Guido pulled into his drive and parked in front of the garage. We have worked together many times, and have fallen into a comfortable routine for sharing the load. He’s a modern man, I know he respects me professionally. Still, his name is Patrini, of the Sicilian Patrinis, and I am a woman. The pain he goes through when he sees me carry anything remotely heavy is pitiful to behold. So when he hauled out the big aluminum camera cases and the insulated bag of videotapes from the back of the Jeep, to spare him grief, I reached for no more than a tripod and a half-full bottle of Evian. He wrestled his load up the incline toward the front door, while I strolled behind. Don’t tell Gloria, but we were both perfectly happy.
The evening air was perfumed with dry eucalyptus and night-blooming jasmine. Somewhere in the woods above me, an owl hooted and set off a rustle of small creatures through the undergrowth.
Guido stopped to listen to the owl before he went inside and turned on lights. Through the open door I could hear him rattling around.
I lingered outside, enjoying the cold breeze on my face, the soft rustle of leaves. Below me, the rugged canyon was too deep for the moonlight to reach the bottom. I felt very small looking over the edge. Not small in the sense of feeling vulnerable. Rather, I felt invisible. Safely insignificant. The sensation helped put the events of the day into perspective.
The film I had been working on had been a problem for me from the beginning. There was a guideline of sorts written into the contract I had with WGBH in Boston and some health consortium. I had spent a lot of effort accumulating footage as if I knew where I was headed. But, truth told, I hadn’t a clue what the thing was really about. From the beginning, I hadn’t been able to find its essential core. Child-raising — what about it?
As I peered into Guido’s canyon, I finally heard the mental click. Behind my eyes I could see the finished film, frame by frame. And the face of Pisces in the moonlight. It was a sad film I saw, but I still felt the exhilaration of discovery at last.
Guido came out of the house and put a glass in my hand with about an inch of Glenlivet scotch in it. I knocked it back and held out my glass for a refill.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Message on the machine from Lyle. He says Casey has a slight fever, but don’t worry.”
“Too late to call her tonight,” I said. “I’d just wake her up.”
“Are you planning to stay out here much longer?” Guido had an evil little expression on his face. “It’s cold.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I have something to show you.”
“What?”
“Just come. You may be a genius.”
Who could resist a line like that? I went inside with him, sipping the second drink on the way. By the time we reached the living room, I was ready for thirds. Guido handed me the bottle and I carried it to the sofa. I pried off my boots, stretched out on the cushions, and waited for him to show me what he was talking about.
Guido squatted in front of his big-screen TV and slipped one of the day’s new tapes into the VCR.
“This is Encino,” he said. He fast-forwarded cherubic little preschoolers at play in the sunshine of their day-care center’s garden until he came to a pudgy little girl. She pranced across the lawn in mommy-dress-up gear: high heels, long dress, pearls, feather boa, big hat. She stopped by the paint easel to daub her cheeks with red tempera paint, then strutted on, feeling elegant. I followed her with the camera until she turned and noticed me. She stopped and dropped her head shyly.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Mrs. Unicorn.”
“Where do you live, Mrs. Unicorn?”
“Here.” With a languid hand she indicated the beautiful playground behind her. A band of little boys on tricycles had stopped in the background to eavesdrop. She turned her back on them and gestured me closer. She whispered into the lens, “I don’t like having my picture taken. You have to call my nanny and make an appointment.”
“Cute, huh?” Guido ejected the tape and slipped in another. “Now MacArthur Park,” he said.
I had hoped that the silvery tones of Pisces by moonlight would be caught on the tape. Instead, she was a deathly blue-gray. The flat screen made her seem even younger, as if she too were a little girl playing dress-up with makeup and sexy clothes. She tottered on heels that were both too big and too high for her.
I heard my voice: “What’s your name?”
“You can call me Pisces.”
“Where do you live, Pisces?”
“Here.” She gestured toward MacArthur Park, averting her face from me. “I don’t like having my picture taken. Not for free.”
All the time I was recording Pisces, my eyes had been focused only on her face and her body. I had not noticed much of the background then. On Guido’s big screen, what I now saw happening around Pisces as we talked I can only describe as a nightmare version of the scene on the Encino playground.
In the frame to the right, a few yards behind Pisces, a derelict sat vomiting in the gutter. Frame left, an old woman with an aluminum walker began a slow and painful progress across the screen. In a flash of lights and sirens, a black-and-white police car blasted out of the station in the middle of the park and sped toward us, its speed and noise a wild contrast to the stillness of the derelict and the old woman. It was great choreography. I wished I could take credit.
On some level, I had noticed all of it as it happened. The city is always noisy. The destitute are everywhere. Who hears sirens anymore?
The one image that really stood out against the blue-tinged scene was the red Corvette that had followed us along the curb. An eerie counterpart to the little Encino boys on tricycles.
“Want to see it again?” Guido asked.
“No,” I said. I tapped my forehead. “I’ve got it here.”
“Infuckingcredible, isn’t it?” Guido took a slug of scotch straight from the bottle. “‘What’s your name and where do you live? Next time I complain when you want to stop and film something, just slap me across the face, will you? It’s brilliant, Maggie. The parallels, each scene a visual metaphor for the other. Fucking brilliant.”
“Uh huh,” I said, getting to my feet. “‘What’s your name and where do you live?’ How else do you start a conversation with a kid? The really big question is, ‘Does your mommy know you’re here, or has she lost you?’ “
Guido was watching me as I began gathering up the tapes and stuffing them into the insulated duffel.
“Need something?” he asked.
“If you’re still sober.”
“I am. More or less.”
“Will you drive me to the airport?”
He yawned. “Now?”
“As soon as I can get a flight,” I said. “Unless you want to drive me all the way to San Francisco.”
“Whatever. But why?”
“You were right. I’m doing nothing here that I can’t do in San Francisco. I want to be home before my daughter wakes up.
CHAPTER 3
Casey’s fever had amounted to nothing. She was already at school before I managed to get home.
I felt like shit. For more reasons than fatigue.
I had always been a working mom. For the last two years I had been a single working mom. It was a fact of Casey’s life that I was not often at home like the Beaver’s mother, with fresh-baked cookies and milk waiting for her after school. Because of the nature of my job, sometimes it was necessary for me to be gone for weeks, and occasionally for months at a time. Casey accepted my time away from her with various degrees of grace, as I accepted it with various degrees of guilt.
During my absences over the years I have been accused of going to extremes to make sure that Casey was not only well tended, but well loved. If that’s true, it’s a sin I can live with. For the last couple of years the privilege of being with my daughter in my stead had been bestowed upon Lyle Lundgren.
Lyle used to be our back-fence neighbor in the Marina District of San
Francisco. When the big quake of recent memory hit, my family was lucky. All we lost was the rear wall of our restored wood-frame Victorian house, while the block behind us, Lyle’s block, was completely leveled. The afternoon of the quake we found Lyle out on the street and took him in. And we kept him.
We have evolved a very happy arrangement. Lyle is our housewife. He works at home as a free-lance copywriter. I charge him some rent for his Bay-view room, but not nearly the going rate. To compensate, he does most of the cooking and cleaning and errand-running. He deals with the workmen who are still making repairs on the house. When I travel, he takes charge of Casey. We adore him. We cannot imagine life without Lyle.
When I called Lyle from Los Angeles before I boarded my plane, he reminded me that it was his day to volunteer at the hospice. He said that on the way he was dropping our beloved dog, Bowser, at the groomer’s to be flea-dipped.
All the way in from the San Francisco airport, I looked forward to having the house to myself for a while.
As soon as I got in the door, I began the ritual of homecoming. First, I put on a pot of coffee — not fresh-ground espresso or caffe whatever, just auto drip stuff out of a can, the way I like it. Then I toted my bag upstairs and unpacked, dumping my dirty clothes down the chute into the basement laundry room. By the time I had finished that, the coffee was ready. I poured a cup and carried it into my workroom. I sorted through the mail and the telephone messages, catalogued the new videotapes, and put the rolls of 35mm stills I had shot into preaddressed processing mailers and set them out for the mailman. It was all very ordinary and, in its way, very comforting.
The next order of business was checking on Sly and Pisces. I picked up the telephone and dialed Agnes Peter.
“How are my kids, Pete?” I asked her.
“They took off, Maggie. Right after breakfast.”
“Did something happen?”
“No. I think they sensed the inquisition was about to begin. They had clean clothes and full tummies, and they just scooted right out the front door.”
“I guess I’m not surprised,” I said. “But, damn, I wish they hadn’t gone.”
“Pisces is a bright little girl. She has our phone number. If she needs us, she’ll call.”
“I hope you’re right. What do I owe you?”
“Whatever you can spare. Walk down the street and put it into the nearest poor box.” She paused, and I waited. “Are you okay, Maggie?”
“Me? Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Just asking. You have my number, too. Anytime you want to talk.”
“I appreciate the offer,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
I hung up and poured myself a second cup of coffee. I had a lot on my mind. My project needed to be refigured. I thought that while I was at it, maybe my entire life could use some refiguring.
Herman Melville said that when a man’s mind turns to contemplation, his feet naturally lead him to water. I did the next best thing. I went up to the third, and top, floor of the house and leaned against the tall front window. From there the view of San Francisco Bay was the stuff of postcards.
The sun shone on the water. Across the Bay, a few dark clouds hovered near the peak of Mount Tamalpais. I watched the ships in the harbor, the ferry crossing to Sausalito, yachts at full sail passing under the Golden Gate. The carillon of Grace Cathedral over on Nob Hill marked the hour. It was better than therapy.
All day, no matter what else I happened to be doing or thinking about, at the back of my mind the film project kept percolating. I saw Pisces as the focal point. Not as a prostitute, but as a child who had somehow lost her family. The title I thought I would use was one of her tough lines, “I remember mothers.” Almost as good was something the pretty little preschooler in Encino had said: “Make an appointment with my nanny.”
I had to redo the working outline and schedule new locations to shoot. The small crew that would help me do the actual filming needed to be booked. The grant people had to be dealt with.
I went back downstairs to my workroom on the first floor and got out my primary resource book, the Metro telephone directory.
In the Yellow Pages I found baby-sitters: live-in, live-out, court-order monitors, nannies. Then I looked under child care: before and after school, latch-key program, swing-shift hours, early mornings, overtime available, vacation day camp, in-home care for sick children, drop-off center for sick children, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Bible stories.
I had a fair list of numbers to work with before I closed the book.
By then it was just after three o’clock, time to start watching for Casey. I pulled a camera battery off the recharges, slipped it into a videocam, and went down to the sidewalk in front of my house. I searched around a bit for the right background, and played with angles to get the light just right. Then I waited.
The primary-grades children in our neighborhood school get out about half an hour before the older ones. At three-fifteen, the parade of children heading home began.
There are many young families on the block. Lots of kids. As real estate in the neighborhood comes dear, there aren’t many single-wage-earner families. When both parents work, someone still has to raise the kids.
The women escorting the predominantly towheaded tots home from school were a fair representation of solid peasant stock from both Asia and Latin America. Now and then a Nordic-looking au pair came into view with a little charge held firmly by the hand.
Visually, the scene was good — happy little faces, crisp hair bows, and thick-soled sneakers coming into view over the crest of the steep hill. The sound was also wonderful. I had the volume input control on my camera turned all the way up:
“Maria,” I heard a little redheaded boy say to the tiny dark woman who carried his Ninja Turtles lunch box and Benetton school bag, “I’m real thirsty. Quiero lemonade.”
“No, mi hijo,” Maria responded, “only leche.”
I was still chuckling when my Casey came into view. The little ones were cute, but Casey stole my eye. She strode down the hill, swinging her jacket from one hand and her book bag from the other, a magnificent, graceful creature. I have a whole wall of tapes and films I have made of Casey, because I love to watch her. Casey is singular. Maybe every mother feels that way. In my case, it’s true.
My sister Emily is six feet tall. There’s a good possibility that my daughter will top her. I kept telling Casey, who had just turned fourteen, that one day she would love her height. Casey wasn’t ready to accept it.
Her one true passion since she was old enough to walk had been ballet. She had indeed become a beautiful, long-legged ballerina with real career potential. The sad thing was, there were rarely boys in the City Ballet tall enough to partner her. Odds are, no matter where she might go, there never would be.
Casey saw me following her with my camera. Ever the ham, performing for her most adoring audience, with a big smile on her face she executed a series of gazellelike leaps for me, incredible legs fully extended, toes like arrows, book bag and jacket whipping through the air as she flung her skinny arms. It was a good show. I am always relieved when I come home to find her intact.
She ended with a showy jete at the base of our front steps, where she dropped her things. She took the camera from my shoulder and turned it on my face.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, grinning so wide I could see all of the bands on her teeth.
“I live here,” I said, grinning back. I reached out and switched off the camera. “Aren’t you home early?”
“I’m ditching study hall. Mr. Stemm isn’t there today. No one will notice.”
“I noticed,” I said, failing to sound stern. I picked up her things as we walked up the steps to go inside. “I’m going to call the school right now.”
“Yeah, sure,” she laughed. She set the camera on the parson’s bench in the entry and took her heavy book bag from me. I had so much to talk to her about. But she pulled out a small paper sack and yelled u
p the stairs:
“Lyle, Lyle, crocodile!”
“He isn’t home yet,” I said.
“Rats. I brought him a treat. He helped me with my English paper and I got an A.”
“Good girl,” I said, stretching up to kiss her cheek. My voice sounded forced. I admit I was a little jealous. Casey hadn’t brought me a treat. She turned a bright smile on me, though.
“Where’s Bowse?” she asked.
“Getting a flea bath.” I was beginning to feel pouty. I was happy to see her. “Isn’t it time for you to say ‘Hi, Mom, I missed you’?”
“Hi, Mom, I missed you.”
“That’s better. Want to go do something together?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Exploratorium? Ghirardelli Square?”
She curled her lip. “With the tourists? I don’t think so. Anyway, I told Madame Semanova I would tutor some little girl this afternoon. She’s getting ready to audition for a mouse part in Cinderella.”
Casey bounded off toward the kitchen.
“Let’s drive up to Squaw over the weekend,” I called after her, still trying. I felt dashed. Rejected. Fully pouty. “We haven’t been skiing all season.”
She turned and looked back at me as if I had lost my mind. “I’m flying to Denver this weekend. Remember?”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Oh.” Her attitude deescalated quickly. “Didn’t I tell you? Dad and Linda are baptizing the baby Sunday. I’m the godmother.”
“You are your baby brother’s godmother?”
“Weird, huh?” She headed off again, talking with her back to me. “Maybe you can get someone else to go skiing with you. Janet or Grandma or someone.”
“Maybe.” I followed her to the kitchen and leaned against the counter while she poured herself a glass of juice and slathered cream cheese on a bagel.
“What are you doing home, anyway?” she asked. “You said you’d be in La-La Land till Monday.”
Midnight Baby Page 3