Haywire (16 page)

After Jill and he left, Mother carefully placed the potato bug between two layers of cotton in a small empty bracelet box, which she then wrapped as a gift. “Don’t worry,” she told me conspiratorially, “he’ll open this and be
horrified
, but it’s just a joke—I’ve already sent over his real birthday present.”

Bridget and I carried the box to the party, my chest throbbing with both delight and fear. Tarquin was standing regally—taller and more handsome than he’d ever been before—silhouetted against the pastel party dresses of what seemed to be hundreds of admirers fluttering on the steps of the house. It was an awful moment. I handed him the box, betraying him, my first love. His face was radiant with joy; the size of the box clearly indicated there was something precious inside. I squeezed my eyes shut, praying that the potato bug had somehow changed into a wristwatch, but it hadn’t—he lifted the top layer of cotton and there was the little gray ball. Mute, Tarquin stared at it, while all our friends shoved and pushed each other for a look. Bridget and I were humiliated; there was no way to explain. Fortunately, the real present was
quickly produced and we were restored to favor. As a result of this episode, I immediately wrote a poem entitled, “When You Kiss Me, Kiss Me with a Smile.”

Bridget, Bill, and I knew that we were the envy of all our friends because we lived in our own house, apart from our parents. The Barn was ours, it belonged to us, every inch of it had been created with us in mind. We derived an enormous sense of pleasure from the possession of something so large, a
house
, entirely tooled to meet our needs. We were aware that ours was a unique situation. It was satisfying to feel superior to and different from anyone else our age, to be envied by all our peers because we could make as much noise as we wanted and bicycle and roller-skate and pull wagons around our own private living-room floor. The Barn was an ideal playhouse.

But sometimes we longed to know what it was like to live like other children, in one house, surrounded by family. And sometimes late at night, I would wake up—feeling alone—and quickly check to make sure there was light filtering through the crack under my door. One time the crack was dark, and I called, Emily, Emily, Emil-ee. When she didn’t come, I was so frightened I forced myself to feel my way downstairs and outside, to traverse the breezeway to The Other House on tiptoe, inch by inch, because I thought the wind rustling the mottled leaves of ivy was alive, a weasel or a fox breathing through the vines as he followed my passage. When I came to the other side—The Other House—although it was only thirty feet away, I felt that at last I had reached civilization after a very dangerous journey through the wilderness. I found Emily in the kitchen, exactly where I thought she would be, chatting with Elsa and Otto over a cup of coffee. They all made a big fuss over me and I forgave Emily because she let me snuggle on her lap—the best place I ever sat—with a cup of cocoa, and comforted me with the promise that, never, ever, for the rest of life, would she forget to leave the light on downstairs or go away and leave me again, except on her day off.

To us, Emily was everything in the world. We loved her totally because she belonged to us; she was entirely ours in a way that Mother and Father never were. We loved them from a distance; we admired them as we admired the sun and moon, adoring their beauty and constancy, their infinite power. They were gods; we worshipped them. But we loved Emily in a different way.

Emily started working for us as a relief nurse and ended up
staying full time. On her days off she went home to her husband, Ed Buck, and once or twice, giving in to our entreaties, she took us with her to their little house with hibiscus bushes growing up either side of the front walk. Emily had no children of her own, and considered us hers, which suited us perfectly. Mother and Father used to say fondly that Emily was the homeliest person they’d ever seen, but the kindest. We, however, thought she was the most beautiful, and said so. She had stringy mouse-colored hair, which hung limply in one stage or another of a bad permanent. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were sparse and did less to define her eyes than the discolored hollows under them. Two deep furrows ran from her rather bulbous nose to the corners of her mouth, where they were intersected by a great system of other lines. Her skin was pitted in some places like old tarmac and in others dislodged by moles or wens; it seemed to be permanently redolent of coffee and as nicotine-stained as her teeth. Emily, like Father, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, preferably Camels, and when they became scarce during the war, she took to rolling her own. On special occasions she wore lipstick, a dark purplish color. She’d apply it carefully to her angular lips, then smack them together and blot most of it off with tissues.

“Poor Em,” we’d sigh, inspecting the varicose veins in her calves, which gave her trouble when she stood too long. “Someday we’ll take care of
you.
” Then Father would interject while she poured him a cup of her coffee, which he preferred to Elsa’s, “I hope to Christ the three of you children take care of
both
of us when you get to be twenty-one years old and I’m doddering around in a state of financial ruin.” Emily would guffaw, and say, “Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hayward, don’t start that again,” and we’d giggle and chorus, “But, Father, we’ll never make enough money to take care of
you.
” Father would lower his teaspoon into the coffee, carefully submerging three lumps of sugar, one for each of us to suck, and shake his head. “God knows, children, it won’t be easy. But that’s what children are for, to take care of their poor old senile parents. You’re all smart as hell; you’ll get good grades at school—you’d better, by God—I’m counting on you to keep me from the poorhouse.…”

“But, Father, we’re not allowed to go to school.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right. Well, someday—now, let’s see—let’s get right down to business. Brooke, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

This was a game we loved, although the answers never changed. “A painter and a writer.”

“No money in that. Bridget?”

“I want to grow up to be a housewife with ten children.”

“No hope there whatsoever. Disaster. My last chance—Bill?”

“When I grow up, I’m going to be either a fireman or the President of the United States.”

“Well, couldn’t you marry a very rich girl while you’re at it? This is just awful. Promise me that
one
of you at least will be considerate enough to marry somebody with a lot of dough for the sake of your beloved old father. After all, I think I deserve to be supported in some kind of style.…”

Father’s mother, Sarah Tappin—Grandsarah—moved to Los Angeles in 1943. She had raised champion cairn terriers with her third husband, Lindsley Tappin, at their country house in Wilton, Connecticut. After he died, she decided to come out to California to see her only son and three grandchildren, so she sold the house, packed her station wagon with one poodle, twenty-six of her favorite cairns, and Archie, her black caretaker, and drove all the way across the country herself (since Archie had never learned how), stopping twice a day to take the dogs out of their individual wicker baskets to feed and exercise them.

Father had bought her a house on Magnolia Boulevard in Van Nuys. Every Sunday we would drive over to the Valley, holding our breaths and making wishes as we came to the entrance of the tunnel through the mountains; then, as Sepulveda Boulevard began its serpentine descent to the lovely clear expanse below, Father would take his foot off the gas as a gesture toward rationing, and the car would careen around the curves, speeding up and slowing down under its own momentum.

My grandmother’s house was dark and cool and filled with beautiful dusty mysteries. Beyond the verandah that ran all around it, softening its borders with six feet of shade, lay the gardens, several acres of them, bounded by high walls and fruit trees gleaming in the sun. Pomegranates overlapped persimmons, peaches and cherries intertwined, a lacy forest of citrus—tangerines, lemons, grapefruits, and oranges—gradually gave way to thick meandering shrubbery, dappled with sweet-skinned kumquats and guavas that
Grandsarah made into jelly each fall. We squinted through the shadowy living room toward the blinding green sunlight, bewitched by the contrast between inside and out. Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s house was the most compelling adventure, the most seductive paradise we knew. We were overcome by desires; we wanted to possess everything that we saw or smelled or tasted, to touch it, hold it, take it away with us so that we could have it forever. In her house we became pirates.

First we headed for the cupboards where she kept her three-odd sets of wineglasses, each with a goblet or two missing, just to make sure none had been broken or rearranged since the previous Sunday. We had, after interminable bickering, staked out our individual territories, and for some reason the wineglasses from which we drank our ginger ale, pretending it was champagne, seemed to exemplify our intangible conquest. “Grandsarah,” I would say, stroking my glass, which had small green bumps blown onto its surface, “you must take good care of these glasses. Right now there are two missing, so—”

Grandsarah chuckled, amused by my ill-concealed longing.

“Don’t worry,” she said cheerfully, poking at the chicken frying on the big stove, “I’ll take good care of them for the next ten years, and then—give the gravy a stir, would you, Viola?” Viola came twice a week to clean and on Sundays to help with lunch; she was black and so fat it took her some time to lower herself, grunting, into a sitting position and quite a bit longer to get up from one. Both Viola and Grandsarah laughed at everything we said and let us do whatever we wanted—spoiled us rotten, said Father, but that’s what grandparents were for.

Bridget’s glass was etched with red leaves. “Mine, too?” she asked, holding it up for more ginger ale, which was forbidden at home.

“Yes, yes.” Grandsarah smiled broadly. “Now I think these mashed potatoes are done just the way your father likes them—yes, and yours, too, Bill. And in ten years when I’m seventy, I’ll probably be dead anyway—nobody should live past seventy—and then I’ll leave them to you.”

“Oh, no, Grandsarah,” we’d wail, simultaneously terrified that she would ever die and pleased at the prospect that the glasses would finally be ours. “Don’t die, Grandsarah, don’t die—what would we do without you? You’re going to live to be a hundred.”

“Seventy’s old enough, old enough. Don’t want to push my luck,” said Grandsarah.

Fried chicken was the traditional Sunday lunch because Father loved it, and as Grandsarah said, he was her only son and the most wonderful person in the whole world. We all sat around her pink wrought-iron-and-glass table while the grownups talked and laughed a lot, dogs pushed their way in and out the French doors to the patio, and Bridget, Bill, and I shoveled speckled vanilla ice cream into our mouths. “My God, that was good, Mother,” Father would say, putting down his napkin. “Now, there is one thing in this room I have
my
eye on, wanted it for as long as I can remember.”

We would all look toward the sideboard where a portable antique liqueur cabinet sat. “Now, Mother,” Father would continue to our huge enjoyment, “you know how much I need this.” He would fondle its dark mahogany sides and open its hinged top to show off the perfect set of crystal decanters and liqueur glasses arranged inside. “You have no use for it whatsoever, Mother, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, Leland.” Grandsarah’s eyes twinkled as she smiled and patted her hair, which was pinned in a roll. “I use it when we play poker.” (Grandsarah had a weekly poker game with Junior and Irene Egan, whom she had met while traveling around the world in 1910.) “Besides, Leland,” she continued, “you know perfectly well I’ve never been able to refuse you anything at all—you’ll get it out of me one of these days.” Then she’d hug him and laugh some more.

“How about my next birthday?” Father would ask.

“Good Lord, Mr. Hayward,” said Emily, “you’re worse than the children.”

After lunch we’d follow Grandsarah down to the kennels at the back of the property to watch her feed the little dogs yapping in their runs. For years she was the foremost breeder of cairn terriers in Los Angeles, until the zoning laws changed and the kennels fell into musty disrepair. Even then we would go down to the end of the garden, through the sunny tangle of irises and narcissus in spring, lilies and roses in summer, to play hide-and-seek in the overgrown ruins that were haunted by mildewing, spider-infested wicker cases and shards of earthenware feeding bowls.

Crisscrossing the gardens was a maze of concrete paths that
had taken Archie and the gardener months to lay and that was inscribed at intervals with Archie’s duly noted progress—
“OCT. 1943, HALFWAY”
—and the occasional graffiti of Bridget, Bill, and me, who had immortalized ourselves in the wet cement under Archie’s drowsy supervision.

“Grandsarah,” we would clamor before leaving, “it’s time to look at your treasures.” To us, her house glittered with treasures: small boxes with dogs enameled on them, silver trophies from dog shows, and the big oil painting over the fireplace that depicted, in deep perspective, all the champion terriers she had ever raised, posing grandly in their wiry coats of different colors against a green Connecticut landscape.

“Can I have that someday, Grandsarah?”

“No, I asked for it last time. She said—”

“No, me, me—”

“When I die, children, when I die.”

And the jewelry boxes, filled with charms and earrings. Our lust had dropped all its disguises somewhere in the garden during the long hot afternoon. “Ooh, what’s this, a moonstone heart? Can I have this when you die?”

We were motivated not just by avarice but also by our first intimations that people grew old and did not live forever, that maybe we could capture her forever as she was at that moment by simply dividing up her possessions.

“Oh, Grandsarah, don’t forget,
please
, you promised to leave this old photograph to me.”

And she, understanding, found nothing macabre in our articulate greed and inarticulate desire to stop time.