Anywhere But Here (61 page)

When my mother was upset, she turned graceless. She bumped into corners, her elbows jabbed walls. She hurt herself.

“Damn,” I heard her say. It frightened me how much she could pack into that small word.

All her knocks and wandering would end up in my room, but there was nothing I could do except wait. There were no locks on any of our doors. Finally, she came. She wasn’t wearing anything but a dirty gray sweat shirt. She squatted on my carpet, barelegged, rocking.

“I don’t know, I just don’t know. SHE’S the one who had to come to California, SHE was going to be a movie star, and I work and work and slave and it’s high time I get something for ME once instead of you, you, you and more you. And you don’t even like me. I can see the way you look at me.”

She covered her hand with her sleeve before she hit me.

I used everything, hitting hard, loose, not seeing what I was doing. And in a few minutes she fell off the side of my bed. I was getting stronger than she was.

She stood up and walked to my door. She crossed her arms and spit, her saliva arching over the carpet, falling a foot short of the sheet.

My mother didn’t forgive me right away. When I came home from school, she was standing in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door, wearing an unfinished wedding dress. A seamstress knelt pinning the hem. I recognized the ivory beaded satin. It was one of our things from Wisconsin. She’d bought it, years ago, in Egypt.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She wouldn’t look away from the mirror. “We’re busy now, Ann.” I just stood there, watching. The woman crawled around my mother’s feet, taking pins out of her mouth and sliding them into the thick fabric. My mother kept changing the position of her mouth and watching the effect in the mirror.

“Look what she did to me.” She rolled back her left sleeve. Her
arms stretched long and thin, light brown. My mother bruised easily. “Look at those marks. She’s like a little animal.”

I sat in the alley. A few gates down, three boys pedaled out on bikes, with baseball bats and mitts in their baskets. They still had high light voices and I watched them ride off, pedaling standing, beautiful boys with careless voices.

An hour later, at dusk, my mother marched out and asked me if I wanted to put on a sweater, so we could go have dinner. She didn’t seem at all surprised to find me slumped in the alley. I sat there a lot of times now. The dressmaker had gone and my mother looked tired. I pulled on an old sweater and she didn’t complain. We both just settled in the car.

“Well, so, what are you thinking?” she said at the restaurant. She propped her face on her fists, tried to smile.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

I shrugged.

She reached over, put her hand on my forehead. “You’re a little warm.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re just tired.” She sighed. “Well, it won’t be long now. Pretty, pretty soon, I think, things will be changing for the better. The much better.”

“Do you still think you’re going to marry Dr. Hawthorne?”

“Mmhmm,” she said, reveling in the adjustment of her smile, all the while studying her nails. “No, I really don’t think, Honey. I
know.”

I crossed my arms on the table. “So if you’re going to marry him, why doesn’t he ever call? You never go out on dates.”

“Honey, you don’t understand.” She leaned closer. “It’s all part of the therapy. Remember the first time when I was upset? Well, he was bringing me through my father and all that pain. I’ve suffered a lot, Ann, you really don’t know. And then the next time it was your father and that was a hard one, boy, I can tell you. Then I had to go through Ted Diamond. But I’m through it all now. It’s over. And he’s stopped seeing me, as a patient. It’s like he’s saying,
Hey, you’re done. You’re finished. Now we can go ahead and just date.”

“So when do you think you’ll get married?”

“I’d say, oh, about a month. Maybe three weeks, but probably a month.”

“When will he start calling and coming over and stufi?”

“Any day now, Honey. Certainly by the weekend.”

But he didn’t call by the weekend. And the next day, my mother’s red envelope, addressed with white ink, came back in our pile of mail on the washing machine top,
Return to Sender
scrawled on it with an ordinary ball-point.

“Give me that,” my mother said.

I followed her to her bedroom and watched her slip it in a drawer. I saw a flash of red. “If he’s going to marry you, why did he send your letter back?”

My mother gave me a patient look. She opened the drawer and took the letter out again. There were dozens of red envelopes in there.

“Look-it, Honey. This is addressed to
Doctor
Leonard Hawthorne. See.” She ran her fingers over the indentations his ballpoint pen had made. “See, he doesn’t want me to write to the doctor. The
doctor
doesn’t want to see me anymore. He wants to know me as Len Hawthorne the man, not the doctor. And believe you me, so do I!”

That night, my mother wrote a long letter to Len Hawthorne, The Man. She addressed it to his home in Santa Monica and used twice as many stamps as necessary.

“This is Adele August. I’d like to—okay, okay. But please. It’s an emergency.” She sat in her bedroom with the door closed, but I could hear through the wall. That was the day when the envelope addressed to Len Hawthorne, The Man, came back in our mail.

Since she’d stopped going to her job, my mother slept in. She almost never woke up before I left for school. Mornings, I stood at the half-size refrigerator, looking at all the food. My mother
kept it perfectly clean and well stocked now, as if she feared a surprise inspection. I used to stand in the quiet, light backhouse with the refrigerator door open. I stared at the fruit. I almost didn’t want to touch it. I wanted it to stay the way it was, cold and hard, the apples beaded with strings of faceted colors.

Then one morning, my mother was moving behind the soda fountain in her peach-colored robe when I woke up. She made us bananas on cereal. She smiled at me weakly while I ate. “Is that good, Honey?”

“Yeah.” When I finished, I brought the bowl to the sink and washed it. We didn’t have dish towels, so I dried it with a paper napkin. Then I went to get my books.

“Oh, Ann,” my mother called. “Could you please stay home for a while this morning. I’ll write you a note. There’s something I need you to do.”

“I should go to school, Mom.” I wanted to go.

“Honey. This is important. I need you to call somewhere.”

“Can’t I do it now?”

“Honey, it doesn’t open until nine.”

I sat back down. I thought of missing Nutrition. It wasn’t even eight yet.

“You’ll be glad you waited. This is for your good, too.”

At exactly nine, I said, “Okay, let’s do it now.”

“Well, just give them a second. I said they
open
at nine. Let them put their things down and get a cup of coffee.”

If I rode my bike to school, I’d be there for Nutrition. I said, “I have to go.”

“Okay, okay, let me find the number.” She was stalling. She knew it by heart. She dialed and handed me the receiver.

“Now, say you need to talk to Doctor Hawthorne. Say your name is Amy Spritzer. Go ahead.”

I didn’t want to do it, but she was looking at me. A woman said, Good morning, and I said, Hello, this is Amy Spritzer, Could I please speak to Dr. Hawthorne? Just a moment, please, she said. It was working.

“What should I say to him?”

My mother’s eyebrows lifted. “Is he coming?”

I handed the receiver over. “Hell-ow,” she said, in a high, soft voice. “Ye-es.”

I went to her purse and took out two dollars, and held them up for her to see. She shoved me away with her hand. It wasn’t going well.

“I just felt, really, once more … Well, I feel I have some things I’d like to talk to you about. With you…. Oh, all right. I know.”

She hung up the phone and looked straight at me. “See, he just got in. This wasn’t the right time. We should’ve waited an hour. Damn.” She bit her cuticle.

“Mom, if he’s going to marry you, why won’t he talk to you? People who marry you talk to you.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”

I walked outside to where I left my bike. My mother followed me. She stood across the pool, holding her robe closed over her chest.

“You better hope it’s true,” she said, in a warning voice. “You better hope Leonard Hawthorne loves me, because if he doesn’t, believe me, there’s nothing for us. Nothing, do you hear, nothing!”

She walked towards me on the cement, and I took off on my bike. I stood up, pedaling, giddy. She couldn’t seem to realize, it didn’t matter what I thought.

My mother said she was going into the hospital for an operation. Something in her voice made it sound like a lie. I tried to hold my own, I didn’t believe her.

There was something about the way she said things, about the way she was vague—it made her always seem wrong. You couldn’t be sure. It was hard to tell what my mother did and didn’t know. She didn’t use facts. But then, things that had seemed to be her whimsy, in the past, back in Wisconsin, things I’d laughed at with the rest of our family, turned out to be true here. Like the way my mother had wanted to get Hal excused from Vietnam by putting braces on his teeth. People had laughed and laughed. But
that’s what Leslie’s brother Dean had done and now he was at Stanford.

“What kind of operation?” I said.

She acted like she didn’t want to tell me. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Cancer,” she said, as if it were a secret.

“Where?”

She slapped a hand on her left breast. “But never mind, never mind.”

She did go into the hospital. She stayed overnight. Jack Irwin drove and I rode along in his car to pick her up. She was wearing her peach-colored robe with a white blanket on her lap when a nurse wheeled her out into the parking lot. I climbed over to the backseat. She acted extremely kind to Jack. And for years that was all I heard about her cancer.

I called Dr. Hawthorne from a pay phone at school and gave the receptionist my real name. He came on the line the same way he did when I’d said I was Amy.

“Yes, Ann, what can I do for you?”

A lot. Too much. That was the problem.

“My mother thinks you’re going to get married and I wanted to know if that was true.” My voice sounded small, peculiar.

“I could see you at three o’clock. Can you come in then?”

I said I could and I didn’t go back to class when the bell rang. I walked around the back of the typing building, where smokers ditched and leaned against the wall. I didn’t have a watch. Every few minutes I got up and looked at the clock over the track.

Dr. Hawthorne’s office was on the ninth floor of a Century City high rise. I leafed through a newsmagazine in his waiting room. It felt really odd to think how many times my mother had been here. I could imagine her, distracted, twisting and biting a piece of her hair.

Dr. Hawthorne wasn’t handsome. He was very thin, he wore glasses, and his mouth seemed to hold a permanent expression of distaste.

I sat down in a large, padded chair and looked around. I
waited. I’d already asked him on the phone if he was going to marry my mother. I was waiting for his answer.

But he didn’t say anything. “You have a couch and everything,” I said finally. I tried to sound normal and kidlike.

He acknowledged my comment with a smile that was more like a wince and then he was silent again. He looked at his hands intently.

“So are you going to marry my mother?”

He shook his head and something collapsed in me, a faint rumble, the beginning of a very long sound. I hadn’t known how much I’d believed my mother until just then. Everything was going to be different.

“She sees what she wants to see,” Dr. Hawthorne said. He held his hands tentatively, forming a basket of air. “My interest in her has always been strictly professional. I’ve told her that many times.”

My mother hadn’t worked for months, those bills jamming the drawer.

“I’ve done everything I can. I’ve stopped therapy. I refuse her phone calls. I am denying any pleas for contact. I feel that’s the best thing.”

I just looked at him.

“In fact,” he said, staring at his fingertips, lifting them slightly back, “I haven’t received payment for the last five months of treatment.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Somehow, that seemed the worst thing yet.

“It would be best for your mother to see another therapist.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” My throat swelled up on the inside, it was hard to talk.

“I feel this is the best thing. The only thing.”

“What should I do?” I tried to keep my chin in, tight, to lock my jaws.

“Do you have any contact with your father?”

I was surprised that after all those sessions with my mom, he didn’t know. I shook my head.

“No contact?”

I shook it again.

“Well, that makes it harder.” He looked at me, squinting. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

I found myself concentrating, as he did, on his wrists. His cuffs seemed amazingly white. “Try not to depend on your mother very much. She’s not responsible enough to take care of herself, not to mention another person.”

My chin wove.

“What are your plans after high school?” he asked finally. I suppose I should have stood up to leave.

“Oh, I don’t know. College. Back east maybe.” The way I was going now, skipping school, forget it. My grades weren’t great. I’d be in more trouble.

“That’s shooting pretty high. Well, good for you.”

I held on to the arms of my chair. I didn’t go. “I don’t know what to do.” That came out like a yelp. “I mean, I lie sometimes, too. I lie to people I’ll never see again, and my friends, they don’t really know me.”

He looked at his watch, on a thick gold band, loose on his delicate wrist. He seemed to be thinking I was her daughter after all. I was screwed up, too.

“We’ll have to stop here.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not going to charge you for this session.”

I still didn’t move. I took off one shoe and pulled down my knee sock and dug into my pockets, collecting all the money. I didn’t trust anywhere in the backhouse anymore, so I carried my money around with me.