Milk (2 page)

I've crossed into San Marino now, where technically I grew up, although I tend to label the whole area as Pasadena—it's habit: as teenagers we'd lie about where we were from, San Marino having certain connotations.

I park in front of the Huntington Pharmacy; if nothing else, they have good face creams in San Marino and I left mine behind in Colorado. I recall parking in this same spot on my way to countless errands: having my hair cut at
Charles
, by Charles himself; being taken to buy my first bra at Shephard's (long gone) where pajamas and white cotton underwear could also be purchased—Spanky pants, we called them. Green linoleum floors and big-bosomed old lady clerks who, whenever you had to try anything on, clasped their hands at their stomachs as though waiting for bad news.

The Huntington Pharmacy is more or less the same, aside from having undergone various small remodelings. It's the people who are different, not in behavior but in looks. More than half the town is Asian now, I'm told. A fact that for some reason makes me giddy with relief: it's no longer the town I grew up in but an artifact, a curiosity. As if the past, my past, doesn't exist. As for the Huntington Pharmacy, its atmosphere still resembles a bank's or a library's. Customers talk in hushed tones. Children are well behaved. Women discreetly spray on colognes, sample lipsticks; personal hygiene products and contraceptives are stowed out of sight. Toward the back of the store is the pharmacy, once upon a time a somber darkened area with a small window for consulting with the pharmacist; I think of my mother long ago, in sunglasses, pretending to be someone else.

I leave on my own sunglasses in case anybody recognizes me, not that anyone would. The face creams, the costly, youth-preserving kind I need, are behind glass. I'll have to ask for help but instead I wander around the store: all the years of wandering this store, my father dropping me off as a pre-teen to buy things, female things, me not knowing what to buy. “Please charge this to Harold Mapes.” A candy bar, a magazine, Right Guard deodorant … same brand as my father and brother, what were girls supposed to buy?

I wander much as a ghost would in a former habitat: I'm invisible, no one speaks to me. Perhaps because I look shoddy, ill-groomed. My hair's wild—couldn't get a brush through it this morning—and I'm wearing one of the three pairs of jeans I threw into my suitcase, this pair a fashionable though frayed black, and my old suede boots that just this morning I noticed have on them a dried dollop of spaghetti sauce, from dinner on the plane—so I'm thinking of this when an Asian woman goes by in crisp white Keds that haven't a smudge on them. Two thoughts occur to me. One, I should get a pair of those, even though I hate Keds; it's just that hers look so clean, so new. The other thought is really habit. I look not at her, but at her clothes, mentally writing catalog copy, which is what I do for a living.
Striped tee, navy blue cardigan, gold buttons for a classic, nautical look that's never out of style, never out of season
.

I find the counter with the face creams: they're like jewels behind glass. I buy one that's terribly expensive and, on an impulse, a special pregnancy cream. “For the belly,” the saleswoman says. She must be seventy-five, with an Old World accent. “It's
von
-derful. So soothing. No stretch marks.” She gestures toward the area below her cinched-in belt.

Back in the car. To my true destination: east on Huntington, farther and farther, past Rosemead, past the Santa Anita Racetrack, until I reach Arcadia Methodist Hospital, where my mother endured many hospitalizations and where she officially died, and where she was brought by ambulance that last time to be resuscitated, too late.

Where did she draw her last breath? My father never said but I always believed it was in the hospital, the moment they brought her in on the gurney.

As a child I thought this hospital existed on an island of sorts: Huntington Drive splits up when it reaches the hospital, one-way traffic on either side, cars rushing by, while on the grounds swayed great lonely pine trees, black and silhouetted: whenever we drove past, I knew my mother had died there and would wave.

I'm not ready yet to go inside and request her records, not today.

In my room at the Alta Vista, I scan the
Star News
that I found in the lobby. Headlines, obituaries, which lately I can't pass up. I check them the way other people check for the winning lottery number: dead people over sixty-five, it'll be a good day. Under fifty, a bad day. I'm nagged by why the younger ones die. Why they die so young. Heart attack, cancer, AIDS, car accident, violence, suicide—speculation on my part although occasionally there are hints, if you read between the lines.

Nobody under seventy today, so I move on to the classifieds, for apartments or rooms to let, if I were to move here, say, instead of returning to Colorado; anyway I've got to get out of the Alta Vista. I can't even go to the bathroom without tiptoeing as though I might step on something wet and slimy. Stupidly, I lost my pen somewhere so there's nothing to circle the ads with, not to mention a phone in my room. Only a pay phone at the Alta Vista and it's not even in the lobby. It's outside.

So I lie down on the bed, training my thoughts away from Jackson. At Stonewall Creek, where we live, where we
lived
, the rocks are red—minarets and pyramids and castles of red sandstone that loom over bluffs of prairie grass and twisted juniper.

This is why I'm afraid to remove my wedding band. It would mean I'm not going back there.

Eagles, snakes, coyote, mule deer, mountain lion. The Arabian horses that grazed, woolly in winter, friendly as dogs, following us on our walks. Licking our cars for the salt, rubbing their teeth against the paint. Peering in the windows of our house while Jackson and I made love.

I should write Jackson a letter and mail it this time. Tell him the truth. Tell him about the baby. Yes, a baby. My period's three weeks late, what else can this be? I try to see Jackson's face as he reads the letter, the profile of his broad, unadorned features, the small stab of the mole on his clean-shaven cheek, the mole that I've always loved. On his face is anger. No, sorrow. He doesn't understand me, never has.
I
don't understand me; why would I leave a perfectly fine marriage?

But it wasn't, it hasn't been.

I have the moral life of a child—no, children have a better sense of right and wrong. One day it seemed a good idea to get married, like playing dress-up. A part of me has never grown up. Entire segments of me have never been exposed to light—they collapsed inside me somewhere, a black hole; no therapist has been able to dig them out. They all want to, especially when they hear those magic words about my mother committing suicide when I was seven, and the infant sister who had died earlier, when I was three, almost four. “Oh?” they'll say, sitting up, suddenly paying attention, taking a lot of notes. It's a weird sense of power, a case a therapist can sink his or her teeth into. I'm the safe they want to crack.

Night-time at the phone booth just outside the front door of the Alta Vista. There's somebody ahead of me, an elderly woman in a pale, thin gown. “They give me tumblers of bourbon or they drug me,” she says into the receiver. “Um-hmm. Or I'm shot up with something, a truth serum sometimes. There might be a group of us strapped to one of those circular laundry lines and we're forced to march round and round, like donkeys bringing up water from a well. We're to walk until somebody slips. Darling, somebody always slips. Some of us have already slipped and are on crutches, some of us have lost our minds. There are nooses around our necks. Nooses rigged with razor blades.”

She hangs up the phone, walks blithely past me. Maybe my father is right about this place.

“Can I do something? Help you back to your room?” I offer.

“Darling, I'm fine.”

I fumble through the phone book—I've got to look up old friends,
somebody
, I've got to talk to somebody other than the residents at the Alta Vista. Maggie Devoe—no listing. Of course, she's probably married now, might have taken her husband's name. Technically, she is a cousin of mine, the relationship so distant it went unacknowledged by both our families. I picture Maggie's face, sarcastic, smirking—a face twenty years younger. I have no idea what she looks like now but I keep picturing cutoffs, T-shirt, hoop earrings. What we wore in high school. Thumbs out, hitchhiking to or from our latest adventure; squished smokes in our back pockets.

I could call Maggie's parents, still listed on Lorraine, I see, but I won't. Anymore than she'd call my father.

I move on to old boyfriends. Gregg, the one I most want to call. To see, to sleep with. A voice in me says: call him, quick, before you get any bigger. Call him before you chicken out. Call him. Call him.

Feeding quarters into the pay phone, I try number after number; the one listed in the phone book leads to another and another. (“That number has been changed.
Please
make a note of it,” says a recorded female voice that ever so slightly hinges on irritation.)

This is what desperate women do when they're drunk and it's late at night—they call old boyfriends.

Only I don't have the excuse of drunkenness, just plain old loneliness. As I dial the last number, pigeons coo in the palm trees overhead, not like the racket they make during the day. Gregg's phone rings. Panic: what if he's married? Surely he is by now, even Gregg. The phone rings and rings and I'm about to hang up gladly, when I get a machine.

It's his voice, music in the background. “Gregg?” (My voice comes out like a squeak.) “This is Theo. I'm in town.” A pause. Help, I'm pausing too long—what if he picks up? Or his wife does? “Um, I'll call back. There's no phone where I'm staying. Ciao.”

Ciao
. I never say that. An attempt at sounding continental? I'll call again tomorrow. I'll never call again. If I see him, another part of me is planning already, get rid of the wedding band. Or maybe I should leave it on as a challenge. Or a deterrent.

I dial my brother's number.

“This is Corb,” he answers.

“Why do you always answer the phone like that?” I say. “Don't you realize how off-putting it is? Why don't you just say ‘hello'?”

“Dad told me you're in town.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“Yes.” He sighs. “I'm sorry, Theo.”

My turn to say something. I can't.

“I hear you're staying at a residence hotel. Dad's all caught up about that too, never mind why you're here. ‘She's staying at the Alta Vista!' he said. He wanted me to offer you a place to stay.”

“So offer.”

“Would you like to stay here?”

I think of nooses rigged with razor blades; I think of my room at the Alta Vista, of the sock dangling from the showerhead. “No,” I say. “No thank you.”

“Well, I offered.”

“Yes, you did. That's over with. Phew, close call, huh?” An old joke between us. None of us have stayed under the same roof in more than fifteen years.

Corb invites me for lunch the next day, a Saturday, and when I let myself in—the front door is unlocked—he and his wife, Diane, are rinsing vegetables at the sink.

“Theo!” Diane wipes her hands on her apron first, but Corb just reaches out for me, hugging me with wet hands.

“Hi, you guys.”

“We're so sorry,” Diane breathes into my ear, “about you and Jackson.”

I break away. “Where are the boys?” Gabe and Bruce, their eleven- and twelve-year-old sons. My nephews.

“Playing Nintendo in the basement,” Diane answers. “Let me look at you.” She turns me this way and that. “You look fabulous. Did you get a haircut?”

She always asks me that. Maybe she thinks I need one.

“No.”

“It's so beautiful, your hair,” Diane says, then gestures at her own straight brown hair cut at the shoulders, slightly turned under. What I think of as an adult haircut. “If I want curls, I have to pay for them.”

“Come on, now.” Corb takes my elbow and steers me out of the kitchen. “I want to show you the new baby.”

“The new baby,” I say. “I can't wait.”

It could be a computer or an addition to the house, or a new animal, which qualifies as a sort of baby, I guess. Corb leads me downstairs to the basement, in something of a hurry. We pass the boys, eyes glazed from Nintendo. By their feet, motionless, is a lop-eared rabbit I've never seen before. “Hi, boys,” I say.

Gabe, the younger one, squints at me (glasses that always seem too large for his face) but doesn't answer, in mid-thought about the game he's playing. “Blow it up,” Bruce says to him. “Blow it up, Gabe!” Gabe touches a button and the TV screen emits an atomic sound, followed by cartoon smoke and exploding colors. The rabbit's nose quivers slightly. “Hi Aunt Theo,” Bruce says, in the same inflectionless way he answers the phone.
This is the Mapes' residence. This is Bruce speaking. May I ask who's calling?

“Come on,” Corb says, pulling me along. Apparently, the rabbit isn't the new baby.

“Where are we going?”

“You'll see.” He's like a kid, the most excited I ever see him, whenever he's about to show me the ‘new baby,' whatever it may be. For a second I think of my new baby—when do I tell him about that?

“Ready?” Corb ushers me into the storage room.

The new baby is a hydroponic lettuce growing kit. You plant seeds in sand and pour in water, and, with the help of grow lights,
voilà
.

The salad at lunch features this lettuce—pale, tender, embryonic.

I can't help asking. “Why don't you just grow the lettuce outside?”

“He likes it because it's a kit,” Diane says, “because it's new.”

My foot kicks something soft under the table. I look. It's the rabbit.