” David said.

She exhaled, a languid plume. “Since when?” she said. “Since the middle of fifth grade,” he said. It was not quite true. He and Billy had found a couple of joints in Billy’s brother’s drawer, along with a bone-handled knife and a roll of money. They’d thought about smoking one, but Billy said that Carl, his brother, would probably kill them. Carl had a half dozen uncured snakeskins tacked to the wall over his bed. They had left the joints in the drawer.

“Is that right?” Janet said. “Damn. They get younger and younger. In fifth grade, I was still playing Barbies.”

“When did you smoke for the first time?”

“Let me think. High school. Tenth grade.”

“I remember you in high school,” he said.

“You were pretty little then.”

“You were in the science club.”

“Well, I pretended to be. The truth is, I was sneaking off to smoke dope with Margie and Luanne.”

“What happened to Margie and Luanne?”

“Well, they got married. They sort of faded away.”

“Oh. Can I have a hit now?” David said.

“Sure. Is Mother standing at the window?”

“No.”

“Okay. Here.” She passed him the joint. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, as he’d seen her do, put it to his lips, and sucked in the smoke, which filled his mouth. He swallowed it, automatically, and coughed it back up. His eyes burned. The smoke hovered for a moment in a rough crescent, and vanished.

“Strong stuff,” he said.

“Try another hit,” she said. “Pull it straight into your lungs, don’t hold it in your mouth.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

He tried again, drawing the smoke in like oxygen. It seared his lungs but he held it, then let it go in a whoosh.

“Good boy,” Janet said. He handed it back, and she took a long, deep drag. The tip glowed, firing its finger of white ash. “Hey look,” Janet said. “There’s Homunculus the Crow.” “Where?”

“See that big star by the TV antenna?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the tip of his beak ”

“Okay. And there’s his eye.”

“No, he doesn’t have an eye.”

“Yes he does.”

“Where are you looking?”

“Right over there. Straight up from the chimney.”

“Oh, that’s not his head at all. His head isn’t half that big.” “Can I have another hit?”

“Sure.”

“Where’s his body, then?”

“See those two stars over the Munsons’ roof?”

“No.”

“A little one and a much brighter one.”

“I guess.”

“That’s the spat on his left foot.”

David, who had no idea what a spat was, said, “Oh yeah, I see,” and gave her back the joint.

“Are you getting stoned?” Janet asked him.

“Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t sure. A tightness had crept up into his head, and he thought that when he looked straight ahead at the house it loomed big as an ocean liner, its windowsblazing. It was hard to tell, when he didn’t know what he was waiting for.

“It’s subtle,” Janet said. “This particular stuff, it just sort of creeps up on you. It makes things funny and a little remote, like you’re watching your life from a safe distance.”

“I think I feel that,” David said.

They sat for a while, looking for constellations. David thought he heard it again, the sound that was no sound, the flutter of the moth’s wings.

“Are you thinking about me right now?” he asked.

“Mm-hm,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I guess I must be stoned.”

“It’s not like what you expect it to be.”

“Janet?” he said.

“What?”

He couldn’t think what he had to tell her. It had to do with his own actual size, which was bigger than his body. She was safe with him.

“Never mind,” he said.

“No, what? Wait a minute, is that Lizzie there?”

“Where?”

“Right there at the back door.”

“Is the joint out?” David asked.

“Yes.”

“Go back inside, Lizzie,” he called.

“No,” Lizzie said. She stood in the doorway for a moment, then walked onto the grass. Her blue nightgown shone, as if she were bringing the light of the house outside with her. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Watching the stars,” Janet told her.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?” David said.

Lizzie positioned herself between their two chairs, spine erect, hands clasped over her belly. The pool was bright behind her. She still couldn’t swim; she refused to learn. Whenever

Mom tried to teach her she would pull herself out the first time she got a nose full of water and stand red-faced on the coping, screaming about how she’d never wanted to learn in the first place. If Dad were still around he’d have picked her up and thrown her back in. That was probably why Mom never did. Although it was ridiculous for Lizzie to live in danger of drowning in her own backyard, David had a grudging respect for her determination not to know anything she didn’t want to know.

“Mom is all alone in the house,” Lizzie said, as if the idea was funny.

“Yes she is,” Janet said. “She’s going to think her children have all run away.”

“I am going to run away,” Lizzie said.

“And go where?” David said.

“Nowhere.”

“The next time it rains, you’re going to get
washed
away,” he said.

“Shut up, you asshole.” She was afraid of floods too.

“Hey look, you two,” Janet said. “There’s the Fat Lady of Fargo.”

“Where?” Lizzie said.

“Right there. Right up over our heads.”

“1 see her,” David said.

“I see her too,” Lizzie said.

“You do not.”

“I do. Those three stars over there are her crown.”

“I’ll be damned,” Janet said. “How did you know she had a crown?”

“I can
see, ”
Lizzie said.

They all kept quiet for a while, watching the sky. David could not see anything but the usual pinwheels, belts, triangles. “I see her too,” he said.

“She’s great big,” Lizzie said. “Her head is way over by the Munsons’ roof.”

“Yes it is,” Janet said.

“Right,” David said. “She’s huge.”

“And she doesn’t have anything on,” Lizzie giggled.

“No she doesn’t” Janet said. “This is really amazing, Lizzie.” “My feet are cold,” Lizzie said.

“Well, I guess we’d better get back inside,” Janet said.

“Not yet,” David said. “Look, the lady has flowers in her hand”

Janet and Lizzie glanced at one another. “What’s nine times seven?” Lizzie asked.

David put his fingers in his ears. “Don’t do that,” he said, and his voice sounded to him as if he was speaking from a cave. Janet said something, and he unstopped his ears. “What?” he asked her.

“My
feet
are cold,” Lizzie said.

“Then go inside. What did you say, Janet?”

“Let’s all go in,” Janet said.

“That’s not what you said.”

“Men,” Janet said to Lizzie, in a lofty, lecturer’s tone, “always want the facts.”

“That’s not true,” David said.

Janet patted his knee. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the lizard inside before she freezes to death.”

“Don’t call me that,” Lizzie said. She had begun hopping on one foot, and shivering.

“Go on,” David said. “I’m going to sit here a little longer.” He hoped Janet would send Lizzie in alone, but she got up and slipped her arm around Lizzie’s skinny shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “See you inside.”

“See you,” David said.

Lizzie tucked her hand under Janet’s belt, glanced over her shoulder, smiled knowingly, and said, “Sixty-three ”

J
ames Watt, the secretary of the interior, said we might as well use things up because Jesus was coming anyway, and it would be a shame to leave a lot behind. He was on the six o’clock news, talking from inside his large, immobile head.

Janet laughed, and sputtered cigarette smoke. She, Mom, and Lizzie sat in a row on the sofa, and David lay on the floor, with Watt’s pink-orange face flickering on the screen before them.

“That’s the best one yet,” Janet said. “I still can’t believe these men are in power. I keep thinking it’ll turn out to be a joke.”

“What assholes,” Lizzie said.

“Lizzie,” Mom said, “I don’t know where you picked up this
asshole
business, but I think you’d better quit it.”

“Yeah, Lizzie,” David said. “You talk like a hooker.”

“You look like a used Band-Aid,” she told him.

“Enough,” Mom said.

David turned back to the television. This morning, he had gone over to Billy’s house to see if Billy was all right. Billy’shouse wasn’t in the tract; it and half a dozen others sat in an isthmus of old lemon trees, with the tract on three sides. The air there was dim and sweet from the trees. Billy’s house had a porch on which old, matted-looking easy chairs were lined up. Billy had been sitting on one of the chairs when David came up. Before they had a chance to speak Billy stood, raised his imaginary rifle, and shot David, again and again, notching the air with the hiss of his bullets. David had stood for a while, getting shot, then turned indignantly around and come back home.

On television, Watt finished talking. The camera switched over to Weinberger, who was talking to reporters about nuclear capability. He said too many of our bombs were planted in farmland, where the enemy could dig them out. He said we needed a more efficient system.

“The king of the assholes,” Janet said.

“Please don’t encourage Cattle Annie here,” Mom said. “Jeez, how do these men get into office?”

“Elected by the public,” Janet said. “Who did you vote for?”

“You know who I voted for. I just didn’t think they’d be so ... I don’t know. At least Reagan’s not as bad as Nixon.”

“Nixon was the worst,” David said. He thought he remembered Nixon, from years ago, when everything was as bad as it could be. Whenever he saw a picture of Nixon it gave him a nervous thrill, the same way pictures of Charlie Manson and Hitler did.

“Maybe we should think about moving to Switzerland,” Janet said.

“I don’t know about you,” Mom said, “but I’m too old to learn Swiss.”

“When I get older, I’m going to move to London,” Lizzie said.

“They’ll nuke London right off,” David told her. “They’ll just polish it off with a couple of extra bombs on their way to America.”

“No they won’t,” Lizzie said. “They’ll only nuke America and China and Russia.”

“That’s enough, both of you,” Mom said.

“They won’t nuke London, will they?” Lizzie asked.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. No. The men in government don’t want bombs any more than we do, I don’t think.” “There’s no point in lying, Mother,” Janet said.

“They’re going to nuke everybody,” David said to Lizzie. “There’s going to be nothing left.”

“Shut up, you asshole,” Lizzie said. She laid her head in Mom’s lap. After a moment’s hesitation she let the tip of her thumb creep into her mouth.

“Lizzie, I want you to clean up your act,” Mom said, stroking her wiry red hair. “I’m serious.”

“It must be hard to be ten in an age like this,” Janet said. “It’s no picnic being forty-eight, either,” Mom told her, smoothing and smoothing Lizzie’s hair.

“Well, what can you do about it?” Janet said.

“Oh, I don’t know. What can you do about anything?”

A few minutes later, the telephone rang.

“I think it’s for me,” Janet said. “I’m going to take it upstairs, all right?”

“If you want,” Mom said.

Janet left the room. David heard the whisk of her feet on the carpeted stairs, and then the phone stopped ringing. He could hear the tone of her voice but couldn’t distinguish the words.

He got up and sat on the sofa, on Mom’s other side. He was worried that no one had contradicted him very sharply about nuking everybody, about there being nothing left. “Do you think Janet is scared of Rob?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” Mom said. “Well, if she is, she’ll get over it. That’s what she’s here for.”

“I know,” David said. Lizzie’s head rose and fell slightly with Mom’s breathing. On television, the news moved throughweather and sports to the funny parts. An old woman in Florida showed the camera a ring of burned grass in her backyard, and said it marked the spot where a flying saucer had landed the night before.

“I was just doing up the dishes,” she said in a strong, nasal voice, “and there it was.” She wore glasses that came to points.

“It sort of glowed,” she said, “and it was just hanging out there, don’t you know, with the lights going on and off. It was, well, beautiful, and I knew I ought to call Ed, that’s my husband, but I just stood there watching it and I felt very, well, relaxed and happy. It was so peculiar. I thought, It can
see
me, don’t you know, but I wasn’t at all afraid. I felt wonderful. Then I opened my mouth to call Ed and
whoosh,
it was gone.”

After everyone had gone to sleep David lay in bed, listening to the nocturnal sounds of the house. Darkness seemed to be the house’s natural state. Lamplight hung in the rooms like smoke, resisting the corners, and when the last light was out the house relaxed into itself, the pipes grumbling.

In the hills, close by, coyotes yipped and howled. The rain had not driven them back. Now that they knew how much easy food could be had in the neighborhoods, they were not about to stay in the hills hunting rabbits.

It wasn’t long before David heard Janet’s door opening. He knew suddenly that the sound of her door was what he’d been expecting, though he hadn’t known until he heard it. Janet walked along the hall, past his door. She went softly down the stairs, knowing to step over the fifth tread, which squeaked.

He let some time go by, then got out of bed. He took off his pajama jacket, changed his mind, and put it back on again. Before leaving his room he checked himself in the mirror. He couldn’t make out his face clearly in the dark, but could tell that his hair wasn’t sticking up at any peculiar angles.

The darkness in the stairwell was deeper and more velvetythan that of the hall, a dark within the dark. He walked downstairs, stepping over the fifth tread..At the bottom he paused to listen. Janet was so silent he thought she must be hiding, holding her breath. He strained into the still air, eyes wide, as if better vision would improve his hearing. His senses radiated out from him like needles of light, and it seemed that if any one was sharpened they would all grow stronger. Dining room, he decided.

She was sitting at the table in her usual place, smoking a cigarette. The tabletop glowed in the filtered moonlight like old ice. The bowl of fruit, black globes, sat in the middle.

“Hi,” David said.

“You should be sleeping,” she told him. Her voice was soft and a little too low.

David sat down at his own place. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just smoking a cigarette. Watching the wallpaper.”

“Oh. Is it okay if I sit with you?”

“Sure”

“Can I have a drag of your cigarette?”

“You don’t smoke cigarettes.”

“Well, I do, sometimes.”

“Sorry. I refuse to contribute.”

“What did Rob tell you when he called?”

She blew out a stream of smoke, which hung palely and stretched itself toward the door before vanishing. “Oh, a lot of things,” she said. “He still wants to get married.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s all so crazy,” she said. “People don’t get married anymore anyway, I’ll bet nobody else in Los Angeles County is sitting in a dark room right now worrying about marriage.” “They’re not?” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“No. If they’re thinking about anything at all they’re thinkingabout—I don’t know. Issues. Or drugs. I don’t have any idea what other people think about, to tell you the truth.”

“You don’t love Rob, do you?” David asked.

“That’s a tricky question. I guess I always thought love would be more ...
definite
She shook her head. “You like Rob, don’t you?”

“Well, I guess so,” David said. It was true; Rob was a nice enough man.

“You know,” Janet said, “I used to look at him and think, My God, this is it. This is what twenty million American women would give their right arms for. A friendly lawyer with nice hands and scads of money, who loves me and wants to take care of me. This is the Great North American Thing.” She dragged deeply on her cigarette. “I got to thinking, if I don’t want
this,
what in the world
do
I want? Maybe I don’t want anything at all.”

“Oh,” David said.

“Blithering again, huh?” Janet said. “I keep forgetting you’re not thirty-five. What I decided to do, David, is live on my own and try getting into medical school again. Even if I’m not exactly brilliant.”

“You are brilliant,” he told her.

“I’m not. You may as well know the awful truth. I’m a solid B student, and B students don’t ordinarily get to be doctors. But I’m going to study hard, and keep trying. Anyway, it’s better than spending my life trying to talk myself into loving somebody.”

“You’ll meet somebody you love more than Rob,” David said. “There are a lot of other people besides him.”

“I guess I will. I know I will. Rob’s just such a... Well, the second awful truth is, I’m not quite what the world calls pretty. I’m not what they’re buying this year.”

David looked at her and tried to imagine that she wasn’t pretty. Although her face was obscured by darkness, he knewit so well he could project every detail from his head. Her nose was longer than most, but it concluded logically over her wide, thin lips. Every feature of hers made sense in terms of every other—her neck was thin, with three deep creases and a pair of cords at the base that moved when she spoke; her forehead rose high above her dark brows, as white and placid as her throat was nervous. Her eyes watched with amusement from pockets of brown-lavender skin that turned, like the colors of a shell, to the pale cream of her cheekbones. She and David looked something alike. There was no way she could not be pretty.

“You are,” he told her. He’d meant to say, You are
pretty,
but the word embarrassed him.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m pretty to you. That’s nice.”

A silence caught, and held. A minute passed.

“Do you want to go to the movies with me after school tomorrow?” David asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks. I think I’ll just stay around the house.”

“Okay. Can’t I have just one drag of your cigarette?”

‘Wo,” she laughed, and ground the cigarette out in the ashtray. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

“It’s late.”

“I know. That’s the best time.”

“Can I go with you?”

“No. It’s a school night. You’d better go back to bed.”

“Well. Okay. See you in the morning.”

“Right. Sleep tight.”

“Good night.”

David left the room and went to the top of the stairs, where he sat down and waited for Janet to leave. This time he
would
follow her. He rested his forehead against the wrought-iron post, which was twisted like a birthday candle. The stairs dropped away beneath him; the house was built over an abandoned mine shaft. He saved himself by clinging to the banister,holding tight while the carpeted treads, still linked, dropped soundlessly into the pit.

This was where Dad had stood, enormous in a bathrobe, one side of which hung open to reveal the whole hairy length of his leg. The ends of the drawstring had hung down below his knees. Janet, who would have been much younger but who had always looked the same to David, had been going out and Dad had hollered to her that she wasn’t going anywhere, she was going to stay home and stop slutting around. She’d said, Oh, fine, I’ll stay here and slut around with you, and in David’s memory Dad had jumped down the whole staircase, one big leap, robe flapping. Janet got the door half open and she and Dad were fighting or hugging in the doorway, there was no telling which. He could picture Janet biting Dad on the lip. A trickle of blood ran down Dad’s chin and spotted his bathrobe. Dad had screamed like a woman. This was either just before or just after David was knocked down the stairs. He could not remember which. He could remember that Janet’s purse had had fringe that flew in rhythm with her hair as she ran across the lawn, and that a silver car had been waiting for her out in the street.

It was some time around then that she had decided to be a doctor. During the divorce it was all she and Mom had talked about. They’d sent away for college catalogues, Mom insisting on Janet’s applying to Berkeley because it was farther away than UCLA. Dad had started pulling up in front of the house at night and sitting there, silent, in his car. Everybody had pictured Janet in a white coat with a syringe, living up north, searching for cures.