by Molly Giles
“Where?” Kay repeated, bending to tighten her laces. “What restaurant?”
“I don’t know. Where do you two go?”
“We don’t.”
“His office is only how close to the library and you don’t go to lunch with him? Kay! I had lunch with my father every week when I lived back East, and once a month we went to the movies.”
“He liked you,” Kay said. “My dad doesn’t like me.”
“You ought to get to know him, Kay.”
“There’s nothing to know,” Kay said. “And anyway, every time I try …” Her voice trailed away. Had she ever had a real talk with Francis? She couldn’t remember one. In fact, she couldn’t remember a single pleasant exchange. Had he ever even touched her? Well yes—Indian wrist burns, Dutch rubs, knuckle raps. He used to flick her with a tea towel when she did the dishes. When she kissed him he squinched his lips up. When she told him she loved him, he said, “Ditto.”
“You ought to get to know him,” Zabeth repeated. “Before your mother dies.”
“My mother is not going to die.”
Zabeth touched her shoulder and looked her in the eye. What bloodshot little eyes she had, inside all that kohl. “Are you all right with this, Kay? It’s just a lunch.”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” But Zabeth didn’t answer this very good question, nor did she invite Kay to join them on Thursday. Instead, she squeezed her shoulder again, hard, waved goodbye, and drove away. Alone in her own car, Kay groped through the glove compartment for the emergency aspirin; when she couldn’t find it, she emptied the entire contents of the glove compartment onto the floor. That felt good. As she sat up, her elbow grazed the stack of Chopin tapes and she knocked them off the seat with a swift smack. That felt good too. Then she shoved the library books onto the tapes. Then all the empty cardboard and Styrofoam fast food containers. Then she pounded the steering wheel with her fists and that felt good too. But not good enough. Her head was throbbing and crazy words were going through her head, like He’s my father. Mine. You can’t have him!—and what sense did those make? She punched the leather seat beside her three times, four times, felt the car flood with yellow light as the sun finally broke through the morning mist, then almost immediately darken as a shadow fell over her hand. She glared and looked up.
Charles Lichtman, leaning on his bike, smiled in at her. She gasped in horror. All she could focus on was the bandanna tied around his dark curly hair; it was the same rosy pink as his full lower lip. “You all right?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” she mouthed. “Fine. Just. You know. Throwing a fit.”
His eyes, brown as syrup, poured over the mess inside the car and returned to her hot face. “Good luck,” he said. He waved and rode away.
She could not stop shaking all the way to the Frederickses’ house. The image of Charles Lichtman bicycling away trembled before her eyes. How long had he watched her tearing the car apart? Had he noticed that the library books she had tried to karate chop were the same books he had just returned? Was he wondering, even now, what interest she had in Van Gogh’s letters, John Wesley Powell’s trip down the Colorado River, or Japanese joinery? Did he know she had only taken those books hoping to find some note or message from him tucked between the pages? Did he think she was insane? Was she insane? She eyed a bar sitting sunny and silent on Main Street: the White Oak. Not open. Too bad. Not that she would go to a bar on a Sunday morning, alone, when she was supposed to be at rehearsal—it was just an idea. For a minute, imagining what it might be like: the boozy secret dark, the long mirror, the candy-colored lights of the jukebox in the corner, a good idea, yes. But not one she would ever pursue. She had never gone to a bar alone. She wasn’t like Zabeth.
Zabeth! Those little red eyes! He could have any woman he wanted. And what about that LSD? What kind of present was that? Dad ought to know better, Kay thought, her lips pressed together. He ought to be ashamed. What does he think he’s doing? The old fool. And Mom. Poor helpless Mom. Oh where was that card with Dr. Tamar’s number on it? Who would trust anyone named Dr. Tamar?
The Frederickses lived in a large tract house at the edge of town, near the freeway, and the other musicians had already arrived by the time Kay drove up. She could hear Walt’s voice as she hurried up the walkway; he was well into his weekly pep talk.
“You know what a genius is?” Kay let herself in the front door and glanced around at the others, ducking her head in apology at being late. Walt sat on his yellow velvet pillow in the center of the living room floor in lotus position, warming his tiny fat hands around a teapot. “A genius is someone who dares. Haydn dared to compose great music and we dare to play it. So what does that make us?”
He twinkled at Lois Hayes, who said, “Excuse me, Walt, but I have to be back in an hour.”
“Of course. Of course. We all have places to go and people to meet and things to do. And why is that? Barry?”
Barry Morris, a volunteer fireman who played the cello, looked at his diver’s watch and said, “I don’t even have an hour.”
“No of course not, you’re busy, we’re all busy, we’re involved with life and we’re involved with life because we dare to be. Isn’t that right? Zipper?”
Walt’s son Zipper ran his hand over his shaved head and said, “Sure. I guess.” Zipper was seventeen and the most balanced of the group—Lois looked wild-eyed already, bouncing her viola case against her knee, and Barbara Billings, who clerked at the shoe store, was making little cluck-cluck sounds to herself, bird calls maybe. “Remember what Haydn said,” Walt continued. He closed his eyes. His face was cheeky as a toddler’s. His tongue flicked between his plump lips. “‘God will forgive me,’” he quoted, “‘for having a cheerful heart.’” His wife came to the doorway; she wiped her hands on her apron and peered around the room, making sure everyone was paying attention to Walt, then she stepped forward, knelt as before an altar, whisked his teapot away, and left.
“Geniuses,” Walt breathed, opening his eyes and clapping his hands, “have cheerful hearts. So let us commence.”
Everyone reached for their instruments with relief. Kay, shaking her wrists out, walked across the room toward the piano. Walt, still on the floor, feinted for her ankles but she sidestepped him, smiling thinly. Every week he made the same pun about her jogging shoes, called them ReBachs instead of Reboks; today he sang a bar of “O Sole Mio” as she tugged them out of his grasp. She pulled out the piano bench, sat down, and opened her music.
She had not practiced regularly this week and she could hear the rushes, fakes, and sloppy phrasing as she began the first movement of the Haydn. She wondered if Walt could hear them too. She glanced up from the keyboard, expecting censure, but he was bent over his violin, intent, eyes closed. She refocused on the music, trying to force a cheerful heart. The Haydn bored her, though, so vigorous and busy; it just made her more tired than she already was. She enjoyed the second movement more, but still could not concentrate. She finished playing and looked up. “I need a lot of work,” she said. No one contradicted her.
The third movement was a nightmare. Lois hissed to herself over her viola, Barbara’s timing was off, Barry flubbed bar after bar, and Walt had to stop playing to rub his wrists, which were swelling with bursitis. Only Zipper, eyes open, fixed on nothing, played well, and he stopped when he saw them all watching and dropped the flute from his lips, a smile becalmed on his face. Walt called, somewhat mechanically, “Bravo, bravo! Now on to the Chopin.”
Kay sat still on the piano bench as the others disbanded. Don’t be nervous, she told herself. Don’t think about your mother, your father, your friend, or your husband. Don’t think about Charles Lichtman. Don’t think about anything but the music. She hit the first notes and was startled when Walt’s “Lovely, lovely” brought her back to the present. She had played the whole piece the way she so often drove, in a dream, head down, flying through blackout. Now as she lifted her hands off the keyboard Walt planted a wet kiss on her for
ehead. “I don’t deserve it,” she warned him.
“You can tell she’s not used to praise,” Walt said to the others. And that at least was true. She was not used to praise.
Four
“Oh no.” Neal stood in his wrinkled shirt cradling a jar of beet juice against his heart as he stared at the tumble of tapes and books spilled onto the floor of the Lincoln. “A thief broke into your car.”
“Not exactly.”
“You got rear-ended?”
“I did it myself. I had a tantrum.” Kay opened the back door of the car for Nicky, watched while he fastened his seat belt, and then carefully set the peach pie down on his lap. “Sure you want to hold this?” she asked. “Yes,” he whispered back. She closed his door and straightened. The smoky autumn night had an edge of cold to the air. Neal stood backlit by the pistachio tree that still held sunset color in its leaves. His face sagged, tragic, rumpled with grief. She felt a throb of alarm. Something was wrong with Neal, something she ought to know about and fix. Sighing, he bent and began to pick Chopin tapes off the floor of her car. She wondered if he’d ask why she’d had a tantrum, if he’d show any curiosity at all, but all he said was “Oh babe,” in that same tearful voice, as if he knew far too much already.
She opened the passenger door, cleared a space, and eased the pot of boeuf bourguignon onto the floor so she could clamp it steady between her feet as Neal drove. The mandarin collar of the brown brocade dress her parents had brought her from Hong Kong bit at her neck as she pulled on the seat belt. “At least when I lose my temper I don’t hold it in,” she said. “I act out.” As if that were anything to be proud of. As if that were even true. She turned and stared out the window.
“I just wish you were happier,” Neal said, and then, to Nicky, in the same funereal voice, “All right, son? Ready to face your mother’s family?”
“It’s his family too,” Kay said.
Neal said nothing. Kay watched the junky, comfortable, tree-shaded clutter of their neighborhood empty into the half-deserted downtown of West Valley, then thin and disappear into the freeway. She wished she could show Nicky what this county had looked like when she was a girl. She could still see the fields of live oaks and lupine where the strip malls were now. She could remember how she and Victor had tobogganed on flattened cardboard boxes down grassy hills now terraced with condominiums. The orchards had been torn down for tract homes; the duck pond had been filled in with concrete and turned into a strange buzzing enclave of radio transmitters, the meadows had been bulldozed for uneasy-looking hotels and office buildings. The new cinema complex floated in glassy splendor on what once had been—and surely would be again—marshland, and Manzanita Heights, which Francis had designed and developed on the east side of the mountain, rose confidently over a lava bed. There were still a few reminders of the old county: the library where she worked still nestled beneath an ancient acacia tree; Le Petit Jardin still sent rich winey smells to the streets of Rancho Valdez over its gated brick walls; the community college where Ida took class after class was still an oasis of white paths winding through clipped green lawns.
Neal’s hand reached for hers across the front seat and she pressed it, grateful, but then his finger probed the place she had burned on her thumb while browning those little pearl onions Victor liked so much and she winced as he rubbed it back and forth. Neal doesn’t know, she reminded herself. It’s just a gift he has. “Honey,” she said, “that hurts.” Neal withdrew, his profile no more stricken than it had been all day. Some people have a secret life, she thought. Neal has a secret death. “Do you think my father has a mistress?” she asked.
“Your mother’s his mistress,” Neal answered. “She runs him ragged.”
“Um. So that’s what mistresses do. I always thought some black lace was involved.” She waited a minute, then, “Zabeth would make a good mistress, wouldn’t she? Don’t you think Zabeth’s attractive?”
“Who’s Zabeth?”
“Help.”
Neal was silent for a while then, “You’ll be good?” He frowned as the old car coughed in its climb to the Heights. “None of your tricks?”
“What tricks?”
“Smoking,” Nicky said from the back seat.
“You don’t smoke anymore, do you?” Neal glanced at her, astonished.
Kay thought of the battered Merit she was about to slip back unsmoked into Ida’s purse and said, “No.” She reached back through a crack in the seat and grabbed for Nicky’s knee; he giggled and hollered, “Yes she does.”
Neal, intent on driving, ignored them. “I was thinking more of the way you upset her,” he said after a while.
“I? Upset her?”
“Just watch what you say. Every time we leave, Ida’s in tears.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Grandmère cries over everything,” Nicky agreed. “Once she even cried when my Go-Bot got broken.”
Kay remembered the Go-Bot, Nicky’s favorite plastic superhero toy, the way its jointed leg had snapped off at the knee when Victor got excited at dinner one night and bent it too far back. “That was because Grandmère’s left leg had just been amputated the first time,” she reminded him, turning to talk over her shoulder. “And try not to stare tonight, Nick. Her other leg is gone now too.”
Nicky nodded gravely as he balanced the pie. “I know,” he said.
“She’s in a lot of pain and she’s very sad.”
“I know.”
“Do you really think I make Mom cry on purpose?” Kay turned back to Neal and waited, convinced as always that at some level Neal knew more than she, saw things more clearly. But Neal said nothing more. He turned the car through the brick gates with the wrought iron arch that Francis had designed in twenty seconds—or so he said—and passed the big houses with their big garages, came to her parents’ driveway at the top, and parked. All the lights were blazing and from somewhere inside they could hear Coco’s sharp bark. God, I don’t want to be here, Kay thought, and she stood in the twilight, clutching her pot of hot food, swaying on her high heels, breathing in the familiar smells of chrysanthemum and cypress from the garden, chlorine from the swimming pool, creosote from the redwood deck, dog poop from the long slate walkway. Nicky walked close to her side, holding the pie, eyes on the swimming pool—he had not gone in the pool since last summer when they had both seen a rattlesnake swim across it, undulating slowly, its wedged head alert, held high, not unlike the way Ida swam, Kay had thought, the same regal sweep. Neal followed with the rest of the groceries as Kay led the way to the door. All three stood, taking a communal deep breath; then Kay raised the heavy brass temple gong and rapped as jazzily as its weight would permit.
“Now who’s come to bother us?” Francis caroled through the door, and Ida cried behind him, “For God’s sake Francis, get the dog!” Then the door opened and there was Francis himself, in corduroy pants and a striped shirt, peering at them over the tops of his glasses. He pointed his gold pen at Nicky. “Well now,” he said, “who invited you?”
Nicky glanced up at Kay, uncertain, and just at that second, Coco, a blur of blond fur and bulging black eyes, raced toward them and leapt. Ida screamed from the living room, Nicky closed his eyes and bravely raised the pie, and Kay collared the dog just as its nails ripped the length of one of her stockings. “Hi, Dad,” she said. “Hope you’re hungry.”
“Oh, I haven’t been hungry since 1934,” Francis said, taking Coco from her, “and then it was only because of the Depression. It passed. Most things do pass,” he said to Nicky, as Nicky opened his eyes again. “You’re not afraid of a little old poodle dog are you?”
“Coco’s not a dog,” Kay said. “She’s a fiend from hell.”
“I didn’t drop the pie, Mom,” Nicky said.
“I’m glad it passed, Francis,” Neal said behind them, his timing, as always, impeccable. “I brought you and Ida some fresh-squeezed beet juice and some of that Vitamin B complex I was telling you about to help it pass
even smoother.”
“More smoothly,” Ida’s voice corrected from the living room.
“Your mother,” Francis said to Kay as he dragged Coco off to her cage in the kitchen, “has been waiting for you since four.”
Kay walked over the polished tile floor of the entry hall, Nicky holding the pie out before him. Their footsteps made hard, hollow sounds and the mirrored walls glittered with recessed lights. She could hear the low roar of the football game Francis had been watching in the television room and she could smell the meaty aroma of Coco’s dinner, simmering on the stove.
“You kept me waiting thirty-six hours before you were born,” Ida sang out, her voice already hoarse from the determination to be gay, tears already edging each word, “and you haven’t changed a bit.” She sat in her wheelchair, positioned in front of the empty black vault of the fireplace; she was flanked on either side by tall unlit candles set on the hearth. She suddenly smiled her beautiful lipsticky smile and lifted her hands, palms up. She was wearing a new dress of flowered pink silk and had a mink blanket over her lap. “Come give me a kiss.”
Kay bent down and kissed her mother’s cheek. She tasted rouge, powder, felt the rough brush of a diamond earring against her lips. Ida’s small head was hot, her hair damp at the roots—she must still be having that afternoon fever. She coughed, laughing, against Kay’s shoulder, and her cough smelled of whiskey, tobacco, perfume, that sweetish hospital medication, and something else, just a whiff of something grey and fetid. “We’re not that late,” Kay soothed. Ida clutched the blanket against her waist with one hand and reached for Nicky with the other.
“What a lovely pie you brought for my dinner,” Ida said to Nicky. “Did you bake it yourself?”
“No.”
“Did you at least pick the peaches yourself?”
“No.”
