“It’s after seven,” she said, without turning to look at us. “He said he’d be home around five.” Lynnie and I stood behind her, studying the floor. “Where could he be? He’s drinking. Well, I hope he never comes home,” she said, and then we heard a car horn honk, and the three of us tore outside. Peg was holding her spatula like a flyswatter, like she was going to rush up to Ed’s car and swat him, but then she put it down and walked to their old slate-blue Nash Rambler and opened Ed’s door. He got out. He was a little bit drunk, and held a brown paper bag by its neck. Lynnie and I stood thirty or so feet away; Lynnie was happy and scared, chewing on the feet of a blue-haired troll doll she had grabbed on the way out, staring sort of stupidly at Ed.
“I thought you had left us,” Peg finally cried, but Ed raised his bag in triumph.
“I’ve been hunting!” he bellowed.
The bag was full of black-red plums. Peg became silent, and weird, and powerful. I don’t remember if they fought or if we ate any of the plums, but I can still see the sky, how pink and purple fog was rolling in, low, flooding the hills.
We went inside. I didn’t feel very well, and called home to see if my father had left us. He hadn’t. I sat down to eat—there was a fabulous red jello salad with fruit cocktail in it—but my stomach was upset, and then I heard a headache coming on. My vision shifted and somehow before the laser was turned on I got my Uncle Ed to drive me home. He was very quiet, very gentle in the car. My father carried me up to my bed, tucked me in, turned off the light, told my brother to turn off his radio, and helped my mother care for me until I fell asleep.
My father left us several months later. I don’t remember much about it. My mother spent that month smoking, praying, putting in a garden with flowers and vegetables in alphabetized rows: asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, daisies. And the local tennis ladies all took to introducing me to each other by my full name. They trolled the boardwalk shops doing their errands and looking for one another, to compare morning round-robin scores and gossip. Their legs were very brown but when they took off their shoes their feet from the ankles down were as white as the balls we used back then. “Robbie and Marie’s daughter?” they would say after giving my full name, all to jog their friend’s mind—Robbie, you know, who just left Marie? And you could see Ah So! in the other woman’s eyes. So Robbie’s left Marie! “Hello,” they would say, and I would reply, Hello Mrs. Collins, Hello Mrs. Mueller, Hello Mrs. Brown, and paw the splintery dark planks of the boardwalk, and stare through the slats into the black space below, shift my eyes to see the little pom-poms at the back of their socks, just above the shoe line, where their tans began. Some who also swam had tan feet too, and all of them painted their toes, and all of them shaved and oiled their legs, their still young legs.
Mady White’s mother was a tennis lady, with one whole drawer full of pom-pom socks, and she had luncheons at her house all the time. She played in the Wednesday morning round robin, with the truly terrible players, the beginners who would always be beginners. Sometimes a temporary beginner would join the Wednesday morning group, and even her beginner’s game would go downhill after a few minutes chasing down unintentional lobs, unintentional drop shots, and balls suddenly coming at her at fifty miles an hour while she stood at the net, with her back turned, about to walk back to the baseline.
Every Wednesday afternoon after school there would still be four or five women in their little tennis skirts and dresses sitting in the patio at Mady White’s house, sipping white wine, talking about the children who caused trouble at school, the men who were said to be having affairs, the problems of women not present. Once I heard them talking about Natalie: one of them was wondering why her ex-husband hadn’t cut off her alimony when she had her illegitimate baby. They did not seem to know that the baby’s father was Uncle Ed; but in any case they didn’t like Natalie’s looks, her tight white pedal pushers, dyed black beehive hair, big black drag-queen eyes.
Mady and I nibbled on their leftovers out in the kitchen. They had had Chicken Rice Roger. Everyone was eating Chicken Rice Roger that year. My mother only made it once; it didn’t turn out right. Essentially all you had to do was pour a can of chicken stock over uncooked rice and chicken breasts, and bake it until the rice was done. But something went wrong, who knows what, and it didn’t turn out at all, and my father had been in a tense, end-of-the-month mood to begin with.
“Darling?” he asked politely. “What the hell is this?”
“Chicken Rice Roger. Just eat it, darling.”
He squinted at her, as if she was out of focus, but she was watching Casey pour himself a glass of milk.
I watched him rev up for an ethical consultation. “Excuse me,” he said, “darling? Excuse me a second, just, just wait, darling, now—Chicken Rice Roger? CHICKEN RICE ROGER?” My mother was looking at me, grimly helpful; I was pouring myself some milk now, and my stomach was buckling with shame. Casey was scowling at his plate of food, and my father began to drum his fingers on the table, saying, “Darling, excuse me—excuse me—did you say—did I hear right, Chicken? Rice? ROGER?”
And Casey shouted, “Bad Dog, Carl,” with exasperated sarcasm, and my father laughed so abruptly that he snorted red wine out of his nose, and Casey and I started laughing, and then my mother started laughing, put her face down into her hands and was crying, too.
When she stayed like that for a while, I decided she was praying. She used to say she was a walking prayer, always saying, Help me, help me, help me, or thank you, thank you, thank you. She looked over at Casey and snickered, nicely, and Casey poked shyly at his food, and then my mother got up, the relief on her face unmistakable. She looked like she did when our heater would finally make the house stop being so cold, and she walked off to the kitchen. I breathed a long deep sigh. Casey and Dad started talking about Casey’s Little League practice. I listened for the sound of my mother, of her lighter in the kitchen, snapping. Then it must have caught, because the sound stopped and after a minute I could smell her cigarette smoke.
Casey and I stayed with Natalie and her twins and the baby that weekend Mom and Dad went down to Monterey, when the forests all through Northern California were on fire. Lucy, the baby, hardly ever cried. She was nearly a year old. Uncle Ed and Aunt Peg, alone and together, had run into Natalie and the baby several times in town, and they both just admired the baby with as much grace as they could muster, before saying good-bye and moving on.
I got to sleep with Natalie that weekend. The baby slept in a crib in the corner of the room, and she cried to be fed only once. I listened to Natalie nurse her in the near dark, to the sucking sounds. The baby looked a lot like the baby pictures of Lynnie. She was a great baby. She made Natalie very happy, and the twins essentially treated her like a new pet.
Natalie was changing her diapers when I woke up that morning, and I watched for a while and then wandered the house wishing Casey would wake up. The light from the morning sun poured slanting into the living room; a long trapezoid of sunlight fell on the reddish blond hardwood floors. Where the sun fell on white—typing paper, an opened book on the ledge below the window—shallow bowls of white fire glowed.
The twins had pictures of their father all over the walls of their bedrooms, pictures of him in his navy uniform, pictures of him and Natalie holding them as babies. Theirs had been the first father to leave. He was very handsome. They stayed with him every other weekend, in San Francisco, out in the avenues. Gabriel McCall, everyone called him Gabe; he called Natalie Nat when he called, every other Friday.
Natalie took us to the rec center after lunch on Saturday. She kept making us put on more Sea and Ski, every time we came out of the water to sprawl on the bleachers, salty, steaming, and she gave us lots of dimes for frozen candy bars. The last fifteen minutes of every hour was Adult Swim—all the kids had to get out of the water and all the adults got in and swam laps. In one quadrant, the right corner of the deep end, the water ballet team got to practice, even though they weren’t ad
ults. They were teenage girls, all the way up to eighteen, floating on their backs, kicking prettily, heads out of the water—all that turquoise blue water barely rippling—dipping underwater into blurs below the surface, in their brightly petaled caps and tank suits. I thought they were the most beautiful creatures on earth. Next to us on the bleachers were the Burton children, five of them watching their mother swim laps. She was fat with another baby, swimming in a maternity tennis dress, crossed rackets over one breast, huge ruffled panties, and on her head she wore a purple petaled swim cap. Her husband had left her when my father left my mother, but her husband hadn’t come back.
Husbands were leaving, leaving; every couple of months it seemed another one was gone. Their children would be at the rec center with extra pocket money for snacks. They would have money to burn and would buy us things so that we would hang out with them. I cultivated friendships with them, like I cultivated friendships with the Catholic children, for tuna-noodle casserole or English muffin pizzas on Fridays. You could cry at the club because everyone’s eyes were red from the chlorine anyway, except for the women who didn’t let their heads go underwater. There was too much bleach in the water, it turned green when we peed, and our blond hair turned green—even though we wore caps, it turned the palest light green, pale seaweed green, like mermaids. The Burton children wore white plastic sunglasses, all five of them, from the ten-year-old girl Teresa, to the two-year-old boy they called Jimbo, and they solemnly watched their mother swim, and in their white plastic glasses they might have been in the desert, watching the A-bomb tests.
I wanted to go to my mother’s church the next morning, but Natalie said it was too beautiful out, so we made Casey and the twins two chopped-olive sandwiches each, which we put in my father’s worn-out drab-green canvas knapsack. The boys collected two dozen crab apples from the tree out back, tiny, sour, wild. They piled into the car with their rods and tackle boxes, and we drove them first to the bait shop and then to the trailhead, which led to the lake where they went to fish for bass. They turned to wave fifty feet from the car, then disappeared around a curve in the road.
I felt rashy with jealousy watching Natalie cradle and talk to Lucy, who gurgled and smiled all blond and rosy with wonderfully squinty blue eyes, while I lumped around, teary, skittish, dark, homesick. Natalie must have noticed, because she arranged for a girl to come baby-sit in the afternoon when it was time for Lucy’s nap.
We walked into town and did a couple of errands and then went to Nellie’s coffee shop for hot fudge sundaes, even though Natalie was on a diet. Nellie brought me a silver blender canister with somebody’s leftover strawberry milkshake and poured it into a Coke glass for me, and I sat there eating and drinking while the women talked. Both of them had beehive hairdos. Nellie said so-and-so’s husband had left, and Natalie’s mouth dropped open. I didn’t know the family. They didn’t have any kids in Casey’s grade or mine.
Natalie was stroking my head while I ate.
“Nanny’s father says they’re leaving because of the Chicken Rice Roger. That that’s why they’re all jumping ship.”
Nellie beamed at me as I ate. Adults, if they weren’t your parents, always beamed at you when you ate, beamed like you were successfully using a fork for the first time. She fished around in her apron pocket for her pack of cigarettes, took one out, lit it. “That’ll put a little meat on your bones; skinniest little girl in town. Don’t you worry, I was skinny too, no boobies at all either.”
“I’m only eight,” I implored.
Nellie had huge bosoms and also dark blue squiggly lines near the tip of her nose, scars from a car accident. The first time my father came in here, and Nellie had brought him a cheeseburger and a glass of ice water, my father dipped his handkerchief into his water and wiped at the tip of her nose. She just stood there. He thought it was ink.
After leaving the coffee shop, Natalie and I went to the railroad yard and sat Indian-style in the dirt beside the tracks in the shadow of a kingly black locomotive. There were two hobos asleep underneath the caboose, safely asleep since the trains didn’t run on Sundays. They were not much older than my father. I had peered down to stare in at them until Natalie dragged me away. I made a joke. I said to Natalie that maybe they had left their homes because of the Chicken Rice Roger. Natalie kissed the air in my direction. And then we sat down by the old locomotive.
The hot summer air was filled with smells of steel and dirt and grease and diesel, with the coconut lotion Natalie always wore and with smoke from the forest fires up north. Natalie fished a bottle of nail polish out of her purse, shook it for a long time, then began to paint her nails red.
“I thought maybe you wanted to talk about when your father left.” I looked up at the black locomotive and shrugged. She didn’t see me. “Hmmm?” she asked, and I looked over my shoulder at the mountain, shrugging again.
She looked over at me, squinting one eye. “You have the right to remain silent,” she said. “Anything you say can—and will—be used against you.” She raised her hand close to her mouth, to inspect and then blow on her nails. Then she began to paint the nails of her other hand.
“Will you paint mine too?”
“Yep.” She looked up. “I never knew a father who loved his kids as much as yours does. He really loves you guys.”
“I know.”
“But his head is always filled with stories he’s working on, and right in the middle the Sears bill’ll come, and he’s already teaching too many hours. I think he starts to feel defeated. And then he shuts down; I’ve seen him. Here darling, give me your hand now. I’ll do yours, and then I’ll give myself a second coat.” I put my hand, palm down, on her knee. She dipped the brush back into the nail polish. So many birds were in the railroad yard, singing. “I’ve seen him shut her out, you know, your mother. And she’s so sensitive, it’s like she’s a recovering burn victim, all pink skin. Not always. But he goes into his head and then, it’s like: ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, didn’t notice you were there.’ ” She bent forward to blow my nails dry.
Walking home on dirt roads, we came around a bend in the green-red-brown redwood shade and saw Earl Palabinkeses and his daughter Tina standing on the footbridge, dropping pebbles into the water below. Tina was one month older than I, and had a relatively mild form of Down’s syndrome. The creek was very low—it looked like water had leaked into the creek bed, settling around slate gray rocks, like someone was going to have to mop it up. Moss covered the redwood trunks, and ivy laced itself, quite far sometimes, up the trunk. From up on the bridge where we joined Tina and her father, the water skeeters sitting on the creek looked like the glass snow-flakes we hung on our tree at Christmas. Unseen wind chimes played. Birds were singing everywhere. There were ferns and bamboo plants growing amongst the ivy, on the banks of the creek, all that ivy, and yellow leaves, and copper leaves, reddish leaves, pine needles turning brown, but mostly green, green leaves. Earl—Mr. Palabinkeses, we called him—was tennis-pro handsome, blond and shaggy and tan. My father didn’t like him much, didn’t like his long impenetrable silences. I remember him telling my mother, “I always find myself feeling like a parody of myself around Earl.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time. At one of our fishhouse punch Christmas parties I discovered Earl hugging Carrie Conners’ mother in the downstairs bathroom. This sort of thing happened routinely at our house, since we had frequent parties and I had trouble sleeping; I was always coming upon people who weren’t couples, hugging in corners of the house, in the bathrooms, in the garden. It utterly confused me, like being in a dream where you get up close to the person you think is your friend, but it turns out they have blind dog eyes.
The Palabinkeses family moved on to our street when I was in first grade. Gussy Palabinkeses and Casey were in third together, Mrs. Bosomhead’s class. (Mrs. Bosomhead’s real name was Mrs. Buwenhead.) Casey stayed the night at Gussy’s house a number of times, and so my mother invited Mrs. Palabinkeses to tea.
Mady
White and I had been banished from the Whites’ house because Mrs. White was hosting a tennis luncheon for the Wednesday morning round-robin group. She was making tomato aspic and Chicken Rice Roger. So we hiked over to my house and found my mother tearing around the living room picking things up, stuffing them under her arms to dump en masse on her bedroom floor, carrying stacks of library books to my father’s study.
“Mrs. Palabinkeses is coming to tea with her daughter,” she said. “Give me a hand, my darlings. Now you know the little girl is retarded, and you know not to stare, right? Right? Okay darlings.” She was wearing a huge ratty white T-shirt of my father’s, worn almost to transparency—you could see the diamond pattern on the cups of her bra—sky-blue gingham pedal pushers, and bleached-out blue deck shoes with the laces undone and holes cut out so her big toes could breathe, so her hangnails wouldn’t hurt. “Help me vacuum, lambchop. Mady, you don’t have to.” But Mady wanted to. After I vacuumed the cat hair off the couches and our oriental rug and the dark hardwood floor that framed the rug, Mady took the attachment off the nozzle and with grim efficiency began to vacuum up all the daddy longlegs that lived in our corners—that had always lived in our corners. I gasped, frozen with shame. Zzzzoooop! Zzzzoooop! She went from corner to corner, sucking up all the spiders; I saw them all imprisoned in the vacuum bag, covered with dirt and dust bunnies, flailing, suffocating. I wanted to cry out, “We don’t do that here!” but suddenly it seemed the right thing to do, the clean and civilized thing to do, the Catholic thing to do. And so I stood there miserably and let Mady vacuum up my family’s spiders, Mady with her old-lady vinegar mouth, grim as if she were from the Health Department and we had just been busted.
Though my mother suggested that maybe Mady and I should go into town—“Here,” she said, “I’ll give you each a quarter”—and even though candy was our life, the getting of it our vocation, we chose to stay. We promised to be good. We promised not to stare. We promised to act perfectly normal in every way, to pretend that we were quite used to seeing little retarded girls. And then there was a knock at the door.