Renata began to feel impatient to get to Boston. Her destination had been a whim originally. A guy named Rick whom she had waited tables with in Venice was from Boston, and he had told her about the cobblestone and brick sidewalks on Beacon Hill, and about the Public Garden, where they had ice skating in the winter and swan boats in the summer. He showed her a picture of his parents’ brownstone, the roof rounded with snow like a house in a children’s book, the shrubs frosted white in a doll-sized garden.
She was driving to that picture as much as anything else, because it represented nothing she had come from; in such a place you could begin your life, the one you were supposed to have.
Renata had no family to leave behind except Marcia and her kids. Her parents were dead, and their parents, the grandparents she never knew, were all dead. Although her father had had some half-brothers and -sisters in California from his mother’s second marriage, he hadn’t known them. Her mother’s family, the O’Conners, were originally from New York City, but the children had dispersed all over the country. Her mother never spoke of her family, other than to say, “You’re better off not knowin’ ‘em, sweet,” when Renata had asked why she didn’t have grandparents and uncles and aunts, like the other kids at school.
Not that much of her life growing up resembled that of the other kids. Even Marcia’s arms around Renata in their bedroom when they were children could not have protected her from the sound of their parents yelling and screaming down the hall. No number of stories Marcia told, in which a princess named Renata escaped from a gloomy castle through a window no bigger than a keyhole, could have reassured. But even those sisterly comforts, slight though they were, proved fleeting. Soon after entering high school, Marcia left Renata to fend for herself. She fell in love her sophomore year, and moved in with her future husband just after graduation.
With Marcia gone, Renata was on her own when her mother died. Though her mother used to drink almost as heavily as her father, she was not a mean drunk, and stayed glassily affectionate to her daughters until she passed out. Renata was always “Rennie” to her mother, who made up a song about “Rennie, Rennie, bright as a penny; Rennie the lass from Kilkenny.” Renata was in junior high when her mother’s cancer slipped in between her ribs like a snake and sucked her from their lives in less than a month. Her father became sober for the first time in years, and actually tried, Renata noticed, to fill in some of the gap in their house, coming straight home after work to cook hamburgers or hot dogs or Kraft macaroni and cheese for them. But to Renata this silent, clear-eyed man was a stranger, and though she did not necessarily prefer the slurring, sarcastic man who cursed her and slammed things, she did know what to expect from him, as she did not from this new father.
They didn’t have much to say to each other, although Renata longed to have a conversation between them, tell him how much she missed her mother, and ask him if he ever missed her, too. She wanted to know things about him: what his days were like; if he had chosen to be a printer or if that was just what had happened to him; whether he was sorry he had had a family so early; if he loved his daughters. But there was no way to pose these questions, and he, in his turn, seemed incurious about her life at school, though Renata at the time was earning straight A’s, and being asked about her thoughts on going to college by the school guidance counselor. She thought it might be her fault that she and her father could not talk at suppertime, because, try as she would, she could not present a cheerful face to him. She guessed that her sadness must have looked like sullenness, since somewhere along the line her father seemed to have given up on her, staying late after work again to drink with his buddies, forgetting to leave any food in the refrigerator.
For a while Renata used her baby-sitting money to buy McDonald’s, then she began writing her father notes to please leave grocery money on the hall table. He did this, and she started doing all the food-shopping for them, as well as cleaning the house when she felt like it. Though her father had returned to his drinking, his outbursts were rarer now, so while they lived together in the house during Renata’s high school years, she could do pretty much as she pleased as long as she stayed out of his way. Both of them started spending nights away from home, she with her twenty-year-old boyfriend who already had an apartment, and her father who knows where. Renata had smoked marijuana first as an experiment at some junior high parties, then because she liked it. She started sleeping in and missing classes in her senior year, and barely graduated. After graduation, she got a job as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes, and saved for a car.
Her grown-up life began with the car. At the age of nineteen, she knew that anytime she needed to, she could pack clothes and leave: she had the keys to her used Toyota, she had waitressing experience and had discovered she wasn’t afraid of hard work, and, more important, she had nothing at home in Springfield that she would be sorry to leave.
One day just short of her twentieth birthday, she did leave, but it was boredom, rather than unhappiness, which caused her to go. By then she had moved in with her boyfriend, and their lives had settled into a routine. After work they hung out at a local tavern. Renata sat on the barstool and smoked, feeding the jukebox; Mike played pool. She thought that they never fought because they were so well matched temperamentally, but on Valentine’s Day, when he suggested they get married, Renata had the revelation that she had never cared enough about him to have an argument. It was his proposal which made up her mind to go to California. When Mike gave her the ring at the Red Rustler steak house, where he liked to go to celebrate all important occasions, she took it because she didn’t know what else to say. In fact, she was touched at the amount of saving he must have done to produce a diamond so big.
She accepted the ring, and then, like a coward, dropped it in the mail to him on her way out of town. She wrote two letters, notes really, one to her father and one to Mike. To her father she said only that she was going to California for a while. She would send him an address and hoped he stayed well. To Mike she wrote that she thought she was too young to settle down, though if she were ready, it would be with him. This last part was not true, but she owed him at least that much sentiment. She insured the ring for $2,000 and sent him the receipt in a separate envelope in case he needed to make a claim.
Renata lived in San Francisco for a few years, but was drawn eventually to the sun in Southern California. She sent her father her address every time she moved, but heard from him only once, on her twenty-fifth birthday. Why the twenty-fifth, and not the twenty-third, or even the twenty-first, which would have made sense, she didn’t know. Actually, it was on her sister’s birthday that he sent the card, but since Renata’s birthday had been only two weeks before, she forgave the mistake. Inside was a check for a hundred dollars, which Renata kept uncashed for a month while she pondered what to do with it. Finally she decided to get herself a very expensive haircut at one of the salons in Santa Monica, and, with whatever money was left, buy lunch overlooking the ocean.
She told the stylist to go very short, and the slim young man whose own hair was a brilliant platinum cropped close to his skull and whose close-fitting white jeans and white T-shirt gave him the appearance of an angel, nodded his head approvingly. First he tilted Renata’s head from side to side, scrutinizing the lines of her profile. Then he robed her and led her to the marble shampoo sink, where he gathered her dark shoulder-length hair in his hand and gently sprayed it, cradling her head as he worked. She watched as he deftly combed her wet hair back from her forehead and experimented with several natural parts. He told her she had a serious face, and she agreed, thinking that it was almost too serious a face for Los Angeles. As her hair fell to the floor under the hairdresser’s quick scissors, Renata grew more and more pleased. By the time he was through with her, her eyes were enormous, and her mouth and nose suddenly had a strong, classic shape. Even the hairdresser was surprised at the difference he had made in her looks.
“Don’t ever hide underneath your
hair again,” he scolded her kindly, rubbing a dollop of scented mousse between his hands and working it through her hair with authority. Her hair, freed from the weight of six inches or so, was now wavy and caught the light with a subdued sheen. He had shaped it close around her head, with short, feathery bangs. From the salon she drove to a restaurant in Malibu where she had never eaten and ordered a margarita. Her table was outside on the deck under a large umbrella. She faced the wide, blue expanse of the Pacific. Since it was a Wednesday around two, she had the deck almost to herself except for one or two customers who looked like Malibu locals, probably record-industry moguls or something, with their casual running shorts, beach sandals, and frayed cotton shirts.
Renata had just ordered her meal and was beginning to drink her second margarita when two guys came out on the deck and took the table next to hers. One of them kept staring at her. She avoided his eyes and studied the ocean. Renata was taking pleasure in reminding herself that she was her father’s guest for lunch, as if that fact were nothing very extraordinary, as if he had even chosen the restaurant and the view. Then the wind blew the baseball cap off the table of the guy who had been watching her, and into her lap. She caught it in surprise and he laughed.
“Good catch,” he told her. “Now let me buy you a drink.”
She allowed them to join her. The three of them drank pitchers of margaritas and she laughed at their jokes. Finally she stood up to go.
“You shouldn’t drive,” he told her, catching her arm and sitting her down again. “Listen, Rod’s house is just up the beach. What do you say we leave your car here and go grill something on his deck for dinner?”
She stared doubtfully.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m a nice guy. Look.” He pointed to his eyes. “Use your intuition.” She stared into his blue eyes, remembering that Ted Bundy was a nice guy; the Hillside Strangler was probably a nice guy. The sun was going down and she was floating on waves of alcohol and ocean breezes that carried wood-burning scents of charred meats and garlic. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt a quick thrill at the surprise of the new haircut. She felt fantastic. She felt reckless.
“Great hair,” he told her, petting her like a cat. “Really great hair.”
From that evening when she stayed over at Rod’s Malibu house, wearing her dress to bed with Bryan on the futon in the living room, her bare legs twined around his jeaned ones, they were a couple. It was a week or two before they finally made love, though they slept together every night from the day they met. From the very beginning they loved just to curl up together, almost like children.
MARCIA CALLED HER TO SAY THEIR FATHER had been in a serious car accident and was not expected to live; would she fly home? The day Renata received this news she had been seeing Bryan about a month. She almost said no, hating to leave town at this moment of heady physical addiction. It was Bryan who told her to go. “You only have one father,” he said. “You don’t have a choice about this.”
As soon as she was on the plane she realized the wisdom of his advice. She hardly remembered her mother’s funeral, so dazed and tired had she been, but she could vividly recall the calm, restored look on her mother’s face in the coffin. Neither the ravages of drinking and smoking nor the toll of the cancer had destroyed her looks. She was buried looking like the mother Renata wished she had always been: self-possessed, faintly amused, beautiful. Her father that day had dressed in his best black suit, the one he had been married in, and had combed his dark hair back until it gleamed. Seeing him bending slightly over her mother’s body, which wore the green dress she always put on for special occasions, Renata believed he mourned her.
Marcia met her at the airport and drove them to the hospital where their father lay in a coma. Renata sat with him while Marcia went home to her kids. There was nothing to do but stare at his bruised and puffy face, and his shaved head where he had needed dozens of stitches. If he was going to die from this accident, Renata was sorry that it would be looking like this. He had been a vain man, with a lean frame and white skin that she had inherited. It didn’t seem fair that the one thing in life he had been lucky with— his looks—should be taken from him at the end.
She tried, and failed, to feel some grief during her vigil. As it was, she sat and read magazines for two days in the intensive-care ward while nurses came and went, adjusting the IV that dripped something into her father’s veins. She stood outside to smoke, and ate in the hospital cafeteria off Styrofoam trays. She didn’t call Bryan, because she could hardly remember Bryan’s face. And although she was staying at the house she grew up in, she found she could remember practically nothing about her childhood even when she was staring at the familiar varnished bookcase that still housed all the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books her mother had once collected. She was in a limbo of nonfeeling; she knew only the present tense, and it gleamed with the coldness of hospital chrome.
When their father died during the middle of the third night of her visit, Renata was ashamed for feeling relieved. He never regained consciousness, never had any last message or advice or apology for her. She stayed in Springfield just long enough to help Marcia arrange for the cremation and empty the house to prepare it for sale. Marcia kept a small cherry desk that her mother had used to pay bills, and a silver tray, their parents’ nicest wedding gift. Renata chose a small gold locket of her mother’s. There was no picture in the locket. She looked through her father’s dresser for a keepsake, finally settling on a silver-plated cigarette case stamped with his initials: FJR, for Francis James Rivera. She liked to think that the locket and cigarette case were presents her parents had given each other. She hunted for some photographs from her childhood, but discovered that her parents had not taken many, and the ones they had were blurry and out of focus. She kept them anyway, along with a photograph of her parents’ wedding, the colors of which had turned bilious. A dealer was summoned to give them a flat fee for the rest of the furniture and haul it away.
Surprisingly, Frank Rivera had left a will. Even more surprising, his job had provided him with life insurance, so although he had never earned much in his lifetime and had no savings, the sisters suddenly found themselves with the proceeds of a small ranch house worth about seventy thousand dollars to split, as well as thirty thousand each in life insurance. The lawyer in Marcia’s office who was handling the probate for them said that in a few months they would have checks.
Renata didn’t know why, upon returning to California, she never mentioned the money to Bryan. She certainly didn’t think he’d try to get his hands on it, aside from his usual casual sponging of movies and meals. He seemed never to actually want for money; he always had enough cash somehow to produce a few lines of coke when he wanted to get them high before bed. But she decided to pretend, even to herself, that the inheritance did not exist, except for allowing herself the indulgence of monthly trips to get her hair cut at the Santa Monica salon, where they always greeted her with a glass of lemon-scented mineral water. The lawyer in Eugene helped her invest the bulk of the money, and then she stopped thinking about it.
It was the money, really, which gave her the courage to have the baby on her own. Though, looking at Charlie now, she told herself that no matter how poor she would have been without her father’s death, she still would have had him. Surely she would have. Wasn’t Charlie her fate, her future, this one particular boy?
But since the incident in the park, the sole responsibility of him was beginning to weigh on her. She slept fitfully, with dreams of Charlie accidentally locked alone inside the car, Charlie left behind at a roadside stop in a moment of amnesia, or Charlie stolen from her motel room while she slept. The dreams never ended with tragedy; Renata woke just before something horrible happened, her heart pounding from the effort to rescue him. Then she would raise herself up on her elbow, waiting for her baby to take shape out of the nothingness as her eyes adjusted to the dark. He would be there beside her in the bed, protected from the edge by a barricade o
f pillows, protected from drafts by a zippered sleeper, protected from the outside world by a single door chain.
RENATA SIGNED THE LEASE on an apartment in Brookline just before Thanksgiving, but was not able to move in until the first of December. Overwhelmed by Boston, she and Charlie drove to Cape Cod for the holiday, finding a room in Hyannis. The Cape and Hyannis were places she had heard of before, associating them with blueberry pie and white-sand beaches, but she was disappointed. She knew the weather would most likely be cold and possibly wet, but she hadn’t expected the relentlessly grim rain of the Cape and the ugly asphalt sprawl of Hyannis. And she couldn’t find the beaches. Every time she followed a road that was supposed to lead to the shore, she found either a tiny stretch of seaweed-strewn sand that soon became private on either side or a boat dock. She was homesick for California, where the weather would be cool but sunny now, and if you wanted ocean you just pointed yourself west until you came upon the vast, straight line of me Pacific.
On Thanksgiving, she propped Charlie up with pillows on their motel bed, his arms encircling a bright pumpkin almost as large as himself, and snapped pictures. Renata wanted him to have holidays. Her mother and father observed them erratically when she was growing up. On a good year, her mother would be up dressing the turkey by six A.M., and have pies ready to bake by ten. Her father would be jovial with his beer and chips in front of the football games on television. With luck they would make it through dinner before the drinking her parents had done that day either started them fighting or caused them to pass out in the living room.
On a bad year, the drinking would be so heavy the night before the holiday that either the arguing would have cast its bitter pall over everything and her mother would refuse to cook, or her parents would still be sleeping at noon, both of them so hung over that when they awoke her mother was not able to cook, or it would be too late. The raw turkey would sit for days in the refrigerator, its watery pink blood collecting at the bottom of the plastic wrapper, then they would throw it out. One year, when Marcia was twelve, she cooked the turkey herself, sitting Renata on a high stool in the kitchen to watch her. She read the cookbook to get the right oven temperature and set the timer to baste the turkey at regular intervals. When she was struggling with the weight of the pan as she tried to slide it back into the oven, some fat splashed over the side of the roaster. A few minutes later the burning fat set off the smoke alarm, waking their father, who ran to the kitchen in a foggy confusion, saw Marcia in a panic at the open oven door waving away billows of black smoke, and Renata in the middle of the kitchen, crying. Without asking any questions, he shoved Marcia aside and reached for the roaster without a pot holder. He burned his hand, cursed, and slapped Marcia hard across the cheek, yelling that she was burning the house down. Marcia and Renata ran to their bedroom, and clung and sobbed together under the covers of Marcia’s bed. That Thanksgiving they ate nothing until nine P.M., when their mother finally put on a robe and ordered a pizza to be delivered.
The Hunger Moon Page 4