Golden States (11 page)

“Good-bye.” She walked out of the kitchen. David thought he heard her whisper something, though the words were lost.

They all waited until her footsteps had sounded on the last stair. A floorboard creaked in the upstairs hall. Rob winced. “Well,” he said, “thank you for breakfast.”

“You haven’t finished,” Mom said.

“I’m not really hungry anymore. I think the sooner I get on the road again, the better it’ll be.”

“I’m sorry, Rob,” Mom said. “But it’s her decision.”

“I know,” he said. “I just thought—I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think at all. I just left the office and got in my car and drove to Los Angeles. I’m probably as surprised as she is to find me here.” He glanced around at the kitchen with such bewilderment that David felt a pang of sympathy despite himself. Everything about Rob’s face had changed: the sharpness gone out of his eye, the thrust out of his jaw. With a shock, David could see how he had looked when he was twelve.

“Well,” Mom said, “let me see if I can dig up a thermos. I’ll give you some tea for the road.”

“No thanks. I think I’ll just pick up and go right now. Bye, kids. It’s been nice seeing you.” He took his napkin from his lap and dabbed his mouth with it, carefully.

“Good-bye,” Lizzie said. When Rob stood up she jumped out of her chair, and followed him to the door. Mom and David came close behind.

“What’s your favorite song on
Thriller?”
Lizzie asked him at the threshold.

“Oh, I don’t know. I like all of them. What’s yours?”

“ ‘Beat It,’ ” Lizzie said. “And ‘Billie Jean.’ ”

“Those are my favorites too,” Rob told her.

“Also, ‘Thriller,’ ” Lizzie said.

“Right, that one’s great too. They’re all great. Thanks for breakfast, Beverly.”

“I don’t really like ‘Baby Be Mine’ all that much,” Lizzie said. “Do call when you get back, okay?” Mom said to Rob. “Just so we don’t worry about you.”

“Right. Take care, David my friend.”

“Uh-huh,” David said.

“Bye, Rob,” Lizzie said. “Drive carefully.”

“Bye, Lizzie.”

“I
do
like ‘Baby Be Mine,’ ” she said. “I just don’t like it as much as the others.”

“I know how you feel. Bye.”

“Bye.
Drive carefully.”

Then he was gone, nimbly down the two concrete steps and along the white walk to the street. From the back he looked wholly respectable, a man in a suit, off to work. Lizzie waved to him, and when he got to the sidewalk he waved back.

“Come back soon,” she called.

As Rob’s suit and hair disappeared around the hedge, David said to her, “That was a stupid thing to say. He’s never coming back.”

“Shut up, you asshole,” she said.

“Back in the house, both of you,” Mom told them.

They returned to the breakfast nook and ate the last of their eggs. “Well, it’s too bad he came all the way down here like that,” Mom said.

“Why wouldn’t Janet talk to him?” Lizzie said.

“Because she didn’t want to,” David said. “She thinks Rob’s a shit.”

“You’re a shit.”

“Because she needs more time alone,” Mom said. “You have to trust Janet. She knows what’s best for herself.”

“But Rob wants to marry her,” Lizzie said.

“Well, Sparkle, she just doesn’t want to be married,” Mom said. “She wants to try again to get into medical school.”

“She could get married
and
go to medical school,” Lizzie said.

“She doesn’t seem to think she could. That’s her choice.”

Lizzie paused, thinking. “Don’t call me Sparkle anymore,” she said.

“Sorry,” Mom said. “It’s an old habit.”

Mom took the dishes to the sink, and David and Lizzie hung around the kitchen, uncertain about how to reenter the normal day. David thought maybe Janet had been a little too hard on Rob. He drove five hundred miles, and all he got was a few bites of scrambled egg. Then again, he hadn’t been allowed to stay around long enough for anyone to uncover David’s new story.

They heard the sound of Janet’s movements upstairs. Although no one said anything about it the air in the kitchen tightened, and David sidestepped a few paces closer to the door, so he’d be the first person she saw.

Her perfume entered, and then she did. Her eyes were dry. “Having devoured her mate,” she said, “the spider went back to her ordinary business of picking up stray flies.”

“You did what you had to do,” Mom said, keeping busy at the sink.

“I know I did. That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

Lizzie squinted at Janet as if she was far away. “I would have let him stay,” she said.

“That’s because you’re a pinhead,” David told her.

“And you’re a faggot.”

“Where do you both learn words like that?” Mom asked. “Who are you people, anyway?”

“Rob is more persistent than you think, Lizzie,” Janet said. “He’s not a
bad
guy but, well, he’s just very determined to have his own way. A gentle no doesn’t work very well with him.”

“I would have let him stay,” Lizzie said.

“Let’s send Lizzie to San Francisco to live with Rob,” David said.

“Let’s get you both off to school,” Mom said. “I can’t tell you what a thrill it’s going to be not to hear your voices for the next eight hours.”

“Maybe I could stay home today,” David said. He was thinking of keeping an eye on Janet, and of staying out of the sights of Billy’s gun for a while longer.

“Maybe you could run upstairs right now,” Mom said, “put your school clothes on, and scrape the moss off your teeth.”

“If David gets to stay home from school I do too,” Lizzie said.

“Nobody’s staying home from school,” Mom said.

“Why don’t they?” Janet said. “Just this one time. I’ll take them to the beach or something. It’d be good to have company today.”

“Do you want to write the notes explaining how they got suntans while they were sick?”

“Sure. We’ll put powder on them or something. Come on, Mother, be a sport.”

“Yeah, be a sport,” David said.

“We’re not doing anything today,” Lizzie said. “There are no tests.”

Mom poured soap into the dishwasher. “Tell you what,” she said. “As of today, you kids make all the decisions. I’ll just go to work and come home and do whatever you say. For every day you get older I’ll get a day younger, and before you know it we’ll be right back here again with me asking you if I can skip work for a day. How would that be?”

“Great,” David said.

While Mom got dressed for work, David, Lizzie, and Janet put on their bathing suits and gathered towels, suntan oil, the transistor radio. Janet filled a sack with fruit from the refrigerator. The house was charged with the sweet strangeness of going, made all the better by the unexpectedness of the trip. A spur-of-the-moment journey improved the house in David’s eyes; it widened its circle of possibility.

When Mom came downstairs in her cocoa-colored skirt and jacket, carrying her purse, Janet drove her to work. Before they left Mom kissed David and Lizzie on the forehead and said, “Be sure you have dinner ready on time tonight. And the electric bill’s due by Friday.”

“Okay,” David said. He was taken with the fact that Mom when she dressed for work looked like anybody. Strangers had no way of knowing she was peculiar and kind. He thought with satisfaction of how Lizzie hadn’t realized that yet.

He and Lizzie stood in the living room in their bathing suits, watching Janet and Mom pull out in Mom’s car, a light blue Camaro with blue upholstery. Everybody called it the Blue Baby. Out in the neighborhood, at this moment, Billy was calculating David’s progress toward school; he might even be waiting in a tree or behind a parked car, his weapon cocked, thinking, Any minute now. Rob was driving back to San Francisco and Dad was in Spokane with Marie. David and Lizzie stood right here in the living room, surrounded by walls. They both looked out the window, not speaking. When they were alone together they didn’t fight much. They hardly talked at all. Lizzie lifted one skinny leg behind her and held her ankle with her hand. Of all the people in the world Lizzie was the only one who had no smell, or if she had a smell it was enough like David’s own that he could barely detect it. She just smelled like a person. David glanced down at her bare legs, the one folded up like a stork’s and the other knob-kneed, dusted with freckles, the unfreckled parts so white they were almost blue. Standing with all her weight on that one thin leg she looked so fragile that David reached over and pushed her off balance, to put her back on two feet. She stumbled sideways and came at him so fast her body might have been attached to his by an elastic band. She punched his shoulder, hard as she could. He said, “That’s too hard, you fucker,” and walked into the kitchen, because he didn’t want to fight. He just didn’t like her looking so delicate, so close to falling over.

Janet came back in the Blue Baby fifteen minutes later, and they loaded their beach things into the trunk. David and Lizzie had some trouble working out the question of who would sit in front, which Janet resolved by flipping a coin. Lizzie had the front seat on the way to the beach, David would have it on the way back.

They drove through the neighborhood, heading for the freeway. Janet steered with one hand, and in that hand she kept a cigarette pinched between her index and middle fingers. She was not a careful driver. She paid only marginal attention to the road, as if it were not quite interesting enough to hold her attention.

“What’s the name of the company Rob works for?” Lizzie asked as the houses ticked by.

“Thorson and Lee,” Janet told her. “It’s called a firm. The companies lawyers work for are called firms.”

“Why does he want to be a lawyer?” David said. “It’s a stupid thing to do.”

“He likes it. He likes making all that money. He even likes wearing a suit. He didn’t like those things quite so much when I first met him.”

“Why not?” Lizzie asked.

“Oh, he just had different ideas then, Lizzie. A lot of people did. He thought he was going to be a lawyer for poor people. You know, keep them out of jail when they get arrested for things they didn’t do.”

“Why do they get arrested, then?” Lizzie asked.

“Sheesh,” David said.

“For a lot of reasons. Anyway, it’s no concern of Rob’s, because he changed his mind. He works for rich people instead.”

“Why?” Lizzie asked.

Janet took a drag from her cigarette, and the car drifted toward the center line. She brought it smoothly back on course. “Because law school is a lot of hard work, and he decided he should be paid back for it. And because his drugs are very expensive. Whoops, don’t tell Mom about that part. Anyway, you think all kinds of wonderful things about the future until you see how much you’re going to have to pay for it.”

“Do you still want to be a doctor for poor people?” David asked.

“At this point I just want to be a doctor, period,” she laughed. “No, that isn’t true. I still want to work in clinics for people who don’t have any money, yes. But I haven’t spent one day in medical school yet. Who knows how much I might be corrupted.”

“You wouldn’t be,” David said.

“Yes she would,” Lizzie said.

David started to tell her she didn’t know what
corrupted
meant, but decided not to chance it. Instead he propped his arm over the back of the seat, in the style of Baretta, and looked out the rear window with the expression of superior boredom he’d been working on. It was then that he saw Rob’s car, the brown Celica, following them one car behind.

A
t first David was too surprised to speak at all. Then he gave what originated deep inside him as a shout but thinned in his windpipe and came out as a squeak instead, which he managed to pull down a notch or two so it ended as a high-pitched groan.

“Are you all right?” Janet called from the driver’s seat. The car swerved gracefully into the next lane as she looked over her shoulder at him.

“He’s following us,” David said.

“Who?” Lizzie said.

“Him,” was all David could think of. The man’s name was suddenly nowhere in his head.

“Shit, I knew it,” Janet said. She steered the car back into its rightful lane.

“I don’t see anything,” Lizzie said. She craned her head up over the sausage-shaped headrest on the back of her seat and said, “Oh, there he is.”

“I thought he was going back to San Francisco,” David said.

“I knew he wouldn’t,” Lizzie said.

“Let’s go to the police.”

“Shut up, you crazy pinhead.”

“We’re just going to go to the beach as planned,” Janet said, “and forget there’s a lunatic driving behind us. Okay?”

“We could try and lose him,” David suggested.

“Not in the Blue Baby.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“You can’t,” Janet said. “You’re twelve.”

“I can drive, though,” he said. Though he’d never tried it, he felt certain he knew how from years of observation. It looked like a simple process.

Janet checked the rearview mirror and took a quick, nervous hit of her cigarette. “Let’s just relax, hmm?” she said. “Lizzie, turn around and face the front, okay?”

Lizzie kept on watching Rob’s car, her chin pressed into the headrest.

“He must be crazy,” David said.

“How about if we sing?” Janet said. “What songs do you both know?”

“I don’t want to sing,” Lizzie said.

“David? Come on.”

“I don’t think I want to sing either,” he said. He glanced back at Rob, whose face behind the wheel looked no different from that of any other grim, businesslike driver.

“Then I’ll do a solo number,” Janet said, and she began singing “Nowhere Man,” in a loud, off-key voice. David joined in midway, when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to get embarrassed and stop. The two of them sang.

David had been listening to Janet’s Beatles records since he was a baby. He knew them better than he’d ever known nursery rhymes. After “Nowhere Man” they sang “Yellow Submarine,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Taxman” and “Norwegian Wood.” “Norwegian Wood” was such a sad, elegant song that David sang it in a sort of English accent which was, to him, the voice of true feeling.

They sang some Neil Young songs they both knew, andsome Grateful Dead. Then they switched over to television songs. Lizzie joined them on “Mr. Ed,” because they couldn’t remember all the words and she was proud of the fact that she could. They sang all the way to the beach, and Rob held steady on their tail.

When they got off the freeway and onto city streets, and the broad blue band of the ocean appeared before them, shimmering above the silvery glare of traffic, David felt as if they’d traveled through dangerous country and reached home. They were by then singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” having nearly run out of songs. Janet pulled into the parking lot they always parked in, and gave two dollars to the old man who sat on a folding metal chair in front of his gray wooden booth. The man’s eyes bugged out and pointed in slightly different directions. Ever since he was a kid David had been afraid of the man and had discreetly avoided looking at him. Now he seemed like an old friend, a protector. Rob waited behind them, and after they’d driven onto the lot David watched Rob pay the man, who took his money and let him in.

Janet parked at the far end of the lot, at the edge of a chalky red bluff that dropped down to the beach. The bluff had been pitted and tunneled by rain, and David knew that from below it looked like a gigantic ant farm. Janet pulled up close to the edge, so the front of the car appeared to be hanging out over the ocean. The dark blue water met the paler sky just along the tops of the fenders. Janet turned off the ignition. “Just sit here a minute and don’t say anything, okay?” she said. “Let me talk to him.”

Rob parked alongside, got out of his car, and ambled over, smiling, his teeth very white. Lizzie called, “Hi, Rob,” and he said, “Hello, Lizzie” as though he were surprised to see her. He put his fingertips lightly on the sill of Janet’s open window.

“Beautiful day,” he said.

Janet maintained her driving posture. “Rob,” she said, “what I want you to do is get back in your car, pull out of hereeven though it just cost you two dollars to get in, and drive back home. I know you think it’s a good idea, keeping after me like this, but it’s not. It makes me think some of my worst thoughts about you are true.”

“We haven’t talked enough,” he said.

“How much should we talk?”

“We should talk until I understand why we were planning our wedding exactly five days ago and now today you won’t give me twenty minutes after I drove five hundred miles. We should talk that much.”

“That’ll be hard,” Janet said, “if you don’t understand already.” She looked straight ahead and gripped the wheel as if she expected the car to run out of control into the ocean.

“Well maybe I should ask questions, and you try to answer them. How would that be?” Rob said. The wind worried his shirt collar and his hair, which was cut into short, overlapping shreds like a television hero’s.

“Please just go, Rob.”

“Question number one: Was anything you ever said to me about love true, to the best of your knowledge?”

“Don’t turn into F. Lee Bailey or I’ll drive right over this cliff.”

“Are you going to answer the question?”

“No.”

“All right. Try this: What have I done that’s ever made you anything but happy?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions.”

“Tell me the ones to ask.”

“See, I can’t seem to make you understand that it’s not your
fault.
It’s me, it isn’t you. If I stay with you I’ll give in to all my cowardly urges to just be protected by you. I won’t do the work to get into medical school. I know just what kind of asshole I am.”

“So what should I do?”

“Let me go.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, I’ve gone.”

“And I’m following you. If you come back to San Francisco I promise not to protect you.”

“That’s not something you can offer. That’s like offering to remove your head.”

“Maybe you and I could talk privately for ten minutes. Maybe the kids could go down to the beach.”

“I won’t go to the beach with just David,” Lizzie shrieked. “Well, that settles that,” Janet said.

“Have you thought about me for one minute in the last five days?” Rob said. “Has the fact that I’m suffering been of any concern to you?”

“You know it has.”

“I don’t know it from the way you’re acting, no. No, I don’t know it at all.”

Janet nodded. She held onto the steering wheel. “Listen, kids,” she said. “How would it be if we all walked down to the beach, and Rob and I can talk while you two go swimming. How would that be?”

“Rob is in a
suit, ”
Lizzie said.

“I’ll be the best-dressed man on the beach,” Rob said. “Come on, Lizzie, let’s you and me head on down, and if the others want to come along, they can.”

“Okay,” Lizzie said, and she was out of the car. She scurried around to the other side. Rob offered her his hand, which she took hesitantly.

“Come on, David,” Janet said. “I promise this won’t last long.”

“Okay.” He was pleased with the fact that, Rob and Lizzie having paired off, he and Janet were made into a couple. They gathered the towels and the sack of fruit.

A gently sloping trail started at the far corner of the parking lot and traversed the cliff face, strewn with candy wrappers and shards of amber glass. They had to go single file on thetrail. Rob went first, followed by Lizzie and Janet; David brought up the rear, holding a stack of towels. He tasted the talcumy dust the others raised. He had on his plaid trunks and his Stevie Wonder T-shirt, and a pair of tennis shoes which struck him as ridiculous. They made a joke of his skinny legs. Walking ahead of him, carrying the grocery bag, Janet looked far more dignified. She wore sandals and a man’s white shirt (Rob’s?), which fell below the bottom of her swimsuit. She wore the sleeves rolled to her elbows in fat cuffs that emphasized her thinness in a complimentary way.

The beach was sparsely populated. People lay on towels here and there, and a few surfers bobbed in the water, watching for good waves, as docilely expectant as commuters at a bus stop. When he reached the base of the trail David immediately stopped to take his shoes off, hopping first on one foot and then on the other. Rob, Lizzie, and Janet walked down to the boundary line where the sand turned wet, and David loped to catch up, the shoes gratifyingly heavy in his hands. Rob stood against the water in his gray suit, hands in his pockets.

“Kids, Janet and I are just going to take a little walk up the beach,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”

“I want to come too,” Lizzie said. She had on blue rubber thongs, her green one-piece bathing suit, and her leopard-skin shirt.

“We’ll be back in ten minutes,” Rob said, and David thought he saw something tighten in his smile.

“How about if you two set up camp?” Janet said. “Pick out a good spot and sort of get things organized.”

“Yuck,” Lizzie said. She was working into tantrum position, shoulders hunched up and head bent as if she was about to batter down a door.

“Give us just a little break, will you, Lizzie?” Rob said, and his smile went that much tighter.

Lizzie paused in her tensed, trembling way, and David waited with mixed dread and glee for the first screech. Robwould see what she was really like. Instead of screaming, though, she held steady a second longer than usual, then began to deflate. Her shoulders inched back down.

“Okay,” she said. “But come back in ten minutes.”

David had never seen her headed off like that. Her tantrums were like thunderstorms—you could protect yourself from them but you couldn’t lessen their force. He would not have been much more surprised if Rob had commanded rain from the clear sky. He had to admit to a certain respect for anyone who could deal with Lizzie.

“Right,” Rob said. “Ten minutes.”

“Don’t go in the water before we get back, okay?” Janet said.

“I’m going to,” Lizzie said, though DaVid knew she had no intention of going in any deeper than her knees, for fear of getting her hair wet.

Janet and Rob walked off along the water’s edge, just shy of the point to which the waves washed, hesitated, and withdrew, leaving lines of dead brown foam and small living bubbles boiling up out of the sand. David watched people noticing Rob in his suit. A fleshy blond woman who sat hugging her big knees on a candy-striped towel stared after him, as did a skinny old man who jogged by, coming in David and Lizzie’s direction. When he passed David and Lizzie he smiled, showing uneven yellow teeth, and said, “You see something new every day.”

David and Lizzie could not quite think of what to do with themselves. David spread out the towels in a spot he decided was too close to the water and moved them farther up. He brushed off the stray grains of sand and straightened the corners. Lizzie stepped out of her thongs and drew her initials in the wet sand with her toes. Janet and Rob grew smaller and smaller. Janet, who was closer to the water, walked slightly bent against the wind, the hem of the shirt flapping up to show how her turquoise swimsuit cut in twin diagonals across her bottom.

In front of Lizzie a gull dipped down low over the water, skimming at an angle, its lower wing tracing the heaving surface. Lizzie had drawn her initials several times and was now working on her full name, longhand, in the big loopy lettering she’d invented for herself. As David glanced back and forth between Janet and Lizzie he was suddenly appalled by the ocean’s size. It had always seemed friendly to him, a broad wet playground, but now he saw how it pushed up onto the sand, taking a little more with each wave, eating already into the farthest of Lizzie’s initials. It could rear up at any moment, a foaming wall ten feet high, and crush them all against the cliff, hungrily sucking their bodies back out with it, leaving only smooth glossy sand behind. Down the beach, Rob and Janet stood facing each other. Though they were far away, David thought he saw Rob lean forward and kiss the air close to Janet’s mouth, and Janet brush the kiss away as if shooing a bee. Lizzie finished writing her name and walked a few paces into the water, letting it break in plumes over her shins. David had an urge to grab her and drag her back up onto the dry sand.

Janet and Rob came back. When they got close enough to be heard Rob looked at his wrist and called, “Nine and a half minutes.”

David nodded, with no idea of what to say. Lizzie trotted up from the water and said to Rob, “You look funny in that suit.”

“I know I do,” he said. “I’m a funny kind of man.”

“Ha ha,” Janet said.

David wondered if his second lie about the boyfriend had been uncovered. He believed for an instant that what they would do was sit him down and tell him they’d compared notes and realized he was the source of all their troubles.