Anywhere But Here (33 page)

They had a rented car and my father drove. He and Uta sat in the front seat. My mother had to climb in the back with the grand-daughter
and me. Her high heels made it hard to balance, getting in. She put her hands on her lap and smiled right away and you could tell she didn’t like this.

“So, Hisham, do you still have the Valiant?”

He chuckled a little. “No, I had to get rid of that.”

I thought of our Valiant in a Nevada dump somewhere. Benny was good with cars. Even though he was only eleven years old, he drove up and down Lime Kiln Road in his dad’s truck. I’d been to the dump in Bay City where they put the old cars; Griling ran it, walking around with a stick. The machine dump covered two sides of a hill and a long valley. It wasn’t just cars, there were old wash machines and refrigerators, their doors open, and warm from the sun. Cats lived on the empty wire shelves.

“I’m calling myself John now,” my father said, glancing over at Uta. Uta nodded, looking down at her purse.

“John,” my mother mulled. “How come?”

My father shrugged. “People recognize it. They know how to spell it.” He laughed. “I’m applying to be a citizen.”

Uta took a small white box from her purse and gave it to my father to give me; it was a gold bracelet, with one charm, a tree with turquoise leaves.

“Well, it’s real, all right,” my mother said, examining it later under the lamp. We stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, my mother and me in one room, them in another. She showed me the tiny stamp of 19K printed on the gold. “It must have been expensive. But it’s gaudy, you know, she’s got money, but no taste. That’s one thing about us, Ann, we have taste. We can go anywhere and they’d think, Hey, what a great-looking mother and daughter. And that’s class.”

For years, I’d watched “The Wonderful World of Disney” on TV. Sometimes in bed, before I went to sleep, I imagined us—my father with more hair than he had now, my mother’s swooped up on top of her head, held with a diamond pin, and me, blond like my mother and prettier than I am—in our old brown car, with rounded fenders, floating down a long canal. A fairy with a wand of flies’ wings perched just at our backs, touching the tops of our
heads. I’d feel her fingers on my spine and lean against her knee, but I wouldn’t turn back to look at her, for fear she wouldn’t be there. The brown car drifted slowly and trees above us bent down with the weight of their fruit. When we touched it, it was ours, the way, when you cup your hand outside the window of a moving car, you imagine something solid and then you feel it. We passed animals on the banks of the canal and at one turn, I saw an elephant carrying the Las Vegas circus children dressed in leopard skins and sequins. The lighted castle stood in the distance. The banks of the canal were a simple yellow, the trees green, the sky and water blue. Disneyland looked like the crayoned city I’d drawn on my grandmother’s floor when I was a child and we floated in the Valiant, farther and farther in.

I’d wanted to see Disneyland for so long and now I was there. All day the five of us bought things. My father and my mother kept peering down into my face and saying, “Having fun?” I felt like they could see all the things I’d imagined to myself, the private things I’d pictured with my eyes closed, in the dark. I’d shrug and say, “Yeah,” and look at the granddaughter. I turned out glad she was there. The two of us got to pick out the restaurants we wanted and what we wanted to order in each one. Nobody talked about money. Uta always paid.

They all kept looking at me and asking what I wanted to do next. I shrugged and said, “I don know.” But that made them nervous. My father walked with his hands in his pockets, looking high up, towards the sky. Then he talked to my mother about cutting my hair.

“We’ve thought of it, but I think it’s better long,” she said.

He seemed to agree. “No, she’d have to be thinner if it were short.”

“Sometimes, I think about bangs,” my mother volunteered.

On Saturday, Uta rented a limousine to drive us to a famous restaurant. It was on top of a tall building so we could see lights of the whole city below us. One side was pure black and my father said that was the ocean.

My father spoke French to the waiter—I watched my mother and Uta look at him and sink back in their chairs. There were some things women couldn’t do and those were the things my father was good at. My father ordered for all of us, something I’d never heard of, tournedos.

When Uta went to the ladies’ room, my mother laughed, leaning over so her face came close to my father’s in the reddish light. She picked up the candleholder in her hands and looked up at my father.

“John, I’m trying to see you as a John,” she said.

He laughed, moving the salt shaker. The granddaughter looked at me. “When you go home, we can write letters to each other and be pen pals. Will you write to me?”

As I watched my mother laughing, I wasn’t sure if it was a real laugh, from happiness, or if it was for our TV.

I was full before my tournedos came. But they were steak and delicious. I asked my father if I could wrap them in a napkin and take it back in a doggy bag. He stamped his cigarette out and looked at my mother, smiling. “No, Ann,” he said. “Not here.”

My mother joined in quickly, “Oh, no, Honey, not in a place like this.”

“Is she yours?” a man asked.

My mother answered, “She sure is, she’s my little one.” We stood in a dark hallway. Uta was paying someone to find our coats.

“A very pretty child,” the man said. He was short and bald, fat, in a dark suit.

“Yes, isn’t she? And she’s nice, too. She’s a real nice girl, aren’t you?” My mother stroked my hair.

“No,” I said, looking down.

The fat man was not alone. He lifted a silver stole off a woman’s shoulders and followed her into the restaurant. My mother bent down to me. “Do you know who that was?
That
was Robert Wise, the producer of
Sound of Music
. Did you see the way he looked at you? You’re going to make it, kid. I can’t believe it.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“Believe me. I just know.”

In the lobby, my father spoke to the headwaiter. He took a salt shaker from his left pocket and a matching pepper shaker from his right and gave them to me. “A little memento of tonight.”

I said thank you and held them the way he held them, in my coat pockets, and looked up, overly grateful. My father always had nerve.

My mother just smiled grimly and thanked Uta and my father, as we crowded in the backseat of the limousine, my mother’s heel catching on the carpet. We felt cowed by their money, both of us.

I worried about the New Sony. We were leaving tomorrow and we hadn’t done anything. All day, I brought up the subject of televisions, but the only one who answered was the granddaughter, who told me that her favorite program was “Gilligan’s Island” and that we could write to each other what our new favorite programs were in fall when the listings came out.

And it wasn’t only my mother, it was me, too. When I slipped my hand in my father’s, I wasn’t sure why. It seemed easier to have another reason. Otherwise, we felt like fools.

My mother and father and I seemed more like a family that trip than we’d ever been and that was because of Uta, because she thought of things. She took pictures of me with my dad. My mother and father each went along with it, but they didn’t seem to like her ideas. They did things because they had to.

It was Uta’s idea that my father and I should meet before dinner the last night, so we’d have a chance to be alone. My mother shrugged as Uta suggested it, as if to say, what for, but she didn’t have the nerve to do anything. In our room, before I was supposed to go down, she brushed my hair out across my back.

I was nervous. I wasn’t used to being alone with my father. I didn’t know what to say to him.

“I’ll bet they’ve got one right here,” my mother said. “In Disneyland.” We both knew what she was talking about.

“I haven’t seen any in the stores.”

“I think I saw one,” she said, winking. “A white one.”

“Where?” I’d been looking all week. It was the only thing I’d known to do.

“In one of those little shops downstairs.”

“Which one?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. But I saw it.”

“What should I do?” I knew I had to learn everything.

My mother shrugged. It seemed easy for her. “Tell him you’re saving for it. He’ll probably just buy it for you. Suck in your cheeks,” she said, brushing blush on my face. She was having fun.

I didn’t want to leave the room. I wanted to close my eyes and keep feeling the spokes of the hairbrush on my back. My mother gave me a short push out the door. I tried to remember everything.

I saw my father’s back first. He was standing by the candy counter in the hotel drugstore. Every time I saw him I went through a gradual series of adjustments, reconciling the picture I held in my imagination to his appearance, as I recognized him. He was almost bald now. He was heavier than he had once been. His chin still shot out, but it no longer made him look eager. He seemed mildly dissatisfied, bored. His lower lip seemed to hang a fraction too far out, it didn’t match his upper lip. He was buying a roll of Life Savers, peeling the wrapping paper off one end. He peeled it in a string.

Then he saw me and smiled. “Would you like anything?” he asked, tilting his head to indicate the rows of candy on the counter.

I thought for one wild moment. I could abandon the plan and say yes. Yes I want a candy bar. Two candy bars. He’d buy me two of the best candy bars there and I could stand and eat them sloppily, all the while gazing up at him. If I smiled, he would smile. He would bend down and dab the chocolate from my mouth with a handkerchief moist with his own saliva.

But I knew I’d remember. And then I would hate my best memory because it would prove that my father could fake love or that love could end, or, worst of all, that love could exist weakly, without the power to dominate a life, his life. And I couldn’t believe he’d write me letters, I just couldn’t believe it. I thought of my grandmother, years and years, walking out to get the mail.

“No,” I said, “I’m saving up my money.”

“What?” My father smiled down. He was still unraveling the paper from his Life Savers. He hadn’t heard me. I had another chance.

“I’m saving my money for a new Sony portable color television,” I blurted.

He had been looking at me and he stopped. He didn’t move but he lifted his eyes up to something over my shoulder. Then he glanced at his watch and scanned the drugstore.

“Oh,” he said.

I think at that moment he relinquished me to my mother. He was humming “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”; he’d been humming all weekend—other people’s songs.

On the way home, neither of us mentioned it.

“Look at the mountains,” I said.

“Yeah, mmhmm.” My mother wouldn’t even move her head.

It’s funny how we were. The bracelet my father and Uta gave me turned out to be worth money, more than what the televisions cost when they came out a year later. It would have taken a miracle to convince us.

When the plane landed, we didn’t even call Ted. We took a taxi home, my mother clicking her nails against the window. When we were inside, she collapsed on the blue-green couch and looked around disapprovingly. Our suitcases lay scattered on the floor.

“You know what he told me when we left? He said after all he did you didn’t even say thank you. He said he’d open doors and you’d just walk through, he’d offer to buy you candy and you just said no. Not even no thank you. Just no. I’ve taught you how to act and what do you do there? Nothing.”

The days with my father flashed like cards. I hadn’t said no-thank-you.

“And here you use big words all the time and complex sentences. You should hear yourself joking around with Ted. You didn’t say ONE BIG WORD the whole time we were there. I couldn’t even stand listening to you. Un-huh. Yeah-uh. I don
know. You didn’t say one smart thing in front of him. Let me tell you, Kid, you sounded dumb.”

“My name is Ann,” I said.

She turned over and sighed. It sounded like air coming out of a balloon. “Sure, Ann. Call yourself whatever you want, I don’t care. Go out and play. Go out and play with your kids.”

I opened the refrigerator door and looked. Ted had made a châteaubriand by himself and sliced it. He’d stacked the rectangles neatly on a plate. Behind me, my mother turned over and knocked the cushions onto the floor. Her shoes dropped, one at a time.

“And you didn’t even smile. Here, you’re sharp and funny. There you slumped and looked down. And you talk about getting on television. You really just looked like any other kid around here. Well, fine. It’s a good thing we’re back because I can see now that this is just where you belong. Here with all the mill workers’ kids. Well, good.”

I walked outside without a jacket, looking for one of my friends. On Carriage Court, kids didn’t knock on each other’s doors. We just went outside and waited. But no one was there. It was a gray, cold day and it looked like it might rain. I was walking when a mother, from down the street, honked. She rolled down her window and asked if I wanted a ride. I got in the station wagon though I didn’t know where I was going. She didn’t even ask me. She just dropped me off at the skating rink. By that time it had started raining. The guard nodded as I walked in and from the lobby I saw Ted on the ice. Just then, I realized it was a workday, a schoolday, Monday. That was why none of the kids came outside. Ted was giving a lesson, bending down and holding a woman’s ankle, pointing her foot into a figure eight.

I walked to his office and took the key for the rental room, from under a certain bench. The rental room was small and covered with cubbyholes, with the sizes of skates painted in yellow. I took a pair of knicked, worn gray fives, with the brown rental stripe in back. When I’d skated, I had my own good skates. In these, the ankles were broken down.

I put them on and ran on points, wobbling because of the skates. Then I stepped onto the ice and skated; I crashed into Ted and held his sweater. He put a hand over my head and told the student something I didn’t hear. When I pulled myself off, the student was gone. I opened my eyes and looked up at Ted; it was different than with my father. I couldn’t bury my head in Ted’s sweater and forget. Here, I knew exactly where I was. Ted was still Ted, standing in front of me. I didn’t expect him to understand.