Anywhere But Here (71 page)

“Why do people catch them?”

“They’re good to eat, I think. I suppose you fry them.”

We stand on the balcony and don’t see anything. The sand looks the way it always looks, shiny and smooth, dark. My mother bends down to roll up her pants. “Come on,” she says.

A few minutes later, she runs back up the redwood stairs, two at a time. “It’s thick with them. They’re all over. You just can’t see them from here.” She takes pails from the garage, stepping over the carrot cake, and we fill them with water from the hose. The buckets feel heavy and the slap of water on my leg is cold as we lug them down to the beach.

It takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust. But then, I see them everywhere, wriggling like corkscrews in the sand, silver on one side. The shore comes alive with them.

“You catch them with your hands,” my mother yells, running, her arms low to the ground.

Holding a grunion is like holding a muscular beam of moonlight. It’s that fast. They try to squirm up out of your fist. Some flop down, slithering back into the dark shellac of water. The ones we catch clap against the sides of our pails.

There are hundreds of them. When you put your foot down in a cluster of grunion, they spread away from you in starlike migration.

I look up at the bowl of the sky, alive with stars and stars. They seem to be wriggling, too, burning holes in the dark. My mother knocks the pail over, giving a slush of fish back to the water. We turn it right and start again. It seems we can go on all night. My hands grow quicker and bold.

Our buckets thump like hearts and we keep running. It seems they will come all night, the wet fish we can touch.

“So you didn’t buy a house.”

She sighs. “I really want a house in just the RIGHT spot, where I can see the mountains and the ocean, and where there’s a little artists’ colony and I can take a ceramics class and make stained-glass windows, all these various things. I’m just going to wait until I can afford a real choice place. The house can be little, cute, but small.”

“You bought the car, though.”

“Yes,” she says, cautiously, not sure what she’s admitting.

We leave the beating pails on our balcony and take our clothes off there, letting them fall in soft piles. I don’t know what time it is. The sand still glitters with grunion. Now I see them everywhere. We run the cold hose water over our bodies, before we go inside.

In the morning, we take showers, still smelling of seaweed. I pack. We step over the carrot cake and the murky buckets of dead black fish in the garage, into the white car in the sun. I bring my suitcase with me. I’m leaving my mother to deal with the stink and dead things when I am gone.

“Today is Sunday. It is the third of March, 1979.” There is a sign on the fourth floor of my mother’s convalescent home in Santa Monica. The bright crayoned letters continue, “The weather today is mild and sunny. ‘Nice.’ ” I follow my mother through the nursing station where she flips through charts, marking files. She moves with competence, the flaps of her lab coat brisk behind her. Everyone knows her here.

“I told you about Miss Eldridge,” she says. “She’s the one who had beautiful, beautiful things. This may be hard for you, but it’s good, I think. You should see what happens.”

My mother told me about Miss Eldridge; she came to Los Angeles from Medford, Oregon, during the First World War and lived with her fiancé, who was in the service. She waited for him and he was killed in the war. Then, she worked all her life as a legal secretary, never married.

The curtain is drawn, separating Miss Eldridge from someone else in the room. What I am not prepared for is her beauty. She sits up on the bed, perfectly clear, her hands the conscious hands of anyone.

“Claire, I told you I’d bring my daughter to come meet you and I brought her. Here she is, here’s my Ann.”

Miss Eldridge looks at my mother and then at me, and shakes my hand. Miss Eldridge is crying without any noise, and my
mother begins to cry too. I go over to a bulletin board and study the pins. There are three postcards. I remember now that Miss Eldridge has no children. “I’ll change it again this month,” my mother says.

“Thank you for bringing her to see me.”

“I told you I would. And I did. I brought her. And now she’s off again.”

Miss Eldridge nods.

We sit in the car.

“She’ll never leave there,” my mother says, “it’s really sad, because she’s mentally as clear as you or me.”

My mother’s open eyes are as motionless and blue as a fish’s. “But they don’t have it that bad, you know?” She looks down. “I feel like you’re always leaving.”

“I always come back,” I say.

“But not for long.”

I shrug. “That’s what kids do, they leave.”

I only left home once and that was years ago.

My mother drives a freeway to the Valley. She turns onto an exit I don’t recognize and slows at a gas station. Across the street is a school, fenced with high aluminum.

She pulls up around the back and then I see it: our own Lincoln, up on cinderblocks.

“Do you want it, Ann? I’ve had them keep it for you. He says it’ll only cost two hundred to spiff it up and it might still run a long time. I’ve got the keys for you.”

She took them out of the glove compartment, but I say no.

“Are you sure? It’s a good car still. You just may need it.”

But we drive to the airport, leaving it.

In front of the terminal, I gather my suitcase. My mother doesn’t want to park in the lot. “Somebody could really bump it, you know? Sit a second, we’ll just talk, we’ll wait here,” my mother says. “You have time.”

My flight is not for an hour. We sit, not moving, in the new car.

Against the window, she looks perfect. Her scarf falls and ripples at her collarbone, her hair curls under. For a second, I feel like she is leaving, not me. Then I glance down at her hands.

“My hands are my worst feature,” she says. “These age marks. But they’re getting better. I put E on them.”

We turn and see each other.

She says, “Life is just too little, isn’t it?”

“Mom.” I kiss her, then I run out of the car.

N
obody knows it to this day, but my husband almost killed Hitler. That was the most exciting time of my life, those three years I was in the service. Before and after, I’ve been pretty much in the ordinary. I’ve stayed here close to home. My sister has had the excitement; she’s been all over, she went to college, did everything. But my big time was during the War.

Before that I was real shy, not like Adele. My mother said even when I was just born, I was always a quiet baby. Apparently, I slept all the time. I didn’t wake them at night, nothing. I was real easy. Well, I can attest that Adele was never that way.

I was eleven years old when they had Adele and I didn’t even know my mother was pregnant. I was so dumb, naive. Just all of a sudden, I had a little sister. I didn’t like it much, either. No. I had to baby-sit. I was the one who got up in the middle of the night to change her. And she cried plenty. There was always such an age difference, too. We were never really friends.

My parents didn’t tell me anything. I remember when I first started menstruating, I didn’t know what it was. I was in church and here I was bleeding. And when I came home I was still bleeding. Well, I was so upset, I didn’t know what to think. I told my mother and she said to me, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you about that?”

And I thought later, many times, Well, gee, who was ever going to tell me, if my own mother didn’t?

When Adele was that age, she had plenty of friends to teach her the ins and outs. She always had a crowd. But I was too shy.
I never even had a date or anything and this was in high school. I was so shy that if I walked down a street and a fellow was coming towards me, I’d go all the way around the block to avoid him. Isn’t that terrible? I think it is.

After high school, I wanted to go in training to be a nurse. But my mother didn’t like the idea of nursing, I don’t know why, she just didn’t see me as a nurse. I still think I would have liked it.

But she knew someone who did beauty and that woman, a Mrs. Beamer, convinced my mother that beauty was really the thing. So I went to beauty school here downtown and then I worked at the Harper Method Beauty Shop. It was okay, it wasn’t too bad, I didn’t mind the work one way or the other and I got in with a nice group of girls.

It did help me with my own hair. Now I can go with once a week in the beauty shop and in between, I keep it up myself. I don’t give myself permanents or tint my own hair, but everything else, I do. And when I lost my hair in that trailer fire, I knew how to style the wig.

And I learned a lot there, from the other girls. Upstairs from the beauty shop was a doctor my father knew. The doctor’s brother was a veterinarian and my father had him out once or twice a year to look at the mink. Well, this particular doctor treated all the girls who lived at the Silver Slipper. That was a tavern at the end of our road. I’d meet them on the stairs as they went up to see Dr. Shea and we nodded. I’d say hello, they’d say hello to me. We’d seen each other on Lime Kiln Road. Well, eighteen years old and until the girls at the beauty shop told me, I didn’t know what they were. My mother never said a word. She told me to stay away from there and I knew my dad was real mad when they opened the Silver Slipper Tavern and put the beer sign up, but I thought he was mad about the drinking.

I don’t know why I was like that, so backward. Maybe because of my father. Because of what happened to them, having to get married, he was too protective. And I think they made me scared. Because I remember once, I was in fifth or sixth grade, we were living in the house on Lime Kiln Road and some boys came once and knocked on the door. They were just boys from my class. And
my father answered and yelled to my mother. “They’re after Carol, keep her upstairs,” he said. “They’re here after Carol.”

Well. I suppose they just wanted to get my homework or for me to come outside and play. Oh, when I even think about it, they’re after Carol. So he was a part of it, I’m sure.

Then, around that time, after high school, I first started going out a little. I was nineteen or twenty and I used to go with the girls I met working. We went out to Bay Beach. Then, Bay Beach was still real nice. That green and white pavilion was just new and all painted—it was a Public Works Project, for years the men were there building and then they painted those murals for the ballroom. Franklin Roosevelt came to Bay City when it opened. Now they just have those darn pinball machines and computer games. It’s all games where it used to be a dance floor. And I remember, they were just putting in the bumper cars. They already had that little train that went along the beach. We saw beautiful sunsets over the Fox River with the silhouettes of the smoke stacks. Those piles of coal and sulfur would take on colors. The bus went right along the river, north to the bay. You went with the girls on a Friday or Saturday night and the fellows came separately. Our crowd from the beauty shop rode on the bus. There were no dates or anything. You’d just dance. And they got the good bands to come here to Bay City then. Tommy Hill and Sammy Kaye. I remember, Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye. You’d stand by the sides with your girl friends and the fellows would come and ask you to dance and you’d think, Ooogh, he asked me, so excited. There was no go off in the car and do things, like now. It was a whole different way of life. Not everything sex, sex, sex. And then you went home on the bus again. If you did go out after, you’d go to Dean’s and have a sundae with the girls. The boys went somewhere else.