To finance Dad’s cure we threw a paper route. I could see Rick pedaling furiously abreast of me, newspaper cocked behind his ear. His face, still pudgy, sweated, veins swelling.
Rick and I drove around. Since he insisted on keeping the top down, we were bundled like polar explorers. The sky was raw and leaden with clouds. We shouted through traffic noise and earmuffs. Rick approved that I’d broken up with Jim, whom I’d met the first month after I moved to Tucson three years before.
Rick and I had a tradition of confiding our most intimate romantic details while the listener dissected the lover mercilessly.
“You undersold yourself on that Jim,” he said. “After Vinnie Toglia, you go out there and take up with an old bald bum.”
“Vinnie Toglia was a sadist.”
“You handled him. That Camaro was the most loaded thing this side of NASA. He’s got his own dog-grooming business now.” The other half of the tradition was that, once departed suitably long, these maligned lovers took on wonderful attributes and their loss was seen as a tragic error in judgment. Within a year or two, I assumed, Rick would have canonized Jim—“oddball, but he showed you respect, a gentleman.”
“I was in a bad space when I was seeing Vinnie,” I said. “I can’t stand this. My face is frostbitten.”
“Arizona has wimped you out.”
We fought a few blocks before Rick curbed the T-Bird and attached the top.
“Rick,” I said once we were moving, “what will you do when Dad’s gone?”
“Fuck knows. Jack around with cars, I guess, free-lance, a garage.”
Rick parked at a renovated corner market of graying brick, the window veined with neon. I would treat him to this video arcade on the way home from Little League.
“Ding-dongs, salted nut roll, and two cream sodas,” the proprietor said immediately. “I wouldn’t have recognized you without Rick,” he told me. “You’ve gotten your hair very ooh-la-la.” He wiggled his head. “You’re beautiful.”
“Anteater nose,” I said.
“No, your face has grown into it. Now you call it queenly.”
After Rick posted high score, slapping and jamming the controls with contemptuous grace, we ate our snacks on tall stools in the rear corner, nearly dark, surrounded by slowly shifting color fields of idle video screens. I almost repeated my question from the car. Surely Rick’s thinking had gone beyond his answer; he must have plans. But, I remembered, talk about Dad was forbidden in the arcade. Instead I said, “I just thought of Monty collecting for St. Ann’s.”
“Oh, no!” Rick threw his arms and legs out, laughing. “The killer kids.”
One day Rick and I were home from school alone when the doorbell rang, followed by heavy knocking.
“Who is it?” we said. The thuds continued.
Never open a crack until the person identifies himself, we’d been commanded. “Who is it?” we yelled. Silence. No footsteps.
Neither daring to leave the other to call the police, Rick grabbed his bat and I the poker. We stood at either side of the door, bellowing “Hello.”
Through a gap in the curtain I saw a sleeve. The pattern looked familiar. Recklessly I tore aside the curtain. It was Monty, a deaf mute.
The story, I realized, was intended to reassure my brother, a classic things-aren’t-as-scary-as-we-make-them.
On the drive home I pulled Rick over for an antique shop. My sprayed-stucco Tucson apartment needed some genuine old Wilmington, I said. Rick, in his Def Leppard sweatshirt and pummeled leather jacket, cupped porcelain shepherdesses in his hands as if they were baby birds, and chatted up the proprietress while I browsed, counting on intuition. I’m no connoisseur.
Rick spotted the plain, bowed-back wooden armchair, part of a display cordoned off with silk rope. “The bedroom. Perfect,” I said. No one was looking. I sat in it. Roomy, and with red velvet cushions it would be comfortable.
“‘Windsor tavern chair,’” Rick read from the catalogue. “Sixty-seven dollars. That’s not such a rip for a place like this.”
“Incredible. Rick, what an eye you’ve got.”
“I’ll buy it.”
“How?” He was out of a job.
“I’ve got some part-time. I want to. It’ll be a memento.”
“I love it,” I said, standing to hug him. I checked the entry. “Circa 1750. This is sixty-seven hundred.”
He grabbed the pamphlet. “To throw your ass in? Christ,” he yelled. He kicked the chair. It sprang away from his boot, rebounded from the wall and onto its side.
Rick bolted.
The four legs pointed at me. The spindly ribs nestled into the stubbled carpet. The chair lay on the floor like a breach of natural law. I ran, too.
My last morning Dad asked me to walk him around the reservoir. “His pep when you’re here, it’s night and day,” Mother remarked.
“Keeping busy, Claire?” Dad said. I was steering him across icy patches, hands at his elbows.
“Best job I’ve had.” An L.A. law firm had rushed open a Tucson office, defending a megadeveloper against a titanic subcontractor. Desperate for help, they’d made me a legal secretary despite no previous experience. I am a quick study. Admitting that sleaze would rule, whoever won the case, we employees joked incessantly, uneasily. But my research was stimulating, the pay good, the lawyers cynical and funny. Beautifully dressed and groomed, they were like models from premium liquor ads.
“Two parents with half a brain equals a kid with a whole one,” Dad panted. We rested.
“Last time I was here, Rick was living in Elsmere, with a girl,” I said.
“I believe that’s so, Claire.”
I pressed. Shouldn’t Rick find his own place? Couldn’t he get on with Sabo Electric again? Was he dating?
“He’s got the T-Bird,” Dad said. “A car is less upkeep than a woman.”
“Aw, Dad.” I spanked his hand. “You can’t talk like that in the ’80’s.”
Because Rick had never left, he had become invisible to Dad. In grade school Rick biked to Dad’s work sites. He quit high school, joining the paint crew full-time to keep the business afloat, just as Dad was preparing to sell out. Now Rick broke leases, lost jobs, always returning.
I flew in from Wilmington racing, unable to settle down. I’d had no personal life outside Jim, and Leah was the only person I could think to call. We made a date for Saturday morning, her beginning ballet class. I’d never taken dance in my life.
Tiptoeing onto the particle-board floor, we lurched through chains of plieing pink babies, a handful of adolescents. My butt and boobs bulged out of the saggy old leotard. Leah didn’t shave her armpits. Repeated in wall-length mirrors, we were a spectacle. But Leah retained vestigial technique from childhood lessons, and my calves were so strong that my sautes impressed the ballet mistress. Stringy and brown, at least sixty-five, she dressed in black from wrists to ankles, catching her hair in an orange kerchief. Referring to herself in third person, she would say, “Madame Rifi is not pleased with port de bras today.”
At the end of class Madame Rifi offered me a role in the spring recital, “Babes in Toyland.”
“Thank God,” Leah said. “I’m the Toymaker.”
To celebrate our new stage careers we ate brunch at a trendy cafe. Leah complained about Eskison, who had been out past three on successive nights. She set a curfew and locked the door, but he pounded and rang. “‘I don’t have to be here.’ He keeps saying it.”
“Junk him,” I said, snapping my fingers.
“Of course. Why didn’t I think of that.”
I spilled sprouts down my chin and front, and laughed and laughed. It struck me as so funny that after a lifetime in men’s company I had spent the morning among generations of women. It was like slinging aside a backpack at the end of a hike, the hard scrunched muscles loosening, expanding.
The recital clearly haunted Madame Rifi. Already in February she began teaching the class our dances. She devoted herself to the main part
s, particularly the leads, a brother and sister played by the two oldest girls, who marked the choreography with spindly, clockwork competence.
Leah and I were expected to coach the Junior Corps, youngest age four. I’d not had to mind little girls since our family Thanksgivings and Christmases fifteen years before; Dad had withdrawn from holidays once he was sick. Simply trying to form the children into a line was impossible, their elbows and hips sticking out every which way. While Leah guided one at a time through the basic steps, the rest sat cross-legged, chewing their feet, or rolled, crashing into each other, giggling.
“Keep your places,” I yelled, clapping my hands. Openly defying me, two ran across the studio and hid behind the water cooler.
Suddenly I was trembling, my concentration blacked out. I felt alone in the room, the rebellion inside my own head. The scattering children were parts of myself getting away from each other. And I was chasing, grabbing their arms, shouting, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” They burst out crying.
Over salad at our cafe I told Leah I was too ashamed to go back.
She shook her head. “Smile and nice them up, and they’ll forgive. With little ones you can get away with murder, frankly. It only comes out later. Twenty years from now they’ll snap and gun down a touring Swan Lake.”
“I’m not myself. I think my brother’s on drugs,” I said, feeling again the bewilderment as I described the fallen chair, the mute legs poking at me. And it was Valentine’s Day, I said, when Jim would have taken us to Mexico for our annual shrimp feast.
“Dear,” Leah said, “you’re one person I don’t worry about. That’s what’s so wonderful about you.” Everybody took drugs, she continued. “When I was Rick’s age, I pickled myself in everything conceivable.”
I admitted experience in that area myself.
“And here we are,” Leah said. For that matter, she continued, Eskison dealt seasonally, to pay his tuition. Not that he’d go so far as to contribute toward rent. Last summer she’d made him get a job, and he drilled a hole through his hand.
Eyebrows raised, Leah stared over her fork at me. I challenge you to accept a fool like me, her expression said. So naturally I did.
I was sorry I yelled, I began. I was in a bad mood, I said, making a ridiculous mean face, pulling down my eyes and spreading my mouth with my fingers. The Junior Corps laughed, except for those two. I was extra attentive to them, manipulating their little hinged knees, rubbery arms, supporting their tummies on walkovers.
Leah, I noticed, treated rehearsal as playing. Demonstrating a step, she’d incorporate an outrageous error, snarling her legs, hopping on one foot. “No, no, Lili,” the Corps howled—and performed the move flawlessly. Leah designated me the model of correctness. “Show her, Claire,” the Corps insisted, cheering when I did, joining me. When the girls finally swarmed us, overexcited, punchy, hugging us, someone pushed, crying. Leah sat us down for circle games.
“You’re incredible,” I said later, as we ate.
“Experience. I raised three.” Currently with their father, in Oakland. “After years of his hounding me, I said, ‘O.K., you’ve got your chance. Take them.’ Face it: He’s remarried, dual-income family. This was before Eskison, I was loose ends. I was kind of moody, at the time, for being a parent.”
Only once, weeks after, Leah flipped open her wallet snapshots. From under Leah’s thick lustrous hair gazed Leah’s intelligent brown eyes in a young woman, teenaged boy and girl. “The father must have no genes,” I said. Leah smiled infinitesimally, for a second.
To reward their progress, Madame Rifi allowed the Junior Corps to rehearse in costume. But the starched chiffon skirts were a failure. During their big number, the March of the Toys, the material snagged, the Toys becoming entangled. Unaccustomed to their new dimensions, the girls constantly bumped, knocking the smallest down.
“The hell with it,” Madame Rifi said, unpinning the skirts. And she redesigned the entire production. The Toys would wear plain black leotards. The March would progress from a serpentine meander across stage to a revolving circle. Then, single file, the Toys would stretch up their arms and sink to the floor.
“Toys are totemic,” Madame said. “Beneath the surface, the March of the Toys has the ritualistic validity of anything in ‘Le Sacre du Printemps.’”
Leah, the evil Toymaster, barelegged in sleeveless black leotard, would register ambivalence toward her misdoings by socking herself in the gut. As Mother Goose, I summoned nursery rhyme characters with alarmed twisting leaps.
Though Madame Rifi was a clown, her choreography for me was intuitive, a physical struggle with my anxieties, my chest and neck straining for height against the sideways wrenching of my arms. I practiced at home until completely drained.
“Babes in Toyland” was a smash. Brother and Sister whirled crisply. The Toys, in floppy yellow headpieces sewn by Leah in homage to youth’s imperishable frivolity—so she convinced Madame Rifi—toppled on cue, in rippling cadence, like dandelions before a mower. Leah gesticulated and doubled over. I sprang, adrenaline lifting me like a hand, my arms ricocheting around me like tetherballs, grunting.
At curtain call Madame Rifi kissed everyone, presenting not only the leads but Leah and me with bouquets of roses. The cast party disbanded quickly since most members were up past bedtime.
Leah and I drank sombreros. “These totemic straws stir with ritualistic validity,” she said, and we laughed, but irresistibly we began moving on our barstools, tossing back and forth bits of our routines. We toasted each other—the Toys had come through. I kept my bouquet long after it dried, and so did Leah.
I wrote Rick during the spring, urging him to visit. I received a postcard of a pig with tricolored Mohawk slopping from a toilet. From library research Leah fed me articles and monographs on depression in ALS families. But all recommended counseling, and Rick would sooner have gone Moslem. Our whole family is that way.
Madame Rifi’s disbanded for the summer.
Early on a Saturday Leah called, distraught. Eskison hadn’t come in at all. I prescribed a hike. When I arrived, Eskison was on the line. “He’s blubbering and stammering,” Leah said. The new lover was his lab partner, nineteen years old. While I packed water and lunch, Leah kneaded her fingers on the couch.
The trail followed a canyon into the mountains. The June morning was deceptively mild until we switchbacked out of the streambed, and the heat turned Leah purple. At the first widening of the path she flagged me for water.
“I was teargassed in People’s Park,” she said aggressively, as if I were responsible. At my uncomprehending look, she said, “Berkeley, 1969. We were a mob, we had broken loose and the fences were going down. We were dangerous. Ecstatic.” She paused. “And then the gas and clubs came in from the other side, and we were smashed into these knots of people. Beaten. Weeping.” Her husband had been an organizer. “Good, dull man. Still at it, runs a co-op in Oakland. Good father. I’m a shit mother.”
I croaked an obligatory dissent, and we trudged upward. On the loops below others toiled under colorful backpacks.
Leah kicked stones off the edge.
“Are you crazy,” I yelled. The avalanche trickled downhill, missed.
“I’m such an asshole.” Leah sat on a rock, slapping her face.
I grabbed her wrists. “Listen,” I said. “You march up this mountain behind me and don’t say one more fucking word.”
It took hours. Emerging from the canyon, the trail bumped over hard, flat tableland, scented with juniper, before ascending through rhyolite pillars and Ponderosa. The last half mile was practically vertical. Our thigh muscles burned. We halted every few dozen yards for water. Finally we flung ourselves on the grassy summit.
Cloud shadows floated over the hazy pastel desert, which met billows of clouds at the horizon.
Leah shook her head, making awed noises in her throat. “You take such good care of me,” she said, throwing her arms around my neck.
Astonis
hed, I stroked her awkwardly. She was musky with fresh sweat, a smell I like.
“He’ll be back, no question there,” she said.
“No,” I said, full of benign power. “He doesn’t get the chance. I’ll help you. You hold to it. Jim doesn’t even know my address or phone.”
Leah sat up. “Not everyone has your guts of steel. I’m a dry old stick. Who’s got time to go looking?”
“You’re so ridiculously beautiful,” I said. The color in her cheeks had subsided to ruddy. Her damp bangs curled across her forehead. Despite threads of gray and lines at her chin, her skin was milky smooth, legs firm as a girl’s, not a vein. She was the healthiest-looking miserable person I’ve met.
“He fucks a teenybopper now and then, what do I expect?” Leah said.
Lunch hit us like an anesthetic. Flattened on the warm grass, we slept.
We woke with cloud in our faces, thunder booming. As we stampeded down the trail, the downpour veiled us from each other, but I heard the sliding rattle of Leah’s footsteps. Plunging out of control, yet charmed, I dodged boulders, leaping logs and roots. Ponderosa stands cut the pelting rain. The path turned to mush. We splattered around switchbacks, alongside gorges, not breaking stride until the parking lot. We had run continuously over an hour. Staggering rubberlegged, we whooped hoarsely, arms upraised.
Leah ripped open her shirt. Her small, perfectly round breasts streamed water. “Claire, I do. I feel cleansed of him,” she said.
She refused to snap up for the ride home.
“What if a cop stops us, or a bus goes by?” I said.
“What if!”
I unbuttoned, too. Wipers singing, arms out the windows, shirts flapping, we cruised the drainage rivers that Tucson streets become. When we rounded the corner to Leah’s block, dusk, Eskison’s truck wasn’t in the driveway.
“Please come in.” Clutching her shirt together, Leah ran for the door, I behind her. After a quick ransacking for signs of his return, she said, in a small voice, “Well?”
All My Relations Page 9
