The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  Lana wondered if she planned to pick it up.

  “Be more careful.”

  “Sor-ry.” Beth hefted the bag onto a chair.

  “Did you have enough dinner? I made spaghetti. Want some? Only take a minute to warm it up.”

  Beth considered this for what seemed a long time to Lana. “Nah. I’m wiped.”

  “Are you sleeping okay?”

  “I’m just tired. No biggie. Why’re you putting the smack down on me?”

  Lana stared at her. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Just leave me alone, will you? I gotta go to bed.”

  “I only asked you if you wanted something to eat.”

  “You think I’m a moron? I don’t get what you’re doing?” Beth flounced across the kitchen, throwing up her arms. “It’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it. You ask me if I want food so I’ll tell you I ate from all the food groups tonight. You ask if I’m okay means you want me to spill my guts. Well, I don’t have any guts to spill, Ma. I’m just really, really tired.”

  Lana’s vocal cords had frozen. She stood up, her hands busy stacking the bills into two neat piles, paid and unpaid. She crossed the kitchen and began to wipe down the counter, wondering how many millions of women felt as she did right then, sick to their souls of wiping down the same slab of counter space just to give themselves something to do to keep from screaming at their children.

  When she could talk, she said, “I want to meet Kimmie.” She stopped herself from explaining why. She did not need to give a reason.

  There was silence and then Beth said, deeply blasé, “Whatever.”

  “I don’t like the way you act since you started hanging out with her. I don’t like this new attitude. It isn’t you, Beth.”

  “Maybe you don’t really know me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I know you. You’re my daughter.”

  “So?”

  “Beth, what’s happening to you?”

  “Nothing is happening to me. Jesus, Ma, has it slipped your attention? I’m fourteen.”

  Lana thought about this answer.

  “Look at me, Beth.” She put her hands on either side of Beth’s face. Beth tried to duck her head away and Lana held her with the pressure of her hands against her cheeks. “Are you telling me everything is okay with you? Really and truly okay? Because if you tell me that, I will believe you.”

  “I’m fine, Ma.” Beth smiled, tossed her head back, and then hugged Lana.

  Her hair smelled dusty, like the herb garden. Not right somehow. But she felt wonderful in Lana’s arms, solid and strong and warm.

  “You believe me, don’t you, Ma?”

  “Oh, Beth.” Lana patted her daughter’s cheek and felt the fire of life burning in her; and from nowhere, tears stinging in her own eyes. “Of course I do.”

  We tell the truth, Jack used to say. It isn’t always easy, but we do it anyway. Once, when she was nearby, Lana heard him tell the girls that every family has core beliefs, and honesty was one of theirs. That night as she prepared for bed Lana wondered if that, like everything else, had changed in the last year and a half.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Beth’s telling you something. I think you should listen,” Mars said the next day when Lana met her for coffee at the university’s Price Center. They took their cappuccinos outside and sat on a bench facing the sun. At midmorning, crowds of milling students in Levi’s and tee shirts filled the stone-and-concrete, amphitheater-shaped food-and-activity court. A few wore shirts and sweaters and there were one or two women in skirts and high heels whom Lana took to be staff or faculty. For the most part, the students were a scruffy bunch. In dramatic contrast, Marlene was in her expensive, hippie-poetry-professor mode, wearing a russet wool cloak matching her wild auburn hair that fought against the combs holding it up and back, chunky amber earrings, a black sweater, and a black skirt cut on a swirling bias. High-heeled boots made Lana’s feet hurt just to look at them.

  “Beth’s growing up,” Mars said. She lifted the lid from her coffee and blew on the foam. “But you keep treating her like a little kid.”

  “I don’t think it’s outrageous to want to know what she eats.”

  “So many kids have issues around food.”

  “She doesn’t have issues—she’s just gotten secretive all of a sudden and I don’t like it. If you had children you’d know what I mean.”

  Mars looked at her.

  “Sorry.”

  “You know, there’s a whole theory about the kids being born today. Kind of interesting.”

  Mars pursed her lips and took a sip of coffee, giving rise to a familiar pinch of envy and admiration in Lana. No one else in the family had her sister’s lippy, sensuous mouth, so glamorous and expressive. “The writer says these kids are radically different from previous generations, much better able to take care of themselves, way more independent by nature. It’s an evolutionary thing. And parents don’t know how to raise them because they’re using antiquated methods.” Mars looked sideways at Lana. “Just a thought.”

  Lana let the New Age theory rest in a corner of her brain while she watched three workmen building a wall to enclose an outside eating area. Rebar—an iron bar, to strengthen the cement. Her daughters, children of the New Age, had rebar running through them. That she knew to be true.

  “Even if you don’t buy the evolution thing,” Mars said, “what you don’t realize—or maybe you do but you don’t want to accept it—is kids are different from when we were growing up.”

  “I’m not a troglodyte, Mars.”

  “Great word.”

  “Ms. Hoffman.” Lana sipped her coffee and wished she still smoked. “It’s not a generation thing. It’s since Jack died, they’ve changed. I feel them getting away from me.”

  “Look at their ages.” Mars tossed her hand blithely. “Beth’s poking her nose out into the world—that’s good. Mick can be a bit fractious. . . .” She paused. “You better tell her about her father, though. That’s a time bomb you’re holding.”

  She went on talking in this vein and Lana beamed up a few feet, watching her sister ’s animated hands that continually shaped and accented her words as she spoke.

  Unlike Lana and Kathryn, Mars had never wanted to be married. When she was seventeen she told Lana that marriage tied a woman to a Hoffa-sized cement block. At eleven Lana had no idea who Hoffa was, but as usual, Mars’s conviction impressed her. Lately, though, a wistful hint of uncertainty had crept in around the edges of her sister’s personality, like algae at a pond’s edge. The hint of green longing made Lana love Mars even more.

  “When I started teaching twenty-five years ago, they were respectful of authority, malleable as putty. Not anymore. If you don’t give these kids autonomy, they take it. Yours are just showing how normal they are.”

  Frankly, thought Lana, I wish they were a pair of oddballs.

  “I still want to meet this new friend of Beth’s.”

  “Oh, absolutely. I’m just saying, why don’t you trust her—”

  “I do trust her. Pretty much.” Sort of. The qualifications were new and made Lana sad. “I was thinking last night how Jack used to say honesty had to be a core family value—”

  “Sweet Jesus, sounds like a sermon from the Crystal Cathedral!”

  “—and I wondered, what d’you think were the core values in our family?”

  Mars looked at her and laughed. “Just one: whatever Stella wants, Stella gets.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I mean it. So long as Ma was happy, anything went. She didn’t really mind my running around playing hippie, you know. But it upset Stan. That man was Mr. Republican. And when he was unhappy, that made her unhappy because when he was pissed off he yelled and drank and ran around.”

  Lana had been too young to understand the alternation of screams and silence, the slamming doors that had characterized the house on Sunset Cliffs. She remembered shielding Kathryn from the expl
osions and, when she could, running along the cliffs, sometimes as far as the lighthouse. She recalled the flash of sunlight on the waves far below, the shock of the cold salt air in her lungs, and the plans and promises she made herself to the beat of her feet on the sandy path. She would have her own family and they would love each other; there would be laughing and no yelling.

  “Speaking of running around,” Lana said, happy to change the subject, “how’s the boy biologist?”

  “You mean Malcolm?” Mars made a down-mouth, tilted her head to one side, and combed her fingers through her corkscrew curls. “I had to let him go, I’m sorry to say. I tired of the lad.”

  Lana poked Mars gently. “Tell me the truth.”

  Mars picked a long, curling hair off her black skirt and sighed. “The truth is that no matter how well preserved and wickedly inspired in bed, a fifty-year-old poet will always lose out to a tight pussy from Big D.”

  Lana laughed as she was supposed to, but her heart ached for her sister having to save face with humor. “You did make that New Year’s resolution, about finding an older man. How old was Malcolm? Twenty-five? Six?”

  “Actually, he was thirty. But the problem is, Lana, I never meet anyone who isn’t young. No one interesting, anyway. I meet sixty-year-old English profs still trying to seduce women with the poems they wrote thirty years ago.” Mars put down her coffee cup. Her voice was low and throaty. “Can you remember how a young man’s skin feels? I bet you can’t. Well, it’s like warm leather, smooth and supple, and it always smells clean. Even their sweat is sweet. And the muscles—God, Lana, the muscles are incredible. Even the boys that don’t work out have this wonderful tone to them.” She paused to watch a pair of male students in snug Levi’s and tees. “They are angels of seduction, Lana. Irresistible. I’m telling you, thinking about it makes me all frothy.”

  Lana stared at her sister and then they burst into laughter so tickly that the students nearest them stopped talking and stared.

  Two old bags acting like schoolgirls, Lana thought. Tired eyes and blotchy skin and hair that requires product to make it shine. Time had stepped in to repossess their teeth and abdominal muscles.

  Someone coughed. Lana looked up at a pretty Asian face and straight black hair with peroxide yellow tips.

  Mars composed herself. “Yes?”

  “Dr. Madison, excuse me for interrupting but my name is Nancy Song and I just want to tell you I bought your book. Of poems? And they were so awesome. Especially the one about the bridge? It just broke me down. So totally. And so I was wondering, if I brought the book by your office—during office hours—would you sign it?”

  Mars smiled graciously. “It would be my pleasure.”

  “Do you have a new collection coming out? I hope so because I think you’re a truly great poet.”

  “Well, aren’t you lovely to say so.”

  Lana watched her sister playing the star as if it were her birthright, using the canned phrases, and the old question came into her head. Who was Mars’s father?

  Kathryn said he had to be a movie star, a Fifties heartthrob who swept Stella off her feet back in the days when she worked at Bullocks Wilshire. Lana had in mind a mogul or a politician, the CEO of a vast financial empire. Mars had no doubts. She was the bastard daughter of a movie giant. C.B. DeMille, maybe. Stella herself had nothing to say on the subject. Never had. In her nastier moments Lana thought it was possible she just didn’t know.

  “I am working on something now,” Marlene told the girl. “Poetry can’t be rushed, of course, but I’m pleased with the progress.”

  When the student had passed on, Lana asked, “Are you actually writing, Oh, ‘truly great poet’?”

  “You know me, Lana. I don’t lie.”

  “I forgot. Honesty’s a Madison family core value, right?”

  It was convenient to stop at Stella’s on the way home from the university. Her town house was part of a small complex of vaguely Spanish-styled homes halfway up Mt. Soledad and faced east across mesas and canyons toward the mountains. It was a view Lana had always loved as she loved the morning light, but Stella had never been satisfied. She associated an ocean view with wealth and everything else with the Hollywood Cafe.

  In a rare act of forward thinking, Stan had paid cash for her unit and put it in her name three years before he died. As a rental it had earned a decent income but when Stella moved in it required extensive interior work. New carpets and paint, all new fixtures in the kitchen, and remodeled bathrooms had eaten up most of the insurance payout so she lived carefully now, depending on revenue from the Hollywood Cafe and a small portfolio of investments.

  Stella was having a martini and watching the five o’clock news when Lana arrived. She offered her a drink.

  “Water, Ma.”

  For a few minutes they watched the news of local disasters, car wrecks, and police chases. Stella loved it.

  “We need to talk,” Lana said. “Can I turn this off?”

  “I want to watch the weather.”

  “I’ll turn down the volume for now.”

  Stella looked irritated but she sat back in her chair and gathered the skirt of her bronze-and-black caftan around her legs.

  “So?” she said. “I suppose you want to hear about my plans.” Lana nodded and let her mother talk about why the house on Mt. Soledad irritated her, the problems with her neighbors, the lack of afternoon sun. “I want to be at the beach again, Lana. I want to see the sunset on the Pacific.”

  “So drive.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What I know is you’re dreaming. Have you actually looked or done any research? Places at the beach cost a million dollars. Minimum.”

  “You exaggerate.” Stella peered around Lana to watch the silent television.

  “A fixer-upper maybe you could get for eight hundred. Thousand, Ma. Eight hundred thousand.”

  “The secret is a good Realtor. A savvy real estate broker can find the bargains.” Stella admitted she had not yet found this miracle worker.

  “You haven’t really done anything, have you? This is all in your head.”

  “Watch your tone, Lana.”

  Lana thought of herself saying much the same thing to Beth and Micki and knew how it made them feel. She walked to the square picture window overlooking the city’s northern suburbs. In the distance the outline of the Cuyamaca Mountains rose like a hazy graph line against the sharp blue of the darkening winter sky. Below streets lined with apartments, condominiums and town houses quilted the mesas between the sharply etched canyons, intersected occasionally by velvet green parks and landscaped “clean” industries—the dozens of electronic and pharmaceutical companies that had come to San Diego when the war industry left. Streetlights had begun to come on.

  She looked back at Stella. “Why do you want to move, anyway? This is a lovely house and the view’s breathtaking. You’ll never be able to afford anything nearly as nice. You’ll end up—”

  “I’m going to sell the Hollywood.”

  Lana sat down again. “Ma, Dora’s leased the Hollywood for years. She pays her rent on time every month. That’s guaranteed income. That’s what buys your groceries.” And your French manicures, and puts high-test in your Cadillac, and sends you off to the Caribbean every other year.

  Stella fiddled with the pearl buttons down the front of her caftan, a voluminous garment that reminded Lana of Las Vegas. And must have cost a bundle. Her mother, tall and willowy as a showgirl, favored the kind of glitzy outfits that had made much of her movie star glamour when she was forty, and from several feet away she still looked stunning. Close up, she made Lana sad, hanging onto powdered and rouged illusion by the tips of her perfect manicure.

  “Dom has offered—”

  “You’d take money from him?”

  “That man has a sense of family, Lana.”

  “Since when has family become a holy word?”

  “You’re prejudiced against him.”

  “Is tha
t what he says?”

  “It’s his culture, Lana. You don’t like that he’s Italian.”

  “Ma, being Italian’s the best thing about Dom. Apart from that he’s a bully and he’s cruel to Kathryn. That’s what I don’t like about him.”

  “Oh, you exaggerate. He wouldn’t raise his hand to Kathryn. He adores her.”

  “Yes, he does. In his way. But he’s still abusive.”

  “And those girls, the sun rises and sets in Tinera.”

  “I’m not going near that one, Ma.” Lana shook her head. “The relationship between him and Tinera is sick.”

  Stella looked at her fiercely. “What are you saying?”

  “There’s something unnatural—”

  “What do you mean, unnatural?”

  “Not incest, not the usual kind, anyway. But it doesn’t have to be physical. There’s such a thing as emotional—”

  “Well, he’s not easy, I’ll grant you that, but that’s not the same as abuse.” Stella rubbed her index fingers in the corners of her lips. “And it’s certainly not incest. I don’t even like to say that disgusting word, Lana.” Stella used to inhale a cigarette when she needed to think. Now she fluffed her hair and fidgeted with her earrings. “You’ve put a halo around Jack. You’ve forgotten how he could make you so angry sometimes. There’s not a man born isn’t a pain in the neck half the time.”

  It was just too much that Stella would speak of Jack and Dom in the same breath. Lana walked into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of tap water. In theory, Stella was a grown woman and did not need a caretaker. Ditto for Kathryn. Why couldn’t Lana just walk away?

  She returned to the living room and sat beside her mother on the gold-and-white brocade couch.

  “Dom doesn’t want it to be a loan,” Stella said, watching herself in a mirror across the room. “It would be a gift.”

  Lana shook her head. “No, Ma, it wouldn’t be a gift. It’d be a bribe in advance. In case you ever realize what a son of a bitch he is, he wants the money there to keep you quiet.”

  Stella widened her blue eyes in apparently genuine bewilderment. “How did you get so cynical? When you were a little girl you had the tenderest heart . . .”