by Annie Katz
Grandma Betty couldn't help us that much, because she had two other daughters with all their kids who used her house for a motel. Her fourth husband, Hugh, was tolerant, but he limited houseguests to one batch at a time, and Janice's sisters always seemed needier than we did.
So I guess I should have seen this coming, but you don't know how bad something is when you are smack in the middle of it. Like a bad smell that you've been breathing in day and night. You don't know how horrid it is until you've been in fresh air long enough to regain your senses. Then you walk back in and, whoa, this place really stinks.
Somewhere around the Oregon border, after all that scenery and all those passengers embarking and debarking, I thought, "Whoa, my life really stinks."
I spent a few miles wallowing in that realization, and then I became curious about what was coming up next.
I studied the white business card that was the ticket to my future. On it was a tiny picture of my newly discovered grandmother. Lila looked old. Her white hair was braided on her head like a crown and it had red flowers stuck in it. My grandma Betty dyed her hair black, the way my mother did, so I was not used to white-haired relatives. I wondered how many other ways Lila would surprise me.
Her card had raised blue lettering that said, Carefree styles for the whole family at Lila Blue's Family Barbershop, Highway 101, Rainbow Village, Oregon.
"She will pick you up" were my mother's parting words. I sure hoped Janice had remembered to tell Lila I was coming.
The rain started at the Oregon border and didn't show any signs of letting up. The whole world turned gray and black. In some places the rain was so heavy the bus's giant windshield wipers could not keep up with it. I strained to help the driver see until I gave myself a headache and had to close my eyes and try to rest. I snuggled in the hooded sweatshirt from my backpack, leaned against the cold bus window, and listened to the tires splash rooster tails of water over everything in our path.
Jane and I had to change buses in Corvallis to get to the coast highway. She was still in horrid condition when I woke her up and gathered her belongings for the transfer. If my mother considered Jane a reliable person, she was delusional.
After I'd ridden a full twelve hours, I finally limped off the bus at the Rainbow Village stop, which turned out to be the village post office, which was closed. By then the clouds had rained themselves out, so even though I was tired and crumpled, at least I wasn't sopping wet when Lila found me.
She looked exactly like the little picture on her card, red flowers tucked in her white braided crown and all. In fact, she looked like Santa's grandma, not mine.
Grandma Betty was an older version of Janice, only with better tastes in shoes and men. Lila Blue was something new. She wore red shoes and socks, a baggy red sweater, and a long black denim skirt.
"Cassandra," she cried, circling me in a hug that smelled of carnations and fresh ocean air. "And so beautiful," she said, holding me away from her to study my face. "Simply beautiful. I'm so happy you are here. So grateful."
She hugged me again, and for some reason, tears ran down my face and dripped on her sweater. I wasn't crying. The tears must have been from exhaustion.
"I'm all muggy and smelly," I said, pushing away from her. My mom hadn't hugged me since I'd started getting breasts. It felt weird to have someone touch me.
Lila pulled my grimy hands up to her face and kissed the tops of them. "Well that's so easily remedied," she said. "You're here now. That's what matters."
She dropped my hands and marched over to get my bag. The suitcase had tiny wheels on the bottom, but when we tried to pull it along the wet sidewalk, it kept falling over. Finally Lila lifted it and marched along to her little red Honda car. She was strong for an old lady.
At least her house wasn't red. It was made out of big, smooth gray rocks, and it perched at the top of a hill overlooking the ocean. When we walked into the kitchen from the garage, my mouth dropped open.
A huge picture window, practically the whole wall was glass, looked over the cliff to white sand, waves breaking on a rift of black rock, and gray ocean out as far as I could see. A high blanket of clouds covered the sky but didn't obscure the bright horizon, where the ocean made a crisp, dark line miles away on the edge of the world.
I had never imaged a house could have that kind of view. It made me dizzy, and I grabbed the back of a padded wooden chair tucked in under the kitchen table.
"Sorry," Lila said. "The floor slopes downhill in the kitchen, so everyone feels woozy at first."
I nodded, gulped, and looked around slowly, trying to keep the world from spinning. When I stood still, my body remembered the motion of the bus, which didn't help. While I clung to the back of the chair, Lila lugged my suitcase and backpack into the living room.
"You have a choice of rooms," she said when she returned. "We can fix you up in my sewing room or you can have the middle bunk in the Crow's Nest upstairs." She seemed so happy and relaxed that I took a deep breath.
"Take your time," she said, prying my hands off the back of the chair and pulling it out for me to sit down. I sat and closed my eyes to stop the sensation of being on a ship bobbing in the sea. I don't know what I expected, but this wasn't it.
I opened my eyes enough to peek through the archway into the living room. I could tell by all the light it had a huge ocean-view window too. Beyond the back of the couch, which sat in the middle of the room, I saw a piano and a small desk with a curtained window above it. I was curious about the rest of the house, but too weary and wobbly to investigate.
My mother's idea of home decorating was white leather sofas, glass tables, and pink satin pillows. I didn't mind that, really, although I would never choose it for myself. The part that bothered me was she liked to top it all off with some grinning boyfriend whose only chore was to flatter her. She was a bartender, so what did I expect? When I suggested she might like to try working in a bank or maybe a dress shop, she said the tips were good at the club and she liked the hours. Right.
I was glad there wasn't the slightest whiff of leather in Lila's house so far. It smelled of salty sea air, vanilla, and something fruity and sweet.
With my eyes closed, I stayed still, breathing. The roar of the ocean, a constant crash swoosh crash swoosh, was punctuated by seagulls crying. I clung to the table, feeling adrift.
"You poor thing," Lila said, sitting down beside me. "Here, drink this. Peppermint tea and honey, to calm the Nellies." She guided my hands around a heavy mug of fragrant tea, and the smell of it did help. After a while I was able to sip the tea, breathe normally, and open my eyes all the way. Then I felt incredibly tired.
"Which first," she said, "shower, sleep, or supper?" Then she laughed at herself and said, "My, that was sibilant, yes?"
"The sss sounds," I said, nodding, "Yes."
"Ooh, another word person in the family. Excellent!" She clapped her hands and bounced up and down like a child.
"Shower," I said.
"Perfect," she said, and she brought me a big shopping bag full of wrapped birthday presents. Even though I was tired, it was fun to open the gifts, which were wrapped in layers of white tissue paper and bright red ribbons. The first gift was a soft, beautiful white flannel nightgown with ruffles on it. Next was a fluffy long blue robe that felt warm and luxurious. And the last package was a pair of fuzzy blue slippers to match the robe. These gifts were so pretty I felt ashamed of my big pity party on the bus earlier.
Lila remembered my birthday. And she went out of her way to make it special. I thanked her, and she carried the presents to the bathroom to get out towels for me. I followed her, and she showed me where everything was and told me to take my time.
Before I stepped into the shower, I tried on the slippers to see if they fit. They fit perfectly, which was truly amazing because I had already passed through the Big Foot stage of puberty.
First came the long arms and legs, then sore little breasts, then zits and shiny skin and stinky armpits,
then little curly hairs popping out overnight in strange places, then big feet. All my body parts seemed to have agendas of their own. I was completely at their mercy.
I even had my period, once, kind of, enough to be yucky. When I had shown my mom my underpants, she'd said, "Great! My daughter has the curse at eleven." She'd wadded up my underwear and thrown them in the trash. "Don't I have enough trouble taking care of you without worrying about this too?"
She'd pushed me in the bathroom and handed me a box of sanitary napkins and a box of tampons. "Read the directions," she'd said. "You'll live." Then she'd closed the door on me.
The nurse at school had called menstruation "our monthly visitor."
I had memorized the textbook diagram of the vulva and vagina and uterus and ovaries and fallopian tubes, but all that knowledge did nothing to ease my loneliness as I sat on the toilet and read all the directions on the blue and white boxes of sanitary products.
When I emerged from that bathroom, I knew what it meant to be unclean.
Now, less than a month later, I was six hundred miles away from home in the bathroom of a grandma I never knew I had. The sturdy grab bar in Lila's tub helped me survive my first shower in Oregon. Every time I was in danger of passing out from exhaustion and fragrant steam, I clutched it, closed my eyes, and took three deep breaths.
After I was clean through and through, I dried with lavender scented towels, and I pulled the soft warm gown over my head and the soft warm slippers onto my feet. When I came out of the bathroom, Lila took my hand and led me to the little sewing room across from her bedroom.
"Sleep here tonight," she said. "Tomorrow you can explore upstairs. I'll leave lights on in the bathroom and kitchen. If you need something in the night, wake me up."
I let her tuck me in bed like a baby. "Sweet dreams, Cassandra," she said.
"Sandy," I said, and she smiled. My eyelids closed, and I plunged into deep, warm sleep.
Sometime in the night, I awoke to Lila's voice in a whispered conversation with someone in her bedroom. First I thought she was calling my mom or maybe she had a grinning boyfriend of her own tucked away in there, but neither of those scenarios fit what I was hearing.
I got up to use the bathroom, and as I passed by her open bedroom door trying not to snoop, two tall white cats came out and brushed by me on their way to the kitchen. They barely glanced at me. Maybe they weren't cats at all, because cats are supposed to be scared or curious, aren't they? Whatever they were, they weren't a grinning boyfriend, so that was a relief.
When I shuffled into the kitchen early the next morning, Lila was sitting at the table writing in a journal and drinking coffee. The whole kitchen still slanted toward the sea. The horizon was pink over a silvery ocean, and seagulls were gliding by the window silently, all headed south, like early morning commuters on the California freeways.
"What would you like for breakfast?" Lila got up and pulled me over to the bank of cupboards and countertops near the sink. She gave me a tour of the kitchen. She had all the normal foods, like cereal and crackers and bread and peanut butter and jam, plus she had lots of stuff I'd never seen before, like a whole pineapple in the huge bowl filled with fresh fruit. My mom's idea of fruit was canned fruit cocktail on sale, the diet kind.
The pineapple looked dangerous.
"My mom lets me drink coffee," I said, because the coffee smelled really good, and it was true that once in a while Janice let me taste her coffee.
"Okay, sweetie," Lila said. "Help yourself. The sugar's in the bowl by the breadbox and there's milk in the fridge if you like to dress it up."
I helped myself before she had time to remember I was barely twelve years old. The coffee, dressed up with lots of sugar and milk, looked okay and smelled okay, so I drank some, and it tasted good.
When I returned to the table, Lila nodded her approval. "Your daddy sniffed everything before he tasted it, too. You inherited that from him."
My father. There it was. I was hoping that subject wouldn't come up until I was good and ready for it. I'd spent years trying to remember one tiny thing about him, but I couldn't. Then I pretended I never had a dad, which I mostly didn't because my mom said he was dead, but how could I believe her?
Now here I was sitting with my father's mother.
I put the coffee cup carefully on the table and stared at the waves crashing on the ridge of black rocks that poked out of the ocean below the house.
The possible facts. It had taken my whole life to drag these tidbits out of my mom, usually when she was drunk or too tired to remember she hated my dad and hated me by association.
My mom and dad were married in Reno, Nevada, in January of 1973. It was raining, and my mom's pink linen suit was crumpled by the time it was their turn at the wedding chapel. There were no pictures, no flowers, no presents. Their honeymoon was one night at a casino hotel, where they lost money playing black jack all night. I was born June fifteenth of the same year. There's some math for you.
My dad's name was David and he was tall, dark and handsome, probably not unlike the Marlborough man. David had green eyes like mine and curly hair like mine, only his hair was brown and mine was orange. Grandma Betty called mine strawberry blonde, but I’d never seen orange strawberries. Mom and Grandma Betty had nagged me about my hair for so long that I refused to let anyone touch it. No one could mistake me for a model. Don't they know how insulting it is to say, "Sandy, you'd be so pretty if..."?
When Mom found out their marriage wasn't legal, she tore up everything related to him, including the invalid wedding license and my real birth certificate. She had to write for a copy of my birth certificate to register me in school, but she scratched out the father's name and threw a tizzy fit in the school office when they asked her about it. The clerks let it go. They recognized a difficult mother when they saw one.
So, no photos, no memories, no cute teddy bears from Dad, not one word.
The smell of frying bacon pulled me off Memory Lane.
"How about scrambled eggs?" asked Lila.
When I looked at her helplessly, she said, "And toast and jam. That should be a good start for your first day at the beach."
Even in my shell-shocked condition, I noticed that breakfast included the best scrambled eggs I'd ever eaten.
"Natural brown eggs from Wilson's farm," Lila said. "Best tasting eggs in the county."
Something about the way she said it made me think she'd tried eggs from every chicken for miles around. Maybe she had, or maybe her voice rang with authority no matter what she was saying.
Lila pointed to my giant suitcase parked against the back of the living room sofa that faced out to sea. "Get on some warm clothes and beach shoes," she said. "Unless you want to go barefoot, like me. Barefoot is the best way to venture forth into a new life."
I opted for canvas shoes.
The stairway in front of the house was a sturdy wooden one, wide enough for one person, with strong handrails on both sides. Twenty-one steps. Lila counted them out loud when she led me down that morning. "Just twenty-one steps to the magnificent Oregon coastline."
Magnificent is a word that must have been invented with Lila's beach in mind. We walked north along the tide line on the wide empty expanse of white sand toward a dark cliff covered in pine trees. The trees must have been ancient, because they looked tall and we were a mile away.
A chilly wind blew from the north, misting our faces with salty air. I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my hooded winter coat, glad my mom had made me bring it. Lila wore her red sweater and a long skirt, which whipped around her ankles in the wind. Her hair was braided in one thick rope that hung nearly to her waist. She wore a red cowboy bandana over her ears like a headband. Lila looked old and young at the same time. Hunched over in my hooded parka, I probably looked young and old too.
"Always start your walk facing the wind," said Lila. The wind and steady rumble of the waves made it hard to hear her, so I stayed close. "That way you can walk as far as you
like, and when you turn around to go home, the wind pushes you and you glide home like a gull on the breeze." She lifted her arms and ran flapping barefoot through the foamy shore break like a big red duck trying to take flight.
We were the only ones on the beach that early in the morning, and no one here knew me, but still. Weren't grandmothers supposed to be sedate? I was mortified.
My mother would have hated it here, and I admit this realization pleased me. Janice wore those tiny little high heel shoes everywhere, even with jeans, because she thought they made her look tall and sexy. She abhorred sand or dirt of any sort. The few times her boyfriends had taken us to beaches in California, she'd never actually touched the sand. She preferred visiting local art galleries and viewing the ocean from inside a restaurant that served expensive wine.
"Come on, child," Lila shouted back at me. "Run! Feel the freedom in the wind and sand and sea. Fly!"
I shook my head. No way was I going to run around like an idiot just because I was at the beach.
Laughing, Lila trotted back to my side and resumed walking, deliberately slowing herself down to match my pace. I trudged along beside her, wishing I'd worn my sunglasses. The sun's reflection off the water and white sand hurt my eyes. Plus the salty wind stung. We finally got to the base of the cliff where the waves crashed, so we could go no farther. We climbed up on a shelf of rocks and watched the water splash on the rocky point below us.
After a time, what I thought were plain rocks being battered by the waves started looking like communities of sea life. Clinging to the more protected faces of the rocks were hundreds of barnacles. Clusters of pale green sea anemones, some as big as my fist, were tucked underneath rocky ledges. And most startling of all, big orange and purple starfish, each one bigger than my hand, clung to clumps of double shelled oblong things that Lila said were called mussels. The black clad mussels ranged from baby fingernail size to fat monsters six inches long. How could they hang on in the pounding surf? One medium sized wave would have mangled me and hauled me out to sea, no matter how hard I hung on to that rock.