by Karen Karbo
Shirl’s great fear in life was not that Mimi would be an unwed mother but that Mouse would die a virgin. She gave Mouse books like How to Get a Teenage Boy and What to Do with Him Once You Get Him. She took her to Dr. Roy, her gynecologist, where Mouse was fitted for a diaphragm. She bought Mouse Maybelline Blooming Colors Eye Shadow. Frustrated when none of these more subtle tactics worked, she exhorted Mouse to be more like Mimi.
“Use your eyes more,” Shirl had said.
It was the spring before Ivan. Mouse was skimming dead slivers of eucalyptus bark from the surface of the Lagoon, the FitzHenrys’ faux-mountain lake swimming pool. It was a wide, irregular oval trimmed with flat rocks: black, slate gray, ocher, brick. The shallow end was shaded by trees, and it had a real waterfall, which Fitzy, when he was alive, had turned on every morning, whether or not anyone was home.
Shirl sat at the patio table drinking a beer, streaking through a crossword puzzle.
Mouse was silent. She plucked bits of bark from the wire mesh of the skimmer. She didn’t understand. She did use her eyes. Hadn’t Mr. Larue, track coach and English teacher, commented that even though Mouse’s spelling was atrocious, she never missed a detail? Wasn’t she only one of five members in the Citrus High Bird Watching Club? Didn’t she always find the everyday objects hidden in the jungle illustration in the Highlights magazine in the dentist’s office? If anything, she overused her eyes. What was Shirl talking about?
What she was talking about was eye contact. “Flutter your eyelashes, for God’s sake,” said Shirl. “Find a boy you like, isn’t there any boy you like? Once you’ve got his attention look down, act demure. Can’t you act demure? I can’t believe I have to explain these things to you. You knew where babies came from when you were four and a half, and I have to explain about using your eyes. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Babies are biology, Mouse wanted to say. This other business is goofy.
But Shirl’s Mousie Mouse was nothing if not obedient. She did, in fact, have a painful crush on Kent Charpentier, row monitor in French IV and water polo champion. He sat in front of her. The sight of the back of his square head of shiny, blond-green hair made her feel as if she was suffocating. In class the next day when he turned to pass a quiz back to her, she stared at him, alternately fluttering her eyes – maybe she was rolling them, she couldn’t quite get the hang of it – and looking down. Finally, unnerved, Kent raised his hand and said, “Madame Robertson, C’est Mouse. Elle a un epileptic fit, je pense.”
Shirl gave up. Her youngest was simply an ignoramus in the ways of men. Femme fatality was not in her blood.
Then, literally out of nowhere – in Shirl’s opinion, a summer school class called Beginning Super 8mm was about as nowhere as you could get – there was a boy. Ivan Esparza. Half communist, so she could forgive the other half. (Shirl liked the communists, her name for everyone east of the Iron Curtain, better than the lazy Mexicans, who never cut the lawn short enough.) And he was polite. He called on the telephone. Mouse! It’s for you! He called at all hours. Tying up the line. Arranging meetings. Meals. Outings. It was a boy! A boy for Mouse!
Ivan came to the house almost every day. Parking in the driveway in his blue Camaro, radio blasting, as it should when you’re young and have lots of hearing still to ruin. Leaving suntan oil-stained towels in a heap by the swimming pool on a blistering smog-swollen July afternoon. Sprawling in the den in Fitzy’s old Barcalounger – Mouse in a neat cross-legged sit on the floor, Shirl on the couch – an iced tea balanced on his knee, watching Haldeman and Ehrlichman grin, fume, and lie. Shirl religiously left the room during commercial breaks to fetch her favorite dry-as-dust bakery-outlet sandwich cookies, hoping, upon her return, to find her Mouse in mid-makeout with her new boyfriend. Unfortunately, often as not she returned to find them talking camera angles.
Mimi, who was between men that summer (at nineteen she had already made the switch from boys or guys) and living miserably at home to save money, told Shirl that Ivan was just Mouse’s classmate and friend. Shirl refused to believe it.
“No boy pays this much attention to a friend,” sputtered Shirl.
There were other disquieting signs, however, that Shirl preferred to ignore.
When Mouse talked to Ivan on the phone she didn’t lie sprawled on her bed weaving the phone cord in and out of her toes, as Mimi did, wheedling, whispering, and giggling. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table, elbows parked on a yellow legal pad, debating the latest installment of the Watergate hearings or their class film projects. She didn’t demand privacy or new clothes. Shirl never caught her watching herself walk as she passed a mirror or plate glass window. She didn’t attempt to even up her tan – she sported a half dozen different tan lines from three different bathing suits. She didn’t pine, moon, or blush when Shirl and Mimi teased her.
One Saturday, while Shirl was out shopping for a new washer and dryer, Mouse was out by the Lagoon, storyboarding a scene for her and Ivan’s third class project. Every team in Beginning Super 8mm was required to make four five-minute Super 8 films, the last two with sound. Mouse was directing and shooting this one. It was about a girl who invites her mother and sister over to a barbecue and poisons them by roasting their hot dogs over the grill with oleander branches. Ivan was rolling sound and editing. His sisters had been cast as Shirl and Mimi. The Pink Fiend, already flourishing in Mouse’s adolescent psyche, had prevented Mouse from asking Shirl and Mimi to play themselves.
Mouse paced from the diving board to the waterfall, her index finger laid along the cleft of her chin in thought. She was wondering whether one of them should fall off the patio chair and into the pool for her death scene. Too hard to control. Then again, Mouse thought, if one of them cracked her head open she could turn it into a documentary on poolside safety.
“Mom thinks you and Ivan are Doing It,” said Mimi, who was sporadically weeding the lawn (her job; Mouse took care of the pool) in between stabs at topless sunbathing.
“Doing what?”
“I told Mom it was a just-friends type of deal. You know how she is, always snoopy about our boyfriends.”
Mouse continued to pace, stopping occasionally to scribble in her notebook. She knew, as she had known for years, that it was very simple to have a conversation with Mimi without ever saying a word, In fact, Mimi preferred it that way.
And where Ivan was concerned… Ivan!… just silently saying his name made her internal organs sizzle.
Yes, she loved Ivan. But it was terrifying, not fun, like Shirl and Mimi had promised. In the course of one slim day she’d want to strangle him, kiss him until she choked, forget she ever knew him, sleep at the end of his bed curled up like a dog for the rest of her life. And deep down she knew that however it turned out, the thought of him would be with her forever. He might go away, but his memory wouldn’t. It would be like a glob of accidentally swallowed bubble gum that would stick to her ribs until ants carted it away while trekking through her coffin-encased remains.
There had been no dates, no flowers, none of the regular do-si-do that led to sex, then disillusionment. It should have been that way. It would have been easier. Instead, Mouse and Ivan’s feelings were akin to those which soldiers who’d shared the same trench had for one another. There was respect, camaraderie, the sense that each had seen the other at his best and worst.
In this case, the trench was Beginning Super 8mm. When Ivan and Mouse hardly knew one another they were showing up at each other’s doorsteps at 5:00 a.m. for a sunrise shoot; turning Mouse’s bedroom into a set, once using her underwear for a prop; doing the coffee-No Doz two-step to stay awake while editing or completing the sound track.
“I mean, Ivan is really a fox. Man, those eyes! But he’s too intense. A bean James Dean. Hey, that rhymes!” Mimi stood, chucking three clumps of weeds over the fence into the Rosenthals’ yard next door. She wiped at her grass-imprinted knees, slunk over to the chaise where she arranged herself languorously. She untied her bikini top, rubbed her
breasts with baby oil. She eased herself down, then laid a quarter on each flat rosy nipple, a trick she had learned to prevent sunburn her first year at Cal State Northridge.
“He is not a bean,” said Mouse.
“I know,” said Mimi.
“Then why’d you say it, if you knew?”
“You are so fucking sensitive. Maybe you’re sleeping with him. Men are only after one thing anyway, that’s what Mom says.”
Mouse was intrigued. “What thing?” She thought it was probably money.
“You know,” said Mimi. “At least all the men I know want it from me”
No, it couldn’t be money.
“Money?” said Mouse.
“Sex, dummy! You are such a retard. Smart about the dumb things and dumb about the smart things, that’s what Mom says.”
Mouse had gone back to blocking out her scene, thinking Mimi must have it confused. Sex was the thing Shirl wanted for her, not Ivan. Ivan wanted someone to go with him to Italian neo-realist movies on Saturday afternoons. Now, trying to get comfortable on the lumpy futon, Mouse’s lips curled up at the thought of her eighteen-year-old self struggling with what it was that all men were after. She still wasn’t sure she knew. Sex scratched the itch of instinct, but certainly men were more complex than that.
Tony rolled toward her, crept his long arm under her neck. “You’re not still bloody awake, are you?”
“What do all men want?” Mouse whispered.
“What?”
“What do all men want?”
“A three-picture deal, I should think.”
7.
ONE DAY WHILE MOUSE AND MIMI WERE RUNNING ERRANDS, Mouse decided she wanted to drive by the on-ramp where Fitzy was killed. It was smoggy and overcast, the sky like cold dishwater whose bubbles had gone flat. She bought a plastic tube of carnations from a boy selling them on the median. She wanted red, but all he had was blue. She wanted to leave them on the curb, at the exact spot where Fitzy’s head had struck the pavement.
Mimi argued for the middle of the ramp. The middle of the ramp symbolized, in Mimi’s opinion, the entire event. She said Mouse was too stuck on the specific. Mouse said she was the one who bought the flowers. Mimi said it was a silly idea anyway. They should just go to the grave, or to Fitzy’s. Shirl had recently sold it to Abde, a knockout Persian with big brown eyes like Sniffy Voyeur’s. Mimi said they should go before he started serving kabobs and souvlaki along with the Guinness.
Mimi turned right onto the ramp and stopped.
“You could have pulled over,” said Mouse.
“Just do it already,” said Mimi. The line of cars behind them was a block long, growing longer by the minute.
Mouse hurried across the ramp. Where there should have been sidewalk was a strip of dirt, rock hard, an intimation of what Los Angeles would have been like without the miracle of irrigation. She knelt by the curb, partially overgrown with parched blond weeds. She couldn’t help but scour it for old bloodstains and clues. Even though she was having trouble remembering what Fitzy looked like, she still sometimes wondered about his last thoughts. How long did he suffer? What if he hadn’t picked up the earring? It had been twenty-six years. The curb, as mute now as it was twenty-six hours after the accident, twenty-six minutes, wasn’t saying. Still, she had to look.
Horns blared behind Mimi’s Datsun. “Move it, bitch!” a man in a hairnet hollered over his ear-splitting sound system. Mouse could feel waves of music pounding against her back as she laid the plastic tube among the snarl of weeds and litter.
Back in the car, they zipped up the diamond lane, passing the line of disgruntled drivers waiting to merge.
“I love having you home. I finally get to be a car pool.”
Mimi had taken a mental-health day off from work. There was not enough time on weekends to write her blockbuster, clean the apartment, read the book for Bibliothèques, and get all her errands done. Plus, even though Mouse had been back over a month, that night Mimi was cooking her a welcome-home dinner.
It was no secret that in L.A. you could make a career out of running errands. What would take twenty minutes in an average town took an hour and a half here. Today Mimi and Mouse had spent two hours and a quarter-tank of gas in search of a can of Solo Poppy Seed Filling for Mimi’s famous lemon poppyseed cake.
She didn’t mind, though. In the car, driving, she and Mouse had a chance to catch up. There were times when they didn’t even turn on the radio. It was good, talking in the car, especially in traffic. You were like people stuck in a cabin during a snowstorm with no books, no TV or jigsaw puzzles or games. You had to talk, there was no way around it. It was cozy.
During the week Mimi hadn’t seen much of Mouse, who was busy trying to set up screenings for her documentaries.
When Mimi worked, Mouse took the bus. No one in L.A. took the bus if they could help it. The poor, the blind, the foreign took the bus. The demented took the bus. Mouse took the bus. She liked it. It was cheap, and you got an all-important glimpse of how the average man lived. Tony, on the other hand, happily borrowed Mimi’s car. He dropped her at Talent and Artists in the morning, then picked her up at night. Tony had bought a Walkman. He had discovered the Venice Beach Boardwalk. He had made friends with Mimi’s boyfriend, Ralph.
If Mouse’s destination was within five miles, she walked, a plastic 7-Up bottle retrieved from Mimi’s garbage full of tap water, half a sandwich wrapped in a recycled swatch of crinkled aluminum foil stowed on her back in a knapsack. She claimed that true knowledge of a place could be gained only through the soles of one’s feet. Twice in one day she was stopped by the police. What, they wanted to know, was she doing? Walking, she said. They remained suspicious.
Mimi was suspicious, too. She was beginning to realize that half a lifetime spent making documentaries in Africa had turned Mouse eccentric. She wondered – sometimes to herself, sometimes aloud to Carole or one of the drudges at work – what Tony saw in her. Besides, of course, the dreary obvious: small hips, big boobs. Those light eyes and cleft chin. That aloofness. She seemed to take Tony for granted and he loved it.
Mouse was not really interested in L.A., to Mimi’s lasting irritation. Lepers and cannibals her sister was hot for, but point out a good health club or the salon with the cleanest tanning beds and her eyes glazed over. Mouse needed to relearn Los Angeles for one reason and for one reason only: so she could find her way to some film society at a sleepy junior college in Glendale, or the Kenyan consulate located somewhere on Wilshire Boulevard, or the struggling theater that showed only art films in Los Feliz, the Society for the Preservation of African Customs in America somewhere in Inglewood, the Southern Californian Animists League on Cahuenga – which smartypants Mouse, despite her smattering of French and Swahili and a number of tribal dialects, kept mispronouncing Ca-hew-ga instead of Ca-wheng-a – any and all places, however obscure, which would be interested in giving her a screening. She’d spent hours spread out on the living room floor, assembling packets of videotapes, still photographs, résumés, clippings from reviews, days on the un-airconditioned bus, going to the copy shop, the photo developers, the film lab.
Despite the knowledge she had gained through the soles of her feet, Mouse kept getting lost. With the exception of the film lab, which was in a graffiti-covered warehouse on a boiling, treeless street in Hollywood, everything else she needed was in a minimall. They all looked alike to her. Once she passed the copy shop where she’d left her clippings and résumés, then demanded to see the manager at a similar-looking shop one block down, certain they’d lost her order.
Finally, after she’d assembled the packets, made the correct-sized videotape for the people allegedly interested in screening the films, ridden the bus for an hour and a half to deliver the material in person, they always said no.
Once, by the time she had taken the bus back to Mimi’s apartment, there was already a message on the answering machine.
Sorry, the voice told her, but there was really no inte
rest in Africa, unless it was South Africa, or a rock group putting on a concert to send wheat to people who were starving. Did Mouse and Tony have anything like that?
The best, the voice continued, would be a full-blown concert featuring many rock stars for South African famine relief. The best would be anything with lots of images of bony black children, tin cups dangling from their clawlike hands, or exploited black diamond miners intercut with images of fat white Afrikaaners in madras slacks lawn bowling, over which was laid an anthemlike rock hymn. Anything like that? Anything at all?
People are starving in Mozambique, said Mouse, returning the call. They’re starving in Rwanda.
But no one’s heard of Mozambique, the voice countered. And who was Wanda? Hopefully no relation of Winnie Mandela, because the market for Winnie Mandela had most certainly dried up. Now, Ethiopia. Ethiopia was a possibility. Mouse said no. They had no starving Ethiopians, no rock stars. Nothing like that.
After this particular rejection, when she went back to retrieve her material, she realized, looking through the plastic window of the tape, the guy hadn’t bothered to rewind it, and that he’d watched only two minutes’ worth.
Sometimes, as she was leaving the film institute, the university, or junior college, they felt sorry for her. Here was this painfully suntanned, painfully earnest woman, dressed in raggedy flares (Flares! Mimi could not believe her eyes. They had been Mouse’s favorite pants in high school), hauling around an African laundry basket-like purse that smelled of camel, a raft of impossible-sounding documentaries on her résumé.
Documentaries on tropical diseases, singing bats and African killer bees, tiny little-known tribes whose ancestral homes were at the bottom of narrow caves, the tops of remote mountains, expatriate hot-air-balloon enthusiasts who practiced their sport high over the Sahara, Berber rockclimbing clubs that scaled the chilling peaks of the high Atlas in sandals and djellabas. Documentaries which, when you happened to catch them on some obscure cable channel at an ungodly hour, you thought, “This stuff is incredible, but where in God’s name was the camera?”
