Her name is really Nguyen, which rhymes with Lyn, more or less. She has lived in Holland and Thailand and British Columbia, one of those people you recognize as bright as soon as you see them. I told her that I was still swimming, and that I had a meet in Sacramento in a few days. Lyn nodded and went to work on my cuticle with a tiny pincers. If you haven’t had your nails done professionally in a while, it’s amazing all the fine, membranous margin they cut away, quietly, intently, with the deft, deliberate step-by-step that reminded me too vividly of the surgeon’s needle.
In drugstores the nail polish has dramatic names—Summer Tempest, Midnight Blush—but something no-nonsense about Lyn had her refer to the polish only by number, and keep a record of what she or her assistants applied in the past. “What’s the matter with Ninety-one?” Lyn asked, showing me a bottle of scarlet-lady vermilion I must have picked out a year before.
When I gave myself a full-frontal look in the mirror all I saw was gray eyes, pulled-back hair, ears pierced—no earrings. Mom had asked if I had bad dreams, and I told her I couldn’t remember any.
We settled on Eighty-eight—perhaps the symmetry of the number had an appeal for me. Lyn put a paper mask over her nose and mouth before she painted on the caramel-rose polish. The mask was a new development since I had visited her. Maybe the fumes were wearing out Lyn’s nervous system, years of inhaling ketones giving her headaches or incipient kidney trouble. She was older than she looked, calling out in Vietnamese as children my age thumped up the stairs to the apartment above.
As she joked with the pedicure customer, expressing mock dismay at the televised crisis, Lyn stretched her arms and rotated her right wrist. The repetition was causing her some pain, using those small muscles every day, holding her arms at the same angle, pinching a nerve. I could visualize the tiny tunnels in the radius and the ulna, the paths the nerves take. I sat with my fingers in the nail dryers, twin toasters that blew hot air.
I ran through the possible scripts, what it was going to be like to meet Cindy. I know from old movies that one is supposed to say, “How do you do,” fluting the words prettily, and offering a hand. But no one does that. We all say “good to meet you,” or “hi.” I wanted to try something new with Cindy.
I rarely fuss over what to wear and always end up sitting in the car while Mom flounces back to change earrings. I had given up on wearing jewelry, so I couldn’t help feeling a kind-hearted superiority toward Mom in this regard. Now Mom was patient with me while I spread skirts and blouses all over the bed, trying to find what would match the angora beret I had bought at Nordstrom to cover the incision in my scalp.
“The trouble is, nothing really goes with this baby-blue hat,” I said at last. “Why did I get angora?”
“Mmm.” Meaning: Good question. But we coexist by avoiding even modestly wise-ass remarks, whenever possible, so she added, “Because it’s soft and it won’t itch. Here.”
She stepped to the bed, selected a full-length skirt, one I wore to see Carmen a few months before. A white blouse, of pioneer severity, something you would see in a daguerreotype of the frontier days, a blouse I liked a lot but kept at one end of my closet. Sometimes I do this with favorite things, save them so they won’t wear out or get one of those malignant tiny stains, little Bic scribbles and leaks that no chemical on earth will make vanish. She marched me into her bedroom, toe-to-toe with her full-length mirror.
Dad lives in Broadway Terrace, three blocks from where the fire stopped consuming houses and human lives several years before. I could ride my bike over, but Miss P discouraged cycling and said it stressed the wrong muscles. So I usually jogged or power-walked, which Miss P said was fine for the cardiovascular package.
When Miss P sees you at a distance she doesn’t call, “Hello there,” or “Good morning.” She says, “Jog it,” meaning: What do you think you’re doing, approaching her at a mere walk? When I’m not backstroking laps I’m running up and down the stairs at the academy.
This evening, though, I didn’t want to arrive all sweaty, especially in my nice clothes, which were a little tight around the waist anyway. Besides, I still had to get my final okay from Dr. Breen and had to go through another examination before I could resume my full workout schedule.
Mom drove me without having to be asked. She spent a while in her room, in a side cubicle we called “the vanity,” adjusting the Shiseido natural-rose foundation she applies so artfully, and did a good job, retouching herself and brushing out her hair. She dropped me off at my dad’s house early that evening, the shadows of the dwarf bamboo fluttering out across the drought-resistant landscape, buffalo grass and sage, carefully raked pea gravel.
I heard the engine of Mom’s Volvo thrumming at the curb as I took the stepping stones toward the door, careful not to leave a footprint in the gravel. It was courtesy, of course, waiting to make sure my hosts were receiving me, but I could feel Mom’s curiosity, too, and all the other emotions she felt sitting there with the car in neutral.
I usually opened the door with my own key, danced right in, and headed for the kitchen and a tall glass of ice water. But this time I pressed the white doorbell button and heard the baritone one-two bells, muted and solemn. And when nothing happened, I hesitated to ring them again, wondering if I had the wrong night. Because Dad is always quick to answer a telephone, hating answering machines, always jumping up in response to a knock at the door, talking all the while, hating to do only one thing at a time.
I knew it wasn’t him, that light step, and when she opened the door my greetings were out before I could remember what I wanted to say. Instead I said, “Hi, I’m Bonnie,” and I shook her hand like a lumberjack.
“He called to say he’s running late,” said Cindy. She added, gesturing to her head. “I like your tam.”
A muted sound, the Volvo pulled away from the curb.
I considered whether to debate if it was a tam-o’-shanter or a beret, but instead all I said was thank you. “Running late” was a family cliché, a phrase I recognized from the dying days of my parents’ marriage, but I knew something important must have kept him at the office, and that a client must have an emergency situation that needed his attention. Dad was always having to file a response to a request for summary judgment or prep an expert witness.
Still, I was disappointed, and I felt underprepared, someone called upon to give a speech to a strange audience. I followed Cindy into the kitchen when she asked me, would I like anything. She must have expected me to sit in the living room, admiring the coffee-table books I had never seen before, Chinese Jade for the Collector, Cloissonné Masterpieces. I followed her right in and accepted a glass of pineapple juice with three big cubes of ice.
“I really like this house,” she said. A car approached in the street, and we both paused to listen. The distant engine murmur traveled on up the neighborhood.
Maybe she was telling me that she hadn’t really overnighted here very often. Maybe she was complimenting me, assuming that I had helped my dad pick out the English fox-hunter prints and the books on the glories of the quarter horse. For someone just back from Hawaii, she didn’t have much of a tan.
She had been Dad’s secretary for about a year and a half, but when I called my dad I almost always spoke to one of the receptionists, a series of temps. I had only visited my Dad’s new office a couple of times, and admired its view of Lake Merritt and the other neighboring office buildings. Ever since my dad and his law partner, Adam David, had split up a couple of years ago, my dad’s schedule had been too frenzied for anyone but him to keep track of. So far, he was only ten minutes late.
“I’m not going to do anything to the landscaping,” Cindy was saying, perhaps on the theory that if my mom liked root systems and broad-leafs, then it was only natural that I did, too. I felt a little sorry for her suddenly. She was a woman just a little older than my sister Georgia, stuck with a stepdaughter who kept giving her a thousand-yard stare.
“I always thought Dad overdid it with
bamboo,” I said.
She kept peeling the Saran wrap off the rosemary chicken, nudging it with a fork to make sure it was still there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sometimes Cindy would glance up, a morsel of chicken breast poised on her fork, mistaking yet another passing car for Dad’s BMW. But unless the car sounded a lot like Dad’s I was rarely deceived. As the evening went on and Dad called again, we settled into stories of Cindy’s childhood. She had grown up in Nevada, Iowa—pronounced with a long a: Ne-vay-da. “They make everything out of soy, ink and food, so my dad raised that, but what he loved was livestock.”
When I told Cindy her books about collectibles were an improvement over Dad’s usual reading matter, the Kentucky Derby and bare-fisted boxing, Cindy said that she was going to invest in transportable assets. This was the one phrase she used that made me stop and look sideways at her as I sipped my pineapple juice, wondering if this was the sort of thing you said if you were raised around abandoned silos. Her fingernails were the same color as mine, but longer.
Dad called yet again, and Cindy said things were great, do what you have to do. I could feel the conversation filling with things she didn’t want to mention, even when she took the portable phone into the den, where Dad kept the largely unread, leather-bound volumes he had inherited from his grandfather, Emerson and Dickens and geographies of a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
Finally, at the end of the third call, Cindy waved me into the den and I stood staring at the spine of Byron’s collected poems while Dad said he was sorry he had made such a mess of the evening, he would make it up to me. He was helping Mrs. Jovanovich.
Cindy drove me home after we had picked at our pine-nut tarts, fresh baked that day at Angelino’s in Montclair. As she dropped me off at my mom’s house, Cindy thanked me for coming over, as if I had done her a big personal favor. I couldn’t bring myself to say you’re welcome, staring into the silhouette of her head, her hair the kind that doesn’t take much of a curl, a lank wave down to each shoulder. I told her I wanted to hear more about tornadoes.
Mrs. Jovanovich was a white-haired woman who walked with two silvery canes. Her family had owned land near Pebble Beach, and her husband had been a television producer. Now her only daughter lived in England, and Dad shepherded her estate through insurance payments, lease agreements, even helping her buy a new hearing aid when an improved model was advertised. This was typical of the kind of support Dad gave his clients, and it was clear to me that Mrs. Jovanovich must have suffered some heart flutter or the legal equivalent of a fainting spell that kept him on the phone to London or to a doctor.
But when Mom asked how did it go, looking up from a mess of paperwork, I didn’t know what to tell her. She meant: Tell me you father didn’t marry a cliché blonde, a brainless flirt. But I didn’t want to go into detail and have to tell her that Dad had never shown up.
“She knows all about hogs,” I said.
“No kidding,” said Mom, with greater interest than I expected.
“You don’t want to live downwind,” I said. “If you raise too many pigs per acre it’s bad for the water table. The manure soaks into the ground.”
“Harvey must love hearing about that every night,” she said. Everyone called my Dad by his entire first name, never Harv.
“Hogs ate a boy’s fingers off,” I said, since the subject seemed to intrigue Mom. “He passed out from the fumes, and the animals thought he was fodder,” using Cindy’s exact words.
The drive from Oakland to Sacramento takes a couple of hours, some one hundred miles through metropolitan fringe, dairy-cow hills, and at last the flat pasture land that used to be an inland sea, according to Rowan. In prehistoric time, he means, although sometimes during winter a levee breaks and again the valley turns into ocean.
Denise suffers from hay fever, and she is almost superstitious about taking antihistamines before a meet, worried they might make her pee test come out false-positive. I tell her this is unlikely in the extreme, but athletes trust suffering.
Some schools rent little yellow school busses, or own cute little vans with REDWOOD PREPARATORY or CARMEL HIGH SCHOOL lettered on the door panel. The academy rents air-conditioned Peerless Stage busses, the same conveyances gamblers charter for the long trip to Reno. The bus was not half full, even with the chaperones, the volunteer supervisors, wives of dentists, and professors on sabbatical. The seats have head cushions, and the armrests have obsolete ashtrays, little metal doors you can flip open and see the old freckles of ash even professional maintenance cannot completely remove. The seats cushions are green velour, very comfy.
Denise and I are among the leading lights of the swim and dive team, and we are also the youngest members, so the other athletes leave us alone. There is no chill involved, it’s all amiable. But Denise and I often lunch together, or swing into the back seat of a bus, and they give us a nod or a wave and let us be. Miss P came to the rear of the bus, hand to hand along the seat backs, asking if Denise was okay.
“Snot,” said Denise, sounding like someone talking from inside a pillow. “My head is full of it.”
Miss P shook her head sympathetically and hunched to get a better view of the dry, empty fields. “Adrenaline will clear it,” said Miss P, and this was true. A sudden shock, or anticipating the gaze of five thousand strangers, will clear your sinuses before you even suit up.
“My head feels like it’s this big,” said Denise almost peacefully.
“I’m allergic to acacia,” said Miss P, and I could see that the coach needed to keep her mind occupied, too.
I wasn’t scheduled to dive. I had put on a show of disappointment, looking around at things with a hard, frustrated glare, but as I sat there watching the dried-up scenery go by, I was relieved.
I didn’t know how I would feel, watching my friends compete. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to look without my ears ringing, the pain coming back.
Miss P had been legendary as a coach who made her athletes run fifteen laps if someone giggled during roll call. But by the time I got to the academy Miss P had lost weight, dwindling from the hardy, tanned brunette who took the top members of the academy swim team to three bronzes in the Goodwill Games a few years ago.
She was still a good coach—a better coach now, in a way, because a touch of frailty made her athletes patient with her if she forgot her whistle or had to sit down during touch-and-go, the relay laps we swim by the hour. She had stayed with me while we watched the videotaped accident backward and forward, until I could see what happened with my eyes closed, my head kissing the edge of the platform.
Sacramento is a sprawling, flat town, with trees blue in the distance, mirage shivering the streets. One step out of the bus and I wanted to climb right back in. Denise made an exaggerated stagger, like someone who’s been shot, but it was no joke. The weather report had said it would hit one hundred and five Fahrenheit, and it felt way hotter than that all the way across the asphalt parking lot.
Parking attendants with EVENT STAFF on their backs in yellow letters squinted around at things, talking into handheld radios, probably to make sure their colleagues had not succumbed to heat stroke. The academy men trailed off with a male assistant, Mr. Browning, the guy who shot the videos, and the women angled into our own facility, but you could see when we split up how few we were.
Our team had a corner of the locker room, a roomy place used by professional teams hardly anyone in Oakland knows anything about, a football league with teams in cities like Salt Lake City and Barcelona, and soccer teams who play in front of nine loyal fans. But marginal pro teams still have plush facilities, and we enjoyed the feel of carpeting under our toes, and lockers big enough to accommodate half a wardrobe.
Swimmers tried on their goggles, took them off, untangled the straps, tugged them on again. Denise climbed into her black swimsuit and put on the red-and-white warm-up togs Miss P insists on, telling us we have to wear our colors whenever we represent the academy.
I wore
exactly what Denise was wearing, and what they all wore. I kept my eyes up, looking people in the eye, zipped all the way to my chin even in the Martian-surface heat we had to single-file our way through. I didn’t want to look in the direction of the platform. I wondered if it was a mistake to be there at all.
I forced myself to watch the swimmers in their preliminary heats, my ears ringing. I sat on the bench while Denise did her dive, screwing up every time, especially on her entry. A front dive is a plain dive, but if your entry is good—the rip you make entering the water—the judges love it. If it looks like nothing has happened, it goes well. One minute the diver is erect on the tower, and the next she’s gone, hardly a ripple.
In Denise’s case there was a ripple. On all three dives. A splash, water all over the place. And each time you could see what a mistake it was. You could see it in Denise’s eyes each time she came out of the pool. Miss P looked at me and shook her head in apology to me, to the team. But I stood up and clapped my hands, and each time I told Denise how well she had done.
CHAPTER NINE
Swimming arenas are a wash of noise, reverberating whistles, shouted encouragement. Some divers wear earplugs to escape the surreal murmur of the crowd. Even a huge place fills with the smell of the lifeless water.
I kept busy on the bench, handing out the blue Speedo WaterShed towels we use instead of terry cloth, but I hated meeting Miss P’s eyes. The wound in my scalp tingled, itched. The Watershed towels are rubbery and specially treated—one wipe and you’re dry. We still use regular cloth towels as a hood—to sit under if you don’t want people to see your face.
Charlotte Witt, an academy senior with seasons of competitive experience, led the field after the preliminary round, doing a front dive layout with a difficulty rating of only 1.2, a springboard dive. Charlotte was a very good diver, but this late in her high school career she was developing too much of a figure and too much of a concentration problem.
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