Golden State (2 page)

At the store after work, feeling clammy and sorry for myself, I spent too much on groceries for dinner—a rack of lamb and an extravagant bottle of wine. Once I was past the cash register and home, it seemed worth it, the kitchen filled with the smell of rosemary and garlic sizzling in fat. Lilly drawing in the steam on the window.

The phone rang, and I knew before answering that it was Eric. When I heard his weary
hey
, I understood he wasn’t going to be just late. He was going to be ten or eleven o’clock late. I tried to push down my anger, my disappointment. More than good food, I’d been craving conversation, adult life, the pleasure of lingering at the table over a second glass of wine. Eric must have wanted some of that, too. When he apologized, he sounded defeated.

It was starting. I knew the cycle of Eric’s overworking as well as I knew the seasons, the back-burner cases heating up, the trial dates looming. At first he’d dread the unreasonable hours, the time away from home, the fatigue, but in time he would give in to the drug of overwork, fingers drumming, his gaze gone from us. The children and I would dismiss this stranger, draw into one another until it was over
and he turned to the task of wooing us back. The girls would give in at the first sign their real father had returned. It took me longer to forgive the betrayal of all those hours.

I ate with the kids, feeling sorry for myself. Julia made a show of clearing a few plates before taking off to study. The rain picked up. I sent Lilly to get ready for bed. She came back, reporting a leak in her bedroom. I grabbed a soup pot and followed her upstairs,

There was no end to the things that needed repairing in our old house. We’d been fearless when we bought it fifteen years before, a 1920s, two-story, Spanish-style stucco, with worn hardwood floors, stairs that creaked, leafy views, and young families up and down the block. We’d updated the kitchen to suit my idea of myself as a cook, and left everything else as it was.

I moved Lilly’s dollhouse away from the damp spot on her ceiling, put the pot on the floor to catch the leak, and read her bedtime story to the plinking of water on metal.

“What are we?” Lilly asked, stalling when I reached to turn off the light.

I asked what she meant.

She ticked off on her fingers. “Mexican, Jewish, Asian, Catholic.”

“We’re Californians,” I said.

“But what else?”

“There is nothing else,” I said, kissing her good night. Another time, I’d tell her the stories from my side of the family: my mother’s forebears crossing the Sierra Nevada just ahead of the Donner Party; my father’s great-great-grandfather arriving for the Gold Rush and never telling anyone where he’d come from or what he’d left behind.

After I’d said good night to Julia, I graded papers exactly the way I told my students never to do their homework: in front of the television. A report on the eleven o’clock news made me put down my red pencil. The FBI had tied the bombing at Stanford two weeks before to a serial bomber they’d nicknamed the Cal Bomber for the state in which he operated. Our state. Years on the FBI’s most wanted list, and all they had on him was the composite drawing on the screen. A man
in a baseball cap and sunglasses. He looked like everyone and no one. Until Stanford, he hadn’t sent a bomb anywhere in six years. Now he was back.

I turned off the set.

Eric opened the front door at eleven twenty, his pinstripe suit rain spattered, the fresh shirt I’d watched him button this morning now limp and clinging to him. He sat next to me, his briefcase sliding to the floor, leaned his head against the couch, and shut his eyes.

“That bad?”

“That bad,” he said. “I’m sorry about dinner.”

“I hate your job.” I meant it. The incessant hours, the every-man-for-himself mentality in the guise of congenial partnership.

“When the kids are through college . . .” His voice trailed off.

We’d crossed this territory before. Eric’s conviction that he overworked for us, and mine that we never asked this of him. I never cared about money. My parents were lofty thinkers who drove old cars and took us on vacations to a dusty cabin in the Sierras. My first job out of college was as a temp for two dollars an hour. It got me to an attic room in Paris, with yogurt and French bread for dinner. When I finally trained for a career, it was as a teacher. When I married Eric in my parents’ backyard, my sister and I barefoot with wildflowers in our hair, he was a part-time high school athletic coach. I’d never felt like we needed anything more.

I brushed Eric’s face with my fingers, and felt the deep creases spreading from his eyes. We were the same age.

I was quiet for a moment. “Remember when my dad was alive and my mother still had Thanksgiving, when we’d sing ‘Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House’ with Julia? And then she’d ask if every pair of trees along I-80 was the woods?”

He laughed, no memory about the kids too corny for us. I asked if he was hungry. He said he was famished, no time even for lunch. In the kitchen, he picked up the wine bottle I’d bought and looked at the label. “I’m sorry,” he said again. I’d left the bottle out so he would be, but I was finished with that game.

“Open it,” I said. He ate his reheated meal as if he’d never tasted anything as good. It was nearly midnight, but we talked as if we didn’t have to get up at six in the morning. Together, we’d always had that, the ability to forget about tomorrow.

I told him what I’d heard on the news.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Julia was there.”

He took my hand. “She’s okay,” he said.

We weren’t talking about a terrible crime anymore. We were talking about Julia, our high-strung daughter, who wailed day and night as an infant, who later couldn’t tolerate a broken crayon, a wrinkled paper, or the seam on the toe of her socks. Our firstborn read by three, played chess at six, and began writing a novel at seven. Even now, we had to limit the hours she studied, enforce days off. Another mother might have bragged. I worried, and Eric reassured.

We got in bed, listening to the water dripping in Lilly’s room. “You know what this means,” he said. “We can’t put off getting a new roof another year.”

I nodded supportively but I didn’t agree. All the roof needed—all I needed—was for it to stop raining.

Eric reached out his arm. I moved next to him, patted down the hair on his chest, and laid my head there. He was asleep immediately. I don’t know how he did that, awake to dead asleep in an instant, no drifting off.

I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to stay here, this hair pressing my cheek, the rhythm of this strong heart at my ear, the sound of rain on the window, punctuated by the night groans of an old house leaking at the seams.

chapter three

T
HANKSGIVING
loomed and I still hadn’t made a single plan. The simplest and the hardest thing would be to start with Sara. Although my sister and I lived less than a hundred and fifty miles apart, we hadn’t seen each other in two years. Sara didn’t do holidays. She hated driving to the city from her place in Potter Valley. She hadn’t much liked my husband since he put on a suit sixteen years ago to go work as a lawyer. She’d say no, but I’d feel good about inviting her, as if the gulf between us were not wide, as if one day she might join us, and Bobby, too.

I called from the wall phone in the kitchen while the kids and Eric watched TV in the family room. My sister and I had both been playing our parts for years. Sara did the aging hippie on her plot of land miles from anywhere, rewashing plastic baggies. I was the corporate lawyer’s wife with the evidence of our careless consumption overflowing the bins at the side of the house.

A few minutes into our conversation, though, Sara threw me a curve. “I thought I’d go down to Mom’s this weekend for her birthday. It’s her eightieth. You should come, Natalie. Mom would like that. The three of us together.”

“Mother isn’t turning eighty,” I corrected. “She was born in 1916. She’s going to be seventy-nine.”

We argued for a few minutes, but the number was hardly the point. Seventy-nine, eighty-four, a million. What did it matter? We both knew that all Mother really wanted for her birthday was to hear from Bobby.

* * *

E
RIC INSISTED
I drive his Lexus to my mother’s even though I was more comfortable in my old Honda. There was something about his car, the padding of the seats, the quiet climate control of the ride, the way the windows demanded to be rolled up, that made me feel not quite present. I was driving from Berkeley to Sacramento, but I was in no way connected to the road.

I pulled off on Stockton Street, the exit for the house I’d grown up in, swearing when I realized my mistake. I’d have to drive through traffic and turn around to get back on the freeway. But, really, what was the rush? There wasn’t any set time for us to gather in the gated community where my mother now lived.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to drive by the old house, I thought, wondering if that had been my aim all along. I turned off the air conditioner, rolled down the windows, and headed toward Forty-Sixth Street. In a car that was not my own, parked in front of the house where my mother no longer lived, I remembered the summer heat of my childhood. Valley heat so intense it burned the grass and shimmered the air, sweat dripping onto my cotton top, my father coming up the walk, his white shirt stuck to his back, his fingers hooked into a jacket thrown over his shoulder, my mother behind drapes drawn to keep out the sun.

When the heat became unbearable, I’d go across the hall to Bobby’s room in the coolest corner of the house. He had a
Boys’ Life
room with brown-on-brown-striped bedspreads, shelves crammed with books, a built-in desk stretching under the window, and a small, shady sun porch stacked with more books. He never seemed to mind it when I showed up in his space. He’d let me read from his collection of Superman and Batman comics. I’d sit on the floor between the second twin bed and the wall, a tall metal glass of icy Kool-Aid at my side, my back against the bed, my bare feet resting on the cool plaster wall. I remembered the smell of those comics, the feel of them on my fingers, my big brother building his model planes or playing a solo game of chess, the two of us quietly together.

A car horn sounded up the street. I snapped to attention, as if the
honk had been directed at me. Then I started my own car, and headed to where I was supposed to be.

* * *

T
HE GUARD
at my mother’s complex waved me through. He wasn’t doing much of a job guarding, but then I didn’t look like much of a robber, a middle-aged woman in her husband’s shiny car, a present for her mother gift-wrapped on the seat beside her.

Even though my mother had lived here four years, I still struggled to find her condo among all the other pale-colored units surrounded by artificially green lawn.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said at the door. “I told Sara not to, but she had a bee in her bonnet.” My mother had graduated first in her class from Berkeley, traveled the world, and danced at the White House, but at heart she was still a girl from the Sacramento Valley. She looked like an advertisement for the golden years—tall, broad shouldered, and smooth faced, her once-salt-and-pepper hair now a stylishly cut white. She wore expensive slacks, a crisp white blouse, and a red cardigan with gold buttons. A pair of heavy gold bracelets jangled on her wrist.

I felt suddenly sloppy in my jeans and T-shirt and the unbuttoned, flowing blouse I’d grabbed at the last minute. I lacked what my mother had always had, the ability to dress well without thinking about it. She waved me toward the bone-colored couch. “Sit, I’ve made iced tea.” She refused to let me help her, and I felt like what I was, a visitor in my mother’s house.

When she went for the tea, I circled the living room. I still couldn’t get over her new place, the white walls, the sterile rooms, the absence of family history. My mother had taken almost no furniture from the house where she had lived with and without my father for forty years. She’d put the photographs away, the framed black-and-whites of my parents’ life in politics: my mother and father with Governor and Mrs. Brown, with Adlai Stevenson, with John F. Kennedy. My father a young man beside Eleanor Roosevelt, who is smiling at him instead of the camera.

“I miss the old stuff,” I said when my mother returned.

“God, I don’t,” she replied, putting our iced tea on coasters on the pristine coffee table.

I looked at my mother. She could have stepped out of a 1940s movie. She was never like the other mothers, nagging, waiting for you to come home. She spoke to five-year-olds as if they were college graduates. As usual, I didn’t know what to say.

When Sara barged through the door a moment later, I was actually relieved.

“Man, I don’t know how you do it,” she said to me. “I just can’t do traffic anymore.” She waved her fingers. “All those people in their miniature tanks.” She knitted her brows. “That’s not your car parked outside, is it, Nat?”

“It’s Eric’s,” I said, repressing the urge to curry favor with her by adding that I still had my same old Honda.

She looked older than when I’d last seen her. The long, wavy hair she tied behind her neck was now more gray than brown. The lines around her eyes were deeper, the flesh on her neck looser, but her body looked as lithe as it had been in her high school cheerleading days. She wore a short, khaki-colored cotton shift, her legs tanned and muscled, a T-shirt, a bulky sweater, and flip-flops. Only Sara could drive for two and a half hours working the stiff clutch of an old Volvo in those floppy rubber sandals.

My sister had started college as a sorority girl and finished as an earth mother dishing up brown rice to a houseful of hippies. She graduated, bought a skirt and blouse, and the next thing I knew, she was a social worker with a car and her own apartment overlooking Lake Merritt. Her new life had seemed so glamorous to me that I fantasized about getting a county job of my own when I got out of college.

After a few years, Sara moved north for a succession of jobs in ever more remote towns, until she settled in Potter Valley. I wasn’t even sure how she lived anymore—whether she worked or not. Sara didn’t like explaining herself any more than she liked getting mired in the quotidian activities that burdened the rest of us.