by Ann Hood
Cal’s mind lingered on the image of her sister. How was she? Cal wondered: She thought of Hope from long ago, before Ricardo Havana had come into her life, before any of it had happened and she and Cal had lived a safe childhood in that house. Cal remembered the way they would huddle together in bed, their bodies smelling of lilac talc, Hope’s soft stomach pressed against Cal’s back. “When we grow up,” Hope would whisper, “let’s be famous ladies.” Her breath smelled of milk and Pepsodent. “All right,” Cal would say. “Let’s move to Paris or Argentina and dance in fancy slippers.” Sometimes, before bedtime, they would practice dancing together, their bathrobes twirling taffeta dresses, their hair fastened by an imaginary jeweled tiara. Years later, Cal would watch her own children do the jitterbug together. “Look, Mommy,” Mackenzie would say, “I’m Gidget.” “I’m Moon Doggie,” Alexander would say.
Cal heard voices outside the bedroom. She thought again of her days ahead, in the cabin at Point Reyes. The sea there, she imagined, was full of abalone, their shells sparkling, bone and purple.
The night before, in a mood for celebration over her poems’ acceptance, Cal had offered to buy Iris dinner.
“Name the spot,” she’d said. After all this time alone, the idea of company had appealed to Cal. Even Iris Bloom’s.
I made it, she’d thought. I am in San Francisco.
“We’ll even have champagne,” she’d added.
Iris had frowned, and Cal wondered if Iris drank. She had still been expecting some cult oddity to surface.
“That sounds great,” Iris had said. “But I already have plans tonight.”
“Oh.” Cal had felt disappointed. She wanted, suddenly, to talk to someone. Or even to just listen. She could ask Iris Bloom why she’d dyed her hair purple, then sit back and listen to the story. The thought of another silent dinner distressed her.
“My boyfriend,” Iris had said, “does a stand-up act in Los Gatos every Thursday. It’s just a hobby, really. But he is such a riot. You should hear him.” Iris had laughed at some remembered joke.
Cal had pictured herself at a restaurant. Linen tablecloths and candlelight. “Table for one,” she’d say, and watch the San Francisco Bay below.
“I’m sure it’s not your thing,” Iris had added, “but you could come with me to see Lloyd. They serve great chicken wings there.”
“Chicken wings,” Cal had said. “Well, that sounds fine.”
She had imagined a dinner of crab and a good white wine, but felt so tangled with emotion that she opted to be with Iris in her bar in Los Gatos instead.
“You know,” Iris had said before they left, ‘I’ll never forget the way your house used to look at Christmas time. It was like stepping into the pages of the Saturday Evening Post.”
Cal had had to turn away from Iris. Her words hit her like a punch. My God, Cal thought, it was like that. There were white poinsettias on every table. Silver bells hung from the front door and tinkled musically when it opened.
“It really was lovely,” Cal had said.
“Mrs. Porter, I was wondering something. Do you think you’d help me decorate my place? I mean, my family was never very big on traditional things like that. Last year I went to buy some decorations and I got overwhelmed. There was so much to choose from. Lights and little Santas and wreaths. I didn’t end up buying anything.”
Cal and Iris had gone shopping, and bought fresh boughs of pine tied with red ribbons. They strung red lights on Iris’s avocado tree. Cal had gotten an urge, surrounded by the smell of fresh pine and the glow of Christmas lights, to call her family. But they were all scattered, distant. She wondered about Jams, all alone. Had he bothered to go up to the attic and bring down the boxes that were marked in green ink: X-mas decorations? In one were the stockings that they hung from the mantel on Christmas Eve. She thought of the droopy candy-cane-striped one with Alexander across the top, the letters stitched long ago, cramped together so they’d all fit. Mackenzie’s had a big M on it in silver glitter.
“You need a Christmas stocking,” Cal had told Iris. She gave her one of her own knee socks—an old one of Mackenzie’s, actually—with a blue and white reindeer and snowflake pattern on it.
Then they had driven to Los Gatos. COMEDY NITE, the sign outside said.
They ate spicy chicken wings, dipping them in blue cheese dressing, and drank Anchor Steam beer. Amateur comics came on, bathed in a too-bright spotlight. Cal had laughed at all of their jokes. A bald man who couldn’t get dates. A divorced woman down on men and stewardesses. A Chicano telling Mexican jokes. She couldn’t imagine actually standing up in front of a room full of strangers and talking about her own faults or infirmities.
Lloyd Gray was short and husky with a tuft of white hair amid a head of black curls.
“I am dull,” he’d said in a monotone.
I left my family, Cal thought, pretending the spotlight was on her, the faces turned toward her.
“Even my name is dull.”
Bad mother. Bad wife.
“Gray Gray.”
Iris had touched Cal’s hand lightly.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she’d whispered. “He’s a riot.”
Lloyd had driven back into the city with them. His voice never wavered or rose. He is dull, Cal had thought.
Now Cal went into Iris’s kitchen. Purple flowered wallpaper showed faintly through a coat of white paint. At the small round table, Iris sat with a woman so thin her bones poked at her skin, sharp and white. Her hair hung down like dried husks of corn to her shoulders.
“And,” the woman was saying, “I’m allergic to dust.”
Her eyes scanned the room for hidden lint.
Iris nodded and jotted something in a notebook.
“So,” Iris said, “that’s cats, smoke, and dust.”
Cal cleared her throat, a habit Jams had that had always irritated her.
Iris and the woman looked up.
“Hi,” Iris said.
“I’m going to get started,” Cal said. After her dream, she felt the ocean beckoning to her, offering solace, answers. “I’m sorry to interrupt but I wanted to tell you good-bye.”
“We’re having a roommate interview,” Iris said.
The woman extended a bony hand, like a skeleton reaching from the grave.
“I’m Judith.”
Cal nodded, shook the hand that was offered. It was cold and damp.
“It’s a nice sunny room,” Cal said.
“Then why are you moving?”
Iris laughed. “She’s just a guest.”
Cal inhaled. The apartment smelled like Christmas. From the living room, she could see the red lights twinkle. She went in and sat on the couch. The prism swallowed the red glow and sent it back out, pink, magenta, purple. Cal wrote on the back of a postcard shaped like the state of Idaho. On the front it said FAMOUS POTATOES.
“Mackenzie,” she wrote, “back on Sunday. Wait.”
The pen hovered over the card. She should write more, but nothing else came to her.
At the top of the stairs, she handed it to Iris, who had joined her to say good-bye.
“In case Mackenzie comes,” Cal said.
“I thought Iowa had potatoes.”
“No,” Cal said. “Idaho.”
“All those I states,” Iris said.
Cal smiled, anxious to get on her way.
“Thanks for helping me with the decorations,” Iris said.
“It was fun,” Cal said, although at night the simple act had haunted her. She had lay in bed, feeling guilty and vaguely homesick, imagining all the Christmases past. She had thought of herself and Hope in that house, and then of her own children, and had been unable to sleep. How, she had wondered, had she wound up in California with Iris Bloom stringing lights on an avocado tree? She had read Abnormal Behavior, case studies on schizophrenics and multiple personalities, until dawn. Below her, a drunk had shouted obscenities against Lyndon Johnson.
“I’ll probably have to ta
ke Judith,” Iris said. “She’s totally macrobiotic.”
Cal nodded. “Well.”
She turned to go down the stairs.
“Wait,” Iris said. “Lloyd would really like to do your name.”
“Do my name?” Cal said. She imagined Lloyd, in his monotone, making jokes about her to a group of strangers.
“He changed my life,” Iris said.
Cal looked down at the card Iris had handed her. Pale gray background with dark gray print, LLOYD GRAY:
NAME THERAPIST.
“Uncover your true self through your name,” Iris said. “Iris is the goddess of rainbows, you know. Lloyd says there may be something in your name. Cal. And here you are in California.”
“It’s Caroline,” Cal said. The name seemed unfamiliar on her lips.
“Oh,” Iris said, disappointed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
JASON SAT IN THE empty apartment. He imagined the wayang puppets that Mackenzie had bought in Indonesia hanging on one wall, his own Avalon Ballroom posters on another. There was a small room off the kitchen, what the realtor, Mindy, had referred to as a junior bedroom. Mackenzie, he thought, could use it as a darkroom. The building itself had a great doorway, which screamed to be photographed. The edges were bordered with a pineapple motif. “Pineapples,” Mindy had told him, “mean welcome.”
“Jason?”
He turned without getting up. Mindy stood in the doorway. She had very black hair, held back by a red and white bow. The bottom left lens of her glasses had a big rhinestone M.
“I didn’t even hear you,” he said.
She touched his arm with the tips of her bright red fingertips. He had only met her twice, and each time she had been perfectly color coordinated. He wondered if she did her nails every night to match the next day’s outfit. Mackenzie’s were short and square, covered in a clear gloss.
“The apartment gets you, doesn’t it?” she said. She had a disconcerting air of familiarity. “And how about this view?”
She craned her neck, stood on tiptoe.
“I think,” Mindy said, “yes, that’s the World Trade Center off to the right.”
Jason had lived his entire childhood, right up until he had left for college, in a suburb outside of Chicago. He hardly remembered the neighborhood, a blur of split-level homes and manicured lawns. The air, he recalled, was the cleanest air he’d ever smelled. Crisp. In his bedroom he’d hung a mobile of spaceships, and had followed each rocket’s launching with an intense fascination. He used to write to Cape Canaveral. “Please,” he’d said, “let me be an astronaut.” But by junior high, he’d replaced the rockets with black light posters. His parents wouldn’t allow him to get the black light that turned them into neon, and so they hung, pale, on his walls.
It was a neighborhood that people left. Families moved out all the time, to better neighborhoods or cities on one of the coasts, Boston, Seattle, Savannah. Only the Fines stayed. And the Adlers, their next-door neighbors, whose father drank and never got promoted or transferred. Jason’s parents moved to Sarasota, Florida, after the children had all left home. They lived in another split-level house, this one smaller, and painted turquoise. It sat right on the ninth hole of a golf course. At least once a month, a stray golf ball shattered the glass on the sliding glass door that led to their patio.
The Adler’s son, Steve, who had been Jason’s best friend growing up, lived on East 88th Street now, and invited Jason to wine and cheese parties, and Trivial Pursuit tournaments. Adler kept intricate notes on all the tournament players, lists of questions that had stumped them, and their weakest and strongest categories. “Been brushing up on that science?” he always asked Jason. As teenagers they had hitchhiked to New York to hear the Beatles play at Shea Stadium. They had been fifteen years old, and, unable to get tickets, had sat in the parking lot to listen. “The fucking Beatles,” Adler had said, over and over, in amazement. When John Lennon had died, Adler called Jason and cried.
Sometimes, Jason asked Adler what he remembered about their neighborhood. “It was dull,” he’d said, “but a good place to grow up. I guess.”
“I’ve got to be honest with you, Jason,” Mindy said. “This place is a real steal. It will be scooped up quickly. If not sooner.”
Jason remembered sitting in the parking lot of Shea Stadium, the Beatles’s singing barely heard above the crowd’s screams, and thinking that New York City was the best place on earth.
“Hey,” Mindy said. She snapped her fingers. A loud click. “Where are you?”
“Shea Stadium.”
“Right,” she said. “The Yankees?”
Adler would say she’d have to brush up on her orange category. Sports and leisure.
Jason stood. The kitchen floor was covered with large black and white squares. The Formica that lined the countertops was pink. “Very sort of art deco-ish,” Mindy had said. He wondered if Mackenzie would like that. She talked so much, and so fondly of her family’s house, recalling everything in great detail. “How can you not remember what your family’s kitchen looked like?” she had said, exasperated. “You lived there your whole life.” He pictured, faintly, daisies or mums on the wallpaper, big and yellow, opened wide. But that seemed more like a house he’d seen in a movie once. Or a television show. “That was either our kitchen wallpaper,” he’d said, “or the Cleavers’. I can’t remember which.” The Porters’ dining room walls were painted a clay red, with white borders. “How can you not remember?” she’d said.
“Yes,” Mindy said, following his gaze. “The kitchen is fabulous.” She did a few quick tap steps, her red cowboy boots Shuffling off to Buffalo across the big squares, a happy housewife with shining floors.
“You know what, Mindy?” Jason said. “I’ve got to walk around and think about it some.”
Her smile didn’t falter for a second. “Of course,” she said. “Absolutely.”
He was thinking that he had to buy it. He had to live here with Mackenzie, have her perfume in the air, the smell of photography chemicals faint behind it, the bathroom full of her powders and lotions, their square white bottles trimmed in silver, lining every shelf. He was thinking how he’d remember forever that the kitchen walls were stark white against the pink countertops.
Mindy looked at her watch, a slow and deliberate gesture.
“I’ve got a couple coming to look at it in about twenty minutes,” she said. “If they want to take it …” Her voice trailed off and she gave a helpless shrug.
He was thinking that Mackenzie would be furious if he bought it without talking to her first.
“You can let yourself out?” Mindy said. “I’m going to just sit here and wait for them.”
On the stairway, a small boy pushed a fire truck back and forth, bored. Inside, a round head with a fireman’s hat sat at the wheel, featureless and bodyless.
“Zoom,” the boy said. “Zoom.”
“Got to get that fire out,” Jason said. If he lived here, he thought, he’d see the boy every day.
“Fire?” the boy said.
Jason pointed to the truck.
“There’s no fire,” the boy said. “It’s just a toy.”
Jason walked around the block, pretending this was his neighborhood. Here’s where we’d buy the paper, he thought. Here’s where we’d come for milk when we ran out. He looked at all the doorways in the buildings he passed. When he talked to Mackenzie he would give her every detail, every smell, every great doorway.
He wondered if there really was a couple coming to look at the place. Or perhaps Mindy was using some sales techniques she’d learned in real estate class. Always make them think someone else wants it too. When he’d moved out to LA with Amanda he’d had to buy a car. After so many years in Manhattan, cars had seemed strange to him, the act of driving ridiculous. The car salesmen had bantered and joked with him, avoiding his questions, changing prices and deals. Finally, tired of all the games, he’d bought a green Dodge Dart, square and plain like someone’s old
uncle’s car, bought it only because the salesman had had no bargaining points with it. It was ugly and had no extras, not even a radio. It was exactly what it seemed. Amanda had refused to ride in it with him. “Honestly, Jason,” she had said when he drove it home, “why do you do these things to me?” She’d given him a red Ferrari matchbox car the next day.
Except for his time with Amanda, he’d lived in New York City for almost ten years. Like his neighborhood near Chicago, it had never seemed like home to him, but rather just where he lived. A place. Since Mackenzie had moved here, though, it was full of personality and meaning to him. The streets and corners were suddenly familiar and dear. It was true he could be totally immune to his environment, sit inside for days working without even lifting his shades, then walk outside to discover there had been a snowstorm, or to his complete surprise find that spring had arrived, or that the building next door was gone. But with Mackenzie, he was constantly aware of his surroundings. He’d found a row of wooden houses with small plots of lawns, a touch of suburbia off Sixth Avenue. The smells of cardamom and coriander pulled him into the Indian grocery on Lexington. Every doorway was beautiful. He felt like he had a home.
She has to move into that apartment with me.
As a child, immersed in Gemini and Apollo space programs, he’d been convinced there would be men on the moon sometime soon. He’d imagined cities there, shiny and silver. “Be serious,” his father used to say. When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Jason had been sure anything was possible.
Maybe she’ll really do it, he thought.
He was in front of the building again. The pineapples carved above the door were delicate scalloped ovals. Welcome.
Inside, the little boy and his truck were gone. Jason smelled chocolate, brownies, or a cake baking.
Mindy sat alone on the windowsill, looking out in the direction of the World Trade Center. Her jacket puffed out around her like a gentle red parachute.