I went downstairs to check out. The clerk handed me a brown paper bag some guy had dropped off early. Hannah hannaH was written in ballpoint pen. He said the guy hadn’t known my last name.
It was Grandma’s box; I’d left it in his car. I opened it to check on the bird. Stroud’s business card was on top of the wrapped body. It was as unsettling as an impenetrable whisper. I could feel his hand putting it in there. I peeked under the card to see the bird’s tiny beak and claws pushing in sharp little points against the orange silk skin, then I closed them in together again.
“Did he leave a note?” I asked.
The guy looked around on the desk and held up a piece of paper. “Just his name and number, said to call if we missed you.”
I went next door and had oatmeal to settle my stomach, then reclaimed Sparky and drove to the funeral home.
The gray-flocked casket had a few sprays of flowers behind it. I hate the smell of dying flowers.
It was the first time I’d seen Grandma dead. Even propped up on the slumber pillow, she barely broke above the rim of her box. She looked especially gaunt. I had to trust it was she. I could see how people who were asked to identify their loved ones could, like my grandmother when she saw my father, deny it. You really have to search for traces of the person you knew. Grandma’s skin looked like thin rubber film stretched over a gray leaden core. They’d added daubs of impossible pink to her cheeks. I knew if I touched her, as I will forever regret doing with my father, she would be hard and stone cold with embalming fluid just under the surface of her fragile skin.
Her dentures were in. I thought she’d hated them in life, so why inflict them on her in death, but I could see why my mother had been so adamant. Her mouth would have looked caved in without them. Her whole body looked caved in. Mom was right about the scarf too; it looked like something on a gay 70s gigolo.
I didn’t have any choice but to take it off her and rearrange it. It was tricky; I’m not a scarf person. And I needed to avoid skin-to-skin contact. I tried to not think about what I was doing, and then I pretended I was at work. Finally I just loved her and told her that I’d had a taste of wild nights and that I hoped she’d have more of her own. I wanted to ask her about it. I could ask her things that I couldn’t ask my mother, but she could only listen.
The funeral director arranged the book, glasses and hands under my supervision. She sent a picture to my mother and aunt while I got out the bird. It reminded me of burying our sweet dog Wags when we were kids. We’d put some dog treats and his favorite stick in the hole to have in heaven. The funeral director lifted the bottom door of the casket. My grandmother’s feet were bare and looked as delicate as a young woman’s. Much better than jammed into tight shoes for all eternity.
It was a gut wrench to see that Bettina had not only retrieved the blanket, but that she’d stopped at the funeral home and folded it under Grandma’s feet. Did she remember Wags? I wondered who knew she’d done it. I gently tucked the weightless bird wrapped in orange silk down in the folds of the blanket. Then I pulled out the bundle of 3x5 cards from the bookstore and tucked those in with the bird; they might help Grandma remember who she was. I closed the door. My work was finally done.
I headed back up the road, past the burned out hills and dairy cows knee-deep in muck. Warm November air, smelling of rancid farm crap and chemicals mixed with smoke and diesel fumes, blew in the open windows.
I wondered if Bettina had always planned on putting the blanket in with Grandma. Why couldn’t she tell me? Was I really such a scold? It always hurt when I discovered their small secrets, the things they all seemed to know but I didn’t. Small secrets don’t feel small when you’re searching for clues and holding your breath while you try to fill the hole under you enough to hold your weight. I wondered if she or Eric had saved something from my father.
Until yesterday, the memory of packing up my father’s things had been buried so deep it might as well have been left to dry out and frost over like a casserole in the neighbor’s freezer. He’d died young. Unlike Grandma, he hadn’t spent years peeling away the unnecessary.
I had walked into the closet with all his suits still hanging in a row, deflated and empty shells. They would never again walk through the kitchen and steal a piece of bacon on the way out the door. They would never slide across my mother’s ass with appreciation when he thought no one was looking. They would never go to a meeting with my teacher, or be hung on the back of his office door when he put on his white doctor’s coat with the swirling blue embroidery, Dr. Spring. They would never again fix the toaster.
He’d used linen handkerchiefs; he said it was more environmental. There was a new box, monogrammed with the letter ‘S’, that I’d given to him. The gift tag was still stuck inside from Christmas morning.
I had used paper grocery bags for his socks and underwear; I didn’t think about it. He had a favorite tee shirt that was full of holes; he loved to wear it when he raked patterns in the gravel around his desert plants. He said it was air-conditioned. It drove my mother crazy that he wore it in the front yard. She thought the neighbors would think we couldn’t afford clothes. I had kept that.
I also kept a small cedar box where he kept his watch, loose change, and the random drawing tickets he always bought from the kids outside the grocery store. He never checked to see if he’d won. I hid the box under my bed until I left home. The inside was unlined. Except for a few scrapes and pen bleeds, it was raw like the day he’d made it in high school shop. His tiny black dress shirt studs and links were mixed in with my jewelry now.
His soft leather flight jacket with patches and pins had disappeared in the post crash confusion. Maybe it was bloody or torn. The plane hadn’t burned or anything; it landed softly in deep snow on the side of a mountain. But he had been injured and had died before they could reach him. Maybe he froze to death. That’s supposed to be painless. Details were unclear; there was no black box in our little Cessna.
He would have loved being buried in that jacket. He wouldn’t have cared about a few holes, but by then my mother had full control over his wardrobe decisions. He was buried in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and nondescript striped tie. It didn’t look anything like a tie he would wear; he was a Dead Head, he loved his collection of crazy ties.
I packed some of it in his suitcases, like he was just going on a trip. The rest I put in trash bags. I didn’t know what else to use. I don’t know what happened to any of it.
I slowed at the Grub ‘n Scrub. Stroud was back in his overalls and bandana looking through his toolbox. I turned in, drove over, and parked. He watched me get out of my car and walk toward him. He glanced over my shoulder at the diner then back at me. I stopped eight feet away.
“I’m not going to embarrass you,” I said.
“Embarrass me?”
“You don’t even know my last name,” I said.
“We didn’t get that far.”
“We got pretty far.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Thanks for leaving her bird,” I said.
“Did your name matter last night?”
“Not then.”
I was not going to add insult to insult by pretending for a second time that I had been tricked into being there last night.
“The bird is with Grandma now,” I said.
“Good place.”
“My sister put a blanket in with her.”
He just nodded, he had no idea what that meant.
“It’s Spring,” I said. “My last name.”
“Okay, Spring.”
“I should go.”
“You have my number,” he said.
“Do you ever get to Los Angeles?”
“Sometimes.”
“I was scared,” I said. “I don’t want to go down those roads. I’m sorry I insulted you.”
“Kinda left field.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t do that,” he said. “So much apologizing.”
>
Rex got up from the shadows. He yawned and stretched out in both directions. The tension must have been getting to him too. He came over and gave my hand a nudge. I stroked his ear. He went back and stood with Stroud. I got in the car and pulled away. I looked in the rear view mirror and could see them watching me go. A semi pulled in and blocked the view as it parked in front of the diner. When the picture was clear again Stroud was gone.
I stopped at a huge farm stand by the side of the road. It felt like step one of re-entry. Working the cash register was a strong looking woman in a thick sweater and bandana. She looked like she’d shucked a lot of corn. I bought a bag of tangerines. I love having a basket of tangerines on the table this time of year. They smell like a promise of warm citrusy days to come.
I turned up my narrow street and parked. I’d scored a dream rental, a small guesthouse on a private lot with a big pool. It had been part of an old movie star’s ranch. The story was that the glamour boys used to ride their horses over, probably with someone else’s wives, and party. It was marooned in the middle of a residential neighborhood, hidden behind an ivy covered grape stake fence that ran along the street. A non-descript gate led to a set of steep uneven brick stairs that hugged the hill down to the house and pool. The pool was large, a simple rectangle.
The house looked bigger than it was. The big 1950s prow-shaped roof looked more South Seas than Los Angeles. It stretched out to form a deep overhang to the south creating a huge covered patio area. Karin and Oscar brought the kids over a lot during the summer. We spent long days cooking burgers and playing Marco Polo, or as her son Richard renamed it, Roger Wilco.
Inside was basically one big room, with a small kitchen retrofitted into what had been a fancy wet bar. The high copper-covered bar top and hanging glassware cabinets screened the view from the rest of the room. The south-facing side was a wall of huge glass doors that slid open to either side of a Swedish fire pit built from stones. The copper hood looked like the Tin Man’s hat. I used it all the time. Finding firewood in Los Angeles was no picnic; I scrounged around every construction site I passed. The flagstone floor ran under the doors, across the patio, and over the edge of the pool. It was totally private. The hillside coming down from the street was planted with jacaranda that put on a mesmerizing display of color.
A luxurious party bathroom, with an oversized shower tiled in a checkerboard pattern of turquoise and cream, adjoined a dressing room. The dressing room could have been a dinky bedroom, but it felt claustrophobic. I’d hung a large Japanese paper ball lantern over the small dining table. I filled a flat basket on the table with the tangerines. It felt good to be back in my cocoon.
Steve was picking me up at seven for dinner. I jumped in the pool and swam laps to get the kinks out. I was getting dressed when the phone rang. Aunt Judith.
“Binky’s upset about the blanket,” she said.
“Still? She got it back. I had no idea she wanted it. I’m rushing, I have a date.”
“A date? Anything with promise?”
“I’ve been dating him for a while. So I guess there’s promise.”
“That’s nice. Is he coming for Christmas? What’s his name?”
“Steve. I doubt it, he’s Jewish.”
“So you’ll be doing Hanukkah now. Well don’t wait too long, you only get three chances.”
“What about Zsa Zsa Gabor?”
I could never resist throwing out Zsa Zsa.
“You’re no Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she said. “She knew what she was doing.”
Two sisters, two rules chiseled in stone. Judith was on her third husband, so in her world you get three chances. Her current husband is nice, though he once told me, rather inappropriately I thought, that he’s into tailbones. His finger had drifted down mine as he said it.
Apparently she hadn’t talked to my mother. My mother said I’d marry a doctor, have three children, and be happy just like she was. We’d seen how great that worked out for Binky.
My parents went out three times in one weekend and he proposed. According to her it was a match made in heaven. She wouldn’t approve of Stroud, but she might relate to the lightning strike aspect.
“You should have gotten the blanket for your sister,” said Aunt Judith. She hung up. Incivility was sweeping the family.
I hated the kernels of truth buried in the nasty remarks they all made; but she was right about Zsa Zsa. I had no idea how women like her thought about men. I had missed the memo about how a smart woman can control any man, one of Judith’s many mantras. Except for the strange side road when I implied a woman in every truck stop with Stroud, I thought of myself as having an uncomplicated approach to men. Judith would say clueless.
The phone rang almost instantly, my brother Eric.
“What did I do to deserve this family, Eric?”
“You’re asking me? The burial is on for Saturday at noon, you good with that?”
“That’s fine. You need me to do anything?”
“No, we’re set. Thanks for handling the poetry and glasses bullshit at the mortuary.”
“No problem. Binky put the blanket in too.”
“And you put in the bird and some paperwork, I heard. It’s a good thing she’d shrunk and left some room.”
“Did you put in something?”
“I didn’t have anything to add. I bought the headstone.”
“Did you keep anything of Dad’s?”
“His watch and logbooks. You still have the box and tee shirt?”
“You know about that?”
“Binky went through your room.”
“Christ, this family. What happened to his jacket?”
“They had to cut it off him.”
“I didn’t know that. What about Binky, did she keep anything?”
“You’ll have to ask her. Anna says hi. We can have lunch when we’re done.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”
“Bye,” he said. “Thanks again.”
Etiquette breakthrough. Eric, Anna and I were the only ones attending the burial. No one wanted to drive all the way to Altadena to see Grandma stashed in the old family plot. Eric had arranged the burial; he wanted to be sure it was done right. I had to rush to get dressed by seven.
Steve let himself in and called hello while I rooted around looking for a pair of shoes. I dropped them by the front door and gave him a welcome kiss.
“Why don’t you pour us a glass of wine while we wait for my mother to call and tell me I’m a childless old maid?”
Steve knew that every foray behind the Orange Curtain, what we called the area south of Los Angeles where my family was holed up, triggered a flurry of phone calls and emails.
“I don’t know why you put up with that shit.” The emphasis was on shit while he pulled the cork.
“Oy, and this from a man with a Jewish mother. Weren’t you supposed to be the doctor I’m supposed to marry?”
“I’m not supposed to marry a Presbyterian, no matter what I do.”
“Ex-Presbyterian and we have a fallen Jew hidden a few generations away. Let’s sleep at your house tonight, your mother will never know.”
Steve was wrapping post-production on a picture on the Warner Brothers lot just down the hill from me. The driving logistics worked out great, a huge consideration in all matters Los Angeles. Relationships, like home values, can hinge on location location location. People can actually be considered geographically undesirable, GUD for short.
Diving into Steve world seemed like a good antidote to Stroud world. They couldn’t be more different. My mind tripped over to drug runner/investment banker. Truck driver/film editor? I smiled; it was worth a shot.
“What are you smiling about?” asked Steve.
“I have no idea. It hasn’t been a forty-eight hours to smile about. Sparky is two months out of warranty.”
I filled him in on all the details except, obviously, anything that involved hiking up my skirt and grinding in the blue jeaned lap of a guy in the boon
docks. I got a jolt just thinking about that, but I took the fact that I was starting to make light of it as a good sign that it might not get added to my black box of shame.
We met Margaret and Ed at our favorite Chinese place on Beverly Blvd. I retold the dentures, dead bird, and 70s gigolo story. Ed and Steve were learning to play golf; they spoke their foreign language. Margaret pressed me to go to India with her. We did effortless work together. We communicated with minimum words, quick sketches, and rudimentary hand waving. The producer was a woman and first-rate, as was the director, who was Indian. It would be a long shoot; they expected to be in India for nine months. Steve’s shoot would only be four months in New Mexico; almost like not leaving home. Maintaining relationships in our business is a problem. Steve wanted me in New Mexico; it had been an ongoing discussion.
We got home to Steve’s hillside lair. The film business is divided into above-the-line and below-the-line people. In shorthand, the above-the-line people live in better neighborhoods, generally west of Laurel Canyon. Steve is above-the-line, so while I parked on the street, he had a garage. His house was hidden on a winding one-lane street. Thick courtyard walls were covered with ivy like mine, but his rustic and faded-turquoise gate was obvious, with big hammered nail details and a pierced metal lantern hanging under the arch. It opened onto a quiet courtyard. His gardener kept the native plantings right on the edge of chaos. A jar fountain burbled just enough to mask the street noise. It was a compact hillside house, like a New York loft in a warm and fuzzy Mediterranean shell.
We went through our brushing and flossing rituals and slid into bed naked. I had some residual Stroud heat and decided it was now or never. I took Steve’s face in my hands and kissed each eye, then guided his hand down between my legs while I watched his face. He was smiling with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. I showed his hand what I wanted. He didn’t get it exactly right, but he was game. The problem was, every time I let go of his hand it wandered off the mark.
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights Page 4
