Anywhere But Here (57 page)

We moved on a week Josh Spritzer was skiing, so we had only the Swans to help us. At first my mother and I cleaned the big house together. We spent long afternoons fighting upstairs over who got to vacuum and who got to dust. Both of us felt embarrassed and we tried to understand each other’s weak points. I never wanted Peter Keller to see me. So my mother did his room and bathroom while he was in school. Then, after a few weeks, I stopped helping. I left it for my mother to do during the day. I went to high school and tried to forget about it.

My mother didn’t last long as a maid. It turned out she didn’t know how to iron. She spent an hour doing each of Mr. Keller’s shirts. He wore two a day, all in shades of white and the palest blue.

“How do you iron your clothes? You must stay up all night,” Mrs. Keller asked.

“Well, actually, since we moved and I was working, I dry-clean,” my mother said.

Another time, Mrs. Keller found my mother standing in her dressing room, with no possible purpose, her arms crossed over her chest, surveying the rows of dresses and shoes.

“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Keller asked.

“I just made the bed,” my mother said. And she had done that—beautifully, with a corner folded down and a water glass of hydrangeas on the end table. The trouble was my mother and Mrs. Keller liked to do the same things, the little touches, graceful additions. Mrs. Keller needed someone good with a mop. It’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. Finally, Mrs. Keller found my mother crying in the kitchen with the cook, both of them on their knees looking for the piece of my mother’s fingernail that had broken off.

“If I bring it in, he can fix it, he has a sheer, sheer fabric he glues it on with.”

The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound cook crawled on the floor, searching, her arm around my mother, to comfort. The roast sat bloody in the sink, uncooked, and the next day Mr. Keller walked over the tennis court to the backhouse and spoke to my mother about the possibilities.

My mother broke down and cried and talked about her master’s degree, moving her ring around the finger with the now-patched nail. They discussed other possibilities for speech therapists: private practice, convalescent hospitals. They decided we could stay in the backhouse, but that my mother would get a job and we would pay rent.

For three weeks she worked as a hostess in the downtown split-level Hamburger Hamlet, wearing long skirts and walking through every night in a terror, afraid that someone who knew Josh Spritzer would come in. Finally, Mr. Keller arranged for an interview at the convalescent hospital where each of Peter’s step-grandfathers had lived, briefly, before he died. My mother got the job.

I found a job, too, as a wrapper in a clothing store. I went in every day after school and all day weekends. During the holiday rush, my mother asked the manager and they hired her on, too, for Saturdays. We measured our Saturdays, not from our salaries, but from what we took. The way we did it was easy. I would wrap huge packages and send them down with another customer’s bags to the pick-up ramp. My mother would write up a receipt for one small thing. We picked the packages up downstairs when we punched out. It didn’t feel like stealing, exactly. We owned clothes now, thousands of dollars’ worth. Clothes seemed easy, not a big deal. Once I opened a drawer and found a little cellophane bag of rings, untagged. I took the whole bag. None of it seemed dangerous really, it was just a small thrill, something that made you suck in your breath a moment so your rib bones rose. And when we drove home as it was turning dark and the streetlights flickered on, you could touch the clothes on the car seat next to you and feel like you’d gotten something out of the day, something you could use later.

But even though we both had jobs, we were never good with money. The first time we couldn’t pay the rent, my mother called Mr. Keller on the telephone and cried and sent me up to the front house carrying mixed flowers and a check they couldn’t cash until two weeks from Wednesday. Mr. Keller was a kind man. He looked at me, put his hand on my arm, his Adam’s apple bobbing up over his collar, and said, “Okay, Ann, tell your mother thanks. And don’t you worry, huh?”

As I turned to go, Mrs. Keller called, “Bert, ask Ann if she’s had anything to eat.”

I was standing at the back door of the kitchen, the door that led to the fenced tennis court, which separated the big house from ours. A cake, with a third cut out, showing its layers, was standing on a cake plate. The smell of roast beef lingered on its tin foil, left, wrinkled on the counter.

I hadn’t had anything to eat yet. My mother was so upset about
the rent, we hadn’t gone to get dinner, but I just said, “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

Not that I was any saint. I scuffed my feet along the tennis court and when I walked in, I plopped down onto the sofa, my hand on my belly.

“What did he say?” my mother asked.

“I’m starving,” I said. “My tummy hurts.”

“Ann, just tell me what Mr. Keller said. Then we’ll get something to eat.”

“He said okay.”

My mother began to beat her chest with an open hand, like a pigeon preparing to take off. “Oh, thank God. Thank you, God,” she said, her head tilted up to the low ceiling.

I groaned. It made me sick when she got grateful. Everybody else had a place to live and you didn’t see them thanking God for it.

“Okay, okay. Let’s go. You’re just not sentimental, are you? Well, I am. I’m thankful when people are nice like that. Get your jacket.”

We had the half-sized refrigerator but we never kept much food in it. Every night we went out for dinner.

“Brrr, come on, hop in,” my mother said. We parked our car in the alley, behind the backhouse. She stood staring up at the sky. I walked around to my door with my fists jammed in my parka pockets. My mother kept quiet because she was making her wish. Forty-four years old and every night of her life she made a wish on a star.

“It’s clear tonight, Ann, look at those constellations.” My mother clapped her hands. “It’s going to be a great day tomorrow.”

A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
. Many of my mother’s enthusiasms could be traced. We turned up the heat full blast in the car and I looked out the window, dreaming to myself. I was always dreaming to myself in those days. I wanted so many things. We drove, slowing the car in front of Josh Spritzer’s old house in Beverly Hills and then, not finding his Thunderbird in the driveway, my mother headed towards his apartment in Century City.

“What are you thinking, Bear Cub?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, you can tell me.”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You know, you could say something once in a while, have a conversation.”

It was hard to find restaurants that time of night. Usually, we didn’t have cash and not too many places took checks. But we’d go into one of those restaurants with the little metal “No checks, please” plaques over the cash register and sit down and eat a whole meal. At the Old World on Sunset, there was a bulletin board in the back of the restaurant, with all the bounced checks pinned up on it. Two of ours were there. You passed it on the way to the bathroom. When my friends from school wanted to eat at the Old World, I didn’t have the nerve to say no, but I sat scared, extremely conscious, the minutes any of them left the table to go to the bathroom.

When the bill came, at the end of a meal, my mother would start writing a check. The waitress would usually look flustered and say, “Oh, but we don’t take checks.”

“You don’t! Why not?”

“We just don’t. Restaurant policy. There’s a sign there, right where you come in.”

“Well, this check is good, I can assure you.”

“I’ll have to ask the manager.”

“Please do get the manager.”

My mother would fold her arms and smile at me over the table. I’d shove my chair back and put on my jacket. “I’m going outside.”

“Okay, Hon,” she’d say. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Then I’d wait for her, leaning against our car. I let her do it alone.

We didn’t say anything about it, but we knew we had to avoid the places we’d ever bounced a check. My mother had two dollars in change and she just shrugged.

“Let’s go and see if that little French place is open.” There was a place on Pico we liked, a small restaurant, that served food like
my grandmother’s; sweetbreads and pork roasts. “You get your little soup and your salad and a little dessert. I could just go for that tonight,” my mother said. But the windows looked dark when we passed. She sighed. “Should we drive over and get ice cream?”

Some nights we skipped dinner and just ate sundaes. We were usually on diets, so it seemed all right. My mother parked under the trees in front of Baskin-Robbins and felt around the bottom of her purse for stray dollars.

“Here, you run in,” she said, pressing three damp dollars into my hand. She would wait in the car with the motor running. I knew which flavors she wanted and extra nuts and whipped cream.

Tonight, though, I minded. “You go in and get them. Why should I always go in?”

“I can’t, Ann.” There was real panic in her voice. “Someone could see me like this.” She was wearing a terry-cloth jogging suit and tennis shoes. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail.

“Someone could see
me.”
I had on sweat pants and a T-shirt and sneakers. My hair was wet because I washed it every night.

“At your age it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyway, you look cute. At my age, they expect a woman to dress up a little. Remember, I’m the one who has to catch a father for you.”

“I already have a father.”

“Yeah, well, where is he?”

She had me there. “Hell if I know.”

“Come on, Ann. Please. Just this once. Run in and get it quick.”

“No.”

We sat there under the trees. “Please, Honey.”

I shook my head. My mother started the car with a jolt and we drove home. For a while, she didn’t speak to me, but when I came down to the living room later, for a glass of water, she was standing by the open refrigerator, eating crackers and sardines, wearing the sweat shirt she slept in.

“Want some sardines?”

I shook my head and went back to my room.

“Ann, come and try some. Come on a second. It’s good.”

I heard her lift out the milk carton and drink from it. I hated it when she drank from the carton. I couldn’t stand the idea of her saliva in my milk.

“I don’t want any,” I yelled. “And I’m trying to sleep.”

“Okay,” she called back. The crackers made crunching noises. “But it’s very good. Very, very good.”

I was hungry. My stomach seemed to acquire consciousness. It wanted things. Steaks with melted butter. Fresh rhubarb pie. Being hungry made me cold and slightly dizzy. I remember that feeling of going to bed hungry and waking up light as if it happened more often than it really did. Most of the nights we didn’t eat, we could have. We were on diets. We were always on diets and neither of us ever got skinny. But years later, it’s hunger we remember.

That night I woke up to find my mother sitting next to me on my bed, looking down at my face. “I was just thinking to myself how lucky I am to have a daughter like you.”

None of the rooms in the backhouse had locks. After she left, I got up and shoved my dresser against the door.

My mother’s room was right next to mine and the construction of the backhouse seemed flimsy. Even with the door shut, I could still hear her breathe on the other side of the wall. I imagined her curled up, pushing into the plaster, trying to make a cave and bore through.

She knocked on the wall. “Good night, Sweetie.”

I slept on the outermost edge of my bed.

Josh Spritzer seemed to be dropping my mother. Her dates with him were down to once every other week. Even now that she had better clothes. And he seemed to be taking more out-of-town vacations.

“I think I
will
call his psychiatrist,” my mother said one morning, while I ironed my jeans before school.

There was another man who asked her out. His name was Jack Irwin and his head was flat and bald as a nickel. He lived with his mother, who was almost a hundred and who had lost control.
When we went to visit in their apartment once, she wobbled in her chair, her face jiggled, her eyes loose, wandering, her hands opening and closing, roaming the air for substance, finding nothing, and, at the end, her mouth opened to about the size of a penny and she left it there and said, “Eh,” not like a question but like a word.

My mother had met Jack Irwin in the convalescent home. His mother had broken a hip. Since those days in Palm Manor, Jack Irwin talked about Solvang all the time. “Lovely little village. Rollicking, rolling green hills. And the Swedes. Everything maintained by the Swedes.” Apparently, he’d been there with his mother in 1961.

“He wants to take me there,” my mother said, one night. She’d come home from a date with him and she sat on her bed, curling off her pantyhose. “For a weekend. I can’t even kiss him. Could you come here a second, Ann, and undo my bra?”

“I’m in bed.”

Then there was the slam of a drawer. “’Course I suppose he could do a lot for us, with all his money.” She sighed and I could hear her sit down again on the mattress. “He always asks about you, Ann, he thinks it’s great you’re doing so well in your school. He wants to talk to you about your college.”