Anywhere But Here (68 page)

As we left the restaurant, my mother noticed a weathervane on the wall, an antique deer, she wanted. I told her it looked like a decoration, but she went back in and found the owner. He accepted her check. We carried the deer to the car. “He’ll fit in a linen closet,” she said. “For the time being.”

My mother had gone to an accountant and now she carried a black checkbook the size of a three-ring binder.

We skidded in front of a church. My mother was driving.

“Since when do you believe in God,” I said.

She told me she wanted to light a candle for my grandmother. “I go to church every Sunday now. The pink Catholic in Beverly Hills. On Little Santa Monica.” This Sonoma church stood empty, plain, with simple pews and a pine altar. But all the candles were either lit or burnt down to the bottom of their glass canisters.

“I’ll blow one out and you can light it again.”

She shook her head no. “We’ll just say a prayer.” Then she dragged out her long black checkbook again. “Turn around, would you?” She wrote a check on my back and folded it up, stuffing it through the coin slot.

I didn’t have to ask the question.

“Sure, it’s charity. It’s a deduction, I deduct all these things now. And they’ll take my check. Gladly.”

She slipped her arm through mine. “You’ll never guess who I saw at church last month. Tony Camden,” she whispered. “I walked in and I saw this very good-looking head. But I only saw the back. You know. He was in front of me. But I thought to myself, Adele, that’s one
very
good-looking back of the head. So I sort of elbowed, genuflecting, you know, I think I was a little late, and I knelt down next to him, and I look and who is it but Tony Camden. He was kneeling holding the pleats of his pants. And I thought, Boy, would I like to know him.”

“Mom, he’s married.”

“Is he still? I’m not sure, I didn’t see her. Anyway, so I sort of smiled you know and then it was time to sit up and he sort of looked at me and he smiled and I’d smile again and then when
we walked out at the end, it was this huge beautiful day, real clear, you could see the mountains just like that, and we’re standing on the steps and he looked at me and said, Bye-bye, and I looked at him and said, Bye-bye. So I’ll tell you, I’m not missing one Sunday.”

Inside a dim, windowless room, on a cement floor, we undressed. A woman with feather earrings handed us rough, chlorine-smelling towels, her heavy hair brushing our arms. We’d stopped at the sign that said “Dr. Hickdimon’s Mud Baths.” My mother knotted a towel above her breasts, making an easy shift. My mother’s brilliance is in a lot of things you notice if you’re around a person all the time, but which don’t count for much in the world. While we talked, her hands moved through her hair, taking bobby pins from the edge of her mouth, arranging a perfect bun,

“This will be just what we need,” she said.

The woman led us to a room with two long bathtubs standing in the middle of the floor. Mud filled them to their thick curled brims and spilled over onto the elaborate claw feet. This wasn’t ordinary mud. It seemed blacker, and twigs and roots showed. It bubbled. A wooden plank floated on the surface of each tub.

It took a long time to lower us in. My mother went first. She sat on the plank, her belly falling into a small sag. It was a shock, to see her naked. She seemed both thinner and looser and I noticed on one of her teeth there was a black hairline like a crack in porcelain.

“Eeeeeee,” she said, sliding into the mud. Sweat glistened on her forehead like a cobweb.

Her eyes closed. “That feel good?” the woman asked.

“Mmmhmm,” my mother murmured.

Then it was my turn. The woman kneeled on the floor and pushed the plank so my legs went down like a seesaw. She covered the rest of me slowly, with handfuls of warm mud. You didn’t sink. The mud was too heavy. I could have lifted an arm or a leg but it would have been hard. Underneath you felt a thick cushion, we floated like the wood planks. Over me, the mud was about the same weight a person is, sleeping on top of you.

“We’ve really come a long way, you know, Ann, when you think about it?” My mother turned, her chin bobbing on the surface, her neck smeared with the mud. Then her eyes shut and she smiled.

I thought of what my mother once said about her dying. She didn’t want to be buried with the rest of our family in the cemetery above Prebble Park. She wanted to be mounted in a glass case, like a diorama at the Bay City Museum, only it would be in her grandchildren’s house. They would change her clothes and accessories according to the season.

I was with my mother the day she’d thought of wanting a scarecrow. We rode and rode past farms until she found the one she liked. It stood alone, set back in a cropped corn field. We couldn’t see it without squinting. The wind still lived in the scarecrow’s sleeves. The barn and farmhouse were miles away, tiny in the distance.

She bought the scarecrow from a farmer. He accepted her yellow check. The scarecrow’s clothes were faded and patched, the thinnest cotton. “He’s really a work of art, you should see in back, the way his overalls have been mended. It’s like an old quilt. He’s all hand done.”

The scarecrow had made my mother think of having herself mounted. It had been a joke in Wisconsin, when she’d been full of mischief, when we drove to the cemetery where our family plots were already owned. Now she’d never go back. She’d probably want to be cremated, scattered on California land, somewhere you could see the ocean and the mountains. She hardly ever made fun of things anymore.

I pushed my hand up to the lip of the tub to find her hand, but I could barely feel through the wet mud. Her hand was like something solid your fingertips hit when you’re digging.

I’d been back to Wisconsin a million times, on slow Greyhound buses during college, where there was always one very young woman in back, her hair in a bandanna, hitting her kid, saying “Shit-up,” softly before each smack, her voice pure as resignation, the kid wailing, arching higher every time, screaming, all
the way to Bay City, where I skipped down, light, onto the snow-dusted pavement in back of Dean’s ice cream parlor.

I remember the winter town, my grandmother asleep in the country at nine o’clock. Taking the Oldsmobile and driving by the Fox River; the old, old buildings of the men’s Y, buying chili and pie at the lighted diner. I sat on a stool smoking, looking out the window. And liking it so: the yellow streetlamps, coal and sulfur piles, smokestacks by the river. A girl going home to a mill town, the familiarity and the strangeness.

I drove to bars at night. Pool tables. Boys sheepish in army coats, home whole from Vietnam. Some. Bashful with me because they knew I went away. I’d gone to college.

To one I said, “I look much better at home.” It felt easy here in the old bars, stained walls, the thick inside air. I knew these boys.

“Jeez, you must look great there because you sure look pretty now.”

I almost got arrested for stealing a hot fudge pitcher at Dean’s. A manager from somewhere else made me take it out of my purse, hurt my arm when I twisted away. Then I had to walk out of the store, in the aisle between warm glass cases, where the intricate-colored German cookies worth a million dollars blinked.

I always drove the Oldsmobile. My mother had never let me touch our Lincoln, even when I was learning. She felt terrified I would ruin it and then she couldn’t get to work. I learned on Daniel Swan’s ancient Triumph and on Peter Keller’s Mercedes. But my grandmother walked with me to the garage, wearing her plastic rainboots, a clear scarf covering her head, and patiently got in at the passenger side and folded her hands in her lap. The Oldsmobile smelled like my grandmother. The tin cans with their coffee labels worn off that we used for watering at the cemetery rattled in the backseat.

It was a smooth, easy car, heavy on roads.

The last time I went, Carol picked me up at the airport, thin in a lemon-colored pantsuit, taking me to a new American car, a convertible.

“He builds now,” she said as we pulled into their gravel driveway. When I stepped out, with my suitcase, Jimmy stood in work boots, on top of the roof, holding huge coils of something silver.

He’d retired from the Rug Doctor and now he built in their wide backyard.

It was nothing like it had been. There was a laned Olympic swimming pool, a garden, blond rocks planted among petunias, an elevated redwood deck, with a redwood ladder to the hot tub. It looked like pictures of California.

“That’s the solar,” Carol said. Jimmy stood installing the silver coils to heat the pool year round. He climbed down and shook my hand. His voice seemed breathless all the time now. He’d built everything himself, slowly.

Carol still kept the books for the store and now she also sold the Herbalife, a menu of vitamins she and Jimmy ate every morning at the white dinette table, looking out at the new backyard.

Hal was changed entirely. He was thinner and he’d moved back home, into the tiny bedroom he and Ben had shared when they were growing up. He slept in his own small bed. When I stayed there, I slept in that room too. Every day, Hal woke up and dressed while I was asleep. I heard him moving around; he seemed exceptionally neat now, spare of movement. He worked at Three Corners, managing the pressure-cleaning machines, renting out the Rug Doctor. He drove to work before seven in the morning. On the bedside table rested a large, hardback book with a pink padded cover like a Valentine’s candy box.
Our Daily Helper
, read the title, and the pink satin ribbon was always placed in that day’s prayer.

I told Carol my mother still had both breasts, the last time I’d seen her.

“I thought so,” she said. “You know the funny thing is we get along now, your mom and I.”

For some reason that made me sad.

Mostly, my aunt drove me around places. Museums, antique shops, flea markets, the huge untouched Goodwill and Salvation Army stores by the river. I liked to find old things.

Friday night, we went out for fish fry. The restaurants flew in the fish, frozen, from Canada because the Fox River and the bay were polluted by the paper mills. Carol said the Wildlife Preservation Center had cameras out from the local news; the ducks’ beaks twisted, they were born mutated, from eating the polluted fish. “And you should smell the East River, does it stink,” she said. “They say it’ll take ten years to clean it up.”

My grandmother’s house, in the yard next door, had been rented.

“A young couple where they both work,” Carol said. “He’s a floor manager at the Shopko.”

I looked at it every day I was there, a dark house with low windows above the ground. The grass had grown tall against the siding. Carol said they hired Mary Griling to mow both lawns.

It made me think of once when I sent my grandmother a blank notebook covered in fabric for a diary. When I helped Carol clean out the house, the dresser drawers, I’d found the book wrapped in wax paper, the pages thick and perfectly white.

I couldn’t stand the food, after a day or two it drove me crazy. Not one thing was fresh. The lettuce, the iceberg lettuce, seemed old. Jimmy took us all for dinner at the new Holiday Inn. It was a buffet; sweet wine, too much food, races for the shrimp, everything else overcooked. I hated it and hated myself hating it.

I told Lolly, when she showed me her office. She worked for Dan Sklar now, we walked through his Japanese rock garden, our heels sinking in the moss. I told her how I couldn’t stand the Holiday Inn buffet.

“On the west side, oh, you didn’t like that? Oh no, hmm, well,
that’s really my favorite place, they have a new chef over there.” She laughed her old sly laugh. “Oh, well, if you didn’t like that, you really have outgrown Bay City. Because that’s really about the best restaurant there is, here.”

Lolly had some kind of diabetic anemia and she had to eat protein every few hours. In the office, she took out a small package of tinfoil from her purse and unwrapped it. It was a cold sliced turkey heart.

Once, from Providence, I’d called information and found Ted Diamond’s number. He still had a listing in Bay City. It turned out he was married, with five sons. His wife sounded nice on the phone. When she put him on, he said he was okay, tired. “Your mother,” he said with a bad laugh.

Carol told me after they’d put in the pool they ran into Ted and the new wife somewhere. A week or two later, it was in summer, the new wife called and asked if she might bring the little boys over to go swimming. They didn’t know each other, just that Ted had been married to my mother once. Carol said no she had bridge club and couldn’t let them come when she wasn’t there because of insurance. The wife had called four or five times again.

Once I found a Christmas card in the mail, one of those pictures, with Ted and the wife and the five little boys dressed in identical red blazers with gold buttons, in front of a big fireplace with five red stockings. The wife had written on the bottom, “Ted sends his love and he’ll write you a letter after the new year.”

The thing with Ted is I always know where to find him. And, like with most people that way, since I could call him and talk to him any time, I never feel like it.