Permission

by Saskia Vogel

  His grand plans involved big names and expensive people like attorneys, but never seemed to be moving forward because he was still at his parents’. But my silence had apparently been speaking volumes to him. I had liked our clean deal. I had liked that everything was on his terms. That he never offered to come to my place, that he only ever talked about us going out and then showed me all the places he’d had his picture taken. This was good. I could relax into our time together by letting him lead and letting our bodies talk, our wordless intimacy. We couldn’t start talking now. This was a person who didn’t know I no longer had a dad. It would have been reasonable to tell him, but maybe I’d wanted to come here because I thought of this space as autonomous, a fantasy, not a place where I could be visited by death. I thought of the calipers and dug my nails into my palms to keep the tears at bay. I said: ‘I didn’t even notice you hadn’t texted.’

  With that, he took his hands off me. ‘You’re un-fucking-believable,’ he said. He adjusted his pillows, pulled the duvet over himself. He grabbed his computer, illuminating his bed with its glow. I hadn’t meant to be so cruel. I wanted to apologize, but before I had a chance, he said, ‘You can let yourself out.’

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I was doing. I hadn’t thought it through. As I took my usual route from his house to my apartment, it settled in. The last time I’d driven down these streets, my dad had been alive and well. And the idea of my apartment frightened me. I hadn’t been back there. It would reek of ‘before,’ of a time when I knew that, if things went wrong, he’d be there to protect me. Dad was a safety net. I could still be a child with him. I could always say that the life I was living was just pretend.

  The light in the carport was flickering. When I shut off the engine, I locked the doors and leaned back in my seat, staring out the windshield at the stucco wall and listening to the cars pass by on the road behind me. I held on to the feeling of being on my way somewhere, travelling with purpose even if travelling was the purpose. When I was in transit, I didn’t need to do anything but focus on the road, the car, the mirrors, brakes, and turn signals, how and when traffic slowed. The other lives on the road.

  My apartment would be as I left it, but everything had changed. Maybe I should leave that space uncontaminated and drive back to my mother’s, where these emotions already had a home. But this would mean another forty minutes in the car, forty minutes hurtling at top speed, catching shadows out of the corner of my eye. I pictured the geometry of the freeway, how light skates across its shapes in the dark. Wheels vibrating on tined concrete, racing toward a vanishing point. It wasn’t human. I couldn’t do it without falling apart. Maybe, I thought, I could sleep right here.

  I ran my hands over the edges of the instrument panels, the assist grip and the puffy fabric around the vanity mirror, feeling its plastics and leathers and rubbers, all the bits drivers shouldn’t touch while driving. I let the windows fog. I drifted off but jumped when something dropped onto my roof from the jacaranda growing on the sidewalk. It took a minute for the world to stop swimming, for me to make sense of the shadow and light. I thought about the noise of the outdoor coin-operated washing machines at the back of the building being used at night. The things I’d found discarded there.

  I hurried through the front gate, keys in hand. I unlocked my front door. My studio apartment was airless and hot, a shoebox space that let all the noise in. The stale old-carpet smell. The venetian blinds were closed, the curtains I’d hung were drawn. I got into bed without turning the lights on. My sheets did not yet smell like sorrow. I feel asleep inside that dream.

  When I woke, there was seaweed stuck in the outboard motor, pillow wet, tangled sheets. I kicked myself free. I pushed my face into my pillow like I wanted to press my nose into the groove of Orly’s collarbone, imagining she would let me, and all I had to do was ask. I cupped my hands between my legs, and then my phone rang. I let it. They left a message.

  I only realized what I’d been hoping to hear when I heard who it was on the other end. Then the dread set in, the pain of habits breaking, the sound of life skipping to the next track.

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ my mother said. A fog had rolled in over her vowels. I wondered how long she’d been keeping herself hazy. If I had driven her to it, like him, to her cigarettes. ‘You left.’

  The wash of guilt left me sticky with resentment. How dare she. I couldn’t get angry; she was too good at turning my anger around, making me out to be the one who needed fixing. I swallowed it down.

  I heard the flick of a lighter. The storm when she exhaled. In a sing-song voice, she said: ‘I’m smoking.’ I listened to her take another drag. ‘No more hiding it from your fahder.’

  I couldn’t remember the last time her tongue had stumbled. I had all but forgotten it could. Fahder. Her pronunciation made me nostalgic – the easy plenty contained in the word ‘home.’ I reached for the feeling, eager to touch it, but it was beyond my grasp and then gone.

  ‘He liked to play high and mighty but he was worse than me! He said that if I thought of you, it would make me quit. But look at us now.’ She cackled.

  My hand was sweating against the phone. I wedged it between my ear and shoulder and wiped my palm on the sheet. It was just like her to pry open my heart only to shiv me through the crack.

  English was my mother’s third language, after German – her family’s tongue – and the Dutch she learned in Rotterdam. Three, that is, if you’re not counting the snatches of Italian she still remembered from the summer boyfriend she had at sixteen. Piero. I liked listening to her say his name, the warm rumble of her r’s, a sound I could never quite master. I liked hearing their story, even with the way she pressed her past into tokens.

  Piero was a student from Genoa working on the ferry to Capri for the summer, she’d say. (The implication: Only industrious men are worthy of your attention.) They held hands and never kissed. (Chastity is a thrill in itself. There is power in restraint.) And were discreetly escorted by her father, who walked ahead of them on the esplanade, generously offering them the privacy needed for romance to bloom. (I was raised with an easy love. Any difficulty between us is not my fault.) Her father was a saint, and it was really so sad I’d never had a chance to know my grandfather before he died. (There’s something missing that you can’t have.)

  At the end of the summer, she left with only the memory of Piero. They didn’t exchange addresses. They made no promises to keep in touch. This detail scandalized me; the idea that love could be temporary. To which she’d respond: ‘Only death is eternal.’

  Then she’d say that’s how Vesuvio got his name. Vesuvio then Vivo then Herr Vampirzahn and Mr. Bitey then Vee for short. Vee was the tomcat she brought with her from Rotterdam. He was offish with everyone but her and painfully effective at catching birds. She doted on the cat, making special trips to a Croatian butcher near the harbour to buy offal, railing against ‘America’ for trying to gloss over the role death played in the omnivore’s diet; she called the gutless grocery store chickens in Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic foil ‘perverse.’ I thought of Vee as Piero incarnate, my orange summer love stalking past my window, sunning himself in our backyard. I learned to be patient, to wait for his affection, grateful for whatever cool caress he offered in passing.

  Vee was the only witness to a life that my mother referred to as ‘real.’ Whatever romance my parents’ story had was filed to a point with the statements beginning with ‘your fahder.’ My father expected us to be at his beck and call, didn’t know how to take vacation, loved his work more than he loved us, always wanted to go running when it was time for family dinner. My father treated us like things to be arranged in his life, like the furniture in our house. She complained as she drove me around, carting me along on her errands, to my activities; I was her captive audience.

  One day a new complaint appeared, sun on polished steel. It was about a year after they’d gotten back together after the separation. It was a day like any other. My mother picke
d me up from school, chest red and blotchy. A sign of upset I had learned to recognize, even when she insisted it was allergies. Like the tears that escaped her eyes. One, two drops rolling down her proud cheeks as she pretended to yawn. I was hoping to talk to her about the fifth-grade science fair, but she began to rant.

  A rant I had heard before. About her desire to go back home – Munich or anywhere else she had lived before here, she didn’t care – to claim the life she wanted to have, close to family on the continent. The continent: where life would be better for me and for her. Where I could have a real childhood. She always spoke in terms of ‘we’ as though her life were my own. But I only knew her Europe from holidays – whistle-stop tours of family and friends from Lake Constance to the Baltic – but my life was here. Incomplete as she insisted it was.

  On this particular day she tacked on something else: a rant about the business my father had started and how if he had never struck out on his own, the shipping company they had worked for could have transferred him anywhere but here. But no. ‘Your fahder’ made sure that our lives were in arrest. She concluded: American men are excellent salesmen, schatz. Like your fahder. Watch out or you’ll get stuck with something you can’t return.

  It was clear that the life she had dreamed of had never included frozen orange juice concentrate and so many hours spent finding parking. Perhaps her disappointment was her way of reminding herself that the woman she understood herself to be was not gone, just dormant, and could rise again. We had this in common: I think she was trying to make sense of herself here.

  Instead of going home, we drove to her first elocution class. The tutor’s office was on the second floor of a shopping mall covered in Spanish tile, meant to look like the Old World. You could allow yourself to believe you were on a narrow street somewhere in Andalusia. It was one of her favourite places to go. She forgave ‘America’ its tolerance for artifice when the aesthetic suited her. Listening to the burble of the fountain in the courtyard, I plotted my science project in the tutor’s waiting room, making lists of things I was curious about: how long it would take for the sea air to devour the wreck of a container ship, the husk of which was corroding on a nearby shore, if there really were shrimp in the tap water in other parts of Los Angeles, what would happen to our lungs if the teachers didn’t make us stay in our classrooms during a smog alert. I had my own mysteries to solve.

  Her first elocution lesson was scheduled on a day when I would have otherwise had a free afternoon – no tutor, no team sports, no horseback riding. She wanted to show me I wasn’t the centre of her world. She had a life too, and sometimes her life required me to wait, dinner to be served late and not be homemade. (‘Mom’ was a gift, not a given.)

  Before she started working with the voice coach, she did all the things the other moms I knew did, but she made clear it was a nightmare made bearable only because of me. She had always wanted to be a mother, she said. But she could be so busy mothering that being her daughter felt incidental. I could have been anyone, but she’d be this mother no matter what.

  Her accent faded quickly. She said her tutor said she had a musical ear. But as the accent faded, so did she. I never thought I’d miss my embarrassment over her not wearing a bra and her conviction that there was nothing indecent about it. I never thought it would make me sad to watch her transition from brunette to blond, to give up a tailored seasonal wardrobe for jeans and jersey knits. She started arriving early enough for afterschool pick-up to join the other mothers who gathered on the steps in their tennis whites to talk about their tennis instructors, their tennis bracelets glinting on their wrists. By the time I was a pre-teen she had become a person who fussed over surfaces: kitchen countertops, the cleanliness of floors, me. She was forever smoothing the flyaway hair at my temples, tugging at the hem of my uniform skirt. My mother didn’t reminisce about Europe anymore, in general or in part. And whenever I asked about Piero, she’d change the subject. My father seemed relieved. He touched her more often, hugging her from behind and saying things like ‘Nice to see you’re in good spirits.’ When she knew he couldn’t see, she’d let her face fall.

  It was during this time that they decided to stop smoking. My father went on one of his health kicks – lean proteins, low-fat yogurt, and smoothies none of us liked. Hints of pine and ash no longer accompanied their wish for me to sleep well. But she still smoked when they argued. Sometimes she stayed late on the balcony, and I’d sneak upstairs and sit with her. She’d say the ocean looked like quicksilver from here, and it made her feel like she was stuck at the end of the world. The house they’d built wasn’t really for them, but what would they have left if they tore it down?

  During their fights, I would hear my mother say, in her new crisp diction: ‘Look at me. I’m killing myself for you.’ To which he’d reply: ‘I didn’t ask you to.’ I wondered how a marriage could turn into such a terrible misunderstanding. It inevitably came back to the smoking: the virtue of his having quit, and her ruinous decision to endure.

  Look at us now.

  I tried to put my mother’s phone call out of my mind. I tried to put next week’s art class out of my mind and focus on my apartment, my space, the life I had chosen. I ignored Fumiko’s call when Wednesday night rolled around and I deleted her voicemail without listening to it, even though I needed the money from the job. The thought of honouring any commitments made my arms weak. I didn’t want to hear what a disappointment I was. I tried to stop time. I stuffed the minutes with the nothing-fluff of days: rummaging through cupboards and drawers, writing emails to my old agent that I didn’t send, and one to his assistant, Van, which I did, reading through Backstage West, Craigslist, listening to daytime radio. Feeling triumphant that it was not yet three and I could still…dejected when the clock struck four because time had slipped my grip and run away from me. I would stare into the night, sure the force of my gaze would keep the sun from rising.

  VAN WAS IN SUIT AND TIE, parked out in front of my apartment building. He was blocking in the other cars as he opened the passenger door for me.

  ‘Meet my new baby. Check out her headroom,’ he said as I buckled myself into his 1986 911 Turbo, words he relished saying. With good reason. It was a beautiful car, down to the way the rear tires filled out the fenders. ‘Leaving Jake was the best decision I ever made.’

  Van smiled. He had new teeth, large, impossibly white and straight. I smiled back, displaying mine. I was born with perfect teeth. Casting agents liked them. I rarely left a call without being told they were pretty or asked to smile one more time. I think they wanted to know if I could do ‘sunny.’ People here seem ill at ease if you can’t. I needed to smile to get there. My bone structure was Old World. A face for witches, exiles, scullery maids, the down-and-out. My mother’s. I looked similar enough to Lola LaForce that people had to look twice, but she had what I did not: a generous mouth. It made her immediately likable. Sunny. It was why she’d gotten all the good roles both of us had been sent out for, and her career had taken off whereas mine had floundered. I used to stand in front of my mirror, hooking my pinkies into the corners of my mouth and pulling it wide, counting how many teeth you could see then compared to when I simply smiled. When Lola smiled you could see twelve teeth in her upper jaw. Me, eight.

  I flipped the sun visor down and flashed a smile at the mirror. Still eight. I had my father’s small mouth. I flipped the visor up. I couldn’t bear another look.

  Van gunned the engine.

  ‘Watch out,’ he said with a grin. ‘The horses in this thing’ll give you whiplash.’

  We zoomed away from my apartment building.

  ‘I’ve got the next Brando on my books. You should see this kid.’

  ‘Do I know him?’

  ‘Nah, no one does. I found him at some improv night before I left TI. Jake didn’t want him. The kid made me see the light. I got him the lead in the new Agent Orange franchise. Chase Cardoso. He’s gonna blow up.’ He kept talking as we drove too fast down S
unset. The car took curves like a dream.

  I didn’t much feel like talking, but didn’t want to seem sullen.

  ‘Your car is so much fun,’ I said, figuring I could interrupt his flow of speech with a car compliment anytime. What had we talked about when he was manning my ex-agent’s desk? I couldn’t recall. But talking with him had felt good, like anything was possible for him, and so, by extension, for me.

  He gave me another blinding smile and looked me in the eye. ‘I’m glad you reached out. There was this girl auditioning for a part. Totally wrong for it. They wanted a Louise Brooks type. I don’t even know why they brought this one in. But something about her made me think: Echo. I should look that girl up. And there you were in my inbox.’ He took his eyes off the road and pointed to his third eye and then to mine. ‘What’s new?’

  His intense, expectant stare. It asked to be impressed.

  I had to turn away and squeeze my eyes shut to keep them from spilling: My father died this summer. He took one wrong step and was gone. Maybe the grip on his sneakers had been worn smooth, or he glanced up from the rocks as he climbed over the sea cave to watch a pelican dive. Everything inside me, ocean. I inhaled with both my nose and mouth, greedy for air, feeling my lungs expand. My body was mostly water, but only mostly, still.

  ‘I’ve been modelling,’ I said, knowing the way he’d hear it – as far away from standing naked in an art centre for sixty bucks a session as I wished to be. The leather on his dash felt impossibly durable.

  He looked me up and down. ‘I knew old Jake should have pushed you for more than crack whores and dead girls.’

  Silence.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Totally.’

  ‘Or…’ He took his hands off the steering wheel to make air quotes and the car drifted into the left lane.

  I froze.

  ‘The fugly friend. Remember that one?’ I didn’t like that we were laughing. He was supposed to want to send me out for comedy, for horror, anything. Van put his hands back on the wheel. When he straightened the car out, he oversteered. It wasn’t his fault, it was this model.