Possessions (13 page)

“It's all right, Leslie; we'll get used to it. And when we do some painting, it will be a lot brighter.”

“But you ought to have more room.”

“I can't afford more room.”

Their different paychecks loomed between them. “In that case,” Leslie said, putting the bags on the floor and holding out her arms, “welcome to San Francisco.”

Katherine laughed and they held each other tightly. “Thank you. And thank you for coming; it's good to see a friendly face.”

“Especially in this place.” Leslie backed up and surveyed it, shaking her head. “Well.” She became businesslike. “Here's the schedule. A crew of muscular young men will be here as soon as I give them the signal, to unload your truck. They do—”

“Leslie, I can't afford movers. We hired a high-school boy in Vancouver and I thought we'd do the same here.”

“They aren't movers; they're maintenance men from one of our branch stores. Consider them a welcome wagon. They do whatever they're told, so have them put every piece of furniture exactly where you want before you let them get away. Then I'm taking all of you to dinner. Don't shake your head at me. It's the same welcome wagon. After this you're on your own, but to start you need something special, so we're going to Henri's at the top of the Hilton. Quite a view, decent food, and wine for the grownups. How does that sound?”

“It sounds like Christmas.”

“Listen, I lured you down here; I have to keep you happy. Speaking of which, I brought you a present.” She pulled something from one of the grocery bags. “Know what this is?”

“It looks like a bundle of rags.”

“It is a bundle of rags. The most valuable gift a friend can bring someone just moving in. Now, I'm going to the pay phone at the corner to call the muscular young men and men I'll help you scrub what I am sure is a grimy kitchen. Jennifer and Todd should help, too, don't you think? Instead of sitting outside looking like the sky has collapsed?”

“Of course. How odd that I never thought of rags.”

With Leslie as organizer, the apartment came to life. Two young men, as muscular as she had promised, unloaded the truck, while Katherine and Leslie, with a mildly grumbling Jennifer and Todd, washed the kitchen and bathroom and all the floors. In the three small rooms, they bumped and tripped over each other, but Leslie joked about it, and as Katherine heard the laughter and saw her own furniture settle into place, the anticipation she had felt that morning began to return.

“You see,” Leslie said later, as they were led to a table in the restaurant. “All it takes is organization.”

“Or desperation,” Katherine said lightly. They sat beside a window while Jennifer and Todd toured the room to see the view from all directions, admitting it was pretty spectacular. Katherine gazed at the glowing city below and the curving panorama of lights across the bay—Oakland, Berkeley and their neighboring towns—and had a moment of pure happiness. Dinner with a friend, her children chattering happily instead of complaining, a home where lamplight and familiar furniture waited, and, in two weeks, when Jennifer and Todd started school, a job, a salary, a beginning. We've found a place, she thought as the waiter brought their shrimp and crab appetizers and Jennifer and Todd sat down to eat. Until Craig comes back, we've found a place to stay.

*  *  *

The small details of everyday life are invisible until they must be changed. Katherine changed almost all of them in her first two weeks in San Francisco. She arranged for a telephone and sent their new number and address to the Vancouver police, Carl Doerner, and two neighbors whom Craig might call when
he found strangers living in their house. Using Leslie's recommendations, she found doctors and a dentist, and made a list of discount stores she could reach on public transportation. She opened checking and savings accounts in a bank near Heath's, filled out an application for check cashing at a neighborhood grocery store, and, borrowing Leslie's car, was first in line one morning to get a California driver's license. All her charge cards were in Craig's name, so she applied for new ones in her own name at Macy's and Sears; she had an employees' account at Heath's. Registering Jennifer and Todd at their new school, she found she'd forgotten to bring their records from Vancouver and sent to their old school for test scores, and to their doctor for their medical histories. And she spent a morning getting acquainted with a neighborhood pharmacist, the butcher at the supermarket, and the owner of a fish store down the street.

Best of all, Jennifer and Todd discovered Annie, who lived across the hall, and brought her to meet Katherine. Tall, blond, lanky, just turned sixteen, she was breezily cheerful, serious about her studies, and mad for new clothes, and therefore always on the lookout for ways to earn extra money—for instance, by keeping an eye on Jennifer and Todd when Katherine began her new job.

“Not that I'm not crazy about them,” she told Katherine earnestly. “I'd do it as a favor, except . . . well, you know, things
cost
so much . . .”

Katherine knew. She also knew that since Annie lived across the hall, she could be in her own home, at least part of the time, at her own typewriter, listening to her own records, and still be earning money as long as both apartment doors were open. Once they agreed it was a good deal for the two of them, they worked out a schedule of hours and payment for after school and evenings.

Not that Katherine expected to be going out at night, but just in case something came up, it was good to know Annie was there. Especially for the afternoons. In Vancouver, she'd always been home when Jennifer and Todd arrived from school and the thought of their wandering around on their own while she was trapped at work had frightened her. Now that fright was gone.

One more arrangement made, she thought. It takes a lot of running and planning, to belong. But there was still more running ahead. They went sightseeing.

Katherine splurged and rented a car, and they left early one morning for the Muir Woods. Driving north, they drove through a tunnel with its entrance painted in a huge rainbow. A good omen, Katherine thought as Jennifer laughed with pleasure when she pointed it out, and a little later, when they stood in awestruck silence beneath the cool grandeur of towering redwoods, all of Todd's and Jennifer's grumbling and disparaging comparisons with Vancouver ended, at least for a while.

The next few days were packed with exploring: museums, parks, an old sailing ship, a chocolate factory converted to a shopping center, a zoo with a Gorilla World and a Zebra Zephyr tour train. But most exciting of all, for Jennifer and Todd, was driving on San Francisco's streets: the weird disembodied feeling that made them screech with delight when Katherine drove up one of the city's steep hills and they saw nothing ahead but sky, nothing of the other side, until the car was at the crest and then precipitously descending, giving them a stomach-clutching view down, down, past a cross street, then down past another, and still down, farther and farther, all the way to the water's edge. Then they would let out a long sigh of relief and pause before demanding, “Where's the next hill?”

At the end of the week, when school and Katherine's job were both about to begin, they listed the places they'd had to postpone. It takes a lot of running to belong, Katherine thought again, smiling. But what a good start we've made.

*  *  *

Heath's main store turns a cool marble facade toward Union Square. From four tall windows, haughty mannequins gaze at the comings and goings in the square across the street: couples entwined on the grass, men in tatters sleeping on benches, revival singers and fervent speakers on a stone platform haranguing anyone who pauses to listen, office workers taking a shortcut on the diagonal walks between flower gardens, clipped hedges, and tall spiky palms. Katherine stood among the mannequins in one of the windows, holding a silk scarf and a handbag, waiting for Gil Lister to ask for them. Heath's window designer for twenty years, Lister ran his little kingdom with entrenched power and a sharp tongue and only reluctantly had
accepted Katherine as his assistant. Short and round, with quivering lips and smooth skin, he established his supremacy the day she arrived.

“Stand there, my dear, no, a little more to the right; now, when I ask for the scarf you will hold it up, so, and wait until I take it from you. No tossing it at me and no scurrying about so that I don't know where you are. Think of yourself as a surgeon's assistant, always alert for what I need, making sure I expend a
minimum
of effort in achieving the
maximum
of my potential. Clear? Not too difficult for you, my dear? Let's try it, then. Stand here—no, a little to the left . . .”

When she was not holding items above her head, her arms aching with the effort of keeping them extended exactly as Lister instructed, she sat at a small desk in a corner of his workroom, copying sketches of window displays, ordering mannequins and sending others out for repair, writing orders for scenery and props, and keeping files on all of Lister's designs and those he copied from designers in other stores. “It doesn't hurt them in the slightest,” he told Katherine. “I'm not taking any business from them, and I could put together far more original ideas of my own, but you see how busy I am, my dear, it is appalling the way time rushes past and art suffers first, you'll discover that, art suffers when we have no time to contemplate and create. Still, we don't want competitors to be peeved at seeing their little designs in our windows, so we embellish them to give our customers the prestigious look they expect from Heath's. Hand me that table, my dear, we'll change this from a den to a living room.”

Alternately amused by his tricks to impress others and furious with his tyranny over her, Katherine could not wait to get away at five thirty each day, and by the end of her first week at work, she was worn out. Still, getting off the bus on Friday, she realized that for a whole week she hadn't anguished over Craig; she'd been too busy, too tired. Is that good or bad? she wondered. I mustn't let him seem too far away; too much depends on him. And if he were here, she reflected, he'd remember that today is my birthday and I wouldn't feel so low about it.

She turned the corner, leaving behind the noisy congestion of Irving Street with its traffic, stores and restaurants from a dozen countries. Walking home, she began to feel better. It
was a quiet, pleasant street of identical tiny houses, each with a garage and a bay window above it, a small patch of lawn in front, with miniature gardens and small trees or bushes, almost like a small village.

Beyond another, identical block was Golden Gate Park, its border of tangled bushes hiding museums and gardens, windmills and lakes, fields, woods, restaurants, and numberless paths to explore. Katherine saw Jennifer and Todd on the edge of the park, with Annie, waving at her, waiting to cross Lincoln Way. When they ran up to her she thought they looked conspiratorial.

“The paint finally came,” said Todd as Annie went in to do her homework. “White and yellow. Pretty dull.”

“Those are the colors I asked for,” Katherine said. “Do I get a greeting?”

They gave her a perfunctory kiss. “When do we eat?”

“For heaven's sake!” she exclaimed. “Can I have a few minutes to be me before I become the cook?”

“Mom!” Todd stepped back and squinted at her. “You never used to talk like that.”

Damn, Katherine thought, and bent to kiss them. “I'm sorry. It hasn't been the best week, you know.” She saw them exchange a look. “All right, let's get dinner. Did you look in those bags to see if we got paint brushes and rollers?”

They talked about school and painting the apartment, and as they were finishing dinner, Katherine said, “You haven't told me what you did after school.”

They gave each other a quick, secretive glance and shrugged. “Walked around with Annie.”

“Where?”

“The park. Irving Street. You know.”

“Just walking?”

“Not exactly . . .”

“Then what?” Katherine asked in frustration.

“This!” Todd shouted, and from beneath his chair whipped out a small wrapped package. “Happy birthday!” he shouted again.

Jennifer jumped up to give Katherine a loud kiss. “Daddy always took us shopping for your birthday so we weren't sure what to get but we hope you like it.” Tears filled Katharine's eyes and Jennifer put her arms tightly around her. “We love
you, Mommy. And next birthday we'll shop with Daddy again, so everything will be all right.”

Katherine tried to smile. All day she had been remembering the ten festive birthdays that had gone before, celebrated with Craig's flowers, lavish gifts, a decorated cake from one of Vancouver's elite bakeries, and a rousing off-key “Happy Birthday” sung by Craig, Todd, and Jennifer. Now, as Jennifer and Todd put before her a plate of glazed doughnuts bristling with candles, it was all she could do to keep her tears from overflowing. “Happy birthday,” they sang—and all of them thought what a thin chorus it was without Craig. Then Katherine blew out the candles and, with Todd and Jennifer eagerly watching, opened her present.

“Oh,” she said blankly, then recovered. “Oh, how lovely; and I've been needing a new one; how did you know?”

They beamed. “It was Jennifer's idea,” Todd said. “I never even heard of a blusher.”

Katherine turned the small plastic square in her hand, opened it to reveal the mirror, pressed powder and small brush, then closed it and ran her finger over the tortoiseshell surface. “I'll use it all the time,” she said, hugging them. “Thank you—and thank you for remembering.” But she wondered, as they washed the dishes, if Jennifer had thought of a compact as a way of telling her to pay more attention to herself. She felt embarrassed, and pressured, because she couldn't rouse herself to care about her looks. Each morning, dressing for work, she knew she should try, but a wave of lassitude would sweep over her and she would give up. I'm clean and neat, she told herself; that's enough. Someday I'll do more. If—when Craig comes back, I'll want to. Until then—She slipped the small compact into her purse. Just as she and the children were waiting for Craig, it would, too.