by Janet Fitch
“Well, pardon me, Princess Grace,” Marvel said. “What’s next, the opera? Change Caitlin’s diaper, will you, I got to take a leak.”
I called the bus company, they said it would take me three hours there, three hours back. It dawned on me how far I was from where I’d begun.
When you broke down in the desert, you had to work fast. In the Mojave, it could be 140 degrees in the shade. In an hour, you might sweat two and a half pints. People went crazy from thirst. You danced and sang and finally embraced a saguaro, thinking it was quite something else. A lover, a mother, a Christ. Then you ran away bleeding to die. To survive in the desert, you had to drink a quart of water a day. There was no sense in rationing — all those movies were lies. To drink less was just to commit slow suicide.
I thought about that, what it meant, as I took the giant box of disposable diapers and toilet paper back to the bathroom. It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn’t survive. You put out your hubcaps to catch morning dew, drank radiator water, and buried yourself to the neck in the sand. Then you set off at nightfall, retracing your steps. Overhead, the sky would be full of stars. You needed a flashlight, a compass, you had to have watched how you came.
Davey had known all of these things. I suddenly knew he would also survive.
In the prolonged twilight of the lengthening day, I started dinner, thinking about the desert, imagining myself buried to the neck, when I heard the mechanical purr of the neighbor’s Corvette turning into her driveway. I looked up in time to see her, a striking black woman in a white linen suit. I’d only seen her a couple of times, picking up her magazines, leaving her house in the evening in silk and pearls. She never spoke to us or anyone in the neighborhood.
Marvel heard the car too, and stopped making a bottle for Caitlin to stare out over my shoulder and glare. “That damn whore. Thinks she ’s the Duchess of Windsor. Makes me want to puke.” We watched the neighbor pull her two small bags of groceries from Whole Foods out of the champagne-colored sports car.
“Mommy, juice,” the baby whined, tugging on Marvel’s T-shirt.
Marvel yanked her shirt from the baby’s hands. “Don’t you ever let me catch you talking to her,” she said to me. “Christ, I remember when this was a good neighborhood. Now it’s the blacks and the whores, chinks and beaners with chickens in the yard. I mean, what next?”
It bothered me that Marvel told me all this stuff, like I sympathized with her, like we were some Aryan secret society out here in the Valley. “I’ll make up some juice,” I said. I didn’t even want to stand next to her.
While I mixed the juice, I watched the neighbor, stopping to pick up the magazines from her porch, slip them inside her grocery bag. She wore white slingbacks with black tips, like deer’s hooves.
Then she disappeared inside the shuttered house. I was sad to see her go but glad she was out of sight of Marvel’s talk like hot tar, that fumed and stank as it left her lips. I wondered if the woman in the linen suit thought we were all like Marvel, that I was like that too. It made me cringe to think that probably she did.
Marvel grabbed the juice and filled the bottle, handed it to Caitlin, who toddled off, clutching her special velvet pillow that said Guam. “Traipsing around in that car,” Marvel grumbled. “Flaunting it in decent people’s faces. Like we didn’t know how she got it. Flat on her back is how.”
The car gleamed like the flanks of a man, soft and muscular, supple. I wanted to lie down on the hood, I thought I could probably come just lying on it. I gazed past the carport to the door where she went in, wished I didn’t have anything to do and could just stand there all evening to see if she’d come out again.
When the dishes were done and the kids put to bed, I slipped out the side door and stood next to her jacaranda, which dripped purple flowers over the fence onto Marvel’s blacktop and perfumed the warm night. Music seeped out, a singer, at first I thought she was drunk but then knew it wasn’t that at all, she had her own way with the words, played with them in her mouth like cherry chocolates.
I don’t know how long I stood in the dark, swaying to this music, the woman with a voice like a horn. It seemed impossible that a woman so elegant could live right next door to us with our fifty-inch TV. I wanted to crawl under her windows, peep through a crack in her fat-slatted shutters, and see what she was doing in there. But I didn’t have the nerve. I picked up a handful of her jacaranda blooms from the ground and pressed them to my face.
THE NEXT DAY, I got off the bus in the four o’clock heat, walked the last mile home. I didn’t need the cane anymore, but the long blocks of walking still made my hip ache, bringing back my limp. I felt dirty and awkward as I trudged up our block, chafed in my Council of Jewish Women thrift store clothes, a white blouse that never softened in the wash, an unsuccessful homemade skirt.
In the shade in front of the house next door, our elegant neighbor was cutting some lily of the Nile, the same color as the jacaranda bloom. She was barefoot in a simple dress, and her feet and the palms of her hands showed pale pink against her burnt caramel skin. They looked ornamental, as if she came from a place where women dipped hands and feet in pink powder. She didn’t smile. She was wholly absorbed in her shears, clipping a stem of rosemary, a stem of mint, in the dappled light and shade. A fallen jacaranda bloom clung to her dark hair, which was up in a careless French twist. I loved that one stray blossom.
I felt clumsy, ashamed of my limp and my ugly clothes. I hoped she wouldn’t see me, that I could get to the house before she looked up. But when I’d reached our chain link and blacktop, and she still hadn’t glanced in my direction, I was disappointed. I wished she would see me, so I could tell her, I’m not like them. Talk to me. Look up, I thought.
But she didn’t, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.
“I like your yard,” I called out.
She looked up, startled, as if she knew I was there but didn’t think I’d speak to her. Her eyes were large and almond-shaped, the color of root beer. She wore a thin scar on her left cheek, and a gold watch on her narrow wrist. She pushed a strand of marcel-waved hair from her face and threw me a quick smile, which faded just as quickly. She turned back to her lilies. “You better not be seen talking to me. She’s going to burn a cross on my lawn.”
“You don’t have a lawn,” I said.
She smiled, but she didn’t look at me again.
“My name’s Astrid,” I said.
“You go inside now,” she said. “Astrid.”
11
HER NAME WAS Olivia Johnstone. That was the name on the magazines and catalogs on her doormat. She took Condé Nast Travelerand French Vogue, thick as a phone book. I babysat the kids in the front yard now, not to miss the least glimpse of her leaving the house in her Jackie O sunglasses, returning from shopping, clipping her herbs. Hoping our eyes would meet again. Packages came for her almost daily, the handsome UPS man lingering in her doorway. I wondered if he was in love with her, his legs like tree trunks in his UPS brown shorts.
At night, from the kitchen window, I began to take note of her visitors. Always men. A black man whose white French cuffs lay bright against his dark skin, gold cuff links glimmering. He drove a black BMW, came around seven-thirty, and was always gone by midnight. A young man with Rasta hair and Birkenstocks came in a Porsche. Sometimes he was still there when I got up in the morning. A large balding white man who wore striped shirts and double-breasted suits with big lapels. He drove a monstrous Mercedes, and came every day for a week.
What I noticed especially was the way they hurried from their shining cars, their excitement. I wondered what she must do that put such urgency in their steps. I wondered which she liked best. I thought about what she must know about men, how she must shine for them like a lighthouse.
I refused to think for a second that Marvel might be right about anything, let
alone Olivia Johnstone. I lived for the sight of her, taking out her trash or alighting from her car in the dim light of dawn while I was making my breakfast. It was just enough dew on my decks to keep me another day.
I picked sprigs of her rosemary and tucked them in my pockets. I went through her garbage when I knew she was out, thirsty to know more, to touch the things she touched. I found a wide-toothed tortoiseshell comb from Kent of London, good as new except for a single broken tooth, and a soap box, Crabtree and Evelyn’s Elderflower. She drank Myers’s rum, used extra virgin olive oil in a tall bottle. One of her boyfriends smoked cigars. I found an impossibly soft stocking, the garter kind, cloud taupe, laddered, and an empty flagon of Ma Griffe perfume, its label decorated with a scribble of black lines on white. It smelled of whispery black organdy dresses, of spotted green orchids and the Bois de Boulogne after rain, where my mother and I once walked for hours. I thrilled to share Paris with Olivia Johnstone. I saved the bottle in my drawer to scent my clothes.
THEN ONE DAY Olivia’s newspapers and magazines lay on her doorstep, untouched. The Corvette sat sullen under a tan canvas cover dotted with fallen jacaranda flowers like mementos of loss. Just the sight of the landlocked Corvette made me wish I had some Percodan left. I settled for some leftover codeine cough syrup Marvel had in her medicine chest. The sticky cloying taste lingered as I sat on my ripcord bedspread and combed my hair with Olivia’s comb. I was in awe of her perfection. A woman who would throw out a handmade tortoiseshell comb just because it was missing a tooth. I wondered if she really made love to men for money, what that was like. Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words. My mother would hate that, but it was true. Words trailing their streamers of judgment. A wife got money from her husband and nobody said anything. And if Olivia’s boyfriends gave her money? So what?
I combed my hair and made a French twist, imagining myself as Olivia. I stalked the small room, walking the way she walked, hips first, like a runway model. What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots — prostitute, housewife, saint — like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I ran her stocking up my leg, smelled the Ma Griffe.
I imagined she’d gone to Paris, that she was sitting at a café, having a cloudy Pernod and water, scarf tied to her purse like the women in her French Vogue. I imagined she was with the BMW man, the quiet one with gold cuff links who liked jazz. I’d imagined them often, dancing in the old-fashioned way in her living room, hardly moving their feet, his cheek resting on the top of her close-waved hair. That’s how I saw her in Paris. Staying up late in a jazz club only black Parisians knew, in a cellar on the Rive Gauche, dancing. I could see the champagne and the way their eyes closed, and they weren’t thinking of anything but more of the same.
I sat in the sun’s blistering glare off the blacktop after school, doing my homework and listening to Justin and Caitlin splash in the inflatable pool, shrieking, squabbling over the toys. I was waiting, thinking ahead, setting out my hubcaps. At 4:25 the UPS man stopped in front of Olivia’s and began to write up a delivery slip.
I stepped up to the chain-link fence. “Excuse me,” I said. “Olivia said you could leave the package with me.” I smiled, trying to project a neighborly trustworthiness. I was the girl next door, after all. “She told me she was expecting it.”
He brought the clipboard and I signed. The shipment was a small box marked Williams-Sonoma. I wondered what it could be, but my curiosity about what was in the box paled when compared to my determination to make friends with Olivia Johnstone, to someday enter the shuttered house.
THE DAY SHE returned, I made up a story about a project I had to finish with a classmate in the neighborhood. I wasn’t a good liar. My mother always said I had no imagination. But I kept it short, and Marvel gave me an hour. “I need you home at five, I’ve got a party.” She sold Mary Kay, and though she didn’t make much money at it, it made her feel important.
I took the box out of my laundry bag, where I’d kept it hidden, and walked up Olivia’s steps, onto her porch. I rang the doorbell.
Almost immediately, her shape appeared behind the bubble-glass diamonds of her door, just like ours except the inserts were yellow instead of turquoise. I could feel her looking at me through the spyhole. I tried to look calm. Just a neighbor doing a favor. The door opened. Olivia Johnstone was wearing a long print halter dress, her hair in a low chignon, her bare cinnamon shoulders smooth as bedposts.
I held the box out to her. “The UPS man left this.” One tooth on the comb, one tooth. She was perfect.
Olivia smiled and took the box. Her nails were short, white-tipped. She thanked me in an amused voice. I could tell she knew it was just a ploy, that I wanted to climb into her life. I tried to look past her but could only see a mirror and a small red-lacquered table.
Then she said the words I’d been dreaming of, hoping for. “Would you like to come in? I was just pouring some tea.”
Was there anything as elegant as Olivia’s house? In the living room, the walls were covered with a gold paper burnished to the quality of cork. She had a taupe velvet couch with a curved back and a leopard throw pillow, a tan leather armchair, and a carved daybed with a striped cotton cover. A wood table with smaller tables tucked underneath it held a dull green ceramic planter bearing a white spray of orchids like moths. Jazz music quickened the pace of the room, the kind the BMW man liked, complicated trumpet runs full of masculine yearning.
“What’s this music?” I asked her.
“Miles Davis,” she said. “‘Seven Steps to Heaven.’”
Seven steps, I thought, was that all it took?
Where we had sliding glass doors, Olivia had casements, open to the backyard. Instead of the air-conditioning, ceiling fans turned lazily. Upon closer examination, a big gilded birdcage held a fake parrot wearing a tiny sombrero, a cigar clamped in its beak. “That’s Charlie,” Olivia said. “Be careful, he bites.” She smiled. She had a slight overbite. I could understand how a man would want to kiss her.
We sat on the velvet couch and drank iced tea sweetened with honey and mint. Now that I was here, I was at a loss to begin. I’d had so many questions, but I couldn’t think of one. The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I’d never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother’s contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.
“How long have you been over there?” Olivia asked, stroking down the condensation on her glass with a manicured forefinger. Her profile was slightly dish-shaped, her forehead high and round.
“Not long. A couple months.” I nodded to the UPS package untouched on the coffee table. “What’d they send you?”
Olivia walked to a small secretary desk, opened it and found a letter opener. She slit the side of the box and lifted out two terracotta hearts. “They’re breadwarmers. You heat them and put them in the basket to keep the rolls warm.”
I was disappointed. I thought it would be something secret and sexual. Breadwarmers didn’t go with my fantasy of Olivia Johnstone.
She sat closer to me this time, arm across the back of the couch. I liked it though it made me nervous. She seemed to know exactly the effect she had on me. I couldn’t stop staring at her skin, which gleamed as if polished, exactly the color of the wallpaper, and I could smell Ma Griffe.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“Back east. New York, Washington,” she said. “A friend had business there.”
“The BMW?”
She smiled, her overbite winking at me. She had an
impish quality up close, not so perfect, but better. “No, not the BMW. He’s very married. You don’t see this man here.”
I’d been afraid she would talk about breadwarmers, but here she was, telling me about the men, as if it was the weather. Encouraged, I pressed for more. “Don’t you worry they’re going to run into each other?”
She pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows. “I do try to avoid it.”
Maybe it was true. Maybe she was. But if she was, it was nothing like the girls on Van Nuys Boulevard in their hot pants and satin baseball jackets. Olivia was linen and champagne and terra-cotta, botanical prints and “Seven Steps to Heaven.”
“Do you like one of them best?” I asked.
She stirred her iced tea with a long-handled spoon, letting Miles Davis seep into our pores. “No. Not really. How about you, do you have a boyfriend, someone special?”
I was going to tell her that I did, an older man, make it sound glamorous, but I ended up telling her my sorry life history, Starr and Ray, my mother, Marvel Turlock. She was easy to talk to, sympathetic. She asked questions, listened, and kept the music coming, tea and lemon cookies. I felt I had woken up on my raft to find a yacht dropping a ladder. You never knew when rescue might come.
“It won’t always be so hard, Astrid,” she told me, brushing a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Beautiful girls have certain advantages.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to know those things she knew, so I wouldn’t be afraid anymore, so I’d believe there was an end to it all. “Like what?”
She looked at me close, examining the planes of my face, the bangs I cut myself now. My stubborn chin, my fat, chapped lips. I tried to look ready. She picked up my hand and held it in hers. Her hands were more delicate than I’d thought, no larger than mine, warm and surprisingly dry, but a bit rough. She twined her fingers in mine, as if we had always held hands.
