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.
I left her in the bathroom and went into the closet, turned on the light, and shut the door. There was a full-length mirror inside and I wanted a minute to look at myself without my mother watching me. What would she say if she saw me coming to her counter? Would she run her fingers along the sides of my face as I had seen her do to other women and tell me what could be done about the shape of my mouth or the length of my nose? And would I think what all those other women must think, that no matter how beautiful she made me, I would never be as beautiful as her?
"I'm going to wear your blue dress," I called out through the door.
"Sure," my mother said, "that'll look good."
I pulled the dress on over my head, and for a minute I thought about staying. Locking the door from the inside for no good reason other than I couldn't remember for a second what Thomas Clinton looked like. But then I did.
It was a night that at nineteen, in southern California in May, was like every other night you had seen so far, but a night that when you remember it years later in a place without an ocean, is like a powerful dream. Everywhere you went you heard the water, the same way you had always heard your breathing, and would later hear the highway, or trains, or women's voices. But the sound was so much a part of everything that you couldn't hear it at all then. This is what I took for granted: The sound of the water. The light on the water, day or night. The way you could look out for so long you couldn't tell the difference between the water and the sky. The sand that blew onto the highway in sheets and formed small dunes against the curbs. The smell of the water. The tough grass that grew from nothing. The soft, hot tar and the birds which never occurred to me would not be everywhere I went. I am saying this from memory and there are things I am forgetting. But I remember this: I wore that blue dress of my mother's which was spotted with holly leaves because I knew that when the wind caught it and blew it back, the skirt would press against my legs and be as big as a sail. I knew we would walk along the beach that night and he would have to remember the sight of me in that dress. I wore it because he went to college, and I liked the way he had to keep looking away from my face when he spoke to me. I knew that dress would break his heart.
Thomas Clinton was about my height, but there was a lightness to him, the size of his bones, the width of his shoulders, that made him seem smaller. Everything about him made me think he had been born late, that he would have been better off being his father, or my father. I could imagine him in a wide-brimmed felt hat, a newspaper folded beneath his arm. I could see him gladly giving up his seat on the bus to anyone who seemed to want it.
He picked me up in a blue Dodge Dart with wide bench seats. My mother and I didn't have a car, and to ride in one was always an occasion. I rolled down the window and leaned my face into the night air while he drove me to dinner in silence. The streets were wide and lined with small houses, every one of them exactly alike except for some small thing: a hedge around the front, a bay window, a garage. They were painted in sherbet colors, pale orange or pink, a creamy yellow. The lawns and the sidewalks made heat lines. You could count on everything being just so. I looked at a house and then closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them again, I would see the same house, a full block away. It was a game I liked to play whenever I was in a car, especially when I was in a car with a date who had nothing to say.
Words came hard to Thomas Clinton. He managed to tell me before our dinner arrived that he was studying to be a math teacher. He would have been better, 1 think, drawing equations on napkins to show me how he felt. What percentage of his heart he had given to me already, as opposed to percentages given to his family, his work. He was fluid in numbers, he could explain them, but in an Italian restaurant, pushing a veal cutlet from side to side on his plate, he was lost. It was not a romantic place, where long silences are full of meaning. It was bright and clean and the waitresses wore uniforms that made them look like nurses. Our waitress came by too often because it was late and all her other tables had paid up and gone.
"Don't you like that?" she said to Thomas, pointing at his dinner. "If something's wrong, you'd tell me, right?" She was a woman in her early fifties, whose bright blond hair looked like candy spun onto her head.
"It's fine," he said, and cut again at the meat. "It's good."
"Well, I hope so. Your girlfriend liked hers. Look, she's almost finished." She leaned over toward me, like she wanted to tell secrets. "The cheesecake is good," she said. "You're skinny, you can eat cheesecake. If you have the room, you should think about it."
There was something about the way she talked, her easy manner, that made our silence singularly unbearable. "I'll just have coffee," I said.
"That's why you can eat cheesecake," she said, and sighed. "Because you don't. That's the way it works."
As soon as she had gone I wanted her to come back. I was no stranger to first dates, to their special kinds of horrors, but the ones I'd had tended to talk more often than not, to try and make an impression any way possible.
"I know you work at Simms," Thomas said finally, his eyes fixed down. Our plates had been taken away, but the waitress had insisted on bringing him his dinner packaged up, even though he'd said he didn't want it.
"You might not want it now," she said, leaving the folded white sack on the table between us, "but tomorrow for lunch, you'll want it."
"I work at Simms," I said. "I schedule deliveries."
"I know because I saw you once, going into the building in the morning. I drove past you." He stopped and I waited, thinking there had to be something more.
"And you knew me from church?"
He nodded. "I've seen you at church. You go with someone."
"My mother."
"Your mother," he said. "I thought it was probably your mother."
I looked out the window because I was afraid I would embarrass him if I looked at him too long. I felt genuinely bad for him, not angry or bored the way I did with so many of the others. I wished I had an idea what to say myself, but somehow the tone had been set; the passage of words would be difficult between us. "I think I'd like to take a walk," I told the window.
So he paid the check while I waited by the door and the waitress said good night and then came after us in the street to give Thomas the sack of cutlets he had left on the table. "You two look real cute," she said. "You have a good night."
I was right about the wind, but by then I was sorry about the way it made my dress into a flag that waved behind us. It was a dark night, and darker as we walked across the highway and down toward Imperial Beach, and I was hoping he wouldn't notice it. There was only a little light on the waves, no stars. As hot as the day had been, it had cooled off, and I could smell the smell that wasn't exactly sand or salt or water, but all three together. When we stopped I put my hand on Thomas Clinton's shoulder to balance myself and take my sandals off, and I felt him tense, almost as if 1 startled him, as if he had forgotten I was there, but when I pulled away he put his hand over mine and held it there near the collar of his shirt. We stayed there, just like that. There was something about the gesture, which was so strange and unexpected, that I think I would have just stood there all night.
"I knew it was your mother you went to church with," he said finally. He was facing the water. His voice was low so I had to lean in to hear him over the sound of the waves. I didn't ask him to speak up. I knew if he stopped talking he'd never be able to start again.
"I knew it was your mother and I knew where you worke
d and I knew where you lived. I drove behind you one morning, all the way from your house to Simms."
I looked at him, thinking it had to be a joke but then knowing for sure it wasn't. The wind was high and it pushed the sand around. It threw my dress out straight behind me. "More than one morning," he added quietly. "Don't think I'm crazy, I'm not. My God, there is nothing crazy about me. It's something about you, Rose. When I saw you in church. I saw the way you put your forehead on your hands when you're kneeling there." He ran his fingers along my fingers. His hand was shaking. "I would sit right behind you. The back of your neck. The back of your dress." He pressed my hand into his shoulder, but he wouldn't look at me. "Every week I thought I would talk to you and then I finally did. And tonight. All night I just sat there and in my mind I was telling you everything. Things I had thought. It's been seven months. You'll think I'm crazy, but I couldn't not tell you this."
My heart was beating so fast and all I could think of was, fast as his. My heart is beating as fast as his.
"I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does that make sense? Once I saw you eating lunch by yourself. It wasn't too far from here. I hadn't even been looking for you but you were there. I used to think if I just had your picture that would be enough. Then I could look at your face. Your beautiful face."