by Ann Hood
“Maybe it’s time for car games,” Howard laughed. “I think Claudia’s bored.”
She shook her head.
When she used to drive all those country roads looking for a farm to buy, she and Simon used to play games. Henry always read, or colored. But Simon would sit up front with her. What if we lived here? Claudia would ask, and point to a house they passed. One, large and white and set far back from the road, with columns in front and a wrought iron gate, looked, Simon had said, like a castle. “I would paint the walls silver,” Claudia had said, “and put a swimming pool in the living room.” “I would marry a princess,” Simon had told her, “or a millionaire.” “Where would that leave your old mom?” she had asked him. “Oh, no,” Simon had said, “no matter who I marry or where I go, I’ll take you with me.”
All those dreams, Claudia thought now. All the planning and planning she had done. It was what had kept her going.
“It’s important to have a plan,” Claudia said out loud, although she meant to say it silently.
“Yes, it is,” Howard said. “It’s always good to have a plan.”
“Like when you know you have tolls to pay. You should take all your change and keep it in a designated spot,” Claudia continued. “The ashtray, maybe. Or the little dent between the seats.”
She had always done that with all her lists. “Simon—dentist. Henry—school shoes. Write letters. Pay phone bill.” Claudia looked out the window. For a moment, she was speeding down the highway with Elizabeth in the old pickup truck. East on the Mass Pike to have lunch with Suzanne. “Did she ever tell you about Abel?” Claudia had asked back then.
“Did she?” she asked now.
“What?” Elizabeth said.
“Tell you about Abel. Suzanne. Did she ever tell you what happened? I mean, details.”
“We know what happened.”
“She never told me what happened.”
“That’s all water under the bridge,” Howard said.
“History,” Claudia said. “Certainly.”
She caught sight of herself in the mirror. She had cut off all her hair, taken a razor after it was cut and spiked the top so it looked like the singers on Friday Night Videos. She had done a good job. Maybe she could become a beautician in San Francisco, wear a hot pink smock with her name sewn on the pocket. Betty, she wanted hers to say. She could wear white nurse’s shoes and chew bubble gum. She loved blowing bubbles, big pink ones. While her customers talked to her she would blow bubbles.
“I have a plan,” Claudia said. “I’ll be a beautician.”
“A beautician?” Elizabeth asked her.
“Oh, yes. All day I’ll discuss the headlines in the National Enquirer. I’ll paint my toenails red.”
“Well,” Howard said, “at least you have a plan.”
“I’ll need some gum, though. To practice. Remember when Andy Messersmith played for the A’s? He blew the biggest and best bubbles of all. He was my hero.”
“YOU SEE,” JOHNATHAN SAID, “it all happened so quickly. The testing. The interviews. Et cetera.”
He was in the back of Henry’s car, sitting beside Jesse. Johnathan had his legs wedged between the front seats. His left foot moved frantically up and down. Periodically, Jesse would clutch Johnathan’s leg. “Stop moving your foot!” he’d shout. “Stop it!” But the foot kept banging, up and down.
“And the really incredible thing,” Johnathan said, “was Mom standing there yelling ‘We’re going back’ every time I left.”
“We’re going back?” Henry said.
“To San Francisco. But, of course, I didn’t know that then.”
Rebekah looked at Henry.
He shrugged. “All I know is I came home last night and found her in the pond. All her hair floating around her like a cape. And then she tells me they’re going to San Francisco.”
“They are so weird,” Rebekah said. “Your mother. My parents. All of them.”
“Stop moving your foot!” Jesse shouted.
Rebekah closed her eyes. She felt foolish in the dress she was wearing, a lavender flowered one with tight sleeves that buttoned to the elbow and a bright purple sash. At home, it had seemed all right, with their sprawling house and the last of the autumn leaves as a background. But they were going to the city. And after they dropped off Claudia and Johnathan, they were eating at a fancy restaurant. To celebrate, her mother had said, life moving on.
“I hate this stupid dress,” she mumbled.
“You look beautiful,” Henry said.
“No, I don’t. I look ridiculous.” She sunk down into the seat.
“Uncle Ben lives in North Beach. Near Chinatown. That’s where we’ll stay until school starts. I mean, that’s the plan for now.”
“I would rather do almost anything than go out wearing this,” Rebekah said.
The signs for Boston were nearer. She was going to a fancy city restaurant in the worst possible dress.
“It’ll be fun,” Henry said. “We’ll drink champagne.”
He squeezed her knee, let his hand linger there.
“Maybe,” Johnathan said, “it will be California champagne. Mondavi.”
“Stop moving your foot!” Jesse screamed. “You alien!”
In the car in front of them, Claudia and Elizabeth turned around and started pointing wildly. Off to the right was Logan Airport. They were there. Claudia wouldn’t let any of them go inside with her and Johnathan. She had an old knapsack for a suitcase, and they all watched her walk away from the crowded sidewalk, surrounded by skycaps and people rushing in to catch flights. Before they disappeared from view, Johnathan turned and did a little step. The mechanical doors opened, and Claudia and Johnathan’s receding voices could barely be heard: “What a glorious feeling,” they sang, “we’re happy again.” And then they were gone.
Sparrow and Suzanne, 1985•
HER MOTHER AND RON had set a wedding date. New Year’s Eve. It was less than a month before they were married and he had moved into the apartment. Already boxes of his things lined the hallways. Neatly labeled in black magic marker—CLASSICAL AND JAZZ ALBUMS, ART BOOKS, LIQUEURS. His suits hung in plastic bags, from the dry cleaners. A small painting by Renoir hung on one wall of the entranceway. The flowers in it looked like colored dots, they were so tiny.
“Mom,” Sparrow said, following her mother into her bedroom, “nothing’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Her mother had had the walls painted a muted gray. “More manly,” she’d told Sparrow. The apartment still smelled of new paint.
“Susan,” her mother said, holding fabric swatches for draperies against the window, “I’m too busy for this.”
“Why can’t you just call me Sparrow? Why can’t you just use my real name? The name you and my father gave me. Sparrow. Say it. Sparrow.”
But Sparrow left the room before her mother could answer.
Later, she stared at her mother as she drank coffee and worked on a client’s portfolio at the dining room table. She wondered who this woman was. She would marry Ron and Sparrow would never know her. Not really. She had once seen a photograph of her with her friends from college, long-haired women, one with black hair, the other with copper, her mother in the middle, smiling. When she had asked her mother who they were, she had answered vaguely. “You know,” her mother had said, “sometimes we are forced to put things behind us. People too. There are choices we make that change our lives forever.” Sparrow had never seen the picture again. She thought now of the one she’d kept, of her father in front of the brightly painted van.
“I won’t be home until late tonight,” her mother said, closing the folder she’d been studying.
“But it’s Saturday. You have to work on Saturday?”
She thought of her mother again, in that lost photograph—girlish smile and blowing hair.
“I have an appointment with the decorator.”
“What decorator?”
“I already told you, Susan.”
“And I told you my name is Sparrow. I bet my real father calls me that.”
Her mother sipped her coffee.
“For the party Christmas Eve. I’m already so busy I thought it would be easier to have it catered and let someone else make the apartment festive. Next year, maybe the three of us can spend Christmas in Watch Hill. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
“You mean we’re not even putting up our own tree? Is that what you mean?” Everything familiar was slipping away. Sparrow thought of the decorations she’d made through the years in school and at camp, dough angels and cardboard Santas. They were wrapped just as carefully as the glass and metal ones her mother had collected.
“When would we find the time? I had a wonderful idea. Everything done in silver and white. White boughs with silver ribbons over there. Long strands of pearls around the tree. What do you think?”
“I think it sounds ugly. Fake.”
The memory returned to her, of a real tree with tinsel and tiny white lights.
Once, the year before, Sparrow had looked up her father’s name in her mother’s address book, a big fat one covered in gray flannel. The front of the book looked like the front of a suit, with a thin miniature strand of real pearls on it and a piece of lace sticking out of the breast pocket. The book had been a gift from Ron, another one of his pricey, useless extravagances. He had one, too, a book dressed in Harris tweed with a pinstriped tie and onyx tie clip. “A-dress book,” he had said when he showed them to Sparrow. “Get it?” She had not found her father’s name there.
But recently, Sparrow had seen her mother pull out a different address book from her night-table drawer and get a phone number from it. “I hate to hurt Ron’s feelings,” Suzanne had said, “he spent a fortune on it. But it’s impossible to write in that book. The pearls are so bumpy that everything I wrote looks sloppy. Not that it isn’t a clever idea, an a-dress book.”
In the night-table drawer, beside her mother’s diaphragm and passport, Sparrow found the old book, and found on its creased pages inked-out names, addresses crossed off and new ones rewritten beneath them. In the back of the book, amidst postcards and business cards and names of restaurants, Sparrow had found a Christmas card from her father. It was signed, simply, Abel.
As soon as Ron and her mother left, Sparrow went into Suzanne’s bedroom right to the night-table drawer, where she knew the address book was, and took the card out. At first, all she could do was stare at the envelope. It made her dizzy, seeing his name and address right there in front of her, and she had to sit on the edge of the bed. The smell of Chanel No. 5 in the room was very strong. Sparrow called information in Maine and got her father’s phone number but didn’t write it down and it slipped her mind as soon as she hung up the phone. She looked at the address on the envelope again and it was then that she decided to go to Maine.
SPARROW WAITED TWO HOURS at the station for a bus to Portland. While she waited she ate at the Burger King in the terminal and read Seventeen magazine. Finally, the bus came.
She spent the time on the bus imagining her father. He is tall, she thought, and strong from chopping wood and hiking. Perhaps he lives in a log cabin that he built himself, decorated with plants and quilts. Sparrow smiled at the thought. The apartment where she lived with her mother had a lot of glass—tables, bookshelves, even the bar. It was decorated in black, white, and blue. Just the other day, her mother had come home with a blue neon sculpture that she bought on Newbury Street. It was placed on the black glass table in the corner beside a blue and white oversized ashtray. “Just what this corner needed,” her mother said proudly. Perhaps her father would be standing outside when she arrived, with his head tilted back, like it was in the picture. Perhaps she would stay with her father, Sparrow thought as the bus rolled into the Portland bus terminal. She would sleep in a brass bed and have a large leaded glass lamp shaped like a tulip to read by at night.
From Portland, Sparrow had to hitchhike to Saco. It was snowing. And cold. She hadn’t brought a scarf or gloves or even a hat. Sparrow had never hitchhiked before, and she stood on the corner, huddled inside her baby blue ski jacket with her hands in her pockets to keep warm. Whenever a car approached, which wasn’t often, she took one hand out and waved it slightly.
After what seemed like a very long time, a woman walked by, jingling her car keys. She paused and watched Sparrow’s efforts to get a ride.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked finally.
“I’m trying to get a ride,” Sparrow said, trying to sound older and surer of herself. “To Saco,” she added, “where my father lives.”
“How did you get here?” The woman squinted at her through wet glasses. “By bus.”
“Why didn’t this father of yours pick you up?”
“I’m surprising him. I finished my finals today and decided to come right home. I could have had a ride the whole way if I waited until tomorrow.” Sparrow was surprised at how easily she lied. She wished the woman, who was bouncing from one foot to the next, would agree to take her to Saco.
“Why don’t you call him?” the woman asked.
“What kind of surprise would that be?”
The woman considered this. “Well,” she said finally, “where’s your mother?”
It was snowing harder.
“She’s married to a successful businessman. They don’t live here.”
“Well, I can certainly tell you don’t hitchhike often.”
Sparrow smiled through her frozen lips. “I’ve never done it before. I just want to surprise my father.” This, at least, was the truth.
“You can’t be too careful these days, you know,” the woman said. “What with ax murderers, men dressed like women, all sorts of things. How do I know you’re not really a psycho dressed like a teenager? Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Sparrow said.
The woman studied her carefully. “I’ll take you,” she said. “I just wanted to be sure.”
However, the roads were not plowed yet and the woman couldn’t get into town. Instead, she dropped Sparrow off as close as she could get. Alone, standing on the deserted street with the snow falling around her, Sparrow began to think that she had made a big mistake in coming here. She should have called first. Or come in the morning when it was, at least, light out. But she was here, now, and she had to do something.
She began to walk, quickly, as if she knew where she was going. Her hands were getting numb from the cold and her ears were tingling. She could see the headlines now: GIRL FOUND FROZEN ON LONELY ROAD.
Finally she came to a 7 Eleven. There was a teenaged boy sitting at the counter lazily looking through a motorcycle magazine. Every now and then he would say “Varoom,” softly, and shift invisible gears. A radio played, elevator music. There were customers in the store, buying milk and bread and cans of soup. The clock on the wall had only one hand, the minute hand, and it drooped toward the six.
Sparrow bought some coffee and held the cup with both hands, to warm them.
“It’s going to be a bad one,” one of the customers said.
The boy nodded indifferently. “Varoom,” he whispered.
“Maybe eight inches. Or more. Maybe ten,” the man continued.
Oh, no, Sparrow thought. This was a blizzard. A real blizzard. And she had nowhere to go. She imagined being snowed in the 7 Eleven for days with this boy, eating Hershey bars and dry muffin mix.
“Please,” she said to anyone who would listen, “where is Chester Street?”
The boy looked up.
“I…my father lives there and I wanted to surprise him.” Sparrow’s eye caught sight of a worn gold garland draped around the counter. A cardboard Santa held a sign. HAPPY HOLIDAYS. “For the holidays,” she added.
Another customer approached the counter. In addition to milk and bread, he had stacks of girlie magazines.
“Chester Street?” he asked her.
Sparrow nodded.
“That’s heading out of town. That way.”
He pointed in the direction from which she had just come.
“Oh, no,” she moaned.
“I’d give you a lift, but I bet those roads aren’t even plowed yet.”
Sparrow looked at the stack of magazines. “That’s okay,” she said.
“It’s not far,” the boy told her. “You can walk it.”
“But I don’t even know where I am.”
“Listen,” the boy said, “if you don’t mind waiting till I close up, you can walk with me. I live over on Myrtle.”
Sparrow had no other choice. “I’ll wait,” she said. She looked around. There were witnesses. If this boy turned out to be one of those psychos the other woman was afraid of, there were people who could describe him. He lived on Myrtle. He pretended to ride a motorcycle.
“Here,” he said in a low voice and he poured her a fresh cup of coffee. “On the house,” he said. “You can read a magazine too.” He pointed to the magazine rack. “Any one you want. Go on.” Then he added proudly, “I’m the only one on at night. I let my friends read the magazines.”
He had friends and a job. Those were good signs, Sparrow thought. She picked up a magazine and sat on a cardboard box full of cat food at the back of the store. She wondered what time it was. Late, she knew. Terrific, she thought, she was going to show up on her father’s doorstep in the middle of the night. During a blizzard.
After some time, the boy came to get her.
“What time is it?” she asked him.
“Quarter of two,” he whispered. “I’m supposed to stay until two, but there’s no one here.”
Sparrow nodded and got up. The boy handed her a large pair of man’s gloves. They were dark yellow suede with curly white trim and lining.
“You could probably use these,” he said. “Someone left them here last week.”
Sparrow put them on. The fingers were so long and wide that her entire hand fit into the palms.
They walked slowly through the snow in silence. Sparrow was so tired that she felt as if she were sleepwalking. She concentrated on her feet, which moved heavily through the snow. Beside her the boy breathed hard, now and then revving his invisible motorcycle.