Golden States

  “What’s the name of the company Rob works for?” Lizzie asked as the houses ticked by.

  “Thorson and Lee,” Janet told her. “It’s called a firm. The companies lawyers work for are called firms.”

  “Why does he want to be a lawyer?” David said. “It’s a stupid thing to do.”

  “He likes it. He likes making all that money. He even likes wearing a suit. He didn’t like those things quite so much when I first met him.”

  “Why not?” Lizzie asked.

  “Oh, he just had different ideas then, Lizzie. A lot of people did. He thought he was going to be a lawyer for poor people. You know, keep them out of jail when they get arrested for things they didn’t do.”

  “Why do they get arrested, then?” Lizzie asked.

  “Sheesh,” David said.

  “For a lot of reasons. Anyway, it’s no concern of Rob’s, because he changed his mind. He works for rich people instead.”

  “Why?” Lizzie asked.

  Janet took a drag from her cigarette, and the car drifted toward the center line. She brought it smoothly back on course. “Because law school is a lot of hard work, and he decided he should be paid back for it. And because his drugs are very expensive. Whoops, don’t tell Mom about that part. Anyway, you think all kinds of wonderful things about the future until you see how much you’re going to have to pay for it.”

  “Do you still want to be a doctor for poor people?” David asked.

  “At this point I just want to be a doctor, period,” she laughed. “No, that isn’t true. I still want to work in clinics for people who don’t have any money, yes. But I haven’t spent one day in medical school yet. Who knows how much I might be corrupted.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” David said.

  “Yes she would,” Lizzie said.

  David started to tell her she didn’t know what corrupted meant, but decided not to chance it. Instead he propped his arm over the back of the seat, in the style of Baretta, and looked out the rear window with the expression of superior boredom he’d been working on. It was then that he saw Rob’s car, the brown Celica, following them one car behind.

  At first David was too surprised to speak at all. Then he gave what originated deep inside him as a shout but thinned in his windpipe and came out as a squeak instead, which he managed to pull down a notch or two so it ended as a high-pitched groan.

  “Are you all right?” Janet called from the driver’s seat. The car swerved gracefully into the next lane as she looked over her shoulder at him.

  “He’s following us,” David said.

  “Who?” Lizzie said.

  “Him,” was all David could think of. The man’s name was suddenly nowhere in his head.

  “Shit, I knew it,” Janet said. She steered the car back into its rightful lane.

  “I don’t see anything,” Lizzie said. She craned her head up over the sausage-shaped headrest on the back of her seat and said, “Oh, there he is.”

  “I thought he was going back to San Francisco,” David said.

  “I knew he wouldn’t,” Lizzie said.

  “Let’s go to the police.”

  “Shut up, you crazy pinhead.”

  “We’re just going to go to the beach as planned,” Janet said, “and forget there’s a lunatic driving behind us. Okay?”

  “We could try and lose him,” David suggested.

  “Not in the Blue Baby.”

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “You can’t,” Janet said. “You’re twelve.”

  “I can drive, though,” he said. Though he’d never tried it, he felt certain he knew how from years of observation. It looked like a simple process.

  Janet checked the rearview mirror and took a quick, nervous hit of her cigarette. “Let’s just relax, hmm?” she said. “Lizzie, turn around and face the front, okay?”

  Lizzie kept on watching Rob’s car, her chin pressed into the headrest.

  “He must be crazy,” David said.

  “How about if we sing?” Janet said. “What songs do you both know?”

  “I don’t want to sing,” Lizzie said.

  “David? Come on.”

  “I don’t think I want to sing either,” he said. He glanced back at Rob, whose face behind the wheel looked no different from that of any other grim, businesslike driver.

  “Then I’ll do a solo number,” Janet said, and she began singing “Nowhere Man,” in a loud, off-key voice. David joined in midway, when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to get embarrassed and stop. The two of them sang.

  David had been listening to Janet’s Beatles records since he was a baby. He knew them better than he’d ever known nursery rhymes. After “Nowhere Man” they sang “Yellow Submarine,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Taxman” and “Norwegian Wood.” “Norwegian Wood” was such a sad, elegant song that David sang it in a sort of English accent which was, to him, the voice of true feeling.

  They sang some Neil Young songs they both knew, andsome Grateful Dead. Then they switched over to television songs. Lizzie joined them on “Mr. Ed,” because they couldn’t remember all the words and she was proud of the fact that she could. They sang all the way to the beach, and Rob held steady on their tail.

  When they got off the freeway and onto city streets, and the broad blue band of the ocean appeared before them, shimmering above the silvery glare of traffic, David felt as if they’d traveled through dangerous country and reached home. They were by then singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” having nearly run out of songs. Janet pulled into the parking lot they always parked in, and gave two dollars to the old man who sat on a folding metal chair in front of his gray wooden booth. The man’s eyes bugged out and pointed in slightly different directions. Ever since he was a kid David had been afraid of the man and had discreetly avoided looking at him. Now he seemed like an old friend, a protector. Rob waited behind them, and after they’d driven onto the lot David watched Rob pay the man, who took his money and let him in.

  Janet parked at the far end of the lot, at the edge of a chalky red bluff that dropped down to the beach. The bluff had been pitted and tunneled by rain, and David knew that from below it looked like a gigantic ant farm. Janet pulled up close to the edge, so the front of the car appeared to be hanging out over the ocean. The dark blue water met the paler sky just along the tops of the fenders. Janet turned off the ignition. “Just sit here a minute and don’t say anything, okay?” she said. “Let me talk to him.”

  Rob parked alongside, got out of his car, and ambled over, smiling, his teeth very white. Lizzie called, “Hi, Rob,” and he said, “Hello, Lizzie” as though he were surprised to see her. He put his fingertips lightly on the sill of Janet’s open window.

  “Beautiful day,” he said.

  Janet maintained her driving posture. “Rob,” she said, “what I want you to do is get back in your car, pull out of hereeven though it just cost you two dollars to get in, and drive back home. I know you think it’s a good idea, keeping after me like this, but it’s not. It makes me think some of my worst thoughts about you are true.”

  “We haven’t talked enough,” he said.

  “How much should we talk?”

  “We should talk until I understand why we were planning our wedding exactly five days ago and now today you won’t give me twenty minutes after I drove five hundred miles. We should talk that much.”

  “That’ll be hard,” Janet said, “if you don’t understand already.” She looked straight ahead and gripped the wheel as if she expected the car to run out of control into the ocean.

  “Well maybe I should ask questions, and you try to answer them. How would that be?” Rob said. The wind worried his shirt collar and his hair, which was cut into short, overlapping shreds like a television hero’s.

  “Please just go, Rob.”

  “Question number one: Was anything you ever said to me about love true, to the best of your knowledge?”

  “Don’t turn into F. Lee Bailey or I’ll
drive right over this cliff.”

  “Are you going to answer the question?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Try this: What have I done that’s ever made you anything but happy?”

  “You’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “Tell me the ones to ask.”

  “See, I can’t seem to make you understand that it’s not your fault. It’s me, it isn’t you. If I stay with you I’ll give in to all my cowardly urges to just be protected by you. I won’t do the work to get into medical school. I know just what kind of asshole I am.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Let me go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, I’ve gone.”

  “And I’m following you. If you come back to San Francisco I promise not to protect you.”

  “That’s not something you can offer. That’s like offering to remove your head.”

  “Maybe you and I could talk privately for ten minutes. Maybe the kids could go down to the beach.”

  “I won’t go to the beach with just David,” Lizzie shrieked. “Well, that settles that,” Janet said.

  “Have you thought about me for one minute in the last five days?” Rob said. “Has the fact that I’m suffering been of any concern to you?”

  “You know it has.”

  “I don’t know it from the way you’re acting, no. No, I don’t know it at all.”

  Janet nodded. She held onto the steering wheel. “Listen, kids,” she said. “How would it be if we all walked down to the beach, and Rob and I can talk while you two go swimming. How would that be?”

  “Rob is in a suit, ” Lizzie said.

  “I’ll be the best-dressed man on the beach,” Rob said. “Come on, Lizzie, let’s you and me head on down, and if the others want to come along, they can.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie said, and she was out of the car. She scurried around to the other side. Rob offered her his hand, which she took hesitantly.

  “Come on, David,” Janet said. “I promise this won’t last long.”

  “Okay.” He was pleased with the fact that, Rob and Lizzie having paired off, he and Janet were made into a couple. They gathered the towels and the sack of fruit.

  A gently sloping trail started at the far corner of the parking lot and traversed the cliff face, strewn with candy wrappers and shards of amber glass. They had to go single file on thetrail. Rob went first, followed by Lizzie and Janet; David brought up the rear, holding a stack of towels. He tasted the talcumy dust the others raised. He had on his plaid trunks and his Stevie Wonder T-shirt, and a pair of tennis shoes which struck him as ridiculous. They made a joke of his skinny legs. Walking ahead of him, carrying the grocery bag, Janet looked far more dignified. She wore sandals and a man’s white shirt (Rob’s?), which fell below the bottom of her swimsuit. She wore the sleeves rolled to her elbows in fat cuffs that emphasized her thinness in a complimentary way.

  The beach was sparsely populated. People lay on towels here and there, and a few surfers bobbed in the water, watching for good waves, as docilely expectant as commuters at a bus stop. When he reached the base of the trail David immediately stopped to take his shoes off, hopping first on one foot and then on the other. Rob, Lizzie, and Janet walked down to the boundary line where the sand turned wet, and David loped to catch up, the shoes gratifyingly heavy in his hands. Rob stood against the water in his gray suit, hands in his pockets.

  “Kids, Janet and I are just going to take a little walk up the beach,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”

  “I want to come too,” Lizzie said. She had on blue rubber thongs, her green one-piece bathing suit, and her leopard-skin shirt.

  “We’ll be back in ten minutes,” Rob said, and David thought he saw something tighten in his smile.

  “How about if you two set up camp?” Janet said. “Pick out a good spot and sort of get things organized.”

  “Yuck,” Lizzie said. She was working into tantrum position, shoulders hunched up and head bent as if she was about to batter down a door.

  “Give us just a little break, will you, Lizzie?” Rob said, and his smile went that much tighter.

  Lizzie paused in her tensed, trembling way, and David waited with mixed dread and glee for the first screech. Robwould see what she was really like. Instead of screaming, though, she held steady a second longer than usual, then began to deflate. Her shoulders inched back down.

  “Okay,” she said. “But come back in ten minutes.”

  David had never seen her headed off like that. Her tantrums were like thunderstorms—you could protect yourself from them but you couldn’t lessen their force. He would not have been much more surprised if Rob had commanded rain from the clear sky. He had to admit to a certain respect for anyone who could deal with Lizzie.

  “Right,” Rob said. “Ten minutes.”

  “Don’t go in the water before we get back, okay?” Janet said.

  “I’m going to,” Lizzie said, though DaVid knew she had no intention of going in any deeper than her knees, for fear of getting her hair wet.

  Janet and Rob walked off along the water’s edge, just shy of the point to which the waves washed, hesitated, and withdrew, leaving lines of dead brown foam and small living bubbles boiling up out of the sand. David watched people noticing Rob in his suit. A fleshy blond woman who sat hugging her big knees on a candy-striped towel stared after him, as did a skinny old man who jogged by, coming in David and Lizzie’s direction. When he passed David and Lizzie he smiled, showing uneven yellow teeth, and said, “You see something new every day.”

  David and Lizzie could not quite think of what to do with themselves. David spread out the towels in a spot he decided was too close to the water and moved them farther up. He brushed off the stray grains of sand and straightened the corners. Lizzie stepped out of her thongs and drew her initials in the wet sand with her toes. Janet and Rob grew smaller and smaller. Janet, who was closer to the water, walked slightly bent against the wind, the hem of the shirt flapping up to show how her turquoise swimsuit cut in twin diagonals across her bottom.

  In front of Lizzie a gull dipped down low over the water, skimming at an angle, its lower wing tracing the heaving surface. Lizzie had drawn her initials several times and was now working on her full name, longhand, in the big loopy lettering she’d invented for herself. As David glanced back and forth between Janet and Lizzie he was suddenly appalled by the ocean’s size. It had always seemed friendly to him, a broad wet playground, but now he saw how it pushed up onto the sand, taking a little more with each wave, eating already into the farthest of Lizzie’s initials. It could rear up at any moment, a foaming wall ten feet high, and crush them all against the cliff, hungrily sucking their bodies back out with it, leaving only smooth glossy sand behind. Down the beach, Rob and Janet stood facing each other. Though they were far away, David thought he saw Rob lean forward and kiss the air close to Janet’s mouth, and Janet brush the kiss away as if shooing a bee. Lizzie finished writing her name and walked a few paces into the water, letting it break in plumes over her shins. David had an urge to grab her and drag her back up onto the dry sand.

  Janet and Rob came back. When they got close enough to be heard Rob looked at his wrist and called, “Nine and a half minutes.”

  David nodded, with no idea of what to say. Lizzie trotted up from the water and said to Rob, “You look funny in that suit.”

  “I know I do,” he said. “I’m a funny kind of man.”

  “Ha ha,” Janet said.

  David wondered if his second lie about the boyfriend had been uncovered. He believed for an instant that what they would do was sit him down and tell him they’d compared notes and realized he was the source of all their troubles.

  “I wrote my name in the sand,” Lizzie said, in a wide-open little-girl voice David hadn’t heard from her since she was six or so.

  “Whoopee-do,” he said.

  “Looks nice,” Rob told her. “You do good work.”
>
  “My real name is Elizabeth,” she said. “Can you read it?”

  “Give us a break, huh Lizzie?” David said. “You sound like a total fool.”

  “Be quiet, you stupid pinhead,” she said, and David was gratified at least to have her returned to her normal, unpleasant self.

  “I’m going to go get the sand out of my shoes,” Rob said. “I’ll see you kids tonight.”

  “Tonight?” David asked.

  “He’s coming over for dinner,” Janet said. She spoke to a point in midair, to the left of David’s face, her eyes unfocused.

  “Yay,” Lizzie said.

  David was so surprised that, although a good line about Lizzie making up a fresh batch of toast came into his head, he didn’t use it.

  “So I’ll see you tonight,” Rob said.

  “See you tonight,” Lizzie said.

  “See you.” Rob reached for Janet’s shoulder and patted the air an inch above it, as if she wore an invisible shield. Then he started across the beach toward the trail.

  “Okay, everybody,” Janet said. “Sorry for the interruption. The day at the beach can now officially begin.”

  “Did you really ask him over for dinner?” David asked.

  “Yes,” Janet said casually. “Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon enough. I just couldn’t—well, I want to be fair to him.” She hugged her elbows and watched Rob, laboring up the trail.

  “You didn’t ask him to come to L. A.,” David said.

  “Well, maybe I did, in a way.”

  “Oh,” David said uncertainly.

  “Come on, let’s go for a swim. Come on, Lizzie.”

  Lizzie had been watching Rob’s progress along the cliff, hugging her elbows. “Okay,” she said, and didn’t move.

  They spent several hours at the beach, swimming and lying in the sun. Janet didn’t talk much. She would run out into thewater, swim until she looked no bigger than the bobbing gulls, and come back in again to lie heavily on the sand, her skin goose-pimply, a scrap of scalloped yellow kelp caught in her hair. David and Lizzie played haphazardly by themselves. The day would not settle into itself; would not descend from its feeling of suspension, as if the real day was still to begin. Lizzie paraded up and down along the wet sand, practicing different walks, and David gathered shells, gull feathers, pretty stones which, as they dried, turned to disappointing grays and browns, their intricate veinings erased. He didn’t see why she had asked him to dinner.