Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  I’m old! Angie thought, without any real opposition. I don’t envy beauty any more!

  The girls had on T-shirts in parakeet colors that bared the studs in their navels. “Our birthstones! Stick-ons!” they crowed, pulling them off to show Angie. “Except Erika’s.” Erika had a thin gold ring threaded through a real hole. They all wore ankle bracelets and multiple rings. With that high agonized laughter of theirs they kept falling on their sides on the rolled-up sleeping bags.

  “Don’t let them fool you, these girls are tough. They all do sports,” Pat had told her. “Basketball, track. Wait till you see Erika run the four hundred meter. And the relay! See those legs?”

  Angie thought of saying, “Long, all right. Eric’s genes in action,” because of the important tone Pat gave the word “relay,” when it was just another form of tag, something you did at recess.

  Or she might say to Pat, “Is she as smart as you were?” Angie saw Erika roughly once a year, she didn’t have much to go on. Erika didn’t seem to have the brains Pat had had in school.

  “Erika’s the leader,” Pat went on patiently. “You’ll see it. They all follow her like ants.”

  “Maybe because she’s tall,” Angie said. “The tallest ant.” It must be that they considered Erika the prettiest, she decided. And their standard must be just this blondness and slenderness and height, and the air Erika had, patient but dissatisfied. Like a woman in a store trying on shoes, nothing unfriendly about her but nothing obliging either.

  Angie watched the muscles slide in Erika’s telephone arm as she moved away from the others, talking seriously. When the call ended she spiraled in one motion down onto her back, laughing and slinging the bag of cotton balls in the air so they rained down on the others. “Wait, wait—it’s on my foot! Hey, Jessie just did my third coat!” The girl with the innocent, triangle face drew her black eyebrows together in a mock scowl. Then she, too, lay back with her arm over her eyes, gracefully waving the foot with the cotton ball stuck to the toes. She was a pretty little thing, more a little girl, perhaps, than the others. Watching her, watching all of them with their long waists, their pearly collarbones, was like being sung to, Angie thought. One of those songs in Gaelic or some old tongue. Rudy’s material, sung at county fairs when he was first starting out. Ballads. Before the war heated up and all those lords and maids and cherry trees and narrow beds were put away, and the guitar took up a harsh line.

  She could see him, in the full-sleeved shirt she had embroidered with birds and ivy, and in tiny script on the collar—it was when sewing machines first did that—his name, Rudy Rudeen.

  Now the five girls were on their backs with their hair spread out on the rug, waving their legs, all talking at once. Erika was on the phone again. They had on that three-chord harmonizing stuff they listened to now. Boy bands. When the time came, Angie’s job was to light fourteen candles on the cake and carry it in. She didn’t see any presents. These girls might be beyond presents.

  The armchair in the computer alcove was so big there was room for a small child on either side of her. And this was no alcove, really, it was an area as big as her own apartment, enclosed by plants and low bookshelves, with two computers and a copier and two fax machines on a counter of grainy stone. It was part of the same room where the girls were, but Angie was some distance away from them. The whole center of the house was laid out in an open design, with divisions suggested by slate inlays in the shining maple floor. You could lose your balance out there, as if you had wandered into a bullring.

  Tropical plants in stone tubs marked the inlays at either end. Most of the lake-facing front of the house was glass, and four skylights poured light on the tall, muscular plants and the area rugs and scattered islands of furniture.

  This was a famously dark, rainy city, but in her daughter’s house you would think you were out on the lake in some kind of a glass atrium. Maybe on a cruise ship, where you could unwrap yourself behind a palm and quickly slip out of sight in a warm pool. Angie had been on a cruise, to Mexico. Her daughter had sent her on it, along with Bill Diehl. “Why not take your pal Bill.” That was what Pat called him the whole time he shared Angie’s place. “The car salesman,” she called him after he moved out and got married, although Bill didn’t sell cars, he sold boats, a harder job, more uncertain.

  Bill was sixty-some, a few years younger than Angie, but Angie’s friend Terri, the one he married, had just hit her forties. Angie was the godmother of their baby girl. “Well, you remember Terri,” Angie had said when she called Pat, after she sent Bill off in the U-Haul with his couch and his cat, “how pretty she is.” She was half hoping Pat would offer up some female curse and half relieved that she did not. “And beauty is everything,” Angie went on. She liked a conversation that would go from there, even an argument. She would have welcomed “Beauty is nothing!” or “Are you kidding? We’re talking about sex!” so that she could reaffirm her hospital vow to keep clear of the negative and appreciate everything. “I’m not making excuses for Bill. It was one of those things.”

  “Right,” said Pat. In the past she would have said to Angie, “What’s with these men? Why is this the story of your life?” But by the time the godchild came along, Pat was no longer making painful or intimate remarks to her. “I don’t know about my daughter these days,” Angie said to Terri and Bill. Terri had placed the baby in Angie’s arms and she brought its wide-eyed face close to hers. “What do you think? Think maybe aliens took my girl and sent a copy?” But what happened with Pat is a secret, she thought. A secret from me because I was the mother.

  The metal stairs at either end of the huge room were like the companionways on a ship. Guests, if there were any guests, climbed up them to the second-floor wings, where they could settle into one of the balcony rooms, or the suite with its own kitchen, where Angie would have been staying on this visit except for the fact that her daughter had taken one look at her and said, “Wait, I’m going to put you in the little courtyard room down here. Rika, ask Cham to make up that bed.”

  Erika’s bedroom was up the metal stairs. Angie had an idea it was something to see, but she had not yet had a look at it. She had tried to, going up hanging onto both rails. At the top a metal walkway ran the length of the great room, a sort of open-work bridge. When she got close to the top she turned and sat down to rest. She waved to Pat, who said, “Come down. Now. And hold on.”

  Pat said the previous owner, a man whose company had done business with hers, had hardly finished remodeling the house in this semi-industrial style when he retired and moved to Hawaii. He had left a full wine cellar behind. “Well, sure I will, I’ll have a glass of wine,” Angie said.

  “Oh,” said Pat. “Sure. I never think of it.”

  “Red wine is good for me. And you said he was going to live here all by himself?”

  “Not for long,” Pat said wryly.

  Angie had heard the stories about shirttail relatives who turned up in Seattle when the software fortunes were first being made. Right from the beginning Bill Diehl kept her up on those things. “Pat’s going to break the bank up there. She’s smart, she’s in the right place at the right time,” he said. Bill had no money of his own but he could always sniff it when somebody else had it or was going to get it. “Some people get kinged,” he said, “just like in checkers.” He was a man of no resentment, and that was what Angie had loved, she had loved his gleeful accounts of sudden, undeserved windfalls, occasions of wild luck. In fact when he and Terri realized they wanted to be married to each other, he told Angie this could almost be one of those, the first of his life.

  Angie could not stand in the way of such a thing. “So what are you waiting for? She’s the one for you,” she said. “I know about that. I had that. There’s only one.”

  Of course she did not believe this. If one, why not more than one. Fortunately Bill would not think of it in that way. His way had always been to skip over twenty-five years of Angie’s history and treat her as a widow. Early on she
had made the discovery of his serious gift for comfort, his knowing at what point to pour the wine down the sink and wipe a woman’s tears with a clean handkerchief. He had bowed his head to the story of Rudy more than once. So let him see himself as an episode late in the day, for Angie, someone with whom she had joined forces for a couple of years, and shared one vacation, and a cat that gave birth in the closet. Though for his sake she had been at some pains to keep up the idea that their arrangement was a romance.

  “We bonded over a stray cat,” she would tell people. Bill was the cat-lover, but they spent weeks united in the search for homes for the kittens. In the end the cat went with Bill, even though she had won Angie over in her solemn hunt for each of her given-away young.

  “Why did the guy put these railings all over the place?” These were of a luminous metal and had a decorative, all-purpose look. Angie had taken hold of one herself a time or two. They were in all the downstairs bathrooms and ran along the first-floor walls.

  “He had a fall. Rock-climbing. I’m going to take the rails out but I haven’t had time to hire anybody.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “A chunk of the rock face fell on him. Crushed his legs.”

  “No. That’s awful. Does he still have them? His legs?”

  “He does. Lots of rehab. Listen, he’s out of the wheelchair, he walks. Don’t worry about him, he’s a tough guy.” Was Pat’s voice bitter? Had the man been her lover? “He tried to take me over. My company.”

  “So you ended up with his house?”

  Pat smiled. “I bought his house.” In her head Angie heard what the old Pat would have said to her. “It amazes me the way you’re always ready to sympathize with some guy. It could be anybody. Somebody’s always hurting these poor men. The guy fell. He went to rehab. He moved. End of story.”

  Pat did not give Angie a tour; she didn’t boast of anything in the house, or the garden with its tall fountain, blown out wide some days like a sheet on the line. While Pat was at work Angie gave herself a tour. She sat on the rim of the fountain by herself. I’m not kidding, I wouldn’t trade with you.

  Oh, because I’m not a good-time girl like my mom?

  You’re not the only one, Patty, who’s had more than one life.

  They didn’t say these things any more. Why was Pat lost to her?

  When Pat came home the first day Angie said the high ceilings made the place echo, but Pat had her yell to prove it, and there was no echo, only her shout.

  Pat had not indulged herself, beyond Erika’s school and this house. She didn’t travel except to meetings and she didn’t buy cars or wear good clothes. She didn’t join a health club. In Oregon Angie lived among people who were barely making it, who swore by health clubs. But Pat ran. Her legs showed knots of muscle and her hips were narrow from the miles she ran, as if she were training for Erika’s relay.

  After she ran and showered, Pat came out and flopped down with her feet up on the coffee table. This was the best time of day to approach her, sitting around the huge table, a metal ring on tube legs holding up a four-inch-thick slab of clouded, pocked glass. You had to be careful where you put a drink down on it because the glass had hills and valleys. “I bet this thing cost you,” Angie said the first day, not sure about swinging her own feet out and raising them to the level where they could be propped. Anyway the table might be for Pat’s feet.

  “Do you like it?” Pat said. She never took offense or acted like she didn’t care for Angie’s meaning, as she once had; she never argued any more. She was above argument.

  “Yeah, I sorta do. It’s weird but it appeals to me.”

  “Weird,” her daughter said with a dreamy expression.

  Angie knew this expression. “I know, honeybaby,” she said. “I know it’s art.”

  “Well, a sculptor did it.” Angie wondered if the sculptor was someone Pat knew. Other than the wheelchair man, Pat hadn’t mentioned anyone she knew. If the phone rang it was for Erika; Pat didn’t even look up. I know about that, Angie might have said. I was blank that way after your father died. But as far as she knew, nobody had died.

  “By the way, you don’t have to do the wash,” Pat said. “Cham will do the wash.”

  “I just put a few things in. I like having something to do.”

  “Right, well, maybe you’d do something for me. Rika’s birthday. Fourteen.” As if Angie didn’t know, didn’t have presents in her suitcase. She wasn’t sure about them, though. She knew to stay a little ahead of the game, but she could see that Erika had suddenly taken a step. Mention of her previous interests would bring a vague, regretful smile.

  “I’ll be here for her actual birthday but then Friday I have to go to Palo Alto, and the party’s that night. If I change it, half the girls can’t come. You have to get these things on the calendar. I can hire a party coordinator but Erika won’t like that.”

  “A party coordinator? Are you kidding? You asked me, I’m doing it.”

  Cham would be in the house, of course. The girls couldn’t put anything over on Cham, a woman who had run into a burning grade school. You could see scars on Cham’s neck and jaw and only guess about the rest of her, always covered up. She had hidden in a sow’s pen, swum through sewage, to get out of Cambodia. Angie knew that. Somewhere back in the dark of that period was a family, children Cham had had, the ones who had been in the grade school. A complicated story of who had gotten out of the country. None of the children. Cham was alone here, suspicious of everyone but Pat. Cousins were here in the city but there was a problem with them; they thought Cham had cursed some relative. She had been with Pat for years now, arriving with a double name that Pat had shortened.

  Cham would be right there, in her bare feet and khaki pants, keeping an eye on everything. But it would be better if Angie met the girls at the door. And you had to be careful with sleepovers. Sometimes boys this age came around. How they got there Pat didn’t know, since none of them drove yet; they were kids. They would come in twos and threes, with cameras or flashlights or masks, after the parents were asleep, and not do anything, just occupy themselves in stealth and heckling and making the girls hysterical enough, as these skinny prepubescent boys could somehow do, to burst out with confessions to their own parents the next day.

  Sometimes drugs turned up, of course. Nothing big so far, knock on wood. And some of the parents had a high enough profile that they had to worry about their children for security reasons. Guard them. One of the party guests was in that category, with her own bodyguard. Or custody disputes, same thing.

  “Some of them know boys from I don’t know, a previous school, or camp, or even church. Or community service. They have to do community service, through the school.”

  “Well, good for them,” said Angie. She knew Pat expected it of her. “What do I do if they show up?” She pictured a string of boys sneaking up the bank from the lake, past the fountain, with knives in their teeth.

  “Send them home. Say you’ll call their parents. But you won’t have to, they can’t even get in the gate. Oh, now you’re going to worry. Hey, even if they cook something up, they’re pretty much a joke to these particular girls. At this age the boys are way behind the girls. This group has a lot to keep them busy. The boys they see in school—they’re so-and-so’s son but these girls know they’re twerps. Erika does. She’s like me,” Pat added, and it was true. But not in the way Pat meant it, not the way Pat had been at her age, full of tears and threats and some display in her walk, Angie thought, some sad teasing, some heat coming off her that might have been called slutty before they all, Angie and her friends, knew slut was a patriarchal term.

  Angie remembered sitting around on the floor with the women she had lived with when Pat was little—women considerably younger than she was, leaning on radiators as they nursed their babies. Every once in a while they dropped a new term into the middle of their sleepy talk, like cloves into the stew. Their subject might be the commodification of breasts. But they would s
lip back, they would sigh over Angie’s little daughter’s rounded beauty, her awareness of her limbs and body as she bathed and danced and fastened her barrettes, her languorous, sweet manner with their boyfriends. But smart, too. Very smart. Competitive. Up in the high percentiles when she got to school, skipping second grade. So there was some connection, after all, between that little girl and the Pat of today.

  And no father. A father who was gone, dead.

  Pat had no memory of Rudy. So she said. None. She had seen the pictures, heard the tapes. When she got to be seven or eight she didn’t want to go with Angie to the cemetery where Rudy was buried, but once, later, she let her boyfriend Eric take her. The Grave of the Unknown Rock Star, she called it. No, she wasn’t especially curious beyond that.

  Pat didn’t have Angie’s problems with pregnancy; she could have had ten babies. But she had only Erika. Rika, now; Erika had renamed herself, just as Pat had. “Pat” was not Pat’s real name, of course. Her name was Parvati. Angie was not going to apologize for that. She and Rudy were back in Oregon; it was 1969 and they had moved into a double-wide just before the home birth—trailer-birth, Pat called it—with Mount Hood visible above the pines. Parvati. Daughter of the mountain.

  In your thirties, in those days, you thought time was running out. Angie had been pregnant four times. “I’m staying put this time. I’m going to have this one if I have to stay in bed the whole time. You do whatever you want. Go on. Go with them!”

  This was after she had scattered the carload of girls who followed the band. She got up from the bed and routed them out of the motel parking lot where they were beating tambourines on their hips. Pregnant, Angie was a terror. Get out of here! Leave us alone!