Pacific Avenue

by Watson, Anne L.

  She did filing all morning. When lunchtime came, I drove us. She didn’t have a car.

  “Where do you live?” I asked as I pulled out of the lot, dodging one of the mixer trucks. I was hoping her place wasn’t too far away. Buses in L.A. were unreliable. I didn’t want to get stuck with someone who was late every day.

  “Down the street.”

  “On Pacific Avenue?”

  “Pacific and Eighth. I just moved in. I found an apartment above The Mystic Eye.”

  That floored me. Pacific Avenue was not a good neighborhood, especially for a little white girl. Now, I knew the woman who owned The Mystic Eye. I wasn’t a customer—no way I’d ever fall for her hoodoo. But I knew her well enough to speak to. Her real name was Marilu Collins, but she called herself Madame Sofia. “Knows all, sees all, tells all.” Well, the “tells all” part was true.

  But Pacific Avenue—I glanced sideways at Kathy. I was sure she didn’t know what she was getting into. For such a small place, San Pedro definitely had its neighborhoods, and she’d picked the tough one.

  The street wasn’t bad on the north end, the industrial section where Giannini’s was. South of us were thrift shops and discount, shabby but safe. At Pacific and Sixth, my husband and some other men had put together a little automotive mall. The next few blocks were probably not too bad—in the daytime, anyway.

  But beyond there, the neighborhood got rough. Rough and smutty, and not all the girls standing on corners were waiting for the bus. Winos hung around outside the bars and spare-changed everyone who walked by. As if anybody would be stupid enough to give them a cent.

  On the south, Pacific Avenue dead-ended at the ocean—no beach, only a chain-link fence with reflectors and warning signs. No one but bums and gangs went past that fence. A long time ago, that end of the street was a nice neighborhood, but then there was a landslide. Most of the homes got pulled back and moved to other lots, but the paving and the building footings stayed, broken and scattered down a steep slope. They called it the Sunken City.

  Kathy didn’t look like the kind of girl who belonged on Pacific Avenue at all.

  When we got to the coffee shop, the waiter gave us a table at the back. Kathy ordered the cheapest item on the menu, a cheese sandwich. I didn’t know if she was in the habit of eating cheap, or if she was being considerate because I was treating. I ordered a burger and a big side of fries for us to split. She was too thin. And she was nearly the same age as my daughter.

  As we ate lunch, I tried to find out a little more about her. “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Evanston, Illinois.”

  This caught my attention—she sure sounded like a southerner to me. A lot like my mother’s family. No Illinois there at all.

  “But you have a southern accent?”

  “My parents are from the South.”

  I played along. “What took them to Illinois?”

  “My dad teaches at Northwestern University.”

  I bought the “university” part, at least. It made sense she was a professor’s kid. Shy, kind of correct, not sure of herself. Teacher, yes. Evanston, no. Not my business, I thought. But I wondered why she’d bother lying to me.

  “What brought you to California?”

  “The climate, I guess. I’d always heard about it.”

  She ate a piece of pie I’d ordered for her and gazed out the window. If weather was what she’d come for, she was getting her money’s worth. Even in December, it was about seventy-five degrees and the sky was almost the color of a bachelor button. Matched her eyes. She would have been a pretty little thing if she’d fixed herself up some.

  When we got back to the office, I set her to copying a big stack of contracts. While she was busy in the copy room, I pulled her employment application, trying to see where she was from. But she’d put Marilu Collins as who to notify in case of emergency, and the education and experience sections weren’t filled out. She’d written “Attached” across the spaces where those things were supposed to be, but nothing was attached. I went into George’s office and searched through the papers on his desk. All I found there was specifications for concrete.

  As far as our records were concerned, Kathy Woodbridge had no past at all.

  ~ 3 ~

  December 1974

  San Pedro

  Kathy

  I liked being alone in the building at Eighth and Pacific after the shop closed. When I lived with Richard, there were always people around us, and unless they were friends of ours, I had to worry about what they might do.

  When we first moved to New Orleans, we lived in a rooming house, a sagging wood building at the far end of Bourbon Street. It was a dump, but we were lucky to have it. The first two places we’d tried, the landlords said they’d just accepted someone else. We were sure they were lying, but what could we do? I’d gone alone to apply for this room, and the manager had rented it to me. But now he’d seen Richard, and we were afraid he’d kick us out on the smallest pretext.

  One night we got home so late, we started tiptoeing when we were two houses away. Shushing each other, bumping through the unlit hallway like clumsy burglars, we crept upstairs to our room. Even after the door was shut behind us, we tried to be quiet. We didn’t dare turn on the lamp—the manager might see light coming through the transom and get mad about it.

  Richard was silent, invisible in the dark. I guessed where he must be and reached out for him, but my guess was wrong—my hands plunged into empty air. For a moment, I felt a familiar stab of aloneness. Then his hands grasped mine, and spread them open, and he kissed my palms, brushing them with his lips. My fingers read his face like a love letter in braille—the downturned eyelids, the short eyelashes with their tight sudden curl, the softness of his mouth. We made love stealthily, the way you do in your parents’ house. Because somehow, everyone was our parents.

  Everyone and no one. I’d lost my parents because of Richard. When I told them I was moving to New Orleans with him, I knew how Mom would act. But Dad surprised me.

  “You’re making a mistake, honey,” he said. “Please don’t do this. It can’t possibly work out.”

  “Baton Rouge is nothing but rednecks,” I said. “Teenage kids who sound like George Wallace, almost like Adolf Hitler, if you really want to know. It’ll never change. New Orleans is different. We can live there—no one will mind.”

  “Maybe someday,” he’d said, “but not now. Not even in New Orleans. No one should give a damn what color Richard is. But they will.”

  “‘A person’s skin is an eighth-inch thick, and we’re all the same underneath it,’” I reminded him. That’s what he’d always told us when we were kids, when everyone was fighting about where people could go, or sit, or which drinking fountain they were allowed to use.

  “That eighth inch is going to be your whole life.” He didn’t sound as sure of himself as he had when he’d said everyone was the same.

  “Someone has to change it.”

  “You want to be first?”

  “You mean, ‘Not my daughter.’”

  “I’m not even sure the two of you can love each other in the middle of all this.”

  “You know all about not being able to love.” I slammed the door as I left.

  That was the end of one conversation. But it wasn’t when I lost him, and it wasn’t why.

  Once I got to San Pedro, the past closed behind me like water behind a swimmer. I wasn’t sure there was a future, but if there was, it had a name: five years. Richard’s sentence.

  It was my sentence, too. A different kind of “someday, but not now.” This time, I didn’t have a choice.

  I did my best. I didn’t feel like getting up most mornings, but I did. Got up and went to work at Giannini Concrete. After a few days, I didn’t even hear the stutter and whine of the dim fluorescent lights, or the rumble of the mixer trucks in the yard. Didn’t notice the dingy gray concrete everywhere. I belonged there. I was dim and dingy too.

  Not like
Lacey, Mr. Giannini’s secretary. Lacey Greer was anything but drab. She even laughed about the building. “Here we are in a concrete box—concrete walls, concrete floor, concrete ceiling. You’d think we’d have better sense than to keep making more.”

  She could laugh. The dreary room only made her stand out more. Madame Sofia was fake exotic, but Lacey was the real thing. She looked like she was even trying to tone it down, in her tailored suits like a lawyer’s secretary and her hair pulled back in a tight chignon. But there was no way she could be anything but exotic. She was nearly six feet tall, for one thing. With her light-brown skin, high cheekbones, hooked nose, and big eyes, she might have been Puerto Rican, or maybe Indian. I couldn’t guess.

  The second week I worked at Giannini’s, a man came in and talked to Lacey in a foreign language.

  “I don’t speak Spanish, I’m sorry,” she said.

  He stomped out, yelling, “You damn snob, won’t even talk to your own people!”

  She shrugged. “Happens all the time. A lot of people mistake me for Hispanic.”

  “What are you, then?” I felt rude and nosy, blurting it out, but I wanted to know.

  She ticked it off on her fingers. “Martiniquean, Greek, and Cherokee.”

  “How did they ever get together?”

  “My father’s family is from all over the South, Tennessee originally. That’s where the Cherokees come from.”

  “What about the others?” I wasn’t sure what a Martiniquean was.

  “Well, there’s more kinds of people in the Deep South than you might think. New Orleans is one of the biggest ports in the world—lots of people from foreign countries settle there. I grew up on the Gulf Coast. Moved to California when I was about your age. You ever been to the South? You must have, if your parents are from there. Ever been to New Orleans?”

  I hadn’t counted on having to fool another southerner. I played dumb.

  “No, my family’s all in Illinois. What’s New Orleans like? I want to go to Mardi Gras someday,” I said.

  Lacey snorted. “Mardi Gras. Willis—that’s my husband—he sometimes drags me down there for Carnival. He loves it. I see all those poor tourists in their resort clothes, shivering like Jell-O. They buy coats after they get there. Scarves. Umbrellas. The stores double their prices—they make a fortune.”

  “I want to see the parades.”

  “Beer bottles up to your ankles, barf in the gutters, and pickpockets on every corner. Stay home, girl.”

  She knows her way around New Orleans, all right. Hope she doesn’t keep up with the newspapers from there. “Oh, I think it would be fun,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go someday.” I turned back to my typewriter.

  New Orleans. Pale cobblestones and painted doorways. The smell of the Quarter: roasting coffee, bus fumes, and river clay. The reek of the Jax Brewery, like an old drunk’s breath. Sitting on iron chairs under the awning of the Café Du Monde, trying to talk to Richard. Loud babble all around, and the traffic on Chartres Street a few feet away.

  Richard had powdered sugar on his chin. He stared at me, making me wonder if I had some on mine, too. “You don’t have to keep it,” he said.

  I refused to listen. I thought I could make him change his mind. I bit into a beignet, greasy sugar wrapped around thin air. Sweet and hollow.

  I’d felt sick then, and I felt sick now. Everything is my fault because I didn’t know what to do that day, because I never know what to do. I want that afternoon back. Maybe if I had another try, I’d get it right.

  “You okay?” asked Lacey.

  “Yes,” I said. I’ll never be okay till I forget Jamie. Which is never.

  Jamie. She isn’t eleven months and five days old anymore. Maybe she isn’t any age at all. Or she may be growing like the rest of us, in some other life I can’t see yet. Like the way she grew inside me—it was invisible, but it was real. Somewhere now, she’s growing into a little girl. Somewhere, we’re looking forward to the future.

  My imaginary future, the one that matches the imaginary past where I did things right.

  “We gotta finish these meeting reports,” said Lacey. That’s what we did for the rest of the morning.

  Roll another sheet into the typewriter. Get it nice and straight. Don’t think about Richard in his jeans and the faded plaid shirt he wore that last day at the zoo. Richard, with Jamie straddled on his hip.

  He might come back someday, come up the dark red stairs to my apartment. But if he ever does, there won’t be any Jamie with him. Jamie’s gone.

  ~ 4 ~

  December 1974

  San Pedro

  Lacey

  Why didn’t I go to Mr. Giannini, or at least to George, and ask where Kathy’s résumé was? Why did I just file her papers as if nothing was wrong? I turned it over in my mind a lot for the next few days. What was the point of stealing a résumé? What was the point of lying about where she came from?

  I pictured it again, the glimpse I’d had, Kathy palming those papers like a magician—or a shoplifter. That worried me a lot. Lord knows we didn’t have much cash lying around, but we handled checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If Mr. Giannini found out Kathy had swiped her résumé back, he’d let her go, no hesitation.

  He’d probably forgotten he’d told me to follow up on her references—but if a big check went missing along with our new assistant, he’d remember in a hurry. If I had the brains God gave a goose, I’d tell Mr. Giannini right away that George had hired Kathy on the spot, and that I hadn’t been able to call her references because they’d disappeared.

  On the other hand, Kathy was just a kid. What would she know about the kind of money in heavy construction? Probably she was running away from a bad marriage or a mean stepfather. I felt sorry for her, and I’d feel terrible if she lost her job because of something I said.

  I could try to find out what her problem was. Most likely, it was only a family misunderstanding, something like that. I might get Kathy to confide in me. If that didn’t work, there was always Marilu Collins. She didn’t have a lot of sense, but she must have gotten some background information before she rented to Kathy. The more I thought that idea over, the more I liked it.

  Of course, there were about a dozen ways the whole thing could blow up in my face. I was starting to wonder if I was getting a little nutty, the way my husband had been hinting ever since our daughter moved out. But Willis was imagining things—and anyway, it wasn’t nutty to help a kid. Anyone would do it.

  So, I started trying to get Kathy to open up. I baked cookies and brought them in, and I told her little things about Willis and Angela. She ate the cookies and she listened politely enough to the stories, but she didn’t tell me anything about herself. Of course, that made me wonder even more.

  It was easy to see she was unhappy. She came in red-eyed a few mornings, and I heard her crying in the restroom once. When I asked her if anything was wrong, she said no. I shut right up. Better not scare her off the way I had Angela, asking questions and giving advice.

  But my first impression that Kathy was a good kid held up, too. She was obviously well brought up. Not society or anything, but she was always polite. I asked her right off to call me Lacey instead of Mrs. Greer, but I appreciated her showing me respect. She was funny when she asked about how dingy the office was, way too tactful to come straight out with it.

  “Did the company just move here?” she asked, looking around.

  I knew what she meant. We didn’t have anything extra, no carpet or good furniture. But most of the people who walked in were likely to have concrete on their boots, so there was no way to fancy the place up. It was an industrial building with mixer trucks parked in back and the office stuck in like an afterthought.

  “No, we’ve been here awhile. Mr. Giannini built this building five or six years ago.”

  “You’ve worked here six years?”

  “Nearly eight—since my daughter Angela was in high school. She’s starting graduate school this year.”


  Kathy looked astonished. Was she surprised that a black woman’s daughter would go to college?

  “I thought . . . .”

  I waited. She stuttered, looking around like a cornered cat. Finally she said, “I thought you were about thirty.”

  “No, I’m in my forties.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked out the window, like something interesting had turned up out there all of a sudden. Her mouth was trembling—she was close to tears. This did not make sense.

  “Don’t be sorry. Nothing wrong with looking thirty. I wish I did!” I kept my tone light and pretended I didn’t notice anything was the matter.

  I could see why she might think she put her foot in her mouth. If I were white, it would be a compliment for her to think I was younger. Not being able to guess my age would be different—too much like what the rednecks used to say: “They all look alike.” A nice girl like her would have been embarrassed to say anything that sounded like that. But I couldn’t figure out why she would be so upset.

  To change the subject, I gave her a whole bunch of stuff to type. I spread papers all over my desk and faked being busy. She turned to her typewriter and got started.

  I remembered to rustle my papers once in a while as if I was working. But I didn’t see them. My mind kept picking at me about who she was and what was going on, the way you pick at a ragged cuticle till it looks like hell.

  ~ 5 ~

  December 1974

  San Pedro

  Kathy

  The entry hall had two black metal mailboxes with holes cut out in front to show when a letter was inside. White showed through mine. I opened the box.

  Two letters. One envelope was addressed in my sister’s writing. The other was in Richard’s.

  I plodded up the stairs, feeling like the five minutes before a math test. When I got to my door, I dropped the key twice before I got in. I stood in the living room and tore Richard’s envelope open. Might as well get it over with.