A Regular Guy

“Are you getting married?” Jane asked, looking up.

  Olivia straightened in her chair and sat with perfect posture. Karen sank closer to the table and leaned over, on her arms. “Does he say anything to you?” she whispered.

  Jane heard Olivia kick Karen under the table.

  “I don’t know anything,” Jane said. “Nobody tells me.”

  A frantic conversation went on between the two women’s eyes.

  “No, we’re not getting married now,” Olivia said, in a low voice, attempting authority.

  Karen’s face loomed towards the table. Scolded, she tucked her bottom lip under her overlapping teeth.

  “But I had to tell him I’m not going to just stay in a hotel while he goes to a party. He can go without me. We’ll take a trip together some other time.” A few minutes later, Olivia excused herself and went to the bathroom, after a warning look at Karen.

  “Do you like living near your father?” she asked Jane.

  “I guess. I don’t see him that much.”

  “Travels a lot, huh?” Karen looked over her shoulder to see that the coast was clear. “She wants to marry him, and sometimes he’s good. Then he pulls a stunt like this.”

  Jane felt like telling all the things he’d done to them too, but Olivia made her cautious. “I know,” was all she said.

  Then Olivia slid back over the floor, fingertips in her jeans pockets. “Karen, you know his mom’s experiencing some pain, and he wants to hire someone to give massage twice or three times a week.”

  “I could do that.” She nodded solemnly.

  That night, Owens took Olivia and Jane to some people’s house for dinner, but they arrived an hour late. Everyone seemed to have been waiting, as if it were a surprise party, but they were all pretending not to. The hostess brought out fresh trays of untouched appetizers. Owens, for whom everything special was saved and around whom all this swirled, alone noticed nothing. Theo, the host, worked for Owens and knew about his eating, so his wife served a mostly vegetarian meal. Two little girls were led down from upstairs in their nightgowns, rubbing their eyes.

  Owens walked out onto the backyard deck, his head up, sniffing. “Jasmine,” he said, lifting the flower to show Jane. Theo stood in the corner, grilling salmon steaks.

  They ate sitting on the carpeted floor. Olivia absentmindedly French-braided her own hair. She braided beautifully.

  On the way home, Owens concluded, “Well, that was nice.”

  Olivia sat in the front seat, upright, not saying anything.

  “So you didn’t have a good time.”

  They rode home the rest of the way in silence, Owens driving grimly, carefully. They were long past the time of sharing mutual impressions, discovering, with pleasure, similar tastes and opinions.

  “How much do you think salmon steaks cost?” he finally asked.

  “I don’t know.” Olivia didn’t eat fish. “A lot, I think.”

  “Well, figure in an average restaurant they’re about eleven dollars, ten at the least? So wholesale must be about half, so what you pay in the grocery store’d be six, six-fifty a steak.” He calculated the cost of the rest of the meal and determined that it must have been a strain. Theo’s wife didn’t work. “A guy like that, works as hard as he does, he ought to be able to serve salmon steaks if he wants to serve salmon steaks.” Owens decided to give the guys a raise, even before Exodus made them rich.

  Jane heard her mother yelling at Eli when she touched the door—it was a continuous sound, like a shell she wanted to set down and run away from, so she walked over to the cottage. Julie was on the telephone and motioned her in, and Jane looked around until she discovered a shelf of children’s toys in the bedroom, a teddy bear and a stuffed goat. Jane thought they were probably from when Julie was little. She was excited at first, but it was all really too simple for her, the books just pictures, and she felt overgrown. Sometimes she wished she were younger.

  “You’ve discovered my secret stash.” Julie had a soft, pealing laugh. “I’ve started collecting.”

  Oh, I guess she really wants a kid. That had never occurred to Jane before. Her mom hadn’t meant to get pregnant; and if it had been up to Owens, they wouldn’t have kept her.

  So this was how it began, what so many people had and she always wanted: before you are born, from the beginning and years earlier, you were already wanted. Jane thought of her mom having a kid and not going to college. She wouldn’t want to do that. Sometimes when Jane started thinking like this, it got worse and worse and she had to bite her finger hard to stop.

  Julie stirred water into a gingerbread mix while Jane helped cut stars out of gold foil to fold into Christmas tree ornaments. Julie pleated the centers.

  “You should be the artist,” Jane said, “and my mom should be the lawyer.”

  Julie told her she’d wanted to be a fashion designer in college but that she liked her job for now.

  It was the way she was with time, Jane decided. She saw an order to it. The way God in the Bible divided life into days and nights at the beginning of the world, Julie saw shapes in weeks and months and seasons. Now she was a young woman, with her dating and parties. She’d already made a home of her cottage and was starting to collect toys. Pretty soon it was going to be time to get married and have a family, and Jane didn’t doubt that she would. Later, it would be time for something else; Jane didn’t even know what came after. Time didn’t move that way for Jane and her mom. They were a jumbled mess. Jane had never had a steady bedtime. They both stumbled out in the morning, stunned and wet in the new light. When they ate a treat in the middle of the day or charged things they couldn’t afford, her mother would say, “It’s overdue for us. Remember what that palm reader told me? It’s long overdue.”

  “Ready,” Julie called from the stove, holding up a toothpick. “Do you want whipped cream?”

  “Oh, yes, please,” Jane said, sitting down as Julie sprayed on cream from a can.

  Jane and her mother had good in their life too, though. They hardly ever ate things bad for you, but when they did, they whipped cream from scratch and flecked in vanilla bean. Mary could make time out of nothing at all; she could break open an hour when Jane felt bad enough, and they’d have a whole afternoon, eating in beautiful places, with a new ornament in Jane’s hair. From a day like that, Jane still owned a long green sparkly glove. The time they made ice cream, with the teachers’ crank machine, her mom had jogged to the store so they could have raw pecans on their hot fudge sundaes.

  Julie lit one candle, and the light caught in the folds of the gold stars. “Jane, your dad asked me to have dinner. What would your mom think about that?”

  “I don’t think she’d like it.” Julie had always been the one coaxing them out of his realm, making them see life in all the little houses. That she wanted in now made Jane dizzy to think of. So Owens could bend her too.

  “Well, that’s fair. I was thinking of asking him to the party. But I won’t, then.”

  “I wish he could come to your party. Why can’t they all just get along?” Jane said, thinking not only of Owens and her mom but of all the people she’d already left in her life. They hadn’t even heard from Bixter since her operation. Jane had friends scattered all over the northern coast. “I wish we could all be in one room together for a holiday.”

  “That’s called your wedding,” Julie said. It was not Jane’s energy or even her difference that attracted attention, she decided that night. Instead her quality of beseechment was so imperative that everywhere she and her mother lived, a small circle of people formed around them, each one believing it was her or his responsibility to help this one child on her way. “Nickel for your thoughts,” Julie added.

  “Oh, I was just thinking I wish I knew what my mother wants. I mean, now she’s trying to be an artist, but sometimes she’s different. I don’t know what would be better.”

  “Well, maybe she wants to get married. I think that’s what I want.”

  Jane said no and th
en stopped, hitting a wall. That was it. Mary wanted to be a wife. But whose? Owens’? She felt that idea dissolve like a sweet but not real.

  Then they heard the bleat of a smoke alarm, and Jane knew it was theirs, hers. She ran across with her hands in her pockets, while Julie watched from the door. A fine soot of ash covered everything inside the bungalow, even Jane’s stack of new paper, like a growth of hair. They’d left the kettle on for tea.

  Jane flicked the light and saw the pile of unfolded laundry, the charred flaking kettle. They were arguing about who forgot.

  “Why aren’t you ever done?” Jane screamed, letting the back door bang, and she heard them fighting still.

  Mary and Eli cleaned the rest of the night, and Jane begged her mother to stop. An hour later, Jane heard noises and got up.

  Mary was leaning on the end of the broom. “Right now, there are so many things I can’t do. But this I can, okay?”

  Jane put her sour clothes back on then and began to help.

  And then, in the middle of the night, Eli discovered the easy way was just to blow. The ash scattered like dandelion seed.

  Julie kept on with the pumpkin farmer. “He’s just too good to let get away,” she explained. She told Jane he was a wonderful dancer and somebody she could always trust, but Jane overheard her saying something to Mary about monkeys scratching each other’s skulls.

  One day, Olivia’s cousin Huck called Mary and asked if she’d like to go hiking, and for once Mary decided to try it. Julie and Peter went too, so it was a double date, but Mary wasn’t sure it was really a date or just friendship.

  It was after ten o’clock when Jane heard her mother’s key rattle the lock. “So how was it?”

  Her mother stood in the kitchen, making hot water and lemon. “You want some? You should be asleep,” she said, calm. “Well, he’s a really nice person. We had a good time.”

  “Were there sparks?”

  “I don’t know. Not really, not like with Eli. But we’ll see. I hardly know him. And I may never feel what I felt for Owens. I’m beginning to think that’s really rare.”

  Peter Bigelow and Huck wanted to take Mary and Julie to Napa for the weekend.

  “I’ll go if you will,” Julie said.

  The Spanish Influence

  When Owens was invited to speak at a convention of educators, he took Jane along so they could visit the Mission San Juan Capistrano.

  Owens had always admired the Spanish influence in California. He’d grown up around a thousand Spanish names without ever learning the language, yet was not immune to its music. He made a point of seeing all the missions, and Capistrano would complete this ambition. He wandered through it for an hour, admiring the calm austerity that suggested a remote permanence. The day was cold, with a fine rain, and nothing inside the building suggested that the life lived there had ever been opulent or plush. Furniture was rare and substantial, primarily oak: desks Owens could imagine writing on, tables he would want to eat on, hard beds.

  “It’s like your house,” Jane said. “That’s why you like it.”

  “Yeah, it kinda is. But simpler.” Jane understood that simpler meant better.

  Evidently, in the damp chapel, Indians had sung Gregorian chants. Owens loved these chants and collected their recordings. He clamped his earphones over Jane’s head and played one of them on his Discman. It sounded rainy, like a huge, cold place.

  All around the mission, as far as they could see, orchards swayed in the wind. The padres had grown oranges, lemons and olives.

  “I wonder what California would be like if it had just been the Spaniards and then the Asians. If the—what did they call them?—the Okies and Pikers and Hoosiers never came.” They were standing in the vineyard, under climbing roses.

  “Course, that would leave you out,” Jane reminded him.

  “And you,” he added.

  But the next day, despite his attraction to the Spanish tradition, he had to say in his speech to nine hundred California teachers that he opposed bilingual education; to him this was no contradiction. He wanted every Californian child to speak English. “Why?” he asked rhetorically. “Because it’s the language used in this country.” His good coat collar brushed the bottom of his chin, and his hair whipped back from his forehead in the high wind.

  “Your father looks dashing,” Kathleen whispered.

  “Because all over the world, it’s the language that’s the standard human tongue. If you’re a biologist in Sweden, you write your scientific papers in English. If you’re a computer scientist in Italy, you program in English. If you’re a Russian doctor, chances are you already know English. And if you don’t know it yet, you’re learning.”

  “Why not both?” someone shouted from the audience.

  “Because a lot of studies show that when you try to do that, it’s the English that suffers. A lot of these kids are hearing Spanish at home. School’s their only chance to learn to read and write in the language that’ll help them succeed.”

  “Aren’t the studies biased?” came a grumble from the side.

  Owens stood at a podium in a decrepit football field, half a mile from the convention center, the teachers sitting on the edges of damp, peeling bleachers. He’d begun in the assigned auditorium, then persuaded the teachers to follow him outside. They’d murmured as they’d come into the billowing, watery, blue-and-white day, but most of them felt glad to be outside. Teachers are used to changing their day for weather.

  “Even without any studies—let’s say they don’t exist—it makes common sense that it’s harder to do two things well than it is to do just one. And here in California, in our public schools, we’re not even doing one thing well yet!”

  A young woman stepped up to the microphone. She had a wide face, dark skin and a particularly upright carriage. “Don’t you think we’re in danger of losing an entire culture if the language that contains it falls by the way?” She had her hands in the pockets of a green parka. I want one like that, Jane thought, with the strings.

  Kathleen scribbled quickly on a note card and handed it to him. He gave it back, mumbling, “I know how to talk without subtitles.” And then he spoke slowly, with care. “I think the best parts of a culture naturally last. For example, my parents come from the Midwest, where they eat a lot of pork. But when I became old enough to decide, I started eating rice and beans, which is not a part of what you would call my culture. I adopted it not because it’s from this culture or that culture but because it’s good.

  “So I don’t think we have to worry about preserving every little thing from each culture. It’s like when your great-grandmother dies. Do you keep every button and figurine from her attic, or do you remember what you learned from her and make it part of yourself? The good things will stay because people want them.

  “If your kid learns English, chances are he’ll do well in school. If he does that, he’s pretty sure of going to college or getting a good job. And don’t you think, at that point, if he wants to learn the language of his grandparents, he can do that pretty easily?”

  Tentative applause rose from spots in the audience, then sputtered out.

  The young woman in the parka had not left the microphone. “What language did your grandparents speak, and did you learn it in college?”

  “Well, that’s kind of a hard question,” Owens said, walking out in front of the podium, arms crossed over his chest, “because I dropped out of college after one semester and also because my mother died when I was born and I didn’t know her parents. All I know about what they spoke is that one of them was Middle Eastern. And no, I didn’t learn that language. And the one grandparent I knew didn’t influence me much.”

  “But doesn’t that prove my point?” the young woman asked. “Doesn’t that make a case for the integrity of an indigenous culture?”

  “Absolutely the opposite!” he exploded, head shaking. He addressed the young woman directly now, his arms moving. This was easy for him, Jane realized. In front of an
audience of nine hundred, what her father was doing was flirting. “She didn’t influence me because I didn’t really care for her. People being related biologically is irrelevant. What matters is if you like ’em. Or even more important, if you respect them.”

  Kathleen fiddled with the recording equipment, gazing at the woman in the parka.

  “What languages did you learn besides English?”

  Jane felt pierced to the ground where she stood. She could tell it was going to sound bad here if he said just English. She wanted to give him her Spanish. She’d been teaching herself since she met the man from the post office picture, delivering Alta’s milk. She tried to catch Owens’ attention with a wave, so at least he could say his daughter had another language. But he didn’t see her.

  “Well, I know FORTRAN and BASIC and probably about forty other computer languages. Oh, and pig latin. I like to think I know not the language of my grandfather but the language of my grandsons and granddaughters.”

  Applause with a foam of laughter rolled through the crowd. Jane looked up at the sky, blue through the fronds of pine. Canary Island pine, Noah Kaskie had taught her. People carried seeds and cuttings from their homelands sewn in pockets, preserved in raw potatoes, and planted them here.

  So he’d pulled it off again. It amazed Jane that though she’d felt a point in her heart like a splinter when he was on the verge of failing, now that he’d succeeded she was left feeling not victorious but chagrined.

  Was he truly the most confident person in the world or, like her mother said, insecure?

  In fact, Owens had not been invited to speak on bilingual education, pro or con. His assigned topic was science in the schools. But since Jane’s arrival in Alta, Owens had become interested in education.

  He wanted every child at large not only to eat but to eat well. This he considered to be no problem. Some of the cheapest food you could buy happened to be what he liked best and believed in. He went on to establish a campaign for California’s fifty-eight county school districts to offer a free hot lunch daily, composed of beans, rice and one banana per pupil. He would donate the seed money himself, but the beauty of the idea was that beans and rice were cheaper than the junk kids ate now. After months of occasional meetings with his five political advisers and numerous phone calls, a bill had actually been drafted and put before the legislature. The rider Owens insisted on attaching called for the abolition of the milk subsidy, whereby children received a carton of milk, often chocolate, at ten o’clock in the morning for a nickel, which had once been Jane’s only incentive to go to school.