Stop That Girl (11 page)

I now owed $337.

“Just get it over with. Ask your parents,” Hannah said. Her parents paid for her to get her toenails done.

“My mother wouldn’t like it,” I said.

“Well, maybe Archie’ll change his mind and chip in,” she said.

I didn’t want to be seen as surrounded by tightwads. “Right. I’m going to call him, somehow, tonight.”

That afternoon I found myself scanning the bulletin board in the employment office. A notice for yard work caught my eye and, from a phone booth outside, I called. The job wasn’t taken! After I described my yard-work experiences, the woman gave me directions and invited me right over.

My tires hummed on the hot concrete, while the air smelled of palm resin and drying grass. There were old oaks and redwoods scattered around these neighborhoods, wild creek beds to cross, and real squirrels running along the phone lines. I found myself rolling up to a little gingerbreadtype house, with copper butterflies mounted on the lintel and with a personalized mat welcoming me.

The Holcombs. An older woman appeared at the door, the pleasant kind that probably played bridge or went to church or made large happy Thanksgiving dinners for her children and grandchildren without outbursts or fuss. She took me into her world, past her cozy plaid couch and cabinet full of animal figurines, out again through a sliding glass door. There she showed me a big mound thriving with birds-of-paradise.

“You pull this part back and this thing pops out and then you take off the old dried leaves back here and now the face can shine out. See?”

With her knobby fingers she managed to preen one. It involved opening the blossom on the bird-of-paradise to its fullest potential. They tended to get trapped in their own armature.

“Good,” she said, when I completed one. “My hands are frozen stiff with arthritis; otherwise I’d do it myself.”

I kind of enjoyed it too. “That’s all you want me to do?”

“Let’s see how it goes. I’ve got a boy who comes and does the grass.”

“So I guess you really like birds-of-paradise,” I said.

“They’re very special,” she said.

“Do you worry about them?” I asked. “Like, if they’re all going to die, or get diseased, or not enough water, stuff like that?”

“Well I’d rather spend my time enjoying them. Now if you see any snails, peel them off.”

She had just found one, and she threw it on the grass and stomped on it.

We agreed that I’d come by twice a week to start. What a stroke of good luck! She also provided sandwiches and root beer, and I didn’t even know that yet.

Someone was pounding on our door.

Hannah opened up to the ox from Orinda. “This is a first,” she said.

“What are these calls to Encino doing on my phone bill?”

I stepped forward.

“It was you on my line, wasn’t it. I thought it was. You owe me seventeen dollars and twenty-five cents.”

More money. I found my checkbook.

“Were you tapping my line because of my family’s connection to the Nixons?”

“Yeah, I was hoping I could hear you and your parents talking about being friends with the Nixons, because I haven’t heard enough about it yet, even though you’ve told everybody probably five times.”

“We don’t talk about it on the phone,” she said.

“Hey, could I make another call right now, and write you another check?”

“This is the way it’s done. I’m going to time you.”

I followed her down the hall to her room, which was a single because she’d paid extra not to have to
share.

“Whose phone are you on this time?” Archie said, not even sounding too excited it was me.

“Listen,” I said, “go to my house and tell my mother there’s a garden nozzle you need and it’s on the shelf with my owls.”

“Why?”

“It’s really valuable. I’m not sure I’ll make enough at my job, and maybe I can sell it.”

“A nozzle?”

“Guess whose it is.”

“Whose?”

“Bob Dylan’s!”

“What are you doing with Bob Dylan’s nozzle?” he said.

The Orinda girl was staring at her watch. “I’ll tell you some other time.”

“Wait a minute, who’s going to believe you?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” I said.

“Is there any
proof
it’s Bob Dylan’s nozzle?”

“Of course it’s his nozzle, why would I make it up?”

“What, is it, like,
engraved
or something?”

“Of course not, why would you even say that?”

“It’s a pretty lame idea,” he said.

“Two minutes,” the Orinda girl said.

“Forget it then,” I said. “I didn’t want to sell it anyway.”

“Was that really your big idea?” He laughed.

“My big idea is that I’m going to enjoy hanging up right now,” I said, and I did enjoy it, though I had to write another check.

That summer, the least of it was my classes. The bird-of-paradise woman increased my hours, and I was spending whole afternoons with her. I fed the birds-of-paradise with fish emulsion and kept all weeds at bay. I learned how to separate overcrowded clumps and start new colonies in various corners of the yard. I maintained beds of annuals and pruned a vibrant eugenia hedge. I rescued plums from the birds and wove tendrils of jasmine onto a bald fence. My ear clicked and crackled the faster I worked, but all the industry made the bird-of-paradise woman look out her back door and smile.

While I ate my tuna sandwich full of pickles, she often mentioned her dead husband, Conrad. “Conrad used to hate weekends,” she’d say. “He detested this town, he was so tired of all the students and coffee shops.” “Conrad used to sit there all weekend; I couldn’t get him to budge.” And Conrad had complained about her cooking. “It was never as good as his mother’s, but that man could really wolf down a meal.”

I was tempted to ask what she’d seen in Conrad, but no matter what she told me, she spoke of him without rancor. I came from a family of anger and impulse. I couldn’t imagine myself living for years with someone like Conrad. Or could I?

It stayed hot those days on the peninsula, the kind of scorching weather that kept the grass brown until the rains fell again in winter. I had a vision that kept me happy, of living in a creaky Victorian in San Francisco someday with a bunch of my friends. I’d have my own phone, and an orange cat sitting in a wicker chair in the sun. We’d all have odd jobs and come home at night with stories to tell.

Then, the last day of summer school, after paying off the college bursar and the ear specialist, I rode my bike over to say goodbye to the bird-of-paradise woman. She had prepared a plump sack of oatmeal cookies for my journey, and I threw my arms around her, wishing for a moment she was my own grandmother, or at least someone I didn’t have to say goodbye to. I had the impulse to love somebody too quickly and desperately, I could see that much. I’d have to be careful of that.

There were parties, address exchanges. “What’re you going to do about Archie?” Hannah asked.

“Not much. I have a lot of studying to do this year,” I said.

“I wish we got to know each other better. Let’s for sure stay in touch, okay?”

“For sure!”

She gave me a Smith College T-shirt that said A CENTURY OF WOMEN ON TOP. She’d gained early admittance, knew her life’s course. Party girl that she was, she wanted to go into the diplomatic corps and later did just that. But for now we all packed and vacated the dorm one Saturday morning before noon, just kids going home, and Hannah’s young, attractive parents gave me and my bike a lift to the bus station. They made jokes about how in the world had I put up with a scoundrel like Hannah, I must be a saint, and so forth, but they were beaming at their daughter and their daughter was beaming at them. It was a love fest. I couldn’t wait to get out of the car.

Roy picked me up twelve hours later. I was stuffed with oatmeal cookies, dirty and tired and sore. “Welcome home,” he said, jamming my things into the back. “How’d it all go?”

I had to turn my head and point my good ear at him. “Not bad,” I said. “How’s everything at home?”

“Not too good,” he said. “We’ll probably start looking to move.”

“Again?”

“No use hassling over it all. We’re not attached to the place anyway. Are you?”

“It’s my senior year,” I said. “I don’t want to change schools.”

“We’ll try to keep you at the same school,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“How’s Mom?”

“Your mother is a great human being.”

“I mean, is she feeling okay?”

“She has a lot on her plate. No more trouble; do we have an understanding?”

“I just got home!”

“Well, do we?”

“Yes! God!”

Soon we pulled up in the driveway of our now designated non-home. The sight of it made me sick, like being greeted by a crippled old dog you’ve decided to take out behind the barn. Mom and Kathy rushed out to meet me. There were hugs and hellos all around.

“Did you have the time of your life?” Mom asked.

“I hope not.”

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“Did you bring me anything?” Kathy said.

I did have something for Kathy, and I groped numbly for it in my bag.

“What is it?” she asked when I handed it to her.

“A gerenuk.”

“What’s a gerenuk?”

“It’s an animal from Africa. I thought maybe you could start a collection.”

She frowned at the gerenuk. “One’s probably enough.”

Mom said, “Behold,” and pointed to the sycamore, which had grown in my absence to further obscure the view.

“Oh, well,” I said.

“Oh, well, is right,” she said. “We’re moving before anything else goes wrong!”

We all gathered around the kitchen table, and it was nice because they wanted to hear about my adventures, though I deleted the ear thing and substituted “a guy on my hall” for Archie in the story of my door. Mom seemed shocked by some of the things she hadn’t known. “You had a
job
?” she said. “You went to this woman’s home off campus? What kind of person was this? You ate there?” After she calmed down, since, after all, I’d only just arrived, she said, “Well, she sounds like a very nice woman. You’ll have to send her a thank-you card immediately.” And since I’d only just arrived, I couldn’t say, “Back off!” could I? But I made them laugh, describing the girl from Orinda and her Nixon-mania, among other tales of dorm life. It was fun making them laugh.

That evening, unpacking in my room, eager to call my friends and announce my return, wondering what I’d be facing next, I found myself gazing idly for a moment at my shelf of owls. Something was missing: my beautiful nozzle! I ran to the den and asked Mom if she’d seen it.

“The nozzle on your shelf? I needed it.”

I ran outside. We had a bunch of hoses in our yard, stationed in various places. A thick aqua-colored one, a thin-skinned dark green one, a short stiff one, a crackled one, one with a stripe. In the moonlight, I could see each had a nozzle attached. While the hoses were different, the nozzles looked identical.

“Which hose did you use it on?” I cried, running back in.

“I don’t remember,” my mother said. “Why does it matter?”

“You’ve got to. Was it the one by the door?”