by Marlene Lee
***
“What were you doing?” Rebecca asked when Tom finally ducked his graying head under the metal doorframe and stepped up into her coach. “What were you doing at Madame Bradley’s?”
“Nothing,” said Tom. “Just talking.”
Rebecca persisted. “Did she say anything about Mother?”
“Not a thing.”
“Well, what were you talking about if you weren’t talking about Mother?”
“Generalities,” said Tom vaguely. “The weather.”
“Jennifer’s father here”—Rebecca gestured toward the girl who was standing on the step, neither in nor out of the motor home—“knows Madame Bradley.”
“Yeah,” Jennifer agreed. “He doesn’t like her.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Tom in a neutral tone. “Why doesn’t he like her?”
“Jennifer thinks Madame Bradley is a con.” Rebecca leaned closer to her brother. “The woman may not be what she seems.”
“You don’t mean to say—”
But before anyone could answer, there was a knock on the door.
“Yoo-hoo,” said Madame Bradley.
“I invited her to have a drink with us,” Tom said in a low voice, “after she got the dogs settled.”
Rebecca was torn between having a new experience and maintaining Mother’s high standards. Tom opened the screen door and stepped back. The motor home swayed as Madame Bradley made her way to one end of the sofa. Jennifer followed in her wake.
“Such a lovely coach,” gushed Madame Bradley. “How fortunate you are, Rebecca, to have such a nice brother to do your hook-ups.”
Tom moved nearer the woman, attracted, Rebecca feared, by her beautiful eyes, her luminous skin. She wondered what Mother would do in such a circumstance.
“I’ve put out feelers,” said Madame Bradley, removing the flowered scarf and fluffing her overly black hair.
“Feelers?” said Tom.
“Feelers to the other side,” Madame Bradley said provocatively.
“Ah, yes,” said Tom. “The other side.”
“Mother,” Rebecca said bluntly. “She’s been talking to our mother.”
Madame Bradley sighed. “I have made contact for many, many people,” she said with that touch of weariness which marks the true professional. At the far end of the coach Jennifer folded her arms and looked stubborn.
“How do you go about it?” Tom asked. He sounded interested. “I’ve done some reading on reincarnation—”
“This is not reincarnation, Tom,” interrupted Madame Bradley “This is a spiritual connection. I serve as a channel between states of consciousness; between worlds. It is really very simple.”
Rebecca held her tongue. Jennifer picked at the scab on her elbow.
“Rebecca tells me you’re a poet,” Madame Bradley said, smiling up at Tom who proceeded to take a seat at the opposite end of the sofa.
“Yes. Yes, I am,” said Tom, his face and scalp growing pink. “That is, I try. I don’t claim to be Shakespeare.” Flattered, he ran his long, slender hand once through his gray hair.
“ ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough,’ ” Madame Bradley recited. Her eyes glazed over and her face glowed with a sheen of fine feeling. Rebecca sniffed.
“ ‘And stands about the woodland ride, ’ ” chimed in her brother, “ ‘wearing white for Eastertide.’ ”
“ ‘Now of my three-score years and ten,’ ” they chanted together—
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Rebecca. “Mother never liked poetry. If we’re going to talk to her, let’s get on with it.”
The banquette at the eating table was bolted to a raised platform over one wheel well and it was here Jennifer chose to sit, dangling her short legs above the carpeted aisle.
“Should the child be here?” asked Tom.
“Jennifer is smarter than her father,” Madame Bradley said. “She may stay. Now, we must all be quiet and receptive,” she continued, folding her plump hands. Her expression under the flowered scarf was beatific. Rebecca sank onto the bench across the table from Jennifer. She watched the hard little face. Jennifer lacked faith; Rebecca would have to demonstrate. In a gesture for the girl’s benefit, Rebecca sighed deeply, leaned back, and let her hands—not soft and white like Madame Bradley’s but large and knobby, with light brown spots that would soon grow darker—fall palms-up on her lap.
“Breathe slowly and deeply,” Madame Bradley instructed, following her own directions with a series of noisy inhalations. Suddenly her head dropped forward.
“Mother!” said Madame Bradley in a tone deeper and richer than her customary voice. “Tom and Rebecca wish to speak with you!”
Tom’s weak, blue eyes flew open. He frowned. Forgetting herself, Rebecca was lifted and diminished at the same time, as if she were the beach and Madame Bradley the sea.
A bossy voice broke into the silence. “Tom,” Mother said quite clearly, “check the water and sewer lines in your sister’s motor home. If Rebecca must take that thing across America by herself. . .” A gust from the ocean rocked the coach and caught the awning on the trailer next door. The canvas roared and flapped with an incessant beat.
Madame Bradley gave a start and opened her eyes. “Mother’s gone.” she said, winded.
“Bring her back!” cried Rebecca in a shattering sob. “Bring her back!”
“Once contact is lost . . .”
Jennifer half-jumped, half-fell into the aisle. She took two running steps and tripped over Rebecca’s feet. “Madame Bradley knows what your mother would say!” she whispered fiercely. “That’s the way mothers talk!” She hurled herself out of the coach and stood stamping her feet on the asphalt. She screwed up her stricken little face, wet and filled with contempt, and shouted up to Rebecca who had followed her to the door, “You just think it’s your Mother!”
“Maybe if you and your father believed in Madame Bradley, she’d be able to help you, too—”
“My mother doesn’t want to come back or she’d be here! My mother wants to be someplace else!”
Rebecca sucked in her breath. Perhaps Mother wanted to be somewhere else, too. The possibility of it was outside of grief. Unimaginable. Incomprehensible. She stepped down from the coach. Fog rolling in from the ocean obscured almost the entire disk of the sun.
The child set off running.
“Jennifer!” Rebecca cried, and tried to follow. But the girl darted between trailers and was gone.
Rebecca walked slowly back toward the new motor home, her thin hair blowing out from her head and her pant legs flapping about her pronated ankles.
For a few minutes inside the coach, Mother had been alive, just as all these years she, herself, had been dead.
4
File Boxes
The freeway was dark and slick, the geography between the Pacific Ocean and California Valley as strange to her as her own veins and arteries, her eyes and cheeks were as wet as the windshield, her thoughts as desperate as the stormy night rolling in and breaking upon her headlights. Still, in the back seat, Rebecca’s file boxes were dry.
When a semi passed and shot muddy water across the windshield, the thump was so loud she yelped and cried out, “Mother!” who, being dead, didn’t hear. “Come back!”
She saw a gas station off to the right of the freeway and abruptly crossed three lanes. A car horn came up fast behind, swerved, blared between her left shoulder and ear, and forced her nerves, heart, lungs, and stomach ahead of her, piercing the future with unbearable truth: Your gas tank is low and your mother is dead.
It took three attempts, forward and reverse, before she lined the car up with the hose. The boy who pumped gas unslung the nozzle.
“Fill ’er up, ma’am?”
Rebecca nodded. As the gasoline rushed in, washing musically in the empty tank, she watched a man with a lunch pail coming along the frontage road toward the station.
“You got a tow?” he called out. “M
y transmission’s shot.”
“No tow truck,” the boy called back from the pump. “Where’s your car at?”
The man switched his lunch pail to the other hand and motioned toward the restaurant behind him. The wind blew his forelock of hair—the only real body of hair on his head—straight up and, between gusts, let it fall again.
Rebecca found her credit card, handed it through the window, and watched the man with the lunch pail turn and walk back along the wet road toward the restaurant, his strands of hair blowing in the wind. By the time she’d signed the receipt, entered cost and mileage in the log sheet filed under ‘L’ for ‘Log,’ she couldn’t see him anymore.
“Do you know that man?” she asked the boy.
“I’ve seen him before,” he said, and sidestepped between pumps to wait on a black car in the next bay.
Rebecca drove slowly along the frontage road, past the man with the lunch pail—who was about her brother’s age, fifty-five or so—and parked in front of the restaurant. She watched him come up in her rear view mirror. His forehead, nose, and jaw formed strong angles, blade and block, whereas her brother Tom’s bones rested in plump upholstery.
She should not have started this trip alone.
She locked the car and followed the man into the restaurant, where he took a stool at the counter. Mother had always warned her about hitch-hikers, but the advice didn’t seem to apply in this situation. This person wasn’t a hitch-hiker. The boy at the gas pump knew him. He was a local man who needed help. Besides, if she invited him, the rules would be different. Certainly Mother would want someone to give Tom a ride if his transmission ever gave out somewhere on a freeway.
Ignoring the dining room that extended beyond the juke box and double doors, she took a seat at the counter two stools away and ordered a Coke. The man held a spoon above his coffee and shook a sugar jar over it.
The waitress leaned on the counter. “Truck runnin’ yet?”
He shook his head. “Can’t get parts until tomorrow.”
Rebecca watched him drink his coffee, get off the stool the way boys get off their bikes, and dig change out of his front pocket. He wasn’t as tall as Tom. He wasn’t as tall as Rebecca, either. Just before he passed her at the counter she lost control of the nervous tic that always lay waiting under her right eye. She covered the eye with one hand, dashed her straw up and down with the other, wasting carbonation, and blurted out, “I heard you mention that your truck isn’t running.”
He looked at her without expression.
“At the gas station I heard you say your truck wasn’t running,” she repeated. “Do you want a ride?”
He tipped his head to one side. “No, thanks.”
Rebecca got up and followed him to the cash register. “It would be something like a business arrangement,” she said, still holding her eye with one hand and also trying to hold his attention. The man gave the cashier a dollar bill. He looked as private as his wallet.
“What did you have in mind?”
Rebecca didn’t have anything clearly in mind. Not business arrangements, driving, compass directions, nor life after Mother. She’d left the family orchard in Northern California for a trip across America but had gotten no farther than Ocean Breeze Trailer Resort just south of San Francisco before she’d succumbed to anxiety and grief which required weeks of rest to overcome. Surprisingly, Tom had felt differently. During an emergency trip to help her with the water and electricity hook-ups, he’d begun to act less and less like the timid brother she knew. Strolling about the resort, he’d begun talking to strangers, people who’d never even seen a peach orchard much less lived on one for fifty-some years. People like, for instance, Madame Bradley, with her scarves and hoop earrings. Rebecca wasn’t sure if she really was French, as she claimed, or a gypsy, as she appeared, but whatever she was, she took up too much of Tom’s time.
The man with the lunch pail was waiting for an answer, and Rebecca felt one of her nervous coughs coming on. “You need a ride and I need directions,” she’d intended to say, but the coughing made her simplify the message.
“I’m lost.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Modesto, I think.”
“Modesto! You’re going the wrong way for Modesto. You want to go back the other way until you hit 580.” And he turned and walked out of the restaurant. Rebecca, after a moment’s hesitation, followed. On the sidewalk they stopped in front of Tom’s Lincoln.
“This your car?” he asked.
“My brother’s.”
“What’s he driving while you’re driving this?”
“He’s staying in my motor home until I get back.” She almost added, “He has a girl friend named Madame Bradley,” but didn’t like the way it sounded, and so she stopped talking.
“Where do you come from?”
“North of Sacramento.”
“How far north?”
“Chico.”
The wet wind blew his hair straight up, then let it drop. “I’ll show you how to get to Chico,” he said. “You want to get back to your people.” He unzipped his windbreaker and took a small notebook and pencil out of his shirt pocket.
“I’m not going back to Chico.”
“You aren’t?” The man had never seen a tall woman with red-gray hair, freckles, wrinkles, and large feet who waited at truck stops for riders. “Here,” he said, writing hasty directions and tearing a page from the notebook. “In case you change your mind.” He climbed into his pickup and sat staring at the rain that drummed on his windshield. She went back inside the restaurant but it wasn’t long before she came out again, carrying the lunch pail he’d left behind. He met her under the awning.
“Thanks,” he said.
“The reason I’m not going back to Chico,” she said, “is because my father lives there with his new fiancée.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Dead.” With red, rawboned hands Rebecca covered her face. The redness wasn’t from dishwater or work, but from a fiery skin condition that left her prone to flare-ups. As a child she’d had allergies, rashes, and eczema. Tom suffered from allergies, too. The doctor had told Mother that her children were high-strung. He’d prescribed restful routines. Also fewer movies. Everyone in town knew that each week Mother took the children to both theatres, all three if you counted the drive-in; that she’d wanted to be a Hollywood actress; that she’d inherited quite a lot of money from her parents; that she’d married into even more money, orchard money, when she married Rebecca and Tom’s father, an irritable man who isolated himself among the peaches. The doctor had gone through school with both parents and thought the whole family was odd.
The man with the lunch pail patted her shoulder once and then backed away. “No disrespect, ma’am, but you ought to be traveling with your brother. And it’s not safe to approach strangers.” He returned to his pickup and watched her open both doors on the passenger side of the Lincoln, haul a file box out of the back, manhandle it forward, and toss it onto the front seat. For such a thin, gangly woman, Rebecca was strong and quick. Back behind the steering wheel, she let the wipers run through a few sweeps before she twisted toward the passenger seat and began a nervous finger-crawl through the file box beside her.
Two people sitting in separate vehicles on a rainy night in front of a chain restaurant which sits a few hundred yards from Freeway 680, a road that can connect you to a knock-kneed man named Tom in his sister’s RV parked on a cliff overlooking the ocean, making love, for the first time in his life, to a spiritualist gypsy. In the other direction the road takes you past the Shell Oil refinery, a small city of light bulbs hanging in the air, and on toward the housing tract where the man with the lunch pail lives in the seventh house on the second street up the hill that slides a little with each storm, his stucco house cracked down the middle of the patio, the pending class-action lawsuit against the developer, soil engineer, and city a nagging worry that, like his lunch pail, seems to be a part of his body.<
br />
Rebecca searched under ‘M’ for ‘Modesto.’ There it was: the city map, along with leaflets about the McHenry Museum and the annual knife and gun show. Over the years she and Mother had filed hundreds of such brochures in alphabetical order, but with no instructions about how to actually get anywhere. Extending her long, freckled arm into the back seat, she found the California map under ‘C,’ spread it over the steering wheel, and began deep-breathing as the doctor had prescribed. The panic attack on the freeway, not to mention the embarrassing rejection from the man with the lunch pail, had heated her neck and face. Mother needn’t have worried about hitch-hikers. She couldn’t even get one when she tried.
He tapped on her window. His wet forehead, nose, and jaw were green under the neon sign.
“Cup of coffee?” he mouthed. He waited beneath the awning while she folded her map and followed him into the restaurant.
“I see where I made my mistake,” she said, unfolding the map to a manageable quadrant on the counter. A new waitress took their order.
“You’re probably so used to driving home, your car automatically turned north.”
“I was trying not to go north,” Rebecca said. She wrapped her hand around the cold glass of Coca-Cola and pressed it to her forehead.
“There’s your trouble. Trying too hard.” The man smiled and looked at her sideways. “Running away from home, is that it?”
“I’m taking a trip across America,” she said.
“You need an RV, then.”
“I have an RV.”
“Oh, yeah. You told me. Your brother . . .”
“My brother wants to stay at the San Francisco Ocean Breeze Motor Resort so he can be near Madame Bradley, phony woman that she is, instead of going back to the orchard. So I took his car, and after my trip I’ll pick him up again, and we’ll both go home, but it won’t seem like home because Mother isn’t there anymore.” She folded her arms tight against her long, thin waist.
The man didn’t say anything, not because he was beaten down by her rambling speech, but because one of his own silences was rolling across him, breaking over his head and prominent nose, draining down his neck and off his back and chest, leaving him beached and tired. Until fifty he’d never experienced these silences. But then he’d gotten married and moved to his wife’s tract home. He’d gone to work at the Shell plant, a nine-to-five job he would never have considered if he hadn’t married and moved into the house on the hill that was slipping.
