by Jill Barnett
“Are you going to sit there, or read it?”
The words on the page were sharp and clear, and all Cale wanted to do was close his eyes. His sorrow at that moment was almost too much to take.
Dear Mr. Banning:
We at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California are happy to inform you . . .
In his hand was his acceptance to the University of Southern California medical school and the future he’d had thought he’d lost. Cale felt himself getting emotional. Dammit! He could just imagine what his grandfather would say to him if he broke down.
“I made a few calls for you.”
The elation he’d just felt, the emotions, the relief, the small inkling of pride—all sank like his stomach. Victor had pulled some strings—or worse yet, written a check—and now he was in. His grandfather wanted him to know he hadn’t earned this. The urge to tear the letter up and throw it in his grandfather’s face was so strong his hand shook.
“It’s yours, Cale. There’s your ticket in.” Victor studied him in that uncomfortable way—as if Cale were steeped in formaldehyde and Victor held the dissection knife. “There is one condition.”
Cale almost laughed. “Of course, there’s a condition.”
“No girls, Cale.”
“It’s med school, not the seminary.”
“You know what I’m telling you. That’s my condition. Take it or leave it.”
“You’re serious?”
“Perfectly serious.”
As usual, Victor had found a way to control him, and a bright red rage hit Cale in his center. “You expect me to be a eunuch?”
“It’s medical school. I doubt you’ll have much free time. You can sleep with as many girls as you can find the time for, but no getting involved with one girl. No girlfriends. Like the one I met the other day.”
His anger was so strong he didn’t dare speak.
“If I’m going to put my name on the line for you, you’re not going to fail. Every time a girl comes into your life, Cale, for any length of time, your life falls completely apart.”
“You old bastard.” The letter started to crumple in his fist.
“We’ll find out how badly you want to be a doctor.” Victor was sitting there as casually as the devil leaning against the gates to hell. “There’s no option here. If you want med school, you’ll give up your weakness for women and your recurring habit of throwing away your life for some bit of tight pussy.”
The words printed on the top of the letter blurred together. Those were the words Cale had wanted to read for so long and the only door open to him. He couldn’t close it. Not even for his empty, beaten pride. He slowly smoothed the wrinkles out of the letter and put it back inside the envelope. He saw no stamp or postmark on the envelope.
Victor’s face was unreadable, his eyes always sharp and penetrating. They gave away nothing but said everything. Something smoldered in his grandfather, something deep and intense. If you split the man open, Cale wasn’t certain whether he’d bleed fire or ice. Then Victor shrugged as if nothing about Cale was important to him. As always with Victor, this was a test. “Do you agree?”
“Yes, I agree,” Cale said, knowing he was lying. Because of Laurel, because of the other night, because of a thousand cracks in his faith and self-worth, it was a promise he would never keep.
Laurel walked through the front door of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Santa Monica and faced a surprisingly empty lobby. Behind a large glass window, a receptionist sat talking on the phone. Nervous, Laurel adjusted her purse, feeling as conspicuous as huge Alice in the tiny rooms of Wonderland. The woman opened the glass and pointed to the sign-in sheet, then went back to her call. Laurel signed and sat down on a small aqua chair next to a table with women’s magazines fanned across it.
There had to be some kind of universal rule that medical lobbies must all look the same: flat, earth-toned, speckled carpet; leatherette seating on cold steel legs done in colors from a past decade; and tables made of sawdust, glue, and photo paper. The rooms typically had an unreal, movie-set quality about them. So she sat there, as uncomfortable as the furniture and left to distract herself with magazines about child rearing, something she was there to prevent.
“Mrs. Peyton.” The receptionist stood in the door.
For just a confused instant Laurel thought the woman was looking for her mother. She recovered quickly and followed her down a narrow, warren like hallway where the sharp static sound of their shoes on the linoleum matched her heartbeat. The end of the hallway opened up to a larger waiting room with more Naugahyde furniture and bright lights. A woman sat feeding a baby, with three more small children playing on a braided rug in front of her. A young, nervous couple huddled in the corner whispering, and a woman in her forties never looked up from her issue of Good Housekeeping.
“Here.” The receptionist handed her a clipboard with a black pen chained to it. “Fill this out. No rush. We’re running behind today.” She disappeared as fast as the White Rabbit.
Laurel filled out the forms with a combination of truths and lies, and wrote the word “cash” in the insurance box, then balanced the clipboard on her knees and tried not to appear nervous. Getting the pill wasn’t easy. She’d been warned. There were girls who’d tried and were told no, and to change their sexual habits. Or worse yet, their family doctors called their parents. With her mother acting so dour, so strangely, she didn’t want to face that possibility.
An hour later, she was sitting on an exam table with stainless steel stirrups bolted to the end, trying to stay covered in a crisp paper gown the size of four napkins. The door opened and a small, older woman in a lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck came in with Laurel’s information sheet and a plain manila folder. “Hello, Laurel. I’m Dr. Davidson. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to see about getting birth control pills.”
The doctor looked at the chart, then up at her again. “You’re twenty-one?”
“Yes,” Laurel lied.
“Your husband?”
“Vietnam.” Her smile felt frozen. “But he’s coming home next month.”
“Care is free for military families at the military facilities.”
“I’m more comfortable with a woman doctor.”
After silently taking vitals, the doctor stepped back. “I’ll need to do a pelvic exam.” The doctor called in a nurse.
Laurel had never had the exam before and lay there, wincing, nervous as she stared up at nothing but the cottage-cheese ceiling and wished the exam would go fast. It didn’t, it hurt, and it took forever. She gripped the side of the exam table and closed her eyes.
“Breathe,” the nurse said softly. “Just relax.”
Laurel wanted to laugh at the impossibility of that. When she opened her eyes, the nurse was watching the clock and wore a look of panicked boredom that said she had a million things to do other than this. No kindness in her, or much understanding in the expression of the doctor examining her.
Was it censure Laurel saw, or was she imagining something that wasn’t there? She closed her eyes and just clung to the table. By the time the exam was over, she was half crying.
“You can sit up now. Everything seems fine.” The doctor spun away from the stirrups on a rolling stool and the nurse rushed out before the doctor’s gloves hit the trash. She made a few notes on the chart and handed Laurel two pink, plastic, pearlized compacts wrapped in plastic and some glossy brochures. “Here are some pill sample packs and information on side effects and venereal disease. You should get in the habit of taking the pill at the same time every day so you build up a routine, either morning or at night. Some women keep them by their toothbrush.
“You’ll probably gain a little weight and your breasts will be tender at first. You could have some spotting and you might not bleed the first month or two. These are all normal responses.” She scribbled something, then tore it off a pad and handed it to her. “Here’s a prescription for
ten additional months. Call if you have a problem.”
The doctor left her alone, covered in napkins and now painfully aware of the scientific, colder side of love. But the pills were what she came for. Uncomfortable, she dressed quickly, paid cash, and walked outside, where the world looked real again. Hot air and traffic. Sound.
She told herself it was the quietness inside there that bothered her. She dropped the round plastic pill containers and prescription into her purse, and ran down the front steps and out into the sunshine. The bus stop was only a block away. She could ride free all day; it was her eighteenth birthday.
16
By August, the summer invasion on the island was at a high, and there were more mainlanders per square foot than locals. The same slow, dreaming languor that enveloped the islanders, making them reluctant to leave, drew visitors with manic lifestyles and demanding jobs that lasted more hours than they slept.
After escaping to Avalon, the men fished and lolled in cool dark taverns watching baseball games and drinking beer. Wives and mothers basked under the summer sun, their skin turning the color of wild honey, while their kids played with bright plastic buckets in the sand and along the soft, foamy edges of crystalline blue water. This time of year, the air on the island smelled of Coppertone, cocoa butter, and tourism.
In one two-day period that week, Kathryn sold over five thousand dollars of her work, which filled the front shop and lined the shelves of her studio and the storage room. Last night, like most nights, she immersed herself in her work, using it to purge some of what twisted her all up inside.
Since spring, she couldn’t sleep for more than two hours straight. To not tell Laurel about the Bannings was a constant weight, always there, a stone in her shoe she couldn’t shake out. So Kathryn knew the sunrises as well as she knew the sunsets. Her new work reflected the dusk and dawn colors of the island, and form came from the dark recesses of an insomniac.
It was afternoon when she moved four pieces from the kiln onto the racks in the back room. A gallery had called her earlier in the week, not about her pieces, or she wouldn’t have returned the call, but because someone wanted the Espinosa paintings sold years before to Julia. Kathryn could never allow them in her small house, where like bad fruit they could rot her home from the inside out. Instead they were wrapped and stacked against a far wall of the storage room, barrels of clay and tubs of chemicals for glazing stacked in front of them. There she could forget they existed. But today she couldn’t walk by. She lifted the wrapping from one corner. The front painting was the slashed one.
At times like this, when tragedy came roiling back at her, triggered by fate, she doubted she could ever get away from its pain. The past was there, lying in wait every hour of a lifetime, and it came back to remind her that her joy and future were fossilized decades ago in asphalt on some street in Los Angeles.
“Hey, Mom!”
Kathryn covered the painting and entered the studio. Laurel stood by the open door in hot pants, fishnet hose, and a clingy, sheer popcorn top. She’d filled out in the last months, her lankiness turning into sweet curves and her bust now as lush as her grandmother’s. The changes were unsettling, because Laurel hadn’t been home in weeks.
“Cale’s flying in. I need to meet him at the pier in a few minutes.” Laurel paused, unable to look Kathryn in the eye, and added, “I just wanted to tell you I won’t be home tonight.”
“What do you mean you won’t be home?” The images in Kathryn’s mind sent red flags everywhere. They were sleeping together, a fact that Laurel just used to draw a line between mother and daughter.
“I’m staying with Cale.” Laurel stepped outside to leave.
“No.” The word was out before Kathryn could stop it. Her daughter turned around. “Yes. I am.” Her expression turned mulish. “I’m eighteen.”
“Your age isn’t what I’m concerned about.”
“What are you so afraid of? You can’t keep me close to you forever. I can’t be your whole life, Mom.”
Was that what Laurel thought she was doing? Kathryn had to bite her lip to keep from telling her the truth. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“So you’ve told me again and again.”
“Think about what you’re doing, Laurel.”
“No, Mom. No. I don’t want to think about life. I want to live it. I’ll see you tomorrow sometime.” She left.
Kathryn couldn’t move or speak. Her arms hung heavily at her sides, and she couldn’t pull her gaze away from the empty spot where Laurel had stood seconds before. The begonias and impatiens hanging near the door looked absurdly happy. The roses on the wall trellis were thick and fertile. They should have been wilting. The petals should have been falling and turning brown at the edges.
When she thought about Laurel with that Banning boy, she could almost smell the choking smoke of a destroyed future. Everything, everything she had ever wanted for her daughter was slipping away.
From the seaplane window, sail and powerboats dotted the harbor as if pieces on a game of Battleship. Luxury yachts, crisp and white, moored outside the snug confines of a half-moon bay flanked with staggered hillsides of stucco homes and ironwood trees. Here and there on the sand, umbrellas cast the image of crouching starfish, and huge striped beach towels spread out in a pattern of solitaire. Near the shoreline, the water was so clear you could see the ocean floor from the air. The entire landscape looked as if it came straight from somewhere in the Mediterranean.
The plane touched down and skimmed the water, motoring up to the pier on pontoons. Cale hadn’t seen Laurel in almost a week, because of their conflicting work schedules. She stood on the pier, waving, but he would have spotted her even if she were deep inside a crowd. He grabbed his bag and jumped to the pier. She ran into his arms and kissed him. He dropped the bag. “That felt like longer than a twenty-five-minute flight. I’ve missed you, babe.”
“It’s only been four days.”
“Five, and we’ve been playing tag most of the summer.” Her school’s internship program had kicked in a week after the term ended and she was working at a chic French eatery in Westwood, the kind of place that was booked weeks in advance and where even Johnny Carson couldn’t walk in and get a table. Meanwhile, Cale had been driving tankers along desolate Highway 5 with nothing but the CB radio and an eight-track tape deck to keep him from going nuts.
“I didn’t know the internship was going to start in June, Cale. The opening came up and I couldn’t turn this down.” She sounded defensive.
Cale didn’t blame her, or didn’t think he did, but knew he resented her work. “I know.” He put his arm around her as they walked. “But I start school in two weeks.”
“You want school.”
“No.” He laughed. “I want to be a doctor. School’s the requirement.”
They passed the candy shop, with a huge taffy wheel in the window, and Cale made a sharp turn, pulling her with him.
“What are you doing?”
“Buying you some taffy.”
“No. I’ve gained too much weight from the pill.”
“You look great.”
“You just think that because my clothes are a size too small. I’m not Corkie,” she snapped.
“Okay, okay, don’t get all pissed off.” They walked silently all the way to the house. Cale unlocked the door. Her attitude set him off. Inside, he dropped his bag. “I’m getting pretty tired of hearing about my old girlfriend from you. What’s the deal?”
“Are you trying to pick a fight?”
He thought he was the one who should be asking that question. She was edgy, touchy. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her troubled face. “Is something wrong?”
“My mom doesn’t like the idea of me staying over.”
“You’re old enough to make that choice.”
“She’s my mom, Cale. In her eyes I’ll never be old enough. But she knows now. And I don’t care.” Her face said she did care.
“Come
here. You’re plenty grown up for me.” He whispered against her lips, “I want you,” knowing he needed to persuade her to forget about her mother and to think only about them. He wanted her so badly and touched her in the places he knew made her melt, then watched her sink slowly under his touch. Something inside his head warned him—he was playing her to get what he wanted, but he didn’t care. He needed this.
It took Jud only half an hour to get from the steamship to the Island Market, then to the house. He used his key to open the front door, dropped his duffel on the floor, headed toward the kitchen with a bag of groceries, but stopped in the doorway, seeing Cale with a half-naked Laurel pinned on the empty counter, her arms around his neck, her head thrown back, and his brother’s mouth locked on her breast. Her hand was massaging deep inside Cale’s jeans.
To see her with his brother shook Jud’s world, shattered that dark place where he hid his deepest, most secret desire. For a brief moment he tried to pretend what he was seeing was nothing. He didn’t want to feel anything, but he did. He wanted to tear his brother away from her. Every breath he took smelled and tasted scorched.
She looked lost in an earthy passion as she jerked Cale’s T-shirt up, her hands all over his tanned back, until she broke their mouths apart with a moan to get the shirt over his head. She glanced over his brother’s shoulder and saw him in an instant of absolute silence—empty, eerily quiet, but teeming with something vital—the kind of silent stillness that comes just before the biggest earthquakes.
“Oh, no . . .” She shoved his brother away and tried to cover herself with loose pieces of clothing.