The doctor and his wife send Eric to buy eggs, transmit information about the state of Maple Ridge Road, and inquire if she needs anything from town. They would prefer to ignore her entirely, but Barbara Stein has a certain status in Woods End. They volunteer their boy as intermediary.
“Mrs. Stein, I’m not sure I can handle putting Grace down,” he says, uncertainly.
“People make too much ado about animals,” Mrs. Stein says. “They should spend more time on babies and less on kittens.”
“That’s not what my mother says,” Eric tells her.
“How old is your mother?” Barbara Stein asks.
“Forty-seven,” Eric replies.
Mrs. Stein laughs. “You mean thirty-seven,” she corrects.
“No, she’s forty-seven. We just had her birthday. I lit the candles myself. Math is my best class,” Eric assures her.
Barbara Stein doesn’t think it’s possible that she and Amanda are the same age. When she’s with the doctor’s wife, she feels matronly, arthritic, and peripheral. Amanda is lithe and eager within her entirely discretionary universe. She plays tennis, goes to yoga classes, and hosts a bridge game on Tuesday afternoons.
When Amanda decided she wanted a garden, she simply ordered one. A landscaper from Buffalo came with a soil expert and drawings, two men to dig and a crew to fence. Her ornamental plum trees were put into the earth larger than Mrs. Stein’s are now, after fifteen years of growing, of wind and ice storms, of what happens when you take an idea and let the elements define its destiny.
When Barbara translates this process into human terms, she thinks of her daughter. Lena is her name now. Her West Coast working name. She’s been Lena for more than a decade. Lena doesn’t want to live unconsciously, but rather one incremental step up. She wishes to inhabit an enormous post-op, permanently on the cusp of surgery. Lena, under the squalid palms of Los Angeles, in her private version of a recovery room, waking from an operation, calling out for Demerol and morphine and getting it. Nurses are eager and competent. They bring syringes, adjust pillows and smile.
Lena, in an apartment by a bay studded with fragile vertical palms that seem superimposed, stitched unconvincingly into the landscape. Lena, in her invented perimeter where it’s artificially cold and hushed, the bleached white of nurses’ uniforms and anesthesia. Lena wants to be in that post-op zone forever, at the edge of coming to and then being put under again, to float in her own inland sea. For her daughter, every day feels like surgery. Sunlight cuts like a razor and must be avoided. Each morning she is knifed and stitched. Night is an abuse. Gravity and air sting and wound her. Voices startle her and she trembles. That’s why she gives herself injections for pain.
Elizabeth is a heroin addict and a prostitute. The order is important. If heroin were dispensed freely, Elizabeth would not be selling her body. Elizabeth would not be HIV positive. Elizabeth has AIDS now. In the clinic, the nurses and technicians believe she’s a criminal, a woman without rights or even the privileges of the terminal. It takes Lena three hours to ride the buses to the hospital. They arbitrarily cancel her appointments and deliberately misplace her chart. They pretend they don’t remember her. Lena waits shivering in corridors through their entire shifts. They want her to die.
Barbara Stein thinks about order and disease as she drives, as highways change numbers and there’s nothing for her to see anymore. It’s a journey she takes every summer.
She remembers searching for Elizabeth in Idaho, in fields of barley and alfalfa. She tried to find her in Kansas City in regions of corn and soy beans. In between were rocks, gravel, abandoned farmland — derelict barns and boarded shut bars, the metal shells of gas stations going to rust. Then the interchangeable motels, anonymous restaurants, featureless towns and ersatz suburbs that might be San Diego or New Jersey.
She avoids cities with their boulevards that could be Baltimore or Dallas. American streets with shops’ racks of cheap faux leather yellow and green jackets and rice bowls and back-scratchers from China no one wants or needs. Stores that have Going Out of Business signs on display windows the day they open. Night is worse. Every shop is locked behind black iron grates. In between are bars lit by flashing red neon. It’s the standard greeting of the great superpower. Buy some junk and get drunk.
Barbara Stein could only afford motels on the margins of cities and in strips along interstates. The designated areas for travelers on budgets. This was what America wanted for itself — a subterfuge of monolithic uniformity. This’s the mirror in which America looks at her face and concludes that she is normal.
Elizabeth couldn’t bear looking at her own face in its entirety. Elizabeth’s skin was blossom subtle, not delicate but rather rare like certain fabrics— thick silks, pure light wool and cashmere. Elizabeth has a spring face and her dark brown hair smells like espresso and harbors. When Mrs. Stein held her daughter, she breathed in her skin.
Elizabeth at thirteen and fourteen, before she ran away, had the scent of a river — the Ganges or Nile, with all the intrigues intact. She was the reason for pilgrimages and shrines, why people read texts beside vases in museums, why they collect pebbles from beaches, tiles from temples, and why they take photographs.
Her daughter with her raw silk face couldn’t bear sunlight and feared it. Mrs. Stein transformed the backyard. She dug and cemented holes in the backyard for canvas umbrellas. She cemented rakes and brooms in the ground and wrapped sheets and tarps to their tops. patches of shade fell geometrically as a sequence of squares. Her daughter, trembling and fevered, crawled between the canvas oases.
One early autumn afternoon when the maple forest was the yellow of votive for prayer and the red of heretics, she dragged a fifty-pound bag of cement toward her backyard. Sheriff Murphy drove down Maple Ridge Road toward campus. He saw her and stopped his patrol car.
Sheriff Jim Murphy carried the cement into her yard. He took her shovel and dug. “How big a tent you plan to pitch?” he asked. His eyes were hazel and he squinted as he looked at her yard.
“As big as circumstance demands,” Mrs. Stein replied.
“Can’t keep her under a canopy indefinitely. It’s unnatural,” Sheriff Murphy decided.
The sheriff handed her his card. “Need something, call me,” the sheriff said. “Anytime. I’ll come. Count on it.”
Mrs. Stein nodded. She no longer believed anyone could help her.
Elizabeth lives near the ocean. She’ll probably die near the ocean, too. Since she came to the West Coast, first to Seattle, then Portland, San Francisco and now Los Angeles, she’s rented an apartment in sight of the water. Barbara remembers this as she takes the last of the freeways to the final exit on the western edge of Los Angeles, at the bay called Santa Monica.
Elizabeth’s telephone is disconnected. It takes Barbara Stein all morning to find the yellowed stucco apartment half a block from the beach. The manager has never heard of Elizabeth or Lena or a dark haired woman resembling the photographs Mrs. Stein supplies. “Could be a blond or redhead now,” the man says. “They’re all skinny broads with wigs.”
Mrs. Stein stands in the entranceway, trying to envision what Elizabeth would have seen. The bay lacks the spectacle her daughter craves. Elizabeth requires seas like the Grenadines and Aegean, defined strata of purples and startled turquoise. Elizabeth wants a permanent Yucatan Caribbean, a patchwork of reefs beneath her skin forming a channel of depth and current only. There are no mirrors or monetary constrictions. You have fins and gills and glide through coral.
Can you say chartreuse, Elizabeth? Can you say cerulean? Do you know what is halfway between Borneo and Sumatra? A tiny island called Palau Kebatu. I’ll take you there someday. And the Bay of Bima to Komoda. Then Sumba, finally, and Bali. That’s what she promised her daughter.
The beach is a congestion of tourists and the bay looks oily and degraded. It smells tangy like citrus that’s gone bad from a wide-open sun that doesn’t play by the rules. The sky is vague and restless as if remembering
a nightmare. Starched white Oleander along the fenced parking lot reminds her of nurses’ uniforms. Elizabeth might have made that association. She would have been drawn to the burgundy Bougainvillea spilling across the sides of the shabby apartment building where the paint has been abraded by wind and sand and formed what looks like scabs. Still, such an extravagance of claret vines would have caught her attention, even stumbling drugged in darkness.
There’s a boardwalk below the slow slope of hill of two-story stucco apartments with identical balconies where Elizabeth and Lena no longer live. Barbara Stein must touch this ocean, anemic and drained of blue as it is. She thinks of her English class assignments about the meaning of movement in American literature. The American experience is about physical passages. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Manifest Destiny and the wagon trains. The European immigrant migrations. Jack Kerouac and the Beatniks. In any event, Barbara Stein must keep walking.
Maybe we each have our own personal manifest destiny, she thinks. It sweeps us from the Allegheny Mountains of northern Pennsylvania to a strip of pavement studded with yogurt shops perched between acres of soiled sand.
Mrs. Stein finds a splintered bench engraved with knife-etched graffiti, gang names, the slang for sexual acts and assorted scatology. It’s much too hot. The sun seems lacquered. It has the texture of paint. Skaters in their bikinis already inhabit a future century where all disease has been eradicated. Elizabeth can sell her body to the whole navy and then take a shower, two weeks in Cancun, rinse it off, heal in salt waters, and be done with it.
“Just don’t bury me,” Elizabeth had said. “Promise.”
“I promise, yes,” Mrs. Stein told her daughter.
They were talking on the telephone. Her daughter has been too long on this earth as it is. Her daughter, subsisting by acts of desperate translation. She negotiates the ordinary and redesigns it for her personal biochemistry of necessity.
“I’m an alien on this planet,” Elizabeth said. “They’ll burn me for free at the clinic. Let them.”
Further south Barbara Stein sees a courtyard partially in sand. It’s dense with excessively magenta flowers and tattered palms, their texture rank. There’s no logic to this stunted progression, she thinks. Women stand at windows facing the ocean. They wear slips and imitation silk kimonos and have syringes of heroin in their fingers.
These women are like Lena. They have divested themselves of their birth certificates and the longitudes and latitudes of their origin. Their documents proved inadequate for survival. Maybe, like her daughter, they were once named Elizabeth. They rebirthed themselves and became Lena, married to a brown tar she burns with a match in a spoon, turned into a fluid like a muddy river she sticks in your vein. The price is your life and she knows it. That’s why such women have faces that are epics. Their eyes are like the one lighthouse on the last peninsula at the end of the world.
Barbara Stein crosses the ragged beach. She suddenly remembers college when she once wanted to collect waters and preserve them in labeled bottles. She wanted certain rivers as merely symbolic ornaments — the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Danube and Seine. They were like one-night-stand rivers, brief encounters she name-dropped at a dinner party. She came to know other rivers with intimacy. The Snake in Idaho during three successive summers when she almost found Elizabeth. Then the Colorado which began as a creek in the Rocky Mountains when she thought Elizabeth was in Denver. She followed it west into the California desert.
It’s a light blue afternoon. Sand offers disappointing tiny fragments of broken gray clam shells. Barbara Stein must acknowledge this region with her hands. Los Angeles is a port, after all. All ports contain certain traditional elements. Sailors and the women they buy, and cargoes of kidnapped girls and smuggled rubies? Refugees float in oceans, hidden in cartons, drinking rainwater and burning with fever.
It’s an ordinary afternoon, boys on bicycles, women hanging T-shirts on ropes. The obligatory fishing boat comes to the dilapidated pier, water a listless bleached pastel. Barbara Stein knows the new wharves of contraband are inland. The stolen computer chips and software, the prototype vaccines for cancers, formulas for extending lifespan and magnifying intelligence. They’re kept in offices in Dallas and Baltimore.
The ocean is cooler than she expected. She places a damp hand across her forehead as if it were a kind of bandage, as if she might faint. She stands by the water until sunset, waiting for Elizabeth to call Mother, Mother. She’s prepared to turn from this bay, which tells her nothing, and embrace her daughter. She stands until the sky is livid and brutal with red and it looks alive and in pain. Somebody should put it out of its misery. Somebody should put a bullet in it.
It’s sunset. Barbara Stein walks south past tattoo parlors, bistros and piercing shops. On the boardwalk, women younger than Elizabeth when she first ran away stick out their palms for dimes. Their eyes are sheeted portals. They have tornadoes in their faces. Still, they’re some version of her 10th grade students with their round faces and wide-into-the-wind eyes. They could wear the clothing of Allegheny Hills High School. In a group photograph, they would look like cousins or classmates.
Barbara Stein isn’t going to find her daughter and she isn’t getting a tattoo. She is forty-seven years old. She’s lived longer than Billie Holiday and Frida Kahlo, Judy Garland and Anne Sexton. Of course she wanted less, took a measured route, but still, there’s a triumph in the simple enduring. Elizabeth will not live this long.
Barbara Stein considers all the women of Los Angeles and Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and Shanghai. A legion of middle aged women strolling boulevards named for royalty, psychotics and saints. They could feed one another’s broken and ravaged daughters. In Barcelona and Amsterdam, in all port cities where the ships come in and children lay on pavement, we must offer them bread and carry them home.
She knows that some children don’t want just one box of crayons. Some reject certain colors entirely and scream when offered yellow or red. Some won’t color within the lines. Some are like Lena and can’t tolerate the air of this Earth. On boulevards named for queens and madmen, teenagers in Salvation Army jackets look up from the pavement, twitching and dazed, longing to be fed like malformed baby birds.
When Ulysses encountered the lotus-eaters, his crew threatened mutiny. They had to be dragged back to the ship, kicking savagely. Some girls can’t simply dial 911 and come home.
At Venice Beach, Barbara Stein sits on a bench facing a billboard where a model in a bikini posed in front of lurid green palm trees. HONOLULU written in pink neon at her bare feet. I am forty-seven, she thinks, and I will never see my daughter again. It’s time for the women to remove themselves from the posters where they are imprisoned. They must peel themselves off the images of implausibly flawless island resorts. They must separate themselves from the overly representational, the vulgar red orchids and garish yellow plumeria. They could climb down feet unsteady on asphalt and then begin walking. With each step, they would enter the enormity of their own unscripted lives.
But in the millennial global warehouse, which is not a village, our offspring curl fetal on sidewalks. We have learned not to notice them. They don’t register. They’re below our radar. We step around them as we once did foreigners with sores and scabs. They are lepers and consumptives. We must not speak to them.
Meanwhile, we are exchanging inappropriate confidences with counterfeit companions in an electronic vacancy. We are intimate with people in Madrid and Tokyo we’ve never met or ever will. The children at our feet are bad girls. They deserve to be sick and suffer. Rather than entering an astonishment we’ve become rigid and laminated. We do not even exchange your real names and serial numbers. We are all prisoners of war now and the Geneva Convention no longer applies. That’s what her students are telling her.
Mrs. Stein walks past fortune-tellers on blankets at the sand’s edge. They’re reading cards and palms as they have for six thousand years. Body-pierced young women who could be in her Allegh
eny Hills classes, returning to the apartment where Elizabeth briefly lived. She stands near the squat stucco building her daughter no longer enters or exits, memorizing its unique characteristics — the four aggressively vertical palm trees, how the sun is white, gritty as if layered with microscopic glass chips, pieces of cactus, and splinters from strangers’ teeth. Sun is a relentless deliberate assault, a series of flesh wounds. A fuchsia on a back balcony, stems like manic dangling and longing for the pavement. They want a mouth full of gravel. They want to be burned at a clinic for free.
Perhaps Elizabeth noticed the almost full moon and smelled the White Star Jasmine in the alley making the darkness scented and drunken. The Eucalyptus, vaguely medicinal, chalky and mysterious. Things bloom in dusk harbors where the trade winds have been and gone. Barbara Stein realizes, if it were the end of myth, there would be nothing to write about.
There are smuggled girls in shuttered alcoves behind tattoo parlors. Girls who ran away in journeys begun by prank and accident. The flesh is an acquired taste like opera and shellfish. Some girls need a tutor to show them the ropes. Teach them the tricks. Turn them out. Girls who couldn’t conceive of the cliffs between Ravello and Amalfi. Big Sur and Malibu were equally distant. The highway to Hana, jungle-side Maui, was beyond their ability. Athens and Shanghai felt contrived in their mouths. They were afraid of capitals.
They were simple as stones and bells. They smelled like glass on October afternoons. They were less than a thumbprint. They didn’t wear make-up, want to speak French or tour the Parthenon. Denim was fine. Spandex and bronze did not occur to them. They hadn’t heard the whisper that says lush are the ladies of the lamps, lit from within, heads dyed copper as coins. That’s why they needed a razor scar on the cheek, a fractured arm and black eye. You’d be surprised. That’s all it takes.
They remember April when they were still cotton panty girls. They had collections of arrowheads and butterflies and a drawer for just bows. Then the powders and injections and days turned Technicolor. They carry their accidents with them. Their coats contain a sadness that doesn’t require translation.
A Good Day for Seppuku Page 8