“I’ve been wanting to tell you that for a long time.” He pulled out a pack of gum, unwrapped two sticks, and held one out to me. “I’m trying to quit smoking. Don’t ever start. It’s a nasty habit.”
We sat chewing, staring at the house. He popped his gum.
“This is really good gum,” I said.
In the hotel elevator, my dad told me to go ahead and press the button, as if I were the same age as his twins. The bellman left all our bags in one room and my dad asked me to choose a bed. We were sharing. I pointed to the one with the sand dune painting over it. He tossed the panda and my mom’s purse on top and went into the bathroom.
The bedside lights worked in a surprising number of combinations, dim or bright, both on or just one, lots of possibilities for a family sharing a room. I sat on the end of my bed, listening for the toilet to flush, but instead he started talking and it took me a minute to realize he was on the phone. A phone in the bathroom was a whole new level of luxury. When Ruby bathed, she dragged the phone in from the living room with the cord snaking around the coffee table and across the hall. My dad spoke about his flight, dinner, what time he would head over to the jewelry show in morning. I hardly breathed, listening for my name.
“Sweet dreams, sugarfoot,” he said; his voice sounded eager, bright. This must be the voice he saved for his daughters. Ruby had different voices, for teachers, girlfriends, men. Her man voice—tipped up to show interest, and breathless to show enthusiasm—made me gag. I was glad she spoke plainly to me. When my father talked to me again, I wanted to hear this daughter voice.
I took out my nightgown and brought it under the covers to wriggle out of my clothes. I was peeling my socks off when he stepped out with his shirt unbuttoned partway. He sighed as he sank down on his bed, then began to pull his boots off. “Nora?” He dropped one boot onto the floor with a thud. “If the phone rings in the morning, let me get it.”
“What?” I wasn’t paying any attention to his voice.
He slumped forward to pull his other boot off. “It would just be my family.” He dropped the second boot, then raked his fingers through his hair.
Again I hardly breathed.
“They don’t know.” He held his finger to his lips when he said it, like we were in on this together.
Something about his finger made me sit up in bed. “I’m a secret?” My heart clunked in my chest, like it had just hit the absolute hard bottom of my story.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to tell Gretchen yet.”
With my full life in California, there were so many other places I could be. At home with my mom and the avocado facemask. Yolanda was probably grounded because of her hickey. I could be at the movies with Doug Jordan, his hand claiming mine. But I was here, a whole weekend of my life, doing this thing I’d imagined forever.
“The girls are still too young to understand.” He stepped back into the bathroom, ran the water. “Okay?” He tried to sound charming but it came out brusque.
Though he wasn’t looking at me, I nodded, up and then down, as if the secret didn’t mean our weekend had a definite end.
“Here’s your water.” He set a glass on my nightstand. “And now I’ll turn off your light.” He leaned over to pinch my toe. He said, “Sweet dreams, Nora,” as if he’d said it every single night of my life.
Plum Tree
Nora cupped the pot in her hand and stepped out to her backyard. Her best friend, Zellie, was waiting, digging through her backpack. “I don’t have any papers,” Zellie said. Instead she held up a Tampax and ran her tongue along the edge of the wrapper. “We’ll have to use this.” She ejected the tampon onto the struggling lawn, where it lay like a white firecracker.
Nora had scraped together just enough from her mom’s stash to make a slim joint, the words
slender reg
along the side. The pot was hidden under Ruby’s bed on a silver tray that in better times had displayed a tea set. When Ruby bought the tray at a neighbor’s yard sale, its scalloped edges were already tarnished, and she never bothered with polish.
“My mom claims this pot is the same kind Hitler smoked before he committed suicide.” Nora wondered if the pot actually had a family tree or if her mother was just trying to scare her off, or if Hitler even smoked pot. “It was one of my mom’s voice-over moments. You know, when moms try to tell you stuff without telling you stuff. As if . . .” She sat in the dirt, leaning against the plum tree behind her bedroom.
“Here’s to Hitler’s suicide,” Zellie said, sucking her voice down her throat with the smoke. Nora’s mom croaked like that when she smoked pot. Sometimes she croaked out entire sentences, like “What should we make for dinner tonight?” or “There’s a
Thin Man
movie on at ten.”
Then they’d roll the TV into her mother’s bedroom. Nora was named for Nora Charles, and she imagined reclining in a satin dressing gown with a dry martini and a sublime husband like Nick. Nora Hargrove would stroll across the bedroom imitating Nora Charles, her mother’s cigarette held elegantly between two fingers. “A little more hip,” her mother would say, or “God, I’d kill for your legs.”
Zellie twisted a plum from the branch above her. “The only thing worth stealing from my mom is a diuretic pill.” When Nora shrugged, Zellie continued. “You know, pee pills, for water retention. She’s practically turned herself into a piece of beef jerky trying to pee away twenty pounds.” Perfect and pert Zellie, with her straight blond hair, major tube-top collection, and the ability to say the exactly right hilarious thing, had nothing to pee away.
“I’d like one of those pills.” Nora held her hand open and Zellie dropped a plum into her palm. This was the first house Nora ever lived in that had a fruit tree.
“Maybe I’ll learn to preserve,” her mom had said to their new landlord. He’d lit her cigarette and she re-inhaled the curl of smoke escaping from her mouth. French, she called it. He told her he’d come every winter to prune and spray for mold.
The tree was nestled at the back of the yard, where the two fence sides sharply met. If Nora had gone to geometry often enough she’d remember what kind of angle it was, acute or oblique or something worse. She’d hated her geometry teacher. Supposedly he was hypoglycemic. He nibbled sandwiches through all of his classes. His wife made them, and his suits. During quizzes Nora stared at the crust and bits of bologna sitting on a cloth napkin on his desk. She read the labels sewn into the suit jackets he hung on the back of his chair.
HAND SEWN BY MRS. LESTER.
If he didn’t remove his jacket, no one would ever know the work she’d put into that suit. Now Nora took courses in which she knew she’d excel, typing instead of geometry. She quickly mastered the home keys and aced all the self-tests.
Now is the time for all good men .
.
.
That’s how she slipped off the college track in school. She still hadn’t told her mother about her schedule change. Ruby had sympathy for screwups, but Nora thought this change was just a decision. Sometimes Ruby made snap decisions—like dyeing her hair red, or adopting strays, or moving to Santa Cruz, or, one time, as if she’d done it a thousand times before, passing Nora her little stone pipe. “What the hell,” she’d said, releasing a long, steady stream of what smelled like burned honey. “We’re home, you’re safe. I’d rather you try it here than somewhere else.” Nora wanted to make decisions like that, change big parts of her life in a heartbeat.
The plum tree’s branches dipped over either side of the fence, the plums dangling into the alley, tempting anyone who passed by. Two years in a row Nora had watched the blossoms give way to green lumps, tight as eyes squeezed shut, and then, with the warmer days, when she came outside to get stoned or escape her mother’s moods, she noticed they’d begun to soften and purple up. Someone had taken the time to plant this tree.
When Nora shelved books at the library to work off detention for cutting classes, she’d come across a book on fruit trees. First she thumbed through the pictures, then she found the chapter on plums, and she’d slumped down in the stacks and read the names: beauty, damson, elephant heart, Golden Nectar, Nubiana. Judging from the description—large, amber-fleshed pulp, deep purple skin, sweet and firm, perfect for baking—she had a Nubiana tree in her yard. There was even a recipe for a tart, and Nora thought that this summer she might bake one. To plant a plum tree you must dig a hole three times the size of the root ball, mound up a pile of soil and compost in the center, and then spread the roots as gingerly as a child’s hair. She imagined a gardener tamping down the soil around the trunk with the toes of her shoes, tucking it in. For such a colossal effort, you’d better know you were sticking around. A fruit tree meant total commitment.
Nora and Zellie passed the misshapen joint, biting hard plums between hits. The tart flesh made Nora salivate. When they couldn’t hold the joint without burning their fingers, Zellie spit on it and dropped it in the film can with their emergency supply of roaches.
“What now?” Zellie asked.
It was the dead zone of the school year, a week left until summer, reports already turned in, finals taken. Yesterday the entire school participated in a rollicking locker purge. Teachers paced the corridors while students chucked torn pictures from
Rolling Stone,
empty lip-gloss applicators, old tests, and shriveled orange peels into strategically placed trash cans. Those who attended school today would be enduring cobwebby videos of
Masterpiece Theatre,
watching the institutional timepieces click: half a notch back, full minute forward. Nora had spent many hours staring at the clocks’ stuttering hands, as if even the clocks had to work hard to gather enough momentum to make it through Junior Composition.
She stood, her left hand pressing against the trunk for support. Overhead, the sky was swept clear of clouds, and the afternoon stretched out before her, full of absolutely nothing. A light feeling crept up from the arches of her feet, along her thighs, and up her spine until she felt herself upright as a sunflower. “Head rush.” She wiped the dirt from her ass. Plum pulp smeared the seat of her pants. “Shit. I promised I’d rake these up.” She kicked at more fallen fruit around the base of the tree.
“Let’s just hang until the party,” Zellie said. Yesterday during PE, when Nora and Zellie were smoking, slouched against the cyclone fence in the senior parking lot and checking their reflections in car windows, a boy they hardly knew told them about a kegger on Ocean View Drive.
On Fridays Nora’s mother could be counted on to hit happy hour after she finished teaching. Zellie and Nora had the house to themselves. Zellie flipped through the channels for an old movie. Nora settled onto the wide sofa cushions where she and her mother used to sit together in front of the TV, first eating dinner and watching Dan Rather and then doing schoolwork to
Taxi.
Her mother had a crush on Judd Hirsch, and she liked Tony Danza.
“Something for everyone,” Nora whispered to herself now. That was before Nora started cutting classes. Before she met Zellie. Before she mixed vodka and crème de menthe in pint milk cartons and brought them to school to share before fifth period. Before she joined her friends screaming insults out car windows at pigeon-toed, D-cupped Tara Danforth. Before she’d made out with a boy and let him slide his hands up and down inside her clothing. Before she was fitted for a diaphragm because all the girls she knew had one.
Her mother tried to get information out of her, calling Nora in to sit on the toilet while she soaked in the tub, a shell-shaped inflatable pillow behind her neck, a hot washcloth spread over her cheeks and chin, opening her pores. Nora didn’t want to hear that her mother had done the same things—that she and her mother were similar in any way. “Beanie, take advantage of my experience,” she would say, staring right at Nora’s face. Nora couldn’t stand when her mother was earnest and dumb. She wanted to make her own new and unique mistakes. She was nothing like Ruby.
After
Planet of the Apes,
and a rerun of
Hogan’s Heroes,
Nora peeled Zellie off the couch. “You’re such a slug.” They walked through her neighborhood to the beach and The Boardwalk, just to kill time. Long arms of late-afternoon sunlight pierced through a fog bank that hung just offshore. A breeze fluffed the girls’ hair around their shoulders and carried the smell of baked kelp up the cliffs to where they stood.
“Do you think Randall looks like Charlton Heston?” They both knew what Zellie was doing, shoehorning the potential glory of Randall into their conversation.
“You mean the noble astronaut George Taylor?” Nora climbed onto the guardrail, hooked her feet beneath the bottom rung. “Nah, more like the apes.”
“No way.” Zellie picked at her split ends as if she didn’t care.
“Okay, Tom Petty.”
“He’s doggly!” She shoved Nora’s shoulder, causing a lurch and a grab for the railing.
Nora yelp-laughed. “Relax. He’s hot and he’s into you. Trust me. I can interpret the way a guy stares.” Though guys didn’t stare at her. It was always at her mother. Fervent men in cars, at gas stations, in checkout lines, and her friends’ dads—even her mother’s ninth-grade-class school bus driver. Her mom used to sit in the third seat behind him just so they could “make eyes” in his rearview mirror. Now whenever Ruby smelled Old Spice cologne, she brought up Leroy, the bus driver, like he was some amazing treasure from her past instead of a creepy older guy. Nora once asked her if anything had come of the flirting, and her mother tipped up her voice and raised her eyebrows expectantly: “No?” Then she paused. The quiet between them was like a gaping window waiting to catch a breeze on a hot day, only she was waiting for Nora to share something about her life. When Nora didn’t, Ruby finally said, “When you’re ready, I’m here. Whatever you need: advice, birth control, a shoulder.”
“I told Randall about the party.” Zellie continued to pick at her hair. “I hope you don’t care.”
Nora shrugged as if she didn’t, although with Randall at the party, she’d be either relegated to third wheel or on her own.