“Let’s go,” she said, her gut burning.
Rivka bent and set a man’s cap on the planter.
“What’s that?”
“Somebody dropped it here on step. Leave it, in case he comes back.”
It looked like the cap Daddy was wearing in the photo in Jane’s pocket. She wanted to grab it, take out the picture, compare them right then, but she didn’t. She couldn’t let Rivka know about this, so she left the cap on the planter and the picture in her pocket and walked with Rivka, silent, to North Beach, feeling she might combust at every street corner.
He’d come to the door where she lived, looking for her.
She saw him in her head as she swung the crowbar the last time. She’d hit him, knocked him into the ditch. He’d never hit her. Could he have attacked Vee? Would he? She felt a sharp pain over her eye, that almond lump.
What are you afraid of?
She thought she was afraid that picture was recent, that Daddy was alive, that he was looking for her, that he’d beaten up Vee one block from the Prospect as a message to Jane. That somebody who looked at this picture would say, “Hey, that guy looks just like Benny Hopper.” Afraid that Sweetie would see Daddy in the paper, think he was a killer, think Jane was a liar—“Your papa killed Daddy over Momma,” Jane had told her. That Vee had chosen to talk to her on that pier because she recognized Daddy in her and that Jane had gotten her attacked, maybe killed by now. Everything Jane wanted, everything she’d earned, would be garnished.
But nobody else was going to see that picture because she’d taken it.
Still, she had to find out when it had been taken and where, who Daddy was to this girl, where he was now. If it had been taken recently, then she hadn’t killed him in the ditch. He was alive, a suspect in this killing. If it had been taken, say, a year ago, it didn’t change anything—no one would see it, and he was dead. No, wait. The cap on the porch. Either way, he was alive and looking for her. But either way, she wasn’t a killer. Then she remembered her brother. Either way, she was a killer.
Still, she had to find him before he found her. She settled that in her head. She couldn’t risk the Prospect and the girls and the flat.
This was what she considered on the walk to Isadore Gomez’s Café on Pacific, so that by the time they arrived, she’d confirmed her plan—first find Daddy and fix it with him. She’d figure out what fixing it meant later.
AS they approached the café, she wondered why they’d worked so hard to go so far. It didn’t look like a place you’d bring anybody for a special dinner. Up a narrow flight of stairs, they entered a smoke-filled room, broken plaster on the ceiling, wobbling chairs, and cracked oilcloth on the tables, no better than a truck stop. Then she got the fatty smell of steak and fries, and her mouth began to water.
The Portuguese owner, Izzy, sat down with them, belly hanging over his belt, the burnt citrus smell of sweat overtaking the table. Rivka asked him if he had the Russian stuff, and he said, “For you and your friend, sim!” He rolled his three hundred-odd pounds back behind the bar and returned with a bottle of vodka and poured it for them at the table with ice and lemon. Jane sipped, frowning at its bite, wondering why everybody loved the stuff.
Izzy said, “You’ll have the fried chicken, son. She’ll have the steak.”
“I was thinking . . .”
“Don’t think,” he said. “Take it easy. Save thinking for old people.”
Rivka told him, “Sweetie will be here soon.”
“We’ll set her up fast if she comes.” Izzy pushed off the chair for the kitchen.
Rivka frowned. “She is coming.”
Jane said, “I wanted the steak.”
“Take the chicken. He never charges us, except two bits for grappa. Do not jinx it. Your accent is risky enough to damage his business.”
“You have an accent.”
“Mine is Prague. Better than Texas. Completely better.”
Izzy came back around to refill their glasses, and they sat in an awkward silence for a few minutes until the vodka broke something loose and a wave of appreciation overtook Jane.
“I want to say I’m sorry. I know my being here stops you from doing things the way you . . . do them.”
Rivka’s face reddened. “What do you think you are interrupting?”
“I know y’all are close.”
Jane said it plain. She’d heard about girls like them before. There were two Sacramento schoolteachers who lived together— Momma called them friendly sisters. She didn’t care. Rivka and Sweetie had been pretty good to her.
“Do not say y’all.” Rivka’s mouth puckered up. “I practice at home in mornings.”
“I’ve heard you.”
“You have not heard what I mean.” Now her cheeks puffed out like her mouth was full and she was choosing whether to spit or swallow. “Your being here has changed it. It has.”
Jane had to work hard to keep things on an even keel with Rivka. Sweetie’d moved from easy, warm, friendly, accepting to pissy, in a general snit. Now Rivka’s criticism hurt. Rivka could be hard work, and right now Jane was tired of it.
A plump girl delivered steak and green beans for Rivka, chicken and mashed potatoes for Jane, the smell of which took her back to Granny’s table, with an oilcloth like the one here. She wanted to eat with her hands.
Rivka said, “I like, I need, to start in quiet, with what is simple, with just my thumb under my hand, and then my hand over thumb, a few movements each way, to get ready for scales and arpeggios, for thirty minutes.”
She stopped to sip her drink, and Jane sipped hers too. The clean, harsh taste shaved fuzz from Jane’s tongue, and she wondered if it did the same for Rivka, cleaned what she was saying. Jane picked up her fork. She couldn’t wait.
“That is how I like to start.”
“Simple. Every day.” Jane nodded, chewing salty fried flour and flesh.
Rivka’s skin darkened.
“It is important. I need my hand to respond to music but also to tone I want. Do I see red? It has to make that.” Rivka closed her eyes and held out her hand, showing Jane. She hadn’t touched her plate. “Do I see blue? Then it is this.” She opened her eyes. Jane looked at her hand. “If I am after melody, I want weight of my arm on key, everything relaxed, this caressing pressure of fingers. Outstretched, flat, caressing fingers. I want to get this right. See, melody is story. If you want to tell story, your fingers go flat. But you make arched hand to tell something under story, something subtle, something maybe composer did not intend. But you do.”
Jane couldn’t see why something so abstract would upset her. Rivka made everything so precious. Jane knew about practice! Everybody did! And her stupid, fancy accent.
Rivka moved her head toward Jane, interrupting the fork in its path to her mouth.
“That is what practice is for. For applying your experience to reach your intention. That is what you are interrupting. You are ruining my expressive intent, and you are starving your own.” Her normally dark eyes fired, glints of gold in the brown.
Jane set down her fork, her throat tight. “I’m a hard worker.”
“I did not say you are not hard worker. I am saying you do not practice meaningfully.”
“I practice. I’ve been writing my journal for years. Years.”
“Journal, ha. I hum while I wash dishes, but is not practice. Is not purposeful. You are not purposeful.”
“You never wash dishes, never! We always wash them.” Jane flushed. “And I am purposeful. I always have a plan, always.”
Rivka sneered. “You waste my time and resources.”
“Waste? How am I a waste? What am I not doing?”
“You have plan for things you want, yes, anyone can sense that. But you do not attend to small things to get there. You are not disciplined. You are not careful or intentional. I hate to see how you fail to work intentionally. You have everything you need . . .”
“Everything I need? Really? You don’t know what I ha
ve. You don’t know what I need.”
She felt something dangerous, tears welling.
“Is true. I do not know your history. But I know you have almost everything you need to be great writer, except character. Something essential is missing in you. You will never be great unless you grow this.”
Jane shoved her plate away, banging it into Rivka’s. “I thought you were trying to help me, but this is for you, not me. You’re a bully. You think you can make me who you think I should be, like you’re the one who knows. You think because you made Sweetie a junior assistant you can make me a writer? Well, how’s that working for Sweetie?”
Izzy appeared at their table. “Speaking of . . . Sweetie called. She’s booked tonight. She’ll see you tomorrow.”
“She planned this dinner.” Rivka sounded suddenly weak.
He shrugged.
“Did she ask for me?”
“It was so loud in here.” He looked away.
Rivka’s lips quivered, changing the shape of her face.
Izzy slinked off, surprisingly nimble.
Jane didn’t care how Rivka felt. Daddy’s cap was the emergency.
“Has anybody been by the flat, asking for me?”
“Who would look for you?”
“No one, then?”
“No.” Rivka rose from the table.
As Jane stood, Izzy handed her a short, corked bottle. “Happy birthday, Boy. Eighteen—you’re a man now. Here’s some Vitamin V, for the road,” he said, and he slapped her back. She slipped it into her pants pocket with the picture and the half sheets.
Was she a man now? Manhood seemed so hard to earn, so easy to lose.
Izzy’s fat hand squeezed the back of her neck. “When you come to a pool of water on a long road, don’t make it muddy. If you pass that way again, you may be thirsty.” He laughed, much bigger than the joke deserved, and returned to the bar.
“He says that to everybody. That is his thing to say.”
Then Jane followed Rivka on the long walk home, fuming at her critic.
The downtown fog filled the air with actual drops, suspended, so that the smells from everybody and everything collected in each drop and what Jane didn’t inhale wet the skin of her face like sweat. They walked down that crowded-at-night sidewalk all the way to their front steps on Clay Street, where Rivka turned to Jane and said, “He came back for his cap.”
SHE slumped against the cabinet, her eyes closed, waiting for milk to warm in its pot.
He’d left his cap on her porch and returned to take it back.
He was talking to her.
She had to find him, not be found, had to go on offense.
But that would be tomorrow. Now she needed sleep. She’d drink her milk, drop into bed. In the morning she’d figure things out, adjust her plan. She poured her drink and headed to the sunporch.
It wasn’t a proper room by other people’s standards, she knew, no closet to speak of, but she only had one suit and one white shirt and one tie, and those she hung on nails she’d hammered into the wall. She kept her wingtips on the floor under the suit.
With the help of a kid she paid a nickel, she’d lugged her hope chest up from Uno’s car to her room the first week she was there, and that’s where she kept her Jergens, which she only used right before bedtime, so she wouldn’t smell like a girl at work. That’s also where she stored her clean skivvies and the cloth bandaging she wrapped round her breasts, which had begun to grow—all those years of wishing, and now they decided to sprout. She also kept the box of Venus Junior sanitary pads and the sanitary belt Sweetie bought her at the Owl Pharmacy in the hope chest for her time of the month. And her notebooks.
The presence of these things made the room personal, which she liked. But the door gave her privacy, which she’d never had before, and she relied on it, having a safe place to think. Her ideas about herself had gotten bigger in this place.
She walked through the door to her room to find Rivka hunched over the desk where she’d set Daddy’s picture and the half slips.
“What are you doing?”
Rivka looked up, her cheeks flushed, standing in front of a big black typewriter, Jane’s other stuff moved to the side.
“What’s that?”
“So you can practice.”
“When would I practice?” Her voice sounded like there was a row of tomatoes still to pick after her wrists above the gloves were already swollen with itch.
“Now,” Rivka answered. “Nights. I told you. Practice. Intention.”
“I don’t know how to type.” Jane spit it out.
“You will figure it out. So you will be ready.” Rivka laid both hands on top of the machine, her long fingers pale against the black metal. “I see something in you, tupý. You need to be ready when moment arrives.”
Jane looked at the typewriter, with its wide stance and forty-six-tooth underbite, the lever like a pencil behind its ear.
“You will succeed,” Rivka said. “That is given. How good will you be, is question. What are you aiming for? Where are you going with all this? Go further. Start now, practice.”
Jane wasn’t sure about the difference between being good and succeeding but felt swayed. It was powerful to be seen as special. Where was she going with all this? Despite what she wanted right now—to sleep—she wanted other things more. She sat and laid her fingers on the keyboard.
“Quick brown fox jumps over lazy dog,” Rivka said. “One hundred times.”
In spite of her tiredness, Jane began typing that stupid line, struggling and slow, with many errors, but intrigued. When Rivka left her room, she laid Martha Gellhorn’s columns on top of a book under the hanging bulb and typed every word of every sentence, over and over, and after a while she heard piano music and knew Rivka was practicing, too, and they both kept it up until Martha’s sentences came out of Jane’s fingers, almost as if she’d chosen them herself—which she had—and then she began to write things not on the clippings, things about Daddy and Momma and her, and with Rivka practicing in the living room, her own words started to sound like a kind of music.
It went on that way until the window light changed to pinkish gray and the piano stopped.
She went down the hall and saw Rivka standing in the bedroom, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Sweetie’d hurt her by not coming to dinner, then not coming home. Jane searched her memory of the things she’d seen in this flat, slights, messages forgotten, questions unanswered. She hadn’t paid attention before as it wasn’t about her.
She had little history of giving comfort or receiving it, having no real friends at home. It just wasn’t possible as a white trash girl who wanted so crassly to move up above the others like her, a girl who hadn’t had the things or the time she’d need to do it. Momma never showed her what comforting looked like.
There was only her Granny for that, when she was little.
JANE would lie on her belly under Granny’s kitchen table, sunshine lighting up the floor from the window over the sink. She’d color over Granny’s old newspapers, arcing three-color rainbows of brown, orange, and blue, the only colors she had, neat and waxy. When she came across a word she liked, she wouldn’t color over it, but would leave a white box open so that when she finished the picture she’d be left with a kind of mystery code she would then aim to crack.
Granny would crawl under the table with a glass of thick milk, look at the picture, pull Jane on her lap, and kiss her ear. “You’ll get up over the buzzards.”
SOME of Granny must have gotten in Jane because she felt sympathy for Rivka, who looked shrunken into a third of herself. Jane wrapped her arms around Rivka’s shoulders and Rivka let her, turning her face and sobbing harder, loud and hoarse, her tears wetting Jane’s shoulder for what seemed like quite a time, making Jane feel awkward. What was she supposed to do about this? Just stand there, waiting?
She thought of the few times she herself had really cried this way. Mostly she’d done it alone. But when she was
young, she’d cried in front of Granny, who had rubbed her back until she stopped, then sat her down, said something simple, inviting her to spill the beans if she wanted. So she did what Granny had taught her, rubbing Rivka’s back, whispering, “Must be awful bad.” She felt Rivka nod her head, yes, and then shake it, no, as if she didn’t know if it were bad at all. She wanted to pull away but also to do this comforting well, to be good at this moment. So she didn’t rush, just kept patting Rivka’s back and nodding agreement that what Rivka was upset about was either really bad or not.
Finally, after a good amount of tears, Rivka pushed away from Jane, who pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, giving it to Rivka to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. Rivka stuck out her bottom lip and took a deep breath.
“I think you are in trouble.”
“I am.”
Rivka lifted her head, her eyes wet.
“A man is looking for me. I need you to tell me if he comes. He looks like me.”
Rivka blinked twice, looking over Jane’s shoulder. Jane turned and saw Sweetie standing at the door to their room, showered, in yesterday’s clothes.
She couldn’t read Sweetie’s face—it was closed down, immobile.
Sweetie broke the silence. “You two are up at a strange hour.”
“Ironic,” Rivka said, wiping tears with the back of her hand.
Good, Jane thought. She’s still got her edge.
Sweetie headed to the kitchen, and they followed her. She dropped the Prospect on the counter and started coffee.
Jane read the headline, “Beautiful Blonde Bashed at Breens.”
CHAPTER SIX
EGATIVE
Pictures sell! You shoulda lost the story instead!”
She sat one spot off the hot seat, down the hall from Mac’s office, where he was yelling.
“I’ll fix it!”
“She gives it only to us—exclusively to us—and you lose it!”
The door flew open and Lambert plowed to his desk, Mac on his heels, his face red and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot.
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