Souvenir of Cold Springs (37 page)

It occurred to her that she had never asked him for a thing. You've changed, he would say. California has changed you. Maybe they should just pack up and move, he should take this job he'd heard about in Ohio, take off and leave them all gaping. First Hawaii, then the job in Columbus, and a tiny apartment with a big bed …

Outside the window, there was sunshine, the day had turned warm. Claire complained about it—how harsh the light was. Peggy listened to them talk, talked a little herself, and felt that she could say whatever she liked, that what would have shocked people at home in Syracuse was here met with laughter and agreement. She told them a lot about Caroline, mimicking her affectations and absurdities, and made them all laugh, even her aunt, who said she recalled Caro as an unpleasant creature even at—what? Five? When had she last been east? 1923? Four? She could still remember little Caroline and her blond curls, how she showed off dancing, reciting poetry—how she played up to people to get what she wanted.

The talk turned to sisters, to daughters, finally to people Peggy didn't know, then back to the situation in Europe, and she stopped listening. The troubles in Europe were like a hurricane far off. She sat quietly, head turned toward the window, but what she saw was home. Suddenly she missed everything—all the things she'd barely thought about all this time: her blue-flowered bedroom, her good black winter coat with the frog closings, the silver urn in the dining room, the jars of penny candy at Minetti's Grocery, Nell's kitten Dinah. The oil-and-dust smell of her father's hardware store. Her mother's corned beef. Dancing at Club Dewitt in her tight-fitting black dress with the slit skirt—how she'd love to get into that again! And snow: Nell had written to say they already had snow. The first thing she would do would be to make a snowman—no, make a snowball and throw it at Jamie! And then go sledding down the hill. There would be the sound of chains on the tires of cars laboring up Hillside Street. And Mother would have cocoa waiting for them when they came in. And John would tease her about how red her nose got in the cold. And she would show them her California things—the half-moon pendant her aunt gave her, the embroidered black shawl from Frances, the funny old doll she found in Chinatown, the blue Mexican beads, the scarab bracelet. And she would put on the blue ring and meet Ray and they would have their talk.

She longed for home, with an actual pain that made her want to put her head in her hands and weep. But she sat quietly, eyes on the blue sky, blue bay, her belly hard under her hand. She wondered how soon, after it was all over, she could get on a train headed east. The Forty-Niner, then change in Chicago for the Broadway Limited. All those dull states, so dusty and shabby on her way out, would be covered with snow on the trip back, made beautiful and serene. She would enjoy the train ride this time. She wouldn't just sit sulking in her roomette, she'd be friendly and talk to people, wave from the window when they went through towns, dress for dinner every night, smoke cigarettes in an ivory holder and drink whiskey sours in the dining car with its round tables and handsome black waiters in white coats.

The women were finishing up their paintings; Aunt Alice pronounced
The Future
nearly done. A day or two more, they said. And there she would be, her likeness, ready for the San Francisco Art League Show in the spring—hanging on someone's wall or, in clay, up on a pedestal where people could touch her as they passed, think perhaps
who was this girl
…?

But by then she would be home. She saw herself moving back across the country, freed of her cargo, sailing swiftly and gaily and brightly flagged, like one of Uncle Ralph's ships coming into port.

EPILOGUE

NELL

1988

On her way to the video store to return
Sid and Nancy
, Nell detoured by the old house on Hillside Street to see what horrors the new people had perpetrated since the last time she passed. With the first signs of spring, they had enclosed the porch. Then they put on beige aluminum siding and replaced the first-floor windows with big staring casements unbroken by panes. Now they were landscaping—sodding over her rose garden, ripping out the overgrown rhododendrons and the lilac bush, widening the driveway, and, from what Nell could see, turning the backyard into a massive concrete patio.

“Not that I care,” she wrote to Jamie and Sandra from her new address—a neat little condo on Grant Boulevard. “I'm just glad to be rid of the place. I should have unloaded it years ago, when Thea died. Four and a half rooms instead of ten! This is what those women in the diet ads must feel like after they've lost 150 pounds.”

She hadn't even taken much with her. Photographs. Books. The afghan Thea had knitted. Jamie's painting,
Blue Number Eleven
, that she had lived with for over twenty years. One small truckload of boxes, and her new kitten, Dinah Number Six. The rest was auctioned off. Now her furniture was all new, and so was the VCR that was the joy of her life.

Nell always got her movies at the Video Bazaar, even though another place had opened up closer to home.
I have a good relationship with my video man
, she wrote to Jamie, then realized how odd it sounded and crossed it out. Sandra would consider it strange indeed to rent a movie every day: She'd use that to make some point about the degeneracy of American culture.

“So what did you think of it?” Randolph asked when she handed over the film.

“I loved it. It reminded me of Keats. And it made me cry, which I always like.”

Margaret had recommended the film in one of her letters from California—letters that were so impeccably spelled and punctuated that Nell had sent her a fat check when the house deal closed. One of her great pleasures was sending money to Margaret, who had a job in a bookstore in San Francisco and was working furiously on her novel; she was planning to dedicate it to her great-aunt Nell, whom she considered a patroness of the arts. As another sign of her gratitude, she gave Nell pointers on keeping up with the times. When people retired, she said, they sometimes lost touch with reality. She hoped
Sid and Nancy
would help.

Randolph put the film back in its box, matched it up with the proper square white card, and stowed it away while Nell watched approvingly. She liked the finickiness of his system, and she liked Randolph, who was short and trim and usually dressed in running clothes. Something about him, she didn't know what, always made her wonder if he was gay.

“So recommend something, Randolph,” she said. “What's good?”

He stood with his hands on his hips surveying the shelves. “Let's put it this way. What haven't you seen?”

They discussed the problem at length, with digressions. There were seldom any other customers at that hour of the morning, so she and Randolph always had plenty of time to talk. Nell ended up with
High Noon
, which she had seen once already (not counting seeing it at the old Paramount in 1952 with Caro and the children) but wanted to see again. She loved watching movies twice. “But only if they're absolutely first-rate,” she said to Randolph.

“This is definitely one of the greats,” he said. “Not what you'd call an innovative film, except maybe for that literal-minded clock motif, but perfect in its own small way. And it has a lot in common with
Sid and Nancy
, come to think of it. Love and death—that's the name of the game.” Randolph had been working on an M.A. in English when he decided to quit and open the video store; the rumor in the neighborhood was that the store had made him a wealthy man, but he still talked like a graduate student. He said, “Hey—is that a good topic for
VB
?”

“Too broad.”

“Think so? Yeah, you're probably right.”

VB
was
Video Blast
, a publication edited, subsidized, and mostly written by Randolph, who handed it out to his customers. He gave her the new issue along with a receipt for the film. They had a private arrangement: two freebies a week, a better deal than he gave his other customers.

“By the way, if you liked
Sid and Nancy
you'll love
Stranger Than Paradise
. It should be back tomorrow.”

“Save it for me. I think that's another one Margaret mentioned.”

“Is she as big a videohead as her auntie?”

Nell flushed. “I hope you don't think I've given up reading entirely, Randolph, just because I watch so many movies.” Though, if pressed, she would have to admit that she read less than she used to. All she really liked now was poetry; she kept Yeats and Eliot by her bed, and the bad romantic poems Joyce wrote in his youth. She said, “I couldn't stop reading anymore than I could stop eating.”

“That's the trouble with a lot of people,” Randolph said, winking at her. “They read instead of watching movies. If you didn't read so much, you'd have time for two movies a day.”

She gave him her tart schoolmarm smile and left, the film tucked in her canvas shopping bag. She was aware that Randolph was watching her go, that he found her quaint and amusing—a colorful little old lady—and she didn't mind that in the least.

Her morning pilgrimage up Grant Boulevard to the corner of Butternut Street was one of the high points of her day. She walked slowly, taking her time and looking about her, enjoying the fact that she was still healthy, she had strong legs, she could have walked miles if she'd chosen to. Retiring from teaching and moving out of the old house had given her a new perspective on the neighborhood she'd lived in all her life; it had become important to her in a new way. She used her leisurely mornings to walk its streets and grow fond of them, and she felt that she and the neighborhood were somehow one, that she encompassed its entire history within herself. The stores, the trees, the buildings, even many of the people she passed: she knew their histories, she saw them come and go, she had lived with them since the day she was born, and she considered them in a sense hers.

The drastic alterations in the neighborhood were all right with Nell. She found them interesting, and she believed that places, like people, needed to change with the times to survive. Minetti's Grocery was gone, and Clarice's, where Caro and Peggy used to have their hair done, and the drugstore with its marble fountain, and the sheet music store. The old Methodist church had evolved into the True Light People's Deliverance Tabernacle and then into a failing kitchenware shop. The building that had once housed her father's hardware business had been knocked down years ago; an apartment house was there now, with dusty geraniums growing out of bare parched dirt in the front yard and an overflowing Dumpster in the back.

The Video Bazaar was where Lily's used to be—the store where she had always shopped for the neat blouses and skirts and sweaters she wore to teach in.

“Don't you miss Lily's like crazy?” Pat Garvey had asked her once—Pat who still wore sweater sets and pleated skirts: disasters on her plump, elderly body. The loss of Lily's didn't bother Nell; she no longer cared what she wore, and Randolph and his store were part of her new life. So was the deli that had opened on the corner where Minetti's had been for years. Now it was called Glorious Food, and Nell stopped in regularly to get takeout for her dinner.

When she got there, she stood outside trying to remember what she had in the refrigerator. She was sure there were leftovers from the day before. She stood looking in the window, where a display of something called California Chili (All Vegetable, All Natural) reminded her of Margaret. Videohead indeed! She smiled. Margaret also recommended books: avoid
Less Than Zero
, she advised, but read
Anywhere But Here
, it's out in paperback.

Nell was flying to San Francisco in August to see Margaret—also to eat her way through Chinatown and feast her eyes on the Pacific Ocean and go to see two of her Aunt Alice's sculptures (one called
The Past
, one
The Future
) that Margaret had discovered at the art museum there. Maybe have dinner with Heather and Rob—find out if there was any truth in Margaret's improbable speculation that Heather was expecting. And something else. When she was cleaning out the old house, she had found a packet of letters in the attic, tied up with ribbon and stored, overlooked and forgotten, with Peggy's costume jewelry in an old tin candy box:
PICKWICK INN CANDY SHOP, SAN FRANCISCO
. They were dated fifty years ago, letters to her sister Peggy from Ray Ridley—that two-timer, the man who had deceived Caro and lured Peggy to her death. Nell had unfolded one and glanced into it—
My darling I don't know if I can ever forgive you
—and tucked the packet away again, blushing and short of breath, as if she were being watched.

Sitting there on the attic floor, with her hands pressed to her heart, it had all come back to her. Struggling home in the blizzard to hear that Peggy hadn't returned from shopping, all her friends had been called, no one knew where she had gone. Then waiting through the night and the next day, when the snow stopped falling and a policeman came with the news, the horror of it. And Ray Ridley. After all these years, she had nearly forgotten his name.

Nell had already sent the jewelry to Margaret—she was Peggy's namesake, after all, and they were pretty pieces, just right for a young girl—but she decided to take the letters to California with her. She couldn't bear them alone, but she and Margaret could look at them together. There could be nothing shameful in reading them now; everyone involved was long dead. They were family history. She put the box away on the top shelf of her linen closet, back where she couldn't see it, but she was always conscious of it there, waiting.

California Chili: no, that didn't tempt her. She remembered that she had some leftover pasta carbonara and some broccoli salad in the fridge, but she went into Glorious Food anyway and bought a giant chocolate-chip cookie and a bottle of raspberry soda. For the first time in her life she was getting what Caroline used to call midriff bulge; Nell didn't mind that, either.