I took a moment. I wanted my life in neat compartments, Miss P in one comic strip, my father in another. “He’ll be okay.”
“How about you?” she said.
I couldn’t talk.
“Platform diving isn’t your entire career,” she said. “You have family concerns, you have plans to take up medicine, make a contribution to society.…” She let her voice drift into what she thought was an agreeable tone of promise.
“You’re saying I can’t do it.”
“I’m saying you don’t have to.”
I had trouble meeting her gaze.
“You’re wondering why I’m not tough, like I used to be. The legendary Miss P.”
I was a little embarrassed. Her nickname was rarely acknowledged by her—it was always Miss Petrossian.
“It’s actually not a bad form of motivation,” she was saying, “the manipulative approach. Make the athlete see that it’s all up to her, while the coach looks on from a great height, noble, long-suffering.”
“Psychology.”
“If you can’t make the Pacific Coast Invitational, for sure you’ll miss Seattle, and there won’t be any Goodwill Games, no pre-Olympic Trials—”
The invitational was being held at Stanford in the fall. I told myself not to worry about something so far in the future, but Miss P always had next year’s calendar already on the wall, scribbled notes on weekends a year away.
“That’s all right, if that’s what you want,” Miss P said, putting a paper clip into its box. “Just don’t lie to yourself. Every hour that goes by and you aren’t working, there are competitors out there in Denver and Salt Lake City and El Centro relieved to hear it. Because they’re hard at work right now, Bonnie.” She gave me some silence. Then she said, “And you aren’t.”
“Subtle,” I said.
She was studying me, trying to read my expression. Dad always said, look them right between the eyes. “I’m going to tell you something I don’t want you to discuss with anyone. This is just between you and me.”
I waited.
Miss P likes sappy movies, the kind Mom likes, The Sound of Music, ET. One of her favorite movies was about a dog and a cat and a pig who traveled three hundred miles through raging rivers and snowbound hell to find their owners. “I’m starting to consider early retirement,” she said.
I was glad she kept talking—I wasn’t ready to make a sound.
“What gets harder is caring about scores and wondering what coach is deploying what computer program to teach center of gravity and angle of descent.”
I kept quiet, letting my emotions rise to the surface and sink.
“I want you to see that life is more than endurance conditioning,” she said, “and one-half twist layouts.”
“But you still care,” I said.
“Do I?”
For a few heartbeats we just looked at each other.
“My attitude isn’t the point. I’ll tell you what matters.”
At last the conversation was on solid, familiar ground.
“If you care, Bonnie,” she was saying. “If you still want to dive, the first thing you do on Monday is run three miles. You come here, nine o’clock, and we start you off on the springboard.”
“The springboard!” I protested.
“You’re too proud for that?”
Swimming I could handle. Maybe I could talk her into letting me swim laps all morning Monday. Maybe I could take up swimming, the two-hundred-meter breaststroke, and be realistic about my future.
I was going to say that my father was facing his arraignment on Monday. I couldn’t possibly be here.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I heard you up again in the night,” said my mother from the dining room.
She doesn’t mind holding a conversation with someone she can’t see. She’ll talk to a closed door, right at you, or through earphones. It was the next morning, after a night of bad dreams.
“I wake up a lot,” I said.
I was slicing a banana. The banana sections looked like primitive coins.
“Why are you eating it like that?” Mom demanded, bustling through the kitchen.
I said something about it being good practice in lab technique. She had a folder marked “Immigration Service” in her hand. An employee had been using the Social Security number of a deceased cousin. She would spend the morning selecting letter formats on her word-processing menu: Business Letter, Personal Letter, Death Warrant.
I had been wondering what role she would adopt: distant but still caring ex-wife, indifferent, nosy. She had opted this morning for the frantic, business-as-usual ploy she used when a cat has died or an unexpected envelope has arrived from the IRS. She said, as she hurried off to the Spartan shelves and drawers of her home office, “I forgot to tell you—there’s a postcard for you, from Georgia. Under the wooden fruit.”
A sweeping panorama, a beach with gigantic driftwood, the ocean-cured logs of the north coast. “Thinking of you, Egg Head!” she had written in her graceful, feminine hand.
“I called her last night and told her about your father,” Mom said.
I asked what Georgia had said.
“She’s worried about you,” Mom said. “She always said you and your father are like this,” she added, holding up two fingers side by side.
Georgia once said the pattern of seeds in a slice of banana look like a monkey’s face. My mom says the Man in the Moon looks like a rabbit eating cabbage. I had a piece of rye toast for breakfast, sliced banana, and a glass of pineapple juice.
I gave Rowan a call, knowing the Beals were probably gone for the weekend. But to my surprise Mrs. Beal answered, and said that they had heard about my father’s troubles and that they had every sympathy. That was the way she expressed it, making this all sound historical, the Time of the Troubles.
Mrs. Beal has the most wonderful voice on the phone, it melts all opposition. “But you have to come over,” she protested. Or maybe she has the gift, knowing what the caller needs to hear.
Mrs. Beal’s parents were always appearing in the society pages, fund raisers for the ballet. Mr. Beal’s family used to own a company that manufactured environment controls for airplanes—the mechanisms that allow aircraft flying through cold and lethally thin air to turn the atmosphere into warm, breathable gas. Mr. Beal’s scuffed hiking boots and loose-fitting plaid shirts were made to order, and their driveway always had brand new cars spattered with mud.
I wondered what they fed you Sunday morning in a county jail.
Mrs. Beal opened the door wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and showing a smile of perfect teeth, the kind you capture after years of orthodontia. She’s a size eight and buys clothes already faded, carefully tailored rips at the knee. “Bonnie!” she cried, and I was a survivor, home from a war.
“You’re just the one we need,” said Mr. Beal.
“I keep telling Dad you’re the most resilient person I know,” said Rowan, offering me a plate of corn muffins.
“Resilient,” I echoed. The Beal family doesn’t say you look “good.” They say you look “top-hole.”
Rowan at once lowered his eyes. For a bright, earnest guy he is easy to embarrass. “I mean—full of life,” he said.
“Is that what I’m full of?” I said, to laughter all around. Good old Bonnie, keeping her sense of humor. Sometimes I thought that despite their ever-warm welcome, Rowan’s parents preferred one of his other girlfriends, the mature sophisticate with long, glossy hair, off to Washington D.C. or Paris to visit her uncle the ambassador.
My dad likes Rowan, always showing him how to lay down a perfect bunt, choking up on the bat, and how to get loose before racket ball, stretching, getting those thigh muscles, the adductor longus, the adductor magnus, ready for action.
Rowan calls his father by his first name, Bill, and his Mom is called Bev by everyone, and while I played along, I was, privately, a little uncomfortable with this casual way of addressing parents.
“Are you re
ady, Miss Chamberlain?” said Mr. Beal. He had a manly little dimple in each cheek, Thomas Jefferson with short hair.
We drove in a Land Rover so new the gearshift knob had a plastic hood like a shower cap. Pigeon droppings already splotched the hood.
The Pacific rarely confronts broad, gentle beaches in Northern California. The land stretches, blackberry and tawny scruff grass. And then it ends, a cliff, a twenty-meter drop to rocky rubble, and the rinse and shrug of the surf.
I didn’t know what sort of trek we had in mind, carrying my part of the gear and the two thermoses—French roast and cranberry juice. Mr. Beal carried the nerve center of the sound equipment in a backpack, and Rowan and I scouted ahead with mike booms, a few lengths of aluminum poles that telescoped into each other. When a casual misstep had me lurching into Rowan, neither of us minded.
The wind tufted the dunes into brief scatterings of sand; the dune grass whispered in the breeze. The air was crisp, the sun warm, kneading through my sweatshirt. Rowan was going on about the charms of a den of coyote pups they had captured with the sort of shotgun mike spies use, and how you could hear each yip as the little teeth of the playful creatures took fun bites out of each other.
I could imagine my father’s voice, what he said on one of our visitations, as the divorce became final. We sat on lawn furniture in his new garden, before the white gravel and the bamboo, before the gardener whose tastes had been celebrated in Sunset Magazine. Georgia wandered among the stands of wild fennel, and if you didn’t know her you would think she wasn’t listening.
Dad’s landscape in those days had been dry dirt and milkweed, and a cord of firewood snaked over by morning glories. His new house was three stories, with a billiard room and four walk-in closets, a skylight in the master bedroom, and an armed-response security alarm.
Dad pointed out where his sand garden was going to be, a white empty expanse you could rake into different patterns. He showed me where the river gravel would shape a path through fluttering, decorative grasses.
“And we’ll put in a swimming pool,” he said, “with a hot tub, Jacuzzi, twelve-foot deep end.” He touched me, on my hand, the way he does when he is describing an intercepted pass, a wild throw from center field, trying to pass his enthusiasm like an electric current.
“What is happening now doesn’t change the way I feel about you,” he said. He turned, speaking toward the shifting, swaying stalks of fennel. “It alters nothing about my feelings for my two girls,” he said.
He touched my hand again, and rested his fingers there when he added, “It doesn’t change the two of us.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was a long walk, the hike to the sea elephants. I imagined my father avoiding eye contact with tattooed skinheads on his way back from breakfast. I imagined the locker-room echoes of the jail. I wished I could send him a mental picture of the scrub jay chattering in the cypress.
“You haven’t reviewed the larger implications of this sort of activity,” I was saying, talk as a kind of game I play to keep my mind busy. Maybe I wanted to keep convincing Rowan that I was as smart as his traveling debutante, the one who won prizes in calculus.
“Like what?” Rowan played along, placid as a horse.
The Beals are under contract with Microsoft to expand the Sounds of Nature software. I could easily perceive the fun it would be for a kid in the inner city to double-click on the cow icon and hear a cow moo. But what would happen if the Beals failed to get a sound bite of a killdeer, a bird that lives in the flat marshes in the Bay Area? As a result, when Microsoft decided to issue the next edition of their encyclopedia, the company would omit mention of the killdeer altogether.
The menu of creatures offered would be limited to the animals who had made the Top One Hundred. And animals that didn’t make any noise at all, the hermit crab, the lawn moth, would be absolutely overlooked. Rowan agreed that this was very true and a real deficiency in the whole idea of sound-replicated nature.
“You’re creating a skewed universe,” I said.
His eyelashes were blond in the sunlight.
I added, “I’m not annoying you, am I?”
He laughed.
“Carry on,” said Mr. Beal approaching from behind, upbeat but impatient, an army officer wishing the army was all male.
Sea elephants smell funny, even at a distance. They smell like decay, rotting chicken skin, garbage left too long under the sink. They didn’t smell bad individually. We nearly stumbled on a living sofa, a finned mammal with doe-like eyes, and she nosed the air in our direction with an air of drowsy courtesy. But the crowd of male sea elephants elbowing up and down the beach in the distance needed to have its locker-room cleaned.
I knew that once the microphones were in place, conversation would enter a cease-fire, so I asked, keeping my voice low, “What would you do if your father got arrested?”
“There isn’t much you can do,” said Rowan.
“How would you feel?”
“My father gets arrested every now and then,” said Rowan.
Somehow I had forgotten this, misfiled it in a part of my mind. I could not associate the Beals with criminal conduct.
“The government trucks carry radioactive isotopes,” Rowan said. “Right through the streets. They go past schools and Laundromats where they could have an accident. Bend a fender and spill plutonium all over the intersection. My father gets together with a Sierra Club spin-off, a group called Atomic Abstinence. They picket the nuclear research lab in Livermore, the Port of Oakland.” Rowan shrugged: Parents, what can you do?
I hate coming out with such a bare question. “He’s been in jail?” I asked, keeping my voice down, Mr. Beal intent on untangling his earphones.
“Overnight, once or twice. When it comes to sentencing, the judge orders him to do community service. He goes around playing the voices of the carnivores for school kids.”
“It’s important for children to learn all about hunting and killing,” I said. What I wanted to say was, Doesn’t it bother you?
“Dad says he looks pretty good,” said Rowan lightly, “in a county jail jumpsuit.”
He must have read the trouble in my eyes. Rowan put his arm around me, enclosing me. “Don’t worry, Bonnie.”
I wanted to joke: Okay, whatever you say.
“Your dad didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, his lips at my ear. Sometimes I’m self-conscious about my earring hole, thinking I should go back to wearing jewelry.
“The courts make all kinds of blunders,” Rowan was saying. “During one of my dad’s protests the cops arrested a mailman, gathered him in with the protesters. He was just following his route, delivering mail.”
I managed a creaking what-do-you-know laugh.
“The law is really stupid, Bonnie.”
Maybe Rowan didn’t realize that if the courts could make tiny mistakes, they could also make a really gigantic one and put an innocent man in prison.
“If it’s all right with you two,” said Mr. Beal, in a half-whisper. Worry lines had appeared in his forehead, the equipment all set up, the digital recorder he had bought in Japan. This was a new Mr. Beal, one I had not seen, the pro at work, and I was almost relieved to see how impatient he was, eager to get Rowan in place with the microphones. I had wondered if the Beals communicated perfectly with each other, every blessed minute.
Rowan put a finger to his lips but motioned me to come on. I tiptoed by Mr. Beal, sure he would snap something at the two of us. But Mr. Beal had that otherworldly expression people wear when they are listening through earphones, and Rowan and I took our places just ahead, on the ridge of a dune.
I had not been aware of any danger, but now I put my hand to my chest.
My body perceived the threat. Not just my eyes and ears. My entire nervous system tingled. Sea elephants basked just a few meters away. Most of the animals were in an advanced state of molt, tattered fur lofting and spinning from their bulk. The blown tatters of skin felt artificial, like nylon. I
tucked a triangle of fur into the hand pockets of my sweatshirt. I would show it to Dad. I would bring my father here, soon, next week.
He would love the massive athleticism of the young males, each the size of a Buick, crashing through the surf, plundering the sand, heaving upslope. Almost every individual hulk rose up from time to time to spar with a neighbor. Each sea elephant had a boxing-glove-size swelling on his nose, and he punched and blocked with this single fist. Sparring partners ascended together, rising high from the crusty sand, and their mutual weight would send them toppling, crashing into the sea foam.
Dad would admire the way Rowan sat, eyes narrowed, catching every belch and chuckle, perched on the ridge, holding the microphones aloft on a glittering aluminum T. He looked my way and lifted his eyebrows: Quite a noise.
I rolled my eyes in agreement, like I was used to this. When I looked back at Mr. Beal he flashed me encouragement with his eyes. We were trespassing, I knew, stealing something, close to these massive animals so we could lift their voices from the air. We did no harm, but I felt the hush of a thief.
The sound was guttural, tenor and bass, growling, yammering, and sometimes one elephant seal would roar. It was the kind of thunder that must have awakened people in villages centuries ago, wide-eyed, gasping: Was it only a dream?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Well before dawn the summer before this, the telephone had startled me awake. I thrashed, struggling to find the clock radio, thinking it was time to get up and run my miles.
I picked up the telephone at last, desperate to silence the source of the noise. “Go outside in the backyard,” my father’s voice was saying, “and look up at the sky, Champion. Don’t ask, don’t talk, just do what I say, and call me back. Do you hear me? Are you there?”
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