A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

  Abby Collins, Paper 1

  The Rise Of The Novel: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne

  November 3, 1993

  Peter Kerner, Ta

  Then she stopped. He had said she could call. But she hadn’t even started the paper yet; what would she ask? She opened her notebook to the notes she had taken that day.

  Richardson’sPamela, or Virtue Rewarded . Richardson was writing letter-writing manual, then switched to epistolary novel. Maidservant Pamela Andrews tells story in letters to parents: she refuses approaches of employer, then marries him when he proves himself worthy.

  Fielding’sJoseph Andrews 1742. (Joseph A. in Fielding’s novel is Pamela’s brother.) Joseph chaste, like his sister: dismissed from job for resisting female employer’s advances, thrown out in hypocritical world. Joke of male chastity→ criticism of Eng. society and its imagined virtues.

  (Fielding’sTom Jones a response to Richardson’sClarissa ? Tom Jones not evil, just easily seduced.)

  Jamie.

  Why Yvette sends Margot to France.

  That was the end of the notes; then she had spaced out completely. She wouldn’t be able to lend these to Peter Kerner.

  She went back to the cursor blinking under the paper heading. She typed, “In Fielding’s The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, ” and watched the cursor blink. Then she picked up Tom Jones to try to read herself to sleep.

  14

  JAMIE HAD PLANNEDbadly and left San Diego in the middle of weekend beach traffic, as if leaving Abby didn’t feel bad enough already. A million cars crawled up the 5 in the relentless sun, which had sunk just low enough to blind him as he drove. His car felt like the torture box in The Bridge on the River Kwai . His shirt, wet, stuck to the upholstery. On his left were endless strip malls; on his right were housing developments with fake Italian names.

  He could, he knew, stop in Hermosa Beach to ask Yvette if Margot was his mother, but he couldn’t face her right now. She would ask how Abby was, and he couldn’t deal with that. So he stayed on the slow freeway through all of Los Angeles, wondering where everyone was going, and why they had to do it now —what was so fucking urgent?

  North of Los Angeles, the traffic finally slackened, and the sun went down, and Jamie could drive unimpeded and think about what to do. He stopped for gas in a desert town and called his bassist friend in San Francisco, to ask if he could have the couch again. His friend had a new girlfriend but said a week was okay, and Jamie drove into the city in the middle of the night, with the vampires and addicts and the wandering homeless. The closest parking spot was six blocks away. He still had a key and let himself into the second-floor apartment.

  When he woke at noon on his familiar old couch, the new girlfriend, Dena, made him pancakes and coffee. She had freckles and played the accordion. Jamie wondered why he’d never found a girl like her, and told her so. She laughed, a sweet laugh, and seemed pleased. They were going to play poker that night, and Jamie went along.

  The poker game was at the house of the guitarist for Blind Melon, and it had expensive-looking leather couches, two felt poker tables, and wraparound windows overlooking the water. A girl at one of the tables was shuffling her poker chips with one hand. She was tall and blond, and looked bored.

  “Who’s that ?” Jamie asked Dena.

  “Oh, don’t be so predictable,” she said.

  “Am I?” he asked. “Is it? Who is she?”

  Dena rolled her eyes, but she told him: the girl was called Saffron, and she was a few years out of Stanford and had never had a job. Her father had made a lot of money in Silicon Valley and had bought her a house in the city. Her mother was some kind of socialite, but they were divorced.

  “She thinks it’s vulgar to ask people what they do,” Dena said, “because she doesn’t do anything. She hates most people.”

  “Would she hate me?”

  “Oh, Jamie,” Dena said. “Her name’s Saffron . She’s proof that too much money is bad for the soul.”

  Jamie figured Dena was right, but there was no harm in looking at Saffron. She had the luminous skin of rich girls, the healthy, glossy hair: everything about her looked carefully tended. She crossed one long leg over the other. It felt good to be longing for someone who wasn’t related to him.

  The buy-in was a hundred dollars, more than Jamie spent on food in a week, and he sat down at Saffron’s table with his chips. He nodded to the others at the table, two men and a girl. They all looked at him with wary friendliness.

  Saffron won the first hand and shuffled expertly. The fear of saying something wrong had paralyzed Jamie, and he didn’t know how to shake it off except by doing exactly what Dena had told him not to do:

  “So what do you do?” he asked.

  Saffron gave him a quick disapproving glance. “Right now I’m shuffling cards.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  “I do other things.”

  “Like?”

  She looked at him, incredulous.

  “I don’t really know what I do either,” he said. “I play the guitar a little.”

  “That’s what the guy who lives here does.”

  “Yeah, but he does it for giant piles of cash. I do it to meet girls.”

  She gave him the deck to cut. “You should do it for giant piles of cash,” she said. “That would help you meet girls.”

  He laughed—she had won the point—and he thought she was softening, knowing she’d won. He concentrated for the rest of the game on making her laugh, without seeming jokey. A few times it worked.

  By the time they stopped playing, Jamie had lost all but six dollars. Most of it had gone to Saffron. The others got up to cash out, and he was left alone with her.

  “Do you always play like that?” she asked.

  “Like what?”

  “You were playing every hand. You should fold more.”

  “I was distracted. Do you live here?”

  “In this house? God, no.”

  “I meant in the city.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Can I call you?”

  She studied him. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? You can call me.”

  She gave him a funny smile. “Thanks.”

  He wrote down his name and the bassist’s number. “For when you get tired of whatever it is you do,” he said. “Shuffling cards.”

  “I’m tired of that already.”

  “Then call me.”

  She slipped the piece of paper into her pocket without looking.

  “It isn’t likely,” she said.

  Two nights later, when Jamie knew he was getting on his hosts’ nerves but wasn’t ready to leave a city Saffron was in, she called, after dinner.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she said.

  “I’m glad you are.”

  “I guess I got bored.”

  “I was counting on that.”

  “I was telling a friend about you, and they’re here.”

  “Okay,” he said. He felt there was something to pause and think about.

  “Why don’t you come over?”

  Jamie could have run through the streets, but he took a cab; he didn’t want to break a sweat.

  The address Saffron had given him was a narrow three-story house in Pacific Heights, painted yellow. Jamie rang the doorbell and was greeted by a tallish young man in his late twenties. This was the thing he should have thought about. Saffron’s “friend” was not a cute brunette sidekick. He looked like a match for Saffron: handsome and rich. Even his handshake felt rich.

  “I’m Martin Russell,” he said. “You must be the fascinating Jamie.”

  In the entry of the house, there was a low yellow bench and a wooden table with a vase of flowers on it. Jamie took off his jacket and left it on the bench, and he saw that on the wall there was a painting of the room, with the bench and the flowers on the table, as if in a mirror.

  “Saffron loves things like that,”
Martin said. “There’s another one upstairs. We’re in here.”

  Jamie followed him to a room where Saffron sat in a low chair by the fireplace. She was wearing a pale blue slip dress, and Jamie’s heart sank further. Why had he gotten his hopes up about a girl this hot? He should have listened to Dena. He should have asked her to find him another Dena. He took an armchair, in what he hoped was a casual way, and Martin said they had almost gone out to Saffron’s place in the wine country for the weekend.

  “It’s her mother’s house,” Martin said. “Her father keeps it up even though they’re divorced. It’s architecturally kind of interesting, it’s been added on to so many times.”

  “He keeps it up for me, ” Saffron said. “We’re having negronis. I’ll get you one.”

  Jamie watched the dress go. He tried to remember what they were talking about. “My sister lives in the wine country—well, in Santa Rosa,” he offered, feeling how inadequate it was.

  “Oh?” Martin said politely.

  They sat in painful silence. Of course there could be nothing interesting to Martin about Jamie’s sister’s house. He felt old and poor, and was grateful when Saffron brought him a dark red drink in a tall glass.

  “They’re kind of awful-looking,” she said. “My parents used to drink them.”

  “I’ve never had one.”

  “Oh, good!” she said. “We’re corrupting you.”

  The drink tasted like wine spiked with gin. He set the glass on the side table.

  “Last year,” Martin said, “I decided that each month, I would try one totally new thing. But I had to stop after five months. I ran out of things I hadn’t done.”

  “Show-off,” Saffron said.

  “It’s true.”

  “Did you try fucking a man? Or piercing your scrotum? Or getting shat on by Japanese girls?”

  “I mean things I hadn’t done that I wanted to do.”

  “Well, that’s a whole different thing,” Saffron said. “You don’t need to set yourself an assignment for that .”

  The conversation went on like that for an hour, with little help from Jamie, and finally Martin got up to leave. Jamie stood to shake his hand but didn’t move toward the doorway. He thought he saw an amused look on Martin’s face, but he might have imagined it. He wondered what Saffron saw in that guy, then remembered that he was good-looking and rich.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” he asked, when Martin was gone.

  “No, just a friend.” She yawned behind her hand. “Are you going, too?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Is that a proposition?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “You were so quiet tonight.”

  “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “You seemed very earnest and serious and direct next to Martin,” she said. “I liked that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a silence, and then he said, “So can I stay?”

  She stretched her long arms over her head and looked up at her hands, as if she were alone and thinking about something else, and then she dropped her arms and shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  He couldn’t call it an enthusiastic invitation, but still Jamie felt he had won the lottery, the sweepstakes, the long-shot bet.

  15

  CLARISSA HAD STARTEDthinking seriously about what she had wanted to do, before she had a husband and a child. Her mother never expected to be anything but a wife and mother, so Clarissa had no role model. What had she really wanted, aside from proving to the nuns, and then to Henry, that she was smart? She couldn’t remember—it seemed just out of her memory’s reach. She had been a teacher, a guidance counselor, a nursing home ombudsman, and a gardening consultant. She liked the gardening best, but it was hard to live on it.

  Del, who had moved into Clarissa’s little bungalow in Santa Rosa, was a contractor and made money by putting roofs over people’s heads. It was straightforward work, and she was good at it. Clarissa envied her clarity and the pleasure she took in her career. Del moved her power tools into the garage and a TV into the living room for sports, and Clarissa wondered why, if life was going to throw her this curveball, she had to fall in love with a woman who was so much like a man. Why not just a woman —why this half measure? Her friend Rae said she wanted Henry back, without a penis. Clarissa said she had liked Henry’s penis fine; it was the rest of him she divorced.

  Some days, Clarissa thought the answer to her emptiness was to have another baby. She was forty-four; it wasn’t too late. She and Del could raise it together. She sized up her male friends as sperm donors and finally floated the idea to Del.

  Del, sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, looked at her with sadness and said, “Don’t do this, Clar. Don’t toy with me when you aren’t serious, it cheapens the things that I want.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Clarissa, don’t.”

  Clarissa took another piece of bread—she was gaining weight, eating as much as Del did—and thought how little Del trusted her.

  “You can be ambivalent,” Del said. “I know that’s true, and honest. You can have the ‘Am I really a dyke’ crisis, because that’s real, and maybe you aren’t. I’m happy to be with you anyway. But you can’t pretend you want things you don’t want. You can’t pretend you’ll stay with me for all the years it takes to raise a kid, because Clarissa, you won’t . I’m not stupid. So don’t fuck with me.”

  After a long silence, during which Clarissa carried dishes to the sink and tried to decide how angry she was, she said, “Maybe I’ll go back to school.”

  “You did that already.”

  “In the wrong thing, though,” Clarissa said. “I got a teaching certificate so I could show a piece of paper to Henry. But that wasn’t where my heart was.”

  “And where was your heart?”

  “I don’t know. Abby’s doing English. Maybe I should have done English.”

  “Would you go back to USF?”

  “I don’t know,” Clarissa said. “There’s probably someplace better. I don’t think I could get into Berkeley. But Abby seems to like UCSD. It’s so different now, from when I was there.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Clarissa.”

  “What?”

  “There are thousands of universities in America, and you want to go study Abby’s major at Abby’s school?”

  “It was my school first. We’d hardly overlap at all.”

  “Clarissa.”

  “What.”

  “I’m not your shrink, and I’m not your daughter,” Del said, “but neither of them would think this is a sane thing to do.”

  Clarissa ran water in the sink, frowning. “Why should Abby stop me from doing what I want?”

  “Because it isn’t what you want,” Del said. “It’s what she wants, and you’d be landing on top of her.”

  “Well,” Clarissa said. “Then maybe I’ll study something else.”

  16

  ABBY WAS LYINGin bed in the dorm at noon, having missed class, looking at the outline of daylight against the white vinyl roll-down shades. The second phase of whatever was happening to her was that she slept, finally, but slept too long, and didn’t want to get out of bed.

  The phone rang, and she watched it ring three times—it didn’t vibrate or dance in the cradle, like in the cartoons—and then she picked it up and listened.

  “Abby?” a man’s voice said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Peter Kerner, your TA,” he said. His section was one of the classes she had missed. “I have your number from the contact sheet.”

  “Hi.”

  “You don’t say hello when you answer the phone.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Where were you during section?”

  “Here.”

  “I have your Tom Jones paper. I handed them back today.”

  “Okay,” she said, embarrassed that he had even seen it.

  “Yo
u got that kind of character really well,” he said. “How everyone likes and roots for him without any real reason to.”

  Abby was relieved but said nothing.

  “Will you be at the lecture tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she said, though she hadn’t been planning on it.

  “I’ll see you there,” he said. “I can show you what I mean about your paper. Don’t skip again.”

  “Okay.”

  She was going to get up and go to lunch, but instead she lay thinking about Peter Kerner. He wasn’t gay. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. The section was in a stuffy trailer, but people showed up for it, and seemed to like him. He said things about the books that seemed true once he had said them. She had once caught him watching as she packed up her books, but pretended she hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t hated her paper. She ran out of things she knew about him and fell back asleep.

  17

  JAMIE STARTED SPENDINGhis nights at Saffron’s house. He loved the expensive sheets, the woman who came to clean, the food ordered in from a fancy market on Union Street. He thought maybe he had found his calling, as a kept man. He didn’t worry about things he had worried about, when money was always an issue. He didn’t ask his mother about Margot, and he didn’t even worry about Abby very much; he knew she was resilient, and he managed to keep her out of his head.

  One night, in the middle of a card game with Martin Russell, Saffron suggested they play strip poker.

  Martin said, “Oh, Saffron, grow up.”

  “Spoilsport,” Saffron said. “It’ll be fun.”

  “We’ve both seen you naked already,” Martin said, “and I think I can safely say that we don’t want to see each other.”

  Jamie was startled. “When has he seen you naked?”

  “Uh-oh,” Martin said. “Was that a secret?”

  “We went to high school together,” Saffron said.

  “Saffron was voted Most Likely to Take Off Her Clothes.”