1974
THE NEXT TIME I SAW MY MOTHER’S SECRET FRIEND, I was nearly twelve, and had just learned that Jesus would come on a cloud shaped like a man’s fist. I learned this from the Sabbath School teacher at our Seventh-day Adventist Church, Mrs. Sullivan, who kept her black hair wrapped around her head helmet-style. My sister and I called her Iguana Woman— she seemed that scaly and cool, skin pale as plaster behind her bright makeup. Her voice was reptilian, too, as she whispered about the Last Days, about fire and falling boulders as if these things were secrets she wasn’t supposed to tell. In the car on the way home, Ali and I would sometimes roll our eyes and snicker at Mrs. Sullivan’s grim predictions. But I never forgot the image of that cloud, its silent, impossible fury, the way endings could surprise you like that—with a crack and a flash when you least expected it.
I learned about the cloud on a dry June morning in 1974.
Fires burned in the Santa Ana foothills, turning the air milky-brown and bringing the occasional distant wail of a siren. My mother woke us with her morning song, her high heels clicking against the Mexican tiles as she sang, “Good morning, merry sunshine, how did you wake so soon, you scared the little stars away and shone away the moon.” Her voice was clear and intrusive as a shard of glass, and it worked. By the third or fourth time she clicked by my door I was awake, anticipating the Sabbath morning hustle. My father would be sitting at the dining room table in his dress shirt and slacks, sipping his coffee, finishing the Los Angeles Times. Already, at 7:00 a.m., he’d have committed several sins against the church: the coffee, the newspaper on a Sabbath, the fact that he was not attending church with the rest of us but heading off to work. My mother never verbally chided him for his transgressions, but each time she swished by him in her buttery-yellow church dress, she heaved a small sigh, pressing her lips into a crease. He took no notice.
It was a Saturday like any other, except for the pungent smell of ash as we emerged from the church sanctuary, made our way across the blistering pavement. Today was potluck day, and Mom had decided, against our will, to participate. As she rummaged in the car for paper plates and cups, Ali and I stood staring at the sky, the brown columns of smoke rising on the horizon.
“Maybe it really is the end of the world,” I said, elbowing Ali in the side. “Maybe Mrs. Sullivan was right.”
“I bet our whole neighborhood is on fire,” Ali murmured in the direction of our mother’s bent back. “And our mother thinks this is a good time for a picnic.”
“All right, girls, all right.” Mom emerged from the backseat with her paper grocery bags, her red handbag dangling from one elbow. “Do you think you can manage being pleasant this afternoon?” She thrust the bags at us, smoothed her sleeveless dress over her hips.
“It’s a hundred million degrees,” Ali whined. “And the food here—”
“Now listen.” Mom looked hard at us. “There’s someone meeting us today. A dear old friend, okay?” And before we could ask, she was strutting toward the meeting room, hoisting her pocketbook up her shoulder. She was the only person who didn’t cower in the heat, didn’t glance toward the blazing hills. There was nothing we could do but follow.
Mom’s friend didn’t appear until the end of the potluck, as people were gathering their empty casserole dishes, mopping damp necks and noses. Ali and I were lobbing pieces of veggie dog from the baked beans at each other when suddenly he was standing close beside us, crooning our names.
Though he’d lost most of his gray curls, he still had the same mischievous eyes and gap-toothed smile. He spread his fingers over Mom’s bare shoulder, just as he used to. He wore plaid knickers—he’d been golfing, he explained—and she introduced him as her dear old friend, Mr. Robert. I started to say I remembered him, that we’d met before, but she narrowed her eyes and shook her head slightly. I took my cue and fell silent.
“So these are the infamous Sandon girls I’ve heard so much about,” Mr. Robert said in his thrumming voice, dimples flexing. Ali gnawed on a thumbnail.
“What have you heard?” I pushed the sticky beans across my plate.
“Oh, secrets.” He sat beside me, his cotton-clad thigh pressed slightly against my own. “Only your darkest, most dreadful secrets. But don’t worry,” he added, winking at Mom, “my lips are sealed. Isn’t that right, Elaine?”
“Don’t chew your fingernails, honey.” Mom reached to tap Alison’s wrist. Then she took my sister’s hand and examined the well-chewed fingertips, tsk-tsking, as if to demonstrate what a conscientious mother she was. Ali whipped her hand away. Had she noticed the way our mother’s name slid off Mr. Robert’s tongue like heated syrup? Or the way Mrs. Dixon and Mrs. Alexander were gawking from the next table over? Mom loaded up a plate for her tall stranger, as if she expected him to stay for a good, long time.
“You don’t come to this church,” Alison announced just as Mr. Robert stuffed a forkful of casserole into his mouth.
“Why, no,” he garbled, wiping his big lips. He used his own monogrammed handkerchief rather than the paper napkin Mom handed him. “I really only come for the bean casserole, which is, uh—exquisite.” He elevated his fork and let a pasty mound plop to his plate. “I’m afraid they won’t win many converts through the cuisine.”
“Oh, Robert.” Mom waved her hand round Mr. Robert’s face as if to scare off a troublesome fly.
“You’re not even Adventist, are you?” Ali pursed her lips, and I pressed her foot with my own. I felt sudden sympathy for our old friend, who had done nothing, as far as I knew, to deserve Ali’s grilling.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not, my dear. But I grew up surrounded by them.” He lapsed into a story about growing up in Walla Walla, Washington, where everyone was Seventh-day Adventist, except him and his nutty old mother. “It took me a while to figure out that the whole world wasn’t filled with bean eaters—that’s what we called them back then. But you girls don’t look like bean eaters to me,” he added quickly. “You girls look more like, let’s see, butter-and-Karo-syrup sandwich eaters, maybe? Chocolate-chip cookie dough straight from the bowl? Or do you still prefer ice cream sodas?” He raised his bristly eyebrows as Alison rose from her seat and stalked off to join her friend Veronica at the next table.
Mr. Robert shrugged. “I have a teenage daughter of my own, you see, Sylvia,” he said. “So I’m used to being snubbed.”
“What grade’s your daughter in?” I was hoping to atone for my sister’s rudeness. But Mr. Robert didn’t seem to hear; he was now watching fiercely as Mom gathered up paper plates and bowls, frosted hair sweeping the tops of her freckled shoulders. I would have thought him angry, but for the sly smile tugging his cheeks. My insides lurched. Why did he come back? What did he want with us? I suddenly remembered what he’d said the last time I’d seen him, about tracking us down, whether or not she wanted him to.
Since then, we’d had four different addresses, traversing the boundaries of the Greater Los Angeles Basin as my father completed his residency, went to work as a surgeon and began his own practice. During those six years, we’d gone from renting a two-bedroom, roach-infested duplex beside the Riverside Freeway to creating our own five-bedroom, Mexican-style dream house near the Santa Ana foothills, complete with inground pool and Jacuzzi.
“We’re coming into our own, girls,” Mom had declared during the weeks after our move, and I knew she meant more than those wallpaper samples she’d been itching to get her hands on. She meant quitting her job as a medical transcriber after tiresome years of night work. She meant the end of my father’s residencies. Maybe now he’d tell stories again, chase us across the lawn and dig in the vegetable garden. Maybe we’d even go for drives up to the mountains, or down to Tijuana—just the four of us. And we’d never again have to load our things into boxes and shove them into a U-Haul.
As always, my mother’s faith worked inside me and grew there like a sweet disease. And for a while, it was sweet.
“We actually should be getting home so
on,” Mom said now as she crammed her potluck things into paper bags.
“Your hair looks great long, Lainie,” Mr. Robert observed. “It’s the only thing different, you know.”
At this she paused, biting the inside of her cheek. She had a canker sore just there—she’d been worrying it with her tongue all morning. “And your hair—”
“I know, I know.” He ran his fingers over his sparse waves, the perfect pink oval of skin at the back. “Time hasn’t been quite so kind to me, I dare say. But I’m hoping—”
“We really do need to get going.” She resumed her gathering and packing.
Mr. Robert placed his boxy hand over my mother’s. He wore a thick gold band on his ring finger, adorned with a single ruby. “I’ve only just gotten here.”
“But it’s late, Robert. And the fires. I know they’re saying everything’s under control, but the whole thing makes me nervous.”
“All the more reason to go somewhere else. Let the firemen do their jobs.” He stood, snatching the bags from her. “I know—I’ll take you all to Disneyland. How ’bout it? I haven’t been there myself since I moved north.”
“Disneyland on a Sabbath?” I asked, my eyes popping.
“It’s not what we do on Saturdays,” my mother explained. “You know that.”
“Ah yes, the Sabbath ritual. Let’s see if I can remember…Sabbath School, then potluck or lunch at the club, then, let’s see, home for the weekly call to Gram and Poppy, a few hymns around the piano… ‘We gather together to whatsa-majigger?’” He boomed out a tremulous tenor, winking at me. “Am I missing anything?”
“You make it all sound so tedious.” She slapped his arm.
“It does sound a bit dull, doesn’t it? In any case, this isn’t a usual Saturday. How often do I get to come to town for the weekend?”
My mother, sighing, pressed her hand to her forehead, as if to take her temperature. I held my breath. My father would soon finish his rounds at the hospital. He’d probably go to the club to practice his shooting and arrive home by early evening. He hadn’t been to church with us in years—I wasn’t sure if this was a question of faith or just scheduling—but he always made it home for the end-of-Sabbath hymns sung around my mother’s Steinway. Saturday night was family night (after sundown hymns, we watched All in the Family and The Carol Burnett Show, sprawled on the orange sofa, eating takeout Chinese straight from the cartons) and I was certain he’d miss us if we were absent when he arrived. At the same time, I must have harbored a small, secret wish for revenge. Let him be the one, for once, who waits and wonders, I must have thought, for I felt an awful, deep thrill when my mother said yes to Mr. Robert, then broke into a girlish grin. “I guess it wouldn’t be so very terrible, just this once,” she said.
Mr. Robert beamed. Surely the good Lord couldn’t disapprove of a little harmless fun on a Saturday afternoon. He even invited us to bring some of our friends. I didn’t have any friends at the potluck that day, but Ali invited Veronica, and the two of them whispered and giggled all the way to Anaheim in the back of Mr. Robert’s cavernous rented Buick. I sat on the front bench seat, sandwiched between the two adults, listening for clues; they spoke of Southern California golf courses, the impeachment hearings, the SLA and Patty Hearst—things any two old acquaintances might discuss. My mind sprang to what I’d learned in Sabbath School that day: Jesus would come on a cloud in the eastern sky when we all least expected it. We had to be vigilant every minute of every day. He might even come today, I thought, glancing at the mirrored buildings along the highway, the blurred brown horizon. What would He do with us if He found us like this, going to Disneyland on a Sabbath with a mysterious friend of Mom’s—an old friend who had now draped his arm across the seat behind me and was brushing his fingertips against the nape of her neck?
That my mother might have a boyfriend seemed as plausible as the sun turning to blood. She was the kind of mother who took Ali and me to the fabric store every Tuesday, wall-papered the insides of her silverware drawers, ironed our father’s dress shirts and had the house scoured on Fridays, in preparation for the Sabbath. She was the kind of wife who kept my father’s dinner warm on the stove all the nights he stayed late at the hospital, who endured his absences and outbursts with a sigh.
Alison and I always teased her about being so perfect. The most heinous crime she could remember committing as a girl was cutting through Mr. Snyder’s forbidden peach orchard on her way home from school one rainy afternoon. The one time we’d heard her swear—when she locked herself out of the house on a Sabbath before church, then stomped around the courtyard breathing, “Damn, damn, damn”—we could hardly contain our delighted shock. Even our father, whose piousness had turned to worldliness over the years, teased Mom by pouring her a drink now and then, insisting it would do her good. She always refused.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want things. I knew she’d once dreamed of being a professional singer, and had the voice to prove it. Each year, she was chosen as the lead soprano in the Christmas and Easter cantatas at church. For weeks leading up to these events, Mom’s piercing, bright melodies floated from the shower and the laundry room, even the produce aisle at the grocery store. I could have recognized that voice anywhere. I knew it as intimately as I knew the lemony smell behind her ears, the five moles hovering on her left shoulder like a tiny constellation, her clean, bony fingers and the four rings that adorned them—one for every five years she and Dad had been together. I’d thought I knew everything about her by heart, even the contents of her cosmetics cases, her girlhood photos and retired longings.
But watching her at Disneyland that afternoon—she was sucking sticky sheets of cotton candy from her fingers, trying on every hat in the Mad Hatter’s shop, laughing openmouthed as we rounded the Matterhorn—I had the sickening feeling that my mother was a stranger, that if I were to walk up behind her and press my nose into her back, as I was longing to do, she’d turn with a start as if I were some other woman’s child, mistaking her for my own.
As we were standing in line for the Haunted Mansion, Mr. Robert sidled up beside me, looping his heavy arm through mine. “Hey, twerp, bet you haven’t had this much fun on a Sabbath before?”
I flinched, resisting the desire to yank myself away. It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t like him. I just didn’t like how hard it was to dislike him. He was silly and buoyant, two things I could never have accused my father of. Despite my edginess and my sister’s complete rudeness—rolling her eyes at his jokes, whispering behind her hand to Veronica—Mr. Robert was trying. He asked about our favorite radio stations. He bought us souvenirs, candy and Cokes, which Mom never let us have. And he didn’t mind making a fool of himself—donning a French-fry mustache, performing a jig to Tinker-bell’s ballet or impersonating W.C. Fields—just to make her laugh. I’d never seen my mother so giggly and flushed.
“Your mother tells me you still love horses.” Mr. Robert’s arm tightened around mine as he leaned down to whisper in my ear. I caught a whiff of spicy mustard on his breath, and my stomach curled into a hard ball, like a pill bug. “I’m an old cowboy myself,” he said. “I’ll take you riding sometime—how ’bout it?”
“Sounds great.” I loved riding above all else, and was obsessed with the wish to own a horse, which my parents had failed to grant. Too dangerous, said my mother. Too costly and time-consuming, said my father, and besides, they were sure it was a passing whim—a typical little-girl fancy I would tire of soon enough. It felt eerie and enticing to have my dream acknowledged now, by this familiar stranger. I dropped my bag of fudge so that I could extricate myself from his meaty grip. He seemed to get the message and took a step sideways, but during the ride, I occasionally felt his hand resting on my shoulder, or on the small of my back, in a gesture that was comforting, and too intimate.
My own father, whose hands were small, precise and knuckly, rarely touched me this way. My own father needled and tickled, or slapped and spanked, depending on the occasion. Jus
t that morning, I’d been blowing bubbles in my milk after he’d told me not to, and I felt the customary, sudden sting of his backhand, his ring scraping my cheekbone as the glass toppled, drenching my dress. After I’d sopped up the mess, Dad placed his hand on top of my head, ruffled my hair—his way to say sorry—but never this strange, open-handed caress in the center of my back, as if he wanted to calm me, or claim me as his own.
By the time Mr. Robert left us at the church parking lot, the sun was going down, smoldering red through layers of haze from the nearby fires. Helicopters circled the pillars of smoke, their percussive beat filling the sky. Ali and Veronica had stopped talking about ninth-grade boys and were oddly silent as we rode home in Mom’s Jaguar. In Veronica’s driveway, Ali begged Mom to let her friend spend the night. She clung to Veronica’s arm until our mother said, “Not tonight, Alison! For the hundredth time, no!”
I couldn’t have named my own dread about returning home until Mom stopped the car at the top of our street and peered at us in the back, a fierce, unfamiliar thrust to her jaw. Backlit by the setting sun, evening shadows sharpening her cheekbones, she reminded me of Pocahontas in my fifth-grade history reader.
“Please, girls, do not mention Mr. Robert, or Disneyland, to your father.”
“What? You want us to lie?” Ali’s eyes gleamed in the dusky orange light.
“No. I don’t want you to lie, exactly. I just— Dad wouldn’t understand, that’s all. It might upset him to know that Mr. Robert and I are still friends.”
Ali and I cast each other a glance.
“So, what have we been, like, doing all day, Mom?” my sister demanded, hooking her golden hair behind her ears, licking her lips. My own lips felt as dry and rubbery as erasers.
Outside the Ordinary World Page 2