“Bullshit,” Laura said. “It’s you he’ll punish. Listen, has she ever had a boyfriend? Has she gotten her period yet?”
“She’s a late bloomer. I was. Lots of her friends are.”
She was silent for a long while, and then she said, “Anorexia can kill you, Met.”
“Do you really think we haven’t been treating her…eating disorder?” I cried. “She’s been to doctors and in therapy since she was fourteen. It’s much better.”
“Couldn’t be much worse,” Laura said. “Why not try something different? Aunt Laura’s Sure Cure. I advise a long motor trip in sunny California, with the top down and good food and new clothes and exotic locations and glamorous people—”
“I can’t let her run all over California by herself, Laura. Be reasonable.” My heart was thumping with annoyance and something else I did not want to examine.
She was silent again, and then she said, “She’d be with me. What you mean is, you can’t let her run all over California with a crackhead actress. I haven’t done a line or had a drink in years, if you’re keeping score. Besides, you could come, too. See my world. I’d love that, Met. I’d love to show you what draws me, what makes me real. I’ve always wanted to; I’ve always thought that if you could just see it, you’d understand…you might see who your daughter is, too, or who she could be. You might even see what you are. You might like what you see.”
“Oh, Laura! I have family—”
“I thought we were family,” she said softly. She kept her eyes on the road and the mountains. They were darkening, casting long blue shadow fingers over the earth. Reaching for us in the red car.
She looked over at me then.
“Aren’t we three here just as much family as your four back there?” she said.
“Pie, please understand—”
“Oh, I do,” she said. She did not speak again.
I was silent, too.
We swept over a rise and down into the vast, mountain-ringed bowl of a valley. Its flat bottom was steeped in shadow like tea, but light still limned the peaks of the mountains, and the sky over them was going silvery. On our left and right stretched huge fields of what looked at first to be strange, stylized, prehistoric birds, all in frenetic motion. They ran in orderly rows that reached to the base of the mountains. I drew in my breath, and then saw that they were propellerlike wind-mills, all running in place before an unseen wind.
I exhaled in pure delight. Laura looked over at me and smiled.
“I know,” she said. “They never fail to knock me out, no matter how many times I pass them. They’re driven by convection, the hot air rising from the bottom of this valley where the mountains hold it in. It’s like someone has literally planted the wind.”
I smiled at the lovely little turn of phrase, forgetting completely that I was angry with her.
“What are they for? What do they do?”
“Power. They can light this desert up for a hundred miles. Back when the big quake up at Big Bear Lake took out all the power these guys went right on working.”
“Quake…Lord, that’s right,” I said, remembering the strange weather and the talk of storms and sinister atmospheric phenomena and the renegade climatologist on TV. “Y’all are supposed to have the big one any minute now. No way am I going to let Glynn stay out here with that hanging over you—”
“Jesus, Met, we have them all the time, little ones, and none of them ever turn into the really big one. Northridge was the Big One; everybody says so. We barely felt Big Bear, and it wasn’t far. If you’re thinking about that wacko scientist, you might remember how the New Madrid business turned out. You’re just reaching, now.”
And I took another deep breath and let it out, and was quiet, because that’s just what I was doing.
You can see Palm Springs a long way away. It is a great swathe of green, a dense emerald prayer rug, flung down in all the tawny, wild-animal colors of the desert. I found it hard, when it came into view, to look away. Palms, jacarandas, hibiscus, lantana, and a great many other exotic flora for which I had no name yet, formed bowers and islands in the almost continuous velvet carpet that, Laura said, was a network of golf courses without parallel in the United States. These were spotted with flashes of silver and blue: ponds, water holes, lakes, and the swimming pools of hundreds of hotels and villas, all catching the last of the sun. In the shadow of the mountains, and up in their steep foothills, lights were beginning to bloom. It looked like a Fabergé village or a particularly glittering Disney theme park.
“Where are the people?” I said. There seemed to be no cars moving on the arrow-straight toy roads that bisected the green.
“At cocktails. Or getting ready for cocktails. Or in some cases getting over the ones they had at lunch,” Laura said. “This is the hour of the dressing drink.”
“What do you do if you don’t drink?”
“Oh…eat. Make love. Garden, if you are so undistinguished as not to have a gardener. Bicycle or run; it’s too hot to do it any other time, except early morning. Ride the tram.”
She gestured ahead, and following her hand I made out a miniature railway snaking up a mountainside, with a tiny tram toiling slowly up it, toward the pink-gold light just receding from the peaks. I thought that what you saw from the top at this hour must be incredible.
“That looks like fun,” I said. “Have you ever been up to it?”
“Believe it or not, I haven’t. It’s sort of like New Yorkers and the Staten Island Ferry. But we could go tomorrow. Glynn wants to.”
“The plane I want leaves at noon,” I said. “I don’t think we could make it if we did the tram.”
“There’s another one at six.”
I did not answer her. The teasing, singsong note I remembered from her childhood was back in her voice. It made me want to shake her and hug her close at the same time. I did not need for Laura to revert to childhood; I had enough on my hands with one agitated child.
Laura swung off the freeway and onto a narrower road. It ran for a time through low, sculptured buildings where fairy lights bloomed on outdoor patios and cobbled streets twisted off into the blue shadows of other buildings. There were people here; strolling in and out of shops, sitting on terraces sipping drinks, jostling and crowding in the canyonlike streets. The buildings were adobe, I supposed, and bleached by the fading light; they reminded me more of Casablanca or Tangier than the American West. Then we were through the cluster and Laura nosed the car up an even narrower road that seemed to climb straight into the roots of the mountains.
Buildings here were low and many-leveled, climbing with the earth. Lights starred some of them. At the end of the road, where the mountains jutted straight up into a rock cliff, lay the carved white cluster of Merlin’s caves that I remembered from her photographs. They were beautiful, but seemed somehow inimical to life. Where would you put your garbage cans in this place? Where would you hang your wet bathing suits, air your rugs? Where would you park your car? When we swung around behind, I saw where: a long, low, white, stable-like building with twisted log supports housed a scattering of Mercedeses and Jaguars and BMWs. There were one or two more Mustang convertibles like Laura’s, gleaming in the dusk. Some of the spaces were empty, but Laura stopped and stared at one that was not. The dusty back end of what appeared to be a late seventies Pontiac protruded from it.
“Shit. Somebody’s company has got my space,” she said. “Everybody knows not to do that; now I’m going to have to call around and catch whoever it is, and they’re going to give me all that crap about not knowing their guests were parked there and…oh, it’s Stu! Oh, good! Or at least I hope it’s good. Damn him, he knows I’m going to have to park in the driveway now. It embarrasses him for people to see that wreck he drives—”
“Who is Stu? I’m surprised Glynn let him in. She knows better,” I said uneasily, thinking that I was not exactly thrilled to have Glynn left alone with one of Laura’s men friends. My mind swiftly built Stu from the air: li
the as a panther, snakehipped, ponytailed and earringed, teeth bleached the white of bones and flashing in a tanned face, jeans riding low, and shirt unbuttoned to show the gold chain nestled in the thatch of chest hair. The gold chain holding the key to Laura’s condo.
She caught my tone and laughed.
“Stu is my agent. Stuart Feinstein. He has a key. No, he’s not going to ravish Glynn. He’s far more likely to be feeding her something healthy and horrible and regaling her with lifestyles of the rich and famous. He’s a darling, an angel, my best friend; he’s never given up on me. And he’s HIV positive and I think he’s got active AIDS, though he won’t say so, and that’s breaking my heart. He seems awfully frail lately. I think I’m the only client he still does much for. He truly believes I’m an extraordinary actress, and that’s more than I can say for most people around here these days, including, sometimes, me.”
“AIDS—”
“She’s not going to catch it from him, Met. Not unless she’s sleeping with him, and I doubt that. He’s gay as a goose. You’re not going to catch it, either. Doesn’t Pom see HIV at that famous clinic?”
“Of course he does, all the time,” I snapped. I was not accustomed to having my sister treat me like a child.
“And I do, too. I volunteer at Jerusalem House back home; it’s this wonderful place where people with active AIDS go and live out whatever time they have left. Their families won’t have them. The volunteers are incredible; they do literally everything that needs doing. The residents are pretty great too, come to that.”
“Terrific,” she said, climbing out of the car and stretching. “What do you do there?”
“Well, I help out with public relations. In fact, I’m going to take that over full-time when we’ve got Mommee settled, I think. I’d love to put what I know to work for them.”
“PR. Whoopdedoo,” Laura said, and went into the gated back entrance of her condo without looking back. Picking up my tote I followed her. I felt like a Junior Leaguer discussing her provisional work. In fact, I had not wanted to join the League, and was pleased that Glynn did not, either. But still, that’s how Laura made me feel. I tried to run lightly and authoritatively up the little curved staircase, needing to regain my big-sisterhood again. Out here in this vast, glittering desert, without my familiar context, I had the uneasy feeling that I was not at all the woman who had boarded the Delta jet in Atlanta that afternoon. But if not her, then who?
She opened the door and vanished into it, and I stood for a moment simply breathing in the alien sounds and smells, and thinking what I would say to my daughter. Somehow, in all the long afternoon and evening, I had never sensed what would be right. I could not feel my way into the meeting ahead. But then, I had never had a daughter who had run two thousand miles away from home, either. I had no precedent for this.
“…and so I said, well, darling, somebody’s got to tell you, and I might as well be the one, because I really don’t give a happy rat’s ass, see, and the plain truth is, you look like a bratwurst in that dress.”
The voice was a tiny, breathy, beelike drone, and might have come from a petulant child, except that there was a sort of corrupted warmth in it that no child could possess. Over it I heard my daughter’s laugh. It was what I thought of as her real laugh, the one she used when she was flat-out tickled and delighted: a belly laugh, a charming, froggy croak.
The other voice laughed, too, and said, “Yes, well there are distinct advantages to dying. You don’t care what you say to who. I’ll bet nobody ever said anything even remotely like that to her in her life. And you know what? She went back and changed the dress.”
“Really? Was it better?” Glynn said.
“Oh, tons. This time she only looked like a meatloaf.”
I stood still, feeling as if I were eavesdropping on children at play.
“Are you really dying?” Glynn said.
“I really am. Not for a while yet, I don’t think, but yep, I’m definitely buying the farm,” the bee voice said.
“Is it awful?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s pretty awful indeed. And then sometimes it’s almost hypnotic, a nice, dreamy, underwater feeling. I kind of like those times.”
“Which do you feel most of the time?”
“You know, most of the time I really don’t think much about it,” he said. “HIV people learn to live right square in the moment. Like babies.”
He must have seen Laura then, because he cried, “Hello, dollbaby! Look what I found messing about in your miso. Can I keep her? She’s quite the prettiest thing I’ve seen until you walked in.”
“Stuart, you faithless hound,” Laura said, and there was the sound of her air kiss and an answering smack of lips on flesh. “This is my niece, Glynn. She’s running away from home.”
“Well, I know that,” he said. “In fact, I know just about everything there is to know about this dollbaby, including the fact that her mama is coming to get her and is in fact here, if that long, tall shadow I see on the floor there is to be believed.”
I felt myself flushing and walked into the kitchen.
A tiny man looked at me. He was damply pale and bald as an egg and looked very old. Then I saw that he was not old, but very ill. Illness seeped out of his pores and dragged at the flesh below his eyes so that the whites showed; illness had eaten away at the meat of him until only his bones were left, fragile and somehow very formal and lovely under the translucent, greenish skin. He had deep-shadowed dark eyes and the remnants of a dark beard, spotty and dry now. His smile was one of singular sweetness and mischief. I felt myself smiling back.
“The shadow says hello,” I said. I looked past him. Glynn, still flushed with laughter, stood stiffly against the refrigerator, backed up against it. Her eyes were wide and her silky hair, fresh-washed, hung in them. She wore her Guess jeans and one of her voluminous, knee-length sweatshirts and her Doc Martens. She should have looked ridiculous, but instead she looked beautiful, and so frightened and vulnerable that I felt tears well into my eyes. I loved her and was glad to see her and was even gladder that it had turned out to be as simple as that.
“Hi, baby,” I said, and she began to cry and ran across the floor and buried her head in my neck. The sweet-smelling top of it came up past my ears now. We had known early on that she would be tall.
Laura drew the little man out of the kitchen and I rocked Glynn gently while I held her, and then said, “Such a lot of tears for such a skinny kid. Don’t waste ’em on your ma; save them for when you need them. I’m not going to holler at you. Didn’t you know I wasn’t?”
“Is Daddy terribly mad at me?” she said, her voice muffled with tears and the cloth of my blazer.
“Terribly. But I imagine he’ll be over it by the time we get home. In fact, I’m sure of it. He’s even madder at me, if that’s any comfort. But what he really is, baby, is scared. He’s scared because his mother is sick and crazy and he can’t help her, and he’s scared because he yelled at his only daughter, whom he loves more than anything in the world, and she was so hurt she ran all the way across the country by herself, and he thinks maybe he can’t get her back, and he’s scared because I took off right behind her. Think about that: the three main women in his world and one is crazy and the other two are on the lam. How would you feel?”
I felt her laugh a little and thought that the tears were over. She raised her stained face to me.
“I feel like such a dork,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him or scare him, or you either. I just…it just seemed like after what he said nothing would ever be the same, and I didn’t think I could stand that. And it wasn’t fair, Mama, it wasn’t fair—”
“Oh, Glynnie,” I said, sighing at how far she had to go, and how little my words could help her. “Almost nothing is, really. There’s what people feel about each other and what they do to each other, but hardly any of it is a matter of fair. I want you to grow up expecting all sorts of wonderful things, but I mustn’t let you grow up
expecting fair.”
“You think he’ll forgive me, then?”
“He already has. He got up this morning and went downstairs to make pancakes especially for you. He was taking them in to you when he found your note.”
“Oh, poor Daddy—” her eyes welled up again.
“Let’s not go too far with this,” I said. “Daddy acted like an ass and he knows he did. He needs you to forgive him as much as you need him to forgive you. He may not have gotten around to realizing it yet, but he will before you see him again. And I promise you, the Mommee stuff is going to stop.”
She sighed deeply. “Will you forgive me?”
She brushed the drifting, wheat-colored hair out of her mouth. Her blue eyes were still shuttered with the thick, gold-tipped lashes that were Laura’s lashes, too. She was not yet ready to look me full in the face.
“For what?” I said, brushing the hair back and looping it behind her ear.
“I must have scared you to death. You never would have taken off out here otherwise.”
“You did. You did indeed scare me to death, and I do indeed forgive you. Now wash your face and come on in the living room. I want to meet this strange man who had you yodeling like Mammy Yokum.”
“Mammy who?”
“Go on and wash. Scram,” I said. “We’ll talk some more about this after I’ve called Daddy and told him when our plane gets in.”
She hesitated for a moment.
“Mom…”
I knew she was truly over the spell of tears and nerves. “Mom” was back. “Mama” was for the bad times.
“Hmmmm?”
“Oh…nothing.”
She vanished into a door that I presumed led to a bathroom and I went into the living room to meet Stuart Feinstein.
He and Laura sat close together on a large, white sofa before a fireplace. A small fire of some strange, sweet-smelling wood snickered behind a beautiful, old, wrought-iron screen, and a bottle of white wine and four glasses stood on a coffee table of weathered gray wood. Besides a tall white lamp, large pillows, and a pair of black canvas butterfly chairs, the room was empty of furniture. Bookcases lined three walls but were bare, and whiter spaces on rough adobe walls spoke of paintings that had once hung there. One wall was uncurtained glass, and the view out over the night-blue bowl that held Palm Springs was breath-stopping. I could see why Laura had fought so hard to keep the condominium. It would be like living in the sky, like a god.
Fault Lines Page 12
