by Ann Packer
Sarabeth was perplexed by a great many things, but mostly by herself, by the weird tranquillity she was beginning to feel—about Liz, about everything. Maybe it was just the way things were when you got older. You let go more easily.
She had with her house. Nothing bothered her anymore—not the falling-apart bathroom, not the makeshift curtain blocking her view of the Heidts’, not the splintery porch nor the dusty pile of objects on the living room floor. The stuff on the floor had even taken on a feeling of permanence. Why not keep it there? It was as good as anywhere else.
In this mood she dug out a box of college papers and found one of her old journals, a blank book with a blue cloth cover. It was full of writing, page after page—not just accounts of her life, but all kinds of other stuff, too: lists of things she’d liked, juxtaposing the exalted (“Chopin’s études”) with the mundane (“Reese’s peanut butter cups”). She’d written about her relationships: “Last night, Jerome said he thought he loved me but that it wouldn’t be fair to either of us for him to say so until he was sure. I really respect him for that.” Then she’d gone back afterward and annotated: “Hello, Sarabeth? He was an asshole!” She’d experimented with alternate handwritings—all caps, like her architecture-major roommate; the tiniest scrawl possible, to show how tortured she was. She’d even played with her name: Sara, Sara B, Sarabande, Sarabé.
And then there was this:
“Lorelei Leoffler is survived by her daughter, Sarabeth.” Think about this. There’s “survived by” and “survived by”: “outlived by” and “tolerated by.” “Lorelei Leoffler was tolerated by her daughter, Sarabeth.” How true.
She’d been twenty-one when she’d written that—an adult. She couldn’t believe the melodrama, the self-pity. Yet she felt in an odd way protective of that former self; when she packed the journal away again, she rubberbanded onto it a note that said “Fragile.”
She was less so. One bright Friday afternoon she went window-shopping: peered into an exotic bird store, paused outside a boutique where she’d once bought a clingy red dress she’d never worn. She stopped in front of a brand-new spice shop and on a whim went inside and wandered around, looking into open bowls, leaning down for a smell of clove, of nutmeg and cinnamon. She found a tin labeled STAR ANISE and opened it to a collection of odd, woody flowers, not at all what she’d expected. Star anise—what had she expected? The smell was like licorice, and the flowers were exquisite, circles of perfect hard petals that dug into the pads of her fingertips when she squeezed one.
She was finally getting her act together lampshadewise, and she let herself buy the tin, all $5.95 of it, as a souvenir of she didn’t know what. She lingered in the shop for an extra moment, reluctant to leave the rows of glass jars, the sound of the grinder as it pulverized hard pods into powder.
Outside, she hesitated; what now? Coldwell Banker had an office nearby, and she wondered if it was the one where Peter Something—Peter Watkins—worked. On tour with Jim last week, she’d seen him for the first time since the day he helped her, and she’d been mildly disappointed when he only smiled and nodded.
“He doesn’t remember,” she said to Jim.
“Of course he does.”
It was the Rockridge Coldwell Banker where he worked, she remembered now. She went and stood in front of this one anyway, looked at the listings and recognized a house she’d staged for Jim a few years back. She cupped her hands at her eyes and peered inside. There were five or six people at desks, talking on phones or tapping at keyboards. As she looked, a woman at the back saw her and waved, then held up her forefinger as if to say Wait.
Did she mean Sarabeth?
The woman smiled and nodded, finger still aloft, and Sarabeth turned around, looking to both sides to make sure there wasn’t someone else right there. The sidewalk was empty, and she hesitated and then stepped to the door. She actually recognized the woman, from touring with Jim; she thought Jim had even worked with her once or twice. She was somewhere in that netherworld of fifty to sixty-five, with chin-length gray-blond hair and an Eileen Fisher outfit.
Once inside, Sarabeth took a few steps forward and then stopped. The place was dim, and though the woman smiled as she approached she looked almost surprised. What did she want with Sarabeth? Something about staging?
“Hi, there,” she said. “Can I help you?”
Confused, Sarabeth looked around again, and now she saw that in fact a car had pulled to the curb right in front of the office, and the driver had lowered the passenger-side window and was leaning forward, waiting.
A young guy at a nearby desk hung up his phone and looked from Sarabeth to his colleague and back again.
“Do you have a minute?” the woman asked him. “Can you help this lady while I step outside?”
When she was gone, he cracked a wide smile. “Sorry, that was just so classic.”
“You saw the whole thing?”
“Start to finish. But I was on the phone, and anyway, some things have to play out in real time.”
He was in his early thirties, surprisingly young for a guy in real estate. Men usually came to it later in life; Jim had had a whole career as a high school English teacher before he made the switch. This guy had a pristine look: close shave, expensive polo shirt, immaculate fingernails. He could have been a pilot on his day off, even a male model, though he wasn’t particularly handsome; just perfect.
“Can we help you?” he said. “Are you house hunting?”
“I was honestly just looking in the window.”
“So what are you hunting for?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Peace and love, same as everyone else.”
His smile was slow at first, and then his lips parted and he was grinning. He said, “Would you settle for coffee?”
“You’re asking me to have coffee?”
“Technically, I was asking if you were hunting for coffee. But that might be splitting hairs.”
“I’m way older than you.”
“What does that mean—you have insomnia? A weak bladder? Your days of drinking coffee are over?”
Sarabeth shook her head, but she couldn’t stop smiling. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Just a passerby.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
The door opened, and the blond woman came back in. “Are we taking care of you?” she asked as she headed back to her desk, but she didn’t slow for an answer.
“The royal ‘we,’” the guy said under his breath. “What a gal.” He lowered his voice even further. “My mother,” he added.
Sarabeth looked at the woman, then back at him; she’d have sooner believed they were lovers.
“How old are you?” she said.
“Twenty-eight.”
“I was in college when you were born.”
He shrugged, and she stood there for another moment and then gave him a little wave and headed off, pushing through the door into the sunlight.
37
I don’t know what to do for my birthday.” Lauren looked directly at Dr. Lewis, then over at his desk, where, to her great frustration, he had no pictures. It was beyond unfair that she had no idea what his wife looked like.
“What would you like to do?”
“That’s the thing, I don’t know.”
“Is there pressure to do something?”
“Well, yeah—it’s my birthday.”
She thought of birthdays in the past—two years ago, when her parents took her and three friends to Mamma Mia!; last year, when her mom paid for her and Amanda to go to a day spa. When she was younger, she’d loved studying magazines for party ideas, but there was really nothing to do that she hadn’t already done, and besides, she wasn’t in the mood.
His white coat was on a hanger on the back of the door, and she couldn’t remember whether it was usually there or not. She had gotten kind of confused about his job—doing therapy here, seeing kids at the hospital. It seemed he should do one or the other.
He laced his fingers together. “I guess another question would be, what do you like to do?”
“For my birthday?”
“For anything.”
Here he went again. Every so often he’d sneak this question in, like maybe he’d trick her into having an answer. She didn’t like to do anything. That was her problem; she had no interests.
She wished she’d brought a bottle of water. Once, she’d seen a yogurt carton in the garbage under the Kleenex table, and she’d been awestruck that someone would eat in front of him. It wasn’t his carton, she was sure—there was another garbage can under his desk.
“You mentioned once,” he said, “that you like to draw.”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Do you like to look at art?”
“I’m not going to go to a museum for my birthday!”
He pooched out his lips, then sort of shrugged.
“That would be incredibly geeky,” she went on.
“Your friends aren’t interested?”
“I don’t have friends.”
He watched her for a long moment. “You’re feeling very empty,” he said at last. “It’s very painful.”
She sighed and looked out the window. Fuck you, she thought. The trees on his street were getting green, and she thought of how she used to try to draw leaves—like, really draw what they looked like. It was hard.
She turned back. “What do you mean ‘empty’?”
“No interests, no friends. No boyfriend.”
“You mean I’m a total loser.”
“I think that’s how you feel.”
“Because I am one.”
“I think there’s a difference,” he said, “between what you are and how you feel. And I don’t think how you feel now will last forever.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, but I’m optimistic. You’re attacking yourself, but without as much passion or despair as a couple months ago. You’re not as focused on Jeff. And while you can’t decide about your birthday, you’d like to do something, which encourages me.”
The session was over, and she got to her feet and put on her jacket. He stood and opened the door. This moment, passing close by him to get out of his office, was always the same—crowded with things she suddenly wanted to say.
At home that evening she waited until everyone was occupied, then crept into the guest room. In a bookcase there her mom kept several books about art—a big art history book that she’d had since college, a book about the Italian Renaissance, several books on specific artists. There was one Lauren wanted to look at—Alex Katz. She pulled it from the shelf and kicked off her shoes, then sat on the guest room bed. This was a book her parents had bought on a trip to New York before she was born. From all the stuff they’d told her about that trip, you’d have thought they’d been there for months, but it was only a week.
Was it true that she wasn’t as focused on Jeff? She’d had some weird moments looking at him lately when she wasn’t even sure she liked him anymore. But she did—of course she did.
Somewhere in this book was a picture of a canoe on water, but she couldn’t find it. Instead, it was pretty much all paintings of people, and mostly of one person, a woman named Ada. The paintings had dates, and Lauren saw that over the years Alex Katz’s painting style had changed from sort of blurry or muddy to really sharp, almost like cutout paper. There was one of a woman—it was Ada again, though it didn’t say so—carrying an umbrella in the rain, and Lauren looked at it for a long time, focusing, finally, on the three white dots he’d put on each of her eyes. Those dots and the falling rain—it was as if she were crying, but she didn’t really look sad.
At last she found the canoe. She couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen it, but it was long ago, when she was a kid. It kind of freaked her out, actually, the canoe nearly filling the picture, blue all around it so you didn’t know where it was: near a house and people, or out in the middle of a cold lake. There had been a time when Lauren had taken this book from its shelf quite frequently, had sat on the guest room rug and stared at this picture. The page was even a little smudged. When had that been?
The blue was as dark as the ocean. The canoe was pale yellow, with markings that suggested it was made of bark. It sat on its own reflection, its pale water-self black at one end, as if that end would pull the entire reflected canoe down into the depths, leaving the other one to try to go on by itself. Lauren closed the book and lay back on the bed. The house was quiet: her parents were downstairs somewhere; Joe was in his room doing homework. She had homework, too, a page of math problems she could never finish by tomorrow, which made her feel it was pointless even to start them. She pulled the book close, rolled onto her side, and rested her forearm on its cool, smooth surface. Maybe she would sleep here tonight, for a change.
38
As weekends approached, Sarabeth thought of making plans, but she was never sure she’d feel like following through, and she hated, above all, to cancel on people. It seemed so wishy-washy. It was.
One Friday evening, after opening a container of leftover pasta puttanesca and discovering that it was sprigged with mold, she simply left the house and got in her car and drove. Other people did this—just headed out—why not her? Something interesting would occur to her, and if not there was always Intermezzo.
She hadn’t seen a movie in a while, and she headed for the likely theaters, but nothing appealed, at least not at the first few. She headed back to Solano, thinking there might be something interesting at the Albany Twin, and amazingly enough there was an open parking space right in front. She thought it might not even matter what the movies were, given how well everything else was working.
But it did matter. She didn’t want to see Catherine Zeta-Jones as a woman with a dying child, nor Jude Law as a football coach. From her car she watched as people spilled down the sidewalk in twos and threes, chatting, laughing, ready for the weekend. She was within a stone’s throw of great Indian food, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t get out of the car, couldn’t join the strolling crowd, not by herself. She felt weak and useless for a moment, but then she summoned a positive thought and reached for her phone. She called Nina: no answer. Jim and Donald: no answer. Miranda: no answer. She had cell phone numbers for all of them, and a year ago she might have used them, interrupted them midevening for salvation. Not now.
She started the engine again and looked over her shoulder. Someone was already waiting for the spot, and she reversed with the sense that she could never keep anything, not even a parking place, for quite long enough. All the drive home she thought this, but without the kind of feeling by which such thoughts used to be accompanied. It was neutral, divested of freight. Maybe it was the truth.
The Heidts’ house was bright with lights, and she didn’t even slow down; she kept going right past it and on to the corner. The clock on her dashboard said 7:42. She reached the freeway quickly, the traffic fairly light for a weekend evening. What to do? She looked at the bridge, saw the way the lights traced the way to the city. Should she? Her last trip across the bay had been the night she saw Liz.
She merged into the bridge traffic. The approach to the toll plaza was a sea of brake lights, and as she neared the stalled cars she felt a sense of misgiving.
Across the bridge, the San Francisco exits offered themselves, but she let each one go by. Passing Cesar Chavez, she realized she was not going to stop, not going to find a little taqueria where she could have a bite to eat and then go home. Coming up was the exit for the Cow Palace, where she had gone with her parents to see Barnum and Bailey; all she remembered was the enrapturing smell of cotton candy and the serious tones with which her parents discussed whether or not to buy her a cone. Did they in the end? She couldn’t recall. She drove on, hungry now, the bay on her left and the dark hills of Brisbane up ahead on her right.
In a while, she passed the airport. The network of skyways was still new to her, unnerving. A bit later she passed th
e exit for Liz’s, and she imagined showing up and ringing the doorbell. Surprise! She was not about to do that. She was going to Palo Alto then, and she was now hungry enough to wonder what restaurant she could find there. When had she last been to Palo Alto? It had been years, and the restaurants changed all the time. What did she want to eat? Wondering made her ravenous, and it seemed nothing could be large enough, no amount of food huge enough, to satisfy her. She wanted a greasy, dripping cheeseburger was what she wanted.
She took University and headed toward downtown. Driving past one enormous house after another, she remembered a burger place farther south. Could she find it from here? She drove by feel, taking turns that seemed right and then were. She could almost taste the cheeseburger with its charred edges and delicious, soft bun. It had been around forever, this place; it had been a Castleberry tradition, Saturday lunch: Robert would grab a kid or two for the drive, load up on food and milk shakes, and head back home to Cowper Street for the actual eating. When Sarabeth and Liz went with him, they sat in one of the red leather booths while he waited in line, gradually approaching the crank-operated grill, where a woman in a smock stood with a spatula, pulling slips of thin white paper from slices of cheese and then laying them on the blackening rounds of meat.
But the place was closed. Not just closed: gone. Sarabeth gaped from her car. She was over an hour from home, and starving, and she had lost something she’d had at the beginning of this adventure, something vital. She went into a supermarket and bought the last rotisserie chicken in the place, and she devoured it in her car, tearing at the breast meat, gnawing on the legs until the bones were clean. She felt like an animal.
There was a kind of muscle memory to driving these streets, a knowingness activated in a not entirely conscious way. Heading for the freeway, she might not have turned on Cowper at all had she been prepared to see it. But no, it was a complete surprise: COWPER STREET on a sign, in advance enough of the actual corner so that there was time to get into the left lane. As she turned, she slowed down and cracked the window, and cold air came in, along with a tree smell from her childhood.