I wiped the tears away and glanced down at the list next to me on the floor. I’d grasped it so hard that it didn’t lie flat; it went up at the edges. How had my mother managed to keep her handwriting so straight on an unlined piece of paper?
Suddenly I saw the omission. “That bitch!” I said loudly. I would have enjoyed living with Stephanie if I couldn’t have a home, but of course Sylvia wasn’t on the list.
That bitch.
20
the human condition
I folded the paper in quarters and put it in my back pocket. My wrist was a little bloody now and stuck to my sleeve, and my heart was still racing. I could hear my mother puttering around downstairs. Quietly, I sneaked the upstairs phone into my room and shut the door behind me. I sat on the edge of the bed, took a breath, and dialed.
“Smoke and Records,” my father answered. He didn’t sound at all perky, and the music in the background was slow and sad. Did he already know?
“Dad? It’s Martha.”
“Hi, honey.”
“Is Hildy there?”
“She’s right here, but—” He could tell I wasn’t okay, and I realized I hardly ever let him see it when I wasn’t okay. “What is it, honey?”
Before I knew it, I was sobbing. “Mom is renting out the house,” I wailed. “She said we have to get out. Drew is going to some boarding school in Fresno this weekend. It’s some place for rebellious—”
“Wait! Slow down, honey.” I heard him cover the receiver and the muffled, “Turn that down, will ya?” as if whoever it was should’ve known he was on an important conversation. He must be behind the smoke shop counter next to Hildy, away from the turntable. I could imagine him stretching the phone cord so he could get a little quiet in the nook where the imported cigars and pipes were stored, behind the glass counter. Drew was probably up in the tree house. I heard Hildy saying, “What is it, Dad? What’s going on?”
“Dad, she just gave me a piece of paper with a list of names on it,” I went on.
“What do you mean, a list?” He covered the receiver. “I said turn that down!” His angry shout was muffled.
“She gave me these names. Of families. I’m supposed to go down the list and find a family to live with. I don’t even know any of the people.”
I remembered something else. Throughout junior high school, my mother had never asked me if Sylvia wanted my mother to pay for my lunches or buy groceries to replace what I’d eaten. Maybe she’d made arrangements with Sylvia without my knowing it, but I didn’t think so. “She didn’t say anything about who’s going to give the family money for my rent or anything like that,” I told my father. “Like, she didn’t explain about my food. Or maybe you’re supposed to do that? Or I guess I could use my—” my voice trailed off.
For a long, uncharacteristic moment, my father didn’t say anything. I could hear a bus passing in front of the store, voices in the background. “We’ll be right over,” he said finally. “You wait out front.”
I cried.
“Okay? Honey? You just come down to the front of the house and wait for us, and we’ll go sit in the park. I see a couple cabs waiting across the street. We’ll get one right now.”
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Okay,” I managed. “But what if Mom finds out you came over? She’ll have a conniption! It’s not a weekend.”
“Don’t you worry about that. Now you go outside and wait.”
“Okay, but Dad? Can you let me talk to Hildy, just for a sec?”
He handed the phone to Hildy. “Martha?”
“Mom is renting out the house. Drew and I have to move out. She’s taking him to some school in Fresno!”
“What? What school?”
I heard my father shouting for Drew to come down from the tree house. “Wrap it up, now!” he told Hildy.
“See you in a few.” Hildy hung up.
I called Stephanie and told her everything. She barely let me finish. “You can stay here, Martha. You can use Brett’s room—he says he’s not coming home from Humboldt State until Thanksgiving. We can fill out our college applications together!”
“That’s so nice—”
“Seriously! You gotta live a little! And then you can double up with me whenever Brett’s here. I just know my mom’ll say yes! She really likes you, Martha.”
“I appreciate it, Steph, really.” I didn’t want to live with Stephanie. I wanted my mother. I wanted those stupid disgusting morning stews. I wanted to know her stupid body was in her stupid toilet-paper-strewn bed in the room right next to mine.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Stephanie agreed. “You, of all people, don’t deserve it. You’re such a good kid! Plus, mothers don’t kick out their own children! Even my mom knows that.”
“But I mean, my dad—” I couldn’t stand the idea that Stephanie had forgotten even for a minute about my father hitting my mother. Hitting all of us. Threatening me with a hot iron! Being mad at me for wanting to do well in school. Smoking pot with Hildy and calling it the human condition. Boring everyone practically to death with his long-winded explanations about things no one else knew about—that I was pretty sure he didn’t know about, either—and mixing it all in with things he did know about, so that people would be so confused, they’d assume he was a genius. “My dad is the one who’s crazy,” I said finally.
“Fine, Martha, great—so your dad is crazy. What the hell is wrong with your mother?”
I went downstairs. “What about the car?” I asked my mother coldly. “Are you giving it to Hildy, at least?”
“What, so your father can use it?”
“Mom, you’re not even going to need it in New York!”
“I told the Cal students it comes with the house.”
I went outside to wait, slamming the front door hard behind me. I sat on the curb, pulled the shirt away from the drying blood. It didn’t show through the shirt. When the cab arrived, it let my father and Hildy and Drew out a little way down the street. I was glad it was just them and not anyone called Shalimar or Mallomar or whatever the hell her name was.
I couldn’t remember the last time we kids were in the corner park with a parent. It was a place defined by the absence of parents, where Hildy and I, and later, Drew, had climbed rocks, pretended to be Indians, played kickball, tried to sell crafts we’d made, and joined with neighborhood kids to form clubs with complicated premises for membership, clubs that fizzled as soon as we’d set them up.
We all sat together on a bench, with me at the end next to Drew. I let Hildy and Drew sandwich my father, because even in this moment, as grateful as I was that he’d come over so quickly, I preferred not to sit next to him.
My father lit one of his Shermans. Hildy and Drew wouldn’t look at me, and thinking about it from their point of view, I knew they had every right to be mad that I’d found out what was going on before they did. I leaned across Drew to give my father the list with my right hand, keeping my left forearm covered. He unfolded the list, looked at it, folded it again, and put in his shirt pocket, and still no one said anything.
“Look, I’m sorry, you guys!” I blurted, twisting my body to face all of them. “I had nothing to do with the decision! I tried to talk her out of it!”
“Martha,” Hildy began, “the thing is—”
“Drew,” I began, “I think you have a right to know that Mom has some boarding school planned for you. Like, a farm or something.”
“Shitballs,” Drew said.
“I told her I thought we should just double up and rent out a room or two! Or get an apartment.”
“Martha, we’re losing our lease,” Hildy blurted.
“What lease?” Wasn’t that for renters, not home owners? “To Smoke and Records!”
“What? Why?”
“The store is closing, end of the month. The landlord wants us out.” Us. Why did Hildy always have to act so grown-up?
“But Dad! Why can’t you just—?” I wanted my father to fix it with the landl
ord, explain the situation we were in, tell the landlord he just had to stay. “When did you find out?”
“A few days ago,” my father said, his head bent.
“But he didn’t tell us until this afternoon,” Hildy said.
“Well, can’t you start another store?” I didn’t care that Hildy and Drew knew before I did.
Hildy said, “We can’t. Because of business debt.”
“Oh.” I didn’t even want to understand what this all meant. My father had to help us. He just had to.
“Don’t you worry, kids,” my father said, as if on cue. “Just sit tight. It’ll all work out.” We sat on the bench for a long time. He lit another Sherman, and then another, until I felt dizzy from the smoke. He said nothing about the human condition.
I missed the bus for school the next morning, mainly because I’d been up really late. Homework didn’t magically get done just because you were having a hard time at home, or wouldn’t even have a home pretty soon. Mrs. Fry had assigned an extra-long passage of the Aeneid to translate, we were having a test in Trig, and the outline for the semester-long project for my Independent Study class was due by the end of the week.
I was kind of glad to have a pile of work, since I couldn’t sleep anyway, but it was hard to concentrate. I could hear my mother snoring, not a care in the world, with these occasional stupid weird throat noises that made me hate her even more. Why couldn’t there be anything about my mother that was admirable or nice or appealing? Just one thing?
Somehow I could tell Drew was still awake, so I went in. He was reading his comic books under the covers with a heavy chrome flashlight, out of habit I guess, as if he’d forgotten that it no longer mattered if my mother had a cow over his staying up late on a school night. What was she going to do, put him in a reform school?
I sat down on the side of Drew’s bed and asked if he wanted to talk. He didn’t. Instead, he showed me the latest Superman with his flashlight, starting with the cover. ACTION COMICS, the top banner screamed. At the bottom, you were urged to guess the secret identity of the President’s killer, which was guaranteed to shock you.
I’d never paid much attention to comic books, because the ones Hildy used to read, with Archie and Veronica and Jughead and Betty, made no sense to me. Cars, dating, bikinis, milkshakes, button-down cardigans with letters sewn on them to signify athletic talent? The characters were supposedly my age, but they might as well be sailors on a whaling ship for how easy it was to relate to them.
But when Drew read Superman to me, adding sound effects (Boom! Bam! Kapow!) and explaining past plot elements as he went along—it was surprisingly soothing. I lay next to him on top of the blanket, sharing his pillow. I guess this was comforting to him, too, because it wasn’t long before there was a pause, and then the flashlight gave a little clunk against the wall and was suddenly shining up onto the ceiling. Gently, I pried it out of Drew’s hand and turned it off, straightened the blanket, patted his head, and crept back to my room. I finally got to sleep after two, and wound up not hearing the alarm clock.
I know this is weird, but I was practically crying by the time I got to school—not because of what was going on in my family, but because I was late. Concert Chorale had already started. We were doing Carmina Burana, and no one knew the piece yet, which meant it was all the more important for me to be there.
Quickly, I made my way up the shallow risers to the back of the room. Since I’d started Berkeley High in tenth grade, Mr. Seton had sat me in the top row so that my voice would carry and help everyone in front of me. I pulled out my music and sat down next to Paisley, who, without interrupting her singing, showed me the right page and measure in the next-to-last movement, “Blanziflor et Helena.”
But something was off. Really off. I knew Paisley had pointed to the right spot, because the rhythms looked right, and the intervals seemed right, too. The problem was, the notes I was hearing didn’t correspond with what was written. Why was I suddenly unable to read music? Why couldn’t I find the right note with my voice? “What the hell—?!” I whispered to Paisley.
She pointed again.
“Those aren’t the notes!” I whispered fiercely.
“Bar 110!” Mr. Seton shouted as he conducted, probably noticing my agitation and trying to help.
“He’s having us read it down a whole step,” Paisley answered.
“What? Why?” I demanded.
“It’s too high for the sopranos,” she whispered. “There’s this high B at the end, and since it’s so early in the morning, Mr. Seton said we should practice it—”
Without stopping, Mr. Seton said, “Settle down back there!” as if Paisley and I were throwing spitballs or something.
“I can’t—I can’t even read this!” I sputtered, and all at once, like one of those people in the movies who are about to vomit and are frantically trying to make it to the toilet, I dropped the score and bolted out of the room as if the tears were puke in my throat. I didn’t grab my purse or my books, or even my protective pea coat.
I leaned against the bulletin board just outside the Concert Chorale room, crying, then slid down, not really intending to sit on the polished vinyl floor but just kind of letting it happen. Maybe everyone else in the room could sing an A and pretend it was a B, but I certainly couldn’t. With the pitches not corresponding to my internal sense of the note, it was as if I’d been exposed to Kryptonite. My special powers were gone, never mind the fact that I was section leader and would likely get several of the solos in Carmina Burana. I cried, wiped my nose with my sleeve, and cried some more. I’d gone from being more than competent to being worse than everyone else.
“Martha?”
I looked up, startled. It was Clifton, carrying a large stack of sheet music.
“Clifton!” I scrambled up, wiped my eyes. “I was—I’m just—” Shrug.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
It was way too hard to explain; no one would understand. But then I remembered: Clifton Cray had perfect pitch, too. “Mr. Seton moved us down a whole step! And we’re supposed to sight-read! How can I sight-read when I have to transpose every single note at the same time?”
“Oh, God, that would drive me up the wall,” he commiserated.
“I know! It’s not fair!”
“—in fact—now that I think about it, it did drive me up the wall. This one summer, when I went to Cazadero? I tried clarinet instead of violin, and the same thing happened to me!”
“They transposed the piece?”
“No,” he explained, “it’s the damned notation! So confusing! You’re reading a C-natural, so you play what’s called a C on the clarinet. But the sound is actually a concert B-flat!”
“You’re kidding me.” I had some vague sense of the B-flat clarinet, but had never given much thought to its notation, how confusing it would be.
“I’m not kidding! It’s enough to give you, like—”
“A seizure!”
“Exactly,” he said. “Frothing at the mouth.”
Clifton Cray had suddenly grown into himself, but it was more than that. There was something so formed about him—confident, solid, as if he had never once experienced self-disappointment. He’d followed me around like a puppy for years. Now I realized I’d mistaken that for a permanent condition of shakiness.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked, trying not to stare. I’d never noticed before that underneath Clifton’s eyes, the skin was just a little darker, and that instead of making him look tired, this made his eyes look bigger and more expressive. The creases at the edges of his mouth were also a little darker than the soft, pillowy lips. “Isn’t Orchestra first period?”
“Krantz sent me to give these scores to Seton,” Clifton answered. “C’mon, let’s go in,” he coaxed, putting a hand tentatively at the small of my back. A little shiver went up my spine.
I looked up at him. “Thanks, Clifton. You really cheered me up.”
“Isolating the spots
!” he said, and winked.
21
ABD
By the time I got to the store after school, Hildy and Drew were already there. I stuffed my pea coat behind the counter as Hildy filled me in. My father had gone with Shalimar in the morning for a meeting with Mr. Hinge, a lawyer who specialized in something called family law.
I remembered Mr. Hinge. He was a Chesterfields smoker and a die-hard fan of the composer my father referred to as Wagner the Interminable. A history teacher of mine had said Wagner didn’t like Jews and that his music was later used by Nazis to stir up anti-Semitism among the German people. Apparently this was not my father’s primary objection. One time, right in front of Mr. Hinge, he said, “Isn’t there some quote about Wagner’s music being better than it sounds?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jules, shut up,” Mr. Hinge had retorted.
My father had started telling people that Smoke and Records would be closing soon, and he wasn’t ordering new merchandise anymore. There were already a few holes where certain candy bars and a couple of cigarette brands had run out. Hildy was worried about how we could afford a lawyer, because my father owed money to people who supplied the store with stuff to sell; that was what “business debt” meant. Plus, Shalimar had told Hildy it sounded like my father would need a lawyer for more than just one conversation. Mr. Hinge thought that stopping my mother was going to take time, maybe a month or two.
Stopping my mother: it hadn’t occurred to me. If Mr. Hinge could stop Willa Goldenthal, could he make her go back to the way she was before? If he could make her go back to the way she was before, could he force her to change some other things, too?
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