After a while she turned to him. “I’m going out. Do you need the car?”
He shook his head. “Oreste is picking me up this time. I told him I didn’t want to use your car again.”
As if that made it all right. As if it were the use of her car to which she objected.
***
When Olivia was fourteen years old, in her first days in high school, her position on the rungs of the ladder of teenage popularity, always somewhat tenuous, had plummeted to the depths of her worst fears. Before then—before the advent of lockers and homerooms, of training bras and boy-craziness, Olivia had been surrounded by a group of girls whose loyal friendship she had always found somewhat surprising. None of these children whom she had known since their first days together in kindergarten was her best friend—she had never had one of those. Still, those girls, even while paired off in their own impenetrable couples, included her in their afterschool activities, sleepover parties, and birthday trips to the Oakland Zoo, the Discovery Museum, the teddy bear factory.
All that changed abruptly when they abandoned the ivy-covered haven and familiar worn blacktop of middle school for the squat brick buildings and bald playing fields of the high school. It was as if on the first day of school each child had been handed a list of names, a strict inventory of students ranked from most to least popular. While invisible, these rosters were absolutely immutable and utterly clear. For whatever reason—because of her lack of a father, of the familiarity of her mother to many of the children who had bought or even stolen candy from the pharmacy, of the precise tidiness of the clothing Elaine purchased for her at the beginning of every school year, or, most likely of all, because of her nearly palpable insecurity—Olivia found herself ranked some notches lower than the girls whom she’d always thought of as her friends.
One day in algebra class, Deirdre Black had punted a small football of a note onto Olivia’s desk. Olivia had unfolded the paper to find a message written by the other girl on behalf of their entire small circle of friends. The note informed Olivia that the girls had had a meeting about her. They had decided that she was “ruining their reputation,” that they could no longer afford to be her friends, and that she was not to sit with them in the lunchroom ever again “as long as we all shall live.” The note was illustrated with Deirdre’s signature doodle—a kitten’s bewhiskered face. The girl had added a single fat tear under one of the cat’s heavily lashed eyes.
Olivia stared at the paper, her face flushed, and her eyes burning with the acid sting of humiliated, and humiliating, tears. When she finally mustered the courage to look at Deirdre, she found the other girl smiling faintly and studiously copying the equation from the blackboard. Without really expecting to, Olivia lurched to her feet, scooped up her books, and ran from the classroom, ignoring the teacher’s cry of protest. She burst through the doors of the school and out onto the street, not even bothering to be relieved that there was no hall monitor to object to her escape. She ran all the way up to College Avenue, the stitch in her side forcing her to limp the last few yards.
The pharmacy was quiet when Olivia lurched through the doors. She found Elaine alone behind the counter and ducked underneath it, flinging herself at her mother’s body. She wrapped her arms around Elaine’s slender waist and howled.
Elaine’s own cry was more muted, but she was still, quite obviously, terrified. “What? What happened? Olivia? Olivia?”
Olivia poured out the story of her mortification, so wrapped up in her own misery and pain that she didn’t notice as her mother’s body stiffened. Finally, when she’d hiccuped out the last of her tale, she looked up into her mother’s face. Elaine’s jaw was tight, and her eyes were dull with disgust.
“You ran away from school because some girl wrote you a note? For God’s sake, Olivia. This is the silliest thing you’ve ever done.”
Olivia dropped her arms, and opened her mouth to protest, to explain to her mother the extent of her shame, the impossibility of her ever walking through the doors of Berkeley High again. Elaine’s raised hand silenced her. Olivia stood by as her mother shrugged off her white coat and hung it on its hook. She followed her mother out the front door, waiting while Elaine meticulously adjusted the hands of the clock on the sign indicating when she’d return.
Olivia stopped crying long before they reached the school building. Her reddened eyes were dry when they entered the principal’s office, and dry when her mother apologized on her behalf. By the time the principal instructed her to report to the detention room that day and every day for the rest of the week, the possibility of her seared, parched eyes shedding tears, then or ever again, seemed entirely remote.
After Olivia left Jorge and went outside, she felt a surprising, overwhelming urge to be with her mother. She wanted once again to be five years old, sitting at the soda fountain, spinning on her stool and drinking a milk shake. As a little girl, Olivia had felt proud of Elaine, glad to belong to the woman whom so many people trusted with their secrets, with their health, with their very lives. She would watch her mother behind the counter, looking so serious in her white coat, dispensing pills and reassuring pats on the hand. When the two of them watched It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas, they clucked their tongues reprovingly at the drunken pharmacist who killed the child in the world in which George Bailey had never been born. They both knew that Elaine would never ever have made such a mistake.
And so, long after the day in high school when it become clear that comfort was not likely to be forthcoming, Olivia sought it anyway.
***
Elaine leaned on the worn wooden counter, one hand stuffed into the pocket of her white coat, the other holding a medicine bottle. She nodded and smiled, doing her best not to let her mind wander as the tiny elderly woman in the nubbly pink sweater chatted on about her granddaughter’s new baby. It was hard, at the end of a long day of dispensing medications and advice, of pretending interest and concern in the minutiae of her customers’ lives, to keep her mask of polite attentiveness from slipping.
Finally, the woman’s conversation wound down, and she piled her purchases on the counter. In addition to the vial of Metoprolol, she bought a tube of Anusol and a package of extra large Band-Aids. Elaine rang up her purchases and placed everything in a brown paper bag.
“Lots of water with that pill, Mrs. Hellwig.”
“I will. A full glass. Or maybe juice. Does juice work?” She sounded worried.
“Juice is fine,” Elaine said in the reassuring tone she’d perfected over the years.
The woman made her methodical way out of the store, and Elaine watched her, noticing how her gnarled toes poked out of the front of her beige sandals. Elaine eased a foot out of her plain, black ballerina flat. Reassured that her own toes had not yet grown knobby from corns, ingrown toenails, and a career spent standing behind a counter, and somewhat disgusted with her foolish vanity, she turned back to her work. She still had a pile of prescriptions to fill before the store closed at six.
Elaine worked steadily for a while, counting out pills, measuring liquids, and typing information into the computer to be printed out on labels for the small amber bottles. She restocked her shelves with more of the blister packs of Claritin Reditabs that flew out of the store. Finally she called in her nightly order to her wholesaler. When she heard the bell ringing over the door by the soda fountain, she raised her eyes and met Olivia’s.
“Honey!” Elaine called, her voice betraying her surprise at seeing her daughter.
Olivia waved and motioned to the stools at the soda fountain. “Can I get a milk shake? Are you closing?”
“Just about. I’ll join you in two shakes.” Elaine said. “Get it? Shakes?”
Olivia replied with a sad, crooked little smile.
Elaine leafed through the remaining prescriptions, pulling only those that she knew needed to be filled for first thing in the morning. She worked qui
ckly and finished just as Ralph, the soda jerk, was locking the front door. She took off her white coat and hung it on its hook behind the counter. She picked up her purse and walked through the store, and, recalling the paper dolls, stopped in one of the aisles to choose a small, sweet-smelling box from the rows of soaps.
Elaine perched on the stool next to Olivia. “Hi, honey, how’s the shake?”
Olivia slurped through her straw. “Delectable, as usual. Ralph, you jerk a mean soda.”
The heavyset man smiled and continued to rinse cups and spoons in the sink. Ralph Shockwell loved her daughter with a ferocity that Elaine had always felt owed something to his intellectual and emotional limitations. Olivia was quite simply Ralph’s favorite person and had been ever since she was a little girl. Something about their relationship made Elaine uncomfortable. There wasn’t anything even remotely sexual between them—Ralph wouldn’t have been capable of that, and Olivia would never have considered it. It was more that Elaine felt that Ralph’s devotion had so little to do with who Olivia really was. He felt that she was perfect, that she could do no wrong. While Elaine was not the type to complain about her daughter to anyone, other than to Arthur, and she certainly would never have confided in Ralph, that he would immediately have taken Olivia’s side in any altercation bothered her.
Elaine knew, of course, that Ralph’s attachment was understandable. He had been a regular customer at the soda fountain when Olivia was a little girl. He came in every day for lunch and lingered late into the afternoon. It was Olivia who had convinced Elaine to hire him to run it when the former manager had quit. This was before Elaine had bought the pharmacy, but even then she knew that the nostalgic appeal of the soda fountain was an important part of the store’s attraction, and she hadn’t wanted to risk its success on someone like Ralph, who if not mentally retarded, was certainly pathologically shy, maybe even autistic. But every day after school, for as long as anyone could remember, Olivia had sat on the stool next to Ralph’s at the fountain. She had drawn him pictures and offered him the remains of her pieces of pie. He had brought her coloring books and crayons and carried in his wallet the fourth-grade photograph she’d given him.
Olivia had begged her mother to give Ralph a chance, and Elaine, much to her own surprise, had done so. It had been a resounding success. Ralph had expanded the menu and the counter, added a couple of tables and a daily soup choice. And then, when the Carters had offered Elaine the chance to buy the business, it was only because of Ralph that she was able to afford it. Ralph had been squirreling away his wages and the money he received from SSI. He had enough to buy the soda fountain. With that paid for, the money Elaine had been saving since she began work was enough to cover the rest of the
pharmacy. So it was that Olivia’s insistence and Ralph’s devotion had paid for Elaine’s independence. In moments of uncharacteristic introspection, she wondered if the debt she owed them was, more than anything else, the thing that bothered her about their relationship.
Elaine handed Olivia the box of soap she’d taken off the shelf. “Look, sweetie. It’s rose and oatmeal. All organic. I thought you might like it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Olivia said, smelling the soap and slipping it into the pocket of her overalls.
“Can you come to dinner?” Elaine asked. “I marinated some shrimp, and Arthur’s making a zucchini soup.” She didn’t expect Olivia to accept; she could count on one hand the times that Olivia had dined with them since she’d left home four years before.
“Yeah. Okay. That’ll be great.”
“Great.” Elaine said, worrying now that she had not bought enough shrimp.
“Wanna sip?” Olivia offered. “It’s really good. It’s got extra malt.”
“No thanks, honey. Arthur and I are in training. He’s registered us for a 10K in two weeks, and we’re trying to make ourselves lean, mean running machines.”
Olivia shrugged her shoulders and slurped noisily.
“Is everything okay?” Elaine asked.
Olivia shrugged her shoulders again. Elaine knew she should press the girl, but she couldn’t bring herself to. Maybe she would have more energy once they’d gotten home and she’d sat down, had a glass of wine.
Olivia finished her shake and unsuccessfully tried to pay Ralph for it. When she asked for her check, he just ignored her, singing loudly along with the ABBA tape he’d put on as soon as he’d locked the doors. Olivia left him a tip the size of the bill she would have paid, and the two women walked together out the door of the drugstore.
“Where’s your car?” Elaine asked.
“Up the block. But let’s walk.”
The two ambled slowly up the quiet residential streets leading from College Avenue to Elaine’s house, playing a game that used to amuse them for hours when Olivia was a child.
“That’s my house.” Elaine pointed at a large, turreted Victorian. “Except I’m going to paint it in shades of green. You can have the room in the tower.”
“That’s my house,” Olivia said. The one she chose was a massive Berkeley brown shingle with a redwood tree in the yard and a white picket fence. “Except I’m going to tear down that stupid looking fence. Maybe put in a redwood one, instead.”
“Redwood? Is that ecologically sound?” Elaine teased.
Olivia blushed and smiled. “Recycled.”
Elaine smiled back. “Of course. Which is my room?”
“You’re in the in-law unit over the garage. You can’t stay in the main house because Jorge and I have so many children. We’ve filled all nine bedrooms with babies.”
Elaine tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. She hated the idea of Olivia marrying Jorge. She imagined a different life for her daughter than one spent supporting an uneducated husband who couldn’t even speak English. She imagined a boyfriend who’d gone to college and even law school or medical school. One who would encourage Olivia to go back to UC Santa Cruz and get her degree. Elaine was fully aware of how ironic it was that she, who had left her parents in search of a long-over summer of love and produced for them a grandchild with no father whatsoever, should have such banal ambitions for her daughter. Elaine had come to believe, however, that happiness just might lie in banality and convention. There was a reason those were the choices most people made.
A large pot simmering pungently on the stove testified to the fact that Arthur had come and gone.
“He must be out running,” Elaine said, putting her purse away and pulling the shrimp out of the fridge. Surreptitiously, she counted them. There were enough. Just.
“Didn’t he used to run in the morning?” Olivia climbed up on the kitchen stool and leaned against the counter, propping her chin in her hands. She had eaten breakfast perched on this stool from the time they had moved to this house when she was four and a half years old until the day she had left for college.
“Yes, but since he’s started working only part-time, he likes to run twice a day.” Elaine pulled open a kitchen drawer and took out a package of bamboo skewers. She began spearing the shrimp, one by one.
Olivia reached for a skewer. “I can’t imagine Arthur not working ten hours a day. Who ever heard of a part-time accountant?”
“Put four or five on each skewer. Lots of accountants work part-time. Most of the women in his firm work part-time when they have new babies.”
“Is there something you guys aren’t telling me?”
Elaine looked up, startled. “What do you mean?”
“Jeez, Mom. It’s a joke. Like do you have a new baby. Get it?”
Elaine smiled. “Oh. Right. Ha.” She paused, holding a shrimp in one hand, the marinade running down her arm, perilously close to her sleeve. She dropped it and wiped her arm on a paper towel. “There is something, actually, Olivia.”
Elaine hadn’t meant to tell Olivia for a while. She hadn’t told anyone yet. She was waiting to see who Arthur told, but
so far, he’d kept mum.
“What?”
“It’s nothing really. Just, well, Arthur and I have been talking about getting married.”
Olivia looked up at her mother, startled. Her face flushed and it looked as though she would cry. “What are you talking about? Arthur doesn’t believe in marriage. You don’t believe in marriage.”
Elaine opened her mouth to reply but then snapped it shut. She turned to a cabinet and got out a bag of rice. She carefully measured two cupfuls and poured them into the rice cooker sitting on the counter. She added water and plugged it in. Only then did she speak. “Arthur and I never said we didn’t believe in marriage. It’s just that neither of us had a particularly good experience with it the first time around. Now that Arthur’s kids have finished college and he has no more child-support obligations, he feels more comfortable with the idea.”
“Yeah, well how do you feel, Mom? Do you feel comfortable with the idea?”
Elaine, to her chagrin, felt herself beginning to blush. “I think I do, yes. We’ve been together quite some time and…” Her voice trailed off.
Olivia wiped her hands on a paper towel and leaned her chin back in her palms. “Well, then, great. It’s kind of a coincidence.”
“What is?”
“Your getting married.”
“Why is that a coincidence?”
“Because Jorge and I are thinking about it, too.”
Elaine froze, the pan full of skewered shrimp in her hand. “Oh, Olivia.”
“What? You can get married and I can’t?”
Elaine put the pan down on the counter and looked closely at her daughter. She didn’t think Olivia was serious. The girl had that same defiant, closed-mouth scowl she always had when she was saying something designed to upset her mother. Elaine knew, however, that unless she pretended to believe her, Olivia would be furious. Worse, she might even do it, for no other reason than to prove that she had meant what she said.
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