Anywhere But Here (67 page)

That morning, Jimmy talked to me, reminding. We paid for Adele’s divorce, we were still at the store, trying to make a go of it, get out of the hole. He wanted to retire and build A swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, the solar, a house in Florida. He wanted to give the Rug Doctor to Hal, for Tina’s college education.

I felt something dissolving in me. Jimmy turned, made me look around. “We could have a nice life yet, Carol. We don’t have much time left.”

I said okay. We sued.

There where we’d slept, that’s where Jimmy put in the swimming pool.

I come about once a week and water the flowers. I pray. I talk to him. I talk to Benny all the time. Oh, I don’t know, I say, “I suppose you’re real disappointed in me, in what I’ve been doing. You must not be too proud of your mother.”

Jimmy wants ashes, he wants to be cremated into that dust. He says I should scatter him in the backyard. He never stops at the cemetery, even when he’s driving past. But he doesn’t really think Ben is here. I do, see.

Gram had seven strokes in all. After the first one, she snapped back in twenty-four hours. With each one it took a little longer. And she’d lost some by the last. “Ben, aren’t you dead yet,” she’d say to me, when she thought I was Benny. “Ben, I thought you died, Ben.”

That last time, your mom called, she talked to all the doctors in the hospital and she had her doctors in Los Angeles give them orders. Gram had things in her hair, test things, wires she really never should have had to have. And all those years, Adele never visited, never once sent a card. But that was your mom. She yelled at me, ooh, in the hospital, it wasn’t nice. But you know, we get along now.

They had to move Gram near the end. That night I stayed up and talked to her. They say the hearing is one of the last things to go. I don’t know anymore what I said. That last night, I was holding her hand, she didn’t seem happy, her mouth looked bitter and she kept calling Adele, Adele. She cried that name all night before she went.

She had a restless time. She’d turn around and toss and switch back and forth. She couldn’t get comfortable. I was there when Granny, your great-grandmother, passed away and she got this
big, beautiful smile on her face. And I was waiting for something like that to come to Gram. But it never did. I asked the doctor, I asked, why couldn’t that have happened to her, Granny was really sort of a mean woman, and my mother was so good, and the doctor said, Everyone does it in a different way. Every one is different.

Benny and my mother and my father all share the one granite stone.

Somebody else finally died.

C
hristmases I did nothing. Holidays in repertory houses, huge silver and black, beautiful LA romances on the screen, sipping expensive coffee, I was in love, but I wouldn’t go to his house, either. By that time families bugged me. Other people’s as much as my own. We’d make out, touching each other’s clothes; the same jeans, flannels, soft, worn-in things. We loved the movies; they were black and white, beautiful—everything we needed. We sat in the dark, audiences raucous from displacement, all of us away from home, gay men, foreign students, Jews, laughing wildly at
Sullivan’s Travels, The Navigator
, or
Seven Chances
, gasping through
Hiroshima Mon Amour
.

No matter what, I wouldn’t go to LA.

“Some people remember birthdays,” my mother said and hung up the phone.

Finally, my mother and I rented a car in northern California, a compromise. She said she’d always wanted to see the wine country. We sat in the car, my mother straight in her seat, staring at her hands, looking deserving. I told her Leslie lived in Berkeley and I’d call her, she could come with us or not, whatever my mother wanted.

“I thought you said it would be just us.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’d rather be just us,” she said.

It was spring. We hadn’t seen each other for five years. It was interesting just to look at her.

All day, my mother talked about retirement. “I know just what I want,” she said. “I’ll do it all in French country. I’ll have a brick wall in the kitchen. Just real homey.” In a restaurant, she tilted her head. “What’s this? Is this Bach? I love Bach. Do you know Des Pres, Honey? Well, I mean, he’s dead, but there’s this record. I learn these things from Daniel Swan, he’s a double major in music at UCLA. You wouldn’t believe all the things I’m learning.” She nodded in time. “This
is
Bach.”

She snuck little pieces of bread into her mouth. “I’ve already started to get things. For the house,” she whispered. “See that blackboard up there? I bought two old school blackboards like that. Even nicer. They’re in the Swans’ basement. And the pine chests I told you about are for the house, too. They’ll eventually go in a bedroom. I have another armoire in Nan’s garage. See, and then what I’ll do is I’ll have a big open kitchen and when you bring your kids home, a boyfriend or someone special, or no, just your kids, you always have nice friends, like Leslie and all of them, I’ll have the menu written down on the blackboard so when you come down in the morning it’ll all be written out.”

“Where are you looking for this house?”

Her cheeks lifted. She folded her arms on the table. “I want somewhere where I can see the mountains and the ocean. The whole wide scope of things. It doesn’t have to be a big place, I just want a little house, something simple.”

“’Cause aren’t houses in LA like a fortune now? I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. Remember that little house I wanted to buy from Julie Edison? Eight hundred thousand dollars, they’re asking now. Remember how I used to drive by? I could shoot myself now. I knew that area was going to be big, I knew it, if I’d have only trusted my instincts—”

“But we never had the money.”

She seemed clear that day, her face intelligent and thin. Her arms refolded, rueful. “No, you’re right. We never had the money.
But I do now. And I’m saving. So just wait. Someday your mom’ll have a real great place for you to bring your friends home to. By the time you’re in graduate school. That’s when you really need it anyway. That’s when the kids in your generation really start to get engaged. I hear it all the time on ‘LA Good-Morning.’ They’re waiting even up until the thirties. Like my dentist.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to graduate school. Anyway, I’m living with this guy.”

“This Henry.” She shrugged. “I wish you’d waited. Pretty soon I’ll have something you could really show someone.”

“Well, I mean, I don’t know if it’s going to work out.”

“But all the others there in Providence must see you’re living with someone, all the real choice boys.”

“Nobody really knows.”

“Sure they do, don’t kid yourself. And they don’t respect you for it either, Ann, no matter what they say. A boy doesn’t respect you when you give him that for nothing. I just remember when I came home from college, what did I have for a boy to see? Lime Kiln Road. And Grilings.”

The waiter came, we ordered dessert.

“Well, I don’t know, I’m not tied to LA, either. And I’m getting sick of all the driving. Maybe I’ll just end up near you, I’ve heard Cape Cod and what is it, something Vineyard, is supposed to be gorgeous, they say they’re the prettiest beaches in the world. I mean, if you really like it there, if you want to stay.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll probably just work for a while, travel around. I might waitress at some truckstop.”

“With your advantages.” She laughed. “I can’t really see you at a truckstop.”

“It could happen.”

“Well, don’t you dare. You know I worked in a cheese factory all through college. It wasn’t so much fun. Speaking of truck-stops, I got a letter from Lolly.” She unfolded a sheet of peach-colored paper from her purse. After all these years and no trips home, Lolly still wrote to my mother. And I knew for an almost fact, my mother never sent letters. After years of saying her mail
was lost, my mother wouldn’t trust the U.S. Postal Service. She believed mailboxes in LA were obsolete, that no one picked up from them anymore. She said she opened one and saw cobwebs. If she absolutely had to send something, she’d drive to the post office and pay nine dollars for overnight express. Paying made my mother trust things more.

I’d heard my grandmother complain. “I never get a card, nothing. Even when she calls and I send money, I never even get a card to say thanks.” It wasn’t exactly laziness. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten them. I’d seen my mother trying to write something down. She would sit at the table with a card or a piece of fancy colored paper and she’d write and cross out and finally give up. She had it in her mind that she would get married and be rich and then she could make up for all she didn’t send by wiring a plane ticket out for her mother to visit and taking her to see everything and buying presents. That’s just the way my mother was.

She smoothed out the soft paper of the Bay City
Press Gazette
clipping; a photograph of Lolly hitting the one-million-dollar mark, lifting her left arm up to a chart. Lolly sold real estate now, she’d gone to school and gotten her license the year we left. “Let me tell you, in Bay City, that must not have been easy. That’s a lot of little houses to add up to a million.” My mother scanned the letter. “And she’s still having this passionate, that’s what she calls it, affair with the ex-priest. She lost her virginity at forty-five, can you imagine that?” My mother wrinkled her nose.

“Do you think she’ll ever get married?”

“No, I don’t think so. I doubt it. But who knows? She does have boyfriends.”

“It sounds like they’re mostly ordained.”

My mother laughed. “You
are
funny, besides being factual.”

“Maybe if we’d stayed in Bay City, you could afford a house there.”

“Oh, sure, I could buy a house there now, a great house. But I’d never go back. It’s really nothing, you know, no culture. Nothing.” My mother took a pill bottle out of her purse and broke off a piece of seaweed for each of us. “At my age, believe me, I need all the E I can get.”