Heat (5 page)

My friendship with Denise was often a matter of deciding which of us was stronger. She shrugged and made a show of turning away to look at a fire extinguisher.

Miss P shrank to a resigned, agreeable person. She sat beside me and pushed the fleshy buttons of the remote, and caused a jittery, streaky fast-forward to appear on the screen. A couple of the other swim team members leaped through their reverses, their half-twists, but only Denise and I practiced off the tower at the other end of the pool.

There we were, running through our reps, maybe ten dives each. Miss P stabbed the remote with her forefinger, let my image in the screen waddle jerkily to the platform, a silent-movie stuttering quality to the male figures rearranging themselves on the seats in the distance. The images slowed, settled into real time. I couldn't help appraising myself the way a diving judge does, because your dive starts the moment you toe your way out onto that cold, wet sharkskin-gritty surface of the tower.

My short blond hair pulled back, my tan, my small bust, my broad shoulders—I looked like a human being designed by God for water.

Miss P stopped it before I left the edge, rewound it. I watched again as my screen self turned halfway up the ascent to say something to someone. Smiling, but not casual. I was intent, at one point absentmindedly pulling the seat of my swimsuit. Like many swimmers and divers, I bought my swimsuits a size too tight.

At first I thought it had to be the wrong tape—even when I saw the whole dive.

Rewind, I wanted to say. At the same I wanted to close my eyes. Miss P was determined, now. If I wanted to watch she would let me, again and again. The VCR whined. I light-footed my way up the tower.

But there was nothing wrong, nothing you could see playing the tape real-time. I leaped, got good altitude on my stretch, a 9.5 beginning, and then I curled, somersaulted and it all looked okay, all the way down into the water. My entry was so-so, actually, but not terrible. If you didn't notice what Miss P did next you would expect me to haul myself dripping out of the pool to pad over to the steps and climb up all over again.

She leaped to her feet and made a front dive off poolside. She strong-armed her way to the bottom where the shifting water obliterated what was down there, the shimmering of the water defracting me into a shapeless figure Miss P pulled from the bottom, scissor kicking to the surface.

“What did I tell you,” said Denise.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I had my nails done. I do this maybe once a year, preferring to use a pair of Revlon clippers and an emery board to keep my nails rounded and short so I won't break one off swimming laps. I sat in Lyn's Beauty Nails, soaking my pinkies in that little bowl they use, with the indentations for the fingers.

A soap opera raged in the far end of the room, where a tiny woman with carefully drawn-on eyebrows and lipstick was having a pedicure, a wife having an affair with her brother-in-law about ten inches away. “Short-short-short?” asked Lyn, sounding like she couldn't believe it.

Her name is really Nguyen, which rhymes with Lyn, more or less. She has lived in Holland and Thailand and British Columbia, one of those people you recognize as bright as soon as you see them. I told her that I was still swimming, and that I had a meet in Sacramento in a few days. Lyn nodded and went to work on my cuticle with a tiny pincers. If you haven't had your nails done professionally in a while, it's amazing all the fine, membranous margin they cut away, quietly, intently, with the deft, deliberate step-by-step that reminded me too vividly of the surgeon's needle.

In drugstores the nail polish has dramatic names—Summer Tempest, Midnight Blush—but something no-nonsense about Lyn had her refer to the polish only by number, and keep a record of what she or her assistants applied in the past. “What's the matter with Ninety-one?” Lyn asked, showing me a bottle of scarlet-lady vermilion I must have picked out a year before.

When I gave myself a full-frontal look in the mirror all I saw was gray eyes, pulled-back hair, ears pierced—no earrings. Mom had asked if I had bad dreams, and I told her I couldn't remember any.

We settled on Eighty-eight—perhaps the symmetry of the number had an appeal for me. Lyn put a paper mask over her nose and mouth before she painted on the caramel-rose polish. The mask was a new development since I had visited her. Maybe the fumes were wearing out Lyn's nervous system, years of inhaling ketones giving her headaches or incipient kidney trouble. She was older than she looked, calling out in Vietnamese as children my age thumped up the stairs to the apartment above.

As she joked with the pedicure customer, expressing mock dismay at the televised crisis, Lyn stretched her arms and rotated her right wrist. The repetition was causing her some pain, using those small muscles every day, holding her arms at the same angle, pinching a nerve. I could visualize the tiny tunnels in the radius and the ulna, the paths the nerves take. I sat with my fingers in the nail dryers, twin toasters that blew hot air.

I ran through the possible scripts, what it was going to be like to meet Cindy. I know from old movies that one is supposed to say, “How do you do,” fluting the words prettily, and offering a hand. But no one does that. We all say “good to meet you,” or “hi.” I wanted to try something new with Cindy.

I rarely fuss over what to wear and always end up sitting in the car while Mom flounces back to change earrings. I had given up on wearing jewelry, so I couldn't help feeling a kind-hearted superiority toward Mom in this regard. Now Mom was patient with me while I spread skirts and blouses all over the bed, trying to find what would match the angora beret I had bought at Nordstrom to cover the incision in my scalp.

“The trouble is, nothing really goes with this baby-blue hat,” I said at last. “Why did I get angora?”

“Mmm.” Meaning: Good question. But we coexist by avoiding even modestly wise-ass remarks, whenever possible, so she added, “Because it's soft and it won't itch. Here.”

She stepped to the bed, selected a full-length skirt, one I wore to see
Carmen
a few months before. A white blouse, of pioneer severity, something you would see in a daguerreotype of the frontier days, a blouse I liked a lot but kept at one end of my closet. Sometimes I do this with favorite things, save them so they won't wear out or get one of those malignant tiny stains, little Bic scribbles and leaks that no chemical on earth will make vanish. She marched me into her bedroom, toe-to-toe with her full-length mirror.

Dad lives in Broadway Terrace, three blocks from where the fire stopped consuming houses and human lives several years before. I could ride my bike over, but Miss P discouraged cycling and said it stressed the wrong muscles. So I usually jogged or power-walked, which Miss P said was fine for the cardiovascular package.

When Miss P sees you at a distance she doesn't call, “Hello there,” or “Good morning.” She says, “Jog it,” meaning: What do you think you're doing, approaching her at a mere walk? When I'm not backstroking laps I'm running up and down the stairs at the academy.

This evening, though, I didn't want to arrive all sweaty, especially in my nice clothes, which were a little tight around the waist anyway. Besides, I still had to get my final okay from Dr. Breen and had to go through another examination before I could resume my full workout schedule.

Mom drove me without having to be asked. She spent a while in her room, in a side cubicle we called “the vanity,” adjusting the Shiseido natural-rose foundation she applies so artfully, and did a good job, retouching herself and brushing out her hair. She dropped me off at my dad's house early that evening, the shadows of the dwarf bamboo fluttering out across the drought-resistant landscape, buffalo grass and sage, carefully raked pea gravel.

I heard the engine of Mom's Volvo thrumming at the curb as I took the stepping stones toward the door, careful not to leave a footprint in the gravel. It was courtesy, of course, waiting to make sure my hosts were receiving me, but I could feel Mom's curiosity, too, and all the other emotions she felt sitting there with the car in neutral.

I usually opened the door with my own key, danced right in, and headed for the kitchen and a tall glass of ice water. But this time I pressed the white doorbell button and heard the baritone one-two bells, muted and solemn. And when nothing happened, I hesitated to ring them again, wondering if I had the wrong night. Because Dad is always quick to answer a telephone, hating answering machines, always jumping up in response to a knock at the door, talking all the while, hating to do only one thing at a time.

I knew it wasn't him, that light step, and when she opened the door my greetings were out before I could remember what I wanted to say. Instead I said, “Hi, I'm Bonnie,” and I shook her hand like a lumberjack.

“He called to say he's running late,” said Cindy. She added, gesturing to her head. “I like your tam.”

A muted sound, the Volvo pulled away from the curb.

I considered whether to debate if it was a tam-o'-shanter or a beret, but instead all I said was thank you. “Running late” was a family cliché, a phrase I recognized from the dying days of my parents' marriage, but I knew something important must have kept him at the office, and that a client must have an emergency situation that needed his attention. Dad was always having to file a response to a request for summary judgment or prep an expert witness.

Still, I was disappointed, and I felt underprepared, someone called upon to give a speech to a strange audience. I followed Cindy into the kitchen when she asked me, would I like anything. She must have expected me to sit in the living room, admiring the coffee-table books I had never seen before,
Chinese Jade for the Collector, Cloissonné Masterpieces
. I followed her right in and accepted a glass of pineapple juice with three big cubes of ice.

“I really like this house,” she said. A car approached in the street, and we both paused to listen. The distant engine murmur traveled on up the neighborhood.

Maybe she was telling me that she hadn't really overnighted here very often. Maybe she was complimenting me, assuming that I had helped my dad pick out the English fox-hunter prints and the books on the glories of the quarter horse. For someone just back from Hawaii, she didn't have much of a tan.

She had been Dad's secretary for about a year and a half, but when I called my dad I almost always spoke to one of the receptionists, a series of temps. I had only visited my Dad's new office a couple of times, and admired its view of Lake Merritt and the other neighboring office buildings. Ever since my dad and his law partner, Adam David, had split up a couple of years ago, my dad's schedule had been too frenzied for anyone but him to keep track of. So far, he was only ten minutes late.

“I'm not going to do anything to the landscaping,” Cindy was saying, perhaps on the theory that if my mom liked root systems and broad-leafs, then it was only natural that I did, too. I felt a little sorry for her suddenly. She was a woman just a little older than my sister Georgia, stuck with a stepdaughter who kept giving her a thousand-yard stare.

“I always thought Dad overdid it with bamboo,” I said.

She kept peeling the Saran wrap off the rosemary chicken, nudging it with a fork to make sure it was still there.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sometimes Cindy would glance up, a morsel of chicken breast poised on her fork, mistaking yet another passing car for Dad's BMW. But unless the car sounded a lot like Dad's I was rarely deceived. As the evening went on and Dad called again, we settled into stories of Cindy's childhood. She had grown up in Nevada, Iowa—pronounced with a long
a:
Ne-
vay
-da. “They make everything out of soy, ink and food, so my dad raised that, but what he loved was livestock.”

When I told Cindy her books about collectibles were an improvement over Dad's usual reading matter, the Kentucky Derby and bare-fisted boxing, Cindy said that she was going to invest in transportable assets. This was the one phrase she used that made me stop and look sideways at her as I sipped my pineapple juice, wondering if this was the sort of thing you said if you were raised around abandoned silos. Her fingernails were the same color as mine, but longer.

Dad called yet again, and Cindy said things were great, do what you have to do. I could feel the conversation filling with things she didn't want to mention, even when she took the portable phone into the den, where Dad kept the largely unread, leather-bound volumes he had inherited from his grandfather, Emerson and Dickens and geographies of a world that doesn't exist anymore.

Finally, at the end of the third call, Cindy waved me into the den and I stood staring at the spine of Byron's collected poems while Dad said he was sorry he had made such a mess of the evening, he would make it up to me. He was helping Mrs. Jovanovich.

Cindy drove me home after we had picked at our pine-nut tarts, fresh baked that day at Angelino's in Montclair. As she dropped me off at my mom's house, Cindy thanked me for coming over, as if I had done her a big personal favor. I couldn't bring myself to say you're welcome, staring into the silhouette of her head, her hair the kind that doesn't take much of a curl, a lank wave down to each shoulder. I told her I wanted to hear more about tornadoes.

Mrs. Jovanovich was a white-haired woman who walked with two silvery canes. Her family had owned land near Pebble Beach, and her husband had been a television producer. Now her only daughter lived in England, and Dad shepherded her estate through insurance payments, lease agreements, even helping her buy a new hearing aid when an improved model was advertised. This was typical of the kind of support Dad gave his clients, and it was clear to me that Mrs. Jovanovich must have suffered some heart flutter or the legal equivalent of a fainting spell that kept him on the phone to London or to a doctor.

But when Mom asked how did it go, looking up from a mess of paperwork, I didn't know what to tell her. She meant: Tell me you father didn't marry a cliché blonde, a brainless flirt. But I didn't want to go into detail and have to tell her that Dad had never shown up.