Woman Enters Left

by Jessica Brockmole

  Friday

  Fainted getting out of the bathtub this morning. I told myself that the anemia is back, that we’ve been eating awfully. But maybe that’s not it. The world always feels a little more solid under my feet when F.’s nearby. Yesterday, I didn’t see her at all.

  I had an excuse ready on my lips. I needed to find her to borrow the car, of course, to go to the grocery in Searchlight. Aunt Marjorie’s kitchen had next to nothing in it, I’d tell her, and I needed fresh foods, full of iron. Liver, tomatoes, spinach. It was a good excuse, one she’d believe, and I practiced it under my breath.

  I didn’t find her, but I found the Lizzie emptied like a tornado hit it. Boxes and duffels, pots and pans, tents, fire grates, everything, scattered all around in the yard. Tripped over a bucket of cold soapy water. A cleaning was overdue (our socks could stand up and walk away), but it made my stomach icy to think of why she was doing it. Was she going to leave?

  Supper: Fried chicken, potato salad, applesauce cake.

  May 28, 1926

  Today I did laundry. Marjorie lent me a bigger washtub than the one I’d carried strapped to the roof. I washed everything in my duffel (my dusty woolen knickers twice), plus all of the blankets and towels. I ran out of clothesline space, so took the last load to hang up over the net on the tennis court.

  Despite the dude wranglers and horses and sagebrush, the ranch has a pool and a perfectly immaculate tennis court, like something you’d see in a magazine. E told me that dude ranches are tourist destinations. Easterners flock West for a rustic (but not too rustic) holiday.

  I’m not sure I believe her. Apart from Marjorie, the brassy-haired woman who owns the Prickly Pear, and the dude wranglers, who sleep above the barn, we’re the only guests. Marjorie gave me a suite of rooms all for my own, but they echo. I half-considered asking if I could set up my tent out back. The very night we arrived, E moved into Carl’s rooms.

  Anyway, this morning, I lugged my basket out back to the tennis court. It’s a quiet sort of place. Warm pavement. Rectangles and right angles. Unpretentious wooden benches. It was a good place to be alone. These days, that’s all I was. But this morning, someone was out on the court with a tin pail of tennis balls.

  Two someones, I realized; one whose head barely came above the net. Anna Louisa, deadly serious expression on her face, stood across the net from one of the dude wranglers. Steve, I remembered. I’d seen him around the ranch. Restless and arrogant. Watchful. He quite obviously adored AL and was fiercely protective of her. All of the guys were, but Steve called her The Empress and lifted her up onto her horse himself. Though he was dressed like a Remington painting, he held the racket like a blue blood, impatiently shouting instructions across the net to AL. She didn’t seem the least bit deterred. Her swings were furious and white balls flew wildly. It looked immensely satisfying.

  I slipped onto a bench alongside the court and just watched. She was Ethel the way I remembered her. Determined. Spunky. Tireless. That little girl, she lit up that tennis court.

  Before too long, she broke off. She was panting. She retrieved a battered metal army canteen and, in that moment, she spotted me. With a dismissive wave at the tall wrangler, she came my way.

  You’re Mother’s friend, aren’t you? She plopped down on the bench next to me and a ratty stuffed horse.

  I’ve known her for a long time, since we were a little older than you are now.

  She thought about this for a space and took a long drink from her canteen. She was wearing the turquoise bracelet E had bought her, wrapped twice around her wrist. I didn’t know she had any friends besides Daddy and me.

  We haven’t talked in a long while, I said. She waited. Sometimes friends lose touch.

  Is that why you look so sad? she asked.

  I was sad because, every night, Carl brought Ethel a cup of coffee. She looked at me instead of saying good night. She followed him into their room and didn’t come out until morning. I’m sad because I have to say goodbye.

  She waved her hand again in that beautifully dismissive gesture. When she grew older, she’d simply devastate people with that wave. I won’t do that.

  Get sad? I scooted closer. Or say goodbye?

  Either. She dribbled water out from the canteen, just to watch it fall. I don’t have any friends. I’m like Mom. I don’t talk to people. Her canvas shoes were getting wet. We get along fine without anyone else.

  I took the canteen from her and capped it. That’s a lonely way to move through life, Miss Anna Louisa.

  She set her chin. I don’t need friends. I’m going to be an actress. Years and years ago, Eth used to lift her chin and declare the same. The only thing I’ll need is the camera.

  I might have to leave Ethel behind. I might have to say goodbye. But to Anna Louisa, swinging her feet above the edge of the tennis court, I said, When you get to Hollywood, I’ll look you up.

  Saturday

  Making biscuits today. Pulled the stool up to the shelf where the flour tin was and stepped up onto it all wrong. Pain up and down my whole leg. I fell off the stool and pulled the tin down with me.

  I was just about fainting from the pain, but I ran fingers down my leg and it didn’t feel right. Wasn’t the first time I’d broken a bone. These days, they took twice as long to heal.

  Tore a dish towel into strips and wrapped them tight around my leg, hoping they’d hold the bones together. Aunt Marjorie came in then and saw me tying off my bandage with flour settled all over everything like snow. She didn’t say anything, but brought me a cigarette. I didn’t even look around to see if C. was watching.

  Supper: Providence chicken, biscuits, canary pudding.

  May 29, 1926

  Lifted the floorboards, lifted the hood, and attempted to clean and check all of the Lizzie’s Important Bits. I cleaned the spark plugs, the timer, the carburetor, the coils. I tightened the clutch and the brake bands. I changed the oil and (I think, I hope) the burned-out bearings. I tried to straighten out the bend in the front bumper.

  I worked right through lunch and through dinner. At one point E brought me out a piece of saucy chicken sandwiched between two halves of a biscuit. I hadn’t seen her up close in days. I’d been avoiding mealtimes, eating cold travel rations in my room, and only seeing her from a distance. She was limping again and looked pale, but, from under the brim of my hat, I drank in the sight of her.

  She didn’t leave right away after she handed over the sandwich. She stepped back into the shade of the porch. She took a breath and asked what I was doing.

  I didn’t want to answer. I’m not sure she even wanted to ask the question. Getting ready to go, I said.

  She thought about it for a good, long while. Opened her mouth a few times as though to say something. I kept on with my mallet and the bumper, trying to pretend I wasn’t watching out of the corner of my eye.

  I thought to make a joke, something about taking as long as Odysseus if I didn’t get moving, but then she asked, Do you have to? and the joke died on my tongue.

  Before I could answer, before I could say that yes, I did, of course I did, because if I stayed I’d wither away a little bit every day, Carl came from the mess hall with two cups of coffee, like he did every night. He touched her on the shoulder, like he did every night, and asked, Okay, Eth? And, like she did every single night, she turned and followed him into the bunkhouse.

  I knocked the bumper clear off the car.

  Sunday

  This little deception, I never intended it.

  I didn’t know where to go that first night. After supper, I didn’t want to leave A.L.’s side. She fell asleep on my shoulder and I carried her into the bunkhouse they’d been sleeping in. She had a little trundle bed on the floor, next to the bed. F. was in a room farther down. C. was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. I laid A.L. down on the trundle and didn’t know where I belonged.

  I suddenly missed the smell of damp canvas and wood smoke, the sound of Florrie’s snoring, the slant of dark tent
above my bed, that cheap wool blanket scratching the bottom of my chin. This room was too quiet. No muffled bonfire conversations, no harmonicas, no wind lifting the tent flaps and rattling poles. I missed it all. I missed Florrie.

  But this is where I had to be, here in this room with C. and A.L. It’s what everyone expected. Despite him leaving, it’s maybe even what C. expected now. But C. came out of the bathroom that first night, lifted A.L. up onto the big bed, and said he’d take the trundle while I was here. While I was here.

  He’d put out the light and crawled into that bed down on the floor. And that’s when I tried to talk to him. Then, and every night since. All the words I wanted to say, all of the words I practiced in my head while driving across the West, I thought maybe they’d be easier in the dark. But when I finally said the first word, each night, he’d already be asleep.

  I haven’t been able to talk to Carl. I haven’t been able to talk to Florrie. Always, I’m too late.

  Supper: Ham and macaroni, prune whip, and I forget what else.

  May 30, 1926

  Today was tires. That Lizzie and her poor wheels. They’ve been taken on and off more times than I can count.

  Worked on the front first. Inner tubes cleaned and patched. Tires wiped down with gasoline. Cracks and cuts filled in with rubber compound. Each inflated to sixty pounds. After three thousand miles on the road, I was a pro.

  The last tire, though, was stubborn. Try as I might, I couldn’t lever the casing up over the rim. It was a newer tire—we’d had to replace it after a particularly disagreeable stretch of Missouri—and refused to budge. I had an excellent profanity that I’d heard a fellow use in Boonville. Carl walked up on me trying it out. He blinked and said, I’ll have to remember that one. Then, Can we talk?

  We used to be the best of friends, two points of our little triangle, but the angle had grown wider over the years, the line drawn between us too long. When I came to their front door in Newark to say goodbye six weeks ago, it was the first time I’d seen him in years. We looked at each other over Ethel’s head, weighing, measuring, evaluating. He was older, tired. Other than nods and hellos, we hadn’t had a conversation in even longer.

  I was old and tired too. And I was mad. Mad at my rotting body. Mad that I didn’t have much time left for my dreams. Mad at Carl for stupidly leaving. Mad at Eth for going after him.

  But I didn’t have a front bumper left to bash and I didn’t have many friends left. I kicked the tire once, pointlessly, then asked, Give me a hand, Carl?

  We talked while he levered off the casing, while I hauled out the inner tube and patched it up. He talked about the war. He talked about coming home not fit for anything but soldiering. About how he opened the butcher shop with his army pal, Hank, just so he wouldn’t feel so adrift. But it felt like life had moved on without him. That E and I had moved on. She felt it too, he said. She wanted everything to go back to the way it was before the war. I asked, Is that why you two got married so fast? He said, Maybe.

  I talked about the past seven years, about the jobs and my very own apartment. I talked about the issue of Variety folded up in my duffel and the MGM contract at the end of this whole, long journey.

  When we ran out of everything else, we talked about her.

  How we used to all be friends. How maybe we still could be. How everything was just right when Ethel was there. She walked up that driveway and I suddenly realized how much I’d missed her, he said. That’s how she gets us to stay. She forgives us and makes us love her and we never want to be anywhere else.

  I didn’t ask him why he left in the first place. I already knew. Listening to him talk about the war and returning home, about the butcher shop and Hank, about not knowing where he fit in, I understood. I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t going to leave again. Through the kitchen window, Ethel limped past, and I knew that too.

  So, he asked, what do we do now?

  Because we both knew that Ethel wasn’t going to decide. She’d stay in there, scrubbing out Marjorie’s kitchen for eternity rather than choose which direction to go. California or New Jersey. And she didn’t have eternity.

  We stumbled through decisions neither of us would make. Possibilities that couldn’t really happen. Understandings. We wrestled the inner tube back on the car. We wrestled with the future. The inner tube was more gracious. I have to leave sometime, I told him. He said, So do I.

  As the sun hovered low, I packed up my toolbox. Carl, we didn’t choose this. None of us did. But going forward, what can we choose?

  Florrie, he said, I don’t know.

  Monday

  I was right there and they didn’t even see me. Was bringing them out lemonade, of all things.

  They always used to look to me for decisions, but now they’re taking them away from me.

  May 31, 1926

  Woke up this morning to the sound of the Lizzie sputtering to life. I pulled a robe on over my pajamas and went out onto the porch to see the car pulling away from the bunkhouse. C came out of his room at a run, barefoot, his shirt untucked.

  I ran with him after the car. It wasn’t going fast. I could see E’s head above the steering wheel. I called her name and she slowed for a moment, but then she put her foot down on the gas. I kicked off my slippers and sprinted after.

  Then a hen ran across the driveway and E swerved. She rolled into the paddock fence and stopped in a crunch of metal. C threw himself at the passenger door and cried, Al!

  I didn’t even realize AL was in there, not until C yanked open the door. She was in the passenger seat, sleepy and dazed, in her thin white nightgown and turquoise bracelet. A trickle of blood ran from her forehead. He pulled her out and squeezed her so hard I thought she’d break in half. E crawled out after, face streaked with tears, and touched AL’s little dangling foot. She’s okay?

  She’s fine, C said. Scared, maybe. Eth, what were you doing?

  She looked between C and me. You two were portioning me out like a peach pie. Deciding where to send me, as though I didn’t have a say in the matter.

  C held AL tight. We weren’t. Honest. We were just sorting some things between us.

  She wiped her eyes. She didn’t look convinced. And what did you decide to do with me?

  I took a step closer. I wished I could scoop her up the way C had AL. Eth, we didn’t.

  That’s why I decided, she said.

  She’d been leaving. In the backseat of the Lizzie I could see her wicker suitcase. A box of food. The tent. AL’s stuffed horse was on the floor. She hadn’t even said goodbye.

  I could see C’s face the moment he realized the same. Where were you going? He let AL slip to the ground, but didn’t let go of her.

  She bit her lip. She was crying again. I don’t know. I thought I did. She wrapped her arms around herself. When had she gotten so thin? But I’m running out of time.

  It was then that I saw that brightness in her eyes, the flush in her cheeks, the little waver as she stood next to the Lizzie. I hadn’t seen her—really seen her—in days.

  I didn’t think twice. I crossed the few feet between us and put my arms around her. I smelled cocoanut oil and felt her heart flutter against my chest.

  I caught her before she fell.

  Beryl scrambles out of stopped Model T.

  BERYL

  You almost hit her!

  FRANCIE

  Thank goodness I didn’t. I’d be picking feathers out of the radiator for a week.

  Both watch an unconcerned hen fleeing across the prairie.

  BERYL

  Is that all you can say? No apologies? No tears? She might have left a dozen orphaned eggs behind.

  FRANCIE

  Why are you so sad? Your favorite variety of chicken is the dead variety.

  BERYL

  You’re mean.

  FRANCIE

  And you’re ridiculous. We ate fried chicken last night. You had three helpings.

  Beryl pointedly dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief.

/>   FRANCIE

  Why did the chicken cross the road?

  BERYL

  Why?

  FRANCIE

  To escape Beryl’s frying pan.

  —Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King

  Chapter Sixteen

  1952

  After Mom died, Dad was uncomfortable in his new role as widower. He fumbled with how to tell people. “Ethel’s gone west,” he’d say. Not knowing the soldier’s expression, six-year-old Anna Louisa took it literally. After all, Mom had driven across the country, from coast to coast. After a while, Anna Louisa began to doubt that there’d really been a funeral. Maybe her memories were mixed up. Primroses, tears, a patch of shade beneath an acacia tree—those could be from anything. “She’s gone west,” Dad said, and Anna Louisa imagined her mom driving clear to California and never wanting to come back.

  She was only a kid, but it was silly, really. All of the tears and handkerchiefs. The gilt-edged cards covered in lilies and indecipherable script. The black armband on her coat. The smell of primroses. She knew, she knew, but still she wondered. At every Saturday matinee, in between bites of Jujubes, she’d scan the faces on the screen. Maybe, just maybe, Mom wasn’t dead. She’d only gone west.

  Even long after she was old enough to know better, long after Dad had sat her down and explained all about radium moving into Mom’s bones and causing a ruckus, she still watched those movies every Saturday afternoon.