Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  “Don’t call me that,” Lizzie said.

  Mom picked up the milk carton, glancing at it with accustomed surprise (things turned up in strange places with humanlike obstinacy; it was the way of the world), and put it back into the refrigerator.

  “Rob, what about some breakfast?” she said.

  David thought, Don’t feed him, so hard he checked around to be sure he hadn’t said it out loud.

  “That’d be great,” Rob said. “I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.” He smiled his proud smile, showing gums.

  “I will make the toast,” Lizzie said with gallant resignation.

  “You’ve never made toast in your life,” David said. He couldn’t contain himself.

  “Yes I have,” Lizzie said.

  “She never makes toast,” he told Rob, helpless in his frustration over Lizzie’s conceit, her wrongness. “She never does anything. I’ll bet she doesn’t even know where the toaster is.”

  “I’ve been hearing about Lizzie’s toast ever since we first met, David, my friend,” Rob said. “I’m told she only makes it on special occasions.”

  David had blundered. Now it was Lizzie and Rob against him.

  Lizzie took bread from the breadbox and said, “David sticks his boogers under the table. There’s one there right now.”

  “More than enough, little darlings,” Mom said.

  Mom cooked the eggs and bacon, Lizzie made toast, and David set the table because he didn’t want to do nothing. Rob leaned against the counter, drinking his tea, talking to Mom and calling her Beverly.

  “Well, Beverly, even a bathrobe becomes you,” he said while she turned the bacon. She didn’t laugh.

  “So how goes the practice?” she asked.

  “All right. Fine. I seem to be passing for a real attorney. The suit and tie help.”

  “The first time I met you you were wearing overalls. I thought you were a farmer.”

  “Overalls and Birkenstocks,” he said. “One uniform traded for another. I still meditate.”

  “Well. That’s nice.”

  “If I have to work late I lock my office door and take the phone off the hook for half an hour,” he said. “I never skip meditating. And I can tell you with absolute certainty, Beverly, that it’s made me a better lawyer. So my hippie days paid off.” “Good,” Mom said.

  “How’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Me? I’m always the same.” She stirred the eggs and with her free hand held her robe closed over her chest.

  “Maybe you’d like to try meditating someday,” Rob said. “I’m always looking for converts.”

  “Do you think it would make me a better assistant administrator of schools?”

  “It might make you a more relaxed one.”

  “If I was any more relaxed I couldn’t stand up. Why don’t you tell me to run away to Brazil? That’s more what I have in mind.”

  Rob smiled and sipped his tea, his one eye shining.

  They had just sat down to eat when Janet came downstairs. Her footsteps were audible on the treads, and a quick silence stitched the air before Mom resumed her story about Buzz Sorely, her boss, who in Mom’s stories was a combination of menace and fool, dangerous in the way of a brontosaurus, which might crush you out of simple disorganized stupidity. She was still talking about him when Janet appeared in the kitchen doorway and stood there, as if waiting to be asked in.

  She wore jeans and an old checkered shirt. Her hair was tied up in a knot. Rob had been watching the empty doorway and now he looked at Janet with only a small change in hisface, a certain deepening of his eyes that reminded David of the remoteness that came into a dog’s eyes when you scratched it in just the right place.

  “Oh God,” Janet said. “Did I do that?”

  “Yes you did,” Rob told her. “You did a very nice job.”

  “Did what?” Lizzie said.

  “Shut up,” said David.

  “Gave him that eye,” Janet told Lizzie. “I didn’t think I hit him so hard.” She made a fist, and looked at it with surprise and satisfaction.

  “You hit him?” Lizzie said.

  Janet nodded, looking at her fist. Then she looked up at Rob. “I just can’t believe you,” she said.

  “Why did you hit him?” Lizzie asked.

  “Aren’t you happy to see me?” Rob said.

  “What do you think? I thought you had more respect for me than this.”

  “Did you hit her back?” Lizzie asked Rob.

  “How about some breakfast, Janny?” Mom said. “Lizzie’s made her special holiday toast.”

  “No thanks. I’ll just have some coffee.” She went to the stove to pour it, but stopped halfway and planted her hands on her hips. “Were you the Peeping Tom last night?” she asked. “No,” Rob said. “What, did you have somebody out there?” “What Peeping Tom? Where? Here?” Lizzie said.

  “The police were here last night,” David told her. “They walked all over the house with flashlights. They even went in your room. You slept right through it.”

  Lizzie’s jaw quivered in disbelief. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” she said to Mom. Her voice was quiet; she didn’t have enough power in her lungs for a shout big enough to match the offense.

  “David thought he saw someone,” Mom said. “There was no point in having any more excitement than we had already.” Thinking of Rob as the man in the yard altered the quality of last night’s fear. The event itself changed: David had not been endangered but just comically put out over a silly character sneaking through the flower beds. It had a parallel cartoon version, with David a short, brave animal, a sort of beaver-bear, and Rob a goggle-eyed human with stork legs and a plumed hat, tiptoeing around on his oversize feet while ghostly hearts and exclamation points rose up out of his head.

  “I told you to always wake me up,” Lizzie said. She settled peevishly into herself.

  Janet brought her coffee to the table. Rob half stood, and she motioned him to sit down again with a single, flat-handed command. David was impressed by the gesture. He would use it himself someday. Janet stood by the table, between David and Lizzie, across from Rob. She was wearing perfume.

  “I still think it was you,” she said. “The minute I heard there was a man outside, I thought of you.”

  “It could have been any of your boyfriends.” Rob smiled.

  “Anyway, we all lived through it,” Mom said. “Clear light of day, and we’re all in one piece.”

  “I’m just trying to figure you out,” Janet said to Rob. “I’m standing here trying to remember what I could have told you to make you think it would be a good idea to hop in the car and drive all the way down here and stand outside my window.”

  “I guess I didn’t think about it at all,” Rob said. He checked Lizzie, briefly, for sympathy.

  “Oh, I can appreciate it in a movie sort of way,” Janet said. “That’s how you expect me to appreciate it, isn’t it?”

  Rob gave an elaborate shrug and crossed his eyes. Lizzie giggled.

  “I’d just like to think you had more respect for my decisions,” Janet said.

  Rob turned serious, chin lowered, and said, “My being here doesn’t have to affect your decision in any way, shape, or form. I’m just somebody having breakfast in your kitchen. If you tellme to, I’ll get up after breakfast and drive right back to San Francisco.”

  “Good,” Janet said. “Finish your breakfast, and go back to San Francisco.”

  He looked at her in his doting, doggish way. “Really?” “Really.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “All right.”

  “Maybe you should sleep a couple of hours first,” Mom said. “No thank you, Beverly. I’ll be all right.”

  “He could take a nap in my room,” Lizzie said.

  “No thanks, I’m fine,” Rob said. “I’ll stop somewhere on the way and meditate.”

  “It’s a long drive,” Mom said.

  David could see that things were turning against Janet.
She seemed to know it, too. She shook her head, and the smell of her perfume, still too fresh to have settled into her body, swelled in David’s nose.

  “I’m sorry, Rob,” she said. “But it was a bad idea. Do you see that?”

  “Yes,” he said gravely, though he didn’t sound convinced. Janet kept on shaking her head. “It’s just the worst possible time for me to see you. You know that. It isn’t fair—shit, I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m going to go upstairs. Call me when you get back to the city, so I know you’re safe, okay?” “Okay,” he said.

  “Good-bye.” She walked out of the kitchen. David thought he heard her whisper something, though the words were lost.

  They all waited until her footsteps had sounded on the last stair. A floorboard creaked in the upstairs hall. Rob winced. “Well,” he said, “thank you for breakfast.”

  “You haven’t finished,” Mom said.

  “I’m not really hungry anymore. I think the sooner I get on the road again, the better it’ll be.”

  “I’m sorry, Rob,” Mom said. “But it’s her decision.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just thought—I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think at all. I just left the office and got in my car and drove to Los Angeles. I’m probably as surprised as she is to find me here.” He glanced around at the kitchen with such bewilderment that David felt a pang of sympathy despite himself. Everything about Rob’s face had changed: the sharpness gone out of his eye, the thrust out of his jaw. With a shock, David could see how he had looked when he was twelve.

  “Well,” Mom said, “let me see if I can dig up a thermos. I’ll give you some tea for the road.”

  “No thanks. I think I’ll just pick up and go right now. Bye, kids. It’s been nice seeing you.” He took his napkin from his lap and dabbed his mouth with it, carefully.

  “Good-bye,” Lizzie said. When Rob stood up she jumped out of her chair, and followed him to the door. Mom and David came close behind.

  “What’s your favorite song on Thriller?” Lizzie asked him at the threshold.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I like all of them. What’s yours?”

  “ ‘Beat It,’ ” Lizzie said. “And ‘Billie Jean.’ ”

  “Those are my favorites too,” Rob told her.

  “Also, ‘Thriller,’ ” Lizzie said.

  “Right, that one’s great too. They’re all great. Thanks for breakfast, Beverly.”

  “I don’t really like ‘Baby Be Mine’ all that much,” Lizzie said. “Do call when you get back, okay?” Mom said to Rob. “Just so we don’t worry about you.”

  “Right. Take care, David my friend.”

  “Uh-huh,” David said.

  “Bye, Rob,” Lizzie said. “Drive carefully.”

  “Bye, Lizzie.”

  “I do like ‘Baby Be Mine,’ ” she said. “I just don’t like it as much as the others.”

  “I know how you feel. Bye.”

  “Bye. Drive carefully.”

  Then he was gone, nimbly down the two concrete steps and along the white walk to the street. From the back he looked wholly respectable, a man in a suit, off to work. Lizzie waved to him, and when he got to the sidewalk he waved back.

  “Come back soon,” she called.

  As Rob’s suit and hair disappeared around the hedge, David said to her, “That was a stupid thing to say. He’s never coming back.”

  “Shut up, you asshole,” she said.

  “Back in the house, both of you,” Mom told them.

  They returned to the breakfast nook and ate the last of their eggs. “Well, it’s too bad he came all the way down here like that,” Mom said.

  “Why wouldn’t Janet talk to him?” Lizzie said.

  “Because she didn’t want to,” David said. “She thinks Rob’s a shit.”

  “You’re a shit.”

  “Because she needs more time alone,” Mom said. “You have to trust Janet. She knows what’s best for herself.”

  “But Rob wants to marry her,” Lizzie said.

  “Well, Sparkle, she just doesn’t want to be married,” Mom said. “She wants to try again to get into medical school.”

  “She could get married and go to medical school,” Lizzie said.

  “She doesn’t seem to think she could. That’s her choice.”

  Lizzie paused, thinking. “Don’t call me Sparkle anymore,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Mom said. “It’s an old habit.”

  Mom took the dishes to the sink, and David and Lizzie hung around the kitchen, uncertain about how to reenter the normal day. David thought maybe Janet had been a little too hard on Rob. He drove five hundred miles, and all he got was a few bites of scrambled egg. Then again, he hadn’t been allowed to stay around long enough for anyone to uncover David’s new story.

  They heard the sound of Janet’s movements upstairs. Although no one said anything about it the air in the kitchen tightened, and David sidestepped a few paces closer to the door, so he’d be the first person she saw.

  Her perfume entered, and then she did. Her eyes were dry. “Having devoured her mate,” she said, “the spider went back to her ordinary business of picking up stray flies.”

  “You did what you had to do,” Mom said, keeping busy at the sink.

  “I know I did. That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  Lizzie squinted at Janet as if she was far away. “I would have let him stay,” she said.

  “That’s because you’re a pinhead,” David told her.

  “And you’re a faggot.”

  “Where do you both learn words like that?” Mom asked. “Who are you people, anyway?”

  “Rob is more persistent than you think, Lizzie,” Janet said. “He’s not a bad guy but, well, he’s just very determined to have his own way. A gentle no doesn’t work very well with him.”

  “I would have let him stay,” Lizzie said.

  “Let’s send Lizzie to San Francisco to live with Rob,” David said.

  “Let’s get you both off to school,” Mom said. “I can’t tell you what a thrill it’s going to be not to hear your voices for the next eight hours.”

  “Maybe I could stay home today,” David said. He was thinking of keeping an eye on Janet, and of staying out of the sights of Billy’s gun for a while longer.

  “Maybe you could run upstairs right now,” Mom said, “put your school clothes on, and scrape the moss off your teeth.”

  “If David gets to stay home from school I do too,” Lizzie said.

  “Nobody’s staying home from school,” Mom said.

  “Why don’t they?” Janet said. “Just this one time. I’ll take them to the beach or something. It’d be good to have company today.”

  “Do you want to write the notes explaining how they got suntans while they were sick?”

  “Sure. We’ll put powder on them or something. Come on, Mother, be a sport.”

  “Yeah, be a sport,” David said.

  “We’re not doing anything today,” Lizzie said. “There are no tests.”

  Mom poured soap into the dishwasher. “Tell you what,” she said. “As of today, you kids make all the decisions. I’ll just go to work and come home and do whatever you say. For every day you get older I’ll get a day younger, and before you know it we’ll be right back here again with me asking you if I can skip work for a day. How would that be?”

  “Great,” David said.

  While Mom got dressed for work, David, Lizzie, and Janet put on their bathing suits and gathered towels, suntan oil, the transistor radio. Janet filled a sack with fruit from the refrigerator. The house was charged with the sweet strangeness of going, made all the better by the unexpectedness of the trip. A spur-of-the-moment journey improved the house in David’s eyes; it widened its circle of possibility.

  When Mom came downstairs in her cocoa-colored skirt and jacket, carrying her purse, Janet drove her to work. Before they left Mom kissed David and Lizzie on the forehead and said, “Be sure you have dinner rea
dy on time tonight. And the electric bill’s due by Friday.”

  “Okay,” David said. He was taken with the fact that Mom when she dressed for work looked like anybody. Strangers had no way of knowing she was peculiar and kind. He thought with satisfaction of how Lizzie hadn’t realized that yet.

  He and Lizzie stood in the living room in their bathing suits, watching Janet and Mom pull out in Mom’s car, a light blue Camaro with blue upholstery. Everybody called it the Blue Baby. Out in the neighborhood, at this moment, Billy was calculating David’s progress toward school; he might even be waiting in a tree or behind a parked car, his weapon cocked, thinking, Any minute now. Rob was driving back to San Francisco and Dad was in Spokane with Marie. David and Lizzie stood right here in the living room, surrounded by walls. They both looked out the window, not speaking. When they were alone together they didn’t fight much. They hardly talked at all. Lizzie lifted one skinny leg behind her and held her ankle with her hand. Of all the people in the world Lizzie was the only one who had no smell, or if she had a smell it was enough like David’s own that he could barely detect it. She just smelled like a person. David glanced down at her bare legs, the one folded up like a stork’s and the other knob-kneed, dusted with freckles, the unfreckled parts so white they were almost blue. Standing with all her weight on that one thin leg she looked so fragile that David reached over and pushed her off balance, to put her back on two feet. She stumbled sideways and came at him so fast her body might have been attached to his by an elastic band. She punched his shoulder, hard as she could. He said, “That’s too hard, you fucker,” and walked into the kitchen, because he didn’t want to fight. He just didn’t like her looking so delicate, so close to falling over.

  Janet came back in the Blue Baby fifteen minutes later, and they loaded their beach things into the trunk. David and Lizzie had some trouble working out the question of who would sit in front, which Janet resolved by flipping a coin. Lizzie had the front seat on the way to the beach, David would have it on the way back.

  They drove through the neighborhood, heading for the freeway. Janet steered with one hand, and in that hand she kept a cigarette pinched between her index and middle fingers. She was not a careful driver. She paid only marginal attention to the road, as if it were not quite interesting enough to hold her attention.