Acts of God

by Mary Morris

  She’d never catch up. How could she? She’d missed fractions and pioneer history. Half the social studies curriculum on petroleum. We’d already read three books for English, so we knew she couldn’t catch up. But she did. The first question Mrs. Grunsky asked, her pale hand shot up.

  She’d never be one of us. She’d never belong.

  We didn’t know anything about Margaret. Who she was or where she came from. We didn’t know how she got to and from school. She just appeared out of nowhere on a street corner and walked with us before we even asked her. We assumed she lived with her family in a house on the Winonah side of town—our side. For in Winonah we all had our visible histories. We had our families, our brothers and sisters. People by whom we located ourselves in space and time. We knew who we were. We never had to ask. Until Margaret came to town, there were no question marks after our names.

  Then one day my mother asked Elena, the Italian woman who ironed my father’s shirts, if she knew anything about the new family and who they were. Because that little girl kept coming around. And Elena told my mother that they’d moved into an apartment above Santini’s Liquor Store in Prairie Vista. Elena told my mother that there was just the mother, who dressed in short skirts that were too tight, and there was talk about her. Just that woman and her daughter. No man in sight.

  My mother was shocked, not because there was no man or because Mrs. Blair wore short, tight skirts, but because it was so rare that a child from Prairie Vista crossed over to Winonah. The lowest place you could live was above one of those stores across the tracks in Prairie Vista. And my mother made it clear, though I don’t remember how, that it would be better if I didn’t have much to do with someone who came from that part of town.

  * * *

  On weekends we went to one another’s houses. Vicky lived in a one-story ranch, like the one we first lived in before we built our two-story white Colonial. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but I knew that’s how our parents referred to our houses—ranch, prairie, Colonial. Colonial was best, I knew that. Vicky’s father was a CPA and every morning he took the same train and came home on the same train like clockwork. Her mother had pure white hair even when we were small.

  We cut pictures out of magazines and glued them onto paper, making collages. We could do this endlessly. Time had not occurred to us yet. It was amazing we ever got from A to B, as Vicky’s mother liked to comment. Vicky’s mother was a large woman with square bones. I was afraid of her. She never hit us or yelled at us, but she just looked at us in a way that was frightening.

  Vicky was afraid of her as well. Vicky’s mother had little china things all over the house. Bone-china plates and china statues—dogs and one statue that we always laughed at of two lovers in an embrace. You had to be very careful when you played in Vicky’s house. Vicky had a big garden and once we got in trouble for eating green beans on the vine. We loved the taste of those green beans that we plucked, snappy and sweet. One day when we were eating beans, Vicky’s mother came outside. We tried to hide in the vines near the corn, but she found us. She stood in front of us, shaking that big finger of hers, telling us never to eat beans out of the garden again.

  Then Margaret showed up at Vicky’s uninvited on a Saturday morning and broke a porcelain dog. “My mother will kill you,” Vicky said, but Margaret just went calmly into the kitchen where Mrs. Walton was, the fragments of the porcelain dog in her hands. I’m not sure what we expected—screaming, Mrs. Walton’s shouting. We hovered by the kitchen door and I heard Mrs. Walton say, “That’s all right, dear. Accidents happen. You did the right thing by telling me.” When we peered into the kitchen, we saw Margaret munching on fresh-baked cookies and drinking milk.

  The next Saturday she showed up at my house. My father must have answered and let her in. He didn’t even ask who she was. He just assumed she was one of the gang, which she wasn’t. I don’t know how she knew the others were at my house, but she did. The gang and I were in the upstairs playroom, eating chips and drinking tall glasses of chocolate milk.

  The playroom was above the garage and in it there was the cedar closet. My mother was adamant about putting the summer clothes in the cedar closet during the winter, and winter clothes in the cedar closet during the summer. Inside it smelled like forests, the deepest parts of forests and ravines, the places you have to walk a long way to get to. There were shelves and cabinets inside the cedar closet and they made very good hiding places. When we played hide-and-seek, I always hid there.

  It was one of the rules of the gang that we made ourselves at home in one another’s houses. I could open a dozen refrigerator doors in Winonah and take anything I wanted and no one would think twice about it. Margaret wasn’t one of the gang, but still she was eating chips, changing stations on the radio.

  “Let’s play hide-and-seek,” Samantha Crawford said.

  Lori Martin wanted to play too and said she’d be it. She started counting to ten, but when I went to my spot in the cedar closet, Margaret was already hiding there. I looked at her, shocked. “Who said you could hide there?” I spoke in an angry whisper.

  She just shrugged. “It seemed like the best place,” she said. Then I hid behind the sofa and was found right away.

  When the gang went home, my sweaters lay on the bed; books had been taken down from the shelf. My collections so neatly arranged on the shelves were suddenly in disarray. Feathers were where the shells should be. I had a cardinal feather and a bluejay’s which I couldn’t find. None of the gang would do this. I yelled at Jeb and Art. “Did you guys go in my room? Did you mess up my stuff?”

  “Take it easy, Squirrel,” Jeb shouted back at me. “Who’d wanta mess with your things?”

  7

  Jade was waiting at the airport when I arrived. Her hair was cut short and she’d spiked it with goo. She wore ripped jeans that were much more expensive than jeans you just buy and rip yourself. She had four rings in each ear and a new one in her nose. The blue lipstick gave her face an eerie, spectral air and I tried not to look at this concoction that was my daughter as she told me that our house was slipping down the cliff.

  It isn’t anything noticeable, she assured me as she stood there, tugging at the crystal amulet around her neck. She informed me matter-of-factly that the insurance company had sent an appraiser by while I was away who noted that the northeast corner of our house needed to be shored up and that the foundation seemed to be giving way.

  Under normal conditions I would have considered this news very bad, but Jade is such a warm, friendly girl and she greeted me with a great big hug and a no-big-deal smile on her face. Smacking her gum in my ear, she said, “Don’t worry, Mom. Like you always say, there are only solutions. No problems. How’s Grandma?”

  “The same.”

  “How about that old boyfriend of yours? Did you see him?”

  “Oh, we spent some time together. He’s on his second divorce.”

  “So you have things in common.” Jade gave me a big wink. I stared at my daughter with her close-cropped hair, her sharp, bony body.

  On the way home we stopped at Half Moon Bay Diner, a little cappuccino and sandwich place I’d stop at for the name alone, perched up high on the edge of the road so you can look down at the Pacific. It’s a place where I love to sit and Jade knew that, which is why she stopped there.

  Since I first saw it, this part of Northern California has always been just right for me, with its dramatic vistas, its crashing sea. But now as I munched on an avocado and sprout sandwich on pita, I felt distracted the way you do when you think you’ve left home with the coffee pot on.

  “So, Mom,” Jade said, “did you see anyone? Did you do anything?”

  “Of course, dear, I saw lots of people and we did lots of things.” She sighed and I realized this wasn’t the kind of answer she wanted to hear. She wanted to know that something exciting had happened in my life, that I would be a different person now that I’d been away for a few days. I was afraid that once more the o
rdinariness of my life was a disappointment to her. Jade was young enough to still believe that you can walk into a room and a sea change will occur; that the earth will move.

  I’m the one who named her Jade. The Orient had once been a passing interest of mine, one of many passing interests, I might add. A place I wanted to visit. When I was younger, I’d sit for hours looking at pictures of those fine carvings out of stone. Rocks that contained an entire world. Swans, flowers, villagers going about their daily chores. Delicate, miniature universes imbedded in stone.

  When I told Charlie that I wanted to name her Jade, he said, “Why don’t you call her Sunset or Aurora? Give her a real California New Age name.” I’d told him for years I really liked the name. Except that now all her friends called her Jaded. She got a kick out of the grimaces I made when a friend called and asked, “Is Jaded there?”

  “Well, did you have any fun?”

  “Yes and no,” I said thoughtfully. Jade rolled her eyes as we munched our sandwiches. The sea crashed below. White spray blew up against the rocks. “It was interesting,” I told her. “It was nice to see everyone.”

  “Mom,” Jade leaned over, squeezing my hand, “aren’t you ever excited about anything? Doesn’t anything get you going?”

  “Yes, dear, you do.” I patted her cheek and she dropped my hand, determining me to be a hopeless case. With a sigh she handed me the keys to the car. “You drive,” she said, and she slept the rest of the way home.

  * * *

  When I pulled up in front of the house, gawkers lined the driveway. There were ten or twenty cars. More than I’ve seen in a long time. “What’re they doing here?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure,” Jade said, “they’ve been staked out for days.”

  The house I live in was built by the poet Francis Cantwell Eagger on a plot of land where nothing would grow. A farmer sold it to him dirt cheap and Eagger spent half a century building his house. When he died, I bought it from his son, who had many debts of his father’s to pay off. He told me I was doing him a favor, taking that wreck off his hands.

  Of course it needed work, which it still does, but I couldn’t believe my luck. To buy a poet’s house, built stone by stone, at the edge of the sea. The son said he hated that house—resented it deeply—because when his father wasn’t writing, he was piling stones. That is what his childhood was, he told me as he handed over the keys, a pile of rocks.

  How was I to know that Eagger would get famous again? That some small press in Minnesota would reissue all of his books in special editions and pilgrims—true believers in his words—would come and stand on the road and stare at me and my children and the house for hours at a time. Still, I had been here over a decade and, despite the oglers and devotees, the constant knocks at the door from readers who want to see the vistas that inspired such poems as “Coastal Views” and “Water at My Window,” I have never wanted to leave.

  In my living room I have the complete works of Francis Cantwell Eagger. The books have nature titles like Along the Rocky Shore and Rock Climbing in Yosemite. Sometimes I take down the volumes and read verses such as “The sea pounds the shore/shattering my dreams/like the morning alarm/I wake, unsure of where I am/or ever have been.”

  It wasn’t clear to me why his work was having such a resurgence but Jade told me it was because he wrote about darkness and mortality. I argued that every poet writes about that, but Jade said there was a drunken edge to his. Sometimes he wrote about drinking and Jade, who was contemplating writing a book about the poet (she wanted to call it Living on the Edge with Francis Cantwell Eagger), said he drank himself to death in our breakfast nook.

  One of the gawkers—a young man who wore jeans and a tweed jacket and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses—who was standing dangerously close to the house (I had warned them that I’d get a court order to keep them off our property) approached me. “It’s an anniversary,” he said. “Eagger’s centennial; he’s a hundred years old this month.” I’d seen this young man before, as he strode beside me, trying to take my bag with his fleshy palm and convince me to let him inside.

  Sweat ran along the side of his brow and he looked as if he had just begun to shave. “Please, Mrs. Winterstone,” he said, “couldn’t I just see the views from the inside? It’s for my doctoral dissertation.”

  “We’ll have to charge admission,” I said to Jade, shaking my head as I made my way to the house.

  “Mom, why don’t we let them in?” Jade pleaded. “They just want to look. Then they’ll go away.”

  “Because it’s my house,” I said, grabbing my bag from the young man and heading toward the door.

  When I walked in, I found everything much the same as I’d left it. Even the coffee mug I’d left as a little test for my children was still in the sink. Ted was sitting, bare chested, listening to ska music in the living room. When he rose and hugged me, I could feel the ring through his right nipple. Every time I saw this ring I cringed. When he was a baby, I used to rub that nipple to soothe him back to sleep. Now someone had pierced it with a staple gun. When he turned his back, I tried not to look at the wing tattooed on his shoulder blade either, the one he said proved he was an angel.

  Though he had promised he wouldn’t maim his lips, his nose, or his tongue, the rest of his body was off limits to me. Things could be worse, I told myself; he could have purple hair in spikes the way his friend Chuck had. On the other hand, Ted could have a job, as could Jade, since they were both, at least for the summer, out of school. In Ted’s case, I believed he was permanently out. They could help me make ends meet, which appeared to be the constant struggle for which I was placed on the planet Earth. But they preferred to be home, hang out at the beach, cruise the highway.

  It wasn’t that they hadn’t tried to get summer jobs. Jade, a politics major at Berkeley, had landed one for a time at a fish-and-chips place near Santa Cruz, but then she told me jokingly one day that she had other fish to fry and had been home ever since. Before I left, I saw a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? lying around, and the makings of a résumé, so I was hopeful. Ted, who for a short time had worked at a bungee-jumping tower where he’d put a halter around young girls and shout, “One, two, three, bungee,” had larger ambitions (film, TV), and his father—his dear father—kept promising to set him up for a big one soon, but I had been married to his father and so I knew what I could and could not expect from that man.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said, picking up my bag. “Did you have a good time?”

  “It was all right.” A girl with beautiful cheekbones and green streaks through her hair sat on the couch. “This is Cherri.”

  Cherri smiled but made no effort to rise. She gave me a little wave, though. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Winterstone,” she said, her tongue ring clicking against her teeth. She spoke in a voice so soft that I felt like a judge asking her how did she plead. When I took my things to my room, I had a feeling they’d been sleeping in my bed. A little while later when I came out, Cherri was gone and no mention of her was made, as if she hadn’t even been there.

  That night as the gawkers drove off and Ted and Jade sat in front of the TV, watching various evening specials, I rinsed out the coffee mug and other dishes that had been left in the sink. After the dishes were washed, dried, and put away, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I thought I could go into the den, read, pay bills, but the television was too loud.

  I made myself a cup of mint tea and settled into the breakfast nook with my mail. The breakfast nook has been my preferred place to sit since I bought the house. From here I can gaze down at some pine trees, and then at the drop into the Pacific. It’s a pretty sheer drop and when the kids were small, I worried a lot about them falling off that cliff.

  Now I sat in the breakfast nook, listening to the surf. Canned laughter came from the living room as I sifted through the pile of mail, bills that awaited me, the note from the insurance appraiser concerning the slippage on the northeast corner that needed to be shored
up. I calculated how much this would cost and how long this would be my house. Month to month I was having trouble making ends meet and Charlie was already hinting, now that the kids were technically out of school, that his support would end soon.

  Not that I lived off my ex, though I had gotten some things that I felt were owed me. I had seen him through two professional schools by working odd jobs. I’d raised our kids more or less without him so I’d felt some help was due to me, but now the kids were older and I knew that the time was coming soon when I’d have to find the way to really support myself. I couldn’t do it just by handling seasonal rentals and time-shares.

  I looked at the kids sitting there, the remote between them. When the phone rang, they both jumped. I picked up the phone and heard voices already speaking. A man said, “I just don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I should do.”

  “Well, maybe you should tell her,” the woman replied. “I think that’s always best.” The voice of the woman was slightly familiar to me. I wanted her to talk more so I could place it.

  The man paused, taking this in, then said, “Well, I know it’s best. It’s just that there’s so much I still like about her.…”

  “Like what?”

  “Hello,” I shouted into the phone, “excuse me. You’re on my line.” I shouted two or three times, but they couldn’t hear me so I hung up.

  The kids stared at me from the couch, both waiting to see if the call was for them. They had that eager, slightly sad look of pets thinking they might be fed. “It’s a crossed line,” I said and they settled back down.

  Though Jade was basically just veging, Ted wasn’t actually watching TV. He was studying it. His eyes stared into the tube and, if I didn’t know better, I’d say he looked like a supplicant before an altar.

  Of course, Ted, like just about everyone else we knew, wanted to be in the movies. It’s the new immortality, he liked to explain to me; it used to be heaven, now it’s celluloid. He was a good-looking boy and he believed he’d get his break. Or at least he believed his father would introduce him to the right people. Charlie made commercials and directed reenactments, so I wasn’t sure who the right people would be that he knew. But, of course, once Charlie had his own dreams, so I wasn’t too hard on him, except where my kids were concerned.