Household Gods (2 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Now that Frank didn't live there anymore, Nicole had to drive twenty minutes in the direction opposite the one that would have taken her to work, then hustle back across the
Valley to the Woodland Hills office. After she got off, she made the same trip in reverse. No wonder the Honda needed a tuneup. Nicole kept wanting to try to find someone closer, preferably on the way to work, but the kids screamed every time she suggested it, and there never seemed to be time. So she kept taking them to Josefina's, and the Honda kept complaining, and she kept scrambling, morning after morning and evening after evening. Someday the Honda would break down and she'd scream loud enough to drown out the kids, and then she'd get around to finding someone else to take care of them while she went about earning a living.
She turned left onto Victory and headed east. Sometimes you could make really good time on Victory, almost as good as on the freeway—the freeway when it wasn't jammed, of course; the eastbound 101 during morning rush hour didn't bear thinking about. She hoped this would be one of those times; she was still running late.
She sailed past the parking lots of the Fallbrook Mall and the more upscale Topanga Plaza. Both were acres of empty asphalt now. They wouldn't slow her down till she came home tonight. Her hands tightened on the wheel as she came up to Pierce College. Things often jammed there in the morning, with people heading for early classes. Some of the kids drove like maniacs, too, and got into wrecks that snarled traffic for a mile in either direction.
Not today, though. “Victory,” Nicole breathed: half street name, half triumph. Victory wasn't like Sherman Way, with a traffic light every short block. Clear sailing till just before the freeway, she thought. She rolled by one gas station, apartment house, condo block, and strip mall with video store or copy place or small-time accountant's office or baseball-card shop or Mexican or Thai or Chinese or Korean or Indian or Armenian restaurant after another, in continual and polyglot confusion. They had a flat and faintly unreal look in the trafficless morning, under the blue California sky.
Six years and she could still marvel at the way the light came down straight and white and hard, with an edge to it that she could taste in the back of her throat. Good solid Los
Angeles smog, pressed down hard by the sun: air you could cut pieces off and eat. She'd thought she'd never be able to breathe it, gone around with a stitch in her side and a catch in her lungs, till one day she woke up and realized she hadn't felt like that in weeks. She'd whooped, which woke up Frank; then she'd had to explain: “I'm an Angeleno now! I can breathe the smog.”
Frank hadn't understood. He'd just eyed her warily and grunted and gone to take over the bathroom the way he did every morning.
She should have seen the end then, but it had taken another couple of years and numerous further signs—then he was gone and she was a statistic. Divorced wife, mother of two.
She came back to the here-and-now just past White Oak, just as everything on the south side of the street turned green. The long rolling stretch of parkland took her back all over again to the Midwest—to the place she'd taught herself to stop calling home. There, she'd taken green for granted. Here, in Southern California, green was a miracle and a gift. Eight months a year, any landscape that wasn't irrigated stretched bare and bleak and brown. Rain seldom fell. Rivers were few and far between. This was desert—rather to the astonishment of most transplants, who'd expected sun and surf and palm trees, but never realized how dry the land was beyond the beaches.
There was actually a river here, the Los Angeles River, running through the park. But the L.A. River, even the brief stretch of it not encased in concrete, would hardly have passed for a creek in Indiana. She shut down a surge of homesickness so strong it caught her by surprise. “Damn,” she said softly—too softly, apparently, for the kids to hear: no voice piped up from the back, no “Damn what, Mommy?” from Justin and no prim “We don't use bad words, Mommy,” from Kimberley. She'd thought she was long past yearning for Indiana. What was there to yearn for? Narrow minds and narrower mindsets, freezing cold in the winter and choking humidity in the summer, and thousands of miles to the nearest ocean.
And green. Green grass and bare naked water, and air that didn't rake the lungs raw.
Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. A red sea of brake lights lay ahead, and she had no way to part it. She glared at the car radio, which hadn't said a word about any accidents. But the traffic reports seldom bothered with surface-street crashes; they had enough trouble keeping up with bad news on the freeways.
“Why aren't we going, Mommy?” Kimberley asked from the backseat, as inevitable as the traffic jam.
“We're stuck,” Nicole answered, as she'd answered a hundred times before. “There must be an accident up ahead.”
They were stuck tight, too. With the park on one side of Victory and a golf course on the other, there weren't even any cross streets with which to escape. Nothing to do but fume, slide forward a couple of inches, hit the brakes, fume again.
People in the fast lane were making U-turns to go back to Hayvenhurst and around the catastrophe that had turned Victory into defeat. Nicole, of course, was trapped in the slow lane. Whenever she tried to get into the fast lane, somebody cut her off. Drivers leaned on their horns (which the Nicole who'd lived in Indianapolis would have been surprised to hear was rare in L.A.), flipped off their neighbors, shook fists. She wondered how many of them had a gun in their waistband or pocket or purse or glove compartment. She didn't want to find out.
Ten mortal minutes and half a mile later, she crawled past the U-Haul truck that had wrapped itself around a pole. The driver was talking to a cop. “Penal Section 502,” she snarled, that being the California section on driving under the influence.
She had to slow down again as cars got onto the San Diego Freeway, but that happened every day. She bore it in resigned annoyance as a proper Angeleno should, but with a thrum of desperation underneath.
Late-late-late
…
Once she got under the overpass, she made reasonably
decent time. Thoughts about locking the barn door after the horse was stolen ran through her mind.
Parts of Van Nuys were ordinary middle-class suburb. Parts were the sort of neighborhood where you wished you could drive with the Club locked on the steering wheel. Josefina's house was right on the edge between the one and the other.
“Hello, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said in accented English as Nicole led her children into the relative coolness and dimness of the house. It smelled faintly of sour milk and babies, more distinctly of spices Nicole had learned to recognize: cilantro, cumin, chili powder. The children tugged at Nicole's hands, trying to break free and bolt, first into Josefina's welcoming arms, then to the playroom where they'd spend most of the day.
Normally, Nicole would have let them go, but Josefina had put herself in the way, and something in her expression made Nicole tighten her grip in spite of the children's protests.
Josefina was somewhere near Nicole's age, several inches shorter, a good deal wider, and addicted to lurid colors: today, an electric blue blouse over fluorescent orange pants. Her taste in clothes, fortunately, didn't extend to the decor of her house; that was a more or less standard Sears amalgam of brown plaid and olive-green slipcovers, with a touch of faded blue and purple and orange in a big terracotta vase of paper flowers that stood by the door. Nicole would remember the flowers later, more clearly than Josefina's face in the shadow of the foyer, or even the day-glo glare of her clothes.
Nicole waited for Josefina to move so that Kimberley and Justin could go in, but Josefina stood her ground, solid as a tiki god in a Hawaiian gift shop. “Listen, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” she said. “I got to tell you something. Something important.”
“What?” Nicole was going to snap again. Damn it, she was late. How in hell was she going to make it to the office on time if the kids' daycare provider wanted to stop and chat?
Josefina could hardly have missed the chill in Nicole's
tone, but she didn't back down. “Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, I'm very sorry, but after today I can't take care of your kids no more. I can't take care of nobody's kids no more.”
She did look sorry. Nicole granted her that. Was there a glisten of tears in her eyes?
Nicole was too horrified to be reasonable, and too astonished to care whether Josefina was happy, sad, or indifferent. “What?” she said. “You what? You can't do that!”
Josefina did not reply with the obvious, which was that she perfectly well could. “I got to go home to Mexico. My mother down in Ciudad Obreg6n, where I come from, she very sick.” Josefina brought the story out pat. And why not? She must have told it a dozen times already, to a dozen other shocked and appalled parents. “She call me last night,” she said, “and I get the airplane ticket. I leave tonight. I don't know when I be back. I don't know if I be back. I'm very sorry, but I can't help it. You give me the check for this part of the month when you pick up the kids tonight, okay?”
Then, finally, she stood a little to the side so that Kimberley and Justin could run past her. They seemed not to know or understand what she'd said, which was a small—a very small—mercy. Nicole stood numbly as they vanished into the depths of the house, staring at Josefina's round flat face above the screaming blue of her blouse. “But—” Nicole said. “But—”
Her brain was as sticky as the Honda's engine. It needed a couple of tries before it would turn over. “But what am I supposed to do? I work for a living, Josefina—I have to. Where am I supposed to take the children tomorrow?”
Josefina's face set. Nicole damned herself for political incorrectness, for thinking that this woman whom she was so careful to think of as an equal and not as an ethnic curiosity, looked just now like every stereotype of the inscrutable and intractable aborigine. Her eyes were flat and black. Her features, the broad cheekbones, the Aztec profile, the bronze sheen of the skin, were completely and undeniably foreign. Years of daycare, daily meetings, little presents for the children on their birthdays and plates of delicious and exotic
cookies at Christmas, reciprocated with boxes of chocolates—Russell Stover, not Godiva; Godiva was an acquired taste if you weren't a yuppie—all added up to this: closed mind and closed face, and nothing to get a grip on, no handhold for sympathy, let alone understanding. This, Nicole knew with a kind of angry despair, was an alien. She'd never been a friend, and she'd never been a compatriot, either. Her whole world just barely touched on anything that Nicole knew. And now even that narrow tangent had disappeared.
“I'm sorry,” Josefina said in her foreign accent, with her soft Spanish vowels. “I know you are upset with me. Lots of parents upset with me, but I can't do nothing about it. My mother got nobody else but me.”
Nicole made her mind work, made herself think and talk some kind of sense. “Do you know anyone who might take Kimberley and Justin on such short notice?”
God, even if Josefina said yes, the kids would pitch a fit. She was … like a mother to them. That had always worried Nicole a little—not, she'd been careful to assure herself, that her impeccably Anglo children should be so attached to a Mexican woman; no, of course not, how wonderfully free of prejudice that would make them, and they'd picked up Spanish, too. No, she worried she herself wasn't mother enough, so they'd had to focus on Josefina for all the things Nicole couldn't, but should, be offering them. And now, when they were fixated like that, to go from her house to some stranger's—
Even as Nicole fussed over what was, after all, a minor worry, Josefina was shaking her head. “Don't know nobody,” she said. She didn't mean it the way it sounded. Of course she didn't. She couldn't mean,
It's no skin off my nose
, lady. Josefina loved the kids. Didn't she?
What did Nicole know of what Josefina felt or didn't feel? Josefina was foreign.
Nicole stood on the front porch, breathing hard. If that was the way Josefina wanted to play it, then that was how Nicole would play it. There had to be some way out. She would have bet money that Josefina was an undocumented
immigrant. She could threaten to call the INS, get her checked out, have her deported …
Anger felt good. Anger felt cleansing. But it didn't change a thing. There wasn't anything she could do. Deport Josefina? She almost laughed. Josefina was leaving the USA on her own tonight. She'd probably welcome the help.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina repeated. As if she meant it. As if she even cared.
Nicole didn't even remember going from the house to the car. One moment she was staring at Josefina, hunting for words that wouldn't come. The next, she was in the Honda, slamming the driver's-side door hard enough to rattle the glass in the window frame. She jammed the key in the ignition, shoved the pedal to the metal, and roared out into the street.
Part of her wanted to feel cold and sick and a little guilty. The rest of her was too ferociously angry to care how she drove.
She might not care, but with the luck she was running, she'd pick up a ticket on top of being drastically late. She made an effort of will and slowed down to something near a reasonable speed. Her brain flicked back into commuter mode, cruising on autopilot. The main part of her mind fretted away at this latest blow.

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