Pink Smog

by Francesca Lia Block

  It felt like a long time passed. I heard my father’s engine start and his yellow Thunderbird drive away. My chest felt numb, as if I’d just had a shot of novocaine in my heart. And then I watched my mother stagger backward and fall into the pool.

  I ran back through the condo and out and down the stairs screaming for help and when I got to the pool I saw a boy in the water with my mother. I dove in, too. The water churned around us, stinging my eyes and nostrils with chlorine and sloshing into my mouth. I reached for my mom but I was suddenly too weak, as if all the life in me was being sucked down the drain at the bottom of the pool. That was when I felt arms lifting me up and out.

  Then we were all on the side of the pool and the boy shouted up to the surrounding buildings: “Call 911!”

  He was skinny and tan with very strong-looking arms and longish blonde hair that dripped over his face. He bent over my mom and pressed on her chest and water came out of her mouth. I’d learned CPR in camp when I was a little kid, practicing blowing into the mouths of baby dolls, but I couldn’t remember anything. But the boy knew what he was doing because he leaned over and breathed into her mouth and I saw her eyelids flutter and she opened her eyes.

  In that moment a weird thing happened—instead of the boy, I saw Charlie there, bending over my mom, blowing life into her. For a second they were one person, the mystery boy and my dad. All the love I felt for my father, all the love that had gotten scattered in the wind when I saw Charlie leave, was attaching to the boy like glitter attaches to glue when you sprinkle it on your art project.

  He looked at me with his blue eyes for just one second but the gaze dropped so deeply into me, like a stone in water—rings and rings. Then he and Charlie were both gone, vanished, like they had never been there at all.

  By the time the paramedics came I had my mother sitting up, wrapped in a towel. The paramedics checked her out and said she was okay and then they left, too. I watched their strong shoulders being swallowed up by the nighttime. I wanted something more from them—some reassuring look or smile, but they had only seemed bored and tired as if they saw this thing all the time. It had only happened once to me and I never wanted it to happen again.

  I brought my mom upstairs and put her to bed under the baby-blue satin quilt. I gently combed her hair away from her face. It felt like straw in my hands from all the bleach, disintegrating at the ends. I wiped off her face with a towel and smoothed lotion onto her legs and feet. She started to doze off. I was sitting next to her, holding her hand when she opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “Why?” she said. “Why didn’t you just let me go?”

  “Mom!” I hugged her but she was rigid in my arms. We still smelled like chlorine. The odor made me nauseous. “Brandy-Lynn!” I said. “I need to talk to Dad.”

  “Never tell anyone!” She was shouting now. “Never tell anyone about this. Ever. Especially him.”

  I won’t tell him. But I have to tell someone. I have to at least write it down.

  I don’t know what happened between my parents. I know that my mom was drinking too much and my dad was “abusing substances,” as my mom called it. I know there were money problems. But I don’t know the really deep reasons, the reasons why love can turn into screaming and hate. Or at least something that looks like hate, especially to a thirteen-year-old.

  I know that my mom and dad loved each other once. When my dad was successful with the monster and scifi movies, and even after he wasn’t, when we lived in that little cottage in the canyon. It had a shingled roof and thick creamy walls and wooden floors that my mom polished with lemon oil soap until they shone. There were big windows with leaded glass panes and a garden full of roses and day lilies. There was a little fishpond and a jacaranda tree and a winding moss-covered path that led nowhere. My dad played the piano with my bare baby feet, dangling me above the keys as I danced out a tune. My mom made pot roasts and baked potatoes for dinner. She wore a flowered apron and her high heels. We all ate together every night. There was one small black-and-white TV but we hardly ever watched it. When it broke, my dad repaired the antenna with wire hangers. The sun shone at a low angle through the leaded glass windows and across the shiny wooden floors, making the dust motes shine like fairies. There was a lemon tree outside my bedroom window and it was covered with pink and white blossoms and yellow lemons, so bright they glowed in the dark. My parents played jazz and rock and roll on the stereo. They played The Beatles a lot. I used to dance to The Beatles for them in the living room while my dad shone a desk lamp on me like a spotlight. I’d make costumes out of things I’d found in the dress-up box. My mom always saved her old dresses, even when they were ripped or out of style, so I had quite a collection to choose from. She had all these satiny cocktail things and lace suits and sequined or bead-covered cashmere sweaters and leopard-print hats and gloves and spike-heeled pumps with pointed toes. My mother had been a starlet before I was born. She met my dad when she landed a role in his movie Planet of the Mummy Men. She was so beautiful then, staring up at my dad in almost every single photograph, a halo of light around her pale hair, as she reclined on the beach with her Betty Grable legs stretched out in front of her, sitting at a nightclub in a pink cocktail dress, smiling over her shoulder, her eyes sparkling like diamonds so that she didn’t need jewelry. When I saw her on screen the first time, I thought she actually looked like Marilyn Monroe, who she was always talking about. She had wanted to be the next Marilyn. When she gave birth to me on the day Marilyn died, she thought it was a sign. A sign of what, I’m not sure. That she would go back to her career? That I would be an actress? That I was Marilyn reincarnated? That I was doomed because I was born on one of the saddest days of my mom’s life, and everybody else’s, too, for that matter?

  I love how sad Marilyn’s eyes look, even when she is smiling. I love her body that just looks like it wants to give itself to everyone like a present. I love her skin and hair like an angel’s. (I always talk about her in the present tense like she didn’t die—who else do you do that with?) She was married to a famous baseball player and a famous, brilliant writer who looked like my dad. I love that. And I love how funny and smart she is and how she makes people fall in love with her with just one look.

  They say Marilyn’s hand was outstretched to the phone when they found her naked on her bed in her apartment in Brentwood. I don’t think she really wanted to die. But you never know.

  My mom almost died that night by the pool. She wanted to, even though she still had me. Marilyn didn’t have any kids at all. I used to wish she were my mom—maybe I could have saved her life, too.

  But it wasn’t me who rescued my mother. It was the boy. I wanted to find him again and thank him.

  THE GIRL ON THE STAIR

  After school that day, I went from door to door in our building, saying I was doing a project for school on statistics and that I had to find out exactly how many men, women, boys, and girls lived in each unit. I knew most of the neighbors but I kept hoping someone I didn’t know, someone who had just moved in, would say they had a son or a brother, or, even better, that the angel boy would answer the door, but there was no sign of him. I wondered if I had made him up. But I could remember his thin, muscled arms and the pale color of his hair and the sharp line of his cheekbones. Also his pale blue eyes, the color of the pool at night. He reminded me of the pop stars my mom had put up on the walls of my room. They all looked a little like girls and that made you like them because they seemed sweet and soft and familiar as well as unfamiliar at the same time. But the boy was much better than the one-dimensional magazine cutouts on my walls. His skin was warm and wet when he dove into my life. Thinking about him made my body pound with adrenalin, made me feel alive with blood. I felt as real as I’d ever felt, so he must be real, too, I reasoned. At least I thought so.

  I didn’t find the boy. This is what I found:

  Unit 1: Tom “Sunshine” Abernathy (33), Marilyn Monroe impersonator. I’d met him before. He let me try o
n his wig once.

  Unit 2: Uncle Oz (75), retired set designer, currently a collector of antique toys and children’s books. When I was younger my mom brought me over there and he read me fairy tales.

  Unit 3: Mimi Jones (25), elementary schoolteacher and fashion plate. I liked to spy on her outfits every morning. She wore mini skirts, suede platforms, colored stockings, and false eyelashes and smoked like a very busy chimney.

  Unit 4: Candy Red (20???), “professional.” She was not very friendly to me and told me I should do a report on someone else’s building.

  Unit 5: Dori Knight (19) and Elsie Capshaw (19). College girls with retail jobs.

  Unit 6: Ben Hoopelson. I have no idea how old he is. He is a mime and won’t talk.

  Unit 7: Carla St. Clair (27), TV hair and makeup artist. A friend of Mimi Jones.

  Unit 8: Arthur (39), Esther (30), Abe (10), and Rebecca (8) Steinberg. Orthodox Jews. Arthur is a teacher. Their apartment smelled like fresh baked bread and simmering meat.

  Unit 9: Brandy-Lynn Bat (35), Weetzie Bat (13).

  Unit 10: Bob (33) and Nancy (27) Levine, assistant professor and homemaker, lovey-dovey newlyweds. They answered the door with their arms around each other, wearing matching aprons.

  Unit 11: Tim (30) and Andrea (29) Shore, movie grip and secretary. They fought almost as much as my mom and dad.

  Unit 12: The Mendoza family—Jose (40), Teresa (37), Wendy and Mary (15). A very nice family. The twins went to my school.

  Unit 13: ???

  The only interesting new person I saw was a tall, lanky lady with a thick accent I didn’t recognize, long black hair, and huge eyes that were such a dark shade of blue they were almost purple. Maybe they were just reflecting her pantsuit. She gave me a nasty look and shut the door of Unit 13 on me before I could even ask her anything. There was something vaguely familiar about her but I couldn’t place it.

  As soon as I got home, all the energy in my body just drained away. There were dirty dishes in the sink and empty bottles everywhere—the trash cans hadn’t been emptied and bills were scattered all over the kitchen table. I hated our condo. It was like as soon as my dad stopped making money and we lost the cottage, my mom had to suddenly pretend we were rich and glamorous. She had to decorate with fake golden cupids and baby-blue velveteen and thick shag carpeting. I remembered the simple cottage with the wooden floors and the flowers everywhere. I remembered my mom dancing around in her cotton dresses.

  My mom looked like she hadn’t gotten out of bed all day. I brought her Brazil nuts and ginger ale and red licorice. I would have tried to cook but I always burned the grilled cheese sandwiches or let the rice bubble over. The only thing I could make was instant mac and cheese but she didn’t want that and neither did I. I wished she had taught me to cook when I was littler and she was happy and loved to make dinner but now it was probably too late.

  While we watched Tony Orlando & Dawn, I stared at Tony’s huge mustache and his backup singers’ glittery dresses wondering how they could have landed a whole show for themselves based on a song about a yellow ribbon around an oak tree. The music wasn’t distracting enough—I thought about my dad and when he was going to call. When the program was over and my mom was asleep, passed out in front of a cop show, I went into my parents’ bedroom, into the closet, and I put my face in my dad’s shirts and sniffed his tobacco and woodsy-smelling aftershave and wished he would appear inside his suit and hold me and hug me and say that he loved us and would never leave again.

  But my dad didn’t even call that night.

  I tucked my mom in and turned off the TV, wishing that Cher was on. There was nothing more beautiful to me than Cher in her sheer dresses with the strategic beading and her belly button showing. And the way she flicked her black Arabian horse mane off her bony shoulder and laughed like she didn’t want to show her cute tiny vampire teeth but she couldn’t help it and her shiny lips would part and her teeth would show. And her voice would crack. Sometimes she’d be an Indian American with feathers, straddling a horse, and sometimes she’d be a showgirl with feathers. No matter what she wore she was sexy and beautiful but she didn’t look like anyone else on TV. I thought about Cher in her feathers because it was better than thinking about my dad and how he hadn’t called and because it was easier to wish for a TV show than for the person you loved more than anyone else.

  Then I realized that the new woman in our building looked a little like Cher and for some reason that took away the comfort I’d been feeling. Suddenly, even Cher made me sad.

  I turned off the lights and went out onto the balcony and looked down at the pool. I remembered the boy crouching over my mother, his tense shoulders and his strong hands. Maybe he would come back? I put on my sweatshirt over my pajamas, pushed my bare feet into my Vans, and left the apartment.

  I went downstairs and sat by the pool and stared at the ghostly blue water and thought about my dad. Was he gone forever? Would he call me? Would he come back? He’d gone away before, on a pretty regular basis, to do some writing or to see his sister, Goldy, in New York or after fights with my mom, but there had never been a fight like this. When he went away, he would always leave me a bottle of his aftershave to use when he was gone so that I would remember him. He also let me wear his shirts. The shirts smelled like cigarettes and the aftershave and if I wore one and closed my eyes and rubbed a piece of sandpaper, as scratchy and granular as his chin, it was like he was there with me.

  I realized that I could go get one of my dad’s shirts and wear the aftershave now—he hadn’t had time to get anything when he left. But I knew it would upset my mom. I’d have to wear the shirt at night while I slept or sneak out in it in the morning. Plus, I didn’t know if I could stand wearing that shirt. It would make me too sad, that smoky, leafy, cinnamon-tinged smell.

  I was lying on a lounge chair and the plastic slats were cutting into my skin through my thin pajamas. I shifted my weight and looked up at the sky. You couldn’t see any stars. I remember going back east with my dad, how he showed me the stars in upstate New York, above this old farmhouse with a creek where Goldy lived, and I was so surprised how many there were. In L.A. the stars look weak and forlorn like the people who come here to be famous and end up working as waiters. Except they are beautiful, too. Like this really cute guy who worked at the Great American Food & Beverage Company on Santa Monica Boulevard. My parents took me there on my twelfth birthday and the cute waiter sang me Cat Stevens songs and brought me a Cobb salad and a piece of birthday cake. And there were the cute, old waitresses at Du-Par’s in the Valley who had probably been starlets once. They wore little, ruffled aprons and pink dresses and squeaky orthopedic shoes and they all reminded me not only of the faded stars in the sky but also of the pretty whipped-cream-covered pies reflected in tilted mirrors along the very top of the walls still hoping to be discovered, if only for a tiny part in a pie commercial.

  All these thoughts made me hungry and I was getting sleepy so I decided to go back in because it didn’t seem as if the boy was going to come. I could have jumped into the pool and pretended to be drowning but that seemed too dramatic so I got up and started toward the stairs.

  I was standing at the bottom of the staircase going up to our unit when I heard this cackling laughter. It had a shockingly hollow sound.

  There was a girl about my age sitting at my front door. She was thin and pale with long, black hair that hung almost to her waist, and large, tilted eyes that looked like the eyes of the woman in number 13. The girl was wearing a childlike, too-small dress with puffed sleeves and a smocked bodice that came to just below where her fairly large (at least compared to mine) breasts were. She also had on bobby socks and old-fashioned white saddle shoes. Her lips were bright red with lipstick.

  “You can’t go home again,” she told me sternly. “Don’t even try it. Home is gone forever.” Then she laughed that hollow doll cackle.

  I backed away and started running. I ran and ran into the night. It was dark and
cold and empty, without even the comfort of a moon anywhere in sight, let alone stars. I thought about the cute waiter who would probably never get a record deal and how the feet of the waitresses at Du-Par’s must hurt them a lot.

  A man in a fancy, white Mercedes pulled up beside me, leaning out the window, and I ran faster, my heart calling uselessly for help inside me.

  All I could make out clearly were his eyes, catching a reflection of the streetlights beneath the white turban he wore—they looked like they had seen everything there was to see.

  “You must not be afraid,” he told me, then reached his hand out the window and tossed something onto the sidewalk before he sped away.

  I stopped where I stood, breathing hard, looking at the something—it was a shiny silver envelope.

  You must not be afraid.

  The man in the car, whoever he was, was right. I’d already lost what was most important to me—my dad. I didn’t have anything to be afraid of except that he might not come back. I didn’t have anything to care about and sometimes that makes you brave.

  I picked up the envelope and opened it. There was a note inside. I unfolded it and a cascade of tiny glittery bits fell out. The words were written in cutout letters like a ransom note:

  Mirror mirror on the wall, you’re Factor’s fairest of them all.

  What the heck? Fairest of them all? Factor’s? I tucked the note in my pocket and walked home. Some of the glitter had clung to my arms like shiny freckles.

  When I got back, determined to stand my ground against the cackling girl, she—just like the mysterious boy—was gone, if she had ever been there at all. In a way I was relieved: even with the encouraging words I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to her anyway. Not yet.