Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  “Who was it?” Lizzie asked.

  “Nobody,” he said. “They hung up.”

  Lizzie looked at him like he had answered the phone wrong and scared off a call that might have brought good fortune. She turned back to her room where dark little Pia stood in the doorway, smiling with happy confusion.

  The phone rang again half an hour later. Lizzie caught it this time, with David two paces shy. The caller hung up again. After the first surprise had faded from her face Lizzie looked at David this time as if he had offended whoever it was so completely that things had gone beyond even her powers of rescue. David sneered at her and returned to the normalcy of his own room, where he was not guilty and where time passed in a more manageable way.

  He knew the moment he heard Mom come in that something was wrong. Something in her walk, a heaviness. Instead of going into the kitchen to wash her hands, she came upstairs and went into her room, which was a violation of ordinary procedure. David listened and heard nothing after the soft closing of Mom’s door. Lizzie’s music put a pulse in the air. Janet was out somewhere, and no one moved around in the kitchen, starting dinner, tapping pans with a spoon. Something was wrong.

  He ventured out into the hallway, and walked through Lizzie’s music, past the stairwell to Mom’s door. He stood outside it for a while, in the silence. Then he knocked.

  “What is it?” Mom’s voice sounded startled, as if she’d been caught at something embarrassing.

  “It’s me,” David said.

  “Just a minute,” she said. David thought she must be hiding whatever he’d surprised her with, slipping something back into a drawer. In a panic he opened the door and walked in.

  “Hi,” he said, groping for something to do with his hands. His neck craned forward. Mom was standing by her bureau, taking a ring off her finger. She smiled guiltily.

  “What’s doing?” she said.

  “Nothing, What are you doing?”

  “I was trying on my old ring.” She held it up for him to see, a silver band with a tiny diamond set in prongs. “This was my wedding ring from Ray.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She slipped it onto her finger, held her hand before her face. “It doesn’t fit anymore,” she said. “It’s too big.”

  “Oh,” he said, and pulled his neck back in.

  Mom twisted the ring on her finger.

  “Did you go to the doctor’s?” David asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Everything is fine.”

  “Then why did you go?”

  “You get to be my age, you have to have your tires rotated every so often. What do you think you’d like for dinner?”

  “You’re not sick?” he asked.

  “Nope. Everything’s fine.” She turned the ring on her finger as if she were tuning in a distant radio station.

  “Oh,” David said.

  “Do me a favor, would you?” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Leave me alone in here for five minutes, and then I’ll go down and start dinner. We can have fish sticks tonight, how’s that?”

  “Good.”

  “David?”

  “What?”

  “You love Lizzie, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Would you help take care of her if she needed it? You have to remember, she’s only ten.”

  “But I’m only twelve, ” he said, too loud.

  Mom laughed. “I know,” she said. “You’re the one that guards the house, though, aren’t you?”

  He could not at that moment have said whether he was more flattered or terrified. “I’m only twelve,” he said again, this time at the right volume.

  Mom looked down at her ring and the two of them stood in awkward silence, like old friends who have met at a party and should have everything to say to one another.

  “Fish sticks sounds good,” he said, to break the silence. “Good,” she said. “I’ll be right down.”

  “Okay.”

  He waited a moment, and let himself out the door. In the hall, he heard the final notes of Lizzie’s record, followed by the click of the needle.

  It was Friday, and if David could manage to stay out of school this one last day he wouldn’t have to see Billy until Monday. Cutting school again would be too risky—by today they’d surely call the house to make certain he wasn’t seriously ill or moved away. That was what they did. He went downstairs and told Mom he felt sick but she didn’t buy it. She could see through his lies with a piercing clarity that unnerved him; when weighing a statement of his she always scrutinized him with her chin lifted and her neck arched, as if he had a tiny window in the top of his head only she knew about. The trick with Mom was to try and keep from mentioning the lie at all, and even when he carried a lie around inside him she regarded him in her suspicious, high-chinned way, the way she would look at the refrigerator if she could smell something going bad inside.

  So he went to school. Although he wished he was braver he couldn’t make himself pass under the avenue of trees and instead went the long way around, an elaborate route that involved cutting through several yards. He climbed the fences in a casual sort of way, with a little smile and a shrug for thebenefit of no one in particular, as if the fences were a silly joke, another of life’s funny inconveniences.

  He waited until the last possible minute to walk into class. Billy was already in his seat at the rear, and David had a hard time getting from the door to his own desk. He lost the knack of walking. When he got within range of his seat he took too large a step, then had to take a second, mincing step to get close enough to the chair to sit in it. He spent the whole period concentrating fiercely on Miss Mullin.

  When the period ended he rushed off to art. In art they were making planets, with balloons and papier-mache. Mrs. Pilegi had assembled paste and paint and crepe paper and glitter, and told the class to let itself go. David was assigned the planet Mars. He took his balloon and his shredded newspaper and a jar of red paint to the farthest corner. He knew Mrs. Pilegi was an asshole, and he knew why everybody but nerds hated coming to art. He himself was a nerd. But even stupid work like pasting newspaper onto a balloon held his attention, and freed him from the unending stream of events and decisions that made up the days. There were so many possible mistakes, so many hidden rules. In obeying one you were usually breaking another. Laying strips of newspaper over the taut blue skin of a balloon was a safe, sure action and he wished sometimes he could live forever in that moment, seated by a window making a simple, useless thing. He hoped Mrs. Pilegi wouldn’t come badgering him to express himself more, and he tried to keep his tongue from wandering outside his pursed lips.

  He was able to stay out of Billy’s way until lunchtime. They met in the yard, among the kids who were eating lunch. David was crossing to the old spot by the fence, his lunch sack in his hand, and Billy walked in front of him, on his way somewhere else. David froze. He was especially aware of the furry feel of the bag’s rolled top curled around his fingertips. Billy turnedand did not so much look at him as through him, as though he didn’t exist. Billy had a faint, untroubled smile on his face and he kept walking in his own direction, looking more at peace than David could remember seeing him.

  Whenever they passed each other through the remainder of the day, Billy looked at David with the same contented remoteness, as if David were a memory too distant to be either good or bad. David was relieved at first, but as time passed it troubled him more and more. It gave him no way to act. If Billy had apologized, which was David’s wildest hope, or if he’d attacked again, there would have been an obvious next thing for David to do. This way, he felt invisible; invisible and small. After fifth period, when they saw each other for the third time, Billy had drifted beyond his half-smile into an expression of calm, complete nonrecognition, so that David would no more have considered talking to him than he would a stranger at the
Plaza. With a click of pleasure, he began to hate Billy. It wasn’t fair, whatever he’d done, to erase him like this. He was in the right. With his hand in his pocket, he straightened his thumb and index finger into a pistol. The next time he saw Billy he’d shoot him cleanly through the head. After school let out he walked home without hesitation by the usual route. The trees were empty. No one shot at him. No one remarked his passage at all. As he walked he counted up the various possible ways of murdering Billy. He could drop a trash can onto his head from the second floor. He could trap a rattlesnake and put it in his locker. He could string piano wire across the street, stand on one side of it, and shout insults at him until he came running, right into the wire.

  Later, after Mom got home, he told her he definitely wasn’t going to Spokane this summer. He sat at the kitchen table with a glass of grape juice which he told himself was wine. He dipped his finger into it and drew invisible pictures on the tabletop.

  “I’m not,” he repeated, with as much finality as he could put into his voice.

  Mom had set her purse down on the counter and was washing her hands with dish soap at the sink. “Well, I can’t send Lizzie alone,” she said.

  David hesitated and drew a series of mountain peaks with his moistened finger. “She doesn’t want to go either,” he said.

  Mom dried her hands with a dish towel, and didn’t put the towel back on its hook. She twisted it between her fingers. “You just have to go, honey,” she said. “It’s not my decision, it’s the court. You know that. When you’re a little older, you can decide for yourself.”

  David drew a long jagged streak, lightning, across the table. “Dad pinches Lizzie too hard,” he said.

  “He pinches her?” Mom said in that low, collected voice.

  “Uh-huh,” David said, his courage suddenly reduced by half. He drew some little circles with his finger.

  “Where does he pinch her?” Mom asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, where on her body?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “All over.”

  Mom stepped forward, as if tracing the low sound of her own voice to its source, which was somewhere in David’s vicinity. “And what does Lizzie do?” she said.

  “Well, she laughs,” David said. “He tickles her too. But she said the pinches hurt.” He was so nervous now his eyes were clouding. If he started trouble, Dad would find out. He also had another secret, a secret within the secret: when they were in Spokane, a part of him wished that he was the one to be tickled and mauled. It didn’t seem fair that Lizzie was the center of everything. More than once, more than a few times, he had walked past Dad with the focus of his being switched from his head to his butt, hoping Dad would snatch him up and pinchhim. He was terrified of the possibility that Mom would see that through the window in his head.

  “Did she have bruises after?” Mom said. “Did you see red marks on her skin?”

  “No,” David said. He could feel himself passing over into the wrong. Mom was by this time standing close beside him and he shifted his weight over a bit, away from her.

  She shook her head. “I’ll call Mr. Blochman,” she said, “but I don’t know if there’s anything he can do. David, if you really have to go to Spokane this summer I want you to keep a close eye on your sister, because she’s very little. You sometimes forget how young she is. If either one of you gets hurt, if your father hits you just once, I want you to call me right away. Do you understand?”

  “Uh-huh.” A thick ooze worked itself up from the pit of his stomach into his throat and he realized, remotely, that he was about to cry. He wouldn’t do it in front of Mom. He got up and walked out of the kitchen. Mom let him go with only a single rough pat to his shoulder, for which he would always be grateful.

  “I called Blochman,” she said at dinnner. “He said he thinks you should probably go visit your father. He’s going to look into it, but he said he thought you should probably go.”

  David and Lizzie said, “Oh,” at the same time.

  “Why don’t you get another lawyer?” Janet said. “All this character ever seems to do is throw up his hands and say he’ll look into it.”

  “He can’t change the law,” Mom said. “If I could find a lawyer who could do that, I’d go to him in a minute.”

  “Frank’s lawyer seems to have gotten him exactly what he wanted,” Janet said.

  “Frank’s lawyer got him much less than he wanted. Three weeks in the summertime, that’s it. It really isn’t much.”

  “Three weeks with Frank Stark is a very long time,” Janet said.

  “Maybe you and I should talk some more about this later.” “Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

  “What did they tell you at UCLA?” Mom asked.

  “I have to enroll as an undergraduate again. It seems the adult extension courses run more along the lines of creative writing and modern dance than they do organic chemistry. So I’ll be right in there with the eighteen-year-olds.”

  “You’re not that much older yourself,” Mom said.

  “I feel that much older. I don’t know, it just sounded less ... humiliating from a distance. When I actually got to the campus and saw all those bright, optimistic eighteen-year-old faces, I felt very old and stupid.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Oh, I know it is,” Janet said.

  “You’re going after what you want. It’s what you’ve wanted since you were in high school.”

  “I know that. I really do. But haven’t you ever had a dream where all the progress you’ve made, and all the changes you tell yourself you’ve gone through, are just sort of undone and there you are back where you started from years ago? Haven’t you ever had a dream like that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mom said. “Maybe I would if I thought I’d made all that much progress.”

  When she swallowed, David saw how her thin neck struggled the food down. Her skin didn’t look right; just under the pink of the surface was a sooty grayness. He glanced at Janet, to see if she noticed anything wrong.

  “You’ve made progress,” Janet said. “You divorced that maniac, for one thing.”

  “Right, and got myself right back to zero.”

  “That’s exactly where I feel like I am now.”

  “Oh no you’re not,” Mom said. “Not with a good mind and a pretty face.”

  “Everybody around here always pretends that I’m smart and pretty. I thank you all.”

  “You are, ” David said.

  She blew him a kiss.

  They finished dinner and settled themselves in the living room. Friday was a good night for television. They sat in their usual places: Mom and Lizzie together on the sofa, Janet in one of the orange chairs, and David stretched out on the floor, because it seemed a more masculine position.

  The telephone rang during “Dukes of Hazzard.” Janet, closest to the doorway, got up for it.

  She stayed away for quite some time, through a chase and a string of commercials and the escape that lay on the commercials’ other side. The television drowned out her voice, and there was no way David could think of to discreetly overhear. She came back with a lit cigarette and stood in the doorway, smoking.

  “You’ll never guess who that was,” she said.

  “Rob?” David said quickly, to get himself into the conversation right from the start.

  “Bingo,” Janet said. “Now you’ll really never guess where he is.” She took a deep drag and exhaled a large disorganized cloud of smoke. Her exhalations were usually more directed. “He’s at the Galaxy Motel in North Hollywood, where he’s been since the day before yesterday, sitting in a room with the blinds drawn.”

  “What does he want?” Mom said.

  “He wants me to meet him for coffee in Glendale, to discuss a whole new, revamped format for our union, is what he wants.”

  “You’re not going to go, are you?” David asked.

  “Yes she is,” Lizzie said. “You are, aren’t you?”
>
  “Well, I guess I am,” Janet said. “I mean, I told him I would.”

  “No,” David said, and at the same time Lizzie hollered, “Yay.”

  “It’s awfully late,” Mom said.

  Janet glanced at her wrist, which had no watch on it. “Must be almost nine-thirty,” she said.

  “Why don’t you see him in the morning?” Mom said.

  “Because by morning I may be reading about him in the newspaper. You don’t know how he sounded.”

  “Oh, I know how they can sound.”

  “Pardon me. I forgot you know everything there is to know about men.”

  “How who can sound?” Lizzie asked.

  David told her to shut up, and she kicked him. He didn’t kick her back, out of respect for Janet.

  “Well, if you’re going, you’re going,” Mom said.

  “For coffee, honey. To sit in a little Formica booth in Glendale and drink coffee and talk and then come back home.”

  “Do me a favor, okay?” Mom said. “Don’t start calling me ‘honey.’ ”

  “Sorry,” Janet said. “I’ll see you all later.”

  “Tell Rob I said hi,” Lizzie said.

  David said, “Yuck, what a moron,” but his heart wasn’t in it. Lizzie, as if sensing this, kept quiet and settled her head onto Mom’s lap.

  “I can’t believe that guy didn’t leave town,” David said after Janet had gone.

  “He loves your sister.” Mom sighed. “People act crazy when they’re in love.”

  “But she doesn’t love him, right?” David said.

  “She says she doesn’t. No, I don’t think she does. I think more than anything she’s just scared right now.”

  “What of?” Lizzie asked from Mom’s lap.

  “Well, she’s afraid she’s not good enough to do what she wants to do,” Mom said.

  “She’s good enough,” David said.

  “I think so too,” Mom said.

  Lizzie said, “I think she should marry Rob.”

  Janet stayed out through “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Lottery!” Lizzie was sent to bed and an hour later David had to go too. He begged to stay up until Janet got home, but Mom shooed him upstairs where he got into his pajamas and lay rigidly awake until he heard Janet come in. It was almost midnight, according to the clock on his dresser, an old clock with Popeye pointing to the minutes and hours. He realized he had gotten too old for a clock like that.