The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Every question, no matter how unimportant, exhausted Sabine. It felt like a turn onto a potentially never-ending off-ramp. "No, it's a pet. It's the name of a friend's pet."

  "A pet mouse?"

  "Yes." Sabine slammed the trunk. She needed some basic parameters. She did not have the slightest idea who these people were. She did not know why she had offered to pick them up. When they got in the car she turned to Mrs. Fetters in the front seat. "Just when was the last time you saw Parsifal?" she said.

  "Guy?"

  Sabine nodded.

  "Two days after his birthday, so February tenth." Mrs. Fetters looked straight ahead out of the cement parking garage. "Nineteen sixty-nine."

  Sabine did the math in her head. "You haven't seen him since he was seventeen?" For some reason she had thought that maybe Parsifal had sneaked away at some point and gone for a visit, at least one visit.

  "Eighteen," Bertie said from the backseat. "It was his eighteenth birthday."

  "And I saw him on television," Mrs. Fetters added in a sad voice. They sat quietly with that information, the car idling in reverse. "I'd like to go right to the cemetery. If that's okay with you."

  Sabine pulled out. She would take them to the cemetery. She would take them to the hotel. And then she would get these people the hell out of her car.

  Los Angeles International Airport was a pilgrimage, a country that was farther away than anyplace you could fly to. They exited and made their way down Sepulveda, past the dried-out patches of grass along the sidewalk and fast-food restaurants that lined the way to the 105 east. With three in the car they could forgo the light and ease out into the diamond lane, where they sped along past a sea of traffic waiting anxiously to get out of the city. Angelenos were loners in their cars. That was the point of living in the city, to have a car and drive alone. They got onto the Harbor Freeway north. They passed the Coliseum ("Look at that," Mrs. Fetters said) and the University of Southern California; went through downtown, where they had to crane their necks backwards to see the housing of the criminal justice system. Sabine stayed left through the bifurcation, moving smoothly towards Pasadena and the series of tunnels where murals marked Latino pride and African-American pride and the pride of a washed-up Anglo movie star turned boxer, his fists wrapped in tape and poised beneath his chin. Sooner or later it all gave way to graffiti: some twisting, ancient alphabet legible only to the tribe. The senseless letters arched and turned, their colors changing with mile markers. They took the Harbor to the Pasadena to the Golden State Freeway, north towards Sacramento, though no one ever went that far. The median swelled with deadly poisonous oleander bushes. Sabine went to the Glendale Freeway and then took the first off-ramp on San Fernando Road, which she took to Glendale Avenue, which left them, when all was said and done, at the towering wrought-iron gates of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, UNDERTAKING, CEMETERY, CREMATORY, MAUSOLEUM, FLOWER SHOP. ONE CALL MAKES ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS, the sign Said.

  "Oh," Bertie whispered.

  In the fountain, bronze frogs spit water onto the legs of bronze cranes, which spit water straight into the sky. Real ducks and one adult swan paddled serenely, doing their job. Forest Lawn was Mecca for the famous dead, the wealthy dead, the powerful dead. They were buried beneath the tight grass or in their beautiful sarcophagi. George Burns was now filed away beside his beloved wife in a locked mausoleum drawer. All of the headstones were laid down flat, which the cemetery claimed gave a pleasing vista but in fact just made the hills easy to mow. Tourists ate picnics on the lawn. Lovers kissed. The devout went down on their knees at the Wee Kirk o' the Heather. There was politics in where you were buried, under trees or near water. The cheap seats were beaten by the sun or sat too close to the edge of the drive. Phan and Parsifal had decided on the best, a center courtyard behind an eight-foot brick wall with locked bronze doors that made casual viewing impossible. When they told Sabine, they were practically giddy—twin plots! Who would have thought there would still be two left? They reeled through the living room, arms around each other's waists, laughing.

  "Forest Lawn?" she had said.

  "It's so beautiful," Phan said. He had spent twenty years in this country and still cynicism eluded him.

  "It's so crass," Sabine said.

  "This is Glendale Forest Lawn," Parsifal said. "That's the original of the five. It's so-o-o much nicer than Hollywood Hills. The shade is stunning."

  "Glendale isn't even close." They were moving too far away. "You don't want to go there."

  "It's Los Angeles," Parsifal said. "This is our city. If you truly love Los Angeles, you want to be buried in Forest Lawn." He leaned back into the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. "We can afford it, we're doing it."

  Sabine decided to drop it. Who was she, after all, to say where another person should be buried?

  After dinner Phan found her alone by the swimming pool. He sat down beside her. The night sky was a dark plum color and in the distance it glowed from the streetlights. "I bought three," he said.

  "Three what?"

  "Three plots." His voice was gentle, always asking a question. It grew softer every day he was sick. Phan's hair, so black and beautifully thick, had turned gray in a month and he wore it cut close to his scalp now. "We should all be together. That is the truth, the three of us are family. I don't want you to be alone."

  Sabine kept her eyes down. Through the generosity of the offer she saw that she was alone. Even in death she would be the third party, along for the ride.

  It got darker every minute they waited. The birds were almost quiet. Phan patted her hand. "It is a very difficult thing to discuss. I imagine that when we are gone your life will only be beginning. You could marry, have a child still. You have so far to go before you'll know how things will end. So this plot is only insurance. It says that Parsifal and I love you always, that we want you with us; and if you don't come, it will always mean the same thing. It will stay for you."

  Sabine nodded, her eyes filling with tears. Thoughts of their deaths, her life alone, an amendment to twin plots, overwhelmed her. Though she and Phan had very few moments when they could be close out of a true fondness for one another, instead of their mutual fondness for Parsifal, she dipped her head down to his shoulder.

  "I can't imagine this," Mrs. Fetters said, looking out over the rolling hills of the cemetery, dotted with the occasional winged angel, marble obelisk, Doric columns. "I'm looking at it hard as I can and I can't imagine it. California and Nebraska shouldn't even be in the same country. Do you think there's someplace I could buy flowers?" Her voice had an almost pleading sound to it. "I don't want to go without bringing something."

  "Of course," Sabine said.

  "I appreciate your being so patient with me." She touched her hand to the window. They passed a statue of the Virgin, her bare feet balanced delicately on top of a globe. "Bertie, do you see how beautiful it is?"

  "It's like a park," Bertie said. "What would it be like to die here?"

  Sabine pulled up in front of the flower shop, information center, and sales office which were all housed together in a rambling imitation English Tudor manor. She should have thought about the flowers. When she came out with Parsifal to visit Phan, they always stopped off in Pasadena and bought their flowers from Jacob Maarse. Cemetery flowers tended to rely heavily on gladiolus and carnations. They were also criminally overpriced. But Sabine was out of practice. She hadn't been out here in two weeks, not since the funeral, and she wasn't buying anything on that trip. She reached into her purse and put on her sunglasses. Her palms were beginning to sweat against the wheel.

  The air in the florist shop was so sweet that they all had to stop for a minute at the door, as if they were trying to walk through something heavy. The colors were too bright, too many pinks and yellows clustered together. The walls were too white, the sun on the floor too severe. The place was as cheerful as a candy store. Business was booming: customers pointing at ready-made arrangements in glass coolers or pulling
out flowers stem by stem from the buckets on the floor. A Mexican woman in a white uniform held a bundle of dark waxy fern leaves in her hand.

  Bertie wandered in a trance, running her fingers along the flat faces of red Gerber daisies.

  "I have never," Mrs. Fetters said slowly, "seen so many flowers."

  Sabine wished they had gardenias. Parsifal loved gardenias. He put them behind his ear and said they made him feel closer to Billie Holiday. She settled for an Oriental hybrid lily called Mona Lisa. She bought all they had, eighty dollars' worth. Eighty dollars' worth of Mona Lisas would make two nice bouquets. She turned down an offer of baby's breath and buffalo grass. She took her flowers plain, swaddled in thin green tissue. Holding them in the bend of one slim arm, she looked like a pageant winner.

  "I can't decide," Mrs. Fetters said, staring into the glass case.

  Sabine said that what they had would be plenty, that there was only one water holder at the grave, but Bertie and her mother each bought a single yellow rose for five dollars apiece.

  They drove to the caretaker's cottage, signed out for the key, and drove to the Court of David. The statue of David was gone, a sign explained, because it had been damaged in the Northridge earthquake. In the field where David should have been gazing down, a group of people gathered around a John Deere tractor and a hole.

  "Listen to this," Parsifal had said. "First you go through the Court of David, into the Garden of the Mystery of Life, and then through the locked doors of the Gardens of Memory." He held the map up for Sabine to see. "Those are the directions! Don't you love it?"

  "Why is it locked?" Bertie asked.

  "It's a very nice part," Sabine told her. "They want to keep people from just walking through and looking." Sabine fumbled with the key. She could hear the light strains of music that were pumped into the private area through speakers on the top of the walls.

  "I wish I was wearing a dress," Mrs. Fetters said. She pulled her sweater down smooth over the top of her pants. "Do you think I ought to have a dress on? Maybe we should wait until later."

  "You look fine," Sabine said.

  "I didn't get cleaned up at all after the flight. It's disrespectful that I should come over here this way. After all the time that's passed."

  "Mama," Bertie said, and touched her mother's neck.

  Mrs. Fetters took a deep breath and ran her fingers under her glasses. She was sixty-six, but at that moment she looked considerably older. "All right," she said. "I'll just come back tomorrow, too. Tomorrow I'll come back looking nicer."

  They went inside.

  Over in the far corner, beneath a Japanese plum tree, the grass had been taken up in a sheet and neatly replaced, but still you could see a difference between Parsifal and Phan. There was a small seam where they had buried Parsifal's ashes, a perforation in the green, whereas everything on Phan's side was settled. Two weeks Parsifal had been down there, way beyond Lazarus. And Lazarus hadn't been cremated. Sabine felt a great, bending wave of grief rise up in her chest and push to the top of her shoulders. There was a reason she hadn't come before.

  Bertie hung back at the gate, unsure, but Mrs. Fetters moved like a mother. She crouched down and ran her hand over the flat brass marker as if wiping it off. "Parsifal," she read aloud. "Well, if that's what you want, I'll get used to it. Guy, you were always one to make the change. Surprised us so much it wasn't even surprising anymore." Her tone was light, conversational. She had practice talking to a son who wasn't there. "Oh, it's nice here, and you've got yourself the prettiest wife. You did all right, kiddo, better than anyone could have ever made up. You have yourself a good laugh at your daddy's expense. You stand up and show him how good you turned out." She looked up and spoke to Sabine, who was pushed back against the brick wall as if espaliered there by years of careful pruning. "You wouldn't believe the way we fight the crabgrass out where his father's buried. If I didn't cut it back every two weeks in the summer, I wouldn't know where he was. Kitty says it's him that grows it, just to torture me ... Kitty," she said, turning back to Parsifal's place in the lawn. "Oh, what Kitty wouldn't give to see this! She would be so proud of you. She misses you something awful, Guy. When she heard you'd died, the doctor had to come and give her something. It broke my heart, the way she cried. You were everything in the world to her. Every single day. But Bertie's here." Mrs. Fetters held out a hand to her youngest. "Bertie, come and say hello to your brother."

  Bertie moved tentatively towards her mother's hand, as if she were inching across a narrow ledge, looking down into a gorge.

  "Say hello," Mrs. Fetters repeated.

  "Hey, Guy," Bertie said in a small voice.

  "Look how big she is, a full-grown woman. Last time you saw her, do you even remember? She was a speck, three years old. She says she doesn't remember you."

  "Mama," Bertie said, as if her mother were telling on her. There were tears running down Bertie's cheeks, and Mrs. Fetters stood up, leaving one child to comfort another.

  "There's nothing wrong with not remembering. You were too young. No shame in that."

  Bertie looked younger, her face flushed so pink with crying. Sabine, stranded, knelt on the ground and began to separate the lilies into two equal bunches.

  "Look how close those headstones are," Mrs. Fetters said. "You'd think for the money they'd give you a little elbow room."

  "Phan was a friend," Sabine said, and put half of the flowers on her friend's grave.

  "Phan Ardeau? What kind of name is that?"

  "Vietnamese. Vietnamese and French, really."

  "Did Guy go to Vietnam?" Mrs. Fetters said, her voice full of panic, as if that were where he was at that very minute. "I didn't think they'd send him."

  "Phan lived in L.A., they met here. Parsifal didn't have to go to Vietnam," Sabine said.

  "Because of his ulcers," his mother said. "There was no way they could send that boy, the kind of ulcers he had."

  Sabine looked at her. That was one thing they both knew.

  "It was awful nice of Guy to buy that poor boy a funeral plot." She took one of the yellow roses off Parsifal's grave and gave it to Phan in charity.

  "Phan bought the plots," Sabine said. She knew it would be better to just let it go, let everything go, but she couldn't think of Phan being dismissed. It was mostly his money they would all be living on from now on. "He bought one for me, too. The one you're standing on."

  Bertie looked down at her feet and took a quick step to the side, but Mrs. Fetters held her ground, green grass cushioning the bottoms of her sensible shoes. "That was real nice of him," she said. "Guy always could make friends."

  They stayed a little longer, none of them talking. They were all worn out from the sadness and the smell of the flowers. The beautiful day had hurt them. Parsifal was wrong, Los Angeles was no place to be buried. It was five o'clock when they left, and the January sun was just making its way down.

  "It was an aneurism, right?" Mrs. Fetters said, as if she were not at all sure that was right. "That's what the lawyer told me."

  "An aneurism," Sabine said, glad she had remembered to take the brain scan off the refrigerator. The car hummed at the front gate of Forest Lawn. "I'll take you to your hotel," she said, but she didn't know where they were staying, which way she should go. "Unless you want to see the house, but we could do that some other time."

  "The house," Bertie and her mother said together with a fresh burst of energy.

  "It's nice of you to ask us," Mrs. Fetters said.

  Sabine could only nod. It was nice of her.

  Phan had bought the house on Oriole seven years ago, when he first came down from the Silicon Valley. By then the traffic was thick with people trying ]to move away from Los Angeles, and houses that had been bought and sold for hysterical amounts of money only a few years before now waited on the market like pregnant dogs at the pound. The agent was delighted by his call. She had six properties lined up to show him the first day, with plans to show him six more every day of the
month, but Phan bought the first one. He refused to see the rest. The house on Oriole was built in the twenties as a contractor's gift to his wife, in a neighborhood where every street was named for a bird, Wren and Bunting and Thrush. Phan had always wanted a Spanish-style house. To him, they looked like California. The creamy stucco swirled like frosting, the red tile roof, the high archways between the rooms, the fireplace big enough for two people to sit in, the careless way in which the house seemed to amble on forever. It reminded him of one of the administration buildings at Cal Tech. "Six bedrooms, a study, guesthouse, mature fruit trees," the agent said, ticking off the points with her fingers; "a pool." Phan went through the glass doors in the back. The water sparkled, hot blue diamonds. Perhaps he would learn to swim.

  "You live here by yourself?" Bertie said, tilting back her head in the driveway to try and take it all in.

  "I do now," Sabine said.

  Bertie stopped and maybe for the first time she looked at Sabine directly. She wrapped her arms around her waist. "I'm sorry. I don't know what made me say that."

  "It's a big house," Sabine said, punching in the code for the alarm. The girl who did the yard had filled the planters with white winter pansies.

  In the front hall their voices echoed. The Fetters began by complimenting the things that were closest, the curve of the staircase, the little table in the entry hall, the yellow-throated orchids on the table. "I have not seen anything like this in my life," Mrs. Fetters said. "Nothing close."

  They went through the house as though they were half starved. They could barely restrain themselves from opening closets. "Is that a guest bath?" Bertie said, pointing to a closed door, and then, "Mama, would you look at this mirror in the bathroom." They picked, up the fancy soaps shaped like seashells and sniffed them. They went through the guest rooms, the study, Sabine's studio. They commented on her interesting work, the perfection of such small trees. They petted the rabbit, who barely woke up, his flop ears stretched in either direction like an airplane. They followed the runner down the hall to her bedroom before Sabine could think about whether or not she wanted them there. But it was in the bedroom that Mrs. Fetters found the thing she had been looking for, the thing she had come to her son's house hoping to find.