After Bergen had left, Teresa went back into the house. For a moment, only a moment, she wondered if the detective could possibly know about her and Silver, if he had just sensed it, if he had found some proof. But clearly, Bergen had always disliked Silver, certainly it was nothing more than that. Later that day, when the detective was back in San Francisco and the sun was lower in the sky, Teresa would sit with Lee and her mother and sister; she would hold a plate full of lemon cake and drink a cup of hot tea. But now, alone in the living room, listening to Lee run the water in the kitchen as she washed the breakfast dishes, Teresa wondered what she would do next, and she wasn’t at all certain that the best thing to do might not be to simply disappear, leaving behind nothing more than a thin, inky line of despair.
On the morning of the day when they were to leave Santa Rosa, Lee woke up early. She got out of bed when the sky was still dark; she put on her black dress and then went to the portable crib to get Jackie, making certain to keep her hand over his mouth so that he couldn’t cry out and wake Silver. She went downstairs in her bare feet, and at the bottom of the stairs she paused by the oval mirror and looked at the bruise on her cheek—the bruise itself was yellow, but all around it, in a circle, her skin had turned purple. At three in the morning, when all the neighbors on Divisadero Street were fast asleep, Silver had hit her, he had turned on her for no reason at all. He had had too much to drink at the Dragon, then hadn’t been able to sleep, he paced across the room, he opened the window and tilted his head, as if listening for a voice he couldn’t quite hear. It was then Lee had gone over to him; she put her arms around him and told him to come back to bed.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Silver said, and maybe she should have known enough to keep quiet, but every day they spent in Santa Rosa seemed to be taking him farther away from her, so Lee put her hand on her hip, and she pushed him too far.
“What the hell are you listening for?” she said. “What the hell do you think you’re going to hear in the middle of the night?”
That was all she said when he turned on her: he caught her by surprise and hit her hard, just as if she were his enemy. He had been sorry then, he had kissed her, called her darling, led her back to bed. And Lee was so stunned that she hadn’t said another word, hadn’t even cried. They fought often, that was nothing new, there were weeks when it seemed as if they did nothing else. But Silver had always cooled down before; he may have wanted to hit her, but he didn’t. Now, as she studied her face in the morning light, and afterward, when she went into the kitchen to get Jackie some breakfast, Lee was certain that it was whatever Silver had been listening for that had made him strike her, it was Santa Rosa, she thought, it was being home.
Lee sat Jackie down on the floor and got him a bowl of Frosted Flakes; she took out a Pepsi for herself and watched her son. She was worried about him, and she grew more so each day. He was so uninterested, so quiet that he sent chills down her spine. Lee was too frightened to take him to a doctor; she hoped he was a late bloomer, only a little slow. At first she had spent all day every day talking to him, hoping that sooner or later he would respond; now, when she was with her son, she was as silent as Jackie, and she watched him with an odd feeling of distrust.
Lee was halfway through her Pepsi when she heard the basement steps creak; she reached to the drainboard and picked up a knife. She tried not to breathe. When the cellar door opened and Teresa stood there, dressed in a cotton nightgown which reached past her knees, Lee threw back her head and laughed.
“You almost got yourself killed,” she told Teresa and she showed her the knife.
“A robber would have to be crazy to come in this house,” Teresa said. “There’s nothing here except this.” She held up a jar she had found; it was blackberry jam left over from the canning Dina had done the summer before. “I was hungry,” Teresa explained, but the truth was she had been dreaming all night of Dina, Dina standing in the kitchen filling Mason jars with sour tomatoes and jam. Teresa filled the tea kettle, then ran the jam jar under hot water. When she unscrewed the top it seemed as if summer filled the room. She took a spoon from the drawer, then sat at the table and began to eat the jam straight from the jar. Lee sat across from her and sipped her Pepsi and it was then that Teresa noticed the bruise.
“What happened?” Teresa asked. She reached over and touched Lee’s face, drawn to the violent mark.
Lee brushed at her cheek as if she were wiping away some rouge. “It’s nothing,” Lee said. “I walked into a wall.”
Teresa brought her feet up and covered her knees with her nightgown; her hair fell carelessly, like strands of knotted black pearls. She felt herself grow jealous; around her mouth the traces of blackberry jam were the same color as the bruise on Lee’s face.
“Did he do it?” Teresa asked. “Is he the wall you walked into?”
Jackie had finished his breakfast and had wandered over to a corner of linoleum that Bergen had put down years before; the corner rose up like a knife. The moment Jackie cut himself on its ragged edge he began to cry; in seconds his cry had become a deep howl. Lee ran over to her son; she got down on her hands and knees, and when her soothing voice couldn’t comfort Jackie, she put her hand over the boy’s mouth.
“Goddamn it,” Lee whispered to Jackie. “You’re going to wake him up.”
But up in his old bedroom on the second floor, Silver was already awake. He had decided there was no way around it: Teresa would have to come and live with them. He hadn’t bothered to discuss his decision with Lee, and the more he thought about it the more her living with them seemed the only possible choice, no matter how uncomfortable it would be for all of them. Silver had gotten dressed quickly; he had put on a clean pair of jeans and a white shirt and left his soiled clothes on the bed for Lee to pack. On his way out the door he tripped over Lee’s high heels, and so he was already muttering to himself about his wife’s stupidity as he walked down the stairs, and his mood was black when he reached the kitchen and found Lee crouched on the floor with their son. He stared at her, disgusted, then went to the table and examined the half-empty Pepsi bottle.
“What the hell is this supposed to be?” he asked Lee. He held the soda bottle in the air and walked over to his wife; he stood so close that his boot crushed the hem of her skirt. “This may come as a shock to you, but most human beings drink coffee in the morning.”
Teresa tried not to look at them; she was afraid that her jealousy would reflect in the open jar of jam. She got up and poured boiling water through the coffee filter and into the pot.
“Thank God someone around here knows how to make coffee,” Silver said. He reached down and pulled Lee to her feet. “If there’s something you do right I wish somebody would tell me about it.”
“Maybe somebody else would appreciate me,” Lee said. “Another man would think I did a lot of things right.”
“Oh, yeah?” Silver said. “Tell me one, just one.”
“Will you stop it?” Teresa said to them. “Just stop.”
Silver and Lee looked away from each other, silenced. Teresa brought two cups of coffee over to the table and sat down; she closed her eyes and leaned her head back so that her neck arched. Silver spooned sugar into both cups.
“Go on,” he told Teresa, “drink this. You’ve been sleeping too much,” he said with more concern than Lee had ever heard from him before.
Teresa did as he told her. “I can’t stand to hear it,” she said. “Don’t fight with her.”
“I can speak for myself,” Lee said. “You don’t have to protect me.”
“After you drink your coffee, get dressed,” Silver said to Teresa. “I’m taking you with us to San Francisco.”
“When was this decided?” Lee asked.
Teresa shook her head. “I’m going back to work today.”
“Maybe Silver’s right,” Lee said, hoping to please. “It’s depressing here, it’s dangerous. You can’t go on living here alone.”
The more Lee talked, th
e jumpier Silver became. He took his car keys out of his pocket and tossed them up so that they chimed like bells; he imagined the three of them in the same house, separated by so little: a bedroom wall, a breakfast table set with brown bowls filled with orange slices. Every night, when the lights had been turned out and the quilts were still cold on the bed, Silver would sleep beside Lee, but all the while he would be thinking about Teresa, worrying that she might someday decide to announce all that had happened between them.
“You don’t want to come to San Francisco?” Silver said to Teresa. “Is that it?”
When Teresa didn’t answer, Lee grew tense; she was certain that Silver would set his sister straight, but all he did was lean against the stove and say, “If you want to stay here I won’t force you to go.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Teresa said. Her voice was dangerously thin.
“Okay,” Silver said softly.
Teresa stood up so quickly that her chair fell backward; one wooden leg splintered as it hit the floor. “You think you can just come back here after all this time?” Silver turned away; he looked out the kitchen window and watched two blackbirds walk along the porch railing. “You can’t expect me to live in your house,” Teresa told him.
“All right,” Silver said. “All right, all right, stay here if that’s what you want.”
Teresa ran from the room; she went upstairs and slammed her door shut. And while Teresa was pulling her waitress uniform out of the closet, Silver turned away from the window to find his wife staring at him from across the room, her eyes so blue they seemed like bits of glass.
“What the hell are you looking at?” Silver asked her.
Later, after Lee had packed all their clothes, and Silver was outside loading up the car, Lee went back into the kitchen. The back door was open, and through the mesh of the screen she could see Teresa walking across the garden, dressed in a white uniform and the sweater Silver had sent her for her last birthday. Teresa cut across the yard, then went out the side gate, avoiding the driveway where Silver was now checking the oil in the Camaro. Alone in the kitchen, Lee watched her sister-in-law; she would have given anything to know why Teresa felt even more abandoned by Silver than she herself did, but by the time Lee had found the courage to ask, Teresa was already running down Divisadero Street, she was already gone.
Teresa continued to work at Max’s Café all through the spring and summer. Every Thursday, after the dinner shift, she got her paycheck, and in return she wrote down orders, polished the countertops, delivered hot plates of fried eggs and hamburger specials. There were two waitresses at Max’s—Teresa, and Lucy, a woman who had been in the same grade as Silver in high school and who still remembered watching Teresa’s brother longingly, finally shoring up the nerve to leave a love note in his locker, a note that Silver never bothered to read, much less answer. Lucy was the only person in town Teresa spoke to regularly all summer long; after work, Teresa was always alone. In the evenings she did her shopping. The huge aisles at the Safeway where Reuben had once worked made her dizzy, and so she went to a corner grocery on Divisadero Street, a small shop where lettuce was piled up in a wooden bin and dust coated the jars of apricots stored in syrup. Late at night, she listened to the radio; she learned old songs by heart and knew every word Roy Orbison and the Drifters had ever sung. The radio she listened to was an old Magnavox King Connors had bought; Teresa kept it on her night table so that even when she slept the dial glowed and there was a never-ending lullaby of blue chords to keep her company. She kept KCAX tuned in: she got to know each D.J.’s favorite songs. Music crept into the corners of the house, even into the rooms Teresa now avoided: Dina’s bedroom, Silver’s room, the living room, where the shades had been drawn for months.
Aside from the D.J.s on KCAX there was only Lucy, and conversations with her were as limited as a weather report. Lucy talked about men, always customers—a truckdriver who had left a five-dollar tip, a boy who had stared at Teresa for so long that his hamburger special had grown cold as ice and he had left Max’s without eating lunch.
“You could get a date just like that,” Lucy said again and again, snapping her fingers in the air. “You don’t have to sit by yourself and listen to the damned radio every night.”
One afternoon when the two women had a break between the breakfast and lunch rushes. Lucy decided to give Teresa some stern advice. Teresa was eating a tunafish sandwich she had fixed for herself more than an hour before, Lucy had a salad with no dressing.
“If you were a little friendlier you could get any man who walked in here,” Lucy said. “Otherwise, you’re going to wind up alone.”
“One of our customers?” Teresa said. “Forget it.”
“I don’t think they’re so bad,” Lucy said.
“They are,” Teresa said. “They’re that bad.”
“I’m seeing someone I met here—Sal, he owns the auto parts store down the street. The problem with you is you’re stuck up. That’s why you can’t even get a date.”
“Maybe I don’t care,” Teresa said. She put down her half-eaten sandwich and walked to the end of the counter.
Lucy went over and put an arm around her. “You don’t have to be crazy about every guy you go out with,” she said. “You don’t even have to like him. There are other reasons to go out with a man.”
Teresa looked over at Lucy. “What other reasons?” she asked.
“Hell,” Lucy said, “I’m not an heiress and neither are you.”
“Are you talking about money?” Teresa said. “Going out with men and getting money for it?”
Lucy glared at Teresa, then shot a look at the short-order cook behind the grill. “I’m talking about getting a little something back for what you put out,” she whispered. “That’s all.”
“Well, that’s disgusting,” Teresa said. “That’s what’s called being a prostitute.”
“Oh, yeah?” Lucy said. “Really? I’d like to know what’s wrong with getting something back. I’m not talking about millions. Thirty dollars for a good time, twenty if I can do what they want without having to take off my clothes.”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” Teresa said. She began to clean the countertop with Windex; she hummed a Bob Dylan song she had heard on KCAX that morning.
“I could fix you up with someone in a minute,” Lucy whispered. “It’s not all work, you know. Some of it’s fun. What’s wrong with having a good time?”
That night, when Teresa walked home from work, she felt lonelier than ever. Nothing helped, not Atlas waiting for her at the door, not the radio or the sound of her favorite D.J.’s voice. It was nearly the end of the summer, five months had passed since Dina’s funeral, and in all that time Teresa hadn’t gone dancing once, she hadn’t had one gin and tonic, she hadn’t been kissed on the mouth. She looked through her closet—nothing was new. She studied her face in the mirror, and carefully painted her eyelids with shadow. That night Teresa listened to the radio without really hearing any lyrics; she washed her hair and then combed it until it stood away from her head, electrified, glowing; she rinsed out a lace slip she’d forgotten she owned and stayed up well past midnight polishing a pair of high-heeled shoes she hadn’t worn since high school. The following day, when she went to work at Max’s, Teresa felt exhausted, but she looked sharp—she wore eyeliner and the polished high heels, and Lucy could tell, in an instant, that Teresa had decided to make a change in her life. But she didn’t pressure Teresa, she waited for Teresa to come to her, and in the afternoon, soon after lunch, Teresa went over to Lucy and looked her straight in the eye.
“Who’re you going to introduce me to first?” Teresa asked.
“You got tired of being alone.” Lucy nodded.
“I don’t know about that,” Teresa told the other waitress. “I think it’s more that I just got tired.”
On a Friday night in the last week of August, Teresa was wearing a black skirt and a red satin blouse. She had been waiting outside the Dragon for
fifteen minutes—long enough to have second thoughts, but not long enough to act on them—when Lucy pulled up in her yellow Pinto.
“Don’t expect too much,” Lucy said as the two women stood in the dark. She ran a comb through her hair. “He’s a friend of Sal’s, he’s married, and he wants to have a good time tonight.”
“Well, so do I,” Teresa said. “I want to go dancing. I want to go everywhere.”
“For now, let’s just try the bar,” Lucy said as they walked into the Dragon. “He’s not going to be a Hollywood movie star, you know.”
It turned out that his name was Roger, and when he saw Teresa he wished that his wife had gone to visit her sister down on the Peninsula for more than just one night; he wished he had a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket, and more than a spoonful of hope left inside. He bought her two drinks—gin and tonics with slices of lime that burned the roof of her mouth. They left the Dragon after less than an hour, just the two of them, gone before Lucy and Sal noticed their absence. They drove to a club in Petaluma and danced until midnight, and even then Teresa didn’t want to stop. On a crowded dance floor, in that last week in August, she had found an antidote for loneliness; every time she stepped onto the dance floor another arrow was removed from her flesh, leaving behind nothing more than a perfect circle, a wound so tiny it could be seen only in starlight.
“Come on,” Roger said to her finally. “We’ve got better things to do.”
They drove back to Santa Rosa; while Roger went into the office of the Lamplighter to register for a room, Teresa reached under her skirt and pulled down her panty hose; her legs were burning hot, on fire. When she saw Roger walking back to the car, the key to their room in hand, Teresa opened the glove compartment and threw the panty hose inside, then got out and followed Roger past the pool, which was surrounded by amber lanterns and laced with chlorine. The night air chilled her bare legs; she thought, briefly, about turning back, but didn’t.
They made love on a bed covered by an orange bedspread; the white sheets had been burned through the center by a cigarette carelessly dropped onto the linen. They kept the lights off, and all the time they held each other Teresa could hear the motor of the ice machine, which stood in a courtyard just beyond their room. He whispered to her: how beautiful she was, how much he wanted her, had always wanted a woman like her, a dark woman with skin that was cool beneath his fingers, someone who knew when to be quiet and when to sigh out loud. At first, Teresa felt as though every inch of her was white with desire; she hoped that the stranger she held was the man of her dreams, this night would become every night, all other memories would be forgotten. But it was no good; when she kissed Roger, when she closed her eyes, she was imagining another man’s kisses, another man’s heart, a man who, if he knew where she was, would have driven all night to find her, jumping out of his car before the wheels had come to a stop, breaking down the motel-room door if he had to, just to get to her, just to find her again. It was Silver she thought about that night, and her thought shocked her. Still it was Silver whose name pounded in her head and echoed off every tile, each piece of teak furniture in the motel room.
White Horses Page 16