“I guess I figured you had enough to deal with. Or maybe I felt ridiculous,” he adds.
“Ridiculous?”
“I might not be able to work on the house for a while,” he states flatly, as if this is the worst news he’s ever had to deliver.
“Clearly.” I laugh. “Although I suppose, knowing you, you’ll find a way to lay tile or something with one hand.”
“Actually, I’ve laid most of the tile already. Did the mudroom floor using remnants from Richie Littleton’s job. There are all these gorgeous little hexagons—sort of a mosaic. I think you’ll like it.”
“I’m sure I will.” My old tenderness for him nudges me like a dog. His consistency, his faithfulness to the dream. “What will you do with yourself once the house gets done?” I tease.
“I’ll make furniture in the converted barn.” He doesn’t miss a beat. “While you paint.”
“Really?” I’m stunned by the realization that—even after all these years—there are slivers of him I don’t recognize, desires I haven’t learned by heart.
“Anyway, I won’t be able to do much for a few weeks,” Nathan repeats. “And we’re just about out of money. Our credit’s tapped out.” He tries to cross his arms behind his head, then winces, remembering the wrist, and turns to me instead. “It’s a serious problem,” he concludes.
“We’ve got more than one,” I tell him after a pause.
“I know we do.” After he says it, I discover that my hands are burning, and the room has started to tilt. “How has it gotten like this, bean?” Nathan says into the gulf between our beds. “When did we stop paying attention?”
I’m loath to utter a single word. Afraid that if I even part my lips, the truth will shoot free like fire, ready to ignite the last threads tying us together, devour everything dear. Instead I probe my memory, trying to locate the exact moment—or series of moments—when our marriage began to stumble: Was it the unrelenting grind of parenthood or the stress of home improvement? Was it my unexpected pregnancy with Emmie or his hurtful indiscretion with the architect? Or does it go back further? Maybe I’m just hardwired for disloyalty.
“There was that woman—” I start, unsure of what I’m after, where I’m going with this.
“Oh, Sylv.” He exhales. “I really thought we’d gotten past that. I thought you knew—”
“I just wonder, you know. What was going through your head?”
“It was one night,” he says. “I was drunk, exhausted, careless. We were in a terrible place—you know that. You were so far away then, so preoccupied, and I was just—Believe me, I wish I could take it back.”
“But what were you thinking, that night, Nathan? Why were you willing to take such a risk?” My heart is laboring painfully now; it’s difficult to even draw a breath.
He turns to face me. “At the time, I guess it felt like I was losing myself—babies, houses, the job…. Losing you, too, everything we’d loved about each other. You were so pissed off all the time.”
“Was I? It’s all kind of a blur.”
“Yeah. It was like, this last chance for lightness, discovery…. Kind of like the moment on the starting block in a swim meet—the second before you plunge into the cold. You need to remember what you’re made of, or something. Whether you’re still in there. I know it sounds completely asinine.”
“No,” I whisper, lacing my aching fingers over my chest. “Not completely.”
“Listen,” he says after a long silence. “I know I’ve been an idiot about the house. Preoccupied, stubborn, maybe a bit obsessive…”
“A bit?”
“Okay, maybe a lot. But somehow, I thought when I saw you out here… I had this fantasy—if I walked in your grandparents’ front door, you’d melt or something. That the distance would just melt.” He chuckles bleakly. “Silly, huh? To think it could be that easy.”
“Yeah.” I pull the electric blanket to my chin. I feel chilled and waterlogged, swollen with sadness and deceit. “I guess I’ve been preoccupied, too,” I offer. “Worried about Hannah. Worried about Gram.”
“Well. Gram’s clearly on her last legs. I had no idea.” He yawns, seemingly relieved to shift to another topic. “I’m sorry I doubted it, Sylvie. Sorry I made light of it.”
As his breathing slows and extends, I’m searching myself for an honest emotion: Am I truly wounded by his earlier indifference? Or is my anger just an excuse to stay separate, and silent? One thing’s for certain—I know I won’t sleep this night.
Two days later, flying over Arizona, I’m thinking about Gram’s last words to me. My bags packed and ready in the entryway, I’d knelt down beside the couch and took her brittle hand, stared into her clouded eyes and apologized. “I’m sorry, Gram,” I said, struggling for words. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner, that I didn’t bring the girls out to—” I broke off as she patted my arm. Outside, Ben and Donny were chasing Emmie across the emerald lawn while Han rocked beside Alison on the glider, absorbing the light. My sister and I had restored a tentative equilibrium, reached our usual unspoken agreement not to talk about things, just to pretend the quarrel never happened.
“Your place is with your family,” Gram said softly.
“I know, Gram. Somehow, it’s been really hard to get home these last few years,” I sniffed. My mother came up behind me, touched my shoulder.
“You’ll miss your plane, if you don’t leave now,” she said. “Nathan’s waiting.”
“No, Sylvie.” My grandmother gripped my hand, gathering her breath for a final thought. “This isn’t your home anymore. Make your home where you’ve chosen to be.” Then she pressed my fingers to her lips before closing her eyes again, turning her face away.
But how? I wonder now, staring at the vast expanse of terra cotta desert below us. How do I do it, Gram? Who will show me the way?
1975
MY MOTHER AND MR. ROBERT WERE MARRIED AT THE end of the school year, in an Adventist chapel in Monterey, nine months after my father’s death. Coming down the aisle on Poppy’s big arm, Mom grinned up at Ali and me—so blushing and unsure, she seemed more like a teenage bride than a thirty-eight-year-old recently widowed mother of two.
Throughout the service, the idea of my father rattled around my head like an empty can. While the preacher droned about God’s will and second chances, while Mom and Mr. Robert read their vows and kissed primly before the congregation, my father circled my thoughts like a shadowy moth. I heard his nasal laugh echo off the dance floor as Lane Aluminum’s CEO toasted Robert, “The best damn salesman to grace our corporation.” And when Poppy refused to call Robert by name, referring to him as “Number Two,” Dad winked and nodded, like he knew all along we were headed for trouble.
Mom didn’t speak of her own misgivings for a while. When she and Mr. Robert returned from their honeymoon, she seemed rested and resigned, if not ecstatic. The thousand-acre Oregon horse ranch had given way months ago, to blueprints for a modest, three-bedroom tract house in the east San Francisco bay, but Mom seemed to take this in stride. “Robert has to work,” she’d announced after the New Year, as if it had been evident all along. “He can’t just uproot his whole life!”
As the movers hauled her Steinway through the new front doors, unloaded our sagging box springs, dropped our crates on the freshly paved driveway, Mom orchestrated with a bright voice and terse smiles, but I knew better. I saw the way she stood apart from her husband, embracing her own ribs. I noticed how she touched Ali’s angry forearm—as if seeking absolution—and fell silent at meals, her face going pallid in the middle of a conversation.
It wasn’t just the tidal wave of loss, the shock and sleepless nights—all three of us wandering the house in silent shifts for months after he died, pursued by nightmares. Mr. Robert had changed, too. Gone was the goofy, cowboy-booted captor who’d made us pancakes at Wallowa. That was vacation, of course, and this was real life, his businessman’s life that we’d signed on with for good.
In this new life,
Mr. Robert left at seven forty-five each morning, wearing his uniform. (It wasn’t really a uniform, but that’s what Ali and I called his blue-gray suits, white shirts, maroon ties and striped socks.) He returned every evening at five-fifteen, kissed my mother’s cheek, patted her ass, poured himself a martini and settled in front of the TV, where he’d nest until dinner. By then, he’d have removed certain parts of the uniform—the jacket and shoes and tie—and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, so his gray chest hairs sprouted around the empty buttonholes. He’d sit on the brand-new couch, hitching his pants to reveal shiny, hairless calves. I’d go in to him sometimes and sit beside him—something I’d rarely done with my own father.
“Hey, twerp,” he’d always chirp, and then he’d start changing the channels, cradling the remote loosely. He’d jump from sports to weather to news and back again, never staying on anything long enough to get a story from it, and soon I’d get discouraged and leave. Sometimes, I wondered if he’d tricked me—maybe once I was gone he’d congratulate himself, take a deep sip of his drink and settle into one program all the way through.
Ali stayed in her room almost all the time now, organizing. Since Dad’s accident, she’d been obsessed with order and had already arranged her new room—books by author, magazines by title, photo albums by date. She’d color-coded her sweaters and the last time I went in, was folding her underwear in shoe boxes to take to boarding school. I wouldn’t start school until September, and had no one to talk to. I had even given my skateboard to Theresa, imagining I wouldn’t need it in our new neighborhood because I’d have a horse. I had pictured rolling fields dotted with shiny equine backs, but the only horses I saw around here were kept in tiny corrals angled up dry hillsides. From the highway, you could see lots of these triangular pens sandwiched between new Tudors or colonials—houses so shameful and stark along the freeway, they seemed like naked hitchhikers, showing themselves blithely to every passing commuter.
To make matters worse, Theresa called in late June to say that she and her family were moving to Vermont in September. Rose, a native New Englander, had inherited a five-hundred-acre Morgan farm outside Brattleboro, wherever that was. It may as well have been Tunisia. “I hope you’ll come out,” she said. Then she asked how things were in my new town.
“It’s great here,” I lied. “There are horses everywhere you look, and no smog!”
The air was cleaner in Danville—on that point I had to give Mr. Robert credit. And there were some buzzing golden hills behind our house; if I hopped the fence and picked my way up the artificial creek, between backyard gates and swimming pools, I could slip out of the development altogether.
“My mom wants to know if you’re doing any painting,” Theresa asked. “She says you have talent.” Rose had started giving me art lessons a month after my father’s accident. What began as a blessed diversion had blossomed into something like a calling. It turned out I loved the soft smear of paint on my fingertips, the grainy skin of canvas. I loved everything about painting—the greasy pull of the dishrag against my forearm, the tiny but infinite worlds I could create. But I hadn’t had the heart to unpack all my supplies, in this new house.
“I walk now instead,” I told Theresa. “There are hills forever here.”
Leaving all the houses behind, I’d climb through the widest stretch in a saggy barbed-wire fence and emerge in the foothills of the great Mount Diablo. There I could wander for whole bright hours without smelling a car or looking at my stepfather’s face. I could make my way through desiccated oak groves, could stretch my skinny legs and shout to the blue-white heavens until dinner without having to confront any evidence of my mother’s and my mistake.
But evidence continued to present itself. In this new life, Mr. Robert had real teenage children who often came to kick at the driveway, nursing bent cigarettes, and an ex-wife who called in the middle of the night. I’d wake in my room, which still smelled of nylon carpet and fresh paint, to the phone ringing in the blackest hours of morning, then Mr. Robert’s exasperated words. “Yes, Bee, I know you feel that way. How much have you had to drink, Bee? Where are the children—can you put Lisa on? This is really going to have to stop. You have to pull yourself together, Beatrice. I’m going now. No—there’s no need for that kind of language.” Then my mother’s sleepy, plaintive voice, and soon the phone would ring again; Mr. Robert would go through the whole thing again before unplugging the cord from the wall. Sometimes Mom’s words became rushed and angry, like sharp little winds cutting through the house, and once I heard her gentle sobbing, accompanied by Mr. Robert’s tired, “There, there, Elaine. I know it’s all been hard.”
I waited for her confession, but it didn’t come. She was quieter than usual as she completed the tasks her new home offered. She looked old all of a sudden, the gray half-moons below her eyes every bit as dark as during the weeks after Dad’s death, the grooves around her mouth setting. Sometimes I sat with her or read to her while she ironed Mr. Robert’s shirts or practiced her golf on the living room carpet, but we couldn’t rustle up much conversation. We were going to make the best of it—that’s what she seemed to say in her sturdy glances, her mustering sighs.
Finally one Saturday morning, in the car en route to our new church, my mother looked at Alison and me and said, “I’m sorry I wrecked our lives, girls, but we’re just going to have to make what happiness we can.” That was all. She looked back at the road before her then, dabbed the corners of her eyes with her ring finger. Alison said, “Jeez, Mom. Get a grip,” and stared out the window for the rest of the ride. I didn’t know what to say, so I just touched Mom’s arm, held her hand in my lap all through Sabbath School. And in the middle of the sermon that day, my mother’s hand in mine, I decided to give myself to Jesus. What else could I do? He looked so patient and paternal in his stained-glass glory, towering behind the minister, a lamb tucked under his arm. Pastor Trumble was talking about preparing for the Second Coming—that glorious event when Jesus would appear in the sky, carry us off absolved to His Father’s house in heaven and I thought, Yes, this is the answer! I didn’t know how long it would take, all this redemption, but I decided to wait for it.
Then in July, the real trouble began. The heat suddenly bore down like a flat boulder over our heads. It was so hot, the soles of our feet blistered on the patio. They said it was a drought year—no rain since March—and the hills behind our development crackled in the midday sun. My stepfather said it was earthquake weather, and stayed home for a few days, lounging in his underwear and socks, martini in hand.
“It’s fire weather,” my mother pronounced.
“It’s the end of the world,” said Gram, who’d started coming to Sabbath School with us each week. “Jesus is coming,” she said. “That’s the reason for all this heat.”
I liked this last explanation the best. I liked the idea of Christ ushered in by the catastrophic heat, his presence breaking the cruel sky, a fury of storm clouds following, raining salt tears over the land.
Instead, Mom’s prediction came true; fires cropped up in the hills again. It seemed a perfect way for the world to end, and I pictured us all spinning toward heaven in a wheel of cleansing fire. Two fires, then three, then four fires raged under the tearless sky, circling Mount Diablo’s bald crown like a ring of bright hair. Mom and I felt the heat as we stepped onto the driveway, though the fires were still several miles away. If we stood there for a few minutes, bits of ash would float down and stick to our arms. My mother’s face was spotted with it.
“Isn’t fire one of the last plagues?” I asked hopefully. “Isn’t that one of the things in Revelation? One of the big things before planets fall? Before Jesus comes?”
“I don’t remember, angel,” she said, wiping the soot from her cheeks. “Let’s go inside and make something cold to drink.”
My walks got more risky. I’d slip out of the house when my mother was busy and climb through the fence, making my way on fire roads toward the source of heat
and smoke. It was the same feeling I’d have later, as a student at UCLA, walking through the streets of East Hollywood, La Brea, Echo Park, L.A., legs pumping, mind spinning, winding my way toward danger as if I needed to walk to the very edge of ruin.
Seven houses in the surrounding foothills caught and burned. Five developments, including the one next door, were evacuated. But not ours. So life continued as the fires raged, becoming an ominous but familiar part of the landscape. Mr. Robert watered the deck every morning, doused the driveway. Mom took Ali and me clothes shopping in Walnut Creek and I watched, stunned, as Ali assembled a new persona for boarding school: pumps instead of platforms, cardigans with shoulder pads. She sauntered off to Petites with Mom, leaving me in Juniors, where I tried on earth shoes and macramé belts by myself. I told myself it didn’t matter; we’d never seen eye to eye. Afterward, we staggered out of the air-conditioning like travelers returning from a journey; then we remembered, and glanced up to see what new damage the fires had wrought.
Finally they died down, leaving massive black scars on the hillsides, air murkier than the worst L.A. smog. It was in this sooty aftermath that Lisa, Mr. Robert’s nineteen-year-old daughter, came to our house, her face smudged with mascara, to tell us that Beatrice had drunk herself to death.
“She’s dead, Daddy,” she sobbed, while Mr. Robert patted her back, Mom, Ali and I standing helplessly aside. “Mommy killed herself,” Lisa sniffed, “And now we have nowhere to go. Me and Randy have nowhere to go.”
“Well, of course you do.” He looked over her shoulder at my mother. “You’ll come stay with us, that’s all. We’ll just have to get a bigger house, won’t we, Elaine? We’ll figure it out.” Mom said nothing, just hugged her elbows, bracing herself for the penalties of this new life.
It seemed a fitting ceremony for the beginning of our new family: all of us clothed in black, huddled in the scant shade of a Moraga cemetery, breathing the gritty residue of ashes. The service took place at graveside, as Beatrice had requested. Mr. Robert stood to one side of the casket beside Lisa and Lou, greeting a smattering of family and friends. My mother, Ali and I sweltered on the other side, not exactly innocent bystanders, but not insiders, either. This tragedy was not ours. A few people who knew Mom came up to give stiff condolences. The rest of the crowd eyed us with curiosity or suspicion, and Beatrice’s younger sister from Portland downright glowered from behind her Chinese paper fan.
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