For a moment, Andy thought she was talking about Mama.
“They get this rage in ’em down in the swamps.”
“Oh . . . Delphine.” Andy smiled. He loved how Margaret summed things up so neatly, the way she kept things uncomplicated for herself. “That’s a new slip,” he said, noticing it for the first time. It was powder blue rayon, lace-trimmed.
Margaret ducked her head as if she’d been complimented at a prom.
“Special customer?” asked Andy.
“Just some Stanford boys. They’ve been here before, but they’ve got a new chum with ’em.” Margaret plumped the white-blond tresses she had piled on her head for the evening. “Girl’s gotta keep up her reputation.” The brave vamp tone didn’t come naturally to her, so she abandoned it immediately. “They’re nice boys, though. Polite as can be on the phone. Listen, lamb, can we chew the fat for a sec?”
“Sure,” said Andy, already puzzled.
“In your room, I mean?”
With Mama in town, it was hard to imagine what could possibly require privacy. What crisis would have to wait until the girls were out of earshot? The dress, thought Andy. The chiffon shame in his closet. At Margaret’s insistence, he had never worn it outside his room—and only three times inside—but Mama could easily have found it. She’d been known to snoop around sometimes, and there was no way to lock his door from the outside. On two occasions Andy had come home from school to find the orange-blossomy sweetness of Mama’s perfume, Je Reviens, inhabiting his room like an overripe tropical garden. It troubled him more than it should have. It didn’t help, of course, that the name meant “I’m coming back.”
Andy led the way into his room. Margaret followed him closely, a picture of international intrigue as she latched the door behind her.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Are you in trouble, lamb?”
“What?”
“You know you can ask me for money. You don’t have to do this.” She sat on the edge of the bed and patted the spot next to her. Andy sat down reluctantly.
“Why would you think I need money?” he asked. He received an allowance from Mama every week when she doled out the cash to the girls. It was nothing to brag about, but it covered lunch money and sodas and movies and such. He knew plenty of kids at Humboldt High who didn’t even get lunch, much less allowances.
Margaret was studying him with big cow eyes. “It’s not like you, lamb. That’s what I don’t understand. Help me to understand, all right?”
“Margaret—”
“I went into town today to buy me some special emerald-green thread, and I passed the pawnshop on the way out of Hunsucker’s.” She laid her hand on her chest and sighed, as if the awful truth had just been finally revealed in full.
“And?” he said.
“They had it for sale in the window, Andy.” A tear blazed its way through her caky makeup. “I know it’s silly. It didn’t belong to me in the first place, but it was a nice piece of luggage—real Italian leather—and I wanted you to have it.”
The valise, thought Andy. Lasko hocked it.
The emotions jostling within him—confusion, betrayal, shame, guilt—left very little room for the truth. “What do you mean?” he asked, completely poker-faced.
“You know, Andy. That beautiful valise.” She pulled a hankie from her slip and blotted her eyes with delicate precision. “I wanted it to be an heirloom from me.”
“Ohhhh.” Andy made it look like the light had finally dawned. “So that’s what happened. I’m so sorry, Margaret. I really am.”
“What do you mean?”
“I took it to school last week. I wanted to show it off. I left it by my chair in the lunchroom when . . . you know, I went to stand in line. When I got back, it was gone. I asked everybody around my table, but nobody said they’d seen it.”
“You didn’t report it to the principal?”
Andy hesitated, scrambling for a way out. “I thought some of the kids were teasing me. I figured I’d get it back in a day or two. I didn’t wanna be a snitch. And I didn’t wanna disappoint you. I just hoped you’d forget about it . . . eventually.”
“Oh, Andy.” She looked so relieved that Andy felt even guiltier.
Why am I protecting Lasko? he thought. I’m the one who was cheated.
“We should tell the sheriff. He can find out who hocked it.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .” Because what? “Because the valise didn’t belong to us either, Margaret. They’ll just think you stole it from that fancy customer.”
“The sheriff knows me, Andy. He wouldn’t think that.” She looked devastated now, as if her reputation with the law had gone with the valise. “Besides, we don’t have to mention where it came from. We’ll say I bought it for you.”
“But . . . you can’t. Not with that monogram.”
“What monogram? I didn’t see no monogram.”
“It was little. It was on the inside. I thought it was the company at first.”
Lie upon lie in the name of love. Not even love yet, and probably never. Just the highly unlikely and nearly impossible possibility of love.
He knew better, of course. Even then, before it happened, he knew better.
Chapter 14
ONLY TALES
The middle of California scrolled past them in a golden blur, steepled with the shrines of Petco and McDonald’s, a landscape like anywhere else in America. Or the world, for that matter. Years ago, when Wren had modeled caftans among the ancient ruins of Delphi, she’d been appalled by the long suburban drive out of Athens. A terrain intended for satyrs had abandoned its soul to Toyota dealerships.
She opened the ice chest and pulled out a sweating bottle. “Kombucha?” she asked, displaying it lengthwise for Mrs. Madrigal as Vanna White might do. “This is lavender, but we also have hibiscus here at the Club Winnebago Sacramento.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Oh shit, who knows. It just showed up in the stores. It has enzymes or something—live cultures—living breathing things. Definitely an acquired taste. Kind of floral and moldy at the same time.”
The old woman widened her eyes. “How much more floral and moldy do I need to be?”
Wren laughed and twisted the cap. “It’s good, though. I was surprised. Stops short of sweet and gets somewhere deeper in your taste buds, if that makes any sense.” She took a sip, then held it out to Anna, who took it from her and drank.
As near as Wren could tell, she liked it.
“Good?”
“Mmm. I’ve always fallen for a good snake oil salesman.”
Wren wasn’t sure how to take that, but she laughed.
“It’s all in the pitch, isn’t it? Show me some enthusiasm and I’ll believe anything you say.”
Wren chuckled. “Did you learn that at the Blue Moon?”
“In the vicinity.” Mrs. Madrigal handed the bottle back to Wren with a tight little smile. “I’m afraid that’s a taste I won’t have sufficient time to acquire.”
“Give her a Coke! I think there’s one in there!” This was Brian, yelling from the driver’s seat. He liked getting lost in what he called “the Zen of the road,” but every now and then he’d pipe up, letting them know he was still there.
“No, dear,” said Anna. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Wren tucked the bottle back into the ice chest. “Would you like to stretch out? The bunk is right there. We’ve got at least two more hours until Tahoe.”
“No, thank you. I’m very comfy. I love watching the world go by. I haven’t done it much lately. It’s a treat.”
“Am I talking too much?”
“Not at all.”
“I wanna know about your life,” Wren said flatly. “How you . . . made it the way it was supposed to be.”
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“My reassignment, you mean?”
“In part, yeah. You must’ve been one of the first?”
“Oh, no. There were people in the thirties. Dr. Hirschfeld in Berlin had several patients, one of whom died after surgery. The one I knew about, of course, was Christine Jorgensen in the early fifties. Everyone knows about her.”
Anna was clearly waiting for an acknowledgment that Wren was unable to provide. “Sorry, that was—”
“Before your time. Of course. She’d been George Jorgensen of the Bronx. In the army like me . . . and she went to Denmark for the hormones and surgery. That’s how I got the idea, though that was tricky business a decade later. The Danish hated the publicity around Christine, so they banned the procedure. I had to find a doctor on the sly in Copenhagen.” Anna rearranged her hands in her lap with imperial dignity. “Christine was very brave. Heroic, really.”
“Having the surgery, you mean?”
“No—well, yes, it was still risky—but I meant back home. The whole sideshow, the cheap jokes. All that ‘GI Becomes Glamour Girl’ nonsense. She took it with remarkable grace and candor. There were reporters waiting for her at the airport, so she wore sunglasses and a mink and stepped off the plane like a movie star. She owned her truth. It was how she kept the world from hurting her.”
Exactly what I did with fat, thought Wren, recalling her life in the world of Big and Beautiful. Tell the joke on yourself first, and others won’t get the chance.
“She must have felt so impatient with people,” Anna added with a sigh. “Even her doctor didn’t understand who she was. He saw himself as performing a humane act for a homosexual. Castrating him for his own good. And the good of society.”
“What do you mean?”
Anna shrugged. “So he couldn’t act on his unnatural attraction to men.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“That’s the way it was,” said Anna.
“Did you feel like a girl when you were a little boy?”
“Oh yes. Always.”
“And you were attracted to boys?”
“Yes—but probably not in the way that you were.”
“How so?”
The old woman’s eyes moved to the parchment-colored hills as she composed her answer. “I was drawn to them romantically. I felt as if I belonged with them romantically, but I knew I had the wrong equipment for it, so . . . it scared the hell out of me—repulsed me, in fact, if they even . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Wren, feeling bold, finished for her. “If they came on to you.”
“Yes. For sex, mind you. Flirting was fine—lovely in fact—as long as it went nowhere, but . . .”
“When push came to shove . . .”
Anna smiled at her. “Yes. Unthinkable. Utterly. I would have felt like someone deformed.”
“Did that happen often?”
“What?”
“A boy coming on to you? Aggressively, I mean.”
“You ladies doing all right back there?” Brian asked, yelling over his shoulder again. Wren wondered how much of their girl talk he had heard, and if he thought she was overstepping her bounds with Mrs. Madrigal. Then she dismissed the thought as ridiculous. What bounds could you possibly overstep with this amazing person? In her own way, she had long ago stepped off the airplane like a movie star. At ninety-two she surely had no secrets left to tell. Only tales.
“We’re fine, pumpkin,” she told her husband before turning to Anna. “Aren’t we?”
“Of course,” said Anna, looking out the window again.
When they arrived at Tahoe, it was already twilight under the tall trees. While Brian handled the hookup, Wren got Anna settled in a camp chair, so she could look out over a patch of sand at the darkening cobalt glass of the lake. This was one of Brian’s favorite places, and Wren could see why. Camp Richardson was a throwback to the 1920s, a rustic resort with Monopoly-board cabins named after the touring cars that once shuttled tourists between here and Placerville: Chevy, Buick, Pierce-Arrow. But the wondrous machines that had brought people to the wild seemed less so now that there was a perpetual traffic jam encircling the lake.
Wren set up a camp chair next to Anna’s and collapsed into it. Anna turned and smiled at her, then returned her gaze to the lake.
“I’m as old as this place,” she said. “Maybe a little older.”
Wren wasn’t sure how to respond, so they let an easy silence fall.
Finally Anna said, “I’m glad you’re with him.”
“So am I.”
“His first wife wasn’t meant to be married. Some people aren’t, you know. Very sweet, but . . . I knew from the day I met her.” A breeze tousled a wisp of Anna’s hair, so she corrected it. “Brian was always gallivanting around, mind you, but I knew he was heading for this. Always.”
Wren raked her fingers through the cool sand next to her chair. “I was a major gallivanter, too. Maybe that’s why it works so well.”
“Quite possibly.”
Another silence.
“I wish you weren’t going away,” said Anna, adding after a moment, “I wish I weren’t.”
Wren reached across and took her hand. Twigs swathed in cool silk.
“Thank you for not contesting that,” said Anna. “It gets tiresome being told you’re immortal.”
Wren chuckled. “I’ll bet.”
“Help me up, dear. Just for a second. While we still have the light.”
Wren helped the old woman to her feet. “Do we have a mission in mind?”
“Oh yes.” Anna pointed a shaky finger at the blue-shadowed beach in front of them. “Just from here to there will be fine.”
Wren took her arm and began to walk. “Wait,” said Anna, holding back, rubbing one Chinese slippered foot against the other in a way that puzzled Wren.
“Goddammit. Help me get them off, would you, dear?”
“Do you have a stone or—”
“I just want them off.”
She wants to go barefoot, thought Wren. “Steady yourself on my shoulder,” she said as she knelt and removed Anna’s slippers one at a time, following up with the socks. Even in the rapidly fading light the seashell-pink varnish on Anna’s toes was unmissable. “Nice color,” said Wren. “I like a girl who paints her toenails.”
“Done it most of my life. Or had it done.”
“Even back at the Blue Moon?”
“Oh yes. My friend Margaret did it. One of the ladies.”
“Who does it now?” Wren began to lead Anna slowly through the sand.
“Who do you think?”
“Jake?”
Anna chuckled. “Helps to keep his lady side alive.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Mmm. For all of us, dear. Both sides are necessary.”
“So how did you keep your man side alive?”
Anna stopped walking for a moment to wriggle her toes in the sand. “Ohhh, that feels lovely. The earth knows exactly how to hold us if we just let it.”
Wren wondered if she’d finally asked the wrong question, but Anna eventually replied: “Your husband.”
“Sorry?”
“How I kept my man side alive. He was my buddy at Barbary Lane. We had some fine man-to-man talks. The way men can do sometimes.”
And it made him a better man, thought Wren.
It made him exactly the kind of open, unthreatened, and sexually confident man that she was able to live with.
In this case, for a lifetime. Whatever that means for the two of us.
They ate dinner together—a big paella for three—on the porch of the lakefront restaurant at Camp Richardson. There was sangria too, several pitchers, and a waiter who thought it was cute to call Anna “young lady” with every refill.
“Condescending asshole,” Wren muttere
d, as soon as he was out of earshot.
Anna took a sip of her sangria. “I don’t mind, dear. He thinks he’s being charming.”
“That’s very gracious of you, but, if he talked to me like a six-year-old, I’d personally hand him his nuts on a platter.”
Brian and Anna both laughed. “I doubt Anna would be bothered by ‘young lady,’ ” said Brian. “She built the word ‘girl’ into her name.”
Wren didn’t have a clue as to what he meant.
“Her name is an anagram,” Brian announced with a note of triumph in his voice. “Anna Madrigal is an anagram for ‘a man and a girl.’ ”
“No shit?” She looked to the old woman for confirmation.
Anna just shrugged. “The letters do spell that out.”
“She tortured me with it for weeks,” said Brian. “In those days you couldn’t figure it out on a computer.”
Wren fished an orange slice out of her sangria and popped it into her mouth. “So you picked your name because it was an anagram for—”
“Actually, no. The anagram came later. I mean, I realized it later. Everyone’s name is an anagram for something. Almost everyone’s.”
“Large wounds,” said Wren.
“Pardon me, dear?”
“Wren Douglas is an anagram for ‘large wounds.’ ” She lowered her eyelids at Anna. “Can you imagine how much that played hell with a fat teenager?”
They shared a merry moment of bonding until Brian interrupted it. “Wait a minute,” he said to Anna. “You told me you chose your name for the anagram.”
The old woman shook her head slowly. “I told you it was an anagram. There’s a big difference.”
Brian’s face turned pouty. “So you were just blowing smoke up my ass.”
Anna smiled dimly. “You may have been inhaling, dear, but I wasn’t blowing.”
That got a snorty laugh from Wren, who filed it away for future use.
Her husband, however, seemed determined to carry through with his indignation. “Okay, then where did Anna Madrigal come from?”
“Winnemucca,” said Anna, as if the answer were patently obvious. “In more ways than one.”
It occurred to Wren, not for the first time, that Mrs. Madrigal enjoyed a good conundrum. Even at this age, with all her cards seemingly on the table, she liked being a woman of mystery. Wren remembered the Google printout in Brian’s shirt pocket and how the old woman had presented it to Brian without explanation.