Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  A breeze blew spangles of water from a tree, and oneplopped cold on the back of David’s neck. For a moment, he thought the rain was starting up again. An image appeared in his mind, clear as memory. He saw the houses sunk to their rooftops in thick yellow water, sticks of furniture twirling in the currents, the people all drowned, and only the dogs strong enough to swim to safety.

  Mom made a fancy dinner, to celebrate Janet’s not getting married. She set the table in the dining room, with a tablecloth and candles and a silver bowl full of fruit. Green apples, dusty plums, nectarines big as a man’s fist, grapes that cascaded over the sides, dangling before their own elliptical reflections. The fruit was piled so high that a nectarine fell from the top as everybody was sitting down. It rolled across the table and landed on the carpet.

  “Too much of a good thing,” Mom said. She picked up the nectarine and placed it more firmly in the arrangement.

  “What is this, lamb?” Lizzie said, “Yuck.”

  “You like lamb,” Mom told her.

  “I do not,” Lizzie said, lifting her chin. She gave all three words equal stress.

  “You liked it last month,” Mom said.

  “I do not like lamb. I will just eat vegetables.”

  “Why don’t you eat yourself?” David said.

  “It looks delicious, Mother,” Janet said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Lizzie thinks she’s a princess,” David announced to Mom and Janet. “She thinks we’re just raising her until the queen comes to pick her up. I heard her say so.”

  “You did not,” Lizzie said.

  “I have ears,” David told her. “You talk to yourself.” It was true. He had heard her in the bathroom a couple of days earlier, whispering, “Oh Mother, I pray you, take me away to my home for I cannot bear to live any longer with natives and criminals.” “I do not,” she said, with surprising calm. It wasn’t long since something like that would have sent her screaming from the table.

  “Enough, you two,” Mom said. “Janet, I hope you still like yours medium rare.”

  “Janet is a vegetarian,” Lizzie said. She was developing a scrupulously even tone, as if her voice was a scraper peeling potatoes.

  “Was, baby,” Janet said. “I gave it up.”

  Lizzie raised her chin another notch. “Why?” she asked. “Well, I’ve been trying to give up a lot of things lately.” “Rob never called, did he?” Mom said.

  “No.” Janet tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear. Her fingernails were bitten down, raw and bloody looking around the edges. “He will, though. I have a feeling the phone’s going to ring any minute.”

  “Where is Rob?” Lizzie asked.

  “He’s still in San Francisco, baby,” Janet said. “He’s keeping the home fires burning.”

  “Why aren’t you getting married?” Lizzie asked.

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” David told her.

  “No, it’s okay,” Janet said. “I’m not getting married because, well, I don’t think I could marry Rob and get into medical school both. I think part of the reason I didn’t get in the first time is that Rob makes me feel too comfortable. So I’m setting out to get less comfortable.” She laughed. “God, that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  “Yes it does,” David said.

  “Oh no, it doesn’t,” Janet said. “I know nonsense when I hear it.”

  “I understand,” Lizzie said.

  “No you don’t,” David told her.

  She looked at him coldly. “Do you know what seven times seven is?” she said.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “It’s forty-nine.”

  “Mom, Lizzie keeps asking multiplication questions and doesn’t give me time to think of the answer. She just knows because they’re doing multiplication now, and I haven’t done it for two years.”

  “Do you know what six times eight is?” Lizzie said. David put his fingers in his ears and closed his eyes. Mom said something to him.

  “What?” he asked her, pulling the finger from one ear cautiously as you’d draw the cork from a champagne bottle.

  “Forty-eight,” Lizzie shouted. David jammed the finger back in his ear.

  The telephone rang. “I think it’s probably for me,” Janet said. She folded her napkin and went into the kitchen. She didn’t pick up the phone until the sixth ring.

  “Hello? Hi.” Her voice was muffled by the two slatted, swinging doors that led from the dining room to the kitchen.

  “Lizzie tells people she was born in London,” David said to Mom.

  “I was born in London,” Lizzie said.

  Mom sat still, her fork tilted in her hand, her head cocked toward the door.

  “She was born in Glendale, right?” David said.

  “No. We’ve already talked,” Janet said in the kitchen.

  “Mom, tell her,” David said.

  “I was pregnant with you in London, honey,” Mom said. “But by the time you got around to being born, we were back in California.”

  “I remember London,” Lizzie said, which overrode a sentence of Janet’s that had begun, “I don’t want—”

  “You couldn’t,” David said. “You were never there.”

  “I was there.”

  “Mom?”

  “Please stop that,” Janet said. “You know how easy it is to make me feel guilty.”

  “You were there in spirit, honey,” Mom said.

  “I remember the Tower of London,” Lizzie said. “There were little windows, and you could see a river through them.” “That’s funny,” Mom said. “I did look out a window in the Tower of London when I was carrying you.”

  “She just saw it in a movie or something,” David said. “There was a boat coming down the river,” Lizzie said. “With red smokestacks and a man in a black hat who waved to us.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mom said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you know,” Janet said, “you’ve used the word owe three times in the last two minutes? I don’t think I owe you anything.”

  “We also went to Buckingham Palace,” Lizzie said. “One of the guards fainted.”

  “—any more tonight. Good-bye,” Janet said. After a moment she came back into the dining room, running the fingers of one hand lightly over her hair. She smiled, tight-lipped, and sat down at her place.

  “Everything all right?” Mom asked her.

  “Oh yes. Everything is fine.” She smiled down at her plate, at the serving of pink lamb.

  “What did he say?” Mom asked.

  “He’s just a little upset, is all. A man naturally gets upset when his bride-to-be leaves him with a note propped up against the salt and pepper shakers. You know, I don’t think I’m very hungry after all. Would you mind if I excused myself and took a little walk?”

  “It’s dark out,” David said.

  “I know. I’ll be back soon.” Still smiling, she got up and walked out of the house.

  “I hope she’ll be all right out there,” Mom said.

  “Do you want me to follow her?” David asked.

  The telephone rang again. Mom got up to answer it. “No, better leave her be,” she said on the way to the kitchen. “I’m sure she’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  David thought maybe he should go anyway. He sat jiggling his legs, uncertain about whether or not to disobey. He looked over at Lizzie, who squinted at him as if he were too small to see clearly.

  “No she isn’t, Rob,” Mom said from the kitchen. “She just stepped out.”

  David and Lizzie sat listening.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mom said. “For a little walk, is all. Yes, I’ll tell her. Of course. Bye.”

  David jumped up and ran for the front door. He would stay well behind Janet, hugging the shadows, so she’d never know she was being watched.

  Mom called his name, but he got to the door before her voice reached his ears. He had made it, technically. He slammed the door behind him and hoped the gestu
re would somehow offend Lizzie without offending Mom.

  The street was dazzlingly lit, by lamps designed to look old-fashioned, loaded with bulbs so bright it was painful to look into their square, spired housings. The lamps set up a ceiling of light that dimmed the sky and closed the neighborhood in. Lights burned in windows across the street, amber for reading and blue for television.

  David crossed over the front yard and peered, cautiously, up and down the street. He could not see her in either direction. He walked a couple of blocks up, and a couple down. She was nowhere. From far away, in the black folds of the hills, a coyote howled. He hated being out alone at night.

  He checked again for her. She seemed to have disappeared. Finally he went back home, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  He paused in front of the house, struck by the hooded shadows the row of miniature pine trees cast against the wall. The Starks’ house was Spanish, like all the others in the neighborhood, its rough plaster walls painted the color of a manila envelope. Its red-tiled roof rose to a high off-center peak— inside the slanted living-room ceiling was two stories high, shot through with specks of silver glitter. The houses on either side were not half so nice, and even the one three houses down, which was the same as the Starks’, lacked some of the special details they had added over the years. Their front walk was lined with flowers, big brightly colored daisies like the ones in old cartoons that grew leafy arms and legs and did a little dance; by the front door, over the square white doorbell, the family name was spelled out in blue letters on white tiles. A black iron eagle had been nailed above the door, and on the stoop lay a green welcome mat, with three daisies in the upper right-hand corner.

  David went inside. “Did you find her?” Mom asked as he entered the dining room.

  “No,” he said. He had hesitated too long again and failed to be of use to anybody.

  “Well, I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Mom said. “Sit down and finish your ice-cold dinner.”

  “Lamb,” Lizzie said. “Yuck.” She speared a sprig of cauliflower with her fork and held it an inch from her mouth. Then she opened her mouth to the exact size of the cauliflower bud, and popped it in.

  “What’s the difference between Lizzie and a pig?” David said.

  “Sit. Eat,” Mom told him.

  The telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” David said. He sprinted forthe kitchen, and picked up the receiver in the middle of the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  “David?” A deep voice, crinkled with static.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This is Rob.”

  “Hi, Rob.”

  “Is Janet back yet?”

  “No”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “No. She went out.”

  “Tell her something for me, would you, David? Tell her I’ll keep calling until I talk to her, every half hour. All night if I have to. Will you tell her that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good boy.”

  David sucked in a deep breath. “Don’t call her anymore, Rob, she doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said, and immediately hung up.

  Mom was standing in the doorway. “You shouldn’t have said that.” She stood with her arms folded over her chest. He noticed her arms. Freckled on top, dead white on their undersides, the flesh so soft it favored whatever direction she leaned in. Her thin black watchband bit into the softness at her wrist-bone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “My only wish in this whole world right now is for you to go back in there and eat your lamb. Would you do that for me?”

  “Okay,” he said. He went back into the dining room and said to Lizzie, “The answer is, a pig at least is worth some money.”

  _____

  After dinner, he went upstairs and walked softly into Mom’s room, avoiding the places in the hall where the floor creaked. Mom’s room was not expressly forbidden, but it opened off the dead end of the hall, and there was rarely any reason for going there. Even Mom stayed out of it, lingering downstairs over television until it was time to sleep. Any furnishing that wore out in another part of the house found its way to Mom’s room. She had the old watercolors of London hanging still in their chipped blond frames, and the lamps with the Mexican shades, and the chair covered in scratchy green material which, as far as David knew, had not been sat on since it left the living room back in kindergarten. He entered the room with a feeling of abashed humility, the way he would enter an abandoned, walled garden.

  The room was dark. David tiptoed to Mom’s dresser and pulled out the top drawer, careful not to let it squeak. A cloud of Mom’s smell rose like a ghost—her perfume and an underlayer of something sweet and old, like bread gone moldy. In this drawer were stacks of Mom’s white underwear, which gave off a hint of light. In the next drawer were sweaters, woolly and neutral-smelling, like a dream of sheep.

  The pistol was in the nightstand. The Starks had had it for years, since Dad first brought it home in first grade. It moved from one place to another around the house and finally came to rest here, in the nightstand, after Dad moved out. It had in a way ceased to exist, since no one had spoken about it in years. It simply edged itself into Mom’s room like other household objects. David wasn’t even sure whether he was supposed to know about it. He did know about it, and checked every so often to make certain it hadn’t moved. It lay on its side along with a bottle of aspirin, a yellow envelope full of negatives, a green, spiral-bound memo pad, a half dozen pens and pencils, and a deck of playing cards, held together with a dirty blue rubber band.

  The pistol was a dull licorice black, with a surprisinglyslender barrel and a short, nubbly handle. David knew its qualities only by sight. He had never touched it. It had too much slumbering life for that.

  He heard movement from downstairs. Lizzie’s voice, saying something sour and unintelligible, grew nearer. He hurriedly closed the drawer and crept back to his own room, where he dropped onto the bed and lay waiting for the sound of Janet coming back. He lay with his hands clasped behind his neck, a posture he had borrowed from Gonzo on “Trapper John” and was trying out for himself. On the ceiling hung a National Geographic map of the galaxy, saggy at the middle, edged with yellowed tape. A rectangle of starry night sky. Dad had put it up there for him, years ago.

  That was before Dad pushed him down the stairs. He knew because he remembered looking up at these same stars when they brought him home from the hospital with the stitches in his head. Dad and Mom had been fighting in their bedroom, and David had stood in the hall listening. He remembered something being said about Janet. Dad threw open the door yelling, “Stupid goddamn lies.” David screamed and then he was falling down the stairs. His forehead when it hit the banister made a sound like biting into an ice cube.

  That had been years ago. After school got out next month, David and Lizzie would fly to Spokane to spend another three weeks with Dad and his new wife, Marie. Dad was kind to them when they visited. He wore plaid shirts and blue jeans. He had a new laugh, sudden as a spring popping out of a box. David treated him with the wary respect he’d show to a piece of large, dangerous-looking machinery, the precise function of which was unknown.

  Time passed. David knew he should be doing homework. On the top of his desk sat a map of California, made of papier-mache, yellow-green in a brilliant blue ocean. He had become famous with his sixth-grade teacher for his elaborately illustrated book reports and minutely detailed maps and was currently in the process of gluing on cotton balls, real kumquats, and the bearded heads of foxtails to represent crops. With each success, he worried more deeply that the next project would be a failure.

  Instead of working on the map he lay listening, aware of his heart and his breathing. He unzipped his pants and started to beat off. When he beat off, his brain shut down completely, and after he finished it was like coming out of a tunnel back into daylight. It left him dazzled and disoriented. He didn’t really like doing it but he started
doing it now; then he stopped for fear Lizzie might hear him. He lay with his hands folded on his chest, listening to the night. For years he had thought of the map on his ceiling as a map of the universe, until Janet told him that it only charted the galaxy, one tiny piece of all there was. Although he didn’t doubt her word, he still thought of it as a map of the universe.

  Finally he heard something at his window, a sound so faint it was hardly sound at all but more an agitation of the air, like the whirr of a moth’s wings under a lampshade in the next room. He got up to look out the window. Janet sat in the backyard smoking a cigarette, a small ember that flared and subsided.

  He walked out of his room and went downstairs. Mom and Lizzie were in the living room watching “Diff’rent Strokes.” David walked by unnoticed, went through the kitchen and out the back door.

  Janet was sitting in one of the redwood lawn chairs, facing the house, on the thin band of grass that lay between house and pool. Behind her the pool stretched motionless, silver, giving back the sky and the scalloped top of the fence that separated the Starks’ property from their neighbors’. The tip of Janet’s cigarette hung suspended before her mouth.

  “Hello,” she said, exhaling a stream of luminous smoke.

  “Hi,” David said. He went and sat in the empty chair besideher. The slats were damp and pulpy, and he ran his fingernails experimentally along the arms.

  “I was looking up at your window and thinking about you,” she said. “And here you are.”

  “Did you go for a walk?” he asked.

  “Well, I didn’t manage the walk after all,” she said. “I got about two houses down and I came right back here to our own backyard. I’ve been listening to the phone ring.”

  “He’s called four times,” David said.

  “I know. He’ll call all night if I don’t come and answer it. I will, the next time it rings.”

  “Okay.”

  She stubbed her cigarette out in the grass, and put the dead butt into her shirt pocket. “I’m not a very good example to you, am I?” she said.