And Now You Can Go (11 page)

Toward the end of dinner, the phone rings and my father gets up to answer it. We can hear his conversation: he's giving his friend John an update on our lives. He mentions that Freddie is eighteen. Freddie looks at me, gestures in the direction of my father, and squints her blue eyes into slits.

My father always thinks Freddie is a year younger than she is—he can never get it right.

When he comes back to the table, she corrects him. "I'm nineteen," she says. She holds up all ten fingers, and then nine.

"Oh," my father says. "Sorry. I don't know why I thought you were eighteen."

"Maybe it's because you missed my fifteenth birthday," Freddie says. "Maybe that's why you always think I'm a year younger."

My mother looks up from her plate and stares at my father.

He closes his eyes. "I tried calling, but the line was always busy. You girls use the phone way too much. How do you get your homework done?"

"For a whole year the line was busy?" Freddie says.

I look out at the neighbors window. Mrs. Alarid is watching a Rudolph cartoon on TV. On her fifteenth birthday, Freddie didn't leave the house. She stayed by the phone until midnight, drawing mazes on yellow legal pads.

My father pours himself some more water. Then he gets up and goes upstairs.

I expect my mother to scold Freddie, but she doesn't. Instead she says it never feels like Christmas without snow. My mother, Freddie, and I talk about skiing, how long it's been since we've been.

"Look what we have here," my father says, as he comes back to the table. He's holding an envelope with Freddies name on it. "I found it behind the bureau. It must have fallen back there years ago and gotten lost."

Freddie slowly opens the envelope. Inside is a card on which my father's written: "
Happy 15th Birthday
." "Not funny," she says. "That's just not funny." She stuffs the card into the envelope and hands it back to him.

I look at my mother and I can see from her eyes that she's disappointed too: my father still hasn't apologized for what he's done.

I wake up the next morning and Freddie's kneeling by my bed. "What are you doing?" I ask. Above my head is a moth and I try to remember:
Don't they only live for a day? Or is it until they mate and then they die
? All this information I learned and forgot.

"Let's go do something girly," she says. "Like what?"

"Something normal girls do." We both are silent, thinking.

"Let's go to a salon," Freddie says. "Like a spa day." "I'm broke and so are you," I say.

"Well let's go and do the cheapest thing we can have done."

I agree to go. I have nothing else to do. And besides, the next-door neighbor gives piano lessons from her living room. Monday is her day for all the beginning students, and I can hear them flubbing their scales. It reminds me too much of Nicholas's violin tapes.

We go to a beauty store in the nearby mall. The cheapest option is eyelash tints. For ten dollars, the woman with extraordinarily tweezed eyebrows tells us, we won't have to wear mascara for a month.

"I don't wear mascara anyway," I tell the woman.

"Well, now you won't need to," she says, and smiles. I can't stop looking at her eyebrows— they look like birds in flight, miles away.

Freddie and I are seated next to each other on bar stools. The woman asks us to close our eyes and she uses a paintbrush to smooth blue-black dye over our lashes. "I'll come back in twenty minutes to check on you," she says. When my eyes were open I didn't notice what an awful, abrasive voice she has. "You might feel some stinging. But whatever you do, don't rub your eyes," the voice tells us.

Freddie and I sit facing each other but with our eyes sealed. Our knees knock against each other's. She grabs my knee between hers and I try to extract myself from her grip.

"Stop it," I say.

Freddie laughs. "You used to always say that," she says. "What?" I ask.

" 'Stop it.' Remember when Dad and I called you 'the stop-it girl.' " "Stop," I say.

She laughs.

We sit in silence for a moment. Inside my eyelids, I see white speckles, the Milky Way. Freddie releases my knee but I don't pull it away. She takes my hands in her hands. We hold hands for longer than I think we've ever held hands. I can't see her face but I know her expression as it changes. At first her hands are shaky and then they're calm, steady, strong. We sit there until the woman comes back to tissue off the dye from our lashes.

At home, I look through my old art books, ones I bought at garage sales when I was in high school. The woman up the street, in another of the sherbet-colored stucco houses that line

our block, would have a sale on the second Saturday of every month. She had been the nurse to a dying man, and when he passed on he left her his house, his money, his possessions.

At each of the garage sales she'd put out more of his art books. I'd buy them, carrying them home in a stack with great difficulty; I'd learned paper bags couldn't support their weight. Once home, I'd sit in my room and pencil check marks next to the pictures I liked the most.

Now, looking through the books, I try to remember what I could possibly have seen in some of the checked-off paintings—the Piero della Francescas; the Botticellis—besides the order and the beauty, the art looking like art. I study Venus's slanting shoulder, its untruthful anatomy. No shoulder slopes like that.

There have to be more important things to paint, to see, to do. There has to be more than all this symmetry and beauty.
When I get back to school I'll study the Baroque period
, I decide. That will fill some of the days, some of the gaps.

I ask my father if we can go visit Uncle Lou—it's been a while since I saw him. I think I need to talk to someone old. My father calls Lou and we arrange to drive to Sacramento the next afternoon.

My father drives and I sit in the passenger seat with my shoes off, my feet on the dashboard. It's sunny out. I roll down the window and stick my arm out the window, my palm turned forward.

It's in the car that my father gives me the strangest news. I was eleven when he wanted to tell me about his marital problems. "I just want you to know that your mother and I don't have a normal marriage," he said. We were driving down a steep hill and I thrust my head out the window so the breeze would blow away the rest of what he was saying.

"Look out for the guy who wears an American tie," my father says to me now, as we approach the Bay Bridge.

"Why? Who's he?" I say.

"He stands on the corner here and if you give him a dollar, he'll give you a prayer." "The same one or a different one each time?" I ask.

"Well, it used to be a different one, but lately I've noticed that it's just the same one. I think he's gotten lazy."

When we get to the man's usual corner my father slows down, looks around, and then sighs loudly. "Not here today," he says, disappointed.

My father knows all the people no one else knows. He knows the black woman with the orange vest who directs traffic around the construction site near the zoo; Charlie, the Chinese meter maid on Fillmore Street; the bald woman who lives a few houses down from us. The bald woman checks on her apple tree every day and counts how many fruits it's bearing. One morning, my father got up early, went to her apple tree and hung grapes and a banana from a branch. He was pleased with himself for a week.

"How exactly is Uncle Lou my uncle?" I ask. I once knew this, but I've forgotten. "He was your grandmother's brother." "So he's
your
uncle," I say.

My father doesn't answer; he's trying to figure it out. We get on the bridge and switch lanes. "Yes," he says.

Uncle Lou helped my father come to the United States from Poland. I've heard this story too and forgotten it.

When we stop for gas, I offer to take the wheel. I roll up the windows at the point of the drive, near Vacaville, where it smells like onions.

Once we get off the exit, my father instructs me to turn onto Gold Country Road and then onto Uncle Lou's street, Gold Rush Drive.

"You've got to be kidding," I say to no one in particular. When we get to the house, a dog barks and Uncle Lou and his wife, Irene, come out to the driveway through a brown fence gate. I haven't seen either of them for five years, since my grandmother's funeral. Uncle Lou looks good. He's eighty-seven years old and wearing dark jeans and red PUMA sneakers. "You and Freddie dress the same," I say as I hug him.

Irene is wearing a purple blouse and purple earrings. I remember this about her now: how her earrings always matched her outfits.

I hug her and her stiff red-dyed hair rubs against my cheek. You've lost a little weight," she says. "You used to have a moon face. Lou, remember how we called her Moon Face?"

"I was going through puberty," I say. I like this about Irene, I decide. You know she's never hiding anything she's thinking; she tells it to you straight.

Irene is Lous sixth wife; they've been together thirty years. She's nineteen years his junior, and aside from her hunched-over posture, looks even younger. She never fails to remind me, or anyone, that her posture is bad because her family was so poor she was forced to sleep on a sagging couch from the time she was three until she was married.

We move into the fenced-in patio with green plastic chairs and four potted plants. I hand Lou a plastic bag full of the golf balls Freddie and I collected on the walk along Land's End. He examines each one, turns it between his fingers. My father tosses a golf ball to the dog, Teddy, named after Roosevelt.

Irene offers us iced tea.

"I'll help you," I say, and follow her into the kitchen. I ask how she's doing.

"Oh, okay," she say's. "It's hard. Lou's forgetting how to do basic things. When he has to make a phone call, he doesn't know what to do if there's an area code before the number. Basic things like that."

Teddy comes inside, jumps up, and places a paw on each of my knees. "You want to see my walls?" Irene says.

Irene has her own room because Lou snores. My father's told me that all of Lou's wives tried to tolerate sleeping in the same room with him and his snoring, and eventually each of them got her own bedroom.

Three walls of Irene's bedroom are covered with framed photos. She walks me through them: herself and Lou on a cruise in Mexico; Lou pulling her up the stairs to the Hall of Justice on their wedding day.

"I got cold feet," she explains.

There are pictures of her schizophrenic son dressed in collared shirts and V-necked sweaters. "My father was schizophrenic too," she says. "It's passed down to the males in the family. All the women are fine."

"How's he doing now?" I ask.

"I think he's okay. We had to stop telling him where we lived because he'd come and rob us."

Irene has so many photos that every year, on the day after Christmas, she rotates them: she gets new ones out of storage and replaces the ones that are up.

She moves across the room. "On this last wall are all my accomplishments. When I retired I thought, "What have I done with my life?' So I decided to put up this wall to remind myself."

Among the framed achievements are her high school diploma, her marriage license, and her certificate for passing a dry-cleaning operator test. "I opened my own plant when I was twenty-one," she says. "
Your
age."

Her purple shirt is ironed and her white knit sweater is spotless.

We go back to the kitchen. Irene gets out the glasses and I get out a pitcher with a light-blue shower cap elasticized around its top. "What a great idea," I say, gesturing to the shower cap. She smiles.

Outside on the patio, we sit in the green plastic chairs and Uncle Lou moves closer to me and turns up his hearing aid.

I ask to see his medals and scrapbooks from the war.

He pets Teddy, and for a moment I think he hasn't heard. But then he stands up and heads into the house. "Back in a jiffy," he says.

Teddy follows him inside.

"It's so nice of you to come here to visit," Irene says. She's relieved to have help entertaining Lou.

I tell her it's been too long since I've seen them. My uncle conies back out with the medals.

"I have a toothache," Irene says. "I'm going to go watch TV."

Uncle Lou keeps his medals pinned to a blue velvet board. The Purple Hearts look like they're candies wrapped in decorative gold foil. The center of each medal is purple, with a gold relief profile of George Washington.

I examine the Bronze Star: it's a large five-pointed star, with a red-and-blue-striped ribbon. I saw it when I was younger—I remember it being shinier. If I found it on the street now I'd think it was a Christmas ornament that fell from a tree.

The Bronze Star is what Uncle Lou's most proud of, he tells me. I ask why.

"Because all you have to do to get a Purple Heart is get hurt bad," he says. His voice is deep and there's something mechanical about the way he talks. I wonder if his pacemaker has anything to do with this.

In Lou's scrapbook are pictures of topless women, from when he was stationed-in New Zealand. "Well, look at that," he says. "She's forgotten to put her top on." He laughs again. He doesn't have a care in the world, I think, or maybe he's forgotten them all.

We turn to the letter that accompanied his Bronze Star:

"For heroic achievement in action against enemy Japanese forces on Saipan, Marianas Islands on 7 July 1944 while serving with a Marine artillery battalion. He serviced and fired the weapon while under heavy fire from the machine guns and small arms. He courageously assisted his section in knocking out a Japanese tank that had killed 5 and wounded 6 men in the section. His courage, initiative, and complete disregard for his own safety are in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service."

I'm struck by "complete disregard for his own safety."

He tells me how he was under fire, holding a rifle that was half metal and half wood. A bullet hit his gun and he was left with a severe burn on his cheek. "I was still holding the gun, but only the metal part, the trigger and so forth. The wooden part was gone."