by Ann Hood
And then the oddest thing had happened.
Iris had heard a man’s voice, as clear as can be, say, “Daisy.”
“I’ve got to go,” Daisy had said then. “Have Sam call me if they do show up.”
“A lot of good that would do,” Iris said, “since he can’t even talk.”
But Daisy just whispered “Bye” and hung up.
So now what was she supposed to think? Maybe Sam was talking again.
Iris went into the hall to dust the banister.
Her flat was on the second floor. There was no door separating it from the stairs that led up to it. If she leaned over the banister, Iris could look right into the downstairs people’s living room. And they could look up into hers.
She walked by the desk and Cal’s letter caught her eye. She should have told Daisy about it. Maybe Mackenzie would take it if she did come here. Why Mackenzie Porter would ever come to her apartment was a big mystery to Iris. All she knew was that she had enough on her mind without worrying about the Porters’ mail. She had wanted to buy Christmas decorations today, nice traditional ones. Snowmen and Santas. Then she had to figure out a way to get to Los Gatos to see Lloyd at that dinner club.
The antique clock struck two.
Iris wished she could figure out a way to turn those chimes off.
Then the doorbell rang again.
“What is going on today?” she said.
The front door opened.
Iris hung her head over the banister. She could see the oriental furniture in the downstairs people’s living room, all black lacquer and floral screens.
“Hello,” Iris called.
A woman walked in and stood, staring around the foyer. She hesitated, then walked into the living room. Almost immediately she turned back toward the stairs.
The woman’s hair was a rich brown, woven with silver, and wavy. She had on a black cloth coat with a silk scarf the color of smoke. When she looked up, Iris couldn’t believe it.
“Iris?” she said. “Is that you up there?”
Iris’s mind filled with the smell of cinnamon and peppermint and pine, and she felt a rush of homey warmth. Her hand touched her hair. After so many colorings and bleachings, it had turned a washed-out brown, the color of dirty water.
“Yes,” Iris said. “It’s me.”
Iris watched as Cal Porter climbed the stairs. Even though she saw her as Cal looked now, the loose hair and thick eyebrows and plain face, Iris imagined her in that living room, before a large tree with a fire popping beside her.
“What a day!” Iris said when Cal reached the top of the stairs. “What’s next?”
Cal couldn’t stop staring at Iris. She had to stop herself from saying what she was thinking. Iris looked normal. Her hair was long and layered, a sort of flat color of brown. She had on Levi’s and a man’s red and white striped Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“And here I was,” Iris said, “expecting Mackenzie.”
At the sound of her daughter’s name, Cal felt herself shiver.
“Mackenzie?” she repeated, as if perhaps she hadn’t heard correctly.
These past few months on the road had allowed Cal to live in an unreal world, a world of Best Westerns and tourist attractions. The days were marked off by pins on a map, by bumper stickers in her suitcase: I VISITED THE LAUREY CAVERNS. HIKE THE CANYON. THIS CAR CLIMBED PIKES PEAK.
Mackenzie wasn’t a part of this world. She lived, instead, in a distant part of Cal’s mind, where she floated safe, golden, and beautiful.
Suddenly Cal’s unreal world was dissolving, and she was being forced back into reality. Mackenzie’s face came to her, and her daughter looked worried, hurt, abandoned.
“Why would Mackenzie be here?” Cal asked. She tried to push away the image of her.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Iris said. “Why don’t you come in and sit down.”
Cal’s legs felt like lead weights were attached to them as she followed Iris into the living room. She sat on the couch. It was made of scratchy cotton, colorless and rough. She ran her hands over the fabric.
Iris half sat, half fell into the bright purple bean bag chair.
“Remnants,” she said.
“What?”
Iris moved her head to face Cal and Cal caught sight of her ear. It was outlined from top to lobe with pearl stud earrings, like a jewel-encrusted shell.
“Remnants of my past,” Iris said.
She patted the bean bag chair.
Cal nodded.
“What about Mackenzie?” she asked. Her stomach rolled.
“I don’t know,” Iris said.
The other ear, Cal saw, was bare.
“Daisy called this morning and said Mackenzie and Sam might come by. Apparently they’re in San Francisco. Visiting.”
Iris held up her hands, a motion of surrender.
“Sam’s with her,” Cal said.
She thought of Mackenzie, right after Alexander’s funeral, holding Sam to her. “He looks just like Alexander,” she’d said. “Doesn’t he? Look at him.” Sam had stood, stiff in her arms, silent, his eyes the color of a troubled ocean.
The day he had been born, Jams had said, “Spitting image, isn’t he? No doubt whose father this boy’s is.”
Cal had refused to agree, had seen, instead, Daisy’s thinness, her awkward gait. Bur here, with the California sunlight bouncing off a giant prism on a low table in front of her, Cal thought of Sam and saw, in him, Alexander. The eyes and chin and wheat-colored hair. The round cheeks that would, like Alexander’s, grow angular as he grew older.
She stared into the large crystal, focused on the way the sun refracted off it, shooting tiny rainbows across the wooden floor.
“You know Daisy,” Iris was saying. “No details and in a big rush.”
Cal nodded—a small movement of her chin, really.
Before the funeral she had knelt in front of Sam in her dark green woolen dress, too warm for June but all she could think of to put on.
“Sam,” she had said, “what was your daddy saying just before he stopped talking?”
The child, in a tight blue suit and an inappropriate bright red bow tie, had stared past her. His lips, she remembered, had been cracked and chapped.
“Answer me, Sam,” she’d said. “What was he saying?”
When the boy didn’t make a gesture toward her, she had taken him by the shoulders and shaken him.
“Goddam you,” she’d said. “Talk!”
His shoulders had felt bony and small.
That information had seemed so vital at the time. Had Alexander been laughing when the lightning hit? Telling a story? It had been as if that last word, that last thought, would solve something, or somehow ease the loss.
“Enough,” Jams had said, prying her fingers off Sam. “The boy has had enough.”
“So have I,” she’d said.
“Cal,” Iris said. “Why are you here?”
Cal kept her gaze on the rainbows. A round spot on the floor was bleached from the sun and it framed the shots of color.
“In San Francisco?” she asked. Or in your apartment with you? she thought.
“Well, yes. I mean, people are worried about you.”
Cal thought of herself, bumping along in Alexander’s car, feeling like she was on some glorious journey. The states blending into each other. The smell of Alexander, strong when she’d begun, fading every day. Once, in West Virginia, she’d found an old shirt of his in the trunk, and had plucked a strand of dirty blonde hair from it. The hair had shone in the daylight, shimmered with life. She’d found napkins with phone numbers written in his pointed way in the glove compartment, and three packets of condoms folded together, and a note on a scrap of paper: “Lydia is off Wednesday and Thursday.” But none of it had affected her like that single strand of hair.
“I mean,” Iris said, “they want to know that you’re all right.”
“I know.”
Iris shifted un
comfortably on the chair.
When Alexander died, Iris had sent the Porters a fruit basket. All that day, trucks had delivered somber floral arrangements, lilies and mums with dark bows draped around the pots. Then a man appeared at the door with a huge watermelon. It had been carved into a basket and filled with small round balls of cantaloupe and honey-dew, chunks of pineapple, and slices of oranges and grapefruit. Its edges were cut into perfect triangles. Nestled among the fruit were two or three orchids.
“This can’t be for us,” Mackenzie had said to the delivery man. She had held the heavy watermelon in her arms like a baby.
“Someone has died here,” she said. “This seems to be for a party of some sort.”
A tag hung off the watermelon handle. ORCHIDS, IT SAID, ARE EDIBLE! ANOTHER FUN FACT FROM FANNY’S FARM!
Once, Missy had had a theme party called Hawaiian Luau. She had roasted a baby pig with an apple in its mouth on a rotisserie in the backyard. Everyone who came got real floral leis and Art played Pineapple Princess on the ukulele. Missy had carved a watermelon and filled it with rum and melon balls. At the end of the night, Missy, Vivvie, and Cal had sung “Tiny Bubbles” and cried. That’s what Cal had thought of as Mackenzie stood rocking the watermelon basket from Iris Bloom. Later, after everyone was asleep, she’d eaten the orchids.
Suddenly, Iris jumped to her feet.
“How could I forget?” she said, slapping her forehead. “I have so much on my mind, I completely forgot.”
Cal stood too.
Iris’s eyes, she noticed, were the color of brandy.
She waited, standing, as Iris went into the hallway, then returned, holding a letter out to her.
“This is for you,” Iris said. “It came yesterday and I had no idea what to do with it.”
Cal took a deep breath before she opened it.
“I didn’t want to open it,” Iris was saying.
DEAR MISS PORTER, WE’RE HAPPY TO ACCEPT YOUR THREE POEMS—POINT JUDITH LIGHTHOUSE, IN THE DESERT, AND LAST THOUGHT …
“I even called the post office,” Iris said.
Cal tried to read the rest of the letter, but her eyes kept returning to the first line, to the word “accept.”
“I mean,” Iris said, “‘in care of’ is a very confusing phrase.”
“My poems,” Cal said. “The San Francisco Review accepted three of my poems.”
“Poems?”
Cal sat back down. Read the letter again. MISS PORTER. She laughed. Wait until they find out she was a grandmother.
Iris sat too, beside her on the couch this time.
“Cal,” she said again, “why are you here?”
Cal looked at her.
“I might stay here a while,” she said. “Find an apartment. A job. I was thinking it would be nice to work in a bookstore. And take some courses. Maybe I’ll even enroll in a program. There’s a thought.”
Her possibilities seemed limitless.
“But that’s all sort of long range,” Iris said.
“Yes,” Cal said, nodding. “I see what you mean. Well, I think I’ll drive out to Point Reyes tomorrow, for a day or two.”
This last surprised even Cal herself. Once, years ago, when Vivvie had been a visiting professor at Berkeley, she had written to Cal about Point Reyes. Stretches of beaches, isolated except for lovers with bottles of wine, and rare birds. Vivvie had rented a cabin there after her divorce. Her husband had wanted to take their daughter, Karen, back to England to live with him. She had felt revived there, she’d told Cal. There’s nothing there but you and the ocean and nature. You realize things.
“Bodega Bay,” Iris laughed.
“What?”
“Bodega Bay. Tippi Hedron. The Birds. That’s out by Point Reyes.”
The movie came back to Cal slowly. A sleepy coastal town invaded by birds. She had dropped all the children off at a Beatles movie. Help? A Hard Day’s Night? It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and she’d taken herself to see The Birds. Later, over pizza, Mackenzie had tried to explain how Paul’s grandfather got kidnapped. But all Cal could think of were those birds, lining up on the telephone wires, planning to attack.
“When are you going?” Iris asked. “Tomorrow?”
Cal nodded.
“The thing is,” Iris said, “if Mackenzie shows up, what should I tell her? To wait for you?”
The sun had shifted and the colors from the crystal lay across the couch now in fuzzy stripes.
Cal smoothed the letter on her lap, seeking energy from its words.
It is possible, she thought, to start a new life here. “Yes,” she said to Iris. “Ask her to wait.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SAM THOUGHT FISHERMAN’S WHARF smelled awful, like french fries and fish. He was glad to finally go inside the museum called Believe It or Not. In the window there, the fattest man in the world sat on a chair and ate pies. The man was so fat that the chair looked tiny underneath him, as if it were a child’s. Sam wondered why it didn’t snap in two, and send the fat man tumbling to the ground.
The museum was full of amazing things. Aunt Mackenzie read the descriptions to Sam as they wandered through the rooms. They stood in one of the shoes of the world’s tallest man, and watched a film of a man riding a miniature bicycle. The bicycle itself was in the museum and it was the perfect size for a GI Joe. They watched another film of a man eating a car, piece by piece, the bumpers and windshields and doors crunching loudly.
“Boys and girls,” a voice in the film said, “don’t try this at home.”
Sam watched the movie three times. He wondered about his mother’s big pink Cadillac. Would it taste like cherries? Or watermelon? An X ray of the man’s stomach showed pieces of rusty metal. The man had eaten a Peugeot and a Mercedes Benz, and the Mercedes’s logo sat right inside his stomach.
The museum had two sounds. Music and slapping. The music, his aunt told him, was Handel’s Water Music.
“Believe it or not,” she said, “a man played that tune under water on a violin for sixty-two hours.”
Sam didn’t believe it. But then again, he had just watched a man eat a car and that didn’t seem too believable at first.
The slapping came from a cardboard arm that stuck out of the wall and swung back and forth, slapping two cardboard faces.
“In Russia,” his aunt said, “two men in a bar slapped each other in the face for thirty-eight hours.”
Sam decided to believe it right away.
There was nothing in the museum about people disappearing and then reappearing. Mackenzie read him a card under a blonde doll sleeping. It said, “Mrs. Helen Jones was in a coma for fourteen years. In 1966 she opened her eyes, sat up, and asked her husband what he wanted for dinner.” Mrs. Helen Jones gave Sam a little hope. A coma, in a way, was a little like disappearing. He tried to imagine his father walking in and asking his mother what was for dinner. Something seemed wrong there, though, and Sam couldn’t really believe that would happen.
Outside, Sam watched the fat man eating pies. On one side of him were stacks and stacks of empty boxes, and on the other side were piles of pies. As they turned to leave, the fat man waved good-bye to Sam. His fingers were like fat white worms.
The street was lined with people selling things—T-shirts, jewelry, watercolors of the city. On the sidewalk, three black kids danced like robots to music playing from a big radio. People stopped and watched them and put money in a top hat. Down the street a man played the piano, drums, harmonica, and tambourine all at the same time. He shook maracas with his teeth.
Then Sam saw the man who wouldn’t talk.
His face was painted white. He was dressed all in black. He came up to Sam and stopped, as if he’d banged his nose on a door. Then, slowly, he opened this imaginary door and stepped through, closing it behind him.
Sam kept waiting for the man to talk. But he didn’t. He pretended to climb out a window, lasso a horse, and cut down a tree.
A crowd had gathered, all watching the
man.
“Hey, mister,” a teenaged girl said. “Can we talk?”
Everyone laughed.
Except Sam, who watched as the man slowly shook his head no.
Why, Sam wondered, hadn’t this man disappeared?
Suddenly, a thought struck Sam. A thought so terrible it made him lose his breath and gasp for air. It was only his father who had disappeared when he stopped talking. This man, and Sam, and Helen Keller were all silent, and they just stayed put.
Mackenzie didn’t understand why the gentle-faced mime had upset Sam so much. She remembered her mother telling them how frightened Alexander used to be of Santa Claus. Perhaps this was the same type of thing. Cal had said that Alexander used to refuse to sit on Santa’s lap. He would hide his face as they passed Santa sitting on his golden throne at the Garden City Shopping Center. Maybe the mime’s painted face had seemed ghostly to Sam, in much the same way as Santa’s cotton candy beard and eyebrows had seemed, as Alexander later had recalled, spooky and otherworldly.
The mime, realizing he was frightening the boy, had quickly blown up an orange balloon and twisted it into a dachshund for Sam. Then he made a yellow poodle for Mackenzie. But still Sam had stood, gulping air, pounding his thighs with tightened fists until Mackenzie led him away. She had planned on taking him for a cable car ride, and to Alioto’s for dinner. Instead, they went right back to the hotel.
The balloon dogs sat deflating on the bureau. Sam lay on one of the beds, rolled into a ball with his eyes scrunched closed. Mackenzie had ordered them cheeseburgers from room service, but his remained untouched.
She dialed Information. They hadn’t come here, after all, to sightsee. She had to find her mother.
“What city?” The voice was nasal and annoyed.
“Do you have a listing for a Cal Porter?” Mackenzie asked. “It would be a very new number.”
“Our computers are updated daily. What city?”
The names of the cities around them stretched across Mackenzie’s mind. Sausalito. Tiberon. Berkeley.
“San Francisco,” she said.
“Sorry,” the operator said. She spread the word out as if it were two words. Sor. Ry.
“How about in a different city? A Cal Porter?”