Emperor of the Air (12 page)

I started drawing instead. When I was a sophomore in high school I drew a picture of our piano, with a couple of my father’s ancient horns resting on it, that was chosen for the school calendar. I drew the picture in October, and that December my father died. A few nights before it happened, a boy named Billy Emond had climbed the tree outside my window and come into my bedroom while my parents were downstairs watching television. I was fifteen and we had arranged this. He crawled through the window, took off his shirt in the dark room, and sat on the far end of my bed. He had one hand in his pocket and the other on the blankets around my feet when we heard my father on the stairs. My father loved to play tennis and took the stairs two and three in a leap. Billy had time to look at me, stand, and go into the corner of my room. My father came in. He said that the TV downstairs had gone fuzzy and that he thought the wind had knocked the antenna loose from outside my window. He said close my eyes, he was going to turn on the light. I closed my eyes. I heard the click of the light switch.

“Hello, Billy,” said my father.

He didn’t mention it the next day. That was a time when I thought of my father as a person I would one day probably know. I remember coming into the kitchen on the evening after he died. My drawing, scissored from the school calendar, hung by banana magnets on the refrigerator.

Now, the first night we are all together, we sing. It is a tradition—voices only, no instruments. My mother hums a note, my sister comes in a third above it, and then they wait for me to find my note, which seems to lie between the pitches I can produce. We have always had this problem.

“Higher,” says my mother.

I go higher with my note and then my mother and sister join me and suddenly the sounds are a chord as absolute as a piano’s. “That’s it,” says Tessa.

My mother and sister harmonize in turn and I follow one of them in the melodies. They both have perfect pitch. My father had it also, but I do not. When he was alive the family played a game in which we identified cars by the pitches of their horns: we took mountain drives on the weekends, and as we went into the steep, blind turns beneath hoods of poplar and elm my father honked the horn of our Cutlass Supreme. That note, I knew, was a B-flat. If there was a car on the other side of the bend it honked too, and my mother and father and sister raced to identify it by pitch. I knew which notes came from which cars—the A of certain Pontiacs, our own B-flat, the sharp C of a Cadillac—but I didn’t know the pitches when I heard them.

“Pontiac,” I guessed sometimes.

“Of course not,” said my mother.

“Way off,” said Tessa.

My sister tried to teach me. She told me to reproduce the sound of our Cutlass horn in my head. “Then go up or down the scale from there,” she said, “until you reach the note you’ve heard.” I guessed at the cars, sometimes correctly, but I couldn’t even reproduce our own B-flat. “Instead of perfect pitch,” she said one day, “maybe it would help if you thought of it as something else. Think of it as pitch memory. You’ve heard all the notes before, so just try to remember them.”

Sometimes in the morning she gave me a note. “Hum it,” she said. “Hum it for me.”

I hummed.

“Okay, now remember it all day.”

I lost a certain part of my youth trying to remember notes. If the pitch was in my range I tried to speak in it all day. Otherwise, I kept it running in my skull.

“Okay,” Tessa said at dinner, “now hum it for me.”

I hummed.

“That’s a C-sharp, honey,” said my mother. “Your sister gave you an E.”

Now, nineteen years later, on our first night together, in the living room of my mother’s house, we sing. My mother is between us and we are facing the large plate-glass window that looks onto the bougainvillaea bushes and the sidewalk. It is just evening, and as we sing it grows darker outside so that the living room window starts to become a mirror. My mother notices this and puts a hand on each of our shoulders.

The next morning my mother and I drink tea in the kitchen. She wants to go clothes-shopping tomorrow and on the table she has arranged pages torn from fashion magazines. This year the models have short hair and the photographs are taken around urban fountains or in the marble entrance foyers of financial plazas. “Just choose anything you like,” my mother says. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

The shopping is her idea. Yesterday when I opened the covers of my bed there was an envelope on the sheets: inside, folded once, was a hundred-dollar bill.

“Mother,” I called, “I have a job.”

“What, honey?”

“I said I have a job already. A job. I earn money.”

“I just thought you’d like to buy some clothes. You never know.”

“What don’t you ever know?”

“
You
know,” she says.

That night I left the hundred-dollar bill on the kitchen table. My mother put it back on my bed. I hung it from the banana magnet on the refrigerator. She put it on my dresser. “Please,” she said when I pinned it to the corkboard in the kitchen, “it’s only to spruce you up a little.” The next morning, talking to Tessa, I found it in my purse.

“Mom wants me to buy clothes,” I said to Tessa.

“Maybe you should.”

“I don’t need clothes,” I said. “I
have
clothes. I have two hundred skirts, maybe three hundred blouses.”

“Be serious. She worries.”

“She keeps trying to give me a hundred-dollar bill.”

“Take it.”

“I won’t take it.”

“The least you can do is let her buy you some clothes. You don’t ever have to wear them. Put them on, get a picture taken, and send it to her. Then sell them.”

“She’s stealing again,” I said.

“What?”

“Mom’s stealing again.”

“How do you know?”

“Look around. The bathroom closet’s a supply warehouse.”

“She worries about things running out.”

“Why does she give me hundred-dollar bills, then?”

“She worries about you, too.”

In the afternoon I clip the back yard grass while my mother watches from the kitchen. It is bright outside and I can see only her dark shape moving behind the window. When I finish, I rake the cuttings, then dump them in the plastic garbage pail in the garage. There are two cars in there still, my mothers Toyota and the big Cutlass, twenty years old now and still running because my mother wants a car for when her daughters come. Then I hand-snip the sidewalk borders and drag a chair to the northeast corner of the yard, where I know a triangle of sun persists until evening.

When I sit down she slides open the kitchen window and begins to read me a list of virtues. “Dedication,” she says, “Discipline, Fortitude, Honor.” It is not early and already the advancing shadows mark my calves.

In our family the violence has always been glancing and reflected. One Thanksgiving when my father was alive he dropped the platter he was carrying to the dining room, and the turkey, which my mother had been basting all afternoon, rolled onto the rug and under the table. “You might as well have dropped
me
,” said my mother, and the next day she backed out too close to the garage and tore the sideview mirror off my father’s Cutlass.

Now it is Thanksgiving Day and my mother knows of an open store. It is run by immigrants, she tells me, who don’t know the meaning of the holiday. We are in the car going to buy me some new clothes. The hundred-dollar bill lies on top of the dashboard, where I have placed it. My mother will not unlock the electric windows.

“I have a list for
you
,” I say to her. “Catherine Ablett, Melanie Green.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re from my high school class. Now they’re streetwalkers.”

In the store she walks with her hand on her breast, not speaking, and in apology I finger the material of a few blouses, take a skirt into the dressing room. “Look,” I tell her when we’re outside again, “it’s just that I don’t need clothes. I’m happy, Mother. I don’t want another job, I don’t need a husband. I’m happy.”

“Nothing’s as secure as you think,” she says. Then she takes the hundred-dollar bill from her purse. “Please,” she whispers, “take the money. You don’t have to spend it when I’m here. But please, will you take it?”

A group of men is watching us. She holds the bill out to me. “Will you take it?”

I do. I take it and place it, folded, in my purse.

For Thanksgiving dinner we go to a restaurant where the turkey is served in oval slices. We drink wine. My mother asks the waiter whether he minds working on Thanksgiving Day and he tells her that everybody’s got to earn a living.

“That’s right,” my mother says when the waiter leaves.

“Mom, I
am
earning a living.”

“Are you going to serve pancakes the rest of your life?”

“I think I will,” I say, and this makes my mother start to cry. Tessa stands, goes to my mother’s chair and helps her up, then walks her to the bathroom. There are a few other families in the restaurant and I’m sure they’re looking at me. I sit alone at the table drinking my glass of wine. I wonder what my sister and mother are saying in the bathroom. I imagine the other diners in the restaurant getting up one by one, slinking away so I don’t notice into the women’s room, where my mother fills them in.
Yes
, my mother says and pauses,
the younger one—an artist. No
, says the man in the checked blazer,
not an artist. Yes, it’s true
, says my mother,
and still not married
.

“You don’t seem very sorry,” Tessa says from behind me. She has returned alone. “I’m not.”

When my mother comes back to the table Tessa pours wine in all our glasses, makes a toast to some aspect of Thanksgiving. We eat. We talk about the smog in Pasadena and about how pleasant it is to get freshly baked rolls at a restaurant. My mother returns to the salad bar three times: her plate is a ruin of lettuce and onions.

The next afternoon, Tessa is at a conference discussing plastic heart valves and I am alone in the house when the phone rings and a man tells me that my mother has been detained for petty larceny outside the Los Angeles branch of J. C. Penney’s. It is best if I come to the store.

So I do. I get the old Cutlass from the garage and drive to Penney’s. The lot is full and I have to park on the street, and then, inside, I’m not sure how to ask where they are keeping a middle-aged woman whose Givenchy handbag brims with loot. I wait in line at the perfume counter. There are customers behind me, and I fumble with my purse, pretend I’ve forgotten something, and let them pass in front. I step back. A man asks if he can help and I tell him no. A group of Girl Scouts surrounds me, laughing in an ugly way, then passes down the aisle, and I move to the escalator, wondering where to proceed, before I think of looking at the store directory.

I find out the security desk is in the basement, and I take the escalator down. There, a man in something like a policeman’s uniform tells me to come with him. His glasses are black mirrors. We pass through a door, down a hall, into a square yellow room where my mother is sitting at a table. She looks small.

The guard locks the door and offers me a chair. I sit down. “Well,” he says.

On the table between my mother and me is a blouse.

“Well,” he says again.

“A blouse,” I say.

“Look,” says my mother, “this is ridiculous.”

“Ma’am, nothing at all like ridiculous.” He looks at me. “The article was in her handbag,” he says, “and she was outside in the parking lot—on her way to the car, I’d say.”

“You don’t know that,” says my mother.

He walks to a corner of the room, leans against the wall, lights a cigarette. He looks at us, then tucks his thumbs into his belt. “What are we going to do?” he says.

“This is ridiculous,” says my mother, “arresting someone for forgetting to pay for a cheap blouse. At home my daughter has a closet of blouses that are twice as expensive.”

“It was in your purse, ma’am.”

“I was going to pay for it, obviously. Obviously I was going to pay for it. Look—ask my daughter. Don’t I often forget? Ask her. Don’t I often forget, honey?”

The guard looks at me.

“You did have it outside the store,” I say.

My mother will not look at me and I will not look at her. In the guard’s black sunglasses the room is reflected. Then I imagine my mother in her neat skirt in front of a magistrate. I imagine her arraignment, some sort of trial or perhaps the decision of a judge only, a man her age. He’ll send her—for a day or two, perhaps a week or a month—to one of the low-security prisons in the valley north of here. I have seen one of them from the road: low, sand-colored, circled by a metal fence, it stands behind a row of cypress and a rectangular highway sign.

“I’m going to call the police now,” the guard says and picks up the telephone—and it is only then, when I do it, that it seems obvious. The guard holds the phone away from him, looks down at my hand half-covered by my purse. He looks at the floor, then at my hand again.

“Who else knows?” I ask.

“Just me,” he says. He looks down. He rubs his chin. Then his arm moves and the bill is out of my fingers and into the pocket of his shirt.

On the way home my mother drives her own car and I drive the old Cutlass. At red lights we look at each other through the windows. The day, somehow past, is already darkening, and when we arrive the house is empty. My mother goes into the kitchen and I go into the television room, where I turn on a movie and sit on the couch. I have entered too late to understand. Soldiers have arrived somewhere to save something, although they don’t look like soldiers and I’m not sure who is on which side. The music is full of clock-ticking rhythms. After a while my mother comes in. She could sit in the wood desk chair or my father’s old lazy lounger, but instead she places herself next to me on the couch, leaning against my shoulder. On my arm I feel where the sweat has wet her blouse.

We watch the movie for a while before I realize she is asleep. Her breathing becomes slow. She leans heavily against my shoulder, her head tilted back, and as we sit there her weight begins to make my forearm tingle. Tessa once explained this tingling to me: it is not the blood circulation being cut off, but a disturbance of the nerves. The funny throbbing spreads to my elbow, and my mother opens her mouth, and, though she still seems to be asleep, she begins to quietly hum. I sit still.