by Jessica Raya
I hitched up my bag and headed for home. This time Jamie let me go.
—
When I got home, Melanie was sitting on my front step. She chewed her hair when she was nervous or upset, and she was chewing it now like it was chocolate flavoured.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
Melanie pushed up the sleeves of her blouse. She’d rolled them up, but they were still soaked to her shoulders. Her jean skirt was dark in the places that hadn’t dried yet. She’d walked half a mile like that. I wondered how far somebody could get in a towel.
“I can’t come to my best friend’s house?” She’d always been a bad liar. It was one of her better qualities. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
When I didn’t answer, Melanie reached down and plucked a mini daisy from the grass. They were weeds, really, but every little girl called them mini daisies. We used to braid them or stick them in each other’s hair. She ran a finger down the flower’s stalk, splitting it with her pink nail. She was making a friendship bracelet. You had to break one flower to thread another one through. Her legs were shiny below her skirt, shins greased with baby oil. She had tanned at lunch like it was just another day. And then this.
“You’re starting to burn,” I said. I poked her knee with my finger. Hard.
“Ouch,” she said, and we watched the moon I’d made go from white to pink.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m all wet?” she said.
“Not really.”
Melanie poked her other knee and smiled. She hadn’t come to confess, I realized. She’d come to gloat.
“I have to go in,” I said, stepping past her to the door. I didn’t know this Melanie. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But I was jealous too. Whoever this Melanie was, she would probably get everything she ever wanted. I pictured Jamie Finley in a grey tuxedo, pants flooded, a lavender rose limp at his lapel.
“Yeah, me too,” she said and tossed the flowers in the grass.
Mom was smoking at the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the driveway. She’d been to the salon, and her hair was freshly bleached and curled. Anniversary diamonds glittered at her earlobes. Her cocktail dress pulled across her chest and puckered between the buttons, and the heels of her silver sandals needed new tips, but from the neck up she was a knockout.
“Was that Melanie out there?” she said. “She didn’t come to the door.”
“She had to go home.”
Mom nodded and stubbed out her half-finished cigarette in a crystal ashtray. “I should probably quit,” she said as she eased another from the pack on the counter. Beside it was a small white vase filled with flowers. Pink tulips and orange gerberas. A teddy bear hugged the vase, his paws handcuffed with yellow ribbon. It wasn’t the kind of thing you send to someone you love. It was the kind of thing you send to someone in the hospital.
I poked around inside the fridge. She hadn’t gone grocery shopping all week, but eating was a hard habit to break too.
“We’re dining at the club tonight,” she said.
“All of us?”
“Of course all of us.”
“But why?” I groaned.
“Because we’re a family, that’s why. And don’t frown. Once those wrinkles set in, they never come out.” She pressed a thumb between her own eyebrows, then reached for the radio on the windowsill. A man was shouting about the grand opening of another car dealership. “These deals are groovy! Tune in, turn on, and drop by!”
“Mom?” I wanted to tell her about Carol and about Melanie, but I’d stopped telling her things by then and I didn’t know how to start again. “You look really nice,” I said.
The ad ended and Eddie Fisher started singing about the games that lovers play. Mom took a thick, wide-throated drag and held it for a long time before turning her face and letting the smoke stream over her shoulder.
“Thanks, kiddo,” she said and turned off the radio.
—
If Golden was a town of mannequins, the Golden Country Club was its Macy’s window. The parking lot was crammed with Cadillacs and Continentals. Evenings and weekends, valets in red vests and sycophantic smiles clogged the neighbouring streets with the overflow. Inside, men wore plaid jackets and ordered whiskey sours. The temperature was kept at a crisp fifteen degrees so the women could wear their stoles year-round. Whether they hailed from Sacramento or Sarasota, they spoke with a drawl particular to cotillions and tennis courts.
Dad looked smart in his navy blazer that night, hair combed back, white teeth bared, affecting the expression of a man enjoying himself. He was a member for the business connections and because it was what families like ours did. He went no more than was necessary. He didn’t even like golf. Now and then, he’d wave across the room while mumbling that, Jesus Christ, he hoped So-and-So wouldn’t come over. He gave people advice all week long, he didn’t want to do it all weekend too. Mom made small talk for both of them while cutting her Salisbury steak into tiny slivers she didn’t eat. I ate my hamburger in silence and made a list in my head of all the places I would rather be.
When the entrees were cleared, Dad ordered a bottle of champagne and poured me half a glass. “I guess we have something to tell you,” he said and made a ceremony of smoothing his tie. Mom rearranged the napkin in her lap and gave me a smile as strained as her dress. They didn’t notice Vera Miller until she was standing right behind them.
“Hello, Fishers.” She held up her martini glass. “Looks as though we’re all celebrating tonight.”
Vera Miller was one of the professional Country Club Wives, women who were attractive without being pretty and had a way of laughing without smiling. Loud and glamorous, she was the kind of person everyone knew but few people liked, including her two ex-husbands and two sons, none of whom talked to her. Her oldest son was a senior at my school who wore skinny leather ties and sold his mother’s prescriptions out of his Camaro in the parking lot. He liked to tell everyone how his mother had been a drive-in waitress before she got married, the kind who wears roller skates. He said it with a sneer, but I couldn’t help admiring somebody who’d had what was possibly the world’s greatest job. Her other son was Moody.
“No, no,” Mom said, lowering her own glass. “Just felt like champagne. Hello, Vera. Congratulations. How was the wedding?”
“Another Vegas quickie. They give me a discount now.”
“Well, you look happy,” Mom said.
“You know what they say. Third one’s the harm. I mean charm.” As Vera laughed, her martini glass flung forward. Cloudy liquid sloshed around the rim, but not a drop spilled. I pictured her on gleaming white roller skates, carrying trays of milkshakes.
Vera tossed an arm over Dad’s shoulder and slumped forward, her breasts testing the integrity of her scooped neckline. “What I wouldn’t do to find a man like this,” she said. “You’re a lucky woman, Elaine.”
There was a long pause. “I’m the lucky one,” Dad said, like a kid in a school play who’s forgotten his lines.
“I guess you Fishers are just a bunch of lucky buggers,” Vera said.
Mom smiled without teeth. I’d once heard her tell my dad that if he wanted a socialite wife, he should have married someone like Vera Miller. He’d said if he was going to have an ex-wife, he was glad it was her. She hadn’t laughed.
A greying man in a white dinner jacket appeared at our table. “Here’s my lucky bugger now. Darling, you know the Fishers.”
“Podiatrist?”
“Insurance,” Dad said, amping up his smile a few more watts. “We do your life and disability.” He shook the man’s liverspotted hand.
“Yes, right,” the man said. “Small world. Well, Vera, that’s probably enough fun for one evening.”
He took hold of her elbow and, in the attempt to extract his new wife, sent half her martini down the front of Dad’s shirt. “You’ll have to forgive her,” the man said. “Thirty-seven years old and she still can’t hold her liquor.”
&nbs
p; While Dad dabbed at the vodka with a napkin and Mom talked about what a whiz their drycleaner was, Vera bent down to me and smiled.
“Don’t listen to a word we say,” she whispered. “We’re all a bunch of fakes and phonies. Even the Fishers with their beautiful house and beautiful everything. Did you know that? Oh, you do know. I can see it in your eyes.” She grinned, delighted. “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” If she’d leaned in any closer I could’ve lit her breath with a match.
“All right. All right. Let’s save it for the late show.” Vera’s husband tugged her away, her martini glass terrorizing the other diners as she stumbled along.
“What a piece of work,” Dad said.
Mom poured herself another glass of champagne. “I actually feel sorry for her.”
“I don’t,” I said, and they both looked over as if surprised to find me there.
“You would if you knew who the sole beneficiary of his will is,” he said.
“Thirty-seven,” Mom scoffed. “In dog years maybe.”
Our cheesecake arrived. Nobody ate. Dad stabbed his slice with his fork and signalled for the bill. Five minutes later, we were on the road, Dad driving with the meticulous care of a drunk insurance man, Mom leaning her cheek against the passenger window and staring out at the dark. When we arrived safe and sound at our beautiful everything, she went to bed and he went to the pool house, and Vera Miller was forgotten, along with whatever it was they had wanted to tell me.
—
I got up in the night to use the bathroom. The window was open and my parents’ soft voices drifted in, carried over the pool as clear as a telephone call.
“You don’t want it,” she said.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“What did you mean, then, Jim? Why don’t you just say what you mean?”
They were standing at the back of the yard, still dressed for dinner, though Mom’s feet were bare. It was a nice night, not too warm yet. Neil’s stars studded the sky. I thought they were arguing about the yard, maybe that new tiling for the pool that she’d seen in some magazine but he’d said was too expensive, he had his limits. With the moonlight on their faces, they almost looked like a couple of kids sneaking out to fool around.
“I’m not getting rid of it,” she said. “If that’s what you meant.”
“I didn’t say that. I just meant—Well, Jesus Christ, Elaine, let’s not go off the deep end here.” Dad was holding a glass of something. He took a drink, tipping his head far back to get the last of it. “Don’t you ever feel like, I don’t know, you took the wrong bus one day and now you’re living somebody else’s life?”
“Whose life am I living?” she said.
Dad shook his head at his glass. “You can’t want this either. That’s all I meant.”
“What, Jim? What can’t I want? Why won’t you say it?”
“All right, this. This!” He swept his arm over the grass, sent the ice cubes flying. “Thirteen more years of this.”
“Fourteen,” she corrected. “Fourteen years.”
They didn’t say anything after that. Dad stared at the nothing in the bottom of his glass. Mom hugged herself as if she felt a sudden chill. My own arms were covered in goosebumps. I stepped back from the window and saw them framed there, prettily, in the soft grey moments before dawn. Two actors waiting for the curtain to fall.
—
When I called Melanie on Saturday, Mrs. D’Angelo said she’d call me back, she was washing her hair. Mom wouldn’t get out of bed. Migraine, she said. I thought I’d spend the day lying on the grass in the backyard, staring at the sun to see if I really could make myself go blind, but Dad had other plans. He stood over me with his hands on his tool-belted hips—never a good sign.
“Let’s go, kiddo. Off your duff. We’ve got a lot to do.”
“You’re putting in the patio tiles?”
“What patio tiles?” He handed me our semi-annual earthquake checklist.
“We just did this,” I said.
Dad gave me one of his hundred-watt smiles. “It’s never too soon to be safe.”
Mom was still in bed, so he’d made breakfast. There was a stack of golden toast on the kitchen table, already buttered and jammed. It was strange to smell coffee that wasn’t scorched.
The first thing on the list was the roof. I went out to the garage to get the ladder while Dad tied a rope around his waist. He double- and triple-knotted it, loop after endless twist. “Falls are the leading—”
“Cause of home injury deaths,” I said.
He stared at me, trying to decide what kind of smart I was being. “That’s right,” he said.
For the next half an hour he shimmied around the roof, crouched down on all fours. He examined every shingle and rattled the base of the TV antenna. It was my job to hold the ladder and listen to his lecture. “One of these killed a fellow in Fresno last year,” he shouted, gripping the weathervane. “Popped off and hit him on the head. Dead on the spot. Just like that.”
“Lucky bugger,” I said, Vera Miller’s voice in my head like an echo.
After the gutters were cleared, wiggled, and tightened, Dad got started on the windows. Each pane of glass had to be tapped delicately, in a spiral pattern, with his knuckle. He patted down the frames as if he was frisking them for weapons. Next, the foundation. This was his favourite part. We circled the house for what felt like hours, Dad stopping every couple of feet to press his palms flat against the concrete like he was copping a feel.
“What am I doing?” he said.
“Embarrassing me?”
“What did you say?”
“Looking for cracks.”
He shook his head. “By the time you see a crack, it’s too late. You know that, Robin. What do you look for?”
“Irregularities?”
“That’s right. You’re checking for cracks, sure, but you’re also on the lookout for smaller changes in the foundation, discoloration, bowing. See that?” He jabbed his finger at the concrete. I nodded dully. What was the point? We lived in California. It was like digging a bomb shelter in the middle of a minefield.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to not live over a fault line,” I said.
“Without that fault line you wouldn’t have a place to live. That fault line puts a roof over your head.”
“Oh, that’s logical.”
“Look.” He took my hand and pressed it against a ridge of concrete. “Feel that.”
He was crouched down in the grass like a boiled crab. His face was red and wet with sweat. I twisted and pulled away, scraping my fingers on the wall’s rough edge.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said, wiping his forehead with the back of one claw.
I didn’t answer. He was ruining my Saturday, but it wasn’t as if I had anything better to do. I could have blamed my sour mood on the heat, on being woken up in the middle of the night, on Joyce Peyton and her stupid capped teeth. But tallying up the offences didn’t make me feel any better. The more I thought about it, the madder I got. I was furious suddenly. Dizzy with it.
“You think your old man doesn’t know what he’s talking about? You have no idea what’s what, kiddo. Let me tell you. We’re all just one—”
I clenched my fists and toes. At fourteen I wasn’t above stomping my feet. “If you say it, I’ll scream, I swear.”
“Do you think I’m having fun out here? You think I like doing this? Who do you think I’m doing all this for? You know, you and your mother—”
I screamed anyway.
Mom came running outside in her nightgown. She looked from Dad to me, back and forth, up and down, searching for bleeding, contusions, broken limbs. “What happened? What on earth?”
“Nothing,” Dad grumbled and disappeared inside the pool house.
Mom picked up the checklist. At some point, I’d thrown it on the ground.
“You know, your father does this because he loves you,” she said.
I went to the kitchen to make a gl
ass of iced tea. I slammed cupboard doors and rattled every dish I touched. When I saw that we were out of ice, I gripped the spoon so tightly it bent.
“It’s too damned hot,” Dad said, standing in the doorway. “We’re all turning into a bunch of grouches. Good day for a swim.”
“I guess,” I mumbled. It wasn’t yet noon and my T-shirt was already a second skin. But my anger clung to me just as fiercely, and I wasn’t ready to let it go.
Dad forced a smile. He hooked his thumb under the metal clip of his Rolex and cracked it open. “What do you say, sport? Think you still got it?”
From the time I could count, my dad had made me practise holding my breath underwater. Drowning was the second leading cause of death for young children and there was a gleaming turquoise deathtrap beckoning to me in our backyard. “Why do we have a pool, then?” Mom would say. “Why not just fill the thing in with concrete?” And he’d say, “Because we live in California, that’s why.” But I loved our drills. Some evenings, Dad would already be taking off his watch as he stepped through the door, saying “Let’s see what you got,” and I would run—run!—to get my suit on. I liked that first sharp plunge, how my small body could shatter the glassy surface, how the shock of cold made everything alive and bright. I liked the pull and push of the water, how weightless I felt as its fingers stroked my hair. Most of all I liked that above me Dad bent forward on the edge of a chair, watching his Rolex with the intensity of a bomb defuser. I would open my eyes and see him quivering over me like Jell-O, like liquid sapphires in the twinkling light, and I would want us to stay this way, a prince and his princess forever frozen in this fairytale world. When my lungs screamed for oxygen, I listened to the heartbeat of the pump, its thump a secret in my ear. For a while there was only this timeless blue place, only this me and that him. By the time I was twelve, I could hold my breath for almost two minutes.
The drills had stopped when he moved into the pool house. One day Mom found my Speedo in the garbage, folded carefully as a soldier’s flag. “Maybe it’s time to sign you up for diving,” she’d said, placing it on my lap, freshly washed. I shook my head and shoved it in a bottom drawer, one more thing I’d unknowingly outgrown.