“Who’s this Asta you were talking about? Isn’t he the dog on
The Jetsons
?” Nick asked.
She shook her head. “That’s Astro.”
“Right.” He showed his teeth again.
“I’ll be right back.” On the porch, everyone belonged to the kissing clan now. Nora wanted a cigarette then realized they must be in Nick’s car. She started toward it, down the stairs. They should have stayed in the car, just the two of them. Perhaps there, behind the fogged windows, she wouldn’t feel so vacant.
“Nora?” Randall and Zellie smiled down at her over the porch railing. Two round, pale faces hovering from the planet Couple.
“Hey.” She looked up at them. “I think I’m going home.”
“What a good girl you are.” Randall said it like it was a compliment. He had his arm around Zellie, their shoulders and hips touching.
“I’m going to stay with Randall. Cover for me?” Zellie asked.
Nora nodded. “Don’t forget the Bounce.”
Her mom’s Rambler was parked straight, an indication Ruby hadn’t been drinking. Nora took a deep breath and opened the door.
“How was the movie?” Ruby called from her bed, her tired voice barely audible over the drone of the TV.
Nora pretended not to have heard. She hadn’t even thought about what movie she was supposed to have seen and now she tried to remember what was playing.
“Come talk to me.”
“I have to pee.” In the bathroom she wadded up toilet paper and stuck it in her underpants. She felt raw, pulpy. She pushed back thoughts about her clean and cornstarched diaphragm, useless in her room.
Her mother, cross-legged in the center of her bed, her faded kimono cinched loose around her waist, stabbed at the adding machine in the center of the silver tray. Her grade book lay open next to her, and a trail of white paper snaked over the quilt and onto the floor. Nora braced herself for questions about the pot.
“Did you and Zellie argue? I thought she was spending the night.”
“She changed her mind.” Nora stayed in the doorway, far from her mother’s prying gaze. On the TV a team of lions chased a herd of gazelles across a landscape of dry grass. “What are you watching?”
“I was watching Johnny Carson.” She kept a finger placed along a column of numbers, someone’s grades, and stared steadily at Nora, whose breath slowed, became deliberate and loud.
A lioness, tawny, all muscle and bone, leaped from a boulder onto a lone gazelle’s back. If anyone could intuit what Nora had done, it was Ruby. That she’d done it, she was glad. She thought she was glad. She had something to tell Zellie. She could cross it off her list. That was all good. “What are you staring at?” Nora finally asked.
Ruby held the grade book out to her. “I’m on Mark Cavanaugh.”
When she was little, Nora helped her mother grade twice a year. They would stay in for an entire weekend and have potpies and candy bars while Ruby corrected stacks of papers and then read out the scores. Nora keyed them into the calculator and wrote the final tally like a prediction of someone’s future. That’s how she used to feel about her own grades, that they meant something.
“Nora, are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Ruby sighed, fished through her nightstand for a cigarette. “Tylenol helps.” The match flared bright and blue. Through the cloud of exhaled smoke, her mother still watched. Nora realized she must reek of tequila. She took a plum from the glass bowl on her mother’s dresser. Outside, beyond the bedroom windows, faint screams rose from the roller coaster.
“Are you happy?”
It was such a weird thing for a mother to ask.
Rate My Life
The industrial mixer gleamed in the clean light, its paddle raised in friendly greeting. Reliable measuring cups, mixing bowls, and cake stands lined the shelves. Croissants in various stages of development—frozen hard as pale stones, thawed to tender puffy crescents that reminded Nora of babies’ arms, and baked to a worn penny shine—rested on the solid bakers’ racks. She transferred trays from freezer to proofing case to oven to racks, everything happening in the right order. Her mix tape—Pink Floyd, Billie Holiday—set on loop, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail, apron snug around her waist, Nora sang and worked, periodically slipping her hand into her pocket to touch the mysterious note.
Your shoulders. They’re sexy and amazing.
Before leaving the apartment, Nora had leaned down to kiss Thad’s shoulder and smelled gin, cigarettes, and a whiff of the acrid bike grease that never washed from beneath his fingernails.
“Tylenol?” He emitted a pasty old-man click with his tongue. “Refrigerator water?” It was one of the differences between them: he liked his water chilled, she liked hers room temperature. He liked sleeping with the window shut, she liked it open a crack, to let in the salty air. Apparently he also liked sitting up late and drinking and smoking cigarettes with her mother, while she liked going to bed early and leaving before sunrise for work and then classes.
Nora tiptoed through the dark living room to accommodate Thad’s request, still in her socks so as not to wake her mother. It seemed strange, Nora sleeping in the double bed beside a man with a hangover, while her mother curled up alone on the narrow couch. When had this happened, this switching of roles? Thad cupped the Tylenols in his palm and gave them a shake, like a pair of dice, before popping them into his mouth. “Come back to bed, chicken.” His voice was raw from smoking or husky with desire. Either way, Nora again did not feel a quickening near her spine, the plummeting-elevator sensation she used to feel when Thad called her chicken. Stroking her arm, he offered a low-luster smile, cuffed her wrist in his callused hand. “That’s some mother you’ve got.” She twisted free, and then, in case she’d been too brusque, hooked his pale hair behind his ear.
Nora slid the last tray in the oven, set the timer, and pushed through the swinging doors from the kitchen to the empty bakery café. Streetlamps and the just-breaking day cast frail ashen light into the room. Chairs upended on café tables sent leggy shadows across the floor and up the walls. She paused in the room’s calm center. When she was little, the television, always on, erased this kind of quiet. Last night, she’d lied to her mother, told Ruby she’d been denied her request for the day off. The truth was, Nora hadn’t asked. What she didn’t want to miss was exactly this: the unruffled mornings at the bakery, the relay between the walk-in, ovens, and industrial sink, the smell—butter and sugar baking—that conjured for Nora seasons and traditions, snow and bulky sweaters, cold milk and flag football, a pair of golden retrievers, leaves to rake and a checkerboard. It was a smell she imagined belonged on the Kennedy compound or in the pretend world of an L.L. Bean catalog.
Waiting for the buzzer, she thumbed through an old
Cosmo
she’d found on the rack out front and stopped when she came upon a Rate My Life quiz. She raced through
gender,
marital
status,
siblings
(none),
age
(twenty),
best friends
(one); hesitated at
weight,
finally choosing “slightly over.”
Ever been in prison
(no).
Are you employed
(yes, hence the slightly overweight: working at a bakery, it was hard to resist).
Financially independent
(partly. Thad didn’t ask her to help with the rent, but she was paying her own way through college; her mother had given her one semester’s tuition, eleven hundred dollars, and told Nora the rest was up to her. Nora was glad of it, as Ruby had already laid claim to too much of her life).
Are you addicted to caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, illicit drugs
(she could check off only one, caffeine, and felt both pride and regret. Perhaps her life would be more interesting with addictions).
Are there one or more people who currently find you romantically appealing
—near her heart she felt a flutter, then a jolt when the timer went off. Nora ripped out the quiz and slipped it into her pocket with her note.
At nine, the baking done, she clocked out and headed to UCSB. Her satire class was held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in a cavernous lecture hall, two hundred seats sloping toward a podium. Nora, living off campus with Thad, didn’t know anyone. So last Friday she’d been surprised when a boy slipped her a note. He wore dark-framed glasses that magnified his eyes, and one peacock feather earring that made his large eyes seem almost violet. “I wouldn’t lie,” he’d said.
Your shoulders. They’re sexy and amazing.
All weekend she had held her back straighter, walked regally, felt as if she had a small red bird perched upon each shoulder. Nora had transferred the note from pocket to pocket, even taking it with her to Sunday brunch at Maple, where her mother and Thad each ordered gin fizzes, plural.
“Come on, Nora. How often does your amazing mother come for a visit? Have a drink with Dad and me.”
“Thad,” Nora corrected.
Thirteen years older than Nora, Thad had been pegged by Ruby as the inevitable father figure and a mistake, not a terrible one, but a mistake nonetheless. When Nora announced that she was moving to be with Thad, Ruby begged her to live on campus and try therapy instead. She said it’d be a cheaper and easier way to deal with Nora’s male-abandonment issues. She’d offered to split the cost, up to a limit.
Plus, how can you trust a man with such thin thighs?
Nora had to explain again that Thad was a cyclist, but Ruby said,
They’re thinner than yours, Nora.
At brunch, Nora nodded to the waitress; maybe a drink would help.
“Yay!” Her mother brightly smiled, wrinkled her nose as if she had won, as if she’d convinced a toddler to taste the mushrooms, just one bite.
The waitress ran a finger under the stretchy band of her watch. “Can I see your ID?”
“Oh, please.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Lighten up.”
“A virgin bloody mary,” Nora said.
Ostensibly Ruby had driven down during her spring vacation to break in her new car, a used red Celica she’d christened Ann-Margret, and also to see where Nora and Thad lived, take them to dinner, though of course Thad wouldn’t hear of it; he wanted to impress. To be the good boyfriend he had to be extra kind to
the mother,
and with Ruby that meant a degree of flirting. When Nora brought Thad home to meet her mother for the first time, Ruby answered their knock in a bikini. “So”—she’d leaned against the door, inviting mutual appraisal—“you’re Beanie’s.” Thad’s smile switched from warm to confused and he cleared his throat, an audible question mark. Nora had to explain it was her nickname. She’d brought boys home before, but Thad was a man standing beside her, a tall man with his own business and a tan line around his wrist when he took his serious watch off at night. In the living room, in front of her mother, Thad seemed even taller, and Nora felt at risk, as if she’d been caught sneaking into a movie or using a fake ID and any moment her mom would prove her an impostor in this new life she was making for herself. But Thad-the-man loved Nora. He’d first told her on a Sunday when Nora closed the blinds in the condo so they could pretend it was too miserable to go outside. From Thad’s bed, hungry and lazy, they watched the Frugal Gourmet prepare his roast sticky chicken. While the chef patted a chicken dry, mixed soy sauce and honey and garlic, Thad declared his love for the skin behind Nora’s ears, her inner arms, inner thighs, all the protected places. He described her as winsome and tender and yielding, his words lingering in the air like the great frothy rain clouds that weren’t outside. And Nora said she loved Thad. She loved that she had to look up words like
winsome,
loved that he would make her roast sticky chicken, that he did his laundry on Tuesdays, that he sat at the kitchen table every evening to open his mail and paid his bills right away. At night when Thad held her, he breathed steadily against her neck.
“So,” Ruby said again. “You’re Beanie’s paramour.”
“I hope that’s what she told you.” He crushed a paper bag with a box of crackers, Fine Herbes Boursin cheese, and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc against his chest—grown-up snacks he’d selected at the market on the way over. With his other arm, he pressed Nora to his side. “Because I feel the same way about your daughter.”
Thad held his bag out to Ruby and she shrugged, raised her tequila and orange soda a bit to show she couldn’t possibly take it, and then she stepped to Nora, turning her own cheek for a kiss. “A man who knocks with his elbows; Nora, you are a Hargrove.”
Nora cringed inside. She went from fearing her mother would expose her to fearing that Thad would judge her based upon her membership in this tiny exclusive club, the Hargrove women.
In the kitchen, she fanned the crackers around the cheese on a plate while Thad and her mom watched her, or rather while Ruby watched Thad and Thad watched Nora and Nora eyed them both.
“Tell me again,” Ruby said. “Last summer she came with her friend—”
“Zellie,” Nora said.
“She and Zellie waltzed in—”
“They did,” Thad agreed. He leaned against the Formica counter, the surface dull from years of scrubbing with cleanser. The refrigerator, one they’d bought used, took up far too much room, and when Nora opened the door to look for anything to add to the plate, Thad stepped back and her mother hopped up to sit on the stove.
“Two lovely young ladies waltzed in and selected bikes. Nora chose red and we shot at the beach.”
“Red shows up in photos. I taught Nora that.” Ruby licked her thumb and wiped at a speck on her thigh.
“It was for the shop’s summer brochure—they’ll have it at the chamber of commerce, car-rental places, libraries. Bikini-clad girls, hair streaming behind them, enticing people with the Santa Barbara lifestyle. Perfect for the bike-rental shop.”
The photo shoot had been fun. Zellie knew the photographer; he offered to drive them down to Santa Barbara, get them high, and take some shots at the beach. They made no money, but it was an out-of-town adventure. Zellie had a crush on the guy and he had sweet Thai sticks. Riding fat-tire bikes on the wet sand, being told to smile, laugh, smear on Vaseline to make their lips shine—it was a fantasy. Plus, Nora’d met Thad, who, when he heard they weren’t getting paid, took them for surf and turf at the Chart House, then for wine on his patio. Nora’s friends usually drank beer or Bacardi 151. Three months later, when her two community-college classes, Chocolate Desserts and Philosophy 101, ended, she quit her waitress job and enrolled at UC Santa Barbara.