But I was letting weeks slip by without thinking that I had a future. I sat beside my mother and read Anita’s diary, from the first, neatly printed entries from almost a year ago to the bounding, energetic writing of the night I had seen her tending one of her blisters.
Anita indicated a break in time with a row of dots, small circles, six of them. Never five or seven. Six tidy circles that meant she had not written anything for a while. Sometimes a week had gone by, sometimes three. The time skipped was indicated by the same set of symbols, six dots.
I still thought that Anita might bound up the stairs, but I no longer felt I had to have an explanation ready. I could take as long as I wanted, turning the pages beside my mother, who fell still and silent. I trusted her quiet more than my father’s chatter.
If an archaeologist discovered this journal centuries from now, brushed away the dust, and translated the scribbles, he would conclude that it was written by a young woman with no other human beings in her life. There was no mention of any of us. Kyle’s name appeared once—“Kyle thinks so, too.”
It was a book of lists, mostly. Books she had read, books she wanted to read, movies she liked, movies she hated. Then the lists grew complicated, branching into arguments, why one author should not have killed herself, why she dreamed she was trapped in a movie about a recluse who found a human tooth in a hole in the wall of his dining room.
The summer before, Anita had begun reading biographies. She read about women who wrote books and poems, women who painted, sang the blues, ruled empires. She began to read diaries, the journals of famous people, writers who would start an entry, “The sun came out by afternoon after spits and spots of rain,” and end by writing that there was no God.
I could see Anita trying to sound like one of these people, how the sunlight slanted through the cedars in the Blankenships’ front yard. I could see her trying to be someone she was not. Not sounding false so much as empty, keeping herself out of the pages and letting someone else in, someone who had never heard of Mom’s fossil collection or the way I could throw a football forty yards off a scissor kick.
“Is there anything?” my mother asked when I closed the book.
For a moment I could not speak, almost blaming Anita for whatever had happened.
17
I put the diary in the top drawer of my dresser. I would be able to say I had taken good care of it.
Downstairs, I stirred some tuna into some tomato soup. The soup had some nonfat milk stirred into it first, and when it starts to simmer, the recipe calls for two cans of tuna. I don’t like using the kind packed with spring water; it reminds me of what we sometimes feed Bronto.
There was a knock at the front door. Dad had a brief conversation in the doorway, and I heard the crackle of money, and that flat silence of cash being counted out. He hustled back into the kitchen with a large package wrapped in brown paper.
He began peeling open the wrapping before I could warn him. I had fragmentary mental warnings, too hideous to think: kidnappers sometimes sent body parts of their victims. But Dad was eager, confident, whisking away the last of the paper.
He stopped ripping paper and stared, putting his hands on his hips. “I didn’t know it would be that color,” he said.
“It looks fine,” said Mother.
“I picked it out,” he corrected himself, “but I didn’t know it would look so awful.”
“It looks good,” I said.
“Do you really think so?” he asked hopefully.
When my dad gets into a mood like this, he has to be reassured. There were five flimsy boxes, electric blue sheets of my sister’s graduation picture reproduced in black and white. At the top border was the word: Missing. At the bottom of the sheet was another black word: Reward.
Smaller lettering gave the Oakland Police Department telephone numbers, and our number, along with a description of Anita and a phrase that hit me: last seen near MacArthur BART station at approx. 8:00 P.M. It added further information, and I wondered which of Anita’s acquaintances at the shelving company had volunteered so much.
The phrase bothered me. Even the abbreviation for approximately didn’t look right. Anita deserved a more dignified poster, not something thrown together in such haste. Her picture looked more unreal than ever reproduced on this shade of blue. And besides—when she came home she would look at all this and tell us what a waste of paper it was, and how polluting the dye would be, deposited in landfill.
“The manager at Copymat suggested goldenrod,” Dad said. “That’s a kind of orange yellow,” he added, making a face to show what he thought of orange yellow.
“What color is this supposed to be?” I heard myself ask.
“It’s called Florida blue,” he said. “I just stood there looking at reams of paper. Lime green, circus pink. And all I could think of was that satin dress she wore to the banquet when I got that award.”
He had been Bay Area Businessperson of the Year, and the mayor had given him a wooden plaque with a brass plate. Dad had given a very funny speech, and we were all proud. It was the first time in my life I had ever worn a tux, rented, all except for the shoes, at Selix. We had all felt happy, and joined in giving Dad a standing ovation. Anita had worn a shiny blue dress, Florida blue, more or less.
“Two thousand five hundred of them,” he said. “I’ll swing by the office, grab some staplers. Not furniture staplers, the standard office kind. You probably want to hit each one with a stapler in each corner, so we’re looking at ten thousand staples.”
Mom and I did not say anything, but Dad responded as though we had. “That’s not as many as it sounds. A box of Bostitch standard staples holds five thousand, a little box the size of a chalkboard eraser. Two boxes like that and we’re all set.”
The pot behind me sputtered. Little specks of tomato and tuna appeared on the stovetop. I spooned the steaming stuff out onto slices of toast. The bread from the machine toasted well, but in odd shapes, not like the loaves from the store. The edges burned, and sometimes a corner that stuck out of the toaster stayed pale, not browning.
“It’ll take half a minute to staple each poster,” I said. “Not counting time spent finding a telephone pole to fasten each one onto—”
“And bulletin boards at libraries. And Safeways. We’re going to plaster the Bay Area.” He didn’t like the way I had said telephone pole, making the words sound absurd.
I thought that hunting all over the East Bay for wooden poles would do very little to help Anita. Some neighborhoods didn’t have telephone poles at all, only streetlights. Streetlight poles were made out of shiny metal or cast concrete. To affix posters to those we would need masking tape. “You put up posters like that for missing pets,” I said. “If Bronto gets lost, we put up a blue poster.”
“Bronto isn’t the issue,” said Mom.
“Reward.” I didn’t like that, either. It made her look like a fugitive.
Anita would have sprinkled some Kraft Parmesan cheese over each serving, and so I did, too. I could see why chefs at Denny’s always add a sprig of parsley. The food looked bare and not very appetizing. It was dark out, early evening. I deliberately didn’t look at the clock.
“The poster is great,” I said. “That blue will get attention.” Anyone could tell I was trying to be diplomatic, and having trouble.
Dad shifted the poster onto the floor with quick, sharp movements. His feelings were hurt.
“We can pass them out at BART stations,” I said. “Put one up at every school in the Bay Area. And clinics.”
“Sure,” Dad said, very quietly.
I put out a fork and spoon for each of us, and a folded paper napkin. Dad heard out my report on the fire inspector without comment. I asked if I should go up on the roof the next morning to double-check the hopper and make sure it was empty of sawdust. He just stared down at his plate as though he did not recognize food.
Mother looked sideways at what I put before her. Her lab coat pockets were bulging with c
andy wrappers, and a brown and green Milky Way wrapper lay at her feet, crumpled. She was probably not hungry, but she found the spoon without looking at, and ate holding the bowl under her chin, sitting sideways like someone not completely committed to sitting where she was.
“We’re not behind yet,” Dad said. “We shipped out thirty-five today. We keep shipping, we’ll be okay.” Nightstands. He could still think about nightstands.
He got up slowly, and took his time getting over to the sink. He was wearing a V-neck undershirt and dress slacks with a nice crease. The shirt and pants did not look good together, the pants expensive and new, the shirt the sort of thing he wears around the house, torn under one armpit.
“I’m not really worried about another fire,” I said. I felt a little guilty for even raising the possibility of a further anxiety in his life. “I’m just thinking.”
“That’s good,” said my father. His glasses were off and his eyes blinked at me, not seeing me very well. There were permanent little indentations on the bridge of his nose where his glasses rested, twin little footprints, one on each side of his nose. He did something I rarely saw him do: He washed his glasses off at the sink, using soap and Palmolive dish soap and a big soft linen dish towel, a map of the Counties of Ireland.
“That’s smart, Cray,” my dad said, not really noticing what he was saying. “You keep thinking.”
The phone rang again. It never stopped for more than five or ten minutes. My mother’s parents had already called twice from Iowa; my dad’s parents had both died when I was too little to remember. Each time the phone rang there was a surge of emotion in me, in all of us.
18
Dad answered the phone. There was always a hitch in his voice, a hesitation; this might be the call.
“It’ll be on the ten o’clock news,” he told someone. Not she’ll be on. It. Anita had become a subject, a story.
He listened to the voice in his ear, nodding as though whoever it was could see the expression on his face. “I talked them into it. I had to push a little, explain that she was an honor student, still only seventeen.” He was bragging about the influence he had with the television station. I didn’t really blame him.
I didn’t even ask who it was. These were Dad’s telephone friends, people he talked to on the phone. Some days he could sit and talk for three hours to one person after another. He had called all of Anita’s friends, taking his time with each one, checking off names on a list. Sometimes it seemed like he could have a better conversation with people he couldn’t see.
When the phone rang later, as I was putting the dishes in the dishwasher, it was a surprise. Dad handed me the black portable phone he liked to carry in his pocket. “It’s for you,” he said, with just a trace of annoyance. He was nice about it, but you could tell that social calls to me were something he didn’t consider very important right now.
“Cray, I have been here for hours.” People like to say my name, starting sentences with it. I knew who it was and I felt myself go stupid. “I have waited one hundred years,” said Paula.
“Christ, what time is it?”
“Almost ten,” she said.
“I forgot.” Dish soap all over my hands, dissolved foam running down the phone. I had not given her a thought all day. I didn’t care very much, either. Maybe I wouldn’t see Paula anymore after this. “There was a family emergency.”
“I was experimenting. Deliberately not calling you. Seeing how late you’d be before you picked up the phone.”
Still, Paula was a friend. “I’m sorry.”
“This is how you really are, Cray. Wherever you are, that’s all you think about. I almost admire it.” She was ready to shift from impatience to anger. “You don’t think anybody else is alive out here.”
“It was an emergency,” I said, giving the final word special emphasis. “It still is. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t want to talk about Anita. Saying her name seemed like it might be bad luck. The sound of her name might break whatever calm we were able to keep.
I think Paula didn’t take my family especially seriously. She has one cousin who is a surgeon, and another in prison. She never came out and said it, but I think she thought my parents were hard to figure out, even a little amusing, wrapped up in their projects. But my tone stopped her.
“I can’t talk right now,” I said.
Paula sighed. It was a theatrical sigh, forgiving, dismissing. But I was a little impressed with Paula. She had enough sense to say good night and hang up.
My mother sat at the table, looking at one of Dad’s lists, or maybe a letter he was going to send to the newspapers. She had a pencil in her hand. When she saw something on the list she didn’t like, she circled it. It was their mailing list, a computer printout they used at Christmas, everyone they knew.
Dad brought one of the portable televisions from upstairs and set it on the sink next to the bread machine.
What was Mother doing, I wondered, proceeding in her silent, methodical way? I could guess. Following Dad’s urgings, sending Anita’s image to everyone who lived within two thousand miles. Or even farther, to Dad’s buyers in Eastern Europe, his designer friends in Japan.
Channel Two’s Award Winning Ten O’clock News went on for an hour, ten to eleven, dragging in news from around the world to add to whatever was happening locally. I couldn’t look at it. I went out into the back garden, that frontier of things my dad hadn’t gotten around to yet.
Oakland, and the flecks of light descending toward the airport in South San Francisco, seemed to appear just as I looked, as though the world had been blank and dark one moment before I turned my head. In a few minutes it would be known, in every corner of the Bay Area and beyond.
When a player suits up for football he puts on a cup over his genitals, a mouthpiece between his teeth. Some players like the mouthpiece so much they carry it around with them, popping it in during math test, a transparent plastic smile that exactly fits the mouth. When it was all put together for the first time, helmet with its cage over the face, shoulder pads, thigh and hip pads, I felt wonderful. Even in the gray practice jersey with HOOVER HIGH stenciled on crooked, a ratty gray shirt that barely stretched down to cover my belly button, all I wanted to do was fall down.
I ran down to the thirty-yard line, down to the twenty, and threw myself on the ground, laughing, rolling, leaping up and doing it again. Even when the jayvee coach, Mr. Ernest, called, “Buchanan, get your behind over here,” in his raspy little voice, I kept spilling, spinning, slamming off the goalposts, ramming into the other players. It was a wonderful feeling—nothing could hurt me.
Dad could have gotten sued for having all this equipment lying around, sledgehammer, post-hole digger covered with a tarp. What if a tax assessor or a PG&E man came back here, someone wandering in to read the gas meter, and he fell over the rusty wheelbarrow?
Was it over yet, I wondered? Was her face and her name all over the place by now? For the first time I felt myself lose control, out there in the dark, my sister’s name, her face, broadcast all over Northern California.
I went to bed.
I listened to music for a while, finding stations that never broadcast any news. I used to fall asleep listening to music almost every night and wake hours later with my earphones still feeding me tunes.
I gave up and turned off the radio and lay there knowing that I would not fall asleep, that it was useless to try.
But I did sleep, a little. Sometimes when I woke I got out of bed and stood at the top of the stairs. I could not see my parents from there, but I could tell where they were. My mother’s lab coat was folded and perched on the magazine stand. Dad had presented it to her as a gentle joke—my wife, the scientist. But she liked wearing it while she watered her plants, or sat in the kitchen writing letters.
She was asleep on the sofa, a box of Kleenex just beyond reach. The kitchen light was bright, and a dim shadow on the living room carpet was my father, head on his arms at the kitchen ta
ble. I don’t think he slept much. The shadow kept moving as he straightened his back, slurped some coffee, put his head down again for a little rest.
He didn’t drink coffee as much as he used to. He took Tagamet for his ulcer, and was supposed to eat five or six small meals a day. Listening to him sip coffee could be annoying. He sucked it in, a long inward whistle, followed by a slurp. He didn’t drink orange juice or milk like that—only coffee.
I dreamed about her. She thumped her way up the stairs and demanded to know how her room got so messed up. She called my name. She was already losing her anger. She wanted me to say something. And I would, as soon as I could rouse myself from this deep sleep. It was not like a dream at all. Only when I woke did I feel the falseness of it.
The Anita of the dream was the Anita of several years before, when she had had such a bad sunburn. Her shoulders had peeled all the while we were at Lake Tahoe, little pink freckles breaking out all over her nose.
When morning arrived, gray light filling the bedroom, I slipped out of bed and got the diary out of the top drawer.
I had not wanted to remember the last words Anita had said to me, the evening before she vanished. Both of us were sitting on the sofa, the television off, Anita watching me search for the remote on the coffee table, pawing through magazines. We both saw it at the same time, the remote with all its tiny buttons lying on the floor beside the coffee plant.
It was late, Mom and Dad both upstairs, and we looked at each other, Anita giving one of her smiles, sly, in on one of life’s jokes. “Things move around when you aren’t looking,” she said. She had a voice that was ready to take on any emotion, her voice colored just then with amusement and even affection.
“On legs,” I had said. And she had made her fingers walk along the sofa, a slow, good-humored spider.
Was that the last thing she had said to me? Hadn’t I said something in return, and hadn’t I walked over to the television and turned it on? One more word. She must have said something else. I could only remember Anita stretching, elaborately, taking more pleasure in it than any cat. And then she went upstairs.
Zero at the Bone Page 8