Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  Then we had to get back because Jazz had to get ready for work. She said we’d look again the next morning. By the time we got back to the hostel, it was too late to do anything about finding the woman named Sasha. I showed Jazz Mama’s paper with the address, and she said Mississippi Street was over in the flats. She said if I wanted to go in the morning, she’d drive me as long as I gave her some money for gas. Then she started getting herself all fixed up for work at Jumbo’s Clown Room. I spent the rest of the evening making trips to the bathroom to see if my moon had come, which it hadn’t. It looked like having Spy’s baby was one more thing I’d have to be facing when I returned to Eden.

  In the morning, as soon as Jazz woke up, we headed over to the flats, which was this other section of L.A., and we found Mississippi Street without taking one wrong turn. There were rows of little houses, one right next to the other, not one of them much bigger than my daddy’s. The number on Mama’s paper was the only one on the entire street that was built of stone. And the front yard was filled with cactus plants, like the person living there couldn’t decide if she wanted to be in California or Texas.

  Jazz asked if she should wait, but I told her no. My stomach was jumping when I pressed the bell. You could hear music blasting inside. An old Billy Joel tune cranked up high. I rang again, holding the button in. Then the door opened and I swear I nearly passed out cold. Standing in front of me was a woman who looked so much like Mama, they could have been sisters. “Yes?” she said.

  I’d practiced what I was going to say, but seeing Mama standing there just robbed me of my voice. Then, like in those cartoon strips, the lightbulb went on above my head and I understood who Sasha was. Mama’d told me that Natalie Wood had had two daughters, one with that awful Robert Wagner and one with another husband. It was clear as crystal I’d landed on the doorstep of one of them. There was no mistaking the resemblance. Same thick black hair and big eyes. She being Natalie’s daughter explained the unlisted phone. Naturally she wouldn’t want strangers calling her up all the time asking her about her famous mother. I couldn’t believe it. Me, Tallie Brock, from Eden, Virginia, actually meeting the daughter of Natalie Wood. I wished I had the Kodak, even if it did make me look like a tourist.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “I’m Tallie,” I blurted.

  She frowned like she was trying to remember if she was supposed to know me.

  “Tallie Brock.” I stuck out my hand for her to shake, but she ignored it. She probably was thinking I was one of those nervy people who buy the maps to movie stars’ homes, then beg for their autographs. Moving quick, before she could shut the door, I dug out the scrap of paper. “This was in my mama’s things,” I said.

  She stared at her name and address written in blue in Mama’s fine writing. “Your mama had this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Her name was Dinah Mae.”

  “I know,” she said. “Dinah Mae Brock.”

  “You knew my mama?”

  She sighed, then looked real irritated. “Did she send you here?”

  “Mama send me? No, I came on my own.” I was still digesting the news that Mama knew one of Natalie’s daughters.

  “How is she?” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Your mama. Who else?”

  “She passed,” I said. “Four years ago. She was real sick.”

  She sighed again, then held the door open. “You better come in.”

  Believe it or not, every single thing inside that house was white. Walls, furniture, even the rugs. I’d never seen anything like it. It was the whitest house I’d ever set foot in. A person’d go crazy trying to keep a place like that clean. It made me nervous to even walk on the floor. A person didn’t need to ask to know there were no children living there. Pets, either. It hardly looked like anyone lived there. Sasha headed directly for the kitchen and though it wasn’t yet noon, she opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of wine. She poured some into two blue glasses—the first speck of color I’d yet seen—and handed one to me. I’d have preferred a beer, but I didn’t want to be rude.

  She nodded toward the paper still clutched in my fingers. “She leave anything besides that?” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” I said.

  She squinted like someone who needed glasses. “Tallie?” she said. “That’s your name, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s short for Natasha.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me. After Natalie Wood. Right?”

  I nodded, embarrassed. Probably I was the millionth person named for her mama.

  “You live in Virginia?” she asked. “Like Dinah Mae?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Eden.”

  “Do you know who I am?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Your mama told you?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just that you look exactly alike.” I figured she probably heard this all the time and wondered if she ever got tired of people telling her this. I wondered if she wanted to be an actress, too, like Natalie.

  She finished her wine and poured another glass. She stared at me like she was waiting for me to say something else, but I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. “She came here, you know,” she said.

  “Mama came here?”

  She nodded. “Four years ago.”

  “Why?”

  She gave this tight little noise that sounded like it was trying to be a laugh, and it made butterflies start up in my stomach.

  “Good question,” she said. “That’s what I asked her. What good does it do to go stirring up ancient history?”

  I couldn’t figure what history she was talking about, then I remembered the picture of Mama standing with Natalie Wood. “You mean about my mama knowing your mama?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I plunged on. “I was wondering ’cause I found this photograph of my mama and she’s standing right next to your mama.”

  She looked at me like she was trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about, then she asked me if I’d run that by her one more time. And when I did, she said, wait a minute, you think I’m Natalie Wood’s daughter.

  “You’re not?” I said. The conversation was getting like a Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the carnival.

  She told me I’d better sit down and have another glass of wine, which is exactly what I did. And that’s when I learned my mama held more secrets than I could have imagined. It took a while for Sasha to tell me the entire story, and by the time she’d finished we’d drunk one bottle of wine and started on another.

  It seemed that Mama hadn’t been able to take Allie Rucker’s baby cure any more than I had. She’d run away from Eden when she was fifteen. She’d come to Hollywood and found a job working in the studio canteen, and when people noticed that she looked exactly like Natalie Wood, she got a job working as a stand-in on the movie Inside Daisy Clover, which explained why Mama knew everything about that movie. When Natalie learned Mama was expecting, she helped her find a home for the baby. The only thing my mama asked was that the baby girl be named Natasha, after Natalie, same as me. There were lots more details, but that was Sasha’s story in a nutshell.

  I had plenty of questions, like why Mama’d returned to Eden and why she never told anyone about working as Natalie’s stand-in, Natalie Wood her idol, but Sasha didn’t have the answers. I figured the two people who could tell me were both gone. Then I was hit with another revelation. “So we’re sisters?” I said.

  She looked at me steady. “The same woman gave birth to us,” she said, “but that doesn’t make us sisters.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Listen, Tallie,” she said. “You seem like a nice girl and I don’t mean this in any cruel way, but I already have a family.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “I have a mother and a father and two younger brothers. I always knew I had a different mother, just like my brothers do, but I never once went looking for the woman who gave me up. I don
’t hold a grudge, but it takes more than an accident of blood to make a family, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” I said, but I didn’t. Here I’d finally found a sister, but before I had five minutes to get used to the idea, she was saying we weren’t kin after all. She must have seen how I felt, because she reached over and I think she was going to give me a hug when we were interrupted. Just when I thought I couldn’t take one more surprise if I lived to be three hundred, the doorbell rang. Sasha went to answer it and when she came back, who was right behind her but my daddy and Martha Lee, come to take me home.

  When I found my voice, I introduced everyone, making explanations, but no one was listening. Daddy was staring at Sasha like he was seeing a ghost, which I guess he was, in a way, her looking like Mama and all. Martha Lee was waving away every word I said. She just wanted to give me a kiss and seemed so happy to see me that for a minute I guess she’d forgotten I was a thief. Sasha was looking like she was getting a headache and kept glancing down at my daddy’s boots and the dirt he was tracking through her all-white house. She didn’t offer anyone any wine. In less than five minutes she had the three of us out the front door. But before I left, she handed me a paper.

  “What’s this?” I said, staring at the number she’d written down.

  “In case you want to call me sometime,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, confused about whether that meant maybe we could be sisters after all.

  “You okay?” Martha Lee said as we headed for my daddy’s truck. I didn’t know if she meant okay because I couldn’t manage to walk a straight line after all that wine, or okay after learning all my mama’s secrets.

  On the way back to the hostel, Martha Lee chatted on and on, talking so it made me even dizzier, talking more than I’d ever heard her. She told me how when she saw the envelope holding the pictures of Mama and Sasha’s address was missing, she figured out where I’d headed, and how it was a good thing she’d remembered the address on that paper or who knew how long before they’d have found me. She told me how my daddy’d been near hysterical when he discovered I’d gone, and how he’d driven all the way across the country to get me, hardly stopping to sleep. I started to tell her I was sorry about taking the money, but she said hell, she didn’t care two sticks about that. I told her I’d make it up to her somehow, and she just gave me a squeeze and told me it wasn’t nothing but money and not to worry. That’s when I noticed she was wearing lipstick, but I was too dizzy from wine and all the surprises to think about it, or add two and two together.

  When I got to the hostel, Jazz didn’t seem the least bit surprised that I was heading back to Virginia. She wished me good luck, and I told her I hoped all her dreams came true, too. “Almost forgot,” she said, and pulled a square of paper out of her pocket. “I don’t know if you still want this.” She’d called around all morning and had found out where Natalie Wood was buried. A cemetery called Westwood Memorial Park, she said. I told her thanks, but said it didn’t matter anymore. Then Martha Lee surprised me by insisting we go anyway. We’d be doing it for Deanie, she said, because she’d never had the chance. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything for a mama who’d kept secrets from me, secrets like a sister, a mama I felt I hardly knew anymore, but Martha Lee wouldn’t be denied on this and, surprise, surprise, surprise, my daddy agreed with her.

  We followed the address Jazz had written down, taking Stoner Street and then going down Olympic, driving round and round, and up and down the street, checking the directions about twenty times. We couldn’t find that cemetery no matter how hard we looked. My daddy said probably the address was wrong. Finally Martha Lee made him stop a postman and he gave us directions. We must have passed by that cemetery a dozen times already, but it was up an alley, so hidden that if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it. It was nothing like that Forest Lawn place or the cemetery behind Paramount. It was a memorial garden and there were no big headstones, just little markers flush with the grass and some benches and walls with places for people’s ashes. There were lots of flowers and it was sweet and peaceful, like it could have been some rich person’s private garden.

  Daddy said he and Martha Lee’d wait in the truck while I found the grave. The man in the office started to tell me where to find Marilyn Monroe because she was there, too, and most people came looking for her, but I said no, I was looking for Natalie Wood. He pointed out this spot beneath a tree that had three big bouquets of flowers and a bench. I crossed over the lawn, walking right by Donna Reed’s grave, an actress who’d played a mama on TV. When I got close, I saw that the flowers weren’t bouquets after all, but potted plants, like little trees or bushes. There was a rose, a gardenia, and an orchid. That’s when I remembered I’d planned on bringing a flower to leave there, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. I sat for a while, grateful for the shade from the tree. Between the sun beating down and all the wine I’d drunk, I wasn’t feeling any too good. The stone on the grave said: Natalie Wood Wagner. Beloved Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother and Friend. Someone had left two pennies there. I sat for a while, staring at the words and reflecting on Natalie and Mama, and considered the amazing coincidence of their looking like twins, and how this fact had changed my mama’s life and how it didn’t take much but a coincidence like that to alter the direction of a person’s life. I thought about some of the things I’d written in my rule book, like how regret was a waste of emotion, and how not one single person lives a perfect life and that dreams were as true as what makes lightning bugs, or silence, or the dust on butterflies’ wings, and how a person should be careful of what she dreamed.

  In a way, it felt like both Mama and Natalie could have been buried beneath that stone, because for sure both of them had been a “Beloved Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother and Friend.” Before I knew it, that hard little chicken bone inside my throat and all the stones that had been growing in my chest just melted away. I was so tired of keeping it all in, I started to cry, shedding every tear I’d been storing up for four years. I just couldn’t stop. Then my daddy was there, holding me tight and saying, let it out, girl, just let it go, let it all go. We sat like that, him holding me and rocking me until I’d gotten rid of every tear.

  When I was all cried out, I was expecting him to tell me we had to get going, that we had a long trip ahead, but he continued to sit there on that stone bench, just like we had all the time in the world.

  After a while, my daddy cleared his throat like he had something important to say. I readied myself for his lecture, which I’d been half expecting since the moment I’d seen him, and I wondered what punishment I could be expecting.

  “Your mama would be proud of you,” he said.

  “She would?” I said, wondering exactly how lying and stealing and running away from home could possibly be the kind of behavior that would make my mama proud.

  Then almost to himself, my daddy said, “My Dinah Mae sure would be proud of her litle girl.”

  I stared right at him. It was the first time since Mama’d passed that my daddy’d said her name aloud. I’d thought for a long time that that meant he’d forgotten about her, but suddenly I knew that he’d never, ever forget Mama. Never. No matter what.

  “I’m proud of you, too,” he said, surprising me.

  “You are?” When were we going to get to the part about how disappointed he was about the stealing and lying?

  He leaned over and picked up a stone from Natalie’s grave and rolled it between his fingers. “You’ve had to put up with a lot, girl,” he said, which was the closest my daddy’d ever come in his life to apologizing.

  It was like somehow, sitting in this cemetery—or maybe it was on that mad-dash, three-day trip across the country to find me—my daddy’d found himself again.

  Something has changed, that was for sure.

  Then Martha Lee was there, too, and that felt right and I thought about what Sasha said about blood not making family and although it’d made me mad when she’d sai
d it, I began to understand what she meant.

  Before we left I plucked one of the roses from the potted rosebush on Natalie’s grave. I didn’t think anyone would mind. I wanted to bring it home and put it on Mama’s grave ’cause I remembered what my Uncle Grayson had said about roses representing love. Mama’d have liked that, ’cause she surely had loved Natalie.

  Then we got in the truck and headed for Eden. We were crossing over into Arizona when I got my moon.

  Tallie’s Book

  Sometimes forgiveness doesn’t have to be earned.

  A person’s job in life is to find and follow her own dream.

  epilogue

  I still have the pictures of me from Glamour Day. I framed the 9 x 12, the one of me in the black satin halter. I can see it from right here where I’m sitting. It continues to remind me of life’s capacity to astound.

  That summer when the Glamour people came to the Kurl I thought I had already exhausted my life’s full measure for surprise. Back then I was only beginning to learn about life and all it holds in store for us, more things than we are capable of imagining, both the good and the bad.