Golden States

  There were pictures. Ray with his big broad face and big body upside down, doing a cartwheel at the beach; Mom in a black bathing suit, with curly gray hair and black lips. David’s favorite picture was the one of Mom, Ray, and Janet taken when Janet was three years old. This one was in color. They were standing in front of the toothy grille of their car, an old Chevy Ray had named the Flying Dutchman, and all three of them wore baseball caps. They had bought a miniature cap for Janet. Mom stood with her arms folded over her chest and one hip cocked, playing tough, and Ray held Janet encircled in one giant arm. You could tell what they’d meant to do—they were all supposed to look mean, like ballplayers. Janet had giggled, though, and Ray, too, had just started busting up when the shutter clicked. Mom’s dark mouth strained to hold in a laugh that must have escaped a moment later, twenty years ago. David studied and studied the picture, taking in its minutest detail, as if it were a relic of a lost civilization.

  He went to the window to watch Janet swim.

  “Don’t you have homework?” Mom said. “What about the epic map of California?”

  “I’ll do it in a minute,” he said. Out in the pool, Janet’s arms sliced the water.

  “I’ll watch Janet,” Mom said.

  “Well, we both can,” he told her.

  Rob called during dinner. Though David tried to answer it, Janet got there first.

  “Hello?” she said. David stood close by her in the kitchen, making no pretense of not listening. Janet rolled her eyes for him, to indicate exhausted patience with the caller.

  “What do you mean, ‘back?’ ” she said. “I’ve been here all day.”

  David went to the refrigerator and took the peach-shaped magnet into his hand. He ran his thumbnail thoughtfully along the cleft. A peach was like an ass.

  “No,” Janet said. “Who would I go with?

  “What?”

  She listened, and laughed. David inched into the cool, humming vicinity of the refrigerator. Janet was looking straight at him now, her head level and her dark brows low over her eyes.

  “Well, I don’t know where anybody would get an idea like that,” she said, “but it’s not true. Of course it isn’t.”

  David backed right up to the refrigerator, passing the peach from hand to hand. His elbows pressed against the slick, perfect surface of the door.

  “No,” Janet said. “What do you think, I’ve got a waiting list? No. In the pool, if you really want to know. Swimming about a thousand laps, so I’d be tired enough to sleep.” Her face had darkened, and a pair of red bruised-looking patches appeared on her cheeks. She twisted the telephone cord around her fingers.

  “No, I don’t think you can,” she said, looking piercingly at

  David. “Because I don’t want you menacing my family, is why. My word should be good enough.”

  She listened, wrapping the cord around and around her fingers. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said finally. “No, maybe I’m glad to hear it. It makes things clearer.

  “I think it’s time for this to stop now. Really. Good night.

  “You only make it worse, Rob. What’s the point?

  “I can’t. No, honey, I do. But I don’t. Oh shit. Good night.”

  She pushed the cradle down and stood another moment with the dead receiver still at her ear. “You made up another story, huh?” she said to David.

  He nodded.

  She replaced the receiver and leaned against the counter, holding one elbow with her opposite hand. She regarded him in the solemn, black-eyed way she used when she was mad or puzzled—her chin dipped down, her mouth tense at the corners with an edgy tightness that could tip over into laughter.

  “So what’s my new boyfriend like?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What made you think of a marine, is what I’d like to know.”

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly.

  “A marine who’s studying medicine.” She shook her head. “You’re really something, you know?”

  “I know.”

  They eyed one another, and David, in a fit of nervousness, held up the little peach for her to see. “Cyanide,” he said. He put it in his mouth and pretended to swallow.

  Her lips trembled, held firm a moment; then she laughed. Success. David crossed his eyes, clutched at his heart and dropped to the linoleum.

  “Be careful,” Janet said, coming to him. “You’ll really swallow that thing.”

  David stayed on the floor, with his eyes squeezed shut and the tip of his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. The magnetic disk on the peach bled an iron taste into his mouth. The floor smelled of ammonia and, distantly, of dust. Janet squatted beside him. She brought her own smells, chlorine and musky perfume.

  “You shouldn’t have lied,” she said. “It isn’t fair to him.”

  David opened his eyes. Why was she worried about him? He took the peach out of his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said, a little flatly.

  She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Next time,” she said, “think of something better for me than a marine. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Is anybody in there coming back to dinner?” Mom called from the dining room.

  “Tell her to send it to the starving Armenians,” David whispered.

  “Nope. Come on now, up.” She took his hand and together they got to their feet. David snapped the wet peach back into place on the refrigerator.

  “Coming,” she called.

  The telephone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” David said.

  “No,” Janet told him. “I’m sure it’s for me. You go on out and finish your dinner.” She took him by the shoulders and propelled him, gently, to the door. When he balked at the threshold, she smacked his rump.

  “Go,” she said. “I’m not fooling.”

  He passed unwillingly through the swinging doors into the dining room, where Mom and Lizzie sat at the table. “It’s about time,” Lizzie said.

  “Shut up,” he told her, and hung around the doorway, listening. Mom and Lizzie listened too.

  “I knew it’d be you,” Janet said in the kitchen. “Listen, you’re going to have to ... What? Oh Rob, don’t cry. No. Come on, honey. Stop. Really. No, there’s no one. Really.”

  Mom pulled her attention back to the table with a visibleshift of her eyes. They were vague and unfocused, then they turned to needles.

  “You going to eat, or what?” she said to David. “Come on, sit down right now.”

  David sat, his ears straining after Janet’s voice.

  “I don’t know what keeps you alive,” Mom said. “It must be sheer force of will, I can promise you it’s not vitamins. I don’t know how you’re going to find the strength to go out there and support me in my old age if you don’t permit an occasional vegetable into your bloodstream. It’s nothing permanent, remember. They’re just passing through—”

  She went on, in a loud voice, despite the fact that David willed her so hard to be quiet he could feel the heat radiating from his face. Her talk drowned out Janet’s voice and she didn’t stop until Janet came back into the room, smiling, her eyes damp and pink.

  “Pardon me, everybody,” she said, and swiped at her nose with her index finger.

  “It’s okay,” David told her.

  “No, it’s not okay,” Janet said. “I don’t want to keep on disrupting everybody like this.”

  “Yes, we’re getting very disrupted,” Lizzie said.

  “You don’t even know what disrupted means,” David said.

  “Yes I do.”

  He opened his mouth to ask her for the definition, and stopped. She might actually know it; she knew a lot of words you wouldn’t expect her to. Instead, he said, “You’re going to have to go to Spokane by yourself this summer, because I’m not going.”

  “Yes you are.” Her eyes clicked over to Mom. “He’s going, isn’t he?” she said.

  “I think he is,” Mom said. “I think you both are. M
atter of fact, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “If David doesn’t go, I don’t have to go either,” Lizzie said.

  “I thought you liked going to see your father,” Mom said.

  A moment of stiff, social silence followed.

  “Well, we do,” David said.

  “/ don’t,” Lizzie said. “We never did.”

  “Shut up, Lizzie,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” “Well, kids, you have to go to your father’s,” Mom said. “He’d be so hurt if you didn’t.”

  “If you don’t go,” David said to Lizzie, “he’ll come down and get you.”

  Her eyes widened, and her lower lip tucked itself in as automatically as a flower closing. She looked at her plate. “I’m not going to eat any of this succotash,” she said.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” Mom said. “Is it really that awful, going up to your father’s?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Lizzie?”

  Lizzie shook her head. “I hate succotash,” she said. “Why do we always have to have it?”

  “We haven’t had it since Valentine’s Day,” Mom said. “Listen, you just have to go to your father’s. It’s not me saying so, it’s the court.”

  “We know,” David said.

  “We know,” Lizzie added softly.

  “Well,” Mom said, and said nothing further. After a while, she asked Janet, “Are you all right over there?”

  Janet’s eyes had dried and taken on a hard sparkle. “Oh sure,” she said. “Just going through a little adjustment.”

  After dinner was finished and the dishes put away, David sat in his room working on his map of California. He heard Janet go into her room. A few minutes later Mom came upstairs and tapped on Janet’s door in her careful, determined way, as though she were breaking open the shell of a soft-boiled egg. David heard Janet’s voice and then Mom’s, clearer, saying, “Can I come in for a minute?” The door opened and closed. Mom’s voice, like Janet’s, was reduced to wordless sound; an oboe. Janet’s was a clarinet. The two of them talked on, and though David tried to hear them through the wall the words couldn’t be fathomed. He listened to the murmur of their voices, and glued foxtails and cotton balls onto the places where the state was most fruitful.

  Dad had taken up shooting when he lost his job. David remembered going with him once to a practice range, where he shot at targets tacked to bales of hay. A red ring inside a blue one, with a black circle the size of a heart at center. David had been only five or six, and Dad wouldn’t let him shoot. He remembered Dad’s hands on the shotgun—long brown fingers that might have been carved from a lighter, finer-grained wood than that of the gun. Although he saw Dad every summer, his clearest recollection was six years old or more. Dad stood with his feet wide apart, aiming the long gun, his profile intent. Sunlight picked out each red hair on his head, and a white aura outlined his hooked nose and heavy, square chin. David had never seen him so still before. For a long moment he was able to look at Dad’s face as intently as he examined his own body. Dad’s eyebrow, darker red than his hair, the color of an Irish setter’s coat, had a single thread of white in it which David had never seen. A giddiness had risen from his belly to his head, the same tingling weightlessness he felt going over the top of a ferris wheel. He loved Dad. The gun cracked, a sharp clean sound. After he was through, Dad gave David the target for a souvenir. The target had five ragged holes shot through its small black center. It was still taped up on David’s wall, by the bed, five dots of white plaster shining through the black like stars.

  Janet went swimming again that night, as he’d thought she would. He waited up for her, watching, after Mom and Lizzie had gone to bed. He stayed on guard and did not beat off.

  This time Janet wore her bathing suit, which looked gray in the darkness, and carried a towel draped over her shoulders like an athlete in a locker room. When she dove, the splash she made lingered surface. David could see the suggestion of her shape, blue-white, as she swam a lap underwater. Before she surfaced, he was downstairs. As he passed through the kitchen, his belly went queasy with anticipation. The pilot lights on the rangetop glowed blue, like the light on television, and for a moment in passing them he was a photograph of himself, moving through a picture of his kitchen. He stepped outside into the smell of the damp grass and the disturbed water, and the sound of Janet’s breathing.

  He stood for a while beside the pool, waiting for her to see him, but she swam with her head down, grinding out the laps. Finally, David peeled off his jeans and stepped cautiously into the water at the shallow end, wearing only his shorts and a T-shirt. He had planned on Janet’s asking him in; he had even put on clean underwear. The water was warm, warmer than the air. Rising to David’s thighs, it felt languid and heavy. He sank to his shoulders, keeping his head above water, since he thought he looked stupid with his hair plastered down. Janet kept on swimming, still unaware of him. He stood crouched at the shallow end with the water lapping around his neck, unsure about how to approach without scaring her. The moon of the streetlight shimmied on the unsteady water, and David could feel the rhythm of Janet’s swimming. The water was alive with her. He worked himself closer, hoping she would notice him. As she passed he felt the wake of her legs. The effervescence they left behind clung to his own legs, tiny bubbles that fizzed like tadpoles against his skin. His cock got hard, with its perverse independence, and though he willed it to go limp again it wouldn’t obey. He edged a bit closer to Janet and as she pushed off the shallow end her arm slid against his belly. Shecame up sputtering, the air whistling out of her. “It’s okay,” David said in a loud whisper. “It’s only me.”

  Janet was a moment in orienting herself. He could see the dark oval of her open mouth. “Only me,” he said again in a soft voice. “Everything’s okay, it’s only me.”

  “Shit, you scared me,” she said breathlessly. “I just thought —God, I don’t know what I thought. All my worst fears seemed to have come true.”

  “I’m sorry. I was trying not to scare you.” He felt ridiculous, just his head bobbing before her like a talking beach ball.

  “It’s okay. I’m glad you’re not a shark.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “So I decided to go swimming with you.”

  “Well, good.” She stroked to the side, her arms and legs rippled by the water, her belly slightly luminous below the bra of her bikini. David couldn’t think of just what to do. He feared that his stiff penis might work its way out of his underpants and float before him. With a mournful thought of his hair he took a breath, ducked underneath, and swam to the deep end.

  The bottom of the pool was netted with undulating shadows, a granular blue darkness. Swimming through it was like a dream of flight. When he reached the far end he surfaced, took a breath, and went back under. Janet was swimming toward him, also under water, her hair billowing, black, framing the pale blue of her face. Bubbles bloomed from her and floated lazily to the surface. David swam straight at her and she jack-knifed to pass under him, a movement slick as a dolphin’s. He felt her slipstream all along his body as she swam beneath. They came up at opposite ends of the pool, then dove and crossed over again, with David brushing the bottom and Janet passing above. As he went under he blew out of his nose and mouth, to tickle her. His head felt light and prickly, and when he shut his eyes a green phosphorescence burst under the lids. He moved carefully, to keep himself tucked into his underpants.

  When he came up he found Janet floating on her back, her hair adrift around her. He floated too, close by her, and found that with his ears under water he could hear the swishing of her arms as she gently paddled to keep herself afloat. Hearing only the steady suck of the water, he watched the night sky. The stars stood out in piercing relief, and for the first time it occurred to him that they were actually hanging in space. He thought he could see the band of the Milky Way, a soaring ghostly belt, and the faint sounds of the w
ater seemed to be the sounds of space as well. He felt like he could rise into space the way he’d rise through water, with a slow patient buoyancy. For a moment it was clear to him that every single thing, every person and animal on earth and every alien being on the millions of planets within his sight, all moved to the rhythmic swooshing of the same water. He was connected to them. He seemed to lift up out of his body and suddenly the stars were there, right before his eyes, nothing like the twinkling specks he’d grown up with but blazing, breathing, unnamable, alive. In a panic he blew out his air and sank. The water closed up over his face and he let himself drop into the deepening blue. He watched the bubbles of his own expelled oxygen and saw the stars scattered on the water’s surface.

  When he came up again Janet was pulling herself out of the pool. She sat perched on the edge of the coping with her legs dangling and said, “Think it’s about time to go back inside?”

  David nodded, and swam to the side. He wondered if she had felt the melting upward, too. Maybe it was an ordinary experience, so common that no one ever mentioned it. He wanted to ask her, but couldn’t couch it in words. He had no idea of what to call it. He docked himself next to her, propping his elbows on the coping beside her legs. Beads of water shone dully on her stomach and shoulders.

  “This was good,” she said. “It’s good to have another body out here with me.”

  David thought she might have felt the nameless thing, andwas telling him indirectly. “Yes,” he said. “It was really, um, great. ”

  “I’ve got a towel here,” she said. “Come on out, I’ll let you have it first.”

  “No thanks,” he said, reluctant to return to the open air in his small, odd body. “I think I’m going to stay in a little longer.” Janet looked up at the sky, kicking her legs idly in the water, setting up a suction David felt on his hips and thighs. “Pretty night,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, and then he said, “Yes,” again, with greater force.