Golden States

  By one o’clock Janet suggested they had probably all had enough sun and ought to think about getting home. Then to head off Lizzie’s tantrum she agreed to a movie instead. They picked up their things, loaded themselves back into the car, and drove to Santa Monica in a logy, sun-dazzled silence.

  They found a matinee showing of a Clint Eastwood movie and sat together in the cool, stale darkness that smelled of mildew and old velvet. They were three of no more than a dozen people and it was exciting to be in a place so entirely forbidden—even if they weren’t cutting school, no decent person was supposed to be at the movies on a sunny afternoon. David checked out the other people in the theater and found them to be mostly ordinary old people who sat watching the screen without expression. Only one man, sitting two rows behind and several seats over, acted like he was seeing the movie, and he apparently saw a different movie from the one on the screen. During the tense parts, when Clint was fighting three men at once or dodging bullets on his motorcycle, the man giggled like it was a comedy. Once he said, “Death to the commie faggot,” just when Clint was in the worst trouble. David strained to look at him without being noticed. The man had a big shapeless body, and he seemed to be wearing three shirts. His head was too small for the baseball cap that rode down over his eyebrows. When David felt the man’s attentionsense his own, and thought that in another half-second the man’s shaded eyes would swing around and lock with his, he snapped his head back toward the screen so fast his neck popped.

  Janet slipped her arm over the back of his seat. He leaned in toward her, letting his shoulder brush her ribs. He forced himself not to look at her, for fear she’d take her arm away. On screen, Clint flew his motorcycle over mountainous terrain most men couldn’t have walked across. His girlfriend clung to his back, wide-eyed and mute, while he tricked the helicopter that was chasing them into a high tension wire, where it flowered into flame. David glanced back at the man, who was tittering, and glanced at Janet. The last of the explosion colored her face. Her skin paled and cooled as the helicopter dissolved into black twisted worms. She smiled at David and took her arm away. The man in the baseball cap said, “Better luck next time, buckaroos.”

  Mom told Janet there wasn’t anything in the kitchen but a few old bones and some hanks of hair.

  “I’ll go to the store after I’ve dropped you off,” Janet said. They had picked Mom up at work and were now driving through the grid of streets to the house. When they’d pulled into the district building’s parking lot Mom had been standing out front, waiting for them, holding her purse in front of her with both hands. They were late. Seeing her in her cocoa-colored suit, backed by the squat, square salmon-tan of the building she worked in, clutching her purse like it was all she owned, David had felt a shock of nonrecognition. She looked so old and abandoned. She might have been anyone.

  “What time is he coming?” she asked, sitting in the back seat with Lizzie, her purse fat on her lap.

  “I don’t know. After seven.” Janet drove loosely, with one hand, and the car drifted from one side of its lane to the other.

  “Well, I guess we can pull something together for him,” Mom said. “It won’t be anything fancy.”

  “Actually, I think dinner is the last thing he cares about,” Janet said.

  “Oh, I know that,” Mom said.

  Janet let them out in the driveway and went off to buy groceries. Mom hustled David and Lizzie inside. “If anybody from school drives by and sees you out here in swimsuits, they’ll get me for an accessory,” she said.

  “Don’t you want Rob to come over for dinner?” Lizzie asked.

  “I want your sister to be happy, is what I want,” Mom said. “Come on now, inside.”

  “But Rob is nice,” Lizzie protested as she was urged through the front door by the pressure of Mom’s fingertips on her thin shoulders.

  “Sure he’s nice,” Mom said. “Nice has nothing to do with it. I want you both to run upstairs and change into your real clothes right now. Macht schnell.” She slapped them both lightly on their rumps, and Lizzie hollered, “Ow,” as a general declaration of unhappiness.

  Up in his room, David changed into underpants and worked his legs halfway into his jeans before he lay down on his bed. Overhead the paper galaxy taped to the ceiling shone on unchanged. Dad had stood on the bed in his socks, right where David lay, to tape it up. He remembered dinners with Dad, who sat enormous in his rolled shirtsleeves, chewing. Dad chewed each mouthful with hungry distaste, as if everything served to him had tiny bones in it. Once Lizzie, who was hardly big enough then to reach the table but refused to sit in a highchair, spilled a glass of milk and Dad slapped her across the face with a hand big and flat as a board. Everybody sucked in a quiet breath. Lizzie, in the shaved second of rising shock and astonishment that would peak and then drop off into tears, glared at Dad with such piercing hatred that David started to cry at the same moment she did, from his own helplessness and from hisconviction that Dad’s only response to such a look would be murder. He’d howl the house down, he’d fall on them like God gone crazy. Instead he stuck his fork deep into his potato, while Mom gathered David and Lizzie and took them to finish their dinners in the kitchen.

  David pulled up his T-shirt to look at his narrow, prominent rib cage, stained pink by the sun. Sometimes he was amazed to find himself in such a small body. The single hair, which had grown with its own insane life, stood up from the hard circle of flesh that covered his heart. He pulled at it but found it as it always was, firmly planted, as if it had roots sunk deep inside. He would get bigger. He would grow more hairs. It was like a werewolf movie, this change happening all by itself. You could fight it until your brain burst but the monster took over anyway and suddenly there it was, right where it wanted to be, nestled in the warm soft heart of things.

  When he heard Janet come back, David finished dressing. He left his room and walked downstairs, past the blare of “Beat It” that came from behind Lizzie’s door. Janet’s and Mom’s voices came from the kitchen, hushed in a way that made him go quietly, not exactly planning to listen but uncertain of how to approach, afraid of snapping a delicate thread he imagined stretched across the kitchen door.

  As he drew closer he could hear Mom saying, “—handled it right the first time, is all.”

  David paused, not really to listen.

  “That’s the kind of thing it’s always easy for other people to say,” Janet said.

  “Just be careful. This is how it starts.”

  “Nothing is starting. I am having the man I lived with for three years over for dinner, after which he’ll sleep on the sofa. After which he’ll drive home.”

  A numbness sank to the bottom of David’s throat. No one had said anything about Rob sleeping over.

  “It just has a familiar ring to it, is all,” Mom said.

  “Well, it’s different this time. Do you want to know why?”

  “Yes. Tell me.”

  “Because I realized I’m not in love with Rob. I’m just not. At bottom it has nothing to do with my becoming a doctor or not becoming one. The main point is, when I got turned down by the med schools and we started talking about marriage and yes, by the way I do know about the connection between the two, anyway when we started talking wedding and maybe even children I looked over at him, I can remember the particular moment even, we were standing in the bathroom together, he’d just gotten out of the tub and I was brushing my teeth and he sort of brushed against me with his hip and I thought to myself, This is not the man. Automatically, like a button had been pushed. Does that make any sense?”

  “Well, I guess so,” Mom said.

  “It’s not that I’m holding out for somebody handsomer or more charming or anything. God knows, it’s more like the opposite. I’ve always been sort of astonished that he was interested in me at all, he could have gotten somebody so much— well, he just could have. He was so damn good he made me mad. So I punched him. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I d
on’t have the foggiest notion.”

  David’s heart rose. Janet didn’t love Rob; there was no danger. Rather than walk into the kitchen he tiptoed back upstairs, to feed on the fact that Rob had no claim here. He was not loved, he had no rights. As David passed through the curtain of Lizzie’s music he thought he would be more careful, starting now, to treat her more kindly, to work on becoming the sort of man who deserves to be loved, who doesn’t need to be driven out of the house.

  Rob arrived a little after seven, carrying daisies in a cone of green paper and wine in a pale green bottle. David greeted him at the door.

  “Hi, Rob,” he said. He liked Rob better now. Rob was changed; shrunken.

  “Hello, my man,” Rob said. “Look here, I brought flowers for the women and wine for you and me.”

  “Oh,” David said. Rob had shaved, and his shirt looked like it had been washed. In the cartoon version, Rob would have been a rabbit that slipped under a bear rug and crept along, scaring everybody, until the rug caught on a nail and the rabbit walked on, growling and snarling, with no idea he’d been exposed.

  Lizzie called from upstairs, “Is that Rob?”

  “Hello, Lizzie,” Rob called.

  They both heard her footsteps pounding down the hall from the bathroom to her own room.

  “She’s been trying to make herself beautiful for an hour,” David said. “She put on Mom’s lipstick and Mom made her take it off and then she put it back on again. They had a big fight.”

  “I happen to like my women natural anyway,” Rob said. “How about if I drop these things in the kitchen?” He gestured with the flowers and the wine, a shrugging motion, like an international sign of harmless intentions.

  “Come on,” David said, and Rob followed him obediently to the kitchen.

  Mom and Janet were there, working on the dinner. Mom stood at the oven with a huge flowered mitt over her hand, and Janet was mixing something with a whisk in one of the blue bowls.

  “Here he is,” David said, and thought it a peculiar statement.

  “Evening, ladies,” Rob said.

  Janet and Mom seemed connected, like a single unit, although they were standing at opposite ends of the room. David would not have been surprised to hear them speak in unison.

  Janet said, “Hi,” and Mom said, “Evening, Rob,” a momentlater. Mom had on maroon pants and a blouse with ruffles which looked too big for her; Janet wore a flimsy pink shirt with no sleeves and a pair of tan pants tied high up on her waist with a thin cloth belt. She put the whisk down and accepted the wine and flowers out of Rob’s hands. She said, “Thank you, these are nice,” in an uninflected way, as if they were no more than expected. For a dizzying moment, David felt more connected to Rob than he did to Janet or Mom.

  “Smells great in here,” Rob said. He inhaled extravagantly to show it.

  “Just baked pork chops,” Mom said. “No big deal.” She finished the adjustments she’d been making in the pan and closed the oven door with the firm, commanding touch she had for familiar objects.

  “It’s a big enough deal to a starving man,” Rob said.

  Janet checked the cupboards for a vase to put the daisies in. She found one, an old studded white vase on a single heavy foot, and filled it at the sink. Watching her do that, so calm and efficient, a part of David met up with a part of Rob and knew how a simple thing, a girl knowing where the vases are kept, could make you feel awkward and in the wrong.

  “What did you do with yourself all day?” Janet asked.

  “I bought a disposable razor and shaved in a Texaco station,” he said. “And I went to a Laundromat and washed my shirt. You have to picture me sitting there, two in the afternoon, in just pants and a jacket. If you start seeing men go around wearing suit jackets with no shirt underneath, it was me that started the trend.”

  Mom and Janet laughed appreciatively, and Rob offered the big smile that showed his gums.

  “Would you like a drink?” Mom asked. “I don’t know exactly what there is. I keep a little brandy in, and after that there’s just whatever anyone’s left here over the years.”

  “I drink anything,” Rob said.

  Janet, having arranged the daisies in the vase, went to the farthest cabinet, where the liquor was kept. ‘Brandy, creme de menthe,” she announced. “Sweet sherry, something in a bottle shaped like a fish, some Drambuie, Jesus, Mother, I think I remember this bottle from when I was a kid, and look here, a bottle of Old Bushmill’s.”

  “The Bushmill’s, please,” Rob grinned, in such an unsurprised way that David wondered whether something was going on. He checked the liquor every now and then, and didn’t remember seeing anything called Old Bushmill’s. The bottle Janet brought out looked like it was brand new.

  “Can I do anything to help?” Rob asked.

  “You can stay out of the way,” Mom told him.

  Janet gave him a glass full of amber-colored liquor and ice, which he accepted with a knowing smile. Janet didn’t smile. She went back to her bowl and whisk.

  “To the whole Stark family,” Rob said, raising his glass. “Good people.”

  A silence passed. Rob looked at the cartoon on the refrigerator and chuckled, as if he’d never seen it before. When Lizzie came in all four people turned to her gratefully.

  “Here she is,” Rob said.

  Lizzie had settled finally on her old best dress, which was slightly too small for her. The sleeves bunched in tight sausagy gatherings at her armpits. David could imagine the agony of indecision she’d gone through. She had a new dress that fit her better but this older one, purple flecked with little blue specks like confetti, she considered a magic dress, the single most perfect thing she had ever owned. She’d decided to chance it. All around her lips the skin looked smudged and bruised, where she had put Mom’s lipstick on one more time and then, thinking better of it, rubbed it off with a Kleenex.

  Lizzie didn’t speak to Rob. Instead she walked over towhere Janet was working and said, “What’s that you’re making?”

  “Just salad dressing, hon,” Janet told her.

  Lizzie watched a moment and said, “You shouldn’t put so much salt in it.”

  Janet tapped the whisk on the rim of the bowl, three measured beats. “Tell you what, sweetie,” she said. “You finish up the dressing, in your own special way, and I’ll entertain our guest. How would that be?” She handed the whisk to Lizzie.

  “I don’t want to,” Lizzie said.

  “Come on. You make it so much better than I do.” She pressed the whisk into Lizzie’s hand. Lizzie, trapped, said, “Well okay,” and set about pretending that she knew how to make salad dressing.

  Janet came over to where Rob and David stood, brushing her hands against her thighs. “Come on into the parlor, men,” she said. “I’ve just been relieved of duty.”

  The three of them went into the living room, Janet in the lead and Rob and David following. Men. David tried the word out in his mind. Come on, men. He and Rob.

  Janet passed up the sofa and sat in the orange chair, where no one could sit beside her. The chair had been there nearly as long as David could remember—it dated back to the time when all the furniture in the house looked like that, its arms and legs made of coffee-colored wood and its joints held together by six-sided black nailheads big as quarters. After Dad left, Mom had started buying new furniture, but she regretted her choices once they’d been made and for years now the house had stood frozen, half one style and half another. The sofa was a pair of slender gray burlap pads that floated on four spindle legs. Mom said one day when her ship came in she was going to throw it all out and start over from scratch.

  Rob sat on the sofa and David did too. “So here I am, bouquet and everything, just like a suitor,” Rob said.

  Janet sat holding the armrests of the chair with both hands, and she kept her feet on the floor. “A suitor is the last thing I want,” she said.

  “You hear that from a lot of women these days,” Rob said. “How’s your
other boyfriend?”

  David’s blood went cold. A high, thin ringing seeped into his ears.

  Janet paused, smiled, and said, “Fine. All my other boyfriends are just fine, thank you.”

  “Good,” Rob said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “How are your other girlfriends?” Janet asked him. “How’s the stripper’s dissertation coming along?”

  “Getting tired of her,” Rob said, sipping his drink. “I’m thinking of getting rid of her.”

  None of this made any sense. Was it possible Janet actually had another boyfriend? Had David stumbled blindly onto the truth?

  “Don’t get rid of her,” Janet said. “You may need her.”

  “I don’t think I will. I know exactly what I need/’

  “I think maybe you just feel guilty,” she said.

  “What have I got to feel guilty about?”

  “There’s the telling statement, right there.” Janet stood up, as she had been waiting to do. “Excuse me,” she said in a stage whisper. “I’m going to go check on the state of the salad dressing.”

  “Be kind,” Rob whispered back. Although David believed Lizzie should be called on her tricks, he didn’t like the idea that Rob and Janet shared a secret image of her that differed from her own. Janet walked out of the room and left David and Rob sitting together on the sofa.

  Rob stretched his long arm out along the backrest. His fingers brushed the knobby bone of David’s nearer shoulder, and David automatically pulled his shoulder away.

  “Do I make you nervous, my man?” Rob asked.

  “No,” David told him.

  “Good. I’m your friend, I shouldn’t make you nervous. Tell me, David. Did you make that up about Janet having a boyfriend?”