Not necessarily, Wendy said. I think people would understand.
Yeah, right. You just think that because you grew up in Neverland. Let me tell you something. When I was three years old, my mom’s downstairs neighbor reported her to CPS, and the next thing you knew, they were putting my brother and me in a foster home. I got to go back home six months later, but my brother never did. Somebody told me one time he was living in a juvenile center in Fresno, but I sure never saw him again.
But you have to do something, Wendy said. You can’t keep sitting around all day in this apartment listening to Walter Charles cry. It’s bound to happen again, and next time could be worse. Babies are really delicate. Especially their heads.
There’s this kind of breathing you could try, Wendy told her. You close your eyes and think of the most peaceful place you can imagine and breathe very deeply, and then you hold it in a long time before letting it out. Never mind if he’s crying while you’re doing it. He’d do better lying in his crib crying than having you pick him up and start shaking him.
I’m trying to think of one peaceful place, Violet said. The hot tub at the Ramada Inn on 1-5 maybe. My boyfriend and me sneaked in there one time.
My dad was always driving us out to the country, to places like New Jersey and Connecticut, Wendy said. He had this thing about picking fruit. Apples, blueberries, strawberries, grapes. Then we’d take it all home and make jam.
I never knew you could make jam yourself, Violet said.
We had a whole shelf of jars in our pantry, Wendy told her. My mom used to say if she lived to be a hundred, we’d never get through all that jam.
Wendy stopped at the bookstore on the way home.
Got a bunch more books in this morning, Alan said. If you feel like another shelving job.
I don’t have a lot of time today, Wendy said. I was actually thinking I’d look for a book.
You finished The Member of the Wedding, eh? he said. Talk about a heartbreaker.
I haven’t quite gotten to the end yet, she said. But I need this other kind of book. She found her way to the child-care section. There was a book called What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and a book by Dr. Spock. There was the book Violet had, with a picture of some doctor in a suit on the cover. A bunch of babies were sitting around him on the floor, and one particularly cute and pudgy baby sat on his lap. From the looks of them, their mothers weren’t having problems slapping them or putting water in their formula when they ran low on food stamps. The mothers who had those kind of problems didn’t have money to buy that many books probably.
I was wondering if you had anything about child abuse? Wendy asked. It’s for a friend of mine.
He didn’t speak for a moment.
Child abuse, huh? he said. I don’t think I have anything like that in stock.
I’m doing a research paper, she told him. For my home schooling.
There are people who help kids out when they have that type of problem, he told her. He was talking slower than usual, and his voice sounded low and serious. I could find you a number to call.
It’s not me, she said. This is just for my paper.
I thought you said it was for a friend.
That, too, she told him. It’s a paper I’m writing with a friend.
Let’s see what we can find, he told her.
Great, she said.
One more thing, Kitty. Anytime at all, you know. You could come talk to me.
Garrett’s truck was just pulling in the driveway when she got back. Carolyn invited us for dinner, he said. She’s made vegetarian lasagna or some damn thing.
No rush, he told her.
It was in the shower that she noticed her other breast was growing. They weren’t quite evened out yet, but close. She was taller, too, she realized, and she had definitely thinned down. Her hair reached her shoulders now, long enough that she could pull it back.
If her mother could see her now, she’d be surprised. I told you how nicely you’d fill out.
Wendy imagined what she might look like ten years from now, or twenty.
Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she’d be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people—someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet—who had known her longer than her mother ever did. The day would come when Louie would not even remember anymore the sound of their mother’s voice.
Our mother had this thing she did where she pretended you were Fred Astaire and she was Ginger Rogers and she got you this little top hat, Wendy would tell him. She used to make you a man out of pieces of pickle, stuck together with toothpicks, for your TV-watching snack. Sometimes, on the way out the door, she’d scoop up a handful of glitter that she kept there and toss it in the air, over our heads, so all day when we walked around places, we sparkled.
Tell me another story, he’d say.
She stepped out of the shower and dried herself off. Put on her too-loose jeans and a T-shirt, studying herself one more time in the mirror first. Symmetrical, almost.
You know what, Slim? Garrett said when she came out of her room. I never used to think so before, but you’re starting to look like your mother.
They were celebrating a new job Carolyn had gotten. Some company was putting up an office building outside Sacramento, and they wanted a low-maintenance cactus garden. They’d hired Carolyn.
So now you’ve got to part with some of your precious darlings, Garrett said. Think you can handle it?
That was a problem all right. There were cacti in her collection—her sea urchin cactus, that she’d gotten at a show in Arizona; the Seven Stars one of her sisters had brought her; the Scarlet Ball she’d dug up on a camping trip to Death Valley with Garrett—that were almost like children to her, she said.
And then once people see the garden you’ve got going, you’re going to start getting more jobs like that, said Garrett. Before you know it, there’s going to be a damn traffic jam out in front of your place, people wanting to buy cactus plants off you, and you’ll be sitting there bawling your head off, watching them go. Nip the problem in the bud’s what I say. Tell them right now at the get-go you’ve changed your mind. They’re better off with petunias and marigolds.
What I might just do is make a trip out to that farm up in Chico tomorrow and buy a bunch of new stuff, she said.
Sounds like a plan, said Garrett, but I’ve got to stay home and work on the truck.
You can come along if you’re interested, Wendy, Carolyn said.
They took the backseat out of Carolyn’s old Valiant station wagon to make more room for the plants. Wait till you see this place, said Carolyn. The way some women get when they walk in a shoe store, that’s how I am when I’m at Harvey’s Cactus World. She threw a couple of shovels in the back in case there were any specimens they’d need to dig up, and two desert garden reference books with pictures of arrangements she particularly liked.
If you want to bring headphones, I won’t feel offended, Carolyn told Wendy when she picked her up. It’s not like I expect you to make conversation the whole way. I’m just happy for the company on the drive.
Wendy had brought her Walkman and a couple of CD’s—Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong together, and Sade, Lover’s Rock. She had her book with her, too, in case she got tired of looking at the cactus plants.
They rode in silence for a long time, past flatland and hills. They passed a place where there had been a bad fire a few years before, Carolyn told her—a stretch of five miles or more covered with the black stubs of trees. They could see a little faint sign of green starting to push through the ash.
Look at that, Carolyn said. It’s finally coming back to life.
They passed a valley with row after row of windmills, all turning at different speeds, depending on the angle the breeze hit them. Those are beautiful, Wendy said. Like an artwork.
Garrett always says the same thing, Carolyn told her.
&
nbsp; There are art galleries in New York City where they show things like pictures of this bridge some guy wrapped in fabric, Wendy said. He spends thousands of dollars just to get pictures of the wrapped-up building, and then after a few weeks, they unwrap it. One time, this rich woman paid Josh a bunch of money to stand next to this garbage dump with his bass playing this piece of music she’d written, while a lot of her friends sat around listening. Afterward, there was wine and sushi.
I think Garrett misses that kind of stuff sometimes, Carolyn said. There’re hardly any artists out here. Not even bad ones. He really closed out that part of his life when he came out here.
He didn’t sell his paintings much when we lived in New York, Wendy said. It probably got pretty frustrating for him. That was one of the things my parents used to argue about.
I can understand where your mother was coming from, she said. If I know Garrett, he’d have been wanting to go out with his friends all the time or off on some camping trip, leaving her home to take care of things.
She was right. You probably didn’t even need to be a palm reader.
The reason it works for us, Carolyn said, is because I don’t expect too much of him. That’s all well and good for me. We don’t have kids. All I’ve got is a bunch of cactus plants. It would be different if you had a kid with a person like that.
Wendy fingered her Walkman. She would have put the headphones on, but she got the feeling Carolyn wasn’t done talking.
I did have a kid one time, she said. It’s not something I talk about much, but your father knows.
A boy or a girl? Wendy asked her. She wanted to start with an easy question.
Boy, Carolyn said. I was eighteen at the time, living on my own in Modesto. Guy I was with at the time would make Garrett look like Ward Cleaver.
Wendy didn’t know who that was, but she figured she should, so she didn’t say anything.
I gave him up for adoption, Carolyn said. He’d be twenty-five years old now. Is, I just don’t know where.
Wendy thought about Violet. The rich couple in San Francisco wanting to know her IQ score. The Led Zeppelin song. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” Violet saying, He’s the one thing I ever had.
Did you ever regret it?
Oh, plenty of times. Not giving him up so much. But being in the position where I didn’t have much choice.
I have a friend like that, Wendy said. She was going to give her baby up, but she decided to keep him.
I wish her luck. Some people can manage it. I’m glad I was at least smart enough to recognize I couldn’t.
Maybe someday he’ll come back to you. Some people who are adopted track down their birth mother when they get older.
Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, she said. It would be one great day if he did. But I don’t kid myself. I’m not his mother anymore. I was for nine months and a day, but that’s all. His mother’s the one who raised him. Best I could be is someone like a caring friend who might happen to look a little like him. If he’s unlucky.
Wendy wanted to ask more. Why Carolyn never had any other kids—later, when she might have been ready for it. Garrett had said she had some kind of problem where she couldn’t, but Wendy wondered if that was really it. Or maybe Carolyn had been like her mother back before she met Josh, saying how it probably just wasn’t in the cards.
The thing about cacti, Carolyn had told her. They’re tough little devils. They live on dirt mostly. It’s harder than hell to kill a cactus. But just because they’ve got all these spines and they aren’t likely to keel over and die doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate a little babying and know-how. They’re tough, but they’ve got needs, just like every other living thing. You have to pay attention.
An hour must have passed where they had said nothing. They were still on the highway. It was getting very hot. High desert.
Later I got to realizing I probably would have made a decent mother for someone after all, Carolyn said. It’s all a matter of timing. When the opportunity comes along, and there’s this person you really should be loving and taking good care of, you might not know how. Then all of a sudden, you’re ready. Only they’re gone.
Wendy’s mother used to say it was a risky business talking to any woman who didn’t have children about why. Even Kate, her best friend in the world, kept her cards close to the chest on that one, she said.
What if you couldn’t have had children? Wendy asked her mother one time. Then you could’ve been a dancer. You could have joined the Mark Morris Dance Company.
Maybe, her mother said. I might have had a really great life without kids, too. If I could have just stopped feeling sad about not having any kids around long enough to enjoy myself. Which I never would have.
But we messed up everything for you, Wendy told her. First me and then just when you might have gotten back on the track, along came Louie.
How lucky can one woman get? her mother said.
I’d never in a million years try to pretend I was some kind of mother figure to you, said Carolyn. But I want you to know if the day ever comes when you need a woman around for some reason, you can give me a try.
Wendy was thinking about the bruise on Violet’s baby, and worrying about Louie turning autistic, and Amelia starting to like Chief more than her maybe. The grandmother coming who was always disappointed by everyone who wasn’t a tennis star or a First Lady. Wendy didn’t even have any of those white monogrammed shirts to wear to Thanksgiving dinner at the Fairmont Hotel.
Most of all, she worried about the terrible things she’d said to her mother and how she could never say she was sorry now.
You probably have tons of other people you’d want to talk to before me, Carolyn said. If not out here, in New York anyway. And, of course, there’s always your father. But just so you know, if the situation ever comes up where you need a woman to talk to, I’d do my best.
The strange thing was, when she had a mother to talk to about the things that upset her, she hardly ever did. In the old days, it had seemed as if her worst problems all had to do with her mother, so that wasn’t exactly the person she’d have gone to.
Terrible things were happening to the girl in The Member of the Wedding. She had met a soldier in a bar and pretended to be older, and he believed her. He took her up to a hotel room and tried to take her clothes off. She bit him. Then she hit him over the head with a pitcher and ran out of there. She might even have killed him, but she didn’t know if she had, she got out of there so fast.
Wendy couldn’t stop reading, even though she knew it would give her a headache, reading in the car. This was one of those situations where you didn’t want to know what would happen next, but you had to keep reading and find out.
And it got worse. When Frankie got to her brother’s wedding, where she thought he was going to take her away with him after, she realized it wasn’t going to happen and she went crazy. When her brother and his bride were driving away for their honeymoon, Frankie had flung herself on the ground and yelled, “Take me, take me.”
Wendy almost wished she was that kind of person, the kind who would have a breakdown, like the kids at her old school thought she’d had, instead of the kind of person she was, who keeps on going no matter what she feels like. A cactus girl.
“Frances wanted the whole world to die,” it said in the book. This was right near the end, when everything was going wrong. “She was against every single person, even strangers in the crowded bus, though she only saw them blurred by tears—and she wished the bus would fall in a river or run into a train. Herself she hated the worst of all, and she wanted the whole world to die.”
Wendy had felt like that in New York City, after the day it happened. When she was walking around putting up flyers, but knowing how totally pointless it was by the time she got to the bottom of her stack. Looking at the faces of all the other people, feeling like one little drip of misery in a whole ocean of more. She had wanted the world to disappear, and her in it.
“You think it’s
all over,” the black cook told Frankie after the big scene she’d made at the wedding, “but that only shows how little you know.” Here was this girl who had done the most humiliating thing a person could do. Her mother was dead and her father never paid any attention to what was really going on, and she didn’t have any friends—not to mention that she might have murdered someone, though he probably deserved it. And still her life kept going.
That must be a good book, Carolyn said. They were heading toward the mountains now.
It’s about a girl my age, Wendy said. It was written a long time ago, but the feelings are just the same.
I should read more myself, said Carolyn. I’m always meaning to, but there just never seems to be any time. Except for garden books and tarot.
A friend of mine has a great bookstore, Wendy said. We could go there sometime. Then she realized he’d call her Kitty and wonder if Carolyn was the mother of the boy who was going to be the next Dalai Lama.
Or I could bring you a book, if you told me the kind of thing that would interest you.
Things I don’t know about, I guess. How people live in other countries. Stories of people who do things like go to Africa and live with gorillas. Some civilization on another planet. Good vegetarian recipes. It wouldn’t be some love-type book I’d want, probably. Those never feel totally real to me.
Maybe I’ll just borrow that one when you’re finished, she said then.
They were on a smaller road now. We’re almost there now, she said. Wait till you see this place.
It would have been easy to miss, if you didn’t know the way. There was only a very small sign that said HARVEY’S CACTUS WORLD, and one of those wooden cutouts of a woman’s rear end bending down, where all you could see was her enormous butt and a couple of shoes sticking out the bottom. There were some pots of cacti hanging up and some larger ones planted in the ground, but the real collection was out back, Carolyn said.
The Usual Rules Page 21