Authors: Paula McLain
Moline was a small town but a sprawling one, with numbered streets laid out in a waving grid that moved north toward the Mississippi River, west toward Davenport, south toward the John Deere factory, which supplied jobs for much of the town, and east toward cornfields, flatland, and eventually Chicago. Up near the river there was the country club and Riverside Park and houses that were large and fine, but most of the town was condemned to row houses and squat bungalows, aluminum siding as far as the eyes could see. The downtown was old, with brick buildings and a town square and a clock tower, but we didn’t shop there. The IGA was just a few blocks north of us, as was a 7-Eleven, an A&W, the Olympic Tavern. I walked everywhere, reassured that I couldn’t get lost for long. The streets being numbered instead of named, I could simply count my way back home.
In the early days with Raymond, I still had my spells. He’d obviously been prepped by Nelson and knew what to do for me, that I needed my inhaler and plenty of space, and he was good about them—he never made me feel too crazy. Raymond was good about giving me my space in general. For instance, he never talked about Suzette. He also never made me speak to Berna on the phone if I didn’t want to. She was still in the nursing home, still recovering slowly. At first, Nelson had called once a week to give us updates, but as time passed, there was less and less to report. Berna had settled into the routine there—occupational therapy, Bingo, dinner on a tray at five p.m., bed before full dark. She could feed herself, in a fashion, with her functional left hand, but nurse’s aides did most everything else for her, including brushing her dentures, bathing her, lifting her onto and off of the toilet. Her speech was so slurred only Nelson and a few of the aides could understand her. When Nelson called from the hospital, he would hold the phone up to Berna’s ear. Raymond rattled away at these times, talking about the
weather and projects at work, even what he’d cooked for dinner. When it was my turn, I found myself so flummoxed for things to say that long silences would invariably creep up, and then Berna would come on the line, hissing and gurgling. I couldn’t recognize my grandmother in those noises and didn’t really want to try. I felt terribly guilty about it, but when the phone calls came, I soon began to pantomime to Raymond that I wasn’t home. Then I’d go sit on the curb and poke at black ants with a stick until I knew he was done talking.
Once Fawn arrived, the problem disappeared in a way because I didn’t have to pretend to be not home, didn’t have to pretend to be busy. Gradually Berna and Nelson faded into the distance like everything in Bakersfield. My memories of it were growing more and more remote, as if they were someone else’s memories lined up in a slide show and projected on a far-off wall, black-and-white and hopelessly out of focus.
In my sight lines instead loomed every given day of summer. Illinois. The town surrounded by cornfields. Raymond’s small house with its dog hair and burbling fish tank, its small windows looking out at a small world that seemed increasingly to belong to me, and me to it. Late at night, Fawn and I would lie in our cots and talk. At three thirty in the morning, the world was quiet but for lightly wheezing insects, wind levitating and settling the bamboo blinds, our voices pushing sleepily through the shadowy synapse between our cots.
At such times, Fawn was free with her secrets. She told me that she’d broken her collarbone falling on a birdhouse when she was nine. How her brother Guy’s farts always smelled slightly of Tater Tots, no matter what he’d been eating. How when she had sex for the first time it hurt so much she thought the boy—his name was Perry, she’d met him at summer camp—was definitely doing something wrong. Maybe he’d screwed the inside of her leg instead? She’d actually even looked for a dent there later.
“They never tell you how much anything will hurt,” she said. “Did you ever notice that? Injections are always ‘a little pinch, a mosquito bite.’ With cramps we’re supposed to feel ‘a slight discomfort.’ Bullshit!” She’d laughed then, a lying-down laugh that was guttural, mostly to herself. “I was bit by a scorpion once,” she said, “but I don’t remember. I was really little then.”
“Can’t scorpions kill you?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Old people and babies mostly.”
“There are rattlesnakes everywhere in Phoenix too, right? Why would you ever live someplace where there were so many things around that could hurt you?”
“Snakes are only out in the desert, and they don’t bother you if you don’t bother them. As for the scorpions, you just need to know which ones to be afraid of. The big ones, like the one that bit me, aren’t so dangerous. My brothers used to catch them in jars and try to freak me out. The really big ones are the color of dried blood. Ugly.” She faked a shudder. “But the ones that can kill you are so small you can’t even see them and they’re really pale, the color of your skin right…there!” she said, reaching to pinch me hard on the inner arm.
I told Fawn stuff too, though it felt decidedly strange to have someone listening after years of hiding out, scuttling and silent as some underground spy. I couldn’t believe it, and so at first, I lied. I didn’t mean to, exactly, but things started leaking out of my mouth. I told Fawn I’d had a boyfriend in Bakersfield, a neighbor boy I’d grown up with. That we’d written letters back and forth when I first moved to Illinois.
“What’s his name?” Fawn asked.
“Patrick,” I said, but when Fawn asked for details, I found myself describing not Patrick but his brother, Myron.
I also told Fawn my mother had been a go-go dancer and my father a regular customer who fell madly in love with her. That after they’d had me they’d moved to Brazil where it wasn’t safe
to take a little baby—what with malaria and the natives and all. As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt an instant regret. It was a lazy lie: Fawn could surely check any family stuff with her mother, Camille, who was Suzette’s first cousin, after all. But Fawn had only said, “Wow. Cool.” And strangely, as soon as Fawn responded this way, I felt it was sort of cool to have a mother who was off living an adventure somewhere, and to have any kind of father at all.
I had become an expert at forgetting I even had parents, as if my conception was miraculous or extraplanetary, my birth as clean and controlled as the cracking open of an egglike pod. Suzette’s name was only occasionally mentioned, and my father, whoever he was, was never, ever brought up. And I didn’t mind this. It made things infinitely simpler, kept the more unmanageable aches at bay. But talking with Fawn felt safe, as if our words built a free zone between us, around us in the dark of our room.
My mother,
I could say, without any kind of sting.
My father.
I guess it was because I was concocting them as I spoke, rather than remembering them, feeling them or their absence in my life. I was lying, but maybe that didn’t matter. There was a sense of permission with Fawn, that if I kept talking, I’d ultimately arrive at the truth, but if I didn’t, that was okay too. The self I was inventing by the minute, the day, the week, seemed just as interesting if not more so, to Fawn. I began to feel I was under construction, that behind this flawed surface—like a plywood facade at a building site—something wonderfully inevitable was happening.
W
hen Raymond headed down to Oxnard from San Francisco to try to find Suzette, a storm followed him all the way down the 101 to Pismo Beach, semis with a death wish passing him fast, kicking up water in endless sheets. He had a serious headache and an unshakable sense of foreboding that whatever bad thing was happening to Suzette had already happened, that he was too late by hours, days, maybe even years; that he had already failed her.
When he got to Oxnard, he parked in a public lot off the boardwalk and paced up and down, thinking he was crazy to have driven so far. It was dinnertime now, he’d been gone all day—and maybe she had called again. Maybe she’d really lost it when he wasn’t there to answer. Overhead, the sky was gray and threatening to rain again. Seagulls wheeled and cried, sounding hungry, impatient. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day. He also needed at least one beer, and so went into the first fried fish place he saw, ordering from a pretty waitress. Every job Suzette had had for the last five years had been in a bar or restaurant. This could be
her
serving him, this girl with the white miniskirt,
freckles on her knees. She could be at the restaurant right next door, balancing platters of fried clams, smiling at strangers, saying
You have a good night, now
as she took their money. All of Suzette’s friends were waitresses too, summer help, transients, living on their looks. He’d met a few of them and even had some numbers in a little red book he carried in his shirt pocket. After he ate, he got five dollars in quarters from the cashier and started feeding the first phone booth he came to. Four or five dead ends later, he finally got some information from a woman named Deanna whom Suzette had roomed with a few years back, when she was working up north in Mendocino County.
“I don’t know that she’d want to be found for sure,” Deanna said on the phone. “So remember, I’m not the one who told you, but she’s in Oxnard, living on the boat of a doctor who has a place in LA. I don’t know his name, but he comes down on weekends and stays with her.” There was no phone, but she gave Raymond the name of the marina where the boat was docked.
When he found a local map, Raymond was satisfied to know he’d been right about how close she was; the marina was less than a mile from where he’d first parked his car, and he made his way there without any trouble. There was a padlocked metal gate at the head of the dock, but he followed a couple through, asking questions until he found the boat, an obviously well-loved forty-footer. It was white with aqua trim work, and the name
Cecilia
was painted with a flourish on the stern. Suzette was sunbathing; a blanket was laid out on the widest part of the deck, a transistor radio no bigger than a paperback novel right next to her ear, Herman’s Hermits sounding tinny and canned. It couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees, the sun was spotty at best, but there she was in her bikini on her back, her arms and legs spread like a human
X
. She looked too frail to Raymond and too exposed, and just when he was thinking of what he might say that wouldn’t startle her, Suzette opened her eyes.
“What a nice surprise,” she said sleepily. She stretched and sat up, then wrapped the blanket around her waist, trailing it like a skirt made for a giantess. “I was just thinking about a cocktail. Are you thirsty?”
It’s not that Raymond wanted to find her crying still, devastated, but somehow it was more troubling that there were no signs of the previous night’s trauma, nothing to suggest she was even the same woman who’d called him. This Suzette had either forgotten the phone call or was pretending she had. In any case, she didn’t want to talk about it. What she did want was a martini, so they went belowdecks and she mixed a drink while she told Raymond about the doctor, John. This was his boat, and he was letting her pay rent, just like an apartment, though to shower or even pee she had to walk up the dock, through the metal gate with her key, and into the yacht club.
“‘Yacht club’ makes it sound a little grander than it is, wouldn’t you agree?”
She half nodded and went on to tell him about what a wonder John was, how she’d met him when she went into the emergency room for strep throat. How he’d told her, when she’d recovered, that she had the loveliest tonsils he’d ever seen.
“Lovely tonsils?”
“Maybe they are. Have you ever seen my tonsils?”
He admitted he hadn’t. “What about this Cecilia? Maybe she’s got some pretty terrific tonsils too.”
“Cecilia’s the wife,” she said, her face strangely untroubled.
Raymond nodded, thinking he’d heard more than enough. The good doctor probably had kids too, and was more of a pharmacist than a doctor, feeding her Percocet, Darvocet, Vicodin, codeine in exchange for an up close and personal relationship with her glands.
When he went up to wash for dinner at the yacht club, he found it wasn’t much more than a big restroom, separated into
his and hers, like at beaches or public parks, with a line of sinks and another line of showers, tile all around. He hated thinking about her going in there to bathe, with only a vinyl shower curtain and a swinging door between her and whatever might want to hurt her. He hated thinking about her in Oxnard at all, sunbathing in the rain, spending her weekends with the good doctor who was telling what to his wife? When he’d gotten in the car, he thought it would be an easy enough trip, just the six hours down and back. He would find her and make sure she was safe. But now he understood that he wasn’t leaving without her, and that she wouldn’t go easily.
The most troubling part was that she claimed to be in love. Suzette never had a better sales pitch than when she was starting over, newly employed or in love. She glowed then, like a preacher. At these times, Raymond tried not to watch too closely. His memory was too good. He could see every spill stretching out behind and in front of her—like cartoon drawings brought to life when you flicked your thumb over the corner of a notebook. He had watched all of them in raw color, dusting her off afterward as best he could, reassuring her that she would move on, that things would be good again and soon. But he was starting to wonder if his own sales pitch wasn’t just as tired and suspect as hers.
“I’m all right, you know,” Suzette said as they sat in what was to pass for a dining room on the boat, a small and shellacked teak table in a C shape, surrounded by the larger C of a bench seat. The cushions were covered in an indoor-outdoor fabric that squeaked. After the martinis, they split a beer, hunched under a yellow pendant light, and then Suzette made scrambled eggs on a galley stove the size of a shoe box.
She was doing her best to make it seem like an occasion, tying a dish towel with clusters of cherries around her waist as an apron, pushing the eggs around the little pan with flourish. She
looked shiny on top—pink and clean with just-washed hair—but under the lamp, when she got close, Raymond could see faint purplish circles under her eyes and at their edges, raised skin like goose bumps, tiny lavender prick marks.
“What’s it like to sleep on this thing?” he asked as she took away the dishes and poured several fingers of warm gin in two paper cups. “I think I’d be sick with all the rocking.”
“You get used to it. It’s kind of nice after a while, and I like the sounds.”
It certainly wasn’t quiet. Waves came at the hull with a slapping rhythm that didn’t seem to vary. The dock was half a foot wider than the boat on each side, and though it was tethered in front and by ropes knotted around cleats, port and starboard (Suzette was now well-schooled in basic nautical terms by the doctor and used these terms unself-consciously, like an old salt), the boat still shimmied side to side, rubbing the buoys with a persistent gummy squeak. High overhead, various wires twanged and buzzed as the wind caught them.
“It gives me a headache,” Raymond said.
“Well I like it. I don’t want things quiet.
Quiet
is what gives me a headache.”
He just nodded and sipped at his gin and thought maybe it wasn’t so bad for her there. It seemed better than the last place she lived, in Truckee above Lake Tahoe, where her boyfriend Lars, a lumberjack or bartender or chicken farmer he’d never met, disappeared on her after a long and outrageous fight that had the neighbors calling the cops. Truckee was two hundred miles from San Francisco, straight over the Donner Pass, which always gave Raymond the creeps. When he found her, she had holed herself up in the bathroom of a rental house that probably went for three hundred dollars a month during the season, though it looked like it was just barely hanging on to the edge of a small lake. He had to knock for ten minutes before she recog
nized his voice and called through the door that he could come in. She was all set up in the bathroom with a teakettle and stacks of crackers on the edge of the sink, her blanket and pillow in the tub. She said she’d heard something out in the room she was scared of. Someone trying to break in, she thought. After that, she went to stay with him and Leon for a few weeks. While she was there, she watched TV all day, curled in a chair under an afghan, her hair unwashed, getting up only to make herself cinnamon toast. And then she was gone again, throwing off the memory of her trouble like the afghan. The apartment smelled like her for days afterward and Raymond couldn’t help but wonder, as the weeks passed with no word, what new drama she was investing herself too deeply in.
On the boat, Raymond slept in the “guest quarters,” a triangle-shaped hollow at the bow that he fit into only by sleeping hooked. Through the cushion he was using as a pillow the hull knocked and vibrated like a skull made of Styrofoam. It wasn’t warm either, and midway through the night, as he groped to find the shirt he’d taken off hours before, he heard Suzette whimpering, a puppy noise that reminded him of her as a little girl. She had been a sweet baby, not colicky as Raymond himself had been. She never even cried much, just made these little squeaks and moans, more a toy delivered to them from Santa’s workshop than a baby, he had thought. When they first brought her home, he was surprised and more than a little terrified that his mother had let him hold her right away. Berna had positioned him on the sofa in the parlor, and when she placed Suzette, who was swaddled tightly in a flannel blanket, in his arms, Raymond’s heart had thudded dully to a stop. She was so small, a tiny albino squirrel with feathery eyebrows that looked painted on. He looked at his mother, who smiled encouragingly from nearby.
“Isn’t she pretty?” Berna asked.
Raymond nodded. In fact she was incredible—a perfect package
of pink-white skin and fine dark hair and bottomless eyes. Holding his breath, he rocked her lightly and pressed his nose down to touch her forehead. He exhaled into her eyelashes, his own warm breath shifting back on him, and just then, the baby closed her eyes, sighed, and with the sighing seemed to condense and grow heavier, more sound and solid. His mother beamed and he felt prouder than he ever had. He had made something good happen. He had put the baby to sleep.
In the first years of her life, Suzette was nothing if not precocious. She walked at ten months, talked in full sentences before she reached the age of two. She never stopped talking, her chirpy voice naming and renaming everything in her world. Raymond would follow her around the house, labeling new things and repeating what she said back to her.
Kitty, that’s a kitty. Feet. Fur. Little black eyes
. He was her interpreter, her translator, and soon she had seemed to completely internalize his voice, inflection and all—particularly his chidings and warnings. “Why do you do that?” he’d ask when for the hundredth time she inverted the nipple of her bottle with a chubby finger. “Don’t poke it,” he’d say, handing the bottle back fixed.
“Don’t poke,” she’d repeat. “Why you do that?” And then she’d poke it again.
It was funny, hearing his own words coming back at him, and soon Raymond understood that he didn’t need to chide her at all, because she was doing it herself, vocalizing his counsel like a second conscience, an angel on her shoulder. But he also couldn’t stop following and scolding her, because no matter what she said or seemed to have control over, she didn’t ever stop doing whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to do. She just rattled away as she yanked the cat’s tail, pitched over a potted plant, peed in the corner after somehow maneuvering her diaper off:
Why you do that?
It wasn’t until Suzette was nearly four that Raymond began to
notice how anxious she could be. If she spilled her milk at dinner, she’d whimper as Berna daubed the mess with a dish towel and refilled her glass. Was it shame? Was she afraid she would get yelled at? Raymond wasn’t sure, but the whimpering and the panicked look on her face made it hard for anyone to stay mad at her for long. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Berna or their father, Earl, or Raymond would sigh, and Suzette would repeat this too, her little face screwed up on the verge of tears.
Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
Raymond was eleven and Suzette had just turned six when Earl died in a farming accident. He’d been plowing on an incline in the field when the tractor had rolled and crushed him underneath. Still alive when a neighbor found him; there had been just enough time for Berna to be fetched from the house. She knelt by him in the field while he whispered a confession of nonsense words, and then closed his eyes.
Earl had not been a good father, exactly, nor had he been a bad one. He put in long days in the field on the combine or baler, or flipping up leaf bases on reconnaissance for beet armyworms, then cared for the animals. When he finally came to the dinner table, he was sunburned and hungry. He ate without chewing and then listened to
I Love a Mystery
on the radio in the parlor, with a bowl of shelled pistachios in one hand and a bottle of cream soda in the other. He was the kind of man who hoarded his words cautiously, and his affections even more so—though no one could call him unkind. He had a particular fondness for animals, clucking to the hens in their own language as he coaxed their bodies to one side on the straw so he could gather eggs. He babied the sheep as well. When he moved them from their stall to clean it, he didn’t use a halter, just his hands on their black noses as he guided them, cooing a little under his breath.