The Good Sister (17 page)

“How’ll I recognize you?” Dennis asked on the phone the night before, a languid drawl in his beautiful, deep voice. “You gonna
wear a red rose?”

“I’ll hold it between my teeth.” Late at night, on the telephone, she felt brave and flirtatious and hummed a few sexy bars
from
Carmen.

She compared the sick nervousness she felt now—like four black coffees on an empty stomach—with the scary excitement of stepping
off the Greyhound in LA with no job, nowhere to live, and not a single friend. Back then she thought she knew about the world
because she’d groped around with boys in the senior class, thought she knew men because her best friend’s father had made
a pass at her. She trusted that life would give her what she wanted if she made herself available, and some of the time it
had. Eventually she’d even found BJ, but on the way to him there had been so many mistakes in judgment. The
memory of every one of them was in the car with her, driving into La Jolla to meet Dennis Dwight.

Ellen was lucky to find a parking place on Herschel, not far from the Mariposa Hotel. She pulled down the visor mirror and
looked at herself. Was her hair too blond? Was the cut good? If it were shorter would her jaw look firmer? She picked up the
red rose she’d cut from a bush at the house. It was a day or two beyond its glory, but would have to do. In the Mariposa’s
lobby, logic told her that the desk clerk and concierge didn’t care if she was there to meet a man she’d only spoken to on
the telephone. But she felt conspicuous anyway and slightly ridiculous holding a red rose, teetering in shoes designed by
Torquemada.

A blue-tiled arch led into the narrow bar, where there was subdued lighting and heavy carpet, small tables and deep-cushioned,
suede-upholstered easy chairs. No mirrors or booths, no vulgar display of bottles. At the Mariposa the alcohol was discreetly
concealed below the granite bar. A trio of enlarged photos of butterflies hung on the bar-back wall.

Ellen ordered a vodka martini, and when the hostess brought it, she told herself to drink slowly. She deliberately did not
look down at the glass for several minutes. She wished she had never quit smoking, thought about BJ, imagined what Dennis
Dwight would look like, checked to see if she had lipstick on her teeth. Just one swallow and then she could sit back and
relax. Business in the bar grew brisk and several men and women in suits and stylish
sportswear entered from the lobby. She felt ridiculously overdressed in four hundred dollars’ worth of tucked silk from Neiman
Marcus.

“I’m meeting someone,” she explained to the hostess and immediately wished she hadn’t.

The girl asked, “Can I get you an appetizer while you wait?”

“No, thank you. We’ll be dining later.”

It seemed as if she’d just taken the first sip and her glass was empty. She couldn’t remember if it was her second or third.
Her rose lay on the table, its petals limp. For a few moments that felt like forever, she fiddled with the stem of her glass,
thin as a drinking straw, and then ordered another. She couldn’t just sit there with nothing in front of her.

More people came into the bar and now the tables and barstools were full. Across from Ellen the place where Dennis Dwight
was meant to sit confronted her like a toothless grin. She didn’t wear a watch but she sensed that she’d been sitting in the
bar at least forty-five minutes. Meetings at Starbucks were better. In a coffee shop she could read a newspaper as she waited.
If she finished her coffee and left, no one had to know that she’d been stood up.

A tall man in a gray suit—expensive though a little snug and a few years out of style—stood at the entrance to the Mariposa
Bar. He saw her; she was sure he saw her. He was the right age and his comb-over was presentable. He was definitely closer
to seventy than fifty but she forgave
him his lie and hoped he wouldn’t find hers out quite so readily.

She didn’t know if she should look at him again or pretend to be fascinated by something. The butterflies on the bar-back—brilliant
turquoise and black with flecks of gold in their hugely magnified wings—were like the ones she and BJ had seen in the rain
forest in Costa Rica. He called them flowers with wings.

She looked up, holding the rose, trying to smile, but the man was gone.

*       *       *

The night sky over San Diego was starless, the light of a million suns blotted out by the gray urban glow. To the east a cantaloupe-colored
moon rose from behind a scrim of lemon-scented eucalyptus trees. Stretched out on a chaise on the terrace, thinking about
that evening’s conversation with Ty, Roxanne found her mind resting easier than it had in many weeks. She dozed until jolted
awake by the slam of a car door. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was too early for Johnny and Simone. A moment later
her mother hobbled around the side of the house, one shoe on, one off, muttering under her breath.

A gust of warm, citrus-scented wind lifted the hair at the back of Roxanne’s neck.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“This dress cost four hundred dollars and I spilled red wine on it. I don’t even know why I was drinking wine. And these shoes!”
She threw them over the edge of
the terrace into the yellow lantana and walked on. She stopped and held up the skirt of her dress, which was discolored by
a dark stain. “Maybe it was Scotch.” She looked at Roxanne. “Does Scotch wash out?”

Seeing her mother intoxicated brought to Roxanne a flood of emotions so old they were barely more than shadows cast by the
memory of shadows.

“Did you drive yourself home?” Her mother nodded. “Mom, you shouldn’t have.”

“Stop managing me.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Why are you here anyway? Where’s Franny?”

“Simone fired her.”

“And you’re babysitting?” Ellen looked suddenly stricken. “No, no, no.” A moment ago she had been rigid with fury over a broken
heel and stained dress; now she was close to tears, broken, a house of cards collapsing. “You should be at home with your
husband. You don’t know how quickly, how suddenly…”

“Mommy, what happened?”

“When?”

“Tonight, of course.”

“Oh. I don’t remember.” She sat on the edge of a chaise. “I’m telling you, Roxanne, you can’t waste this time. You’re young
and you love each other, I know you do, but you take him for granted and one day you’ll be sorry. You’ll think of all the
meetings and open houses and signing conferences you just had to attend and then
he’ll die ahead of you because they always do, and you’ll regret it all….”

In Roxanne’s eyes, Ellen had always moved through the world unhampered by self-doubt and regret; but tonight it was achingly
clear that her confidence was a thin shell mapped with cracks. Roxanne didn’t want to know this. She didn’t want to feel sorry
for the mother who had abandoned her.

“You should go up to bed.”

“Don’t dismiss me! Just hear what I’m saying. I never gave you much advice, did I? So when I do, you should listen. You’re
so judgmental, like your grandmother.”

Don’t you dare criticize Gran.
Roxanne wanted to walk away and leave her mother alone, feeling sorry for herself.
She saved me. You abandoned me.
The hurt was as fresh as if it had only recently happened….

It was dark when they arrived at Gran’s. Roxanne remembered getting out of the Buick and standing at the foot of the verandah
steps. As she looked up, the woman on the porch with her large, muscular arms folded across her chest had seemed by the light
of a single yellow bulb to be an enormous creature, a colossus. “What are you doing here, Ellen Rae? You should have called
ahead. You can’t barge—”

“Take her, Mom.” Ellen thrust Roxanne forward so she stumbled against the first step and sat down, whimpering as she rubbed
her shin. “I can’t deal with her.”

“You should have thought of that before you had her.”

“Don’t lecture me, don’t say I told you so. Just for once, say nothing. I’m begging you, Mother. You have to do this.”

The memory of that day filled Roxanne’s mind, expanding to include the huge, empty house, the thousand rows of fruit trees
standing witness, a harvest moon…. She remembered the bright light of it, Ellen’s fearful and exhausted expression, the tremble
of a nerve at the corner of Gran’s pursed lips. That night, this night: there was something about the oversize moon, the warm
night air…

Ellen talked on, half to herself. “You want to be smart for your kids and do all the right things, but if you did the right
thing you never would have had them. In the first place.” She looked at Roxanne, light glittering in her narrowed eyes, and
poked a manicured finger in her direction. “You’re not a kid anymore, Roxanne, so pay attention. I know what I’m talking about….
There isn’t time…. You gotta let your sister… I know I shouldn’t have made you take care of her… all the time. BJ said it
wasn’t fair….”

To Roxanne’s knowledge her mother had never admitted to any flaw or apologized to anyone for anything. Now this remorse: was
it real or alcohol talking? She could be in a blackout right now and remember nothing in the morning. Was there any point
in listening?

Elizabeth had a theory that before birth, souls choose
their families, specifically their mothers and fathers, for what they can learn from them. So what karmic lesson was Roxanne
learning from Ellen? Don’t drink, don’t abandon your kid. Lead an orderly life because if you don’t, everything will fall
apart around and over you.

“Come on, Mom. It’s getting cool out here. Let’s get you up to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

Ellen looked at her, blinking. “Why are you here? You’re always here. Someday… Did I say this? They always die, Roxanne. They
die and they’re gone and you’re alone.” She pulled up her skirt and sobbed into the stained silk.

“That’s enough now, you’ll ruin your dress.”

”Don’t take that tone with me.” Ellen shoved past Roxanne. “I’m not a child, I was never a child.”

That makes two of us.

As Roxanne watched her stagger up the stairs to her apartment over the garage, she remembered that there had been a time before
Gran and Simone when her mother was drunk every night. She had put her mother to bed, cleaned up her messes.

From the top of the stairs Ellen called out loud enough to wake the neighborhood. “There’s something wrong with this damn
key.”

A sheet of pale gold moonlight fell across the carpet in Ellen’s bedroom. Roxanne pulled back the bedspread and helped her
mother lie down. There was something about this night and the moon’s calm expression observing through the window beside the
bed. Roxanne shook
her head to clear it, and the mist shimmered and swirled and parted and came together again.

A night for remembering.

Ellen and Dale liked parties, poker parties, mostly. Roxanne remembered the arguments and laughter and the LP records stacked
on the spindle of the stereo, the clink of red, white, and blue poker chips as her father spilled them back and forth between
his hands. In the morning the house smelled sticky-sweet and smoky as she washed the glasses and emptied the ashtrays. By
contrast Gran had been a teetotaler except for one glass of red wine at dinner on Sunday night and another when she worked
on her jigsaw puzzle. Roxanne thought of the parties in Logan Hills and she recalled Gran and the ranch; and when she did,
the old, never-completely-asked, never-honestly-answered question rose from the calm surface of her thoughts.

“Tell me, Mom.” If she’d had enough to drink, she might actually tell the truth. “Why did you take me up to Gran’s and leave
me there?”

“You ought to thank me for that. I did the right thing.”

You broke my heart, you marked me forever, how could that have been the right thing?

“I can’t get it out of my mind, Mom. I’ve tried, all my life I’ve tried, but I can’t.” She touched her mother’s wrist, put
her lips on the pulse she felt there. “You didn’t visit me once. Not once.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Help me understand, Mom. Just tell me why.”

From the peak of the roof came the song of a mockingbird, a serenade.

“I never wanted you children. Not your sister, not you. It wasn’t personal. I just wasn’t cut out for it: motherhood. When
I got pregnant with you, I wanted an abortion, but we didn’t have the money. Back then it was either pay some old woman with
a crochet hook or a decent doctor over the border, and one of those cost five hundred dollars. I thought I’d do it myself,
but I just couldn’t.”

Roxanne had read of the women who tried to end their pregnancies with bent wires and plumbers’ snakes, even long-handled soda
spoons. Over the centuries, millions of women and girls and their unborns had bled to death in bathtubs and basements and
out-of-doors behind garden sheds. She and her mother might easily have been two of them.

“I was a little off my rocker. I thought if I ignored you, you’d go away. I threw up all the time and I told them at the dealership
that I had flu, and they believed me, but your dad knew better and what a rampage he went on. I thought I couldn’t live without
him. I thought I’d die if he left me.”

“You loved him.”

“I was a fool.”

In the night garden, by the glow of an orange moon,
crickets sang songs of love and black moths sacrificed themselves to the light.

“He was the sexiest man I’d ever met. Not a high school boy or a car salesman trying to make his quota in a cheap suit. Your
father was the kind of man who came into a room and everything stopped. The women all wanted him and the men envied him and
looked up to him and did what he wanted. When I was with him I felt hypnotized.” Ellen looked at her. “You have no idea.”
Her eyes were glassy with drink and tears.

“I know what love is now, but back then… Lust. Love. I got them confused. I thought love was doing whatever I wanted and not
making excuses to anyone. And lots of sex. I loved him that way.”

Roxanne did not think she had ever been as young as the girl her mother was describing. She knew she’d never been in blinding
love that way and never wanted to be.