Then dinner. Green beans and shepherd’s pie. Angel food cake with brownie-mix icing. That was my idea and everyone loves it. Everyone is noisy setting the table. Fighting over this and that, the same as every evening. Everyone afraid there won’t be enough to go round. There always is. Anton taps his glass to say grace. We quiet down and join hands. Listen. When he’s finished we each say our own blessing to thank Anton. We thank him for providing the food, for driving, for being generous. Caroline thanks him for bringing our families together and then she thanks Mom too for loving her as a daughter. I’m in love with Caroline. She’s soft and quiet and warm and just the way she speaks to you or touches you makes you want to be good, like her. Jane’s turn. “Thanks for teaching us to argue.” She smiles. Everyone laughs, relieved. James keeps his hands folded and his eyes closed and he thanks Anton for saving him when he was destitute and for giving him a place to live and he thanks Mom as well for loving him as a mother would. He’s decided to stay on and live with us. My mind empties and all I can think about is Anton checking my bruise and that whispery sensation I had had. Thinking that makes me feel dirty inside like I’m black and rotten in there. Mom said she thinks of her insides as clean and white like a potato, but I know mine aren’t like that. I felt them moving, sloshing around, excited and hurting. Now I can’t think of anything to say except that I want to go home. I look at Julia, who encourages me with a nod. Anton’s prayer book is opened in front of him.
“Kate, say a blessing,” Mom urges. “Ka-te, it’s your tu-rn.” To the others she says, “She’s just shy.”
“I’m not shy,” I murmur, then add: “I love Anton.” My voice is so soft I have to repeat it. But that’s not what I want to say.
♦
I saw Dad and our big white house receding into a past, left there alone like a dream, a memory, getting smaller, smaller, fading as we moved forward. His life stuck there, unchanging, so unlike ours, so utterly separate. As if time stopped for him when we weren’t there. I began to believe in the ordinary. Believed in it so absolutely.
When I would want to crawl beneath the cool sheets of my bed back at home. My knees ached. I was tired. It was tiring being extraordinary. It was tiring loving all these people. “They’re just growing pains, your knee-aches,” Mom would say. “Knee-aches?” Anton would say and smile at me as if I’d just invented something ridiculous yet grand. I became shy around Anton, afraid he’d want to check my bruise again. He’d smile at me with that pouty, flirtatious grin, sensing my new shyness, trying to knit me back into him.
He bought me things. An orange book called Poisonous Dwellers of the Desert with a scorpion on the cover poised to strike – he knew how much I liked to identify things. A BB gun because he wanted me to be tough and to trust, more like a boy. It was a beautiful shiny black gun that looked real. I identified gila monsters and learned to shoot straight at a pyramid of beer cans Anton had set up for me. He stood behind me in his robe, his arms wrapped around me to help me aim. One by one I shot all the cans down, and as I did Mom clapped and shouted, “Brava, brava.” I learned to twirl the gun on my fingers like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. I belted the leather holster around my hips and wore the gun proudly.
But even so, despite the gifts, the gun, I wanted my old life back. It sat out there on the horizon like a poker hand that was just within my grasp of winning. I saw our white house on that horizon and my father walking down the driveway to get the mail and the newspaper. Ordinary and simple like before.
We were finally headed for the Grand Canyon, because none of us had ever been there. Anton held a family meeting and the issue was decided. “I told you so,” I said to Finny and winked proudly. I could see in his eyes and by the way he looked at me that he held me in awe.
“You don’t know anything,” he said, but I ignored him. If we went back to my father he wouldn’t be my little brother anymore and none of this would matter.
For a long time it had made me sad, the idea of Dad at the Grand Canyon waiting for Julia and me to arrive while we were at home studying the multiplication tables, and I had wanted to go there as if Dad would still be there – his life frozen, waiting for ours to catch up with his. But I didn’t care about all that now either. I wanted to go home.
I didn’t have any crazy ideas about going home by myself. I was going to go with my sisters and Mom, back to our house. I was tired. Exhausted. Inside I started getting anxious, feeling if I didn’t act soon it would be lost. I started drawing calendars, marking off the days. I made lists of the things I needed to do in order to get us home. One way or another I was going to do it. I knew it would take some planning and time, but I was resourceful. That’s what Mom had always said about me. We’d take a bus or a plane. I’d get us there. I thought about my twenty dollars all the time now, knowing that if I had it I could multiply it. I remembered poker. I had an inscrutable face, could have it if I wanted it. And if that didn’t work, I was going to call my father and get him to come. But he’d have to promise to take Mom too. I felt good inside. Grand, actually. I liked having a plan. With a plan I knew what would happen next.
I wrote my father letters, preparing him. The first letter was mailed from Lee Vining. I dropped it in a blue postbox. Weeds curled up its legs and it stood alone at the end of a parking lot by the edge of the road. There wasn’t much in that town, a strip of stores, a few hotels flashing VACANT signs and miles of dry, brittle terrain. A yellow-shirted boy raced by on his bicycle with a baseball bat poking from his knapsack. My legs were sore. My knees ached. I imagined he was riding home.
The red earth reddened in the early evening light as if about to crack, and the air turned cold. The moon was a wafer, blending with a few wispy clouds. I dropped the letter in the box and listened to it clap against the bottom. I had told Dad where we were, had described the tufa towers of Mono Lake because I thought he’d like to know. I described all the rocks of the different terrains we’d visited. I told him about the fruitcake melange of the Big Sur cliffs. I told him where we were headed, hoping he would come. Then I thought about the letter being picked up by a postman and taken to somewhere, to another postman and then to another, passing through all those hands, until eventually it made its way, dirty, to my father sitting at his desk. By then we’d be long gone from here.
I thought of how on my father’s office walls, over the maps and charts, he’d hang the notes and letters we’d write to him. ‘I love you’s scribbled down on scraps of paper, singing to him, keeping us present.
I wrote my father from several towns along the way, really believing he would come after us. I imagined him following the trace of my letters, scattered across America in the pits of those mailboxes, collecting them like bread crumbs until he caught up with us. His little white car dawning on the horizon, slipping in the oily mirage of road, catching up with the camper. I saw him standing by his car at the Grand Canyon, excited, preparing in his way to give us a lecture about the land. Waiting, with an itinerary for our trip home in his hands.
♦
Even if Dad had tried to come after us, he never would have found us. One moment you thought you were going one place and the next thing you’d be somewhere entirely different. I had written Dad that we were headed for the Grand Canyon, but just when we thought we were going there we ended up in Malibu. I still saw Dad everywhere, sneaking over the horizon in the white VW, coming around that bend in the road, appearing late at our campsite a little tired, smelling of sweat, that dry, dusty sweat – the way you sweat out here. Jane would forgive him and Julia would hug him and Mom would wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him on the lips. We’d put our stuff together and kiss everyone good-bye and get in the car and drive away.
♦
We went to Malibu because we needed another car. There were too many of us for the camper and when we picked up strangers we were absolutely uncomfortable and we were picking them up all the time now. We picked up some Ursuline nuns whose car had broken down. Lively ladies who fli
rted and teased with Anton in a way I didn’t think God, or those working for Him, were allowed to do. We picked up some proper girls who were trying to be hippies. But they left quickly because they found us strange. Anton got it in his head to postpone the Grand Canyon and go to Malibu to borrow a car from Mark Bitar, an old patient who hated children. We’d be doing Mark Bitar a favor if we borrowed his car and drove it back across the country. Mark Bitar was a bicoastal millionaire and wanted a car in the East, so the plan was good for everyone. I didn’t care what the reasons were, I was glad we’d finally have another car.
Mark Bitar’s house was a long, flat modern one overlooking the ocean, with lots of windows and mirrors and green carpeting. Candles lit the house and the soothing sound of waves and of the wind in the palm trees came through Japanese doors. The living room had high ceilings and an indoor swimming pool surrounded by a rim of steps on which rested wooden candelabras carved with naked figures having sex. A thin layer of mist drifted just above the pool. In the corners stood peach-cushioned massage tables and from the ceiling hung ferns. The Japanese doors led outside to another pool and beyond it was the ocean.
We descended on that house like we descended on any town, making it momentarily ours. It was after midnight when we arrived, and all of us clomped in, dropping our stuff here and there. We carried sleeping bags and pillows and found places to sleep anywhere. We were tired and hungry. My knees ached. I wondered if Mark Bitar knew we were here.
I fell asleep easily in a beanbag chair, although I felt a little uncomfortable sleeping in the house of someone I hadn’t met. I worried they’d wake up in the middle of the night and see us sprawled all over the place and it made things worse that he hated children.
“Do you know,” Sofia said in the dark, “this is the worst place we could be when the big one happens, the big earthquake. It’s expected, you know.”
“Shut up,” Timothy said. “Like the Hell’s Angels?” Nicholas teased. “The land’ll just break away and we’ll all fold into the ocean and disappear.” I knew better than that, but I was too tired to explain.
♦
“You’ve multiplied,” Katherine said to Anton, as she came out to greet us in the morning. Everyone was eating and some of the kids were already swimming or down by the beach. Katherine was Mark Bitar’s girlfriend, although she was twenty years older. Sofia had said that since Mark Bitar hated children, he had an old girlfriend so he wouldn’t have to have children. Katherine was beautiful, with lots of blond hair piled on her head and soothing brown eyes. She dressed entirely in pale blue. “Every time I see you you’ve multiplied.” Anton laughed and they flirted for a moment and she asked about his book and he asked about her work. She devoted her life to religion and traveled everywhere learning about all the different religions. She had her own bedroom, separate from Mark’s, and there was one gigantic waterbed and an enormous bathtub in front of a window that opened onto a tiny courtyard in which stood statues of religious figures that she said came from all over the world. The only one I recognized was the Virgin.
It wasn’t long before the orange tent was erected on the front lawn and all the contents of the camper were strewn over the asphalt driveway. Anton and Mom wanted to clean the camper out before we got going again, which was a good thing because it smelled. We spent a few days vacuuming and scrubbing, rearranging our luggage, throwing away garbage. The rocks that I’d collected in Big Sur and Mono Lake had spilled all over the place and Anton told me I either had to keep them orderly or throw them away. Sofia threw them out, but I didn’t notice until later, and by then I didn’t care.
Anton put Mom in charge of the cleaning and we were supposed to do what she said, but Anton’s children didn’t pay attention to her. Mom got mad at them, but then Anton got mad at her for getting mad at them. In the end he had to take charge. “I can’t be responsible for everything,” he said. Jane told Mom that it wasn’t fair that Anton could boss her kids around, but that she had no authority over his. “Ja-ne,” Mom said, drawing out the name to mean, “Let it rest. Everything’s wonderful.” But I agreed with Jane.
Mark Bitar was a tall man with a thin red beard and large brown eyes fringed with stubby eyelashes. He wore white patent-leather shoes that clicked on the asphalt and a pair of hip-hugger jeans that were so tight I could see the outline of his penis. He laughed a lot and Sofia said that he’d spent time in a Swedish Hospitality Institute in Connecticut. “A funny farm, you know.” He made silly jokes and laughed at them and somehow the funny farm made sense. I hated people who laughed at their own jokes. I thought about a story my father had told me about a tall man, so tall his head touched a live electrical wire, the kind up with the telephone wires, and he got electrocuted and died.
In the afternoons, Mark and Anton did therapy in the study and we had to be quiet. Sometimes we’d hear Mark cry. Mostly we heard nothing. I hoped he was discussing why he hated children.
♦
The kids were scattered all over the place, trying to stay out of the way. Mark Bitar and Katherine were hosting a party for Anton. Jane and Caroline were in the kitchen making dinner for us. It was night. A green night. The music was loud. Incense burned. People filled the house. Anton flirted with Katherine, telling her about the dolphin therapist, John Lilly, who spent his life studying the thought patterns of dolphins because he believed we could learn from their placidity and love of sex and life. The outdoor pool was heated up and steam lifted off it. Katherine kept asking for more stories. I saw the silhouette of their arms and hands, fingers pinched together. Nicholas and James were in the pool with the adults. James and Mom and an older man with a deep, drawn-out English/American accent that sounded strange, discussed poetry, quoting poems to each other. They drank champagne. Mom’s eyes were wide and remote. Her nose red. Her arms crossed over her breasts. I could tell she didn’t feel comfortable being naked in front of them. The man with the funny accent said he’d heard about their blow-up at Esalen, said he wanted to hear her version.
“Oh, Lord,” Mom said. “Anton was just being ridiculously jealous over nothing.”
“Marvelous,” the man kept saying. He put his hand on Mom’s shoulder, rubbed a little. “Absolutely marvelous.” And then they continued to talk about poetry.
Bottles of champagne popped open and people milled about the buffet under a blue-and-white striped awning. Oysters and clams. “They’re alive,” Sofia warned and she squirted lemon on them so that I could see them flinch. I didn’t eat them. People dropped their clothes everywhere. I worried that they’d all get mixed up and nobody would find the right ones. Then I laughed at myself for worrying. Then I hoped the clothes would get lost and everyone would have to go home naked. I didn’t want to see any of the naked bodies. I hoped they’d all stay in the steam. I thought about my bruise. Anton asked me all the time if it was better. At first I was honest. Now I lied, still afraid he’d want to look at it again.
On the buffet next to the oysters and clams a heap of tiny mushrooms rested on a silver platter. “They have to be eaten in groups of seven,” Mark Bitar explained, pinching together a bunch of seven and popping them in his mouth. He totally ignored us kids. “For a good high try forty-nine. Seven groups of seven.”
“Were they really naked onstage?” I asked Jane in the kitchen. Her face was red. She was making creamed chipped beef. It had been a long time since we’d had any of that. Caroline cut up parsley. I thought Jane looked beautiful, though her big brown eyes were tired. I felt sorry for her. “You mean in Hair. Yes, Kate,” she said, annoyed. She’d told me they were naked a hundred times already. And so had Nicholas and Caroline and Sofia and Julia.
Anton fed seven mushrooms to Katherine. Mom held seven in the palm of her hand, eating them one by one, standing alone now in the shallow end of the pool. Her big breasts hung like weights from her chest. I watched her and kept thinking about maggots, as if she were slipping maggots between her lips. Mark had said the mushrooms grew in shit and that in the shit there
were little white maggots.
Someone walked around playing a flute. He was followed by another man playing the harmonica. Timothy splashed in a cannon ball into the outdoor pool to make Mark mad. I was so tired.
Everyone was lost in the mist, drifting in it. A woman in a long dress stretched her arm over her back and unzipped her dress and it slithered to the ground and she stood naked with no underclothes. Just high heels. “Dina. Marvelous Dina,” the older man said. Anton drifted over to Dina and they hugged naked, and started talking about his book. I thought of Dad showing up now in his little white VW and I almost started laughing. The candles hissed, sparks flitted. Dad would be mad.
“My father’s coming to get us,” I said to Finny as he marched by.
“No he isn’t.”
“Fuck off.” I paused, thinking of something mean. “When he does you won’t be my little brother anymore.”
“Kate.” Mom floated up to me and wrapped herself in a robe. “Anton’s promised shooting stars.” She clutched my arm and dragged me down to the beach. The ocean was glassy, iridescent, running over our feet. Shells rippled on the sand. Water soaked the hems of my dresses, making them heavy with sand. They smacked against my ankles, chafing the skin.
With her heel Mom dug a hole in the sand. Then she shoved her fingers down her throat and threw up. She wobbled, clinging to me. Spit drooled from her lips as she heaved. The chewed-up mushrooms followed. I held her steady, wiping away the throw-up with the back of my hand. I wanted Jane here. She’d know what to do. I tried to act grown-up like Jane.
“I’m going to get Jane,” I whispered.
“No. No,” she said. “Absolutely no. I can’t bear another fight.” I felt older than Mom, and that scared me. “Just my little Katy.” Houses lined the beach, lit and glowing, in perfect order, warm inside. I could see figures walking around. I didn’t want anyone to see us. Mom threw up again, heaving. From the beach Mark Bitar’s house looked like all the others. “Look at that moon. Just look at how bright it is. It’s a million-kilowatt moon.” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and together we lay down. Her hands crept up my warm stomach. “You’re my baby. This flesh belongs to me,” she said, squeezing my chest.
Bright Angel Time Page 13
