“I mean, where would your dad put you, anyway? Isn’t his apartment just a studio?” Stephanie shook her head. “Martha, there’s no way they’re giving him custody!”
“I know, Steph, don’t have a spaz.”
“Well, you’re welcome to stay here. For as long as you want.”
“Thanks.” I wished I could stay right in Stephanie’s room with her, even though it would be cramped in her bed. Stephanie’s things were pink and purple and orange. The nightgowns were thick and freshly laundered, and there were so many of them that they spilled out of her bureau drawer. Stephanie now had Brett’s fish tank in her room, and it looked cheerful in there. The shutters on the windows were white, and the floor was painted a dark rose color. It was the kind of place that protected you, with things whose main purpose was to be pleasant, things like sunlight and cozy flowery sheets and a full-length mirror so you could see what you looked like when you got dressed in the morning and change your mind about what to wear if you wanted.
Eventually I went in to Brett’s room and turned on the nightlight, got in bed and listened to Helvetica settling in. No matter how hot it was during these fall days, there was always an edge of chill at night. I tried not to think about the draft that came in through the opening at the bottom of the doors leading out to Brett’s porch, which was probably how the mouse had gotten in. I tried to ignore the lump in my throat. I didn’t like Brett’s drab green walls, the dark wood cabinets with black pulls, the navy plaid sheets. I couldn’t even listen to music, because he’d brought his turntable and speakers with him to Humboldt State. We still had Stephanie’s record player, but Brett had taken a lot of the records.
What was my mother going to do when she found out that, because of me, my father’s lawyer had evidence against her? And what about Plowshares? She’d be furious about being “undermined” in what she thought was right for Drew. She’d say that she had insight, and the whole rest of the world wasn’t psychologically sophisticated. And if I didn’t see things her way, she’d hate me even more than she already did.
As I lay on Brett’s pillow, it was Hildy I ached for. I missed the way when we were younger, she would read and read, not caring that her hair was messy or plastered to her head. It never bothered her that when she gave her attention over to a book, there was a whole world that she wasn’t paying attention to: how did she feel safe doing that? I missed the candy and gum stashes she’d always kept in her room at home, wrappers strewn all over her bed. I missed her knowing everything better than I did. I missed how she would straighten out my blouse sometimes, or my hair, saying, “Here, Marth, lemme fix your perceptions! They’re so lopsided!”
24
court
With all the foot traffic in and out of the store, someone was bound to be looking for a violin. Mine had been sitting in the back of my closet for years, and my mother hadn’t even noticed that I’d left with it. My father tried to talk me out of selling it. He said I might want to play again someday. I told him no, and a few days later, he got sixty dollars for it at the flea market. He didn’t thank me.
A professor in the English department wanted to get rid of his spare car, an old turquoise Plymouth automatic with gears you changed by pushing these neat rectangular buttons on the dashboard. My father gave the professor all the remaining Bach cantatas and Handel oratorios, two or three dozen jazz records, and the big speaker he’d used the day that Nazi riot had been brewing across the street. I worried about my father’s getting a car prematurely. If he was thinking we’d need it to pick up Drew, shouldn’t he have waited, instead of maybe jinxing the whole thing?
Shalimar still hung around the store, but she didn’t visit the apartment anymore except to help us bring cartons up. She told me and Hildy she was “on a roll” with her writing. I didn’t know what she meant, since I didn’t realize writing required luck, but Shalimar seemed happy. She was maybe a third of the way done with her dissertation on Amrita Sher-Gil. It was all because of my father, she said.
My father talked with the record distributors, but no one knew of any work. He went to Prufrock and Cody’s and Moe’s and all the other bookstores. Nobody was hiring. Part of the problem was that fall quarter had started, and students already had their jobs for the year. As the days passed and my father still didn’t have work, I was glad we had the Plymouth, because he could take records down to the flea market and sell them there. But the warm weather we were having could warp the records if they were left in the sun, and especially if they sat in a hot car for storage. And then once it started raining, the flea market would close. In any case, it wouldn’t be the kind of steady income Mr. Hinge had in mind.
I had decided to talk with Mr. Lucas before sitting my father down. I wanted to be able to present it to my father as a done deal—I’d gotten him a job, but he had to get along and do things Mr. Lucas’s way. And I’d only tell Hildy once I’d accomplished the task.
“Mr. Lucas?” I began, at the beginning of my next shift. “Um, I was thinking—see, the thing is, my father really has to get a job, because—”
“He lost his lease,” Mr. Lucas finished for me. He was counting bills from the register and filling out a bank deposit form. “Terrible thing.”
“Right. So, um, I was wondering, wouldn’t it be better to have him work here instead of me?”
“What’s that, now?”
“My father. He needs a job.” Shrug. “I was thinking—maybe he could take over my shifts? And maybe, um, a few more hours? He could help you organize the classical section!”
Mr. Lucas looked up with a strange expression, his pen stuck in mid-air. Then I realized he was trying not to smile. “Martha, uh, that probably wouldn’t work out so well. Your dad likes things his way, and—”
“I know, I know, but—”
“Besides, I can’t lose you,” he added. “You’re smart, and you learn quickly. You don’t give me any crap. You’re reliable. You try to be friendly. I like how you handle the customers. You just need a little self-confidence, is all.”
“Oh!” I wasn’t expecting a review of my performance. Shrug.
“Your father is used to having his own place, and—”
“Mr. Lucas, it’s really nice of you to say those things about me. So, thank you! But—listen, I know my dad is kind of difficult, but—he’s changed!” I said wildly.
“You know who is looking, though? The manager over at RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT!”
“Oh! But I don’t think—”
“They need someone to work evenings.”
This wasn’t what I was hoping to present to my father, but it was something. I knew he wouldn’t thank me. Hildy did, though.
Smoke and Records shut its doors about a week after our meeting with Mr. Hinge. The landlord was going to put a Doughnut Central in there, one of those awful chain stores, but construction wasn’t ready to start, so the place was locked up for now, and dark. It was too bad Drew wasn’t there to see the way the shop looked just before it closed, because I knew Hildy and I would never be able to describe it with the impact it deserved. Drew would have been fascinated by the ripped out cabinets left at weird angles in the abandoned space, the deep wooden cubicles where all the candy bars had been, the huge gap left by the Coca-Cola machine, and the way the vinyl tiles underneath where it had been were a better color because they hadn’t been worn down for all those years.
The Coke machine: as a little kid, Drew had asked dozens of times for orange soda. He was more interested in the purchase itself than in the “spicy bubbles” that made his throat sting. Hildy would lift Drew up, his head bobbing, his canvas PF Flyers kicking with excitement, his fingers trembling as he struggled to deposit the dime into the oversized red refrigerator. We’d all watch the red and white cup drop, followed by five or six little blobs of ice and, finally, the whoosh of brightly colored liquid that magically stopped just as the froth seemed about to spill over. “Use two hands, Drew,” we’d remind him. “Careful!”
&nb
sp; Now a few of the vinyl squares were broken or missing back there, leaving dusty, dried up black tar in a squiggly pattern in their place. Drew would have wanted to see how the whole store looked all cleared out, the tree house finally uncluttered, the cash registers empty and open. Maybe he’d be back soon. Maybe the court could make a special case for Drew to live with my father, even though no one’s ever heard of a father’s getting custody, let alone my father. Maybe I could relax into staying with Stephanie, “live a little,” as she would put it, and my mother would be forced by the court to send Sylvia money for my rent and food.
On Friday, I took the day off from school to go to court with Hildy and my father. I didn’t want to get behind, but I knew I was going to have to run interference when my mother got there. She’d for sure start bitching at me about how I’d been brainwashed along with Hildy and Drew, or worse, make a big fat public scene. In spite of everything, I stood the best chance of smoothing things out.
It was hard to picture my mother with a lawyer. All I could imagine was her tearfully telling the judge that she’d done the healthiest possible thing for me and Drew. If the judge didn’t immediately grasp how brilliant and sophisticated her solution was, my mother wouldn’t hesitate to shriek at him that his perceptions were lopsided, or demand to know why he couldn’t see through Jules Goldenthal’s psychologically seductive bullshit, blah, blah, blah.
But for some reason, neither my father nor Hildy seemed worried about my mother’s presence, and as the minutes passed, then an hour, I realized she wasn’t going to show up. Maybe my father and Hildy had already known. It made me kind of mad to think I was missing school for no good reason when I could’ve taken the Trig practice test and gone to my Physics lab, but I didn’t share my resentment with Hildy. We sat quietly outside the judge’s chambers. She twirled her hair and read The Brothers Karamazov while I alternated between my Virgil translation and the UC application forms I’d picked up at school.
Mid-morning, a social worker came out and asked if we wanted to go in and talk to the judge. Hildy went, but I didn’t want to; even in my mother’s absence I was scared of her. If I told the judge that my father was a hitter—though now not really a hitter anymore, but only because he was a pothead—it still wouldn’t change my disloyalty. I know this sounds nuts, but I really felt like my just existing in this situation was a betrayal of my mother. Let Hildy be the one to tell the judge how awful my mother was.
Later, my father met with the social worker privately, and Mr. Hinge came out to talk to me and Hildy. His hair was combed. He was wearing a tan corduroy suit and a green paisley tie, and he looked much more like a lawyer. If I mentally squinted, I could almost imagine the Wagner making sense.
My father, Mr. Hinge said, had been awarded sole custody of me and Drew, effective immediately.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it.
25
laundry land
I slept at Stephanie’s that night. My father’s apartment wasn’t set up yet, plus there was no time to drive to Fresno; my father had a shift at RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT!, and since he’d just started working there, he couldn’t get out of it. None of us had planned for what happened: it was the opposite of my father’s having gotten the Plymouth. Stephanie and I watched TV and made popcorn. I told Stephanie I’d still stay with her often. I made it sound like I was being forced by the court to go live with my father. This probably sounds stupid, which is why I couldn’t quite say it to Stephanie, but with Drew coming home to my father and Hildy visiting often, I wanted to be part of my family again.
The next morning, when my father came to pick me up to go to Fresno, Shalimar was with him in the front seat in a long lavender dress and white sandals. She had a flowery silk scarf tied in a band around her forehead with the ends dangling at the back. I wasn’t happy to see Shalimar, and the shrug happened four times in a row. I was afraid the court would somehow find out about her hanging around with us, and we’d be in trouble.
Hildy had taken the day off from Gabel. In the back seat, she reached out to touch pinkies, and I touched back and was able to relax a little. Shalimar was pretty and smiley, and everyone around her seemed to be having a better life just because she was there. We rolled down the windows. It was a warm day. Shalimar’s hair blew in the wind, and she kept using her long, thin fingers to catch the ends and hold them down before forgetting and letting her hair go again.
Hildy had called Plowshares to ask for directions, writing them down on a piece of binder paper. My father was remarkably calm under her navigation, and four hours later, we were driving on a side road, past a huge overgrown garden behind a chain-link fence. As we pulled into the unpaved parking lot, the tires made a satisfying crunch on the gravel. It was the sound of our having arrived where we were going, and our having every right to be there.
We walked toward the main bungalow, hot gravel under our feet. Shalimar was getting tiny grey rocks in her sandals and falling behind, but no one waited for her. We needed to get to the office so Hildy could pull the court documents out of her purse. Then Hildy and I, and Shalimar, would need to try to keep my father from blowing up if it took the Plowshares people too long to produce Drew.
I was just thinking that the office could say the papers we had weren’t the right papers, or that Drew wasn’t there, when suddenly, there he was in his faded blue jeans and sweatshirt, grinning, waving a little uncertainly, but walking toward us, slowly at first and then fast, grey dust kicking up in the sunlight. Hildy ran up to him and hugged him close, and my father and I quickly followed. We were in a bundle, the four of us, hanging on for dear life.
Drew wasn’t taller; if anything, he looked littler than I remembered, but at the same time, he seemed more grown up. He smiled again briefly and kept hugging us, but he didn’t say much. His hair was dusty and he smelled like dirt. There was grime underneath his fingernails.
A tall, thin man came out of the bungalow and down the rickety wooden steps, carrying one brown grocery bag and one white shopping bag with handles. Two blond teenage boys, about Hildy’s and my age, followed. They were both wearing white T-shirts, and might have been brothers. The older one was in brown corduroy cutoffs and looked mean. The younger one kept using the back of his hand to scratch his nose.
The man handed the bags to my father; they were Drew’s things. He introduced himself as the director of Plowshares and smiled, showing teeth that had that overly white look of dentures. He was tan, his jeans were faded and dirty, and his slick dark hair was parted on the side and carefully combed.
“Well now, we really enjoyed having young Andrew here,” the man said in a nasal tone that I could tell rubbed my father the wrong way. “Cute kid, and darned smart, too.”
“Yeah, too bad he’s leaving,” the older of the two boys sneered. “He was just getting used to it, right, buddy?” He took a step toward Drew, and Drew moved away. The boy had a familiar lemony smell that I remembered from when Hildy and I used to go in and sniff the fragrance samples at Rexall. Vitalis hair tonic, that was it.
“Come on now, Jimmy, that’s enough,” the man said.
My father had handed the bags to me and Hildy. “Get in the car, kids,” he said, not taking his eyes off the man. Shalimar had come up and was standing right next to my father. She slipped her arm in his. Drew and Hildy and I turned to leave, with Drew in the middle, but my father stayed put. I felt the familiar jelly in my gut, the certainty that he was about to start ranting or hitting. But when I looked back, Shalimar was pulling him gently toward the car. My father opened the trunk with the key, and we put the bags in. Drew climbed in back and sat between me and Hildy.
My father pushed the rectangular “reverse” button and backed out of the lot. As soon as we passed the garden, away from the gravel dust, we all rolled down the windows and kept them down all the way to the Foster’s Freeze we’d seen near the highway exit. Hildy and I kept holding out our pinkies to Drew, and he touched back, but he didn’t
smile. When we parked, Drew asked my father to open the trunk of the car. He got his sleeping bag out and, without a word, fed it into the big garbage bin at the back of the Foster’s Freeze even though he was barely tall enough to reach the lid. We all just let him.
My father ordered burgers for all of us except Shalimar, who wasn’t hungry. While he was at the counter, the rest of us sat down at an outdoor table and waited. No one said anything. Had Drew been beaten up by that older boy? Locked in a closet in the dark by the man? Why had Drew thrown away the sleeping bag? Usually I was able to imagine the worst, but this time it was as if my brain shut down. Drew had wet the bed, that was all. He was embarrassed, that had to be it.
A kind of quietness had settled over us, and I didn’t dare break it. All I could think about was how much I hated my mother.
Soon my father brought over a chocolate milkshake and a Coke for all of us to share, a Tab for Shalimar, and a paper-lined red plastic oval basket with French fries in it. Our burgers came. Hildy told Drew about my father’s job at RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT! and how we were calling it RAAD. “Mom didn’t even show up in court,” I put in. Then Hildy told Drew he was going to get to go to Washington Elementary now instead of Cragmont, because Washington was closer to the apartment.
Drew didn’t like Cragmont, especially since he had a horrible teacher this year, but I was worried that he might be unhappy about changing schools. His friends would still be at Cragmont, and next year, they’d be going to King Jr. High while Drew would be at Willard. “Washington is right across the street from Berkeley High,” I said, removing a wilted pickle slice from my burger. “I can ride the bus with you this year. Or we can walk down together.”
“Billions of blistering blue barnacles!” Drew responded, like Captain Haddock from the Tintin books. Hildy and I exchanged glances. Drew wasn’t normally a sarcastic kid.
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