Acts of God (8 page)

For a long time I imagined Gardol protecting me as Mr. Tooth Decay—or whatever else I needed protection from—fought to get through. I imagined invisible shields everywhere and at some point it became clear to me that I couldn't shake them. I kept thinking somebody would come along and fight his way past, but he or she never had. I was always sorry after I talked to Charlie that he hadn't been the one.

I went to the door of the living room and called, “Hey, Teddy, Jade. Why don't we order a pizza? Or I'll make a noodle casserole. Would you guys like that?”

“No thanks, Mom,” Ted shouted back. “Not hungry.”

“Me either,” Jade piped in. I poked around in the fridge, found some leftover casserole, which I dug into with a fork. When I was their age, I had things I wanted to do with my life. Now, night after night, they sat watching
Seinfeld
or listening to Loose Screw. Recently Jade had been saying she wanted to go to massage therapy school. Before that, she talked about being a flight attendant.

I gazed at the bills for a new roof, mortgage, car payments, the appraiser, setting aside the ones that would have to wait a month or so. There was also the set of keys I kept to all the houses I was responsible for. These were houses of fairly wealthy people who were away half the year, but wanted the income from a rental to cover their costs while they were in the Bahamas or back East. Maybe I
should
charge admission to my house, I thought. It seemed like a sensible thing to do.

I had been thinking about opening the bed-and-breakfast in earnest. In fact, ever since my little start-up company, Mind Your Own Business, failed, it'd been about the only thing I could think of. Mind Your Own Business was a company for people who wanted to start their own at-home small businesses, and the idea was that my company would get them set up. I had a partner—a friend from San Francisco—and we offered office design, computer setup and programming, file management, marketing surveys, mailing lists—whatever a client needed. The problem was most people in start-ups didn't have the money for my services. We lasted a year. I still thought it was a good idea.

But for now, turning the house into a bed-and-breakfast seemed the way to resolve everything. Though the house was small—just three bedrooms—it had two baths and I could convert the garage into a separate apartment, which would be good for families. I could even turn the den, which had a breathtaking view of the sea, into a small room. This would give me five spaces to rent out. I would be able to keep my house, which everyone wanted to see anyway. Lots of historic houses (like Lizzie Borden's, Ted reminded me when I brought up this idea) were being turned into B-and-Bs. It would pay for bills and provide a decent tax write-off. I could have guests whenever I wanted, but I wouldn't have to all the time.

Besides, I liked the idea of people from Stuttgart or Bogotá stopping for a night on their way down the coast. I could offer walking tours of this craggy shoreline, share my knowledge of marine life. Or provide the devotees of Eagger with a night within the walls of their beloved poet's home. I'd serve them cranberry scones with whipped butter and cream in ceramic jugs and gourmet coffee in the morning, and slip after-dinner mints onto their pillows at night as they sipped cinnamon tea downstairs by the fire.

And when they left, they would hand me their business cards or write their names in the leather-bound guestbook and tell me to look them up when next I was on the Continent or traveling through the Andes. I'd call it the Eagger House Bed and Breakfast, and I could envision the brochure. A picture taken out at sea, another of the view from the breakfast nook. A perfect place for a monastic rest.

If my father had been alive, he would have told me that the house was a fairly crazy place to live. I could only insure it for fire and theft. I had flood from above but not from below, which meant if it rained I was okay, but if a river of mud flowed down from the hills, I wasn't. I'd tried to get an act-of-God rider but my insurance agent, John Martelli, said the house was going to roll off the cliff one day and I'd be left with zilch. There was no premium I could afford for that. I had to say he probably had a point.

I knew a little about what natural disasters could do because I traveled with my father to the floodplain and saw catastrophe up close. We traversed a town in a canoe. The cornfields were lakes. Cows waded up to their knees in muddy water as if they were the water buffalo of Thailand. A bed, still made, drifted by. A house stood without walls as a river flowing through it carried its pots and pans away. Trophies, photo albums, a wedding dress flowed past us in the debris.

My father had shaken his head. “Hold on to what's yours, Squirrel,” he told me that day. “You never know when it will be taken away.”

8

I was Daddy's girl. Everyone
said it. All their friends. The Rosenmans, the Lauters. Whenever they came over, they said, She's Daddy's girl, all right. And I was. I clung to his chair when company was over, and when he let me, until I got too big, I'd sit in his lap. It was a firm, muscular lap with bony knees and I could sit there for hours, just rocking on his knees. When he left on Monday morning, I was always there to wave good-bye. And when he drove back in on Thursday after school, I was always there to greet him. “Where's my little Squirrel,” he'd call, waving as he pulled in the drive.

When he got home, he liked to put a record on. He enjoyed old jazz like the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra or show tunes. Once he put on
South Pacific.
When “Some Enchanted Evening” came on, he tried to get my mother to dance. “Come on, Lily,” he said, waltzing into the kitchen with an invisible woman. “Dance with me.” He caught her in his arms and tried to spin her into the living room, but she batted him away.

“Victor, I've got dinner on.” She wiped her hands on her apron. My mother always had a million things to do—clothes to hang up, newspapers to throw out, meals to prepare. “Now let me be.”

Though my father was used to this, he pretended to pout, then turned to me and made a deep bow. “May I have this dance?” he said. He scooped me up and we waltzed, dipping with each glide, singing, my father gazing with pretend infatuation into my eyes.

*   *   *

When the school year ended and summer came, my father took me and Jeb back to the floodplain. I knew he wouldn't go without me. When Art saw we were leaving, he howled again, but our father told him he still wasn't old enough. He'd just turned seven. It was too long a drive for a seven-year-old. You had to be ten. “Next year, Squirt,” he said.

My father rolled down the window to say good-bye. “Now, please call if you're going to stay away longer,” our mother said.

“Don't worry.” He kissed her on the lips. Art shrieked as we pulled away and I put my hand to the glass, gave him a little wave. As our mother held Art back, she gave us a little wave like a windshield wiper, back and forth.

Once he couldn't see them in the rearview mirror, our father clicked the radio on high and began to sing along. I hadn't heard his voice loud and booming like that in almost a year. He knew new songs now. “Pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue, oh Peggy, my Peggy Sue…” Dumb lyrics, but he followed along.

This year I knew the road. It was old hat, an expression Lily liked to use. Old hat. I anticipated the flatness, the yellow land, the smell of pigs and fertilizer. It was less amusing when Jeb and I had to hold our noses. We were too big for road games. That was old hat as well.

The flood was less spectacular. No floating cows, no bedroom sets. Jeb didn't try to fool me that he was going to dive in. Instead he seemed to pay more attention to some giggling girls in shorts by a picnic table. He tried to act cool and pretended he didn't know me.

We stayed in a motel but my father had called ahead this time. We had a reservation. When we arrived, the desk clerk said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Winterstone,” even before my father said his name. I missed “acancy.” I wanted to go back to that place where the clerk with the bloodshot eyes who smelled of smoke looked startled when we walked in the door. I wanted to surprise him again.

But here we were expected. My father had reserved two rooms. Adjoining rooms, they were called. “One for you, Tess. This year you get your own room.” I didn't want my own room. I didn't know what to do in it. It had a connecting door and for most of the evening we kept the door open, moving freely between our rooms. My father wanted to read and rest, so Jeb and I watched television in my room. Then my father called Jeb when it was bedtime. My father gave me a hug, a peck on the cheek, then closed the door between our two rooms.

With the door closed I sat up in the big bed with the scratchy sheets (that was the only thing that was the same). I thought about opening the door, but I didn't. Almost all night I stared at it. I put my ear to it from time to time so I could hear them breathing on the other side.

*   *   *

Every night when he wasn't on the road, my father came and tucked me in. He sat at the edge of the bed, told me a story, sang me a song. Usually it was the Whiffenpoof song about how we're poor little lambs who've gone astray. I sang it to my kids when they were small. But not long after that trip to the floodplain, when I turned ten, everything changed.

He stopped walking into my room without knocking, and after a while he just gave me a peck on the cheek before I went to bed. I tried to get used to being alone in my room. I busied myself with rearranging my stuff on the shelves (“It looks like a museum in here,” Lily always said when she came in my room) or trying to read, but basically I was waiting for him to tuck me in. My room had pink wallpaper shaped in squares. If I was tired, lying on my side, the wallpaper seemed to move in strips like film through a projector, like when you're sitting on the window of a train, watching the world go by.

I had two beds. I slept in the one near the window and my stuffed animals slept in the other, unless I had a sleepover, and then the stuffed animals got moved to the shelves. Mostly I used the extra bed for my clothes, which I tossed there on a daily basis and didn't hang up until my mother shouted at me to hang them up, which I did about once a week. There were often big piles of clothes because, God forbid, we wouldn't be caught dead wearing the same thing two days in a row.

I lay there one night watching the wallpaper move, thinking I'd heard footsteps. My father, having had a change of heart, coming to tuck me in. I couldn't seem to get used to it. The silence, the lack of footsteps coming toward my door. Four nights a week my father was on the road, but the other nights, the ones when he was home, I waited for that sound.

For hours I waited. The wallpaper moved miles and miles; dragons, maps, years passed before my eyes. But he didn't come. I tiptoed into their room hoping he'd change his mind. My father was sitting in the chaise longue, reading. My mother sat in bed with the TV on. I asked him if he wouldn't come and tuck me in.

“Why not, Victor?” my mother said. “She's still a little girl.”

“No, she's not,” my father said with a laugh as he gave me a peck on the cheek. “She's in the double digits now.” Then he gently swatted my backside. “Off to bed now.”

My mother got up and took me by the hand. “I'll tuck you in, dear,” she said.

She brought me down the hall to my room, waited until I slipped under the covers. She kissed my forehead, smoothed my covers, and said good night. But it wasn't the same thing.

I wasn't sure why this double digits was such a magical threshold I didn't even remember passing, except we had a party just like every year (ten girls, swimming, box lunches with fried chicken). I wasn't even sure when my father stopped coming into my room without knocking and sitting at the side of my bed, telling me a story he'd made up while he was on the road driving around selling insurance—about a raccoon who lived in a hollow log or a snowflake that didn't want to fall to earth and leave its family behind. Or real stories about someone he might have met or a tornado he saw twirling in the horizon against the sky. It happened slowly, so I hadn't noticed it at first, but once that swimming party was over, I don't remember my father coming into my room at night again.

Some nights when my father was on the road, I woke up from disaster dreams—the earth splitting, a swirling wind carrying me away. A huge black wave rising above my head. I woke from these dreams breathless, my hands clawing at the air. I'd never had these dreams when he was home, tucking me in. Only when he was away. But now I seemed to have them all the time.

There was one dream I had over and over again. I am sitting in the yard playing when the sky turns yellow. I do not notice the color, but I notice the silence. There is no sound of wind. Everything is still. Two hands reach down and grab me just as the tornado whirls by.

9

John Martelli had his office
at the Salinas Mall and he insured me for car, home, life, and theft. Somehow Charlie managed to keep me on his medical plan, but John took care of all my other insurance needs. His office was in a strip mall, beside a Starbucks and a Staples. He brokered for Allstate, but he also put together packages for difficult-to-insure clients such as myself.

I drove over there and parked next to John's car, a beige Volvo with a license plate that reads
URCOVERD
. John smiled as I walked in. The Beach Boys played on the Musak. “Hey, Tess, how you doing?” His braided ponytail swung behind his back as he got up to greet me. His office smelled of deli sandwiches and coffee. John's hand was moist as he shook mine, squeezing the knuckles together until I felt the bones crunch. Behind him on the wall a framed imitation Whitman sampler read, “You Can't Be Too Careful.”

“What can I do for you?” John Martelli had a big smile that never put me exactly at ease. He made you feel as if he were pulling one over on you and probably he was and I always thought he should be selling cars, not insurance.