The Patron Saint of Liars (2 page)

The Hotel Louisa was getting worn, fretwork slipped from the porch, shutters hung down. In any other town it would have been ransacked, people breaking out windows and carrying off furniture in the night. But the people of Habit were true to their name and just kept on avoiding the old hotel like they did in the days when they wouldn't have had the right clothes to go inside for a cup of coffee.

The Clatterbucks waited and watched. Then one day a station wagon pulled up the front drive and two nuns, dressed in what looked to be white bed sheets, and five big-bellied girls got out. June and her mother were just coming through the woods at the time, out for their daily walk.

The nuns cut across the dried creek bed, not knowing a thing. They didn't know how the hotel had come to be or that they were standing on top of what might have been the closest thing to a real miracle that any of them was ever going to see. They were occupied, unloading the car.

"Pregnant girls," Mrs. Clatterbuck said. "They've gone and made it into a home for pregnant girls."

ROSE

1

I
WAS SOMEWHERE
outside of Ludlow, California, headed due east toward Kentucky, when I realized that I would be a liar for the rest of my life. There was plenty of time to think about things like that, headed into the desert alone, windows down, radio up. I imagined that it was possible for people to have talents, great talents, that they never stumbled across in the course of their lives. Somewhere out there, maybe in one of those African countries where all people have time to do is starve to death, was a painter who had never seen a canvas. Maybe he scratched simple pictures into the dirt with a stick, and it felt right to him even if he didn't know what it meant. So maybe I was born to lie, and it just took me twenty-three years to find the reason to do it. I started out with a lie of omission, which some people might see as easier, but I think is actually more complex. I left my husband with only a note.

Dear Thomas,

I am unhappy and it cannot be resolved. Do not try and find me. I will not come home. I'm sorry about taking the car.

Rose

I reworked it two dozen times, but it was still not a good note. Writing is not my talent. It was stiff and formal, given the fact that we had been married for almost three years and that he was, at every turn, a good man. But I thought the smallest bit of kindness would send him out looking for me, and since he wouldn't be able to find me, what kind of life would that be for him? Wandering in the desert, showing my picture in gas stations, pinning fliers that gave my height and weight, the place I was last seen, onto telephone poles. The hardest part was knowing how to sign the note, because
Love
wasn't right and anything less (
Sincerely, All best,
) was worse than nothing. So I went with nothing.

But like I said, I started with omission, which means the contents of the note were true, but there was a larger, unmentioned truth which I took with me from Marina del Rey. I was pregnant. The beginnings of a child, his, mine, slept between my hips, a quarter-size life beneath the steering wheel of the blue Dodge Dart. Maybe you could trace the lying back further than that, to the darker issue of lying to myself. I lied to myself for three months, thinking that my period had gone someplace from which it would quickly return, that my body had simply forgotten and would remember. I lied to myself about wanting to be married, too. But I forgave myself that.

Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven. What would be the point in confessing a sin for which you had guilt but no remorse? Bless me, father, for I have sinned, I have lied to my husband, left him never knowing he will have a child, and would do it all again in a heartbeat. Bless me, for I will continue to lie until I go the way of all the earth. Bless me in my absence of remorse.

At nineteen I had been to Tijuana three times, drank mescal with high school boys, bet them money on dart games and let them kiss me, never anything else. I was saving myself for that one person who would be mine alone in all the world. That's what I thought at nineteen. There was one out there who was looking for me like I was lost. I had been to Los Angeles a dozen times, and farther, up the coast to Malibu and Zuma and Ventura, names so beautiful you'd think they were someplace else, and all the time I watched the waves and let the boy who drove me put his arm around my waist and slip the ends of my hair into his mouth as if they'd just blown there by accident, I never cared. Never cared for any of them. I would go into the water all the way through late November, even when the waves were high and cold enough to cut you in half. I would swim out with long strokes while the boy quickly drifted back toward the shore, shivering in the daylight, looking for his shirt. He would try again, go up to his ankles, his knees, but the water would push him back as fast as it pushed me out. As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past that first set of waves. That's why people are afraid to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You've got to go through them, dive under just when they're rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get through that, you'll find there isn't a better place for swimming because it's the ocean and it goes on forever. You don't have to see anyone you don't want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it's easy to imagine that there's no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.

I never turned and waved to the boy. I felt how cold the water was, but never like I felt him watching me. I knew how my arms would look, how a lump would rise in his throat as I dove down again and then stayed under too long. I swam until I got tired, and I didn't get tired fast. By the time I walked out of the Pacific Ocean I could be sure he would remember this, and that I would remember it too: the swimming, not the boy.

In church I prayed to God. Every morning on my way to school, every morning before going to work when it wasn't on my way anymore, I stopped and knelt before a rack of candles. The flames would tremble inside their red glass cups when my elbows pressed against the railing. I would pray for the soul of my father, who I said I could remember but could not, that his young and handsome face from my parents' wedding picture was watching over me. I would pray for the exams I had not studied for and the small ruby ring in the window of Cantrell's Jewelry. I would pray for high-heeled shoes, my girlfriends, and permission to do as I pleased. I would pray to be noticed, beautiful, and loved, but mostly for that sign to which I was rightfully entitled. Every candle I lit, every long wooden match I gave a dime for and struck against the bottom of the coin box, making a small disruption of sulfur and light in the church, was by way of reminding God that I was still here, waiting. I knew that it could come at any time, and that any time could be a long way off, but I thought that by constantly placing myself in God's presence, He might be more inclined to think of me sooner rather than later. I did not ask for more than my share, one sign. That which was by rights mine because I believed and was so ready to listen.

Sometimes I prayed for Holy Orders, so that I would walk away from them in a way that would make me amazing; the strength of my will sanctified by God. Father O'Donnell had said that God called us to our vocations, in some kind of dog whistle voice that only we would hear, and if we kept our heart open, our ear to the ground, we would know what to do. Nun or Wife, my choices loomed above me like giant doors, and I waited, listening, for God to give me the word. But God was quiet in San Diego in the middle sixties. If He had an opinion as to which way I should go He kept it to Himself, or maybe He said it while I was in the shower, humming something, and the moment of my lifetime passed me by. But I was like a woman lost in the desert, her eyes trained for water for so long that she begins to think she could drink the reflections of light on the sand. What I finally accepted as my sign came in the form of Thomas Clinton, as Father O'Donnell told us God can come to us in many ways and we should never be quick to discount anyone. I was nineteen and working as a secretary at Simms candy factory on Pacific Avenue. I ate the lunch I brought from home on the beach. Thomas was in college, went to our church, and asked if he could take me to dinner some Saturday night.

"Which Saturday night?"

My mother was happy because he didn't wrap chocolates or drive a truck. I said yes because it seemed so hard for him to ask me. I wondered how many Sundays I had walked by him while he watched me, how many times the words had come up in his throat, or he had started to reach out to touch the sleeve of my dress but I was past him already and he would have to wait another week. You think that sounds conceited, you think that maybe it was the first time he had seen me, thought to ask at all. But any girl who tells herself the truth knows differently. So I said yes to Thomas Clinton and later thought that I had said yes to God and later still realized I had said yes only to Thomas Clinton.

My mother and I had our own lives, our own schedules. Sometimes it seemed like the only time we managed to spend together was in the bathroom while one of us was getting ready to go to work or out for the evening. "This is going to be a good date," my mother said. She said it every time, regardless of who I was going out with. "I have a feeling." She was sitting on the edge of the tub, still wearing her dress from work. She sold cosmetics at I. Magnin's. She used to work in hosiery. Cosmetics was a big promotion because she made a commission, and my mother knew that no woman thought she was beautiful, or beautiful enough, or beautiful in the right way. "They look into the mirror and all they can see is a collection of flaws," she used to say. "I can fix that." She sold to them gently, she soothed them. When they said their eyes were small, she did not deny it, but instead brought up a thin blue pencil from someplace deep beneath the counter and showed them how to draw themselves on. "There's no sense worrying about what you're given," my mother would say. "The important thing is what you do with it."

I was working on my face from the vast collection of samples my mother brought home, overused testers with just enough left for us. She rubbed a Kleenex over the top of a lipstick and handed it to me.

"It's too light," I said.

"It's not too light."

My mother liked to watch me get ready, like I had watched her get ready when 1 was a girl. After my father died when I was three, after enough time had passed, she would get ready to go on dates herself. I would pick out her earrings, sniff the bottle of Rive Gauche which was her. The women at church were always telling my mother she should marry again, that she should give me another father. "Rose has a father," she told them. "She doesn't need another one." My mother took marriage very seriously. It was a sacrament, the same as communion. It was a long time before she decided that maybe being married to someone who was dead wasn't as binding as being married to someone who was alive. By the time I had graduated from high school, she had pretty much settled with Joe, who handled claims forms for an insurance company. But then it wasn't a date anymore, only a series of nights she went to his house and nights he came to ours and they made dinner and watched TV and went home late but always went home.

"Your blush is too high."

I looked in the mirror again and started to wipe it off. I had stopped fighting with my mother, at least over make-up, a long time ago. It was the thing she knew, I could give her that much.

There was a way she watched me when I was looking in the mirror. She thought I didn't see her. She would stare at me so intently and I knew she was trying to see me like a stranger would, to judge me as harshly as the world would judge me. If she had that information, she thought she could prepare me somehow for what was to come. "Pretty girls have it harder," she said while I brushed out my hair.

"What?"

"People think it's the other way, that the ugly girls, the plain girls even, they're the ones to feel sorry for. But they don't have so many"—she stopped and pushed her eyebrows together, trying to think of the word—"distractions, I guess. There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it's the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds."

"You don't know what you're talking about." My mother loved to talk about things like that, but I wasn't in the mood. I was going to be late. I pressed my mouth against my hand and then washed it off.

"You're a pretty girl," my mother said. "I was a pretty girl. I know what I'm talking about."

My mother was a pretty girl. I had seen the pictures, her dark hair sweeping off her forehead in a wave, her head tilted imperceptibly to one side, her mouth open to show the rows of small, perfect teeth. There was a picture of her in her confirmation dress, standing on the steps of the church, another waving from the bow of the
Queen Mary,
a snapshot taken on a guided tour, her sunglasses on, her gloved hand raised to the camera. But as she grew older my mother became beautiful. I could never find the exact moment it happened. In the pictures she changed, her face had lost its sweetness but taken on another thing. You can see it best in the photograph taken at my father's funeral. Who would have had the nerve to make a picture then, or how it came to be in her possession, I never knew, but there she was in a black dress, walking toward the camera but looking away from it. The cemetery is only a backdrop, the trees making an arch behind her, the headstones arranged like lilac bushes. She is more beautiful than a bride. Once, when I was ten and intent on finding every photograph of my father ever taken, I ran across this one. When I showed it to her, she closed her eyes and turned away. "Keep that if you want it," she said, "but I don't ever want to see it around. Do you understand me?" For the rest of the day she was quiet, and while I later understood it was because she didn't want to remember the day she watched them bury my father, at the time I thought she was ashamed, ashamed of the beauty that seemed somehow to break apart the grief around her. I put the picture in my Bible between the Gospels of Luke and John. I took the Bible with me when I left. It is the only picture of my mother I have.