Three Short Novels (30 page)

Athena pushed away the money Naomi was trying to place on the bartender's tray. “When I was sixteen,” she said, sipping, “I had it all plotted out to get rid of my dad. He hated everybody even then. There was some people he liked, he wasn't as bad as now but bad enough for me because I felt like I had to grow up to hate people and I didn't want to hate people. I had it all plotted out. Now he's seventy-six, I make custard for him and kiss him and tuck him in at night.”

Naomi's eyes began to water from the drink and the embarrassment of hearing a confession.

“Sometimes I think that maybe I should've done it. They would've sent me to Tehachapi Prison for Women. I'd have had a little patch of garden, maybe, and listened to other tales of woe over the sewing
machines or the jute mill or whatever they put you to work on. I would've been out by now, if it was twenty years. But I mean, there's something about doing something like that that lifts you out of the rut. While you're young, I mean.” She laughed a long laugh, buoyed up by the pleasure of being in the bar. “It doesn't mean anything when you're fifty. No purpose in it. The old man's not long for this world anyway.”

Athena stirred the martini with the toothpick. “That's why I never had kids. I could have, I was married eleven years, but I figured they'd grow up to hate me. No, maybe that wasn't the reason, maybe I just didn't have the courage. Is it courage? What is it? Maybe I was selfish, but when I look back on those years, I wonder what I had to be selfish about. You like kids?”

“My brother Hal, his wife's got a boy, thirteen years old now. I haven't seen him for a year. Yeah, I like
that
kid.” She sipped. “My brother Cort's going to have himself some kids. Got married this summer. Met this girl, love at first sight, got married a month after. He's the baby of the family. I always think of him as the baby of the family.”

“I feel sorry for kids,” Athena mused. “So damn much to learn. Sometimes you almost snap your cap, like my own plot.”

Naomi found it very hard to lift her gaze to the tired face across the table. Athena had come to work in the assessor's office six weeks ago, and this was the first time they had gone out together after work, and Naomi was unable to combine in one person the friendly, joking woman and the woman confessing a plot to murder her father.

Three young men came in, bareheaded, wearing jackets, and hoisted themselves up in a row at the bar, talking loudly, carrying on a humorous argument. One, at the end, leaned around the one in the middle and punched low in the back the one at the other end. The punched one gave a half-laugh, half-moan, jerking his back inward.

“If kids could only see beyond the hump,” Athena said. “If they could see that pretty soon they're going to be helping the old man out
of the tub. When you're a kid, you couldn't see them with no clothes on and you wouldn't let them see you, your father I mean, and now I help him out of the tub.” She laughed through closed lips because she'd put the olive in her mouth.

“Cort married a nice girl,” Naomi said, wanting to drop this talk about the terrible things that could have happened when they were young. “Her name's Pauline. She's a typist at the Bon Marché. One time Cort brought her over to meet Mama and she hardly said two words. She wouldn't let Cort hold her hand.”

“I got no brother,” Athena said. “Got a kid sister, used to have two but one died a couple of years ago, left three kids. The sister I got left lives in Tulsa.” She took another sip, began to laugh before she had swallowed it. “I remember one time we were living in Louisville, Kentucky. My dad was working in the tobacco company there, and one night my mom and dad had this awful fight, he said the kid she was pregnant with wasn't his. My sister and me, we held each other in bed. I guess I was about eleven or so. Then he comes in and orders us girls to get up and get our clothes on. Our mom began to beat on his back, and he let her because it wasn't hurting him any, he was a big guy. He piled my sister and me into his Chevy and drove us a hundred miles to some little town where we'd never been and he knocked on a door there. To this day I don't know if he knew those people or not. He won't answer me when I ask, I think he's forgot. He says to the woman who answered the door, he says that ‘we hadn't no breakfast and hadn't no money,' and would she give us some breakfast while he looked around for work in that town. She gave us oatmeal, my sister and me. It was the first time I ever ate oatmeal.”

“What happened after that?” Naomi asked.

“Oh, after that they got together again and we had another little sister and we all moved out West. Los Angeles.”

A warmth came over Naomi, a feeling like love. The woman across the table had become her sister, and nothing was secret between them
and nothing was unforgivable. “Our family was real close,” she said, carefully because the words wanted to mix themselves up.

“Some families are.” Athena looked irritated.

Naomi wondered if what she had said about her own family was taken as a criticism of Athena's family. I ought to be going home, she thought. Mama's alone. What am I doing, sitting here laughing with this woman who almost murdered her father?

“My father was a barber,” she heard herself say. “Had a shop where they've got Rich's Cafeteria now. He died of a heart attack when Cort was still almost a baby.” Her tongue and lips got in the way of her words. She wanted to say that he was a small man and meticulously neat, she wanted to describe his face and the way he walked and his gentle hands that smelled of cologne, but she couldn't form the words right, and even if she could, respect would prevent her from describing his physical aspects. The memory of him bloomed up here in this place where she ought not to be, and she was a delinquent child whom he had come into the bar for, to fetch home. Hal had gone into bars and Cort went into bars, and that was all right. But what was
she
doing here when she ought to be home with her mother, especially on this day, the day a year ago her brother had died?

“How old's your mother?” Athena asked, and began to laugh again. One of the three young men in a row at the bar turned his head to watch her. “The reason I asked, I had this idea about your mother and my dad. Maybe they could get together.”

Naomi watched the young man watching Athena laughing. Athena could not see him. Her friend might be pleased with his interest, Naomi thought, but to her it was not interest in Athena as a woman, it was a contemptuous interest, because the woman was not young, because her sagging throat moved with the laughter, and the gold particles in her teeth shone in the amber light. As she watched the young man watching—a man with a crew cut over his flattish head and wide eyes in a small face—a desire rose up in her to protect
her friend with love, to protect even the young punk, to protect everybody with a love that would submerge all contempt. He saw her watching him and turned his gaze on her, and a many-fingered lightning raced across her belly.

“We ought to arrange it so they'd get married,” Athena was saying. “One time I tried to get him to go into a rest home. I told him he'd have lots of friends, but he wouldn't budge. So I thought, what the hell, let him have his own way, take care of him, give me something to do in the evening besides file my fingernails.”

A seeking look in Athena's large eyes shocked Naomi, and she fumbled around in her conscience for the right response. In her friend's eyes was a desperate need to be instructed in the rigors of her own old age coming, a need to be solaced even by the picayune face of Naomi, by Naomi, who was ignorant of what everybody else knew. But Naomi could console only her own, only Mama and Cort. She heard herself laughing, she bent her head down to the rickety table, laughing at the joke that Athena had already left far behind. “Oh, they'd make a couple all right!” she agreed.

“You girls think of something funny?” the young punk asked.

“We just arranged a marriage,” Athena said.

“For you?”

“Oh, yes, for me!” Athena, laughing, almost choked on the smoke of her cigarette.

“Well, why not?” he asked, his eyes closing for an instant to hide the taunting in them, his mouth smiling acceptingly. “Why not?”

Athena was pounding her chest to bring up the smoke. “Don't ask me why not so many times or I'll tell you why not!”

Naomi, impressed by her friend's rejection of the young punk's ridicule, bowed her head to the table again, laughing, taken over by pleasure with her own life. She was who she had chosen to be, a county courthouse clerk, unmarried, going home in a minute to her mother.

The sky was dark when she got off the bus and walked the three blocks to home. “Mama,” she called, unlocking the door, accidentally kicking a small sample box of cereal left on the porch. With the door open, her hand on the knob, she stooped to pick up the box. On it was the face of a happy squirrel wearing a bow tie. “Mama,” she called, “somebody left something for you.”

Her mother was lying on the sofa, covered by the afghan, her face pale in the flicker and waves of blue light from the television screen. No light was on anywhere in the rest of the house. “Where you been?”

“I did some shopping.”

“Today's the day he died.” Her mother lifted her arms, and Naomi sank down and gathered up the old body grown so thin in the past year. But her mother thrust her away. The smell of the bar was on her.

Naomi pushed herself up and stood unsteadily, took off her hat, took off her coat, stepped out of her high-heeled shoes. She had been reminded for over a month that this Friday was the date he had died a year ago. She had known it herself without reminders. Without any warning in herself, a wail came up, and more wails, sounding like wails of remorse to appease her mother. Unable to do anything about them, she could only wonder. They weren't over her brother, nor over her mother, and she didn't know what they were over, unless they were over herself.

5

D
olores left the city a few days after high-school graduation exercises, boarding the bus to San Francisco. She found a place to live in an apartment shared by three other girls. It was a first-floor apartment, old, heavily carpeted, the living room full of potted plants, the mantelpiece laden with dime-store china figures. They took turns cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming the living room that nobody used. Above them lived more girls, and on the third floor, the top, lived the landlady, a Frenchwoman who came down to investigate complaints and to make complaints of her own. Her rooms for girls were known to agencies for immigrants, to the French consul, and were advertised in the “For Rent” columns, and no more than a day passed between the vacating of a room and the renting of it. At the time Dolores moved into the front bedroom that faced the street, two French girls were living in the bedrooms down the hall, one a secretary at the consulate and the other a typist for an importer, and the fourth bedroom was rented to a girl from Chicago, a cocktail waitress, who made use of the extra closet in the living room to hang up the clothes her own closet couldn't hold and to set out shoes in a row, shoes with heels fantastically high—lucite heels
and gilt heels and electric-blue suede heels and red lacquered heels.

“Oh, you are so
attracteef
!” Janine, the consular secretary, told Dolores the first day. Chatting over coffee in the small kitchen, Dolores began to sense sharply the appraising that women do of one another. Janine was observing Dolores's womanness, everything about her—her skin, her features, her hands, her legs, her hair, particulars even more meaningful than they had been to the men in her mother's cafe back home, and Dolores felt the presence of the thousands of women in the city, the women by whom she would be measured and against whom she would measure herself. The eyes of this woman showed a degree more of keenness than that in men's eyes, a desperation, a touch of despair, and Dolores felt trapped by this woman across the table, this flattering woman constantly pushing up the sleeves of her soiled pongee kimono, tossing back her short dark hair.

Dolores found a job as waitress in a small restaurant serving expensive lunches on white tablecloths, and in her third week there accepted an invitation to take a ride around the city from a gray-haired, bustling man, a contractor who joked with her almost every day, snuffling his laughter down his nose. Back home, small-time contractors came into her mother's cafe in clothes the color of concrete dust and complained about unions, lumberyards, architects, owners, and banks. This one wore tailored suits and parked his red and white Corvette at the foot of a hill and pointed out to her an apartment building at the top, its windows hot gold in the setting sun, or parked before a modern house, square, a great reflective expanse of glass facing the bay, or before a stark, concrete church, a neon cross dividing its triangular front. Once, when they were parked on a hill that gave a view of the Embarcadero, she expected him to say that the white ship alongside a pier was his, like an exuberant child would say to an adult in tow. But she saw that
she
was the child, believing that a city grew up by itself, magically. Not only did he alter the skyline, change the
views of the city, he knew about scandals in city politics, and those involved in the scandals were friends or enemies of his; he patronized the best restaurants and the jazz clubs, and pointed out to her which innocuous houses had once been famous houses of prostitution.