Stop That Girl (12 page)

“Maybe. I honestly can’t say.”

“Was it the one out by the fence, where the tomatoes are?”

“Ann, calm down.”

“Come on, think!”

Mom said, “I don’t remember, and you’re making me extremely tense.”

I started to cry. My life was a ruin. There was no hope for me anytime, anywhere.

“What’s going on, was it a special nozzle?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Did Archie give it to you?” she asked, smoothing my hair.

“No!” I said. “I hate Archie,” I added.

“I’m not surprised,” Mom said. “He was arrogant and narcissistic, and I couldn’t stand him, frankly.”

“God, couldn’t you have asked me, about the nozzle?”

My mother said, “You should have hidden it away, if it was so important.”

“Oh, great, is that the way to live life?”

“Please go get some rest,” she said.

I tossed. I turned. I was full of horrible feelings, feelings I couldn’t name. I wanted to attack something. I
had
to attack something. I decided to attack the tree across the street.

I crept out of bed, slipped on a T-shirt and jeans, let myself out the back door. I moved stealthily down the driveway and across the street to inspect the small tree that truly was starting to block the so-called view. Up close, I could see it was larger than I’d thought. The trunk was a few inches thick at the base, and when I tried wiggling it, it barely budged.

No matter. I pushed it, kicked it, twisted it, threw myself at it. I ripped off its lower branches and bent it to the ground. I jumped on it, cracked it, split it. In so doing, I began to expose some of the roots.

I sawed and pounded and hacked at them with a stone. I tore at them. I lacerated whatever part of any root I could see. After nearly an hour, I was finally able to wrest the tree from the ground. At about twelve feet long, it was heavy.

I ran down the street, pulling the carcass along. It scraped the asphalt, leaves ripped and scattered, twigs jumped and snapped. At last I stood at the top of a small ravine, a dark area between two houses. I threw the murdered sapling like a javelin, and gravity brought it to rest with a shivering thud.

Then I walked home. My work was done. The night was warm, as it was late August in the valley. I lifted my T-shirt and let the air touch my skin, blotted my face with the hem of it. Then I found a place on the curb in front of our house and sat a moment, letting my heart slow down. My hands were grazed and torn but I hardly cared. I was still young and silly enough to wonder if what I’d just done might make a difference. Keep us from having to move again. Change the course of history. I couldn’t wait for morning, when Mom would look out and realize her view was no longer being obstructed. At first I imagined her excitement about it, then wondered how long it would take her to find something else to worry about. I planned on keeping a perfectly straight face.

Look Out, Kids

It was a full-time job, cooking pizza and selling slices in a cinder-block bungalow on the beach in Santa Monica. All day from the counter I watched people frolicking and laughing and lying around with Frisbees and books and slices of our pizza on the warm white sand. Our pizza was good and we often had lines. In the back room I dragged bags of flour to the dough machine every couple of hours, mixed in the yeast and the oil and the water, and waited for it to rise into a big white lump like a naked stomach that hadn’t been out on the beach all summer. Like, for example, my own.

I earned $2 an hour, so I made $80 a week. I was saving for college. No money to waste on clothes or records or concert tickets. I’d be up at seven, swigging down a cup of instant Maxim, out the door by seven-thirty in my family’s old Buick station wagon with the cracking vinyl seats, down Sepulveda to Pico all the way to the beach to report by eight.

We had a new house, over the hill. My parents were the kind that didn’t believe in giving anyone a free ride. My mother supposedly knew a Rockefeller while she was in college and was always impressed that he worked in a gas station on the side. That he was being taught the right values. There was no arguing that one. If a Rockefeller had to work his way through school, so did I.

Anyway, a lot of people had to work. I was no different.

It wasn’t bad. For one thing, my first day on the job I met Jake. He had hair to his back pockets, longer and shinier than mine, and he played the harmonica during his ten-minute break out on the back stoop next to the Dumpster. That day he told me he’d just taken the Green Turtle to New York and back, sleeping on the floor of the gutted bus with the coolest people I could imagine, almost as cool as the Merry Pranksters.

I liked him.

One day, a week into the job, as I was about to put some proceeds into the cash register, Jake said, “Pause a moment. Are you actually satisfied with the slave wages we’re getting here?”

I shrugged. “I guess. It’s the going rate.”

“The going rate for what?” he said. “Selling your youth?”

I laughed. “Don’t think about it so much. A job’s a job, right?”

“Yeah, but who keeps this place going, Sal or us?” Sal was the owner, a short, ugly small-time businessman who fancied himself with it by virtue of a few gold chains around his turkey-gobbler neck.

“I guess he pays for the ingredients,” I replied.

“Okay, so he buys industrial-sized sacks of flour, wheels of the blandest cheese, and army-issue cans of sauce, and everything together probably costs him pennies. We carefully prepare it and stand here all day in a broiling shack.”

All we had to do, according to Jake, was sell a couple of pieces of pizza every hour that we didn’t ring up. Sixty cents each. After all, we were allowed to
eat
as much as we wanted to. It would only be the same as eating a couple more slices an hour, but we’d take the $1.20 or $1.80 in cash. Kind of like a tip. “I don’t know,” I said. “If you want to do it, go ahead. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I can’t do it if you won’t.” He sulked.

“Suit yourself.”

“What if you were a fatso? You’d be scarfing all day at Sal’s expense,” he said. “Which you’re not, by the way. Fat. At all.”

“If you think it’s so bad here, why did you take the job?”

“How long did you look in the want ads?” Jake said. “It was this or a car wash in Venice or a stockroom in a light fixture store in Culver City.”

I hadn’t tried anywhere else.

Whenever I came home from work, my family would be waiting to see how much pizza I brought home (the day’s leftovers, destined for the garbage). But it’s not like we were poor. It’s not like we couldn’t buy our own pizza. Soon our freezer was full of pizza slices. We had enough to last for months. “This is quite a deal you have going,” Roy said, chomping on his latest warmed-up slice. “We’re going to miss it when it’s over.”

“It’s just a bunch of dough,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

“Good dough,” Roy said.

Los Angeles is usually hot in the summer, but not where I was working. In the morning, fog covered the beach, and the cement building was chilly from absorbing the night air. Once the ovens were fired, we’d warm up, though. The sea breezes kept the place aired out.

One day Sal came in and reminded us that he’d need volunteers on the Fourth of July to keep the place open until midnight. We’d get double time. We’d get to see the fireworks out over the pier. Jake said no, but I needed the money and said I’d take the shift; then Jake changed his mind and said he would too.

“Might get rowdy down here,” Sal told us. “Last year somebody tried to blow the place up. You sure you two can handle it?”

“We’ll just hand out pizza and calm everybody down,” Jake said.

“You better not,” Sal said. “You want me to start keeping inventory? Too much work for all of us. But no funny stuff. You’re using too much cheese,” he said, biting into a square of what I’d made that morning in the fog. “Use the measuring cup. Don’t get fancy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What the hell is this?” Sal said, leaning over behind the tanks that made the fizz in the soft drinks. He picked up the book Jake brought in that morning,
Naked Lunch.
“Nobody’s having any naked lunch on my time,” he said, pocketing it.

The afternoons were long, especially when it was cloudy. The water turned the color of old broccoli, dog walkers clipped by in their sweats, and the only people coming up to our window were the local drunks that Jake had been extending Sal’s charity to. It was the day he told me he was starting at Otis College of Art and Design in the fall, and asked what school I’d be attending. I said, “I’m not sure. I got into UC Santa Cruz, but I didn’t get any financial aid, so I’m not sure I can go until I save up.”

“Hey, no kidding, that’s where my brother goes,” Jake said. “Major hippie school.”

“It’s modeled on the Oxford system, and it’s supposed to be excellent academically,” I said.

“Yeah, everyone I’ve ever met up there was a space case. In a good way. Really cool folks. Artsy. That kind of place. Won’t your parents help you out?”

“They would if they could.”

“But how are you going to save anything working here?”

“It adds up,” I said.

“That’s insane. You’re totally the college type.” Per Sal’s instructions, he was counting pepperoni like it was currency coming out of the cash drawer: twenty a pie, one every two inches. “You know,” he said, “next weekend I’m driving up there to visit my brother. He’s in summer school. Why don’t you come? It’ll be hip, plus maybe you can talk to the financial aid people, change their minds.”

“Change their minds?” The idea confused me. Was Financial Aid a real place I could actually go? They’d already turned me down based on my family’s middle-class income, so how could I change their minds?

“Just go in there and see what they say,” he insisted.

That night I told Mom and Roy what I wanted to do. Mom said, “Who is this boy? What kind of car does he have?”

I said, “It’s an Opel Cadet. He’s really nice. His dad’s a chemistry professor at UCLA.”

“I take it he likes you.”

“No, he’s just a friend,” I said. “I guess we’ll stay in his brother’s dorm.”

“Well, we have plenty of pizza in the freezer,” Roy said. “We’ll survive.”

My mother said, “I don’t know what you’ll tell the financial aid people they don’t already know. They eviscerated us. They know more about us than the IRS.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I can talk them into giving me a work-study grant.”

“Give it the old college try,” Roy said.

The details escape me now, but somehow I was able to call up and make an appointment. This, in itself, amazed me. Then Jake and I planned the trip all week, plotting how we would both call in sick at dawn on Friday and basically close the place down, unless Sal manned the counter by himself. The thought of him frantically baking and taking change at the order window cracked us up. And he wouldn’t be able to fire us, since he’d be counting on us for Saturday night, the Fourth.

When Jake picked me up early Friday morning, the back of his car was full of clothes and books and records that his brother wanted from home, plus two sleeping bags that looked like they were already zipped together. Shoving my stuff in back, I saw a packet of condoms poking out of Jake’s backpack. He pressed an eight-track tape into his deck and we started our journey listening to
Workingman’s
Dead,
which I’d never heard before.

Driving up 101 with Jake, I watched as he did a mysterious thing with his hands. He was holding them out, one at a time, and slowly manipulating his fingers, as if admiring at arm’s length how they worked. He did it in slow motion. He always held his flexing hand in front of the air vent, and that’s when I finally realized he was merely drying out his sweaty palms.

Just outside of Santa Barbara, Jake said, “I finally feel like I’m waking up.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I couldn’t sleep last night. I was weirdly excited about this trip,” he said.

“I bet you miss your brother,” I mused.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it wasn’t that.” He put on another tape,
Sweet Baby James.
At the time I thought James Taylor was boring and insipid, but since everybody else in the world loved him, I didn’t say anything. “So,” he said then, “are you, like, seeing anyone these days?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m surprised, because you seem like the type who’d always have a boyfriend on hand somewhere.”

“Nope,” I said. “Not me.” To make conversation, I said, “Are you?”

“Had a big breakup in the spring. Two years we were together. She left me for another guy. A total geek.”

“Sorry,” I said.

He smiled. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“I brought some sandwiches. My mother made them. They’re ham. Do you like ham?”

“When I’m hungry I like it,” I said.

“Want to stop and take a walk on the beach, or should we just keep driving?”

“Maybe we should just keep driving,” I said.

Jake nodded. He changed the subject. He said he had a big surprise for his brother, patting his pocket, as if I’d know what that meant. I didn’t.

At that point in my life, I guess I was what you would call square. I did what I had to do, more or less; I didn’t stay out late at night; I studied; I went to bed. That kind of kid. I wasn’t exactly happy, but my life philosophy wasn’t very well developed. I expected things to get better. Without realizing it at the time, I subscribed heartily to
delayed gratifi
cation.

For example, whenever someone gave me a usable item, like a candle or a bar of soap, I’d never use it. I’d save it for later. Years would go by. Seriously, I had dust-caked candles I’d won at parties in fourth grade. I had bars of soap from my great-aunt that were cracked with age. I was eighteen years old. What was I waiting for?