A Regular Guy

  Michelle was devoted to fun. It was her life’s purpose and philosophy. For all of Noah’s life, she’d been a counterpoint to his pains. As she traveled, he’d received postcards from the world’s widest and most rapid rivers, from Andean ruins and the glacial plains of Alaska. At home, he followed her on expeditions to the artichoke capital of the world, on hikes in an off-road chair to see the desert bloom or the tree where monarch butterflies flock every August. He had, when he could, joined her Tuesday-night poker game. Michelle worked part time at clerical jobs she didn’t care about to support her photography and her life of pleasure. Noah admired his sister and missed her acutely. But for him, fun could not bear so much intention; it had to be side-glanced, stolen from the edges of a life dedicated to more trustworthy things.

  That night, he opened a closet door in the kitchen and saw the scratch marks. Michelle 1969 was scribbled at about three feet. Michelle 1971, six inches higher. The last mark was 1974. There were no scratches with his name. His parents had painted the house since he and Michelle moved out, but they must have preserved this, as a memento. He’d never before thought of it that way—his and Michelle’s childhoods being for them too.

  His mother cooked him her best meal. He’d brought what was left of the cake, and only then did he imagine he should’ve brought Rachel or even Louise. But that would have got his mother too excited; she’d assume the best and start buying whomever little thoughtful gifts.

  But then his mother and dad hadn’t been in love when they married. They’d never seen any reason not to tell their children the truth. They went to the prom together one night. They hardly knew each other. And she got pregnant. “We came into love late,” they always told him. “We did it the hard way.”

  Christmasing

  In November, Peter Bigelow called the bungalow from his farm in Half Moon Bay and asked if Mary and Jane would help him pick out Julie’s birthday present. He drove them in his truck to a department store in the city.

  They thought of a pair of boots, or maybe a purse: things they’d want themselves. Then Jane spotted the dress she’d always imagined—red, on a headless mannequin.

  “Do you think she’d wear something like that?” Mary asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Peter said. “She’s gonna flip when she sees this.” When he learned the price, he whistled and pulled out a silver money clip. Jane had never seen a money clip before.

  “Will it last a long time?” Mary asked the saleswoman.

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s a classic sheath.”

  “I see.” Mary didn’t know what that was. The fabric maybe.

  After the saleswoman handed him the large gift-wrapped box, Peter said, “Let me take you two out for a restorative cup of hot chocolate.”

  They were on the top floor. On the way down, he bought them each a present—a hat that looked wonderful on Mary and flowered tights for Jane. Even though she never wore dresses, she had a pair of short pants that would let them show. In department stores, it seemed to Jane, the most expensive things were on the top, all the way down to food at the bottom.

  They sat at a table on the first floor, sipping hot chocolate from a silver teapot and eating ginger cookies wantonly.

  Then Peter said, “I’m gonna show you something.” He took out a felt bag from his inside corduroy pocket. “I need some paper.”

  “I have construction paper,” Mary offered, digging into her big purse.

  On a blue sheet, he poured sparkly stones from the little bag.

  “What is it?” Jane asked.

  “Diamonds.”

  Neither of them had seen diamonds before, up close. Jane counted nine, all different shapes. When you looked, they were slightly different colors too.

  “I asked my mother.” Peter grabbed Mary’s arm and stared at her, as if he were telling her something important. “This’s how crazy I am. I told her I was getting close to proposing, so she gave me these. ‘Maybe this’ll help,’ she said. ‘They’re all from women in the family, their engagement rings.’ ”

  Jane wondered where all the rings were now—in some junk pile, empty of stones, in a dump? She thought of asking if she could have just the rings. She would find a stone, from the seashore or the ground, or wear them all together on a chain around her neck.

  Thunder clapped outside now, with an answering peal of rain. This was the kind of day Jane always wanted, an afternoon that went on and on and no one left.

  “Would you pick out a ring, or how would you do it?” Mary seemed timid, as if the proposal was something she hadn’t considered.

  “No. Julie would have to pick out her own,” he said. “I thought I’d pour these out and let her see which ones she liked.”

  “More than one?” Jane said.

  “As many as she wants.” He smiled, but the smile cracked. “She’s not ready, though.” He stared up at Mary, and his neck seemed white and weak, like the tender inside stem of a weed. “What do you think, Mare?”

  Mary and Jane glanced at each other. He was right. Yesterday morning, Julie had walked in when they were eating almond butter on toast. “I think Peter’s getting close,” she’d said.

  “Huck wants me to go to New Orleans,” Mary had said. “For Thanksgiving.”

  “That sounds like a proposal to me,” Julie said.

  “We’re not nearly ready. I don’t even know what would happen with me and Owens.”

  “What about Eli?” Jane said.

  “I will if you will.” Julie had laughed.

  But today, under the sway of Peter’s eyes and the sound of steady rain on the tall department store windows, they wanted Julie to be.

  “I think if I asked her now,” he said, “she’d run scared.”

  But he was the one who looked frightened. They drove all the way back in his truck in the rain, Peter humming a way that seemed binding. In the bungalow, Mary found the bag where she kept fabrics. Someday she meant to make a quilt for Jane. She held up a scrap of deep-blue velvet from the coat Noah Kaskie had once bought for her daughter, which she’d now grown out of.

  “Here,” she said. “You can use this instead of paper.”

  “I spread this cloth out and then pour ’em and say, ‘Just pick out the ones you want, honey.’ ” He shook his head, looking at Jane. “Your mom and Julie, two peas in a pod.”

  That made them happy for a little while.

  The teachers offered to take Jane when Mary went to New Orleans. “We’d be ever so glad to have her,” Amber insisted, though both sisters felt dubious about the trip.

  “I’m not even sure I’m going.” Mary sighed.

  “I can understand that,” Ruby said.

  “You don’t have to go,” Amber added.

  Jane kicked her mother’s leg under the table and held up a glass jar of preserved limes. The teachers’ house no longer seemed like Christmas. “I’m not staying there,” she declared when they left. “They fuss all the time. Just forget it. I’ll ask Julie.”

  “I already thought of Julie, but Peter invited her to his family’s ranch.”

  “Fine. I’ll find a place myself.”

  The night before Mary left, she and Eli sat at the kitchen table, leaning down over Japanese teacups. In the cone of lamplight, their heads looked pretty and serious. The house was mostly dark and the heat was making funny noises. Jane ground her shoe on an anthill. Anthills had begun to rise in the corners.

  Jane took her suitcase, and looked back at her mother and Eli, their hands in front of them on the table, then slipped out the front door. She didn’t want to go to the teachers. She saw them so many hours every week. Time in their hotel-clean house moved so slowly that Amber seemed to release powder into the air whenever she moved. Jane had read in the newspaper about new math. There were probably new subjects—new reading, new science, new spelling, new history—and Jane was learning only the old.

  She carried the suitcase, head down, to the first corner, then decided to go to Owens’ house. Once she cr
ossed the highway that separated Alta and Auburn from the hill towns, she’d be in the woods. She looked up at palms and eucalyptus, an occasional pine. Nothing here frightened her, and the air billowed warm.

  One tree more, and the aunts must have arrived. She thought of the way Ruby drove, so slow it was dangerous, with Amber quibbling from the passenger seat. They would be wearing their going-out clothes. Once they got home, they’d want her to go to sleep even though it was a loud bright night and only eight o’clock. They would want to begin the long business of undressing and putting away. Ruby, the younger and the one Jane minded less, ate a bowl of cereal in the kitchen every night before bed. For a second, Jane longed to be in that chalky kitchen, eating the milk-wet Rice Krispies and wondering what novel written by a long-ago Englishwoman Amber had left where the sheet folded down like a turned-back page on the bed.

  But she wasn’t there. Amber and Ruby would’ve talked Mary into calling the police. They would all be looking for her; maybe they’d drive by soon, any minute. She had to cross the highway; she imagined the long roaring. After that, it was slow uphill, pines and easy. She slid down the embankment, her hands grabbing weeds and her feet at cutting angles. She was almost on all fours, dirty. This highway was Owens’ favorite, clean and black. Cars came few but fast, streaking, and Jane made a run for it to the center, then she panicked, startled in a daze of headlights, the traffic pouring the other way, big halos. She had no idea if the drivers could see her. She panted, shivering, but then she remembered from further than she could place or catalogue a highway animal, something small and ruminant, a skunk or a raccoon, and went for it, abandoning caution, her chest in front of her, hair falling out of its rubber band, and on the other side she tasted the sweet night air like happiness, the sharp inhale of mint.

  From here she walked through waist-high weeds and wild fennel onto streets that led by the yards and corrals of millionaires. Dense horses moved through the grayey dark, rustling weeds and scattering insects. Occasionally, far back, she could see a light. Now she was close, and she slowed, hoping he’d be home.

  After she passed through the crumbling stone gate it was still a long way, but the noises seemed owned and safe, his. The road was lined on both sides by feathery pines, and then it was there, the old mansion, and she knew from the two cars that he was home. She went in through the unlocked front door.

  Owens was standing in the kitchen, testing a noodle on a chopstick. “Jane! You okay?”

  She nodded, and he invited her to sit down and eat. He ladled out noodles and cut an avocado on top of hers while she explained.

  “My mom’s going to New Orleans with Huck and I didn’t want to stay with the teachers.”

  “What does Eli say about all this?”

  “He’s not happy. But Julie told my mom to say there are two states of being at their age, and that’s married or single.”

  Owens looked at Jane, genuinely intrigued. “I don’t believe that at all. I’d be really upset if Olivia took off on a trip with some other guy.”

  “So’s Eli.”

  “Wow,” he said, eating with his chopsticks. “Well, I better call Mare and tell her you’re here.”

  Everything at his house was for health. It didn’t taste good. At the end you felt both full and hungry, as if the one part of food that binds and makes it a meal, the oil maybe, that was what was missing.

  Lying on the futon in her cold room, trying to sleep, she remembered her mother at the wintercamp once handing her a hot yam in a rag, the melting gold inside. Sweet the way burnt things are.

  In the morning, Owens asked if she wanted to come with him to the office or stay home. Jane wanted to be here, alone. After she heard his car drive away, she loosened in the house. This was where she’d come that first day, when it looked strange, like a dilapidated castle. She hadn’t gone inside. She’d knocked with the knocker on the huge front door. Even if they’d been home, they never would have heard. If she’d only pressed the latch down, she could have walked right in. She was two years younger then and different, a girl who’d lived most of her life in communes. She hadn’t imagined for a second that people who lived in a place like this would ever leave it open. When no one answered, she’d turned back to the overgrown garden and pressed herself into the dirt, a hand under her cheek, to fall asleep.

  In all this time she’d never been alone here. She tried to see what could have been if she’d been different that first day, not expecting big doors always to be locked.

  She was still disappointed: old curtains no one had ever cleaned or taken down; a vase without flowers. The mansion had twenty-nine rooms, but only a few were livable. The parlor had a magnificent piano, which no one knew how to play. She sat down on the polished bench, surprised again that her fingers could coax no music. On either side of a man-sized fireplace stood speakers taller than she was. Twelve chairs waited in the dining room around the table.

  She raced upstairs to where Owens lived. There, alone in his bathroom, she opened a cupboard and discovered a warehouse. There were duplicates and triplicates of things, more, still in boxes. She counted fifteen identical full bottles of a shampoo she’d never heard of, geranium, with the price tags still on, thirteen dollars. Then there were soaps and toothpaste, twenty stacked. He had ten toothbrushes never opened. “It was always here,” she said to herself again and again, as if her mother’s life and hers had been a cruel game, an obstacle course set by an unkind laughing god that made their suffering not noble but embarrassing. It was always here, what they’d wanted and gone without. She would never completely forgive herself for not pushing that heavy door open the first day and coming inside.

  She didn’t know until she found the treasure that she’d been on a hunt. She ended up in the storage room downstairs, where she’d been once before, with her mother. Posters, plaques, magazines, boxes and boxes of Genesis mementos, were scattered around among old skis and a parked motorcycle. Mary had told Owens he should file the stuff for posterity, not that she and Jane kept such good track of their own lives. Owens had looked up. He’d been digging pictures out of piles for more than an hour. “It’s probably better if all this gets destroyed in a fire or something. You shouldn’t live with this stuff.” He was sometimes wise about himself. But what he said was better than he was.

  She sat down and read about him; there were letters from presidents and photographs with kings, but she was looking for something else. And there it was, amidst his papers and an architectural model of Katsura on the cluttered Ping-Pong table: the pictures her mother had sent. Jane, first grade, age six. On one her mom had handwritten, So maybe we haven’t done such a bad job after all. Jane fingered through the room until she’d seen all the evidence of herself, and then she fell fast asleep on the floor.

  The phone woke her. Before they lived in Alta, they’d leave messages for him that bore no relation to answers, like letters in bottles thrown to the sea. They always spoke to secretaries or into his machine. Jane now understood there were phones he answered all along, but they had never had the right number.

  The number they always had still worked: it belonged to the white answering machine in the kitchen. But he’d explained: too many people knew it. So he let the machine answer, and every week or so he played the messages. He got new numbers, gave them to three or five people, used them until they too became cluttered, but for some reason he kept the old ones too. Perhaps out of some sense of the miraculous in his character, he wanted to be able to be found. He wanted someone—not them, obviously—to reach him.

  Jane wondered, as she touched the machine where they’d left all their hopeful complaining messages for so many years, who the person was he was waiting for, the one he would have called back. She played the button: whoever called had left no message.

  Jane tried to make sense of the ramshackle kitchen in order to prepare dinner, but she couldn’t find basic things like milk. Then Owens walked in, saying, “Hey, I thought we could call your friend—what’s he
r name, Julie?—and maybe go skating.”

  Jane called her, hoping she’d say no. But she sounded happy to be asked.

  “What about Peter?” Jane asked.

  She laughed. “I’m too old to go steady.”

  Before long, she came through the kitchen door, carrying a pair of old-fashioned roller skates. Owens had bought Rollerblades for himself and Jane several months before.

  Roller-skating was in fact the last thing Julie felt like doing. She still had on a suit from work, and her ankles had always been wobbly, but she was curious about Owens. Tonight, up close, he seemed both smaller and more handsome than he had at his party. This made her fingers fumble with her laces.

  Owens led the way, and to Julie’s surprise he wasn’t a very good skater. His long arms flailed as he turned and yelled, “There’s some downhill here, but after that it’s flat for miles.”

  Julie’s legs spread wider and wider as she sped down. At the bottom, Owens grabbed her and spun her until they both slowed. Julie felt a wet patch on her neck. Had he kissed her? She twirled around once more, as if she could catch sight of a ghost, then looked ahead as Jane bombed down like a skier.

  They emerged in old Alta, where the quiet streets were empty and smooth.

  Owens yanked a handful of plant from someone’s yard and held it near Julie. “Lavender,” he said, as if it were a gift.

  I like him, she thought, with a feeling of alarm.

  Sprinklers raked back and forth over the lawns, and night blooms opened their fragrance; here they entered a room of jasmine, then a scarf of oregano passed over their faces. Julie’s ankles tilted in, and she wondered how much longer this would go on. But it was easier here, on the flat. She’d already decided she couldn’t skate all the way back. Maybe he could pick her up in the car. Far away, the bells of the old church began their evening call.

  They passed a park, where a Little League game moved slowly on the lighted diamond. Owens twirled to a stop, his arms above his head in an unintentional parody of figure skating, and Julie slowed by grabbing the wire fence, burning her fingers. Children’s uniforms glowed bright in the dusk. “This is nice,” Owens said. He seemed to be waiting for her to talk. This was a date that was overdue, and she felt nervous and excited. “So what is it exactly that you do all day?” he asked. Perhaps for him it was an ordinary evening and he was bored.