by Paula McLain
Only Raymond seemed to have immunity to Fawn’s charms. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. He was always as distantly friendly with her as he was with me, but what he wouldn’t do was cave every time Fawn batted her eyes. If he said no to something, he’d stick to it, no matter how much she pouted or rolled her eyes or carried on about how unfair he was being.
When Raymond came home at the end of one long and rainy Friday, dust in his eyebrows, under his shirt collar, tucked into the cuffs of his Levi’s, Fawn all but assaulted him at the door, asking if she and I could go out after dinner.
“Out where?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A movie?”
“A movie? You don’t sound convinced, sweetheart.”
“I am. We definitely want to go. Don’t we Jamie?”
Raymond dismissed her easily. “The theater’s all the way over on the other side of town. You’d have to take the bus there and back, and I can’t imagine you’d be back before eleven. I don’t want you girls out late.”
“Eleven is late? In what century? I’m sixteen, you know, or have you forgotten?”
“I know exactly how old you are,” he said. He lifted his John Deere cap to scratch lightly under the brim, releasing a curtain of silt from his bangs. “It’s because you’re sixteen I want to keep an eye on you.” He went off down the hall to shower then, leaving Fawn no audience but me for her sulking until dinner, when she turned up her nose at Raymond’s meat loaf.
“This has a skin on it,” she said, prodding the gray-brown gelatinous mass with her fork tines. She shoved the plate to one side and ate, instead, two pieces of white bread spread thinly with French’s yellow mustard. Raymond looked at her for a long minute, snorted lightly, then picked up her plate and scraped everything onto his own with the flat of his butter knife. “More for me.”
I offered him my plate as well, to which he replied, “Now don’t you start in on me too.”
I had known Raymond longer than Fawn had, but I wouldn’t exactly say I knew him better. I didn’t feel any closer to him, in fact, than the day he’d arrived in Bakersfield to take me with him back to Illinois.
Raymond liked to drive at night. This was one thing I knew about him, and only because he told me directly as he settled behind the wheel, adjusting his mirrors, pulling a pair of metal-framed sunglasses from the visor and pitching them into the glove box. There were a few days between the time Raymond arrived in Bakersfield and our leaving, days when lots of business got settled in Berna’s room at the nursing home with the door closed to me, or at home in the living room, well after I’d gone to bed. I’d sit cross-legged in my nightgown at the top of the stairs, trying to hear what was being decided for me, my future, but Nelson’s and Raymond’s voices were humming strings of mumbling. In the silences, bits of the news rose up, also indistinct.
It was late afternoon when Raymond and I left Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley, and fully dark by the time we cleared the last reaches of LA. Out my window, I saw a blinking truck-stop marquee in the shape of a high-heeled shoe and a shadowy garden of giant pinwheeling turbines. Blown-rubber smithereens twitched on the roadside like prehistoric reptiles cast in tar. I considered pointing out these things to Raymond but couldn’t seem to make myself form the necessary words. I didn’t yet know if he was the kind of man who would find such things interesting, or me interesting, for that matter. So we didn’t talk, we listened, to the stiff road-hum that seemed to hold everything aloft, to the heart tones of diesels braking and downshifting, and to Merle Haggard: If we make it through December. The console glowed. Inside, there was the smell of Raymond’s cigarette. He inhaled deeply, then held the lit end out his cracked window, sending the ash barrel-rolling behind the truck, where it fell into cinders.
Moving to Moline required a lot of adjustment, and adjust I did, to a point. I learned to pack a crack-shot snowball, to breathe through a soggy woolen scarf, to walk on an ice-slicked sidewalk and avoid doorways daggered with hanging icicles. I got used to the accents of Moliners, flat as the fields stretching everywhere; they said pop for Coke and party store for 7-Eleven and Ma for Mom. I learned to like the way my ears felt flushing from the rims inward when I came in from the cold, and how the forced heat smelled, linty and socklike. How it ticked coming on, and shuddered shutting off, and whirred loudly in the spaces between.
Moline was a small town but a sprawling one, with numbered streets laid out in a waving grid that moved north toward the Mississippi River, west toward Davenport, south toward the John Deere factory, which supplied jobs for much of the town, and east toward cornfields, flatland, and eventually Chicago. Up near the river there was the country club and Riverside Park and houses that were large and fine, but most of the town was condemned to row houses and squat bungalows, aluminum siding as far as the eyes could see. The downtown was old, with brick buildings and a town square and a clock tower, but we didn’t shop there. The IGA was just a few blocks north of us, as was a 7-Eleven, an A&W, the Olympic Tavern. I walked everywhere, reassured that I couldn’t get lost for long. The streets being numbered instead of named, I could simply count my way back home.
In the early days with Raymond, I still had my spells. He’d obviously been prepped by Nelson and knew what to do for me, that I needed my inhaler and plenty of space, and he was good about them—he never made me feel too crazy. Raymond was good about giving me my space in general. For instance, he never talked about Suzette. He also never made me speak to Berna on the phone if I didn’t want to. She was still in the nursing home, still recovering slowly. At first, Nelson had called once a week to give us updates, but as time passed, there was less and less to report. Berna had settled into the routine there—occupational therapy, Bingo, dinner on a tray at five p.m., bed before full dark. She could feed herself, in a fashion, with her functional left hand, but nurse’s aides did most everything else for her, including brushing her dentures, bathing her, lifting her onto and off of the toilet. Her speech was so slurred only Nelson and a few of the aides could understand her. When Nelson called from the hospital, he would hold the phone up to Berna’s ear. Raymond rattled away at these times, talking about the weather and projects at work, even what he’d cooked for dinner. When it was my turn, I found myself so flummoxed for things to say that long silences would invariably creep up, and then Berna would come on the line, hissing and gurgling. I couldn’t recognize my grandmother in those noises and didn’t really want to try. I felt terribly guilty about it, but when the phone calls came, I soon began to pantomime to Raymond that I wasn’t home. Then I’d go sit on the curb and poke at black ants with a stick until I knew he was done talking.
Once Fawn arrived, the problem disappeared in a way because I didn’t have to pretend to be not home, didn’t have to pretend to be busy. Gradually Berna and Nelson faded into the distance like everything in Bakersfield. My memories of it were growing more and more remote, as if they were someone else’s memories lined up in a slide show and projected on a far-off wall, black-and-white and hopelessly out of focus.
In my sight lines instead loomed every given day of summer. Illinois. The town surrounded by cornfields. Raymond’s small house with its dog hair and burbling fish tank, its small windows looking out at a small world that seemed increasingly to belong to me, and me to it. Late at night, Fawn and I would lie in our cots and talk. At three thirty in the morning, the world was quiet but for lightly wheezing insects, wind levitating and settling the bamboo blinds, our voices pushing sleepily through the shadowy synapse between our cots.
At such times, Fawn was free with her secrets. She told me that she’d broken her collarbone falling on a birdhouse when she was nine. How her brother Guy’s farts always smelled slightly of Tater Tots, no matter what he’d been eating. How when she had sex for the first time it hurt so much she thought the boy—his name was Perry, she’d met him at summer camp—was definitely doing something wrong. Maybe he’d screwed the inside of her leg instead? She’d actually even looked for
a dent there later.
“They never tell you how much anything will hurt,” she said. “Did you ever notice that? Injections are always ‘a little pinch, a mosquito bite.’ With cramps we’re supposed to feel ‘a slight discomfort.’ Bullshit!” She’d laughed then, a lying-down laugh that was guttural, mostly to herself. “I was bit by a scorpion once,” she said, “but I don’t remember. I was really little then.”
“Can’t scorpions kill you?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Old people and babies mostly.”
“There are rattlesnakes everywhere in Phoenix too, right? Why would you ever live someplace where there were so many things around that could hurt you?”
“Snakes are only out in the desert, and they don’t bother you if you don’t bother them. As for the scorpions, you just need to know which ones to be afraid of. The big ones, like the one that bit me, aren’t so dangerous. My brothers used to catch them in jars and try to freak me out. The really big ones are the color of dried blood. Ugly.” She faked a shudder. “But the ones that can kill you are so small you can’t even see them and they’re really pale, the color of your skin right…there!” she said, reaching to pinch me hard on the inner arm.
I told Fawn stuff too, though it felt decidedly strange to have someone listening after years of hiding out, scuttling and silent as some underground spy. I couldn’t believe it, and so at first, I lied. I didn’t mean to, exactly, but things started leaking out of my mouth. I told Fawn I’d had a boyfriend in Bakersfield, a neighbor boy I’d grown up with. That we’d written letters back and forth when I first moved to Illinois.
“What’s his name?” Fawn asked.
“Patrick,” I said, but when Fawn asked for details, I found myself describing not Patrick but his brother, Myron.
I also told Fawn my mother had been a go-go dancer and my father a regular customer who fell madly in love with her. That after they’d had me they’d moved to Brazil where it wasn’t safe to take a little baby—what with malaria and the natives and all. As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt an instant regret. It was a lazy lie: Fawn could surely check any family stuff with her mother, Camille, who was Suzette’s first cousin, after all. But Fawn had only said, “Wow. Cool.” And strangely, as soon as Fawn responded this way, I felt it was sort of cool to have a mother who was off living an adventure somewhere, and to have any kind of father at all.
I had become an expert at forgetting I even had parents, as if my conception was miraculous or extraplanetary, my birth as clean and controlled as the cracking open of an egglike pod. Suzette’s name was only occasionally mentioned, and my father, whoever he was, was never, ever brought up. And I didn’t mind this. It made things infinitely simpler, kept the more unmanageable aches at bay. But talking with Fawn felt safe, as if our words built a free zone between us, around us in the dark of our room. My mother, I could say, without any kind of sting. My father. I guess it was because I was concocting them as I spoke, rather than remembering them, feeling them or their absence in my life. I was lying, but maybe that didn’t matter. There was a sense of permission with Fawn, that if I kept talking, I’d ultimately arrive at the truth, but if I didn’t, that was okay too. The self I was inventing by the minute, the day, the week, seemed just as interesting if not more so, to Fawn. I began to feel I was under construction, that behind this flawed surface—like a plywood facade at a building site—something wonderfully inevitable was happening.
CAN’T YOU HEAR MY HEARTBEAT
When Raymond headed down to Oxnard from San Francisco to try to find Suzette, a storm followed him all the way down the 101 to Pismo Beach, semis with a death wish passing him fast, kicking up water in endless sheets. He had a serious headache and an unshakable sense of foreboding that whatever bad thing was happening to Suzette had already happened, that he was too late by hours, days, maybe even years; that he had already failed her.
When he got to Oxnard, he parked in a public lot off the boardwalk and paced up and down, thinking he was crazy to have driven so far. It was dinnertime now, he’d been gone all day—and maybe she had called again. Maybe she’d really lost it when he wasn’t there to answer. Overhead, the sky was gray and threatening to rain again. Seagulls wheeled and cried, sounding hungry, impatient. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day. He also needed at least one beer, and so went into the first fried fish place he saw, ordering from a pretty waitress. Every job Suzette had had for the last five years had been in a bar or restaurant. This could be her serving him, this girl with the white miniskirt, freckles on her knees. She could be at the restaurant right next door, balancing platters of fried clams, smiling at strangers, saying You have a good night, now as she took their money. All of Suzette’s friends were waitresses too, summer help, transients, living on their looks. He’d met a few of them and even had some numbers in a little red book he carried in his shirt pocket. After he ate, he got five dollars in quarters from the cashier and started feeding the first phone booth he came to. Four or five dead ends later, he finally got some information from a woman named Deanna whom Suzette had roomed with a few years back, when she was working up north in Mendocino County.
“I don’t know that she’d want to be found for sure,” Deanna said on the phone. “So remember, I’m not the one who told you, but she’s in Oxnard, living on the boat of a doctor who has a place in LA. I don’t know his name, but he comes down on weekends and stays with her.” There was no phone, but she gave Raymond the name of the marina where the boat was docked.
When he found a local map, Raymond was satisfied to know he’d been right about how close she was; the marina was less than a mile from where he’d first parked his car, and he made his way there without any trouble. There was a padlocked metal gate at the head of the dock, but he followed a couple through, asking questions until he found the boat, an obviously well-loved forty-footer. It was white with aqua trim work, and the name Cecilia was painted with a flourish on the stern. Suzette was sunbathing; a blanket was laid out on the widest part of the deck, a transistor radio no bigger than a paperback novel right next to her ear, Herman’s Hermits sounding tinny and canned. It couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees, the sun was spotty at best, but there she was in her bikini on her back, her arms and legs spread like a human X. She looked too frail to Raymond and too exposed, and just when he was thinking of what he might say that wouldn’t startle her, Suzette opened her eyes.
“What a nice surprise,” she said sleepily. She stretched and sat up, then wrapped the blanket around her waist, trailing it like a skirt made for a giantess. “I was just thinking about a cocktail. Are you thirsty?”
It’s not that Raymond wanted to find her crying still, devastated, but somehow it was more troubling that there were no signs of the previous night’s trauma, nothing to suggest she was even the same woman who’d called him. This Suzette had either forgotten the phone call or was pretending she had. In any case, she didn’t want to talk about it. What she did want was a martini, so they went belowdecks and she mixed a drink while she told Raymond about the doctor, John. This was his boat, and he was letting her pay rent, just like an apartment, though to shower or even pee she had to walk up the dock, through the metal gate with her key, and into the yacht club.
“‘Yacht club’ makes it sound a little grander than it is, wouldn’t you agree?”
She half nodded and went on to tell him about what a wonder John was, how she’d met him when she went into the emergency room for strep throat. How he’d told her, when she’d recovered, that she had the loveliest tonsils he’d ever seen.
“Lovely tonsils?”
“Maybe they are. Have you ever seen my tonsils?”
He admitted he hadn’t. “What about this Cecilia? Maybe she’s got some pretty terrific tonsils too.”
“Cecilia’s the wife,” she said, her face strangely untroubled.
Raymond nodded, thinking he’d heard more than enough. The good doctor probably had kids too, and was more of a pharmacist than a
doctor, feeding her Percocet, Darvocet, Vicodin, codeine in exchange for an up close and personal relationship with her glands.
When he went up to wash for dinner at the yacht club, he found it wasn’t much more than a big restroom, separated into his and hers, like at beaches or public parks, with a line of sinks and another line of showers, tile all around. He hated thinking about her going in there to bathe, with only a vinyl shower curtain and a swinging door between her and whatever might want to hurt her. He hated thinking about her in Oxnard at all, sunbathing in the rain, spending her weekends with the good doctor who was telling what to his wife? When he’d gotten in the car, he thought it would be an easy enough trip, just the six hours down and back. He would find her and make sure she was safe. But now he understood that he wasn’t leaving without her, and that she wouldn’t go easily.
The most troubling part was that she claimed to be in love. Suzette never had a better sales pitch than when she was starting over, newly employed or in love. She glowed then, like a preacher. At these times, Raymond tried not to watch too closely. His memory was too good. He could see every spill stretching out behind and in front of her—like cartoon drawings brought to life when you flicked your thumb over the corner of a notebook. He had watched all of them in raw color, dusting her off afterward as best he could, reassuring her that she would move on, that things would be good again and soon. But he was starting to wonder if his own sales pitch wasn’t just as tired and suspect as hers.
“I’m all right, you know,” Suzette said as they sat in what was to pass for a dining room on the boat, a small and shellacked teak table in a C shape, surrounded by the larger C of a bench seat. The cushions were covered in an indoor-outdoor fabric that squeaked. After the martinis, they split a beer, hunched under a yellow pendant light, and then Suzette made scrambled eggs on a galley stove the size of a shoe box.
