by Janet Fitch
“I’m so tired,” Yvonne said, as we started off again. “I hate my life.” She filled the coffee cup, gulped it down, filled it again and handed it to me. It was instant, hot and too strong.
Behind the wheel, Rena dragged on her cigarette, she held it like a pencil. “I told you get rid. What you need baby? Cow.”
Rena Grushenka. Rock music and American slang both twenty years out of date, discount Stoli from Bargain Circus. She trained her black magpie eyes on the curb with its neatly arrayed trash cans and recycling bins. She could see in the dark with those eyes. This morning she wore a necklace of silver milagros, arms, hands, and legs. You were supposed to pin them to the velvet skirts of the Virgin to pray, but to Rena they were just pawned body parts.
“Hey, turnip people,” she called out the window as we squeezed past an old Cadillac double-parked, a Mexican couple emptying somebody’s recycling. Bagged cans and bottles crammed their trunk and backseat. “Dobro utro, kulaks.” She laughed with her mouth wide open, her gold inlays glinting.
They stared at us without expression as we clattered by.
Rena sang along with Mick in her thick accent, tapping on the blue steering wheel with the inside of her ring, craning her neck in and out like a chicken. She had a deep voice, a good ear.
Niki yawned and stretched in the other captain’s chair. “I need a ride back to work sometime to pick up my truck. Werner took me to his place last night.” She grinned her lop-toothed smile.
Rena sipped from her Winchell’s cup. “The knackwurst.”
“Four times,” Niki said. “I can hardly walk.” Werner, supposedly a German rock promoter, came to the Bavarian gardens, where Niki worked three nights a week, though she wasn’t twenty-one. She had a fake ID from one of Rena’s friends.
“You should bring knackwurst. I got to meet.”
“Fat chance of that,” Niki said. “He gets one look at you bitches, he’ll be on the first plane back to Frankfurt.”
“You’re just afraid he’ll see you’re a man,” Yvonne said.
Their talk went on like this, ceaseless as waves. I leaned on my forearms against the oxidized blue console between the front seats. Before me lay a collage of debris, like a forest floor: empty black Sobranie packages, fliers in Spanish, a little brush full of black hair, a key ring with a blue rubber coin purse, the kind you squeeze on the sides and the mouth opens up. I played with it, making it sing along to the tape.
The sunrise was a pale rubbing along the eastern horizon, gray-white clouds like scumbled pastels, a sponge-painted sky. Gradually, the manmade features of the landscape receded — the train yards, freeway, houses, and roads — until all that remained was blue hills backlit by dawn light, red over the ridgeline. It was a set for a western movie. I could almost see the arms of giant saguaro, the scurry of coyote and kit fox. The Great Basin, Valley of Smoke. I held my breath. I wished it could always be like this, no people, no city, just rising sun and blue hills.
But the sun cleared the ridge, returning the 2 and the 5, early traffic moving downtown, truck drivers heading to Bakersfield, thinking about pancakes, and us in the van on garbage day.
We continued to sift the city’s flotsam, rescuing a wine rack and a couple of broken cane-bottom chairs. We took on an aluminum walker, a box of musty books, and a full recycling bin of Rolling Rock empties that sharpened the mold smell in the back. I pocketed a book about Buddhism, and one called My Antonia.
I liked these winding streets and hillside spills of bougainvillea, the long flights of stairs. We drove by the house where Anaïs Nin lived, and I had no one to point it out to. My mother used to like to drive by the places famous writers lived in L.A. — Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Isherwood, Huxley. I remembered this particular view of the lake, the Chinese mailbox. We had all her books. I liked their titles — Ladders to Fire, House of Incest — and her face on the covers, the false eyelashes, her storybook hair coiled and twisted. There was a picture of her with her head in a birdcage. But who was left to care?
We stopped for doughnuts, startling a convention of parking lot pigeons that rose in a great flickering wheel of dark and light grays, taking the stale morning sun on their wings, the freshness already bled from the air. Yvonne stayed in the van, reading her magazine. The girl at the counter at Winchell’s rubbed sleep from her eyes as Rena, Niki, and I came into the shop. Rena bent over the glass case in her cherry-red pants, giving an on-purpose bust-and-rump show for the homeless men and mental patients from the nearby board and care, cruelly flaunting what they couldn’t have, and I couldn’t help thinking of Claire when the bum smelled her hair. We ordered our doughnuts, jelly-filled, custard, glazed. Rena had the girl refill her coffee cup.
Outside, a man squatted by the door, in his arms a tray of ladybugs in plastic bubbles.
“Ladybug,” he half sang. “Laaaady-bug.”
He was a small man, wiry, of indeterminate age, his face weathered, his black beard and long ponytail shot with gray. Unlike most street people, he didn’t seem drunk or insane.
Rena and Niki ignored him, but I stopped to look at the red specks crawling in the bubble. What was the harm in being polite. Anyway, I’d never seen anyone selling ladybugs as a profession.
“Eats the aphids in your garden,” he said.
“We don’t have a garden,” I said.
He smiled. His teeth were gray but not rotten. “Take one anyway. They’re lucky.”
I gave him a dollar and he handed me the ladybugs in their plastic bubble, the kind rings and trolls came in in the twenty-five-cent gumball machines.
In the van we lingered over our fried dough and caffeine. Flakes of sugar fell on our clothes. The worst thing about Ripple Street was the food. We ate takeout every night. At Rena’s, nobody cooked. She didn’t even own a recipe book. Her battered recycle bin pans were coated with dust. Four women in one house and nobody knew how to do anything, no one wanted to. We just called Tiny Thai. For people who would stop for empty beer bottles, we pissed all our money away.
As we drove to the other side of the lake, I turned my plastic bubble over, slowly, watching the ladybugs run to stay upright. They were healthier than you’d think. Caught this morning. I imagined the ladybug man’s patient blue eyes searching the dewy fennel for the red dots.
Throw it back, Claire had said. It’s so alive.
But they were lucky, that’s what the ladybug man said.
From between the captain’s seats, I could see Silver Lake in its nest of hills reflecting the cloudless sky. It reminded me of a place in Switzerland I went once with my mother. A mountain dropping right down into the lake, the town on the slope. There were camellias and palm trees and tall narrow shutters, and it had started to snow as we ate lunch. Snow on the pink camellias.
Now we were on the good side of the lake. We gazed longingly at the big houses, Spanish, Cape Cod, New Orleans, in a morning scented bready-sweet from the big carob trees. Imagining what it would be to be so real. “That one’s mine,” Yvonne said, pointing to the half-Tudor with the brick driveway. Niki liked a modern one, all glass, you could see the fifties-style lamps against the ceiling, a Calder mobile. “I don’t want any junk in my house,” she said. “I want it stripped. Chrome and black leather.”
As we switchbacked up the hill, we passed a house where someone was practicing the piano before work. It was a Spanish-style place, white with a tile roof and a live oak in the tiny front yard behind a wrought iron fence. It looked so safe, something that could hold beauty like a pool glinting with trout.
Rena noticed me watching it pass. “You think they don’t got problem?” Rena said. “Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.” She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. “We are the free birds. They want to be us.”
We stopped before a house perched way on top of the hill, they had stuff at the curb. I jumped down, got the baby gate, the high chair with blue food-mottled pads, the playpen and the bounce
r seat. Yvonne’s eyes turned dark when she saw what I was handing her. Her high color bleached to beige, her mouth pressed together. She grabbed the chair and threw it in the back, more roughly than necessary.
She curled up on the carseat when we were moving again, picked up her Seventeen and turned pages, her hands trembling. She closed the magazine and stared at the girl on the cover, a girl who had never been pregnant, never had a social worker or a filling. Yvonne stroked the water-wavy cover. I could tell, she wanted to know what that girl knew, feel how she felt, to be so beautiful, wanted, confident. Like people touching the statue of a saint.
“You think I’d look good blond?” Yvonne held the cover up next to her face.
“It’s never done me much good,” I said, rotating the ladybugs, making them run.
I saw Claire ’s face on the banks of the McKenzie, pleading with me to let the fish go. It was the least I could do. I would have to make my own luck anyway. I leaned out behind Niki and opened the bubble into the wind.
IT WAS quarter to eight when we pulled up in front of Marshall High. My eighth school in five years. The front building was faced with elaborate brick, but temporary trailers flanked it on every side. Yvonne lowered her head over the magazine, embarrassed to be seen. She had just dropped out of school this winter.
“Hey,” Rena called to me as I got out of the van. She leaned across Niki, holding out a couple of folded bills. “Money makes world go around.”
I took the money and thought of Amelia as I shoved it in my pocket. “Thanks.”
Niki sneered at the kids sitting on the wall, finishing their cigarettes before class. “School sucks. Why don’t you blow it off? Rena doesn’t care.”
I shrugged. “I’ve only got one more semester,” I said. But truthfully, I was afraid to have one less thing in my life.
24
I SAT UP in bed at one in the morning, cotton stuffed in my ears, as Rena and the comrades partied down in the living room. Just now, they were wailing along to an old Who record cranked so loud I could feel it right through the floor. This was why Rena liked it down here among contractors and bakeries and sheet metal shops. You could make all the noise you wanted. I was learning, everything on Ripple Street was rock ’n’ roll. Niki sang with three different bands, and Rena’s personal soundtrack consisted of all the big seventies rock she’d first heard on black market tapes in Magnitogorsk. I tried to recall the melodies of Debussy, the gamelan, Miles Davis, but the Who bass line pounded it right out of my head.
To me this rock was just more faceless sex in a man’s world, up against a concrete wall behind bathrooms. Give me a Satie tone poem like light on a Monet haystack, or Brazilian Astrud like a Matisse line. Let me lie down in a half-shuttered room in the south of France with Matisse and the soft flutter of heavy-feathered white doves, their mild calls. Only a little time, Henri, before Picasso will come with his big boots. We should take our afternoon.
I missed beauty. The Tujunga night with too many stars, Claire’s neck as she bent over me, checking my homework. My mother, swimming underwater in the pool in Hollywood, the melody of her words. All gone now. This was my life, the way it was. Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.
Across the room, Yvonne’s bed was empty, she had left with someone at about eleven to go to a party across the river. I sat up in bed, drawing by lamplight, chasing an indigo line of oil pastel on violet paper with a whispery silver. It was a boat, a dark canoe, on the shore of a moonless sea. There was no one in the boat, no oars, no sail. It made me think of the sunless seas of Kublai Khan and also of my mother’s Vikings sending their dead out on boats.
I blew on my hands, rubbed them together. The furnace wasn’t working, Rena still hadn’t fixed it. We just wore sweaters all the time. “Cold?” she said. “In California? You joke.” They weren’t feeling it, out there braying to the records, drinking Hunter’s Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.
I looked around the cramped, crowded room, like the stockroom of a Goodwill store. I imagined what my mother would say if she could see who I was now, her burning little artist. Just another used item in Rena’s thrift shop. You like that lamp with the bubbled green base? Name a price. How about the oil painting of the fat-cheeked peasant woman with the orange kerchief? For you, ten dollars. A bouquet of beaded flowers? Talk to Rena, she ’d let you have it for seven-fifty. We had a furry Oriental rug, and a solid oak table, only slightly tilted, along with five unmatched chairs, special today. We had an enormous tiki salad set, and a complete Encyclopædia Britannica from 1962. We had three matted white cats, cathair over everything, cat smell. All this, and an old-fashioned hi-fi in a fruitwood cabinet and a stack of records from the seventies higher than Bowie’s platform shoes.
And our clothes, Mother, how do you like our clothes? Polyester tops and lavender hiphuggers, yellow shirts with industrial zippers. Clothes floated around from closet to closet until we were bored, then we sold them and bought something else. You wouldn’t recognize the girl I’ve become. My hair is growing out, I found a pair of Jackie O sunglasses and I wear them all the time.
My clothes are gone, the rich orphan clothes from Fred Segal and Barney’s New York. Rena made me sell them. I’m sure you’d approve. We were unloading in the parking lot of Natalia’s Nails one Saturday. I was arranging coffee mugs when I saw Rena pulling my clothes out of a black plastic garbage bag. My French blue tweed jacket, my Betsey Johnson halter dress, my Myrna Loy pajamas. Hanging them on hangers on the rolling rack.
I snatched them off the rack, stood there shaking. She had gone through my drawers, my closet. “These are mine.”
Rena ignored me, shook out a rose-and-gray long skirt, pinned it to a hanger. “Why you need? Dressed best at Marshall High School? Maybe Tiny Thai, Trader Joe? Maybe Melrose Place call for you to be star?” She bent and took out an armful of my Fred Segal T-shirts, dumped them into my arms. “Here.” She put a roll of tape and a marker on top. “You name price, you keep money, ladno?” She kept pulling my things out of plastic garbage bags, hanging them up. Dove-gray high-waisted pants with an Edwardian jacket, a charcoal velvet collar. White shirt with ruffled front. My Jessica McClintock dress with the white cutwork collar.
“Not that,” I said. “Come on, have a heart.”
Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. “You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him 1918.” She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. “Is fact.”
I stood there, my arms full of the silky T-shirts. Egyptian cotton. Sour pliers squeezed my throat, juicing it like a lemon. She couldn’t make me sell my clothes. That witch.
But I couldn’t stop the thought that, really, what exactly was I saving them for? When would I ever need a two-hundred-dollar Jessica McClintock dress again? It was a roast-goose-with-chestnuts dress, Puccini at the Music Center, gold rims on china. I looked at Rena in her shiny red blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, high heels, and jeans. Niki, setting up kitchen appliances, magenta hair and black polyester. Yvonne, round as a watermelon in her purple baby doll dress with a swirl pattern from the sixties, sadly arranging the baby furniture, posing a worn teddy bear in the high chair.
Why couldn’t anybody ever hang on to anything? You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words, one picture of my grandmother and one of your 4-H cow. Only Claire could hold memory. It was the present that she couldn’t sort out.
“Someone gave it to me,” I finally said to Rena.
“So?” Rena looked up from her hangers. “You’re lucky, someone gave to you. Now you sell, get money out.”
I stood there, sullen, my arms still full of T-shirts.
“You want car?” Rena said. “Artist college? You think I don’t know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .” She stopped, struggling
to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. “Money. You want remember, so just remember.”
So I did it. I marked a price on my crimson velvet dream. I marked it high, hoping it wouldn’t sell. I marked them all high. But they sold. As the sun got warm, the hard bargainers left and the couples came, lazily, arm in arm, old people out for a stroll, young people. The T-shirts, the pants, the jackets went. But by afternoon, the crimson dress was still unsold. People kept asking Rena if it was really one hundred dollars.
“What she say,” Rena replied in her deep voice, implying helplessness.
“It’s a Jessica McClintock,” I said defensively. “Never been worn.” My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.
I could still remember how I looked in it when I tried it on at the store in Beverly Hills. I looked innocent, like somebody’s daughter, somebody’s real daughter. A girl who was cared for. A girl in that dress wasn’t a girl who had a beer and a cigarette for lunch, who lay down for the father on carpet pads in an unfinished house. It wasn’t a dress that knew how to make a living if it had to, that had to worry about its teeth and whether its mother would come home. When I showed it to Claire, she made me turn for her like a ballerina on a music box, her hands clapped to her mouth, pride flowing from her like tears. She believed I was that girl. And for a moment, so did I.
All day, I helped them on with it, slid the satin lining over their sweaty shoulders, zipped it up as far as it would go without straining. After the fifth woman had tried it on, I started not caring so much. At about three, a group of girls came around, and one of them kept looking at the red dress, holding it up to herself. “Can I try this on?”