I stared out at Alcatraz, and thought briefly about jumping off the bridge. “How come you have to leave tomorrow?” I asked.
“Matt’s company dinner is tomorrow. I have to put on my rhinestones and slapshoes and dazzle the boss.”
“Do you think you’ll ever move back?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. Matt’s company may open an office up here next year. Then again they may not. It’s all in the planning stages. We’ll just have to play it all by ear. So who all’s coming tonight?”
“Well, Ed and Peg,” said my mother, “which you knew. And maybe Lynnie, but probably not. Casey. Sam and Bea Gold.”
“How did their kid turn out?”
“Not so good. He’s all caught up in this hippie shit, long hair, living in the Haight. Big drugs.”
“Oh, God. What a funny little kid he was.”
“Yeah. And Nanny’s best friend Pru’ll be there too.”
“Whatever happened to Mady White?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said.
“Grandma Bette took her and Nanny to see Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
“Why on earth . . .”
“She thought it was about dolls.”
“Oh. So what happened?”
“Mady freaked out,” I said. “She threw up all over the place.”
“What a toad. Does Robbie look the same?”
“Exactly. Maybe a little grayer around the temples.”
Our house looked exactly the same, too, but with a lot more books in the living room, a couple of new paintings by an old friend named Stiek, more-recent pictures of us on the piano, and all new daddy longlegs in the corners.
I sat outside with my father and Natalie while my mother insisted on being alone in the kitchen. They talked about the war, about Ronnie the Rat and LBJ, about Casey and the twins.
“I pray now that the boys break their legs badly, lose their sight, or fingers. Anything.”
“So do we, darling.”
“You don’t pray, though, Robbie.”
“On this one thing I do.”
“Does Casey have a girl?”
“Casey has a secret life. He could be married and have children for all we know.”
“Robbie? Is this going to work out okay?”
“Being with Ed and Peg, you mean? Yes, I think it will.”
And it did, at least in my eyes. Everyone seemed perfectly at ease, although maybe a little shy. The evening passed in a flash. I don’t remember anyone seeming edgy or angry or sad. It was just some run-of-the-mill family party, no big deal, lots of food and music and laughter. My father’s version was somewhat different:
“I would say it was the longest three hours of my life. Right there, baby, is all you need to know—what other party in our entire history lasted only three hours? Your mother was a wreck. If you had walked up behind her in the kitchen and tapped her on the shoulder, she would have screamed bloody murder. Peg as it was bit a hole in her own tongue, while having a nice little talk with Natalie about the weather. She spent half an hour in the bathroom spitting out blood, running cold water over her tongue. Ed was as close to drinking as he’s been since he quit—he told me later that the jungle drums were beating all night, and a still, small voice inside him said that maybe his problem all along had only been that he drank too fast, you see. He said he felt like there was a knife twisting in his guts. Sam sat there looking like he was waiting to see his proctologist. Natalie was a hero, though. Of course she and your mother both had quite a lot to drink. And Casey was so stoned, I seriously doubt he has any memories of the evening at all.”
But he did: “It was like everything that’s wrong with this country,” his version began. “Everyone caught up in the lie, that everything is okay. Everyone just trying to be clever and to look like they’ve got their act together. All this time just passing, being killed. All this incredibly heavy shit is hitting the fan in this country, all around the world, and everyone sits around saying, ‘Isn’t this just the most marvelous cheese?’ Dad going around whacking everyone on the shoulders, all very jovial and good old boy, spouting all his great bleeding-heart liberal theories, telling jokes he’d told a hundred times before.”
Years later I asked my mother, “What do you remember of that night?”
She said, “I remember how kind and heroic your father was, how calm and generous, taking on all that tension himself, dancing as fast as he could to keep the conversation going, to help people stay reasonably comfortable. Casey was really high; your father didn’t want to deal with him at all, but he didn’t lay some heavy trip on him. He tried to let it go. I prayed the entire evening, but still, God, it was hard. But it didn’t have to be perfect, and it meant that down the road Peg and Natalie could work things out in a way that was more real. You know—more authentic. Ed did great, I thought. I think his heart really ached, wanting to talk to Natalie, wanting to ask about Lucy. Natalie had known that it wouldn’t be a piece of cake, and it wasn’t. It was hard on everyone. But it was sort of beautiful, too, in its own way.”
It hadn’t been hard on me at all, maybe because my father was letting me and Pru and Casey drink a little beer. Normally, then as now, if everyone around me is comfortable, I can relax and be comfortable too, and if everyone—no, if anyone is nervous, I sit there psychically panting like an old woodchuck. But the night of my twelfth birthday, I was blessedly blind and oblivious, wearing the necklace my brother had stolen, hidden under a rose-colored poorboy Pru’s sister had given to me.
Ed and Peg arrived at the same time as Sam and Bea, and suddenly the house was filled with adults, everyone but Ed drinking old man diGrazia’s latest batch of dago red, old man diGrazia now in his eightieth year. Joan Baez was on the stereo, and Peg and Natalie gave each other a little hug when they first saw each other, as did Ed and Natalie—an even shorter hug, and everyone was talking at once, except for Peg, who had gone into the bathroom. I suppose, looking back, that this was when she had bitten through her tongue. When she finally got out, she took a seat by Sam Gold. I went over to see her.
She pulled me in against her, so that I was sort of leaning into her lap, actually sitting on one of her thighs, and she buried her face in my back, and we sat like that for a while. I didn’t particularly notice she was feeling pain. In fact, it didn’t even cross my mind. And I sat on her, listening to Joan Baez until, over all the commotion, I heard Pru scratching at the door like a dog.
Something bad had happened to Pru the weekend before. A boy gave her hickeys, on her breasts. He was a friend of her sister’s, three years older than Pru, whom Alison’s boyfriend had brought over when he came to see Alison. Pru told me several days later, while we lay by the creek that ran beside what had been the rec center. “We had all this rum and Coke,” she said. “And then Allie put on some records and we danced. Then she and her boyfriend went to her room, and this boy and I had more to drink, and a bunch of cigarettes, and we were just sitting on the couch, talking, and then we started making out. It was really nice. Then he started feeling me up, and then he pulled my bra down, so it was around my waist, and then he was kissing my boobs, and then he was giving them monkeybites.” She was flushed, squinting up at the sun. There were blackberry bushes behind her, water skeeters all over the creek, guppies and tadpoles floating by in schools. There were no berries on the blackberry bushes. We could hear the thwock-thwock-thwock of tennis balls in the background, the piping and cries of children in the pool, cars, and unseen birds like fingerbells. ‘And he just kept doing it, giving them hickeys. It sort of hurt a little, I don’t know.” I felt the tightening down there in my crotch. Her roots were growing out again. I was scared and jealous, as flushed as Pru.
I opened the door and stepped outside. She had toned down the ratted hair and Nefertiti eyes for the evening. “Let’s go have a smoke,” I whispered. We went under the house, and sat in the little space next to the water heater, surrounded by pipes, a ladder, old half-gallon cans of turpe
ntine and linseed oil, the black cat carrier, filmy curtains of cobwebs.
She fished around in her purse and pulled out a can of beer, which she opened and handed to me. I took a long sip, as if I were desperately thirsty. She got out her white lipstick and we both put some on, and then she fished around some more and got out her Marlboros and some matches. She shook one out for each of us, lit her own and then mine. I touched her hand as if to steady it as she held the match to my cigarette, like a woman in the movies. We heard a car door open and Casey say something and slam the door, and we heard the car pull away, then Casey’s footsteps on the dirt walkway leading to the front door. We sat smoking in silence. She went back into her purse and pulled out a wrapped present, with a ribbon just like the one on Peg’s present to me—paper grosgrain curled with the edge of the scissors into tight ringlets of ribbon. It was bikini underpants, a white lacy pair, a black lacy pair.
“Oh, my god, I can’t believe it,” I said, several times. We finished up the beer, then stubbed out our cigarettes, and I had Pru put the underpants back in her purse, so I could smuggle them into my room later. We heard my mother open the back door and call my name. I bellowed that I would be right there.
“Right now,” my mother yelled.
“God!” I said to Pru, letting my shoulders drop two inches, as if my mother wanted me to come in and scrub the kitchen floor. “I guess we better go in.”
“This oughta be good,” she said. It was Pru’s first adult dinner party, as her mother never, ever, had company over, except for the occasional boyfriend. Pru’s mother went out most evenings. Joan Baez had been replaced with The Weavers, and my father was letting the three of us kids drink beer. My mother had made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and all the adults except Ed drank lots of wine and laughed and talked and were nice to Pru, especially Natalie, and all in all for Pru, compared to her own strange cold household, the evening was lively and loving.
After dinner we all moved back into the living room, to wait for my mother to dish up the cake. I was a little bit drunk. Pru and I were sharing the piano bench, and Ed had gone to sit next to Natalie for a few minutes. Then he got up and hurried after Peg, who had dashed to the kitchen. After a minute the lights in the living room went out, and Peg carried in the cake, her face illuminated by the thirteen candles, one to grow on. My mother walked in behind her, carrying a stack of plates, with Ed beside her, carrying a knife and some napkins. Everyone clustered around me and Pru at the piano, everyone craning forward to see how my mother had decorated the cake. Ed tried to shoo people away with waves of his hand, as if they were all rubbernecking at the scene of a car accident. “Hey, come on, come on,” he said, “haven’t you people ever seen a cake before?” and it made Peg giggle so hard that she had to stand there in front of me holding the cake with her legs crossed.
I made a wish and blew the candles out. I don’t remember what I wished for, probably a boyfriend, or breasts. Some time later, after coffee and cake, after I opened my presents while listening to Woody Guthrie, everyone started to leave. After helping with the dishes Ed and Peg drove Pru home. My father slept in my bed, and I slept with my mother and Natalie in my parents’ bed. Natalie was in the middle. I slept with my arm draped around her. She smelled of lemons, soap, and wine. I passed out early on; but they were awake until dawn. Every time I woke up, they were still talking softly in the dark.
FOR NEARLY a year now I have been living back in the town where I grew up, in an illegal mother-in-law unit half a mile away from my mother. She would be old enough to retire now, if she had a job. She works, but not for money, serving at soup kitchens, visiting hospitals, registering voters. My brother lives across the bay in San Francisco, half a block away from his ex-wife and their nine-year-old son Rob.
He was in town a few days ago for the wedding of his old friend Owen Turner, Mighty Owen Turner, who now works for the Bank of America, votes Republican, and wears a beige hairpiece to match what is left of his thinning beige hair. Casey was one of the ushers. He wore a rented tuxedo, cropped his beard for the occasion, and picked us up an hour before the ceremony was to begin. We drove into town for gas before heading up the hill to the little white church. The town is not the same place where we grew up. It is like a game of Monopoly now. The entire length and width of the railroad yard is filled with a dense development of condominiums and office buildings and restaurants. The view to the left as you drive into town from my mother’s house—of the wild blue scintillant bay, Angel Island, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, the city—is still so beautiful it can make you feel almost desperate; but below the view, between the road and the shore is a series of rolling grassy knolls, low and perfectly manicured. It looks like you are at a golf course or a retirement community for the rich. It looks like a town where children are not allowed.
At the gas station my brother told the attendant to fill it up, and the three of us climbed out of the car. Casey usually pumps the gas himself, but he didn’t want to get gas on his tuxedo. My mother and I went into the ladies’ room, and Casey went to use the pay phone, to check in with the foreman at the house he was remodeling. When my mother and I came out of the bathroom, Casey was still on the phone. My mother and I stared at each other. Casey glanced over, and crooked his finger at us, beckoning. We both shook out heads. He did it again and again, crooking his finger. I stared down at the ground, sort of smiling, and then walked over to him. He reached our to pull me in closer and then draped his arm around me. We stood there for a few more minutes while he talked.
My mother stood nearby smoking, staring up at the little white church on the hill surrounded by tiny cars and figures. My mother was sixty-three this year but she looks somewhat older than that. Thin people as a rule age more dramatically. Her hair turned white when my father got sick. It is shoulder length but she always wears it up, loosely. Her skin is fair but she looks like someone who has been smoking her whole life. We see each other nearly once a week for a meal or a movie. She is very careful not to wear out her welcome, although of course it is I who have moved back to town. We are pretty close, although she still says things that make my stomach or hands clench up, that make me go from being the daughter of the year to a person who would like to smash her in the face and break her nose. She asks me if I have met any interesting men and I want to scream. I have asked her maybe two hundred times not to ask me this one question, but every few weeks she asks again. She used to do this to me in seventh and eighth grade, when Pru and I went to dances in our minis and our poorboys, our black fishnet stockings, white lipstick, fringe moccasins. I would come home having eaten a package of Certs on the way, to cover up the beer and cigarettes on my breath, and she would ask me nicely if anyone had asked me to dance. And I would look at her like she had cat shit on her clothes.
Now she calls and before saying hello, blurts out things like, “Darling, let me put the ice cream away!” and I protest, “Mom, you called me” but at least now she doesn’t call me first thing in the morning. The first morning that I was back, she called me at seven-fifteen.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “How was your first night home?”
“Mom, you don’t call people at 7 a.m.!”
“But darling, I thought you got up early. I mean, you tell people you do.”
“What, are you saying now I lie?”
“Oh, honey.”
“Do you call Natalie at seven?”
“Sure, sometimes.”
“Well, don’t call me till nine. I don’t want to talk until then.”
So the next morning the phone rang at a quarter to ten, and when I picked it up, she said urgently, “Did I wake you?”
My brother and mother and I drove past the private club where the rec center used to be. The hills above it were covered with condominiums. These were the hills, once shaggy and bare, where walking at dusk with my father one night, we came upon a gypsy camp. The gypsies gave my father a glass of red wine in a red coffee cup. There were buildings being b
uilt on these hills by the time I turned twelve. Pru and I used to come sit in the empty frames on the weekends, smoke cigarettes and dope, discussing what we would do with our lives, listening to rock and roll on Pru’s transistor radio.
Pru got killed in Santa Cruz when she was twenty-one; in the mountains; raped and strangled. We hadn’t been friends for years, but I cried when my mother told me the news. My mother was crying, too. After eighth grade when I went off to a little hippie high school in San Francisco, Pru stayed and went to the local public high school, although daily attendance was not her strong suit. I’m sure she just barely, barely got by. I would see her over the years, and we would both be somewhat embarrassed, I in my best hippie Indian clothes, she in minis and dominatrix boots, me with no makeup, Pru all dolled up like a hooker. I cried one day when we ended up at a bus stop together, and she shared a half-pint of warm vodka with me. I cried after she got on her bus and I started to think of what a great friend she had been, of what a stroke of luck it had been to find her coming out of the record store that day, of how when I came to that place on the tracks God or life threw the switch, and I ended up with Pru, and with all that that meant: it meant I belonged. She was thinner that day at the bus stop. She had probably discovered speed. We were fifteen years old. After she died, her mother sold the laundromat. It has been replaced by a fancy chocolate store.
I saw Pru’s mother in downtown San Francisco a few years ago, near Union Square. She didn’t look nearly as old as my mother, although she is in fact three years older. Her hair was still black, although I’m sure she dyed it, and her face and eyes must have been done a number of times: she definitely had that look of surprise and innocence, like we used to see at the rec center when women would wear swim caps that were too small for them. She was emaciated and dressed very stylishly, in a short denim dress, with black stockings and black heels.