Valley Fever (13 page)

“A little hair of the dog.”

“Have you ever tried pickle juice?” It was Mother's cure.

“Let's have gin and tonics.”

“Gin is very good for bad news,” I said.

“Gin was invented for bad news.” It's humiliating enough to get dumped, but it's much worse to find out you were among the last to know it was coming.

The kitchen was dark and hot. We opened the windows and squeezed limes into a pitcher of gin and we drank until we couldn't feel the heat anymore.

“This place isn't as comforting as I thought it would be,” Anne said. “Why is it comforting for you but not for me?”

“You have someplace else that's home.”

“Charlie has never watched the cartoon, you know.”

I had seen only a couple episodes of Anne's cartoon. “It's not your life's work, Anne.”

“It's my work right now. It pays half our mortgage. And he never watches my guest spots, either. He hardly knows what it is I do.”

“Do you know what it is he does?”

“All he does is look at his phone.” She dipped her finger into her drink, pushing the ice cubes below the surface. “We don't really get along, Inky. We just live together in that house with the shutters. I don't even think he likes the shutters.”

You know that feeling when a deep hole opens up inside you and you feel like, physically, your whole body is being sucked into it? It can take all your energy not to disappear into that hole. “Maybe you should talk to another doctor,” I said.

“There's a doctor in Sherman Oaks everyone goes to.”

“Do you want a child or is that just what Charlie wants?”

“It's all so expensive,” she said. “God, doesn't the heat tire you out?”

“I don't know yet.”

“How can you not know in twenty seconds?”

“I'm not tired yet.”

“You're depressing to talk to.”

Mother appeared in the doorway. We hadn't heard her come out of her room. “What's this chitchat about?” she said.

“The heat,” Anne said. “The weather. Isn't that what everyone talks about around here?”

“Around here, the weather is business,” Mother said.

Anne poured herself another drink. The white tile on the kitchen counter had several sticky rings where we'd lifted and set the pitcher of gimlets.

“Stop drinking,” she said to Anne. “You girls drink too much.”

Anne did not respond.

“Well, don't stop speaking because I came in,” Mother said.

“We were out of things to say,” I said.

“We never have anything to say to one another,” Mother said. “Other mothers and daughters speak to each other.”

“Didn't you tell us when we were little that we were different from other people?” Anne said.

“Did I tell you that?”

“Very, very different. Special,” Anne said. “Don't lower your expectations now.”

“You are special,” Mother said. “Of course I had high expectations. I still have high expectations.” She held her slender hand up to the window screen, checking for a breeze.

“You can't have it all ways, Mother,” Anne said, taking more than one gulp from her glass. “Do you want common daughters who tell you all their trashy, vulgar personal details, or do you want daughters who are exceptional? Make up your mind.”

“I want you,” Mother said. “You're exceptional.”

“Oh, very exceptional. Very special,” Anne said.

“Ingrid? What's she upset about?”

Anne gave me a gentle look I couldn't interpret. It could have meant
Tell Mother my news so I don't have to
, or it could have meant
Please keep your mouth shut
. I said, “I think Anne might feel a little bit of pressure to come up with things to tell you,” which was the truest and least revealing thing I could think of.

“Oh,” Mother said. “That's all right. We can sit in silence.” She gently touched the side of her face, as if she were feeling for a hair growing in.

We did, for a few moments, sit in silence.

But Mother can't stand to sit in silence.

“I thought we were very happy out here at the house on the river,” she said. She opened the backgammon board and began to set it up.

“When?” Anne said.

“Well, always. Still, now,” said Mother. “But when you were growing up, when you're saying I wanted you to be exceptional. I didn't want you to be exceptional, you just were. That's not my fault.” She waited for us to respond. She said, “Or anyone's fault.” She rattled the dice in their cup.

“We've always been happy here,” I said. “We were happy growing up.”

“Well, not you,” Mother said. “You weren't so happy.”

She was referring to my teenage years, when first I left for Massachusetts because I hated school in Fresno, and then three years later when I came home from school in Massachusetts and the shrink told my parents to hospitalize me for depression. My parents decided I'd be more comfortable at home on the river than in the juvenile psychiatric hospital, which I was. “I was never that unhappy,” I said. “It was other people who kept telling me I was unhappy.”

“You stopped sleeping.”

“That's anxiety. There's a difference between anxiety and unhappy.”

“You should have told me this twenty years ago,” Mother said.

“I did tell you,” I said. Then we were quiet again, and I felt sorry for Mother. “I'm saying no one is unhappy. No one is angry.”

“I'm a little bit angry,” Anne said. Her cheeks were red from drink and from keeping everything from Mother and from herself.

“Don't be angry,” Mother said.

“Oh, all right. Thank you. I'll not be angry.”

“You have nothing to be angry about.”

“Oh, I know,” said Anne. “Think of the tennis lessons, and the horses, and the vacations. Think of the way we were treated in France. ‘Think of the clothes you had.'” Anne imitated Mother's voice, which she did perfectly, like a song.

“Well, yes,” Mother said.

“All right,” Anne said. “This is why we can't have this conversation.”

Mother said, “We never have any conversation.”

I said, “We're having a conversation right now.”

“Not really,” Anne said.

“No, not really,” Mother agreed. Even when they were arguing with each other, Anne and Mother could find a way to side against me.

I felt that deep hole opening up in me and all my insides got desperate, as if they were trying to crawl out for survival. Nothing resolved this feeling as well as a Tylenol PM. “I guess I'll go to bed,” I said.

“Because I came in?” asked Mother.

“I'm tired,” I said. “My head hurts a little.” I put my glass in the sink. I took the old sponge and wiped sticky rings of gimlet from the tiles on the kitchen counter.

“Mom,” Anne said, ignoring us both, “what in the world is going on with your hair?”

Mother touched her hair tenderly, as if she didn't want to muss it, but her hair, as usual these days, was lopsided from sleeping. “Is it too dark? Ingrid says it's too dark.”

“Good night, you two,” I said.

“You look like a vampire. Who is doing the color? What is it with hair color in this family?”

“Let's have cigarettes,” Mother whispered to Anne. “Good night, Inky.”

Anne went on, “I don't know why you don't come to LA and have my guy do it.”

“Good night, Annie.” I stood in the doorway.

“It's early yet,” Anne said. “Stay with us.”

“I'm still tired from last night,” I said.

“I didn't know you were that drunk last night,” she said. Right in front of Mother. She'd had more to drink than I had the night before, and had been twice as drunk.

“All right,” I said, and turned to go.

I heard them as I walked through the living room and down the hall: “Why do you think I have cigarettes?”

“I know you have cigarettes. I saw them in your purse. I suspect you want me to see them.”

“You always look in my purse,” Anne said.

My sheets were crumpled and slightly smelly. I hadn't yet changed them since I got home almost two weeks ago. There is nothing worse than old sheets, especially when the temperatures at night are over 100 and you're sweating out booze. Tomorrow I would get new, crisp sheets. I would iron them, maybe, so they would be cool and flat for bedtime. I took the Tylenol PM and waited to feel drowsy. Tomorrow everything would be new, in fact. Tomorrow I would start to fix things, or think of a way to start to fix things.

I should have had another gimlet. Alcohol increases the speed of the Tylenol, even if the combination kills you quicker.

Mother and Anne thought they were so clever and furtive with their cigarettes, but the smoke came straight from the kitchen terrace up through my open window. I could hear the shoosh of their whispering. Being left out of their pretty-girl clique was a feeling so familiar I could almost nestle into it for comfort. They had the same low, delicate laugh. Had they swept the dead bees off the crisscross chairs before sitting down? Their laughs sounded like chiffon. I would have shouted to them to quiet down but I didn't want to wake Dad. Poor Dad, with his cough and worrying about the grapes and no booze tonight and no cigarettes. He'd been in bed all evening, long before dark. I did not hear his gentle, wavelike snoring. I heard only chiffon laughing and crickets.

I started to think about those nights George and I had spent in the garage apartment at his parents' house. George always made sure to have new sheets. There was a polyester quilt that a renter had left. The long closet had accordion doors and stored clothes no one in the family wore anymore, like worn-out work boots and boys' vinyl raincoats and old football jerseys George and his brothers had not returned to the high school.

I started to feel that heaviness in the forehead from the Tylenol PM. I took one more to make sure it worked.

George's mother had these plates with strawberries in the middle, and she always made sure when setting the table that the big strawberry pointed down. She liked pink things: sweaters and umbrellas and plates. This was something else my mother found unforgivable, the affinity for anything pink.

After George's dad died, his mother instructed him to sell the old shotguns in the attic. They turned out to be extremely valuable, much older and in much better condition than anyone had guessed. George sold them to one of the Wentes of Lodi and bought a black Alfa Romeo convertible with the money his mother allowed him to keep.

I started to feel the heaviness of that Tylenol PM in my nose and my throat.

The Sweets' apartment above the garage had unfinished pine planks on the walls and a wet bar as big as the tiny kitchen. And it had clean carpet.

Anne always left very early in the morning, so she didn't have to say goodbye to anyone. Still, it was always slightly a surprise to wake up and find her gone.

 

10.

Escape plans were my specialty. I had done this so many times, from so many places. I had escaped from Fresno twice before.

I set a routine. I had a plan and I wrote it down in a fresh college-ruled notebook. There is nothing more promising than a blank notebook. I would get up at seven and work on the screenplay. Two pages a day, I decided, and I could be done with the thing by October, whether or not it was any good. I had abandoned all ideas of it being any good. By October Mother and Dad would have the money from the grapes and could possibly loan me something to rent an apartment near Anne's house. I hoped that by then she and Charlie would have worked out the discomfort between them. I liked spending time with Anne and Charlie when they were happy with each other. It gave me the sense of being part of a couple.

“I read online that runny yolks are good for your brain,” I said to Mother that morning as we tapped our eggs.

“Good how?”

“Good like they keep you energetic and sharp.”

“Why?”

“Butter, too, it said. We can eat all the things we like.”

“I always eat the things I like,” Mother said, which was not true, of course. Mother ate nearly nothing. Her body was like skin poured over muscle, with realistic fake breasts, two pears hung from sinew.

“Eat your toast soldiers.”

“I do like toast soldiers,” she said.

“What did Anne have to say?”

“You always ask that,” Mother said, “as if you haven't talked to her yourself. Didn't you talk to her the whole time she was here?”

“I mean when you were outside.”

“Oh, Ingrid. You sound like a spy. You sound like an East German.”

Mother knew nothing about East Germany apart from what she might have heard on reruns of
Murder She Wrote.
“I'm making conversation,” I said. “I thought you liked making conversation.”

“You didn't even notice that I invoked East Germany.” She got that long-necked look that Anne gets, too, chin up, neck like a garden hose.

“I noticed,” I said. At the house in Fresno, my feelings were hurt about 60 percent of the time.

“You think I am so dumb.”

“No.”

“You think I don't know the difference between Africa and South Africa.”

“Where did you come up with that?”

“I do know about South Africa, though. I learned all about it in the eighties when we went to see their vines.”

“What did you learn?”

“I learned about vines!” she said. “They can do red and white, but mostly white. And I learned they have these lovely batik tunics at stalls in the marketplace. I'll bet they don't have those anymore.” She sucked the white from the lopped-off top of her egg. I always saved that part for last, but Mother ate it first thing.

“You must have learned a lot,” I said.