The Diamond Lane

by Karen Karbo

  Tears flooded Mouse’s weary eyes, the side effect of an old memory being freed from its cage. That’s more like it, sniffed The Fiend. Show a little womanly sentimentality.

  When Mouse was very young, someone in Shirl’s women’s club had described Shirl as having olive skin. Mouse thought the lady meant her mother, who was short and oval-shaped, with a smallish head and small feet, and twenty extra pounds that had found a happy home around her waist, looked like an olive. Mouse read up on olives in The Golden Book of Fruits and Vegetables and thought that she and her mother – for Mouse took after Shirl’s side of the family, as the taller, fairer Mimi took after Fitzy’s side – had been grown on gnarly trees in Italy and imported to the United States. It was not the stork who delivered them but the teamsters.

  Mouse laughed out loud at the memory.

  Shirl’s eyes cracked open. She slowly rolled her head upright. “The wife of the caviar czar is gone,” she intoned in a flat voice, like a member from an underground movement delivering a dangerous message in code.

  “Who?” Mouse’s voice was dry. It occurred to her that perhaps she should have talked to Mimi before she came. What was the prognosis? How much damage had the falling ceiling fan done? Her mother had survived the surgery, but what if she was now in some complicated neurological way totally bonkers? She should talk to a doctor is what she should do. She backed toward the door, hoping to escape before her mother recognized her. “I’m sorry,” said Mouse, “I must have the wrong room.”

  “Is that you, Mousie Mouse?” Shirl lifted her head off the pillow, fumbling for her glasses on the metal tray next to her bed. The bandage half-covered her ears, leaving only the red buds of her lobes exposed. She shoved them on anyway. They had large frames and plastic turquoise rims. Her little round nose bore the brunt of balancing them before her eyes.

  “Mom! It’s you!” Mouse stumbled forward. Too eagerly she leaned to kiss her mother’s cheek. She knocked the glasses off her face and onto the linoleum, one earpiece snagged in the stainless steel bedpan tucked half under the bed. “Bloody Christ.” Mouse knelt to retrieve the glasses.

  “Why, Mousie Mouse.”

  “Mouse, Mom, Mouse.” She gritted her teeth, wiped the dripping earpiece on her skirt and handed the glasses back to her mother.

  Shirl pursed her lips. She returned them pointedly to the metal tray.

  “Sorry,” said Mouse. Clumsy! Vulgar! Boorish! “I’m just… I’m so…It’s good to see you.” She wrung her sunburned hands.

  “This boy is British, then?” said Shirl.

  This boy? Mouse wondered. Could her mother really be that disoriented? She decided it was best to ignore the stray remark. “Mom, how are you? How did the surgery go? I came straight from the airport. I haven’t slept in about forty hours. That’s why I look such a mess.”

  “Grubby. Your middle name.”

  “I thought it was more important to see how you were.”

  Shirl sighed, as if the decision Mouse had made was, as always, the wrong one. “I’m dying.” Her head lolled away from Mouse. She stared at the wall for a few seconds, then became interested in a news story on how modern technology has changed the world of artificial limbs.

  “How long?” whispered Mouse.

  “What?” said Shirl. “I had the nurse pick these up for you.” She patted the magazines on her lap.

  “Thank you,” said Mouse. “Thank you.” She sniffed back tears. It was important to be like a rock. The low drone of the jet engines still hummed in her ears. Her bead throbbed.

  “Is he British?”

  “Who?” croaked Mouse. She had come all the way home for this. Somehow she’d thought if she’d made the effort, spent the money, rushed back without a decent night’s sleep or a shower…

  “Is he British?”

  “I don’t know who you mean, Mom.”

  “Your fiancé.”

  “Ralph?” her mother suggested.

  “Who?” Mouse felt as if she’d landed in a bad production of a Harold Pinter play.

  “No, that’s somebody else. Somebody Mimi knows.” Shirl sighed with effort. “I’ll think of it.”

  Mouse took her mother’s hand and held it. She rested her forehead against the side of the cool, clean bed.

  “Tom?” said her mother. “Toby?”

  Mouse quivered with shame. Her shoulders shivered and shook. The globe-trotting, family-deserting, tough-as-nails, hardship documentary filmmaker was unable to control herself while her brave little mother, who was afraid of snails on the sidewalk and driving on the freeway, of shopping after dark (rape and vivisection while walking to the car parked, inevitably, at the end of the lot), of public restrooms (loitering heroin-shooting lesbians hiding in the stalls), of eating shellfish (food poisoning), whitefish (choking), of the possibility of her daughters having boyfriends (sex and pregnancy) or not having boyfriends (no sex and social humiliation), was the picture of calm and strength in the face of death.

  “Now now now,” said Shirl, “it’s only natural. I cried too. Just promise me one thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “You will wear white.”

  “To the, to the –” She couldn’t bring herself to say funeral.

  “And it will be done at a proper church.”

  At that moment the surfer nurse glided in, a tiny paper cup balanced on her palm. She poured Shirl a glass of water from a carafe on her bedside table. “How we doing here?” she chirped.

  “My daughter just returned from, where is it you were?”

  “Kenya,” said Mouse.

  “She doesn’t normally look like an Amway saleswoman. Where did you get that jacket?”

  Mouse combed though her hair with her fingers. The lighting in the hospital room made everything shine with a greenish tinge. Her stomach churned and boiled in the heroic task of digesting three days’ worth of airplane food. Her bones felt like overcooked noodles. She had to sit down, lie down, something.

  She settled for something, which was to doze for a minute or two standing up. Her eyes remained open. An obsequious, guilt-ridden smile hung on her lips.

  “…the date,” the nurse was saying.

  “Maybe sometime in the spring. Although that’s up to the bride and groom. It’s certainly none of my business. April is nice.”

  Shirl and the nurse both turned to look at Mouse. “It is,” she said. She had nothing against April. She had missed something. Who was getting married? Mimi, no doubt. Probably to her best friend’s boyfriend.

  “Well?” said Shirl.

  Mouse looked blank. She was starting to suspect that in her absence the English language had changed.

  “You haven’t discussed it, I take it,” said Shirl.

  “I haven’t even seen her. I told you, I came right here.”

  “Her?”

  “Mimi.”

  “Your Maid of Honor!” said Shirl. “Of course you need to check her schedule. She has been one busy girl since you’ve been hiding out in, where was it? She’s a big talent agent now, some show biz thing, and she’s writing a book. She’s really made something of herself. And you should see all her fellas! Well, you know, she’s always attracted them.”

  “Maid of Honor?” said Mouse. “My Maid of Honor?”

  “You are having a maid of honor,” said Shirl. “You promised.”

  Suddenly Mouse laughed. She had a deep hooting laugh that sounded like an owl being strangled. “Hoog-hoog-hoog-hoog…”

  “I hope you’re not taking this lightly. It does not bode well for the marriage, taking a wedding lightly.”

  “Uh-huhuggg-hugggg-hoog-hoog-hoog-hoog.”

  “Honestly, Mousie Mouse.”

  The nurse, anxious to avoid the crossfire of what she could see was developing into a mother-daughter skirmish, scampered out of the room, promising Shirl the doctor would check in later.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mouse.

  “I hope the groom is more stable than you are.”

&
nbsp; “What groom? You sure you’re not thinking of Mimi?”

  “You’re not getting married?” Tears welled up in her mother’s eyes, then coursed down her crêpey cheeks. She dropped her bandaged head onto her chest and held it in both hands, as though it was a fragile, overripe melon. “Fitzy. I think of Fitzy –”

  “– Mom, please –”

  “– just a day or two before he died we were talking about your wedding.”

  I was nine years old, Mouse wanted to say, how could you be talking about my wedding? She patted her mother’s hand.

  “He was such a good, gentle person, Fitzy. I’m not just saying that because he’s dead. People get revised after they die, their personalities, but he was always a gentle, honest man. Uncouth, but honest.”

  “He was,” said Mouse.

  “How can you remember?”

  “I do,” said Mouse. She blotted the tears from her own eyes with her knuckles.

  “Be careful of that skin under your eyes. Remind me to give you some cream before you go. I have a sample of some of that Estée Lauder Mimi gave me. It’s for women my age, but you look like you could use it. Did you put anything on your skin when you were in…”

  “… Kenya.”

  “I know where you were!” she suddenly yelled. “Don’t treat me like… I have trouble remembering. I was in that Gateau on Melrose, you know, no, you wouldn’t. I ordered and the girl came with the coffee and suddenly I’ve got a tube coming out of my nose and a damned IV and my wrist –” She lifted up her cast, then dropped it back in her lap. “When’s the date? All I ask is it’s after my hair has grown back.”

  “Of course, Mom, of course.”

  MOUSE STOLE A glance at Tony as they stood shivering on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, waiting for yet another cab to come and take them to Mimi’s apartment. He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, like some fair-haired, broken-nosed Maasai warming up for a tribal dance.

  She was dead set against allowing a sense of guilt about leaving her mother and sister to live in Africa or about her mother’s recent brush with death to change her mind about marriage. Anyway, even if she wasn’t dead set against marriage, she was dead set against marrying Tony. She loved him, she supposed, but he was basically Not Her Type. It would make your mother so happy, said The Pink Fiend.

  He was attractive, intelligent. All right. But he was too tall and rangy. He laughed very loud at things that were only marginally funny. He had large, loose joints, and was forever dislocating fingers, even elbows. He was lazy, congenial, uncritical. He was the dancing-on-a-sinking-ship type, whereas she was inclined to discover why the ship was sinking and see if it could be remedied. Give me a brooding Latin, she thought, a hairy, compact, cross-eyed Arab. Give me someone more dangerous, less decent. Tony was that – decent, and an awfully good companion into the bargain.

  She could always call the thing off. Get engaged, then, if she absolutely could not bring herself to go through with it…

  It was eleven o’clock. Hardly the time to broach the subject. They’d been waiting in front of the hospital for fifty minutes. They were freezing. They were jet-lagged and constipated, depressed and cranky. A cold wind blew in off the desert, rustling through a windbreak of eucalyptus trees growing in a vacant lot next door.

  All she had to do was mention the conversation she’d had with her mother. Tony would do the rest. Although this was hardly his style. Standing in front of the Good Samaritan of the Valley, duffel bags leaning against their shins, surrounded by a ragtag assortment of camera gear and an impossibly heavy light kit which they had not sent ahead, for fear it would disappear into the black hole of international shipping.

  Tony was a devotee of the hackneyed flourish. He would require flowers, champagne, proper music. This would hardly do. It was the opposite of a memorable romantic moment. It was one of those horrendous bits of transitory time which, mercifully, our memories generally refuse to have anything to do with. Mouse had to go to the bathroom but was afraid if she scurried back inside the cab would arrive and refuse to wait. She pressed her thighs together and tried to conjure up images of the drought in Sudan.

  No. This was definitely not the time.

  “Do you still want to get married?” she asked.

  “Pardon?” He was daydreaming about the Lakers. He’d read an article about them in the in-flight magazine on the airplane and was wondering how one went about getting season tickets.

  “I think we should get married. If you still want to.”

  “Eow Gawd! M’ girl’s gone off ’er bean.” He did a silly cockney accent at serious moments that drove her crazy.

  “Do you have to do that?”

  “What happened to marriage as a prison without walls?” He dropped the accent. “A method of self-sabotage synonymous with stagnation? You quoted someone. Auden, perhaps? No, Voltaire. ‘Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.’ Am I missing any of your major points?”

  These were the reasons she had refused him before, and he had not forgotten. His ego had taken a drubbing. The first time he had proposed was on the balcony of their hotel during a vacation in the Kenyan seaside town of Malindi. He went to a great deal of trouble to get an ocean view and a bottle of decent wine sent up. Thereafter he’d popped the question when he was drunk and feeling disgusted with himself and looking for an argument.

  Even though Mouse insisted she loved him, he didn’t believe her. He didn’t believe that any normal woman in love could resist marriage, even if it wasn’t in her own best interest. Which left two disturbing options: either Mouse wasn’t normal or she wasn’t in love.

  “You can’t just say yes or no, can you?”

  “Considering our history, I certainly think I’m entitled to whip you a hefty rasher of shit.”

  “You mean considering the number of Peace Corps girls and embassy wives you passed up in the interest of fidelity.”

  “I didn’t pass up so many.”

  Mouse looked into his face, just to double-check that he was teasing. “So all that graffiti I read about you on the ladies’ room walls of East Africa was true.”

  “Quite. Give you a demonstration on our honeymoon.”

  “Our honeymoon.” Mouse tried not to cringe at the thought.

  6.

  NINE O’CLOCK CAME AND NO MOUSE. TEN O’CLOCK. TEN-THIRTY. Mimi was beginning to worry. What if their plane had crashed? What if they’d been taken hostage? If it would happen to anyone it would happen to a FitzHenry. If the plane was simply delayed and Mouse had not called, she would be pissed.

  The Bibliothèques struggled to discuss the book for an hour, then gave up. Elaine left, off to Dallas the next morning for a car-FAX-machine convention. Luke and Marty begged off too. The rest of the women migrated to the kitchen to slouch against the counter, finish the wine, complain about men and the business. The men turned on the World Series, forgetting everything. Then Mouse and Tony arrived.

  Mimi thought Mouse looked terrible. She’d expected someone tan and fit in a safari suit with big shoulder pads and a cinched waist, not this broom with teeth.

  “Mouse! You look great. You still look nineteen.” Her eyes looked great, anyway, light as green glass next to her sunfried skin. And that weirdly sexy cleft chin. Mimi suddenly understood a law of beauty: all you needed was one exotic feature. Mouse had two, the eyes and the chin. Everything else about her was plain and parched. She had the look of someone who’d been camping out for the last sixteen years. She was wearing some Mom Outfit even Shirl wouldn’t be seen in. A-line skirt, pumps, a blouse. A brown-and-beige blazer with food stains on it. Mouse was still a dolt when it came to normal girl stuff, which only made Mimi happier to see her. Who said travel changed you? Mousie Mouse hadn’t changed a bit. Mimi tried to imagine her in a wedding dress and couldn’t.

  “Sorry we’re late, we went right to the hospital. Mom seems to be doing okay.”

  “She’s fine now. It’s the aftereffects you got to wo
rry about.”

  Mouse put down her duffel bag and camera. They hugged. Mimi could feel Mouse’s bones through the back of her blazer. Bird bones. She was too thin. Mimi felt proud of herself for thinking someone was too thin. That proved she did not have an eating disorder. Mimi felt that if she wanted to she could pick Mouse up with one hand and wave her over her head. “You’re so skinny. You really do look great.”

  “You do too. You’re a blond.”

  “I have a great haircutter guy now!” cried Mimi, releasing Mouse to wildly scrunch her stiff blond curls. “I used to go to this woman who was great until she permed me. I looked like I’d been electrocuted. My new guy cuts my hair on the front lawn of his house. Sometimes the neighbors come and watch. It’s cheaper at his house than at the salon. I’ll have to give you his name.” Over Mouse’s shoulder Mimi peeked at the future husband-boyfriend-fiancé. He stood to one side politely, a suitcase dangling at the end of each long, freckled arm.

  Mimi was an expert on men, especially the kind like Ralph who grew on you. Men whose weak chins you could ignore because they had nice eyes. Men whose funny jokes could be loved instead of a good bone structure. Men who were plain old nice, who had a couple of okay features which always seemed more than okay when there was no one else. Ugly men whose power or wealth made up for everything. Men you needed to know to find attractive.

  This guy was none of these men. He was the type whose careless glance made you feel as if you were standing on your head while riding an express elevator to the top floor of a building during an earthquake.

  At the sound of the doorbell Lisa and Carole had drifted back into the living room, curious about Mimi’s little sister, and about what type of man was to he found roaming around East Africa. Now she noticed them discreetly rearranging themselves, leaning at more alluring angles against the doorjambs. Mouse had lucked out. Unless, of course, Tony turned out to be a serial killer or an aspiring director. Mimi wasn’t sure which would be worse.

  “Where should I deposit these?” he asked.

  “You’re English!” Mimi cried.