Nora Jane (52 page)

“I want to blot it. I want to go back to being someone who isn’t a cancer survivor or victim or subject. I just want it to
be done.”

“Good. Let’s do that. Walk faster. You won’t get the hemoglobin back until you force it. Let’s try to double-time that hill.
After that it’s downhill all the way.”

“Okay. Let’s go.” They trudged off together, past the lovely gardens of a row of restored houses and up a long hill to where
the street parted and moved down into Freddy’s neighborhood. “Breathe,” Nieman kept saying. “Watch out where you’re going.”

L
ITTLE FREDDY WAS IN HIS ROOM
, drawing a floor plan for the addition they were going to build at Willits. At Nieman’s suggestion he had made a scale model
of the existing house. He had it on a card table beside his computer, which used to be Tammili’s computer. Because the scale
model and the computer took up so much room, Little Freddy had had to spend two afternoons changing everything in his room.
He had put all his toys and sports equipment under one of his twin beds. He had taken most of the clothes out of his closet
and folded them and put them in stacks underneath the second bed. He had painted his closet brick red with some paint he found
in the storage shed and nailed a lot of nails on the walls so he could hang more things there. This arrangement left room
along a wall for two card tables. One held the scale model that Lydia had helped him make out of cardboard. The second held
the computer. He was sitting at it now, drawing the addition he thought they should build. The problem was that there were
too many people now. If they all came to Willits at the same time there would never be enough rooms, because the place where
the house was built wasn’t wide enough to make many rooms. “I’ll make the kitchen all by itself like another house,” he decided.
He was pondering that idea when his sister came and got him to come meet the visitors from New Orleans.

“Who is it?” he asked. “Why do I have to meet everyone?”

“It’s Mitzi’s mother and her boyfriend. Come on. You know you have to. It won’t take long. What have you done in here? My
God, what have you done to your closet? Has Mother seen this?”

“I’m making an office for my work,” he said. “Get out. It’s not your room.”

“Where are your clothes?”

“Under the bed. I folded them. Lydia, come look at this picture. See if you like this.”

“You are going to be in big trouble for doing this to your closet…Well, never mind. Come on. They’re waiting for you.” She
dragged him off his chair and out the door to the hallway and down the hallway to the living room.

Carla Ozburt was sitting on the sunken sofa, telling everyone about the Hopi ruin outside Weggins, Arizona. She had brought
a book about the Hopi dwellings and was showing it to Nora Jane.

Little Freddy walked up and was introduced and began to look at the book.

“This gives me an idea,” he said. “This is it, Daddy. This is the way we can fix the house at Willits. Look at this.”

His father looked his way. “I’ll be there in a minute, son. Mr. DeLesseps Johnston was telling me about their trip. This is
Mitzi’s mother, Freddy. And Mr. Johnston is her friend and they have driven all the way out here from New Orleans, where your
mother lived when she was a little girl.”

“But look at this,” Little Freddy said. He was holding the book now. They weren’t listening. They never listened if company
was there.

“It’s a mysterious and holy place,” Carla said, pointing to the book. She moved nearer to him. Ever since she arrived in the
Bay Area she had been searching for someone she could talk to without feeling she had to gauge every word to see if it was
correct. The aggrieved look on Little Freddy’s face made her think she had found a friend at last. “What are you building
that this gives you an idea for?”

“We’re making some more rooms for our house in Willits. It’s far away from town with twees all over the place. Trreees, I
mean.” He looked at Lydia, who was listening. It was Lydia who kept threatening him with speech therapy, so he tried to pronounce
words when she was around. He turned back to Carla.

“You want to see it? I have a model me and Lydia made and I’m dwawing, I’m drrrawing the plan. See, first you dwaw something
if you want to build it. If you dwaw it first you know what to do. You want to see?”

“I’d love to see your drawing.” Carla turned to Nora Jane to see if that was all right. Nora Jane was beaming. Nora Jane’s
favorite people in the world were people who liked Little Freddy as much as she liked him.

“Go with him,” Nora Jane said. “Go see what he’s doing.”

Carla stood up. She was wearing a pink silk pantsuit with a matching lisle sweater and in the moist air her hair was curling
around her face in little ringlets. She looked very pretty this afternoon and much younger than her sixty-four years. She
liked little boys, because she liked and understood ego and the will to power.

“You won’t believe what he’s done to his room,” Lydia said, moving over to take Carla’s place beside her mother. “But we’ll
go into that later. I don’t want to bring it up when we have guests.”

“What?” Nora Jane asked. “Tell me now.”

Little Freddy made his escape with his new friend, Mrs. Ozburt. “Call me Carla,” she said. “My young friends always call me
Carla.”

“What kind of house do you live in?” Freddy asked.

“An old house that is a hundred years old. It is very tall and has a lot of rooms I don’t use. It has flowers all around it.
It’s in a place called the Garden District, where all the houses are very old. Maybe you will come to New Orleans and see
it someday.”

“We forgot the book,” Little Freddy said. “I’ll get it.”

Carla waited while he ran back to the living room and got the book of photographs of Hopi ruins. He put the book on the table
by the scale model of the house in Willits.

“See this house?” he said. “It’s too little for all of us. Dad and Nieman built it when they were at Berkeley to prove you
could make things work with just power from the sun. See these things? They are panels that collect power from the sun and
it goes into this wire and then the tank over there, and when you need it it can make cold water hot and turn on lights but
they don’t get very bright so sometimes we have to use flashlights or go to bed when it gets dark, or have candles.

“We like to go there and there’s not room for everyone, so our friends that built the hot tub, Carlito and Fernando and their
dad, Diego, are going to help us build more rooms but first we have to draw them so they know what to do. They have to know
what to bring up there, how many boards and nails and windows.” He paused and checked to make sure Carla was really listening.
“Me and Nieman are drawing it because my dad was sick and he is just taking it easy now. Okay.” He waited while Carla inspected
the model of the tall square house with long wide windows on one side. “The reason I like this book is our house is on a sandy
hill just like these Hopi dwellings are.”

“Mesas,” Carla said. “They call those kinds of hills mesas.”

“We could make our kitchen and our dining room on one of those hills and not have it in the house where everyone is sleeping,
and then if Dad got up early to do his work he could go over there and not wake everyone up making coffee. See?”

“What a wonderful idea, Freddy. I mean it, that’s a really good idea.”

“See these steps they got here. We could make steps up the side like that.” Freddy was drawing on white paper to show Carla
what he had in mind. Carla bent over his plans thinking, suddenly, that if Mitzi got married and settled down maybe she, Carla,
would have a grandchild and it might be a little boy like this with intent blue eyes and small fragrant hands, moving a pencil
across a piece of paper as if to invent the world all over again with every stroke.

Nora Jane and Lydia and Mitzi had come to stand in the door to Little Freddy’s room. Freddy and DeLesseps and Tammili had
gone out to the yard to see the apple trees Freddy had planted the week before.

It was six o’clock in the afternoon on the tenth of March in the only world there is, on top of one of the most active coastal
plates in North America, with a rainstorm coming in over the Pacific Ocean, but not due to arrive until midnight, with babies
in the wombs of women and colts in horses and puppies in dogs and kittens in cats, not to mention deer and mountain lions
and antelope and moose and squirrels and robins.

Danen Marcus, MD, was watching his wife make pasta. He was madly in love with her again and planning on taking her to France
to buy a house in Provence. Sister Anne Aurora was praying for a man in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, who was recovering from
surgery; Larry Binghamton was at his ex-wife’s house fixing to make the mistake of his life by attempting a reconciliation;
and the babies in Stella Light-Gluuk’s womb (the fetus had split and become two) were settling down to grow thinking apparatuses
at the ends of their spinal columns.

“What happened with this closet?” Nora Jane was asking.

“I fixed it,” her son answered. “Carlito gave me the paint.”

“Where are your clothes, if I may ask?”

“Under the bed,” Carla answered.

“Where are the paintbrushes?” Lydia asked.

“With the paint, out by Carlito’s tools in the shed. Come and look at how we could make a kitchen like these Hopi Indians
had theirs. Come look, Lydia, don’t worry about my room. It’s not your room. Don’t worry about it.”

They all gathered around Little Freddy’s drawings. Carla got up and went to her daughter and put her arm around her waist
and was content for the first time in months. All of a sudden she just decided to be content.

“There is food in the dining room,” Nora Jane said. “I wish some of you would get something to eat.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Carla and Mitzi were in Mitzi’s kitchen making coffee in an old-fashioned coffeepot. It was chicory coffee that Carla had
brought from New Orleans and it had to be brewed in a percolator, unless you had time to cold drip it, which Mitzi certainly
did not, not with all that was going on, planning a wedding; finding a way to sleep with Donovan when her mother wouldn’t
have to know about it; worrying about Nora Jane and Freddy; working at the shop so she wouldn’t get fired; looking for a house
for her mother to buy for her; mopping up rainwater every time it rained and water came in the bathroom wall of her rented
condominium; trying to find time to get in a few Pilates classes, etcetera.

Her mother was being a doll. She was buying Mitzi a house and talking about buying her a new car.

Mitzi poured the coffee into small blue cups and added boiled milk and sugar. She handed one cup to her mother and took the
other one herself. They sat down at a small wooden table painted with flowers. Mitzi had painted it herself one night when
she was lonely, before she met Donovan and her life started up again.

“Nora Jane said we could get married in her garden if the church isn’t nice about marrying us. Or in that front room with
all the pianos and the harpsichord. You saw that room, didn’t you?”

“They had better be nice. There’s no question of them marrying you, is there?”

“It might take more time than we want to wait. We want to go on and get married, Momma. I mean, right away.”

“Before we buy the house?”

“Before I end up pregnant. Donny doesn’t like the idea of birth control.”

“I see. All right then. Set a date and tell me where there’s a florist so I can order flowers.”

“I think next Saturday then. A week from tomorrow.”

“Who will marry you if not a priest?”

“Nora Jane and Freddy know a federal judge who does it for friends of theirs. He’s this very good-looking man who was in a
John Grisham movie, that one about the runaway jury. He played himself. It was a real role. All right then. I’ll call Nora
Jane and see if the judge is free a week from Saturday and we’re all set. You’re an angel, Momma, to be so nice about everything
and buy us a house.”

“It’s an investment. I’m just letting you live in it. We need to start shopping for clothes. I’m not going to my daughter’s
wedding in some old dress I find in a mall. Call and find out where the good shops are. I want to go this afternoon.”

That was Friday morning. By Saturday afternoon the plans were laid. The ceremony would be at eleven in the morning in Nora
Jane and Freddy Harwood’s living room. A cake and petits fours were being made at Fantastic Foods in Oakland. Flowers were
being delivered from Nieman’s Marxist friend’s shop; Tammili and Lydia would be bridesmaids in dresses they had worn in the
spring for a dance recital. The dresses were long and soft and white. In their hair would be bar-rettes decorated with cymbidium
orchids. Mitzi was wearing an off-white ankle-length cocktail dress and Manolo Blahnik shoes in pale blue. Carla was wearing
a pale gray suit with a fitted jacket and shoes to match. Little Freddy had agreed to wear his suit. No one was coming except
the Harwoods, the Gluuks, three of Mitzi’s friends from the salon, the judge and his wife, and a few other assorted friends.

There would be cake and champagne, and then Mitzi and Donovan were going to a spa near Las Vegas to spend four days being
pampered and taking walks in the desert.

“It’s so Hollywood,” Carla told DeLesseps. “You just pick up a phone and get a wedding going. This would take months to arrange
in New Orleans.”

“This wedding stuff makes me feel left out,” DeLesseps said. “Not that it matters, but I’d like to get married too, as I’ve
told you a dozen times. I’ll have more money than you do when my grandmother dies. But I guess you won’t marry me until then,
will you?”

“No, I won’t. But I love you asking.” She went to him and let him caress her breasts.

“I love your breasts,” he said. “They are as soft as silk.”

“They’re in my way,” she answered. “They ruin the way my blouses fit, so I’m glad someone is getting some use of them.”